If you get an iPAQ (or any PDA) with tMobile's unlimited internet is a much better deal. Looking at all the plans for BlackBerries, the $30/month (or $20/month if you allready have a tmobile cell) for tMobile is really cheap. You could also go with the sidekick for $100 less.
Just a clarification, as a banker. ANY cash transfer of 10,000.01 or greater, into or out of the bank, requires a "CTR", which is sent to the IRS. It dosn't have to be just one person, and it dosn't have to be just one account. Person A could withdraw $8,000 from a joint account with Person B, and person B could withdraw another $6000 (all in cash). 2 different people, but a shared account, so it has to be reported. Personally I wish they would all go away, they are annoying as heck to complete.
How is buying new hardware cheaper than just upgrading firmware? I'm all for more widespread adoption of Linux, but companys arn't going to do something that makes absolutly no economic sence.
XP does have su, its called runas. What he showed was "fast user switching" where you can log out and leave a user running, but you can also go to the commandline and use the runas program to run a program as a user with admin abilities.
I recently started as a bank teller. I was not trained in any way, shape, or form in handwriting analaysis. If it dosn't look very close, I just ask for ID.
I highly doubt that they have problems ripping things at decent speed, its a problem of getting the music labels to allow them to put the songs up. This is still a new technology, and I would think that the labels are still uneasy about allowing their music go to up in this format.
IANAL, but my understanding of the US legal system is that the plantiff can't appeal if s/he/they lose. If the RIAA/MPAA won the case, Morpheus & Grokster could appeal, since they are defendants, but since the RIAA/MPAA are plantiffs, they can't appeal.
Valenti's Views
The MPAA president and former LBJ aide opens up on a range of topics
By Derek Slater
Jack Valenti has led a prolific political life. A decorated World War II pilot, Valenti served as a special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson until 1966. Since then, he has served as the President of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), turning the entertainment studio consortium into a lobbying juggernaut. Valenti helped pioneer the movie industry's voluntary rating system and has tirelessly fought government censorship. He has also headed the Motion Picture Export Association, protecting American film studios' interests in other countries.
In recent years, Valenti has become an outspoken leader in the fight against piracy on the Internet. Known for his sharp rhetorical abilities, Valenti always speaks about piracy in calamitous terms, prophesizing the eventual death of the movie industry. To defend its copyrights, MPAA successfully sued publishers of a program that undermined the copy prevention technology on DVDs and is currently suing several file-sharing services. In addition, Valenti has taken his case to Congress, pushing for mandated copy prevention technologies in all digital devices that play movies, music, and other media.
But many people have criticized Valenti's hard-line stance, calling it anti-technology and anti-consumer. These critics assert that Valenti's copy prevention mandates will harm innovation, forcing all technologists to ask the MPAA's permission before creating the next generation of amazing gadgets. Copyright holders have always fought new technologies, from Marconi's radio to cable television to VCRs, and in no case have their apocalyptic visions come true. Furthermore, copy prevention technologies will go beyond ending piracy by limiting how consumers can make personal use of their legally purchased movies.
After delivering a speech on "Persuasion and Leadership" at Harvard's Institute of Politics, Valenti sat down with the HPR to discuss his side of the digital debate and his life in politics.
HPR: You once remarked that "VCR is [to the movie industry]...as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." Even though the movie industry profits from video rentals, the MPAA still fears new technologies like digital VCRs and the Internet. What are the significant differences between the threat posed by the VCR and by today's technologies?
Jack Valenti: I wasn't opposed to the VCR. The MPAA tried to establish by law that the VCR was infringing on copyright. Then we would go to the Congress and get a copyright royalty fee put on all blank videocassettes and that would go back to the creators [to compensate for videocassette piracy].
I predicted great piracy. We now lose $3.5 billion a year in videocassette analog piracy. It was a 5-4 Supreme Court decision that determined VCRs were not infringing, which I regret. As a result, we never got the copyright royalty fee, but everything I predicted came true.
