Free speech is the right do say what you believe without fear of (pretty broadly) being stripped of your freedom because of it (meaning incarceration, death...)
So you wouldn't have a problem with say the FCC shutting down Air America because they aren't sending anyone to prison or killing them?
The only thing the first amendment assures you is that the government will not prevent you from speaking (and should protect your life from the results of such speech I guess).
Free speech can be seen as an idea whose restriction by government is banned by the first amendment, the first amendment's restriction doesn't necessarily embody the entirety of the concept. If someone says that the first amendment guarantees their right to air whatever they wish no matter what the owners of the medium say, they'd be wrong. If they say they should be able to say whatever they want because of freedom of speech, they have a point.
Look at the declaration of independence to see some of the thinkings of enlightened people at the time:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
At the time of the writing of the constitution, many people didn't think we needed the Bill of Rights, that's why they are included as the first ten amendments instead of being embodied in the constitution. The thinking was that the constitution so narrowly defined the power of the government that it would be unable to abuse its power to start with. Many people thankfully disagreed and only voted for the constitution with the understanding that the Bill of Rights would be passed as well. Many people today see our rights flowing from the government, which I believe is backwards. Our rights are central to being human, the government merely exists to protect them, not define them.
Can you imagine the abuse of power that would be occurring now if we didn't have those ten amendments? The current administration has chosen to flout them enough as it is.
... the capability to show over 100 units onscreen at a time.
Neato. That's why I quit playing RTS games. You used to create a small force and you could control the units individually. I remember charging after the catapult in Warcraft 2 the enemy brought in to take down my towers. What these games need to do is get back to their roots and come up with more interesting gameplay where you can get involved instead of just worrying about the formulas for resource gathering and how many dozens of what units are in your army.
It'd be substantially cheaper to buy a computer and four of those 1 TB hardisks that were mentioned yesterday, and they'd be rewritable!
The computer will be cheaper, the media about the same as a hard drive. You can get cheapo 500 gig HDs on pricewatch for just over $100, but $180 is probably the MSRP and the MSRP of those hard drives is probably closer to $150, making it the same per gigabyte. Now you have to compare a device used for archival purposes (where you specifically DON'T want the data to be erased) with a hard drive that you can write over, possibly by accident. While hard drives are approaching the physical minimum distance where magnetism can be reliably used to write to and read from the media, optics have a ways to go especially with holographic media. You would have to have adapters for the drives to let you plug them in and out at will, where you will just put them on the shelf. Is the shelf life for the data on a disconnected hard drive longer than the 50 years for this media? If you want to send the data to someone else, you'd need to wrap up the disconnected hard drive and ship it, plus make sure they have a computer setup with the same interface and with the same file system drivers. It's just not as convenient as a removable media type.
Eleven years ago the company I worked at bought one of the first generation of CD-R drives for $900. CD-R media cost about $5 to $10 if I remember correctly. If this device follows the same trend, in twelve years these would be available for $200 and the disc would cost $1.80.
A company I worked with had decided to switch from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice to save money instead of upgrading to the new version of MS Office. A week later everyone was running MS Office again. Apparently one of the executives sent out a Word document that had some embarrassing comments he made "deleted", but they were still there because of "Track Changes". When you opened up the document in OpenOffice, you could see them easily. I was just a peon, or I would have tried to explain that if he had been using OpenOffice himself it wouldn't have happened, and that someone knowledgeable could have viewed them in MS Office anyway. Instead they decided to spend tens of thousands on new licenses to go back to MS Office...
[...] if people create intellectual property they have the right to do what the fuck they want with it, including NOT giving it away for free.
Then they can keep it to themselves if they wish. As soon as they make it available to the public, I have the right to do whatever the fuck I want with it. That is until the government restricts my legal right to do so in order to grant a limited monopoly on copying and distribution to the author. That right is granted by the government as an economic incentive to encourage the production of new works. That is the stated purpose in the constitution of the United States at least. Some other countries see it as a moral right, and the U.S. appears to be moving in that direction. The explained purpose of copyright extensions is to bring the U.S. in line with other countries in the world. In fact it acts to protect the corporate interests that own the large majority of copyrighted works. This occurs at the expense of the public domain and of the people. You should read Melancholy Elephants for a look at where we're headed.
