I am saddened if this treatment is found to be a breakthrough that it has come too late for us who have lost a loved one
Rejoice. For two reasons.
1) Other people will be spared our experience.
2) We're both genetically predisposed to prostate cancer, which means that this cure may help us someday. We might dodge the bullet. As a father myself I know I'd rather get cancer than my son. Easy decision. Maybe our Dads would feel the same way. "At least my son doesn't have to have this."
How many men would choose between impotence and a, say, 1/1000 (no idea if that is the actual chance) of dying earlier?
You'd need to have the whole picture before you could make an educated choice.
I lost my father to prostate cancer a couple of years ago. When it got bad he wanted to die at home. We arranged that for him. I was with him during his last day. I watched him die.
I can tell you this. It's a life changing event watching someone die from cancer. Most people happily have no idea what it's like. I know though. Tumors up and down your spine, eyedroppers full of synthetic morphine to deal with the pain...it's absolutely unreal. Honestly.
Believe me, if it came down to it and someone told me today that they'd have to remove everything from my balls to my bellybutton to avoid that fate, I'd go to the table with a smile. I'd happily sit to pee if it meant I could dodge that bullet. Anyone would if they knew what I know.
Oh yeah, on an unrelated note - people who smoke are bat shit insane. They have absolutely no idea what's at the end of a losing roll of the dice.
tax abatements sabotaging the school system (brilliant idea, Mr. Voinovich).
I always thought Voinovich was pretty pro education. I've never heard anyone speak poorly about him on that topic. I'm a registered Democrat and I've voted for him based on his educational record.
Is there something I've missed? If so, could you fill me in? I've always thought he was one of the good guys.
It's an incredibly racist proposal, whether you realized it or not.
It's not simply picking places full of residents you don't like and/or are scared of.
Oh for fuck's sake. I only know the part I drive through. It's a lot of abandoned factories on/near the lake. It reminds me of the abandoned industrial area they shot the last part of Robocop in. It's an abandoned graffiti magnet. I wasn't suggesting leveling the suburbs. The east side of Cleveland proper though - nobody would miss it. It would make a lovely park.
And BTW, there is nothing more annoying than being accused of racism when it's not warranted. Not everyone evaluates every single fucking thing they say for their impact on whatever ethnic group anyone might personally have a bug up their ass about. Part of the trouble in this country is that people feel they have a right to never be offended, so they're constantly on the lookout for things that do. Strangely enough, these people perpetuate the racism they loudly claim to despise by constantly making it an issue. Let me tell you something about racism. It's boring. And the people who keep bringing it up are crashing bores as well.
You're one of these people.
So if I've offended you, please let me state this in the strongest possible way: Get bent.
There are better places in Ohio to run a bulldozer. Youngstown would be a good pick. We could do without most of the East side of Cleveland too. Parts of downtown Akron where the rubber plants pulled out. Those wouldn't be missed. They'd make nice parks.
I can think of a few malls that should go too. Rolling Acres in Akron tops that list. It looks like something out of Fallout 3. I had to go in there once last year to talk to the last remaining business in the whole place - a Jackson Hewitt office. It really did look like something after Judgement Day.
The Flats in Cleveland could go too. The Flats are as dead as Elvis. Knock them down and plant trees.
I'm a touch typist, took a class in it in high school. Fingers on the home keys. Left hand rests on ASDF. Right hand on JKL;.
If you move up a row from ASDF, you get QWER. My left pinky is A, move up 1 to Q. My right pointer is on F, move up 1 row to R.
Move up to the next row for numbers. ASDF becomes 1234. Now here's where we get to the mistake. We were taught that your left pointer goes up 2, and towards the middle 1 to get to 5. Likewise, your right pointer goes up 2 and over to the middle one 1 to get to 6.
Notice how the 6 is on the wrong side? When my brain thinks "6", my right pointer wants to see it right next to the 7. It's now the responsibility of my left pointer to be in charge of 456, and my right pointer is now only in charge of 7.
I can't tell you how frustrating this keyboard is to a touch typing programmer. It's as if nobody at Microsoft knows how to touch type.