Now the difference between analog piracy and digital piracy is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. For example, it's very cumbersome to deal in piracy of videocassettes; it costs a lot of money. But in digital piracy, with the click of a mouse a twelve year-old can send a film hurdling around the world.
The music industry now is suffering nine, ten, fifteen percent losses in revenue. When you compound that over the next three or four years, the music industry is dead. I don't see a future for it. After awhile, who's going to produce it?
It now costs about $350,000 to produce a CD; it costs $80 million to make and market a movie. Big difference. The MPAA could live with the fifteen million homes that currently have broadband internet access. But when sixty million homes have broadband, plus the people on fast connections in universities, making it so easy to bring down a movie in minutes...
We're breeding a new group of young students who wouldn't dream of going into a Blockbuster and putting a DVD under their coat. But they have no compunction about bringing down a movie on the Internet. That isn't wrong to them. Why? I don't know.
HPR: The MPAA has backed several bills mandating copy prevention technologies. Critics have lambasted these bills for curbing consumer's "fair use" rights, including the ability to make back-up copies. How can we balance the interests of consumers and the movie industry?
JV: What is fair use? Fair use is not a law. There's nothing in law.
Right now, any professor can show a complete movie in his classroom without paying a dime--that's fair use. What is not fair use is making a copy of an encrypted DVD, because once you're able to break the encryption, you've undermined the encryption itself.
HPR: Even if breaking the encryption is for a legitimate purpose, to make a back-up copy?
JV: But you've already got a DVD. It lasts forever. It never wears out. In the digital world, we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out. It is timeless.
The minute that you allow people to break an encryption, you lose all security. If anyone can do it under the rubric of fair use, how can we protect the artists?
Today, it's illegal to copy a videocassette. No one has a fair use to copy a videocassette. If you lose it, you get another one, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's what people have been doing for generations.
HPR: Why do we need government mandates for copy prevention technologies?
JV: You have to have copy prevention mandated by the government sooner or later because otherwise everybody's not playing by the same ground rules. For example, the standards of my cell phone have to be mandated by the FCC because everybody has to operate off the same standards. Also, all railroad tracks in this country are the same standardized width.
If you don't have tightly focused, narrowly drawn mandates, either regulatory or congressional, then, if I'm a maverick computer maker in Taiwan, I can say, "Hell, I'm not going to play by the rules. I'm going to do it so everybody can copy." Then Toshiba and Sony and IBM can say, "Well if he does that, then I want to do it." We always operate on the fact that everybody needs to know that there's a 55 mph speed limit. That's called a standard.
HPR: You served as special assistant to President Johnson at the formative stages of the Vietnam War. Given your experience, what do you consider most crucial to keeping the war on terrorism, in light of conflict in Iraq, from becoming a quagmire?
JV: Nobody realizes that when Johnson became president on Nov. 22, 1963, we had 16,000 fighting men in Vietnam. Nobody remembers that.
The problem in Vietnam was that we couldn't get these people to negotiate. Johnson always believed that there was no such thing as victory--only negotiation. He never could get the Vietcong to the negotiating table. A lot of people urged him to go all out, as Richard Nixon did later, to bomb them into the Stone Age; he refused to do that, ultimately to his detriment.
I think you need to remember what de Tocqueville once wrote, that "The people grow tired of a confusion whose end is not in sight." If you're going to go to war, you must have the people with you. If you lose the confidence of the American people, you face a terrifying problem.
So long as George Bush has the majority of the American people on his side in the war on terrorism and the war against Iraq, he'll be just fine. But if he ever begins to lose that support, he will not do fine. That's what you learn from Johnson.
HPR: In an interview with CNN.com, you discussed how costly the lack of censorship was to President Johnson during the Vietnam War. Having fought against the government's attempts to censor the movie industry, how do you think the government should approach censorship during wartime?
