Don't you buy Virtual money everytime you use a bank?
Nope. You're not buying anything. You're making a deposit. You still own that money, they're just holding it for you.
Your bank can keep track of how much of your money they have electronically, or on a napkin, but it doesn't change the legal status of the money.
Think about it in terms of a car, instead of money:
You deposit your car at the bank. They keep it, use it, and pay you for its use, but you still own it. If someone erases your car from the banks files, they will still have your physical car. If someone erases your horse in Everquest, there's nothing left. That's because your horse was purely electronic. It was not real. If someone were to zero out the balance in my bank account, that money would still exist. That bank would still have it, they just wouldn't know who it belonged to.
My point is that your money is real property, while your horse in EQ is just numbers in a file (that you don't own) somewhere. It's just part of a game. The owner of that file can legally do whatever he wants to it. He could kill your horse just for fun. You don't own that horse, Sony does. You're paying them to play around in their world. You're subject to whatever agreement(s) you have with them.
They might take the thing apart when you send it in, remove the chips, put them in some other system to read them, and then put them in a camera case again when they send it out.
I don't think you're aware how much board rework costs. No one designs a product such that you'll have to remove and reinstall actual chips. That's what connectors are for. There is no way they could expect to teach all their employees to competently remove and reinstall RAM chips from the PCB.
Sticking the flash chips directly on some strange card and slapping that card into some strange slot and doing plain IDE directly over that wouldn't cost very much to develop at all.
That would be a standard port with a nonstandard pinout. Just as the grandparent post was suggesting.
Actually, having retired as a professional musician this year, I do know what I'm talking about. CD sales are THE ONLY royalty that songwriters recieve. There is a lot of talk about royalties paid by radio stations for airplay that BMI and ASCAP collect, but the fees are so small that they just take care of the research that went into the song licensing in the first place.
Read this paragraph again. You just admitted that CD sales are not the only royalty songwriters recieve.
I have no problem at all with someone correcting me or explaining something to me, but don't tell me I have no idea what I'm talking about when I'm discussing an industry that used to put food on my table.
Oh, I'm sorry. I assumed you had just made an honest mistake. How could I have known that you were deliberately lying?
By the way, when did you work in the recording industry?
Please. One does not have to work in the industry to know that your statment was incorrect. Whether that was ignorance or intent, wasn't up to me.
As for your other childish comments about my lack of education: Grow up. Everyone knows that many performers don't write their own stuff. Composers have been paid to write music for a very long time. Only recently has society been giving them money everytime their work is performed. There's nothing ignorant about questioning royalties. Why should you get paid for the rest of your life for a one-time effort? Heck, if I found the cure for cancer, I'd only get paid for 20 years.
Intelligent, educated people think about things like this.
Intelligent, educated people also try to respond with valid arguments.
Ticketbastard charges an exorbitant fee to sell tickets, mostly because they have a de facto monopoly through exclusive deals with venues. They don't front the money for the concert and they don't assume any risk.
Later on, you also state: "Music labels front the money for an album and they assume much of the risk if it fails." Not quite true. Although the RIAA does assume risk, they basically force the artist to cover all their expenditures. Any money they spend, the artist is obligated to pay back. A similar situation would be if Ticketbastard were to charge 100% service charge until all of their costs have been recouped. Then they would charge a 50% service charge, after they have already covered all their costs.
The RIAA is also not a monopoly.
Correct. They are a cartel. Which is basically just as bad.
But this is all like arguing who was more evil: Stalin or Hitler?
Mouse buttons have a horrible tactile feel for trying to enter morse code. Even using a keyboard key would be a lot better.
Maybe that's true, I've never used morse code myself, but the idea of entering morse code via your mouse seems like it could actually be a good idea.
I think it would be a great help for CAD users, VLSI, etc. Anything where most of the time you're clicking and dragging, but sometimes you need to type in a label, dimension, or whatnot.
It could even be worth modifying a mouse to replace one of the current buttons with one which has the correct feel.
This would be much easier to do with a mouse, as opposed to a keyboard, since mouse buttons are typically dicrete switches, while many keyboards now use a large rubber membrane keypad internally.
Chances are you would want to expand morse code to include more symbols, but the basic concept sounds interesting.
I just love the way that one say, Slashdotters are saying that 'everyone should be buying Indie music, and not supporting the RIAA' and the next they are saying that 'eMusic has nothing that I want, no big names'. Why are big names big names? Because the RIAA promote them. So who do you support? Make your mind up.