The facts of changes in music buying habits are irrelevant [sic] to the rights and wrongs here.
Since the stated purpose of copyright is to provide financial incentive for the creation of new works, something that does not financially detract from the value of copyright should not be illegal. Extending the term of copyrights to 75 years after the death of the author does little more than the original 28-year term to provide incentive to create new works. On the other hand it restricts the rights of EVERYONE. Think about that. One person gets money for his works (or not since most works that old are of little value or it is his ancestors and most don't get the financial backing for another run of publishing) for 75 years. On the other hand, BILLIONS of people have their rights restricted for THEIR ENTIRE LIVES.
That's a bombshell. It looks like almost every developer of Microsoft Windows software is also violating Microsoft's patents also. That's not just the developers, but the users of said software too. If Linux and it's applications violate the patents, then most Microsoft Windows software surely does as well. Heck, I'm probably violating Microsoft's patents by using Skype right now. I would say since they run on Windows, applications built for Windows are probably more likely to infringe. I don't remember anything in the Visual Studio EULA granting me the right to sub-license Microsoft's UI patents to the people I distribute my application to...
As long as you, your three friends and the equipment all weigh less than 40 kg total, that is probably ok. Also if strapping 30 watts of DC power to your testicles will make you work:)
It's basically a 3D shooter. You have weapons, health, shields, vehicles, aliens and cut scenes. There's was never anything revolutionary about it. Bungee took a genre that was already successful and gave it a decent story and designed it well.
We need to clearly identify behavior as acceptable or unacceptable and enforce that in all venues, virtual or not.
We need to lock up Anthony Hopkins for the murders he committed virtually in "Silence of the Lambs". We also must mandate X-Box Live for everyone and monitoring software. That way you can play Grand Theft Auto, but if you shoot someone or run over someone in your car the police will be notified so they can come arrest you. Don't get me started on the housing code violations I found on my Aunt's low-rent Baltic Avenue slum last weekend... Whack-a-mole at Chucky Cheese? I say "Animal abuse!"
I say the punishment should fit the crime though, much like Grand Theft Auto has the police that come after you if you commit crimes. If you catch someone in Second Life having virtual sex with an under-aged-looking avatar, make them have a virtual trial and make their avatar sit in virtual jail. They can login whenever they want, but they can only move around in their cells and pray their cell-mate doesn't take a shining to them...
Oh wait, It's not illegal to have sex with someone that merely looks underage. Some women in their twenties still look like their 14. Do you want to explain to the dwarf with cancer why she can't have sex with her husband?
No. What I'm saying is that there is a difference between dressing your real partner--who may have varicose veins, cellulite, a birthday coming up, even pubic hair, anything to remind you that she or he is in actuality an adult--as a school girl and creating a virtually realistic fantasy centered on an avatar who, within the limits of the virtual reality system, is for all intents and purposes and appearences a child.
So we should make it legal to have sex with tall, fat kids, but illegal to have sex with adults that have a bikini wax or are flat-chested? You need to think about WHY laws make things illegal, and why we have so many of them. By their nature, laws restrict our freedom. I am of the opinion that we shouldn't make things illegal that don't harm others. Although states disagree on an age where someone can give consent to have sexual acts, I think we can all agree that sex before some age is harmful to that person's development, even if they believe it to be consensual. If you have actual child pornography, there was some child that was abused in the taking of that picture. Without the market for the picture, it may not have been taken and the child might not have been abused. Having sex with a 25-year-old woman that looks like she's 15 causes no harm to anyone. Having virtual sex in Second Life with a 25-year-old woman that is just pretending to be under-age doesn't hurt anybody.
But it doesn't matter. My point was not that an ACTUAL child was under your power, but a VIRTUAL child, who speaks, looks, and acts like a child. This is, after all, a virtual world.
So why make it illegal? It is like making it illegal to think something. The actual act itself is nothing harmful to anyone, you are basically punishing them for their thoughts. You're not actually making an argument that avatars (lacking even AI since they are operated by people) deserve protection based on their pixels? You could make the argument that people that are into that have a higher risk of abusing children so we should get them off the streets, but then you are depriving them of their rights for only being likely to do something actually harmful. This may come from deep hatred we hold for child molesters and the sorrow for their innocent victims, but must we throw out the wheat with the chaff?