You realize that by criticizing the RIAA evidence you are implicitly agreeing that the defendant would be financially liable were better quality evidence produced.
What's the biggest word in that sentence? WERE.
If better evidence WERE to be produced, then maybe. But so far none has, and (so far at least) we have that whole "innocent until proven guilty" thing.
And again, Mediasentry are not cops. They are not officers of the court. There are merely people with a story to tell. The defendant is another person with another story to tell.
So sure, IF better evidence were to have been collected, and IF she actually was guilty of something, and IF there was actual evidence to collect, and IF it was illegal to "make available", THEN maybe she'd be liable for some damages.
Well if the evidence was collected incorrectly or illegally - then perhaps she's not guilty? Maybe that is an ideal thing to rally around. Due process. I'm terribly fond of it, myself.
Maybe it's for the best that only the police get to be the police, and not some corporate funded entity with a personal stake in the matter like Mediasoft. It would be nice for a court to make that point.
This case seems like the exact type of case the RIAA avoids like the plague. Any time any of their methods are subjected to any serious scrutiny, they drop the case and run. They know any serious discovery will kill their racket.
So what's to keep them from dropping this like a radioactive potato when the bevy of tech savvy pro bono lawyers start to tear Mediasentry a new one? It would be nice if the case went on long enough for this Rule 702 thing to kill Mediasentry gathered evidence - which could hopefully be used as a precedent for other cases or requests for retrial. But at this point I'm not counting on the RIAA staying with this one long enough for even that much good to come from it.
But his opening idea, that people who download illegally often download a LOT more than they could possibly buy, should seriously be taken account when thinking about this issue.
An excellent point about how the music industry is cooking the books. Here's another point they refuse to discuss: You can illegally download games too, and it doesn't seem to be hurting the games industry one single bit.
No, really! You can. And yet the games industry is booming and the music industry is not.
I wonder what the difference could be.
Could it be that suing your customer base is a bad idea? Could it be that the games industry is putting out a more appealing product? Could it be that music and games both compete in the entertainment arena and people only have so much money to spend on luxury items in a recession?
Nah, couldn't be any of that. Clearly it's P2P that's killing the music industry.
The live demo has to reproduce the state of the defendant's system and internet connection exactly.
All the better! Most users don't patch.
You have just opened the door wide open to a full forensic examination of his software, hardware and peripherals.
And your rationale for this is...what?
If you're hoping for a comparative analysis then that would be useless. Not all hackers do the same thing. There are thousands of security holes. The only thing a forensic examination of the machine would be able to determine is how it happened, that is if it is something the forensics people could even find. And finding nothing doesn't prove a thing - maybe there is a hacker more clever than the forensics guy.
The court also ruled that, 'given the evidence that there is no wireless router involved in this case, the Court excludes Kim's opinion that it is possible that someone could have spoofed or hijacked Defendant's Internet account through an unprotected wireless access point.
To this:
The court also ruled that, 'given the evidence that there is no wireless router involved in this case, the Court excludes Kim's opinion that it is possible that someone could have spoofed or hijacked Defendant's Internet account.
Then a demonstration. Take a PC into the courtroom and hook it to a cablemodem. Then tell the guys at Defcon to give the judge a live demonstration of pwnage.
...but we geeks are getting old. Fortran, punch cards, and then you had to go and drop the D&D bomb. Now people are going to start bragging about what color box set they started playing on. Well, I'll nip that one in the bud, dammit.
My D&D box was clear. Yup, you heard me. Clear. Not blue, not red, not white. Clear. Gary Gygax made it for me himself out of cellophane tape and saran wrap as a gift commemorating the fifth anniversary of the D Day landing. The books were written on bar napkins and held together with roofing nails and bubblegum because staples hadn't been invented yet. The cover was done in Dodo pelts. Monster manual actually had an entry for North Koreans. There.
I'm guessing that the RIAA lawyers realized they have some kind of problem with their paperwork, and thought this a clever way of short-circuiting it. Instead, of course, they have merely red-flagged it for Ms. Thomas-Rasset's new legal team.
Ok, here's the idea this phrase gave me.