Did you ever stop to think that maybe there are at least two different groups of slashdotters?
It is possible that maybe different people with different opinions post on the same website?
It is possible, just maybe, that these differences of opinion lead to the (hopefully) interesting discussion that is slashdot commentary?
I almost never buy tickets through ticketmaster. I think I've done it once, ever.
I'm not saying I won't do it again, but if I can save money, and aviod giving tickemaster money, I'm doing it.
Ticketmaster charges what, 50% service charge? As sick as that is (and it's really disgusting), it's nowhere close to what the RIAA gets from artists. If I had to choose between the two, I'd have to pick ticketmaster.
the reason Sony does as well as it does in the videogame market is because it tries to find out what it's competitor does well, and improves upon it. I'm not saying this is going to be a GBA killer, (price is going to be a big factor) but it looks as if there is finally going to be a viable GBA competitor. (N-Gage eat your heart-out.)
You're forgetting another important reason. They have a lot of money, and already control a large protion of the consumer electronics market.
There are other issues besides the device itself that effect the success or failure of a piece of hardware, let the ability to get stores to carry it.
Sorry... I just have to say this. Songwriters don't make a dime unless a physical cd sells. So to them it is stealing.
You clearly have no idea what you're talking about. CDs aren't the only source of royalties. They aren't even a good one. They are plenty of ways to make a dime without selling CDs. If you really know any songwriters, you should know that.
Most artists would make more money if you mailed them a quarter than if you bought their CD. Many artists have actually lost money by releasing an album.
As far as the songwriters you know, you've already explained why that example is worthless.
Of course maybe the songwriters you know consider copyright infringement to be rape and murder as well. They could possibly be some pretty messed up individuals.
Maybe your friends should get involved in live performance, instead of expecting to do a small amount of work once and get paid for it the rest of their lives.
I perfectly willing to pay $20 to go see an artist I like perform. I am not willing to pay $20 for a CD, of which $19.50 or more will go to a few megacorps which want pass laws I don't like and promote bands which suck.
Besides, do you really think ANY company is going to hire you for $50k/year if you're not going to be bringing in significantly more than that?
I know not everyone is worth that much, but there are lots of other costs involved. I mentioned them in my post.
It's like driving a car. If you figured your cost/mile using only how much it costs you for gas, you would be way off. You need to figure in depreciation, repairs/maintenance, insurance, the value of your time, etc.
There are people posting all over the place that this study must off by a couple factors or magnitude, but they just aren't looking at the problem sensibly. Maybe the average person really is only worth 50k/year to a business and gets paid 25k/year by said business. The cost per spam at 20 spams per day still isn't chump change, even before you consider the total cost.
It's amazing how many people are screaming:
"There's no way spam costs $1/message"
"It doesn't take me that long to hit the delete key."
[sarcasm]What an amazing, informative analysis[/sarcasm]
First off, they're probably figuring their cost as their take home pay. This is much too low.
Say I was to make around $25/hr. That says nothing about all the other hidden costs/tradeoffs going on. I could be making that much, but the corp. I work for could be billing for my time at a rate of $1000/day. If they have a substantial backlog of contracts, they basically are loosing out on that much money if I don't work for a day.
Now lets do some math. $1000/8hours = 125 dollars / hour * 1 hour / 60 min = $2.08 / minute
Say it takes me 15 seconds to open up outlook, see the message, realize it's spam, delete it, and go back to what I was doing. That's $.52 right there. Then you have to add in other costs.
How much did/does it cost to store that email? How much did it cost to download it (including the gifs)? How much of your IT staff's time is devoted to reducing spam, upgrading mailservers, deleting old mail, backing up mail, etc? Is that email you just got from Hamza Kalu just spam, or an event that should be reported to corporate security? (Some businesses do have to worry about fraud/industrial espionage via forged email.) How much time did you spend thinking about that? Five seconds? Ten?
Is the spam clever enough to fool other, less tech savvy people? (I once recieved a fake email from BestBuy.com's fraud dept, the would be pretty convincing to someone who doesn't know much about conputers.) How much time do you spend warning them?
Spam is costing businesses a significant amout of money. It may cost less for some and more for others, but it seems some people have no idea how quickly the dollar signs add up when you're running a business. I know I have a tough time wrapping my brain around it.