The only way to have it make any sense is to go by the actual age of the participants. Second Life doesn't have the best graphics around in the first place. What if a 30 year old midget with a bikini wax wants to make an avatar that looks like her real body but without the wrinkles? Will we also make it illegal to shout "Who's your daddy?" while having sex because it implies incest? Will a college football player get arrested for having virtual sex with a college cheerleader that is young-looking?
But even more than that, I recently felt like checking out old Xbox games so I went to http://xbox.ign.com/index/reviews.html?constraint. floor.article.overall_rating=9&constraint.return_a ll=is_true&sort.attribute=article.overall_rating&s ort.order=desc [ign.com] this link which is all the 9s and above for the Xbox. If you've played most of these games you'll know they are in no way 9s or at least not as high as they are given.
If you look at other numbers though, there are many more lower than '9':
The average score is about 7. That shouldn't be too surprising. I've come to understand that games aren't rated linearly, they're rated on a curve. '5' is not an average game any more than someone that did better than half the class and worse than half the class would get 50% (an F) no matter how many questions they missed. As far as games go, here we have half the games getting a 'C' or better and half the games getting a 'D' or worse. That seems about right. Don't forget they rate on different aspects of the game also. A game could have great sound and graphics (nines) but the worst gameplay ever (a zero) and that would still average to 6.
Some students were suspended up to 3 months. I can't find anywhere that says what the differences were, but there could have been several things. Maybe they're the one that setup the external proxy and told all the other students about it, wasting everyone's time and getting more people into trouble. Maybe the student was engaged in cyberbullying or sending threatening messages. It's all conjecture because we don't know why certain students got a harsher penalty than others.
Students are liable for their actions, not for the school's insecurity. You know you shouldn't be doing it, yet you continue because you can. That's like saying "Why should I be liable for skipping class? The door was unlocked and there was no malicious intent..." You'd better learn to follow rules before you graduate or you'll be posting about how you're homeless because your employer caught you surfing the 'net at work.
So you should just expect if you buy an iBook that you will have to replace it shortly after a year. Just like when you bought an iPod and had to have the battery replaced after a year...
That reminds me of an old program I wrote to show converting between data types in c++... I know it runs on Intel processors for sure. This code is copyrighted by me, but anyone can use it for any purpose whatsoever with no limitations.
#include <stdio.h>
void main() { int i; unsigned char *chars; unsigned int numbers[4] = {0x9dae7636, 0x24bcab32, 0x6a891ea7, 0xff07e9fc};
I'm excited, I can't wait to get one. If I can get a laptop pre-loaded with OpenOffice and drivers for everything (bluetooth, wi-fi, audio, video) that just work, that will be awesome. I really hope they set the 3d desktop as the default... I wonder if they'll find a ton of crap to preload though like they do for windows.
What would be a HUGE seller though is if they added an option to have a working WOW install with the BC expansion... I could finally get rid of Windows for good:)
The Tauren live a peaceful existence in tune with nature. The current orc ruler Thrall was enslaved as a child by humans and forced to fight gladiator-style battles by his captors until freed. The undead are a group that freed themselves from control by the scourge and merely attempt to survive against the "Alliance" that would do them harm. The trolls ruled an empire until the Night Elves delved into destructive magic and destroyed it, luring the Burning Legion to Azeroth in the process. The high elves created a kingdom on the sacred ground of the trolls, and the trolls would have reclaimed it if not for the aid of the humans.
The original orcs that came to Azeroth (with the help of a human named Medivh) were corrupted, but what makes you call the current members of the Horde evil?
I don't believe things people say without checking them...
... even if all CFLs were to break open, the mercury released would be less than would be released if the lights had remained incandescent...
So I did some calculating...