JV: At all costs, the government should stay out of censorship, except in war. When soldiers lives may be at stake, I think you can. Vietnam is the only war we've ever fought in the history of our country, without censorship. But in any other arena, I'm totally opposed to censorship in any form. I'm a great believer and defender of the First Amendment.
HPR: How do you view the influence of lobbyists in government and campaign finance reform? Do organizations like the MPAA have an undue influence because they have money?
JV: I think lobbying is really an honest profession. Lobbying means trying to persuade Congress to accept your point of view. Sometimes you can give them a lot of facts they didn't have before.
Money, however, is negative--it's corrupting the body politic. Even though money might be the most self-conflicting force in politics today, there are too many loopholes in this McCain-Feingold bill. All these lobbyists in town who are callous to what the bill stands for are going to exploit it. They'll turn to state parties and special interest groups and the money will keep pouring in. It's a tragedy.
Gamecube uses a propritary disk, I don't see how you could easily copy it. It uses a mini 1.5 GB dvd type thing. I don't know anyone that can copy those, but I do know it is VERY possible to get blank cartridges, some hardware at radio shack, and some parts from a SNES and make your own carts.
The BSA simply wants to do their own DRM, and dosn't want it mandated to them. If the RIAA/MPAA gets to choose the DRM, the BSA has to implement one that they might not like. If the BSA can implement their own DRM, they can charge royalties for using it, and they get to choose their own.
"No, you can't just get HBO for $2.99 a month and EPSON for $1.99 a month because there are many fixed costs for cable." (emphasis added)
Not usually a grammer nazi, but thasts a funny typo:p
This is, IMO, one of the problems with our legal system. Ok, HBO is a channel. Well, we can't make someone buy more hardware and still call it a channel, so we'll just call it a tier. Same thing, different name. Whatever happened to spirit of the law?
I was searching around earlier, and to solve my own spam problem I downloaded POPFile. It is a cross platform email proxy (runs locally). You still use whatever email client you want, with just a few minor changes to your configuration (pop server is now 127.0.0.1 and username is now mail.server:username). It employs a bayesian filtering method. It is very easy to use and has been working GREAT for me so far. It can add a classification to the subject (IE an email labed hello, would become [spam] hello) or it can add a X-Text-Classification header which your mail client can search for, so you can decide exactly what you want to do with different kinds of email. I havn't found a better solution yet.
No, thats Internet Explorer. Here is the blurb in IE's about page:
Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM); was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Distributed under a licensing agreement with Spyglass, Inc.
Contains security software licensed from RSA Data Security Inc.
Portions of this software are based in part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group.
Multimedia software components, including Indeo(R); video, Indeo(R) audio, and Web Design Effects are provided by Intel Corp.
Unix version contains software licensed from Mainsoft Corporation. Copyright (c) 1998-1999 Mainsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Mainsoft is a trademark of Mainsoft Corporation.
Who says that slashdot is anti ms? Slashdot is whatever the editors want in. Furethermore, I've seen msnbc publish some pro linux articles, they don't seem to have a ms bias.
I would only want a bottle opener if it didn't have the deoderant in it as well. Sticking a phone in my armpit and then using it to open a bottle dosn't seem too healthy to me.
Slashdot Mirror
If you get an iPAQ (or any PDA) with tMobile's unlimited internet is a much better deal. Looking at all the plans for BlackBerries, the $30/month (or $20/month if you allready have a tmobile cell) for tMobile is really cheap. You could also go with the sidekick for $100 less.
If this is modded +4, all of slashdot is going to need a adv-adult...
10,000.01 or more in a single day.
Just a clarification, as a banker. ANY cash transfer of 10,000.01 or greater, into or out of the bank, requires a "CTR", which is sent to the IRS. It dosn't have to be just one person, and it dosn't have to be just one account. Person A could withdraw $8,000 from a joint account with Person B, and person B could withdraw another $6000 (all in cash). 2 different people, but a shared account, so it has to be reported. Personally I wish they would all go away, they are annoying as heck to complete.