First you state that you aren't cheaper than US workers. Then you state that you have to live with a proverbial gun to your head.
That's why you're cheaper! It's simple economics, you have less bargaining power therefore you have to take less money.
I'm against H1-B Visas precisely because of the "you loose your job, you get sent back to XXXXX".
If we really need more type X workers than we have, there should be no issue with them staying here. A certain amount of turnover is normal. If we really needed them, they should be able to find a new job pretty easily. Deporting them would be bad for both them and us.
If we don't need more type X workers, we shouldn't be allowing companies to bring in people from poor countries and make them work for substandard wages under threat of deportation. It's bad for both sides of the globe.
I'm not against you, I'm against the program by which you came here. It artifically lowers wages for both foreign and domestic workers.
I'm not trying to be mean-spirited by saying your statement was really funny, but you really should reconsider your statement.
Re:Nice to see the sideswipe at .NET (not)
on
Nat Demos Dashboard
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· Score: 1
Microsoft has applied for one patent on the.NET APIs and they have stated publicly that they will let open source implementations use it.
First, have they just said they would let the public use it, or have they actually licensed the patent for public use?
Second, I'm highly doubtful that Microsoft has only one patent that relates to.NET. Refer to my mention of Unisys. Did everyone know that there was a a patent on GIFs?
My point is: Just how easy would it be for Microsoft to design.NET such that it would be impossible to implement without violating their patents?
Maybe they didn't, but are you really that sure? I doubt you have reviewed all of Microsoft's current patent holdings, so what are you basing your opinion on? Unless it's an independent review by a trusted third party, I fail to see how you can claim there's nothing to worry about with.NET.
and why would people continue to invent things?
Currently people create things (for the most part) to make a profit. If there is nothing to protect those profits (copyrights, patents, etc), what motivation is there to create something?
Becuase it will make life easier, duh.
Sheesh, it the patent system were to disappear tommorow, it's not as if people would suddenly stop inventing things.
Problems exist, people invent things to solve those problems. I invent things all the time without patenting them. I invent them because the are useful to me, that's the incentive. Besides, people also do it just for fun.
Where will the money needed to fund the economy come from? Taxation on the purchase on materials needed to use the replicator?
There's so much wrong with this statement I don't even know where to start. Fund the economy? WTF?! Where does the money to fund all the beta-tape manufacturers come from? It doesn't. Nor should it. If everyone can get hot, fresh waffles from their household replicator, we won't really need waffle manfacturers anymore. What crazy idea makes you think we should keep giving them money?
"The economy" would still exist, it would just be different. Different things would be traded. No funding necssary
There seems to be a really weird idea floating around these days that just because you were able to make money with a certain business model, it's the rest of society's responsibility to preserve that situation. It makes me want to scream. (Think Sam Kinison) Should you be forced to buy horse feed just because, once upon a time, people rode horses? If course not the idea is ridiculous. If your business is obsolete, move on with the rest of society.
Your ISP's TOS are an agreement between you and them, not a law. They don't really have anything to do with whether or not you can legally claim to be an ISP. Yeah, maybe sharing your uplink is a breach of their TOS, but that just means you're breaking their TOS by acting as an ISP.
It probably says that and only you (can prevent forest fires, heh) are responsible for access to your account, and for anything you do with your account.
It probably does. That means the ISP will hold me responsible (really, claim no responsibility for my actions), not the gov't.
The higher tier providers that my ISP gets its service from probably have a similar agreement with my isp. "Only my ISP is responsible for who accesses their network" So what? Would that make my ISP the responsible party if I do something bad? Of course not. I am.
So whatever they do with your connection, looks for all the world like you did it. Especially with NAT.
Please, it's not like IP address are anything like social security numbers. It's just routing information. Anyone with any computer knowledge will understand that there are often hundreds of users connecting to the internet through a single IP (think corporate firewall).
The IP will show which network the traffic came from, not which person. The person investiaging this traffic then needs to find out more information, if they want any hope of ever knowing who it came from.
Think about this:
If I go hack from my local public library, are the librarians going to be put in jail?
If all you have is an IP address you don't have enough information. You need to know who uses that IP to prove anything. If more than one person uses that IP, then you need to be able to convince a judge that a specfic person was using it at the time is question.
They'd probably argue that you're responsible for access to your router. Somebody does something naughty on it (illegal file sharing, hacking, child porn, etc.), you get the blame anyway.
This could have a chilling effect on the public access WAPs.