2.931 * 10^14 watt-hours of energy produced by coal plants each year [1]
one-third of total electricity production if from coal [1]
48 tons of mercury emitted by coal power plants, will eventually reduce to 15 tons under new rule [2]
48 tons converts to 4.35 * 10^10 milligrams [3]
A compact fluorescent bulb lasts up to 10,000 hours
One 15 watt companct fluorescent bulb produced as much light as a 60 watt incandescent and contains 5 milligrams of mercury
45 watts {6} * 10,000 hours {5} = 450,000 watt-hours saved by switching
4.35 * 10^10 {4} / (2.931 * 10^14 * 3) {1,2} =.00005 mg mercury per watt-hour of energy
So switching one 60 watt bulb with a 15 watt CF will save 22 milligrams of mercury from entering the atmosphere. So you keep the mercury in 4.5 CF bulb from entering the atmosphere for each CF bulb you use to replace an incandescent. If you don't break the bulbs (like the author) you can recycle them and save it all.
However I don't know if concentrated mercury levels in a landfill would be a worse problem than diffuse levels in the air if they aren't recycled. Also I don't know about the 10,000 hour rated life of CF bulbs, they never seem to last that long for me. Most I've seen rate themselves at 8k hours or less. If the current rule mandated by the EPA actually lowers levels to 15 tons per year, that will bring the value down to 7.5 milligrams, comparable to the mercury in a CF bulb.
Now that I've wasted all that time, I found an EPA fact sheet with a graph showing similar results, but I don't know where they get their numbers from...
If you buy replacements for burned out bulbs (a rare event)...
I get burned out bulbs all the time. They last longer than incandescents, but don't let the "8000 hours" fool you. I'm just too lazy (and $2 isn't enough) to save all my receipts and keep track of when I bought each bulb in my house.
On a somewhat unrelated topic, why don't you want to upgrade to Vista? So far, the *vast* majority of people who I know that have taken the plunge love it almost without exception. I certainly hate going back to XP every day at work.
That's a good question. I haven't used Vista yet myself, I could probably get my boss to let me try it out at work, but he's skittish about trying a new Windows version before the first service pack. I simply don't want to pay for it at home, plus I'm skittish myself. I actually like the thought behind the new driver model. When I'm playing WOW in a window and I get a pop-up in the system tray or I hover over an app on my taskbar, the whole system grinds down to 1 or 2 frames per second. It sounds like Vista would treat the game and all other things equally so that wouldn't happen. I have heard that games run a bit slower under Vista also...
Yes, I noted that, and noted that none of the others apply...
3. definite; not vague or elusive: no tangible grounds for suspicion.
Definite number of shares of stock...
The underlying point is that the value of these relationships, whether they be ownership of a gnome or a government bond or a business venture, depends on the trust people have that the relationships will be honored. Legal recourse is one way to establish trust, but it is not the *only* way, and legal remedies are themselves dependent on trust of the government to do what it said it will. Simple tradition by Blizzard of honoring these transactions can create substantial expectation that they will be honored, as that is exactly why US treasuries have value.
The difference is that Blizzard (who controls the data) has never said that these transactions will be honored. In fact they specifically state that these transactions are not allowed. They say the data belongs to them, you are only "playing" in their virtual (not real or definite) world. Virtual characters and money (at least in Wow's case) do not represent something tangible. Ownership in a company is tangible, you own X shares out of Y. The shares themselves represent a company that exists in reality. A virtual character is just bits stored on a computer. You might as well start taxing Monopoly money for each game played, which although it is tangible, represents the intangible conditions during a game.
By that I think he meant that he could demonstrate that she did not have a wireless router, and therefore that the computer belonged to her. Yes, a friend could have come by and plugged in, but ruling out wireless squatters as a scapegoat is a significant achievement for the plaintiff.
Ruling out a wireless router would be beneficial to the plaintiff, but I don't think he did. He specifically noted that her computer was setup for DHCP. My wireless router can be setup for DHCP also. It seemed from his deposition that he may have been referring to metadata transmitted to Kazaa that said the computer knew its public internet IP address, but applications can discovery that through a NAT and specifically some applications using the Kazaa network do that. Also it could have been someone plugging in to her connection even without a wireless router.