How is buying new hardware cheaper than just upgrading firmware? I'm all for more widespread adoption of Linux, but companys arn't going to do something that makes absolutly no economic sence.
XP does have su, its called runas. What he showed was "fast user switching" where you can log out and leave a user running, but you can also go to the commandline and use the runas program to run a program as a user with admin abilities.
I recently started as a bank teller. I was not trained in any way, shape, or form in handwriting analaysis. If it dosn't look very close, I just ask for ID.
I highly doubt that they have problems ripping things at decent speed, its a problem of getting the music labels to allow them to put the songs up. This is still a new technology, and I would think that the labels are still uneasy about allowing their music go to up in this format.
IANAL, but my understanding of the US legal system is that the plantiff can't appeal if s/he/they lose. If the RIAA/MPAA won the case, Morpheus & Grokster could appeal, since they are defendants, but since the RIAA/MPAA are plantiffs, they can't appeal.
Moz is hosted in AOL's datacenter. Good luck slashdotting it.
You are aware that mozilla is hosted in AOL's datacenter, arn't you? Good luck slashdotting it.
From domainwhitepages.com:
OrgName: Netscape Communications Corp.
OrgID: NSCP
Address: 501 E. Middlefield
City: Mountain View
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 94043
Country: US
NetRange: 207.200.64.0 - 207.200.127.255
CIDR: 207.200.64.0/18
NetName: NETSCAPE-CIDR
NetHandle: NET-207-200-64-0-1
Parent: NET-207-0-0-0-0
NetType: Direct Allocation
NameServer: NS.NETSCAPE.COM
NameServer: NS2.NETSCAPE.COM
Comment: ADDRESSES WITHIN THIS BLOCK ARE NON-PORTABLE
RegDate: 1996-09-06
Updated: 2001-03-28
TechHandle: AOL-NOC-ARIN
TechName: America Online, Inc.
TechPhone: +1-703-265-4670
TechEmail: domains@aol.net
I think AOL can hold up aginst a slashdotting...
Dell will be smart enough to make sure their mobos can flash from CD/probably boot usb.
Valenti's Views The MPAA president and former LBJ aide opens up on a range of topics By Derek Slater Jack Valenti has led a prolific political life. A decorated World War II pilot, Valenti served as a special assistant to President Lyndon Johnson until 1966. Since then, he has served as the President of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), turning the entertainment studio consortium into a lobbying juggernaut. Valenti helped pioneer the movie industry's voluntary rating system and has tirelessly fought government censorship. He has also headed the Motion Picture Export Association, protecting American film studios' interests in other countries. In recent years, Valenti has become an outspoken leader in the fight against piracy on the Internet. Known for his sharp rhetorical abilities, Valenti always speaks about piracy in calamitous terms, prophesizing the eventual death of the movie industry. To defend its copyrights, MPAA successfully sued publishers of a program that undermined the copy prevention technology on DVDs and is currently suing several file-sharing services. In addition, Valenti has taken his case to Congress, pushing for mandated copy prevention technologies in all digital devices that play movies, music, and other media. But many people have criticized Valenti's hard-line stance, calling it anti-technology and anti-consumer. These critics assert that Valenti's copy prevention mandates will harm innovation, forcing all technologists to ask the MPAA's permission before creating the next generation of amazing gadgets. Copyright holders have always fought new technologies, from Marconi's radio to cable television to VCRs, and in no case have their apocalyptic visions come true. Furthermore, copy prevention technologies will go beyond ending piracy by limiting how consumers can make personal use of their legally purchased movies. After delivering a speech on "Persuasion and Leadership" at Harvard's Institute of Politics, Valenti sat down with the HPR to discuss his side of the digital debate and his life in politics. HPR: You once remarked that "VCR is [to the movie industry]...as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." Even though the movie industry profits from video rentals, the MPAA still fears new technologies like digital VCRs and the Internet. What are the significant differences between the threat posed by the VCR and by today's technologies? Jack Valenti: I wasn't opposed to the VCR. The MPAA tried to establish by law that the VCR was infringing on copyright. Then we would go to the Congress and get a copyright royalty fee put on all blank videocassettes and that would go back to the creators [to compensate for videocassette piracy]. I predicted great piracy. We now lose $3.5 billion a year in videocassette analog piracy. It was a 5-4 Supreme Court decision that determined VCRs were not infringing, which I regret. As a result, we never got the copyright royalty fee, but everything I predicted came true. Now the difference between analog piracy and digital piracy is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. For example, it's very cumbersome to deal in piracy of videocassettes; it costs a lot of money. But in digital piracy, with the click of a mouse a twelve year-old can send a film hurdling around the world. The music industry now is suffering nine, ten, fifteen percent losses in revenue. When you compound that over the next three or four years, the