The neat part there is:
How are they going to make you liable for whomever connects to your AP, without making AOL liable for you using AOL to hack foobar.com?
AOL has money and doesn't want to be liable for your actions, so they are going to make sure no laws are passed that would make them liable.
If I'm using your network to access the internet, it should be possible to argue that you are acting as an ISP and deserve all the same protections.
Freenet will not protect you from civil liability for copyright infringement. Civil copyright infringement is a strict liability statute. It doesn't matter if you know what you are sending is copyrighted or not. If you send someone a copyrighted album, whether you initiated it or not you are still liable.
3 problems:
If freenet preserves your anonymity, they can't sue you.
If you're hosting someone else's file without knowledge of it, you're probably in the clear. Under the DMCA they should notify you that you are hosting it, and then you can remove it and be protected by the "safe harbor" provision.
Email
An email does not pass directly from the sender's computer to the recipient's. It spends time in many other computers along its journey. Are all those computers' owners liable? Heck no.
Freenet is a protocol, like email. If freenet nodes are liable, so is every mail server on the internet.
Since this is the second post I've seen about the superparamagnetic limit, I though I would remind everyone that this has been mentioned on slashdot before. AFAIK this limit is not a fundamental limit, unlike say the Nyquist theorem, which can't be broken.
The superparamagnetic limit seems to be a practical limitation of current technology, not a fundamental limit of bits per cm^2.
You do realize that this is illegal and you can be prosecuted?
First off: It is possibly illegal.
Are you familiar with the computer crime laws in most Asian countries? Do they exist? Do you know if they protect computers with no passwords? Many computer crime laws offer very little protection for computers on public networks, if the owner doesn't bother to protect them himself.
Second: Most spam is blatantly fraudulent. Let say I'm getting 419 scam emails from somewhere actually inside the US. The second they file a complaint against me, I can go after them for fraud. Put simply: Spammers don't want you to know who they are. They can't file a complaint, our you could go after them for fraud.
Third: How is someone in Singapore going to prosecute him? Is the US going to extradite him for crashing a computer that was sending fraudulent email to the US? Or are they going to say: "Hey why don't you come set foot on US soil and then we'll talk about it?"
Fourth: Let's say this computer does belong to an "innocent" (read negligent) bystander. Crashing his computer might actually get him to fix the problem/alert him that someone else is controlling it.
This isn't something I'd be likely to do myself, but I'm not going to start yelling "Hey, that's illegal!" without thinking about it. Morally, I don't see very much wrong with what he's doing. Legally, he's on shaky ground, but he could, possibly be in the clear.
If you go ahead and make the assumption that the sats are in "the same configuration with one extra sat" you have automatically invalidated the generality of statement "more sats in view = better position accuracy".
I see your point now. You could have 5 sats with poor GDOP or 3 with better locations.
While you valid have a point there, it seems like you're spiltting hairs. Yes, in some arbitrary math problem you could have more satellites, but less accuracy, but taking the current GPS constellation as a given, any additional satellites are going to improve your accuracy. I think it's reasonable to assume "same configuration with one extra sat" since they aren't planning on shooting any down.
That's a good point. However, my argument was with your blanket generalization that "more sats in view = better position accuracy", which, as I said before, is not strictly true. Just adding more orbital planes will not necessarily lead to improved GDOP performance.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. It seems statistics come into play here. Even if you only have 3 satellites, having 5 measurements is going to be better than having 3 (the more measurements you have, the more random error you can remove). Say you had 5 satellites, but 2 of them were right next to other satellites, this could be treated as the situation above (somewhat). Correct?
Technically, more satellites should always improve your accuracy, even if you were adding one right next to another.
Perhaps that's not true from a positional point of view, but it's definately true from a timing point of view.
I am getting soooooo sick of the French bashing.
Look, if it hadn't been for France bailing your asses out 250 years ago, you'd have continued to have your "country" run by some unelected idiot called George whose only qualification to the job was that his father did it.
Thankfully the French were there to help you defeat King George III, and you avoided that situation.
You have a very strange view of history.
So exactly how many soldiers did France send over to the US to help out?
Yeah, that's right.
It was helpful that France was also at war with England, but it's not as though France sent a sizeable portion of their army over to help us. Besides, you could argue that France would have lost that war if it wasn't for us Americans:P The reality is that we both had a common enemy at the time, so we cooperated.