My main problem is that one of his conclusions, that he says he will prove in court, is that Ms. Lindor's computer was used to distribute the songs, yet he cannot prove that and he knows it. It's like the scene of a murder where you have just a pool of blood and a missing butcher knife. An expert could attest to the fact that a murder took place because so much blood was lost, but they couldn't prove that the butcher's knife was the murder weapon without finding it or the body. The person could have been shot or stabbed with a different weapon for all they know and the butcher knife could have been taken to throw them off.
That's like saying Newton's laws of motion are errors because of relativity. There are different levels of detail we can go into when discussing these things, and since he started with a postal analogy I think it's safe to say that NAT, proxies, etc., are a little bit beyond the scope of this introductory explanation. If you want to say he was imprecise or generalizing, fine, but he was not "wrong".
I agree with you a bit here that he doesn't have to go into that great of detail, but his statement is wrong. Every device connected to the internet does not necessarily have a unique public IP address. I think this would be akin to him saying that objects can accelerate to superluminal velocity according to Newton. Not only can he not prove that a NAT wasn't used, he can't prove that it was Ms. Lindor's computer, yet he claims to be able to.
Why on Earth should the expert for the plaintiff be required to save the results of the test? Let him do whatever the hell he wants to with his test, if he has no further use for it then he can throw it out for all I care. I have my own copy of the test results and the source material after all.
I think you're right here. In a perfect world, an expert would be independent and simply report all of his findings, but I don't think that is required for civil cases in the United States. It seems all right to me since they are willing to concede that the hard drive didn't have any file sharing software or MP3s on it.
He freely admitted that any identification of who that IP address belonged to was not done by him, and he had no way to verify it; his testimony was about what IP was being used for filesharing, not who that IP belonged to. ...
The only problems I've seen anyone have with his testimony are that he's relying on the data he's given to be accurate (HTF else is he supposed to operate?), that he made a few minor errors in his testimony - i.e. mixing up some terms (this happens to people, and unlike a written deposition he cannot go back over it for mistakes before sending it in), and that he is inaccurate with some of what he says while trying to explain complex technical details to a layperson (everything taught to laypeople is like this; generally correct, even if not correct in specifics).
His report states the following:
15) I will testify to the procedures and results obtained by MediaSentry coupled with the information complied by defendant's ISP to demonstrate the defendant's internet account and computer were used to download and upload copyrighted music from the internet using the KaZaA peer-to-peer network.
He can't do that. It's impossible. there is no way he can use those materials to prove that a computer owned by the defendant was used. Throughout his deposition he gives misleading and weasly answers. "I'll show the defendant's computer was used", yet he cannot and in fact found no evidence on her hard drive. He's getting paid by the RIAA, but his duty as an expert is to give his accurate interpretation of the evidence. We've all seen on TV (and in the SCO vs. IBM litigation) that some experts will say anything for money. This appears to be another case of that. He not only makes "technical" mistakes in attempting to describe it to a layperson, he makes glaring errors and omissions to further his client's case.
His report has this error shortly after his credentials:
The Internet is a collection of interconnected computers or network devices. In order to be able to deliver traffic from one computer or network device to another, each computer or network device must have a unique address within the Internet. The unique address is called the Internet Protocol (IP) address. This is analogous to the postal system where each mail drop has a unique address.
He doesn't mention NAT or proxy servers at all. There can actually be many computers sharing a single public IP address. NAT (Network Address Translation) is when one computer or device separates two networks. On one side of the device, computers can have different addresses. When they want to communicate to the other side of the device, they use the device as a gateway. The NAT device then uses it's own IP address on the other side. There can be many computers on the "internal" side, but they all look the same to computers or devices on the other side of the NAT device. Imagine you live in a house with two friends, Joe and Moe. Joe gets a subscription to Scientific American and Moe gets a subscription to Playboy, but they only fill out the address. When the mail comes, you give Joe the Scientific American and Moe the Playboy because you know they requested them. The magazines only know someone at your address has a subscription. Even though there are three people living at that address, the magazines can't tell.