We're all about openness here. Open source, open standards...openness. We've seen the good it can do. A good example is the Linux kernel. What makes it so good? What makes it work so well? The many thousands of eyes looking at it every day. It is open, and has a lot of good and talented people studying it every day.
So why not open up cases like these to public scrutiny and try for the same result?
Look at what's happened here. The RIAA had their team look at it, they found a problem, and tried to sidestep it. In doing so they basically pointed a big glowing arrow at the things in the case they would wish to have hidden.
Well...we could do that too. Right?
If there were a place where all the info were made available, and some sort of public campaign to let "us geeks" know about it...we would read it. "Help us fight for your rights against the RIAA - donate 15 minutes of your time. Click this link." That kind of a thing. A little bit here, a little bit there. If we were to take the Linux management concept and apply it to a legal case (a few high level moderators, lots of low level contributors)...who knows what other red flags the community might find? There are a lot of surprising sorts in the community, and I'd bet we actually do have quite a few legally trained folks who might want to do some small increment of good over a boring lunch break, for instance.
If every person in this thread were to read a paragraph or two and try to spot problems...well yeah, we're not lawyers but we all can read pretty much. Maybe something might come of it.
Anyways, it's just an idea. Maybe a good one and maybe a bad one. Fans and Flames to follow, see below. =)
Slashdot Mirror
I am saddened if this treatment is found to be a breakthrough that it has come too late for us who have lost a loved one
Rejoice. For two reasons.
1) Other people will be spared our experience.
2) We're both genetically predisposed to prostate cancer, which means that this cure may help us someday. We might dodge the bullet. As a father myself I know I'd rather get cancer than my son. Easy decision. Maybe our Dads would feel the same way. "At least my son doesn't have to have this."
How many men would choose between impotence and a, say, 1/1000 (no idea if that is the actual chance) of dying earlier?
You'd need to have the whole picture before you could make an educated choice.
I lost my father to prostate cancer a couple of years ago. When it got bad he wanted to die at home. We arranged that for him. I was with him during his last day. I watched him die.
I can tell you this. It's a life changing event watching someone die from cancer. Most people happily have no idea what it's like. I know though. Tumors up and down your spine, eyedroppers full of synthetic morphine to deal with the pain...it's absolutely unreal. Honestly.
Believe me, if it came down to it and someone told me today that they'd have to remove everything from my balls to my bellybutton to avoid that fate, I'd go to the table with a smile. I'd happily sit to pee if it meant I could dodge that bullet. Anyone would if they knew what I know.
Oh yeah, on an unrelated note - people who smoke are bat shit insane. They have absolutely no idea what's at the end of a losing roll of the dice.
At length.
Fair enough, apology accepted. I also apologize for the harshness of my response.
tax abatements sabotaging the school system (brilliant idea, Mr. Voinovich).
I always thought Voinovich was pretty pro education. I've never heard anyone speak poorly about him on that topic. I'm a registered Democrat and I've voted for him based on his educational record.
Is there something I've missed? If so, could you fill me in? I've always thought he was one of the good guys.
It's an incredibly racist proposal, whether you realized it or not.
It's not simply picking places full of residents you don't like and/or are scared of.
Oh for fuck's sake. I only know the part I drive through. It's a lot of abandoned factories on/near the lake. It reminds me of the abandoned industrial area they shot the last part of Robocop in. It's an abandoned graffiti magnet. I wasn't suggesting leveling the suburbs. The east side of Cleveland proper though - nobody would miss it. It would make a lovely park.
And BTW, there is nothing more annoying than being accused of racism when it's not warranted. Not everyone evaluates every single fucking thing they say for their impact on whatever ethnic group anyone might personally have a bug up their ass about. Part of the trouble in this country is that people feel they have a right to never be offended, so they're constantly on the lookout for things that do. Strangely enough, these people perpetuate the racism they loudly claim to despise by constantly making it an issue. Let me tell you something about racism. It's boring. And the people who keep bringing it up are crashing bores as well.
You're one of these people.
So if I've offended you, please let me state this in the strongest possible way: Get bent.
There are better places in Ohio to run a bulldozer. Youngstown would be a good pick. We could do without most of the East side of Cleveland too. Parts of downtown Akron where the rubber plants pulled out. Those wouldn't be missed. They'd make nice parks.