It not like the US surrendered to England and the French had to come over here an save us.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't you buy Virtual money everytime you use a bank?
Nope. You're not buying anything. You're making a deposit. You still own that money, they're just holding it for you.
Your bank can keep track of how much of your money they have electronically, or on a napkin, but it doesn't change the legal status of the money.
Think about it in terms of a car, instead of money:
You deposit your car at the bank. They keep it, use it, and pay you for its use, but you still own it. If someone erases your car from the banks files, they will still have your physical car. If someone erases your horse in Everquest, there's nothing left. That's because your horse was purely electronic. It was not real. If someone were to zero out the balance in my bank account, that money would still exist. That bank would still have it, they just wouldn't know who it belonged to.
My point is that your money is real property, while your horse in EQ is just numbers in a file (that you don't own) somewhere. It's just part of a game. The owner of that file can legally do whatever he wants to it. He could kill your horse just for fun. You don't own that horse, Sony does. You're paying them to play around in their world. You're subject to whatever agreement(s) you have with them.
They might take the thing apart when you send it in, remove the chips, put them in some other system to read them, and then put them in a camera case again when they send it out.
I don't think you're aware how much board rework costs. No one designs a product such that you'll have to remove and reinstall actual chips. That's what connectors are for. There is no way they could expect to teach all their employees to competently remove and reinstall RAM chips from the PCB.
Sticking the flash chips directly on some strange card and slapping that card into some strange slot and doing plain IDE directly over that wouldn't cost very much to develop at all.
That would be a standard port with a nonstandard pinout. Just as the grandparent post was suggesting.
Actually, having retired as a professional musician this year, I do know what I'm talking about. CD sales are THE ONLY royalty that songwriters recieve. There is a lot of talk about royalties paid by radio stations for airplay that BMI and ASCAP collect, but the fees are so small that they just take care of the research that went into the song licensing in the first place.
Read this paragraph again. You just admitted that CD sales are not the only royalty songwriters recieve.
I have no problem at all with someone correcting me or explaining something to me, but don't tell me I have no idea what I'm talking about when I'm discussing an industry that used to put food on my table.
Oh, I'm sorry. I assumed you had just made an honest mistake. How could I have known that you were deliberately lying?
By the way, when did you work in the recording industry?
Please. One does not have to work in the industry to know that your statment was incorrect. Whether that was ignorance or intent, wasn't up to me.
As for your other childish comments about my lack of education: Grow up. Everyone knows that many performers don't write their own stuff. Composers have been paid to write music for a very long time. Only recently has society been giving them money everytime their work is performed. There's nothing ignorant about questioning royalties. Why should you get paid for the rest of your life for a one-time effort? Heck, if I found the cure for cancer, I'd only get paid for 20 years.
Intelligent, educated people think about things like this.
Intelligent, educated people also try to respond with valid arguments.
Ticketbastard charges an exorbitant fee to sell tickets, mostly because they have a de facto monopoly through exclusive deals with venues. They don't front the money for the concert and they don't assume any risk.
Later on, you also state: "Music labels front the money for an album and they assume much of the risk if it fails." Not quite true. Although the RIAA does assume risk, they basically force the artist to cover all their expenditures. Any money they spend, the artist is obligated to pay back. A similar situation would be if Ticketbastard were to charge 100% service charge until all of their costs have been recouped. Then they would charge a 50% service charge, after they have already covered all their costs.
The RIAA is also not a monopoly.
Correct. They are a cartel. Which is basically just as bad.
But this is all like arguing who was more evil: Stalin or Hitler?
Mouse buttons have a horrible tactile feel for trying to enter morse code. Even using a keyboard key would be a lot better.
Maybe that's true, I've never used morse code myself, but the idea of entering morse code via your mouse seems like it could actually be a good idea.
I think it would be a great help for CAD users, VLSI, etc. Anything where most of the time you're clicking and dragging, but sometimes you need to type in a label, dimension, or whatnot.
It could even be worth modifying a mouse to replace one of the current buttons with one which has the correct feel.
This would be much easier to do with a mouse, as opposed to a keyboard, since mouse buttons are typically dicrete switches, while many keyboards now use a large rubber membrane keypad internally.
Chances are you would want to expand morse code to include more symbols, but the basic concept sounds interesting.
I just love the way that one say, Slashdotters are saying that 'everyone should be buying Indie music, and not supporting the RIAA' and the next they are saying that 'eMusic has nothing that I want, no big names'. Why are big names big names? Because the RIAA promote them. So who do you support? Make your mind up.