Proxy servers can also be used to mask the final destination. Think of it almost as a post-office box. Many people can rent PO boxes from one address. They come to that address to get their mail, then they take it home to their personal address. The place with the PO Boxes might not even have your personal address, like a proxy server might not store logs. This is especially the case when someone with nefarious intent got you to install something on your computer without your knowledge to make it act as a proxy s
MediaSentry is the software that detected the sharing of files and provided the initial IP address that was used to subpoena the account information. It's list of files available and the IP address of the computer that was sharing them is central to the case. In Florida, drunken driving cases have been thrown out because the manufacturer of the breathalyser wouldn't disclose the source code or internal workings. I think the defendant should have a right to inspect the MediaSentry source code. Otherwise they could A) purposely make it output certain (or random) numbers or B) have a bug in their application that would lead to improper identification. I don't think this guy even actually used MediaSentry, he was simply provided with logs from MediaSentry that were accumulated by someone else.
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Free speech can be seen as an idea whose restriction by government is banned by the first amendment, the first amendment's restriction doesn't necessarily embody the entirety of the concept. If someone says that the first amendment guarantees their right to air whatever they wish no matter what the owners of the medium say, they'd be wrong. If they say they should be able to say whatever they want because of freedom of speech, they have a point.
Look at the declaration of independence to see some of the thinkings of enlightened people at the time:
At the time of the writing of the constitution, many people didn't think we needed the Bill of Rights, that's why they are included as the first ten amendments instead of being embodied in the constitution. The thinking was that the constitution so narrowly defined the power of the government that it would be unable to abuse its power to start with. Many people thankfully disagreed and only voted for the constitution with the understanding that the Bill of Rights would be passed as well. Many people today see our rights flowing from the government, which I believe is backwards. Our rights are central to being human, the government merely exists to protect them, not define them.
Can you imagine the abuse of power that would be occurring now if we didn't have those ten amendments? The current administration has chosen to flout them enough as it is.
The computer will be cheaper, the media about the same as a hard drive. You can get cheapo 500 gig HDs on pricewatch for just over $100, but $180 is probably the MSRP and the MSRP of those hard drives is probably closer to $150, making it the same per gigabyte. Now you have to compare a device used for archival purposes (where you specifically DON'T want the data to be erased) with a hard drive that you can write over, possibly by accident. While hard drives are approaching the physical minimum distance where magnetism can be reliably used to write to and read from the media, optics have a ways to go especially with holographic media. You would have to have adapters for the drives to let you plug them in and out at will, where you will just put them on the shelf. Is the shelf life for the data on a disconnected hard drive longer than the 50 years for this media? If you want to send the data to someone else, you'd need to wrap up the disconnected hard drive and ship it, plus make sure they have a computer setup with the same interface and with the same file system drivers. It's just not as convenient as a removable media type.
Eleven years ago the company I worked at bought one of the first generation of CD-R drives for $900. CD-R media cost about $5 to $10 if I remember correctly. If this device follows the same trend, in twelve years these would be available for $200 and the disc would cost $1.80.
A company I worked with had decided to switch from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice to save money instead of upgrading to the new version of MS Office. A week later everyone was running MS Office again. Apparently one of the executives sent out a Word document that had some embarrassing comments he made "deleted", but they were still there because of "Track Changes". When you opened up the document in OpenOffice, you could see them easily. I was just a peon, or I would have tried to explain that if he had been using OpenOffice himself it wouldn't have happened, and that someone knowledgeable could have viewed them in MS Office anyway. Instead they decided to spend tens of thousands on new licenses to go back to MS Office...
Then they can keep it to themselves if they wish. As soon as they make it available to the public, I have the right to do whatever the fuck I want with it. That is until the government restricts my legal right to do so in order to grant a limited monopoly on copying and distribution to the author. That right is granted by the government as an economic incentive to encourage the production of new works. That is the stated purpose in the constitution of the United States at least. Some other countries see it as a moral right, and the U.S. appears to be moving in that direction. The explained purpose of copyright extensions is to bring the U.S. in line with other countries in the world. In fact it acts to protect the corporate interests that own the large majority of copyrighted works. This occurs at the expense of the public domain and of the people. You should read Melancholy Elephants for a look at where we're headed.
Since the stated purpose of copyright is to provide financial incentive for the creation of new works, something that does not financially detract from the value of copyright should not be illegal. Extending the term of copyrights to 75 years after the death of the author does little more than the original 28-year term to provide incentive to create new works. On the other hand it restricts the rights of EVERYONE. Think about that. One person gets money for his works (or not since most works that old are of little value or it is his ancestors and most don't get the financial backing for another run of publishing) for 75 years. On the other hand, BILLIONS of people have their rights restricted for THEIR ENTIRE LIVES.