I can think of a few malls that should go too. Rolling Acres in Akron tops that list. It looks like something out of Fallout 3. I had to go in there once last year to talk to the last remaining business in the whole place - a Jackson Hewitt office. It really did look like something after Judgement Day.
The Flats in Cleveland could go too. The Flats are as dead as Elvis. Knock them down and plant trees.
Here is an article with a picture of one.
I'm a touch typist, took a class in it in high school. Fingers on the home keys. Left hand rests on ASDF. Right hand on JKL;.
If you move up a row from ASDF, you get QWER. My left pinky is A, move up 1 to Q. My right pointer is on F, move up 1 row to R.
Move up to the next row for numbers. ASDF becomes 1234. Now here's where we get to the mistake. We were taught that your left pointer goes up 2, and towards the middle 1 to get to 5. Likewise, your right pointer goes up 2 and over to the middle one 1 to get to 6.
Notice how the 6 is on the wrong side? When my brain thinks "6", my right pointer wants to see it right next to the 7. It's now the responsibility of my left pointer to be in charge of 456, and my right pointer is now only in charge of 7.
I can't tell you how frustrating this keyboard is to a touch typing programmer. It's as if nobody at Microsoft knows how to touch type.
You realize that by criticizing the RIAA evidence you are implicitly agreeing that the defendant would be financially liable were better quality evidence produced.
What's the biggest word in that sentence? WERE.
If better evidence WERE to be produced, then maybe. But so far none has, and (so far at least) we have that whole "innocent until proven guilty" thing.
And again, Mediasentry are not cops. They are not officers of the court. There are merely people with a story to tell. The defendant is another person with another story to tell.
So sure, IF better evidence were to have been collected, and IF she actually was guilty of something, and IF there was actual evidence to collect, and IF it was illegal to "make available", THEN maybe she'd be liable for some damages.
But that's a lot of IFs.
Well if the evidence was collected incorrectly or illegally - then perhaps she's not guilty? Maybe that is an ideal thing to rally around. Due process. I'm terribly fond of it, myself.
Maybe it's for the best that only the police get to be the police, and not some corporate funded entity with a personal stake in the matter like Mediasoft. It would be nice for a court to make that point.
This should be interesting.
This case seems like the exact type of case the RIAA avoids like the plague. Any time any of their methods are subjected to any serious scrutiny, they drop the case and run. They know any serious discovery will kill their racket.
So what's to keep them from dropping this like a radioactive potato when the bevy of tech savvy pro bono lawyers start to tear Mediasentry a new one? It would be nice if the case went on long enough for this Rule 702 thing to kill Mediasentry gathered evidence - which could hopefully be used as a precedent for other cases or requests for retrial. But at this point I'm not counting on the RIAA staying with this one long enough for even that much good to come from it.
Hopefully I'm missing something.
But his opening idea, that people who download illegally often download a LOT more than they could possibly buy, should seriously be taken account when thinking about this issue.
An excellent point about how the music industry is cooking the books. Here's another point they refuse to discuss: You can illegally download games too, and it doesn't seem to be hurting the games industry one single bit.
No, really! You can. And yet the games industry is booming and the music industry is not.
I wonder what the difference could be.
Could it be that suing your customer base is a bad idea? Could it be that the games industry is putting out a more appealing product? Could it be that music and games both compete in the entertainment arena and people only have so much money to spend on luxury items in a recession?
Nah, couldn't be any of that. Clearly it's P2P that's killing the music industry.
If the demo fails your defense dies on the table.
Dude. Defcon.
The live demo has to reproduce the state of the defendant's system and internet connection exactly.
All the better! Most users don't patch.
You have just opened the door wide open to a full forensic examination of his software, hardware and peripherals.
And your rationale for this is...what?
If you're hoping for a comparative analysis then that would be useless. Not all hackers do the same thing. There are thousands of security holes. The only thing a forensic examination of the machine would be able to determine is how it happened, that is if it is something the forensics people could even find. And finding nothing doesn't prove a thing - maybe there is a hacker more clever than the forensics guy.