Did you ever stop to think that maybe there are at least two different groups of slashdotters?
It is possible that maybe different people with different opinions post on the same website?
It is possible, just maybe, that these differences of opinion lead to the (hopefully) interesting discussion that is slashdot commentary?
I almost never buy tickets through ticketmaster. I think I've done it once, ever.
I'm not saying I won't do it again, but if I can save money, and aviod giving tickemaster money, I'm doing it.
Ticketmaster charges what, 50% service charge? As sick as that is (and it's really disgusting), it's nowhere close to what the RIAA gets from artists. If I had to choose between the two, I'd have to pick ticketmaster.
the reason Sony does as well as it does in the videogame market is because it tries to find out what it's competitor does well, and improves upon it. I'm not saying this is going to be a GBA killer, (price is going to be a big factor) but it looks as if there is finally going to be a viable GBA competitor. (N-Gage eat your heart-out.)
You're forgetting another important reason. They have a lot of money, and already control a large protion of the consumer electronics market.
There are other issues besides the device itself that effect the success or failure of a piece of hardware, let the ability to get stores to carry it.
Sorry... I just have to say this. Songwriters don't make a dime unless a physical cd sells. So to them it is stealing.
You clearly have no idea what you're talking about. CDs aren't the only source of royalties. They aren't even a good one. They are plenty of ways to make a dime without selling CDs. If you really know any songwriters, you should know that.
Most artists would make more money if you mailed them a quarter than if you bought their CD. Many artists have actually lost money by releasing an album.
As far as the songwriters you know, you've already explained why that example is worthless.
Of course maybe the songwriters you know consider copyright infringement to be rape and murder as well. They could possibly be some pretty messed up individuals.
Maybe your friends should get involved in live performance, instead of expecting to do a small amount of work once and get paid for it the rest of their lives.
I perfectly willing to pay $20 to go see an artist I like perform. I am not willing to pay $20 for a CD, of which $19.50 or more will go to a few megacorps which want pass laws I don't like and promote bands which suck.
They are hiring more people, a lot more people.
:)
Guess what?
I'm a new hire
Besides, do you really think ANY company is going to hire you for $50k/year if you're not going to be bringing in significantly more than that?
I know not everyone is worth that much, but there are lots of other costs involved. I mentioned them in my post.
It's like driving a car. If you figured your cost/mile using only how much it costs you for gas, you would be way off. You need to figure in depreciation, repairs/maintenance, insurance, the value of your time, etc.
There are people posting all over the place that this study must off by a couple factors or magnitude, but they just aren't looking at the problem sensibly. Maybe the average person really is only worth 50k/year to a business and gets paid 25k/year by said business. The cost per spam at 20 spams per day still isn't chump change, even before you consider the total cost.
It's amazing how many people are screaming:
"There's no way spam costs $1/message"
"It doesn't take me that long to hit the delete key."
[sarcasm]What an amazing, informative analysis[/sarcasm]
First off, they're probably figuring their cost as their take home pay. This is much too low.
Say I was to make around $25/hr. That says nothing about all the other hidden costs/tradeoffs going on. I could be making that much, but the corp. I work for could be billing for my time at a rate of $1000/day. If they have a substantial backlog of contracts, they basically are loosing out on that much money if I don't work for a day.
Now lets do some math. $1000/8hours = 125 dollars / hour * 1 hour / 60 min = $2.08 / minute
Say it takes me 15 seconds to open up outlook, see the message, realize it's spam, delete it, and go back to what I was doing. That's $.52 right there.
Then you have to add in other costs.
How much did/does it cost to store that email? How much did it cost to download it (including the gifs)? How much of your IT staff's time is devoted to reducing spam, upgrading mailservers, deleting old mail, backing up mail, etc? Is that email you just got from Hamza Kalu just spam, or an event that should be reported to corporate security? (Some businesses do have to worry about fraud/industrial espionage via forged email.) How much time did you spend thinking about that? Five seconds? Ten?
Is the spam clever enough to fool other, less tech savvy people? (I once recieved a fake email from BestBuy.com's fraud dept, the would be pretty convincing to someone who doesn't know much about conputers.) How much time do you spend warning them?
Spam is costing businesses a significant amout of money. It may cost less for some and more for others, but it seems some people have no idea how quickly the dollar signs add up when you're running a business. I know I have a tough time wrapping my brain around it.