That's a bombshell. It looks like almost every developer of Microsoft Windows software is also violating Microsoft's patents also. That's not just the developers, but the users of said software too. If Linux and it's applications violate the patents, then most Microsoft Windows software surely does as well. Heck, I'm probably violating Microsoft's patents by using Skype right now. I would say since they run on Windows, applications built for Windows are probably more likely to infringe. I don't remember anything in the Visual Studio EULA granting me the right to sub-license Microsoft's UI patents to the people I distribute my application to...
As long as you, your three friends and the equipment all weigh less than 40 kg total, that is probably ok. Also if strapping 30 watts of DC power to your testicles will make you work :)
It's basically a 3D shooter. You have weapons, health, shields, vehicles, aliens and cut scenes. There's was never anything revolutionary about it. Bungee took a genre that was already successful and gave it a decent story and designed it well.
We need to lock up Anthony Hopkins for the murders he committed virtually in "Silence of the Lambs". We also must mandate X-Box Live for everyone and monitoring software. That way you can play Grand Theft Auto, but if you shoot someone or run over someone in your car the police will be notified so they can come arrest you. Don't get me started on the housing code violations I found on my Aunt's low-rent Baltic Avenue slum last weekend... Whack-a-mole at Chucky Cheese? I say "Animal abuse!"
I say the punishment should fit the crime though, much like Grand Theft Auto has the police that come after you if you commit crimes. If you catch someone in Second Life having virtual sex with an under-aged-looking avatar, make them have a virtual trial and make their avatar sit in virtual jail. They can login whenever they want, but they can only move around in their cells and pray their cell-mate doesn't take a shining to them...
Oh wait, It's not illegal to have sex with someone that merely looks underage. Some women in their twenties still look like their 14. Do you want to explain to the dwarf with cancer why she can't have sex with her husband?
So we should make it legal to have sex with tall, fat kids, but illegal to have sex with adults that have a bikini wax or are flat-chested? You need to think about WHY laws make things illegal, and why we have so many of them. By their nature, laws restrict our freedom. I am of the opinion that we shouldn't make things illegal that don't harm others. Although states disagree on an age where someone can give consent to have sexual acts, I think we can all agree that sex before some age is harmful to that person's development, even if they believe it to be consensual. If you have actual child pornography, there was some child that was abused in the taking of that picture. Without the market for the picture, it may not have been taken and the child might not have been abused. Having sex with a 25-year-old woman that looks like she's 15 causes no harm to anyone. Having virtual sex in Second Life with a 25-year-old woman that is just pretending to be under-age doesn't hurt anybody.
So why make it illegal? It is like making it illegal to think something. The actual act itself is nothing harmful to anyone, you are basically punishing them for their thoughts. You're not actually making an argument that avatars (lacking even AI since they are operated by people) deserve protection based on their pixels? You could make the argument that people that are into that have a higher risk of abusing children so we should get them off the streets, but then you are depriving them of their rights for only being likely to do something actually harmful. This may come from deep hatred we hold for child molesters and the sorrow for their innocent victims, but must we throw out the wheat with the chaff?
The only way to have it make any sense is to go by the actual age of the participants. Second Life doesn't have the best graphics around in the first place. What if a 30 year old midget with a bikini wax wants to make an avatar that looks like her real body but without the wrinkles? Will we also make it illegal to shout "Who's your daddy?" while having sex because it implies incest? Will a college football player get arrested for having virtual sex with a college cheerleader that is young-looking?
The average score is about 7. That shouldn't be too surprising. I've come to understand that games aren't rated linearly, they're rated on a curve. '5' is not an average game any more than someone that did better than half the class and worse than half the class would get 50% (an F) no matter how many questions they missed. As far as games go, here we have half the games getting a 'C' or better and half the games getting a 'D' or worse. That seems about right. Don't forget they rate on different aspects of the game also. A game could have great sound and graphics (nines) but the worst gameplay ever (a zero) and that would still average to 6.