music industry is dead. I don't see a future for it. After awhile, who's going to produce it? It now costs about $350,000 to produce a CD; it costs $80 million to make and market a movie. Big difference. The MPAA could live with the fifteen million homes that currently have broadband internet access. But when sixty million homes have broadband, plus the people on fast connections in universities, making it so easy to bring down a movie in minutes... We're breeding a new group of young students who wouldn't dream of going into a Blockbuster and putting a DVD under their coat. But they have no compunction about bringing down a movie on the Internet. That isn't wrong to them. Why? I don't know. HPR: The MPAA has backed several bills mandating copy prevention technologies. Critics have lambasted these bills for curbing consumer's "fair use" rights, including the ability to make back-up copies. How can we balance the interests of consumers and the movie industry? JV: What is fair use? Fair use is not a law. There's nothing in law. Right now, any professor can show a complete movie in his classroom without paying a dime--that's fair use. What is not fair use is making a copy of an encrypted DVD, because once you're able to break the encryption, you've undermined the encryption itself. HPR: Even if breaking the encryption is for a legitimate purpose, to make a back-up copy? JV: But you've already got a DVD. It lasts forever. It never wears out. In the digital world, we don't need back-ups, because a digital copy never wears out. It is timeless. The minute that you allow people to break an encryption, you lose all security. If anyone can do it under the rubric of fair use, how can we protect the artists? Today, it's illegal to copy a videocassette. No one has a fair use to copy a videocassette. If you lose it, you get another one, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's what people have been doing for generations. HPR: Why do we need government mandates for copy prevention technologies? JV: You have to have copy prevention mandated by the government sooner or later because otherwise everybody's not playing by the same ground rules. For example, the standards of my cell phone have to be mandated by the FCC because everybody has to operate off the same standards. Also, all railroad tracks in this country are the same standardized width. If you don't have tightly focused, narrowly drawn mandates, either regulatory or congressional, then, if I'm a maverick computer maker in Taiwan, I can say, "Hell, I'm not going to play by the rules. I'm going to do it so everybody can copy." Then Toshiba and Sony and IBM can say, "Well if he does that, then I want to do it." We always operate on the fact that everybody needs to know that there's a 55 mph speed limit. That's called a standard. HPR: You served as special assistant to President Johnson at the formative stages of the Vietnam War. Given your experience, what do you consider most crucial to keeping the war on terrorism, in light of conflict in Iraq, from becoming a quagmire? JV: Nobody realizes that when Johnson became president on Nov. 22, 1963, we had 16,000 fighting men in Vietnam. Nobody remembers that. The problem in Vietnam was that we couldn't get these people to negotiate. Johnson always believed that there was no such thing as victory--only negotiation. He never could get the Vietcong to the negotiating table. A lot of people urged him to go all out, as Richard Nixon did later, to bomb them into the Stone Age; he refused to do that, ultimately to his detriment. I think you need to remember what de Tocqueville once wrote, that "The people grow tired of a confusion whose end is not in sight." If you're going to go to war, you must have the people with you. If you lose the confidence of the American people, you face a terrifying problem. So long as George Bush has the majority of the American people on his side in the war on terrorism and the war against Iraq, he'll be just fine. But if he ever begins to lose that support, he will not do fine. That's what you learn from Johnson. HPR: In an interview with CNN.com, you discussed how costly the lack of censorship was to President Johnson during the Vietnam War. Having fought against the government's attempts to censor the movie industry, how do you think the government should approach censorship during wartime? JV: At all costs, the government should stay out of censorship, except in war. When soldiers lives may be at stake, I think you can. Vietnam is the only war we've ever fought in the history of our country, without censorship. But in any other arena, I'm totally opposed to censorship in any form. I'm a great believer and defender of the First Amendment. HPR: How do you view the influence of lobbyists in government and campaign finance reform? Do organizations like the MPAA have an undue influence because they have money? JV: I think lobbying is really an honest profession. Lobbying means trying to persuade Congress to accept your point of view. Sometimes you can give them a lot of facts they didn't have before. Money, however, is negative--it's corrupting the body politic. Even though money might be the most self-conflicting force in politics today, there are too many loopholes in this McCain-Feingold bill. All these lobbyists in town who are callous to what the bill stands for are going to exploit it. They'll turn to state parties and special interest groups and the money will keep pouring in. It's a tragedy.