That's really funny.
First you state that you aren't cheaper than US workers. Then you state that you have to live with a proverbial gun to your head.
That's why you're cheaper! It's simple economics, you have less bargaining power therefore you have to take less money.
I'm against H1-B Visas precisely because of the "you loose your job, you get sent back to XXXXX".
If we really need more type X workers than we have, there should be no issue with them staying here. A certain amount of turnover is normal. If we really needed them, they should be able to find a new job pretty easily. Deporting them would be bad for both them and us.
If we don't need more type X workers, we shouldn't be allowing companies to bring in people from poor countries and make them work for substandard wages under threat of deportation. It's bad for both sides of the globe.
I'm not against you, I'm against the program by which you came here. It artifically lowers wages for both foreign and domestic workers.
I'm not trying to be mean-spirited by saying your statement was really funny, but you really should reconsider your statement.
Microsoft has applied for one patent on the .NET APIs and they have stated publicly that they will let open source implementations use it.
.NET. Refer to my mention of Unisys. Did everyone know that there was a a patent on GIFs?
.NET such that it would be impossible to implement without violating their patents?
.NET.
First, have they just said they would let the public use it, or have they actually licensed the patent for public use?
Second, I'm highly doubtful that Microsoft has only one patent that relates to
My point is: Just how easy would it be for Microsoft to design
Maybe they didn't, but are you really that sure? I doubt you have reviewed all of Microsoft's current patent holdings, so what are you basing your opinion on? Unless it's an independent review by a trusted third party, I fail to see how you can claim there's nothing to worry about with
Or you just a a remote with a touchscreen LCD.
:P
That's what I have, and I only spent $40.
I have one word for you:
Patents.
Every heard of Unisys?
Understand now?
Parent was not a troll. Follow the link.
These are very serious issues, and legitimate questions. Questions I have yet to see seriously answered.
and why would people continue to invent things? Currently people create things (for the most part) to make a profit. If there is nothing to protect those profits (copyrights, patents, etc), what motivation is there to create something?
Becuase it will make life easier, duh.
Sheesh, it the patent system were to disappear tommorow, it's not as if people would suddenly stop inventing things.
Problems exist, people invent things to solve those problems. I invent things all the time without patenting them. I invent them because the are useful to me, that's the incentive. Besides, people also do it just for fun.
Where will the money needed to fund the economy come from? Taxation on the purchase on materials needed to use the replicator?
There's so much wrong with this statement I don't even know where to start. Fund the economy? WTF?! Where does the money to fund all the beta-tape manufacturers come from? It doesn't. Nor should it. If everyone can get hot, fresh waffles from their household replicator, we won't really need waffle manfacturers anymore. What crazy idea makes you think we should keep giving them money?
"The economy" would still exist, it would just be different. Different things would be traded. No funding necssary
There seems to be a really weird idea floating around these days that just because you were able to make money with a certain business model, it's the rest of society's responsibility to preserve that situation. It makes me want to scream. (Think Sam Kinison) Should you be forced to buy horse feed just because, once upon a time, people rode horses? If course not the idea is ridiculous. If your business is obsolete, move on with the rest of society.
What exactly is your point?
Your ISP's TOS are an agreement between you and them, not a law. They don't really have anything to do with whether or not you can legally claim to be an ISP. Yeah, maybe sharing your uplink is a breach of their TOS, but that just means you're breaking their TOS by acting as an ISP.
It probably says that and only you (can prevent forest fires, heh) are responsible for access to your account, and for anything you do with your account.
It probably does. That means the ISP will hold me responsible (really, claim no responsibility for my actions), not the gov't.
The higher tier providers that my ISP gets its service from probably have a similar agreement with my isp. "Only my ISP is responsible for who accesses their network" So what? Would that make my ISP the responsible party if I do something bad? Of course not. I am.
So whatever they do with your connection, looks for all the world like you did it. Especially with NAT.
Please, it's not like IP address are anything like social security numbers. It's just routing information. Anyone with any computer knowledge will understand that there are often hundreds of users connecting to the internet through a single IP (think corporate firewall).
The IP will show which network the traffic came from, not which person. The person investiaging this traffic then needs to find out more information, if they want any hope of ever knowing who it came from.
Think about this:
If I go hack from my local public library, are the librarians going to be put in jail?