Simple. Change this:
The court also ruled that, 'given the evidence that there is no wireless router involved in this case, the Court excludes Kim's opinion that it is possible that someone could have spoofed or hijacked Defendant's Internet account through an unprotected wireless access point.
To this:
The court also ruled that, 'given the evidence that there is no wireless router involved in this case, the Court excludes Kim's opinion that it is possible that someone could have spoofed or hijacked Defendant's Internet account.
Then a demonstration. Take a PC into the courtroom and hook it to a cablemodem. Then tell the guys at Defcon to give the judge a live demonstration of pwnage.
Dammit! Someone always throws down the white box/Chainmail geek cred!! AAARGH!
Ok, ok...you win. I confess. Red box here.
And extra bonus geek points for the Yorkshiremen. I am officially pwnt. =)
...but we geeks are getting old. Fortran, punch cards, and then you had to go and drop the D&D bomb. Now people are going to start bragging about what color box set they started playing on. Well, I'll nip that one in the bud, dammit.
My D&D box was clear. Yup, you heard me. Clear. Not blue, not red, not white. Clear. Gary Gygax made it for me himself out of cellophane tape and saran wrap as a gift commemorating the fifth anniversary of the D Day landing. The books were written on bar napkins and held together with roofing nails and bubblegum because staples hadn't been invented yet. The cover was done in Dodo pelts. Monster manual actually had an entry for North Koreans. There.
So top that.
Yup, we're boned.
I did pretty much the same thing. I went camping and saw the milky way for the first time. In my 30's.
Honestly - my first words once I saw it were "What the hell is that?"
Other recommendations contained in the bill include a $77million reduction in NASA's proposed space operations budget
When I read this I decided to see what that is relative to the Iraq war.
I'm using this chart as a reference. It says we've been at it for about 7 years, and it's cost about $670 billion in total.
So, 7 years is about 2500 days. Divide that through and you get about $268,000,000 per day. That works out to 11.16 million per hour.
77 million / 11.16 = 6.89 hours.
7 hours.
Firstly, because it's basically a way around the bans on testing fusion weapons.
Yeah, we'll sure be ready for the day when we get an enemy to sit still all day long while we fine tune 192 x ray lasers to fire all in sync at him.
You must be new here.
Ah, ok then. I've just never heard you say "Hey guys - come look at this" before. Perhaps I should check your webpage more often.
So anyways GMTA, and all that. =)
I'm guessing that the RIAA lawyers realized they have some kind of problem with their paperwork, and thought this a clever way of short-circuiting it. Instead, of course, they have merely red-flagged it for Ms. Thomas-Rasset's new legal team.
Ok, here's the idea this phrase gave me.
We're all about openness here. Open source, open standards...openness. We've seen the good it can do. A good example is the Linux kernel. What makes it so good? What makes it work so well? The many thousands of eyes looking at it every day. It is open, and has a lot of good and talented people studying it every day.
So why not open up cases like these to public scrutiny and try for the same result?
Look at what's happened here. The RIAA had their team look at it, they found a problem, and tried to sidestep it. In doing so they basically pointed a big glowing arrow at the things in the case they would wish to have hidden.
Well...we could do that too. Right?
If there were a place where all the info were made available, and some sort of public campaign to let "us geeks" know about it...we would read it. "Help us fight for your rights against the RIAA - donate 15 minutes of your time. Click this link." That kind of a thing. A little bit here, a little bit there. If we were to take the Linux management concept and apply it to a legal case (a few high level moderators, lots of low level contributors)...who knows what other red flags the community might find? There are a lot of surprising sorts in the community, and I'd bet we actually do have quite a few legally trained folks who might want to do some small increment of good over a boring lunch break, for instance.
If every person in this thread were to read a paragraph or two and try to spot problems...well yeah, we're not lawyers but we all can read pretty much. Maybe something might come of it.
Anyways, it's just an idea. Maybe a good one and maybe a bad one. Fans and Flames to follow, see below. =)
Uncomfortable truths well, 2.
True, but what is the occasion of the call?
"This time it didn't."
They'd never call you and say that it's worked 1000 times and still is, and that's just great.
It's the crashes that stand out in memory, not uptime. At least that's been my experience.