But the dreamcast could read normal CDs, and those were used to pirate. The GC can't even fit a normal CD in the drive.
Gamecube uses a propritary disk, I don't see how you could easily copy it. It uses a mini 1.5 GB dvd type thing. I don't know anyone that can copy those, but I do know it is VERY possible to get blank cartridges, some hardware at radio shack, and some parts from a SNES and make your own carts.
The BSA simply wants to do their own DRM, and dosn't want it mandated to them. If the RIAA/MPAA gets to choose the DRM, the BSA has to implement one that they might not like. If the BSA can implement their own DRM, they can charge royalties for using it, and they get to choose their own.
"No, you can't just get HBO for $2.99 a month and EPSON for $1.99 a month because there are many fixed costs for cable." (emphasis added) Not usually a grammer nazi, but thasts a funny typo :p
This is, IMO, one of the problems with our legal system. Ok, HBO is a channel. Well, we can't make someone buy more hardware and still call it a channel, so we'll just call it a tier. Same thing, different name. Whatever happened to spirit of the law?
Yes, it still has spyware, but Kazaa lite is kazaa without spyware. You can get it at Kazaalite.com.
I was searching around earlier, and to solve my own spam problem I downloaded POPFile. It is a cross platform email proxy (runs locally). You still use whatever email client you want, with just a few minor changes to your configuration (pop server is now 127.0.0.1 and username is now mail.server:username). It employs a bayesian filtering method. It is very easy to use and has been working GREAT for me so far. It can add a classification to the subject (IE an email labed hello, would become [spam] hello) or it can add a X-Text-Classification header which your mail client can search for, so you can decide exactly what you want to do with different kinds of email. I havn't found a better solution yet.
No, thats Internet Explorer. Here is the blurb in IE's about page: Based on NCSA Mosaic. NCSA Mosaic(TM); was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Distributed under a licensing agreement with Spyglass, Inc. Contains security software licensed from RSA Data Security Inc. Portions of this software are based in part on the work of the Independent JPEG Group. Multimedia software components, including Indeo(R); video, Indeo(R) audio, and Web Design Effects are provided by Intel Corp. Unix version contains software licensed from Mainsoft Corporation. Copyright (c) 1998-1999 Mainsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Mainsoft is a trademark of Mainsoft Corporation.
Who says that slashdot is anti ms? Slashdot is whatever the editors want in. Furethermore, I've seen msnbc publish some pro linux articles, they don't seem to have a ms bias.
I get webmaster, and I've gotten the odd spam to hr, telling me that I just hired an incompitent person (wtf, when did I start running a buisness?).
They don't. If JS is disabled, nothing happens.
I would only want a bottle opener if it didn't have the deoderant in it as well. Sticking a phone in my armpit and then using it to open a bottle dosn't seem too healthy to me.