If all you have is an IP address you don't have enough information. You need to know who uses that IP to prove anything. If more than one person uses that IP, then you need to be able to convince a judge that a specfic person was using it at the time is question.
They'd probably argue that you're responsible for access to your router. Somebody does something naughty on it (illegal file sharing, hacking, child porn, etc.), you get the blame anyway. This could have a chilling effect on the public access WAPs.
The neat part there is:
How are they going to make you liable for whomever connects to your AP, without making AOL liable for you using AOL to hack foobar.com?
AOL has money and doesn't want to be liable for your actions, so they are going to make sure no laws are passed that would make them liable.
If I'm using your network to access the internet, it should be possible to argue that you are acting as an ISP and deserve all the same protections.
3 problems:
An email does not pass directly from the sender's computer to the recipient's. It spends time in many other computers along its journey. Are all those computers' owners liable? Heck no.
Freenet is a protocol, like email. If freenet nodes are liable, so is every mail server on the internet.
Since this is the second post I've seen about the superparamagnetic limit, I though I would remind everyone that this has been mentioned on slashdot before. AFAIK this limit is not a fundamental limit, unlike say the Nyquist theorem, which can't be broken.
The superparamagnetic limit seems to be a practical limitation of current technology, not a fundamental limit of bits per cm^2.
Link.
My point is just that this limit seems to be more of a technological hurdle, than a brick wall. Just my 2c.
You do realize that this is illegal and you can be prosecuted?
First off: It is possibly illegal.
Are you familiar with the computer crime laws in most Asian countries? Do they exist? Do you know if they protect computers with no passwords? Many computer crime laws offer very little protection for computers on public networks, if the owner doesn't bother to protect them himself.
Second: Most spam is blatantly fraudulent. Let say I'm getting 419 scam emails from somewhere actually inside the US. The second they file a complaint against me, I can go after them for fraud. Put simply: Spammers don't want you to know who they are. They can't file a complaint, our you could go after them for fraud.
Third: How is someone in Singapore going to prosecute him? Is the US going to extradite him for crashing a computer that was sending fraudulent email to the US? Or are they going to say: "Hey why don't you come set foot on US soil and then we'll talk about it?"
Fourth: Let's say this computer does belong to an "innocent" (read negligent) bystander. Crashing his computer might actually get him to fix the problem/alert him that someone else is controlling it.
This isn't something I'd be likely to do myself, but I'm not going to start yelling "Hey, that's illegal!" without thinking about it. Morally, I don't see very much wrong with what he's doing. Legally, he's on shaky ground, but he could, possibly be in the clear.
If you go ahead and make the assumption that the sats are in "the same configuration with one extra sat" you have automatically invalidated the generality of statement "more sats in view = better position accuracy".
I see your point now. You could have 5 sats with poor GDOP or 3 with better locations.
While you valid have a point there, it seems like you're spiltting hairs. Yes, in some arbitrary math problem you could have more satellites, but less accuracy, but taking the current GPS constellation as a given, any additional satellites are going to improve your accuracy. I think it's reasonable to assume "same configuration with one extra sat" since they aren't planning on shooting any down.
That said, you're right.
That's a good point. However, my argument was with your blanket generalization that "more sats in view = better position accuracy", which, as I said before, is not strictly true. Just adding more orbital planes will not necessarily lead to improved GDOP performance.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. It seems statistics come into play here. Even if you only have 3 satellites, having 5 measurements is going to be better than having 3 (the more measurements you have, the more random error you can remove). Say you had 5 satellites, but 2 of them were right next to other satellites, this could be treated as the situation above (somewhat). Correct?
Technically, more satellites should always improve your accuracy, even if you were adding one right next to another.
Perhaps that's not true from a positional point of view, but it's definately true from a timing point of view.
I am getting soooooo sick of the French bashing. Look, if it hadn't been for France bailing your asses out 250 years ago, you'd have continued to have your "country" run by some unelected idiot called George whose only qualification to the job was that his father did it. Thankfully the French were there to help you defeat King George III, and you avoided that situation.
:P The reality is that we both had a common enemy at the time, so we cooperated.
You have a very strange view of history.
So exactly how many soldiers did France send over to the US to help out?
Yeah, that's right.
It was helpful that France was also at war with England, but it's not as though France sent a sizeable portion of their army over to help us. Besides, you could argue that France would have lost that war if it wasn't for us Americans
It not like the US surrendered to England and the French had to come over here an save us.