Some students were suspended up to 3 months. I can't find anywhere that says what the differences were, but there could have been several things. Maybe they're the one that setup the external proxy and told all the other students about it, wasting everyone's time and getting more people into trouble. Maybe the student was engaged in cyberbullying or sending threatening messages. It's all conjecture because we don't know why certain students got a harsher penalty than others.
Students are liable for their actions, not for the school's insecurity. You know you shouldn't be doing it, yet you continue because you can. That's like saying "Why should I be liable for skipping class? The door was unlocked and there was no malicious intent..." You'd better learn to follow rules before you graduate or you'll be posting about how you're homeless because your employer caught you surfing the 'net at work.
So you should just expect if you buy an iBook that you will have to replace it shortly after a year. Just like when you bought an iPod and had to have the battery replaced after a year...
I just don't want to bother with trying to get it to work myself.
I'm excited, I can't wait to get one. If I can get a laptop pre-loaded with OpenOffice and drivers for everything (bluetooth, wi-fi, audio, video) that just work, that will be awesome. I really hope they set the 3d desktop as the default... I wonder if they'll find a ton of crap to preload though like they do for windows.
What would be a HUGE seller though is if they added an option to have a working WOW install with the BC expansion... I could finally get rid of Windows for good :)
The Tauren live a peaceful existence in tune with nature. The current orc ruler Thrall was enslaved as a child by humans and forced to fight gladiator-style battles by his captors until freed. The undead are a group that freed themselves from control by the scourge and merely attempt to survive against the "Alliance" that would do them harm. The trolls ruled an empire until the Night Elves delved into destructive magic and destroyed it, luring the Burning Legion to Azeroth in the process. The high elves created a kingdom on the sacred ground of the trolls, and the trolls would have reclaimed it if not for the aid of the humans.
The original orcs that came to Azeroth (with the help of a human named Medivh) were corrupted, but what makes you call the current members of the Horde evil?
45 watts {6} * 10,000 hours {5} = 450,000 watt-hours saved by switching
4.35 * 10^10 {4} / (2.931 * 10^14 * 3) {1,2} =
So switching one 60 watt bulb with a 15 watt CF will save 22 milligrams of mercury from entering the atmosphere. So you keep the mercury in 4.5 CF bulb from entering the atmosphere for each CF bulb you use to replace an incandescent. If you don't break the bulbs (like the author) you can recycle them and save it all.
However I don't know if concentrated mercury levels in a landfill would be a worse problem than diffuse levels in the air if they aren't recycled. Also I don't know about the 10,000 hour rated life of CF bulbs, they never seem to last that long for me. Most I've seen rate themselves at 8k hours or less. If the current rule mandated by the EPA actually lowers levels to 15 tons per year, that will bring the value down to 7.5 milligrams, comparable to the mercury in a CF bulb.
Now that I've wasted all that time, I found an EPA fact sheet with a graph showing similar results, but I don't know where they get their numbers from...
I get burned out bulbs all the time. They last longer than incandescents, but don't let the "8000 hours" fool you. I'm just too lazy (and $2 isn't enough) to save all my receipts and keep track of when I bought each bulb in my house.
Ruling out a wireless router would be beneficial to the plaintiff, but I don't think he did. He specifically noted that her computer was setup for DHCP. My wireless router can be setup for DHCP also. It seemed from his deposition that he may have been referring to metadata transmitted to Kazaa that said the computer knew its public internet IP address, but applications can discovery that through a NAT and specifically some applications using the Kazaa network do that. Also it could have been someone plugging in to her connection even without a wireless router.
My main problem is that one of his conclusions, that he says he will prove in court, is that Ms. Lindor's computer was used to distribute the songs, yet he cannot prove that and he knows it. It's like the scene of a murder where you have just a pool of blood and a missing butcher knife. An expert could attest to the fact that a murder took place because so much blood was lost, but they couldn't prove that the butcher's knife was the murder weapon without finding it or the body. The person could have been shot or stabbed with a different weapon for all they know and the butcher knife could have been taken to throw them off.
I agree with you a bit here that he doesn't have to go into that great of detail, but his statement is wrong. Every device connected to the internet does not necessarily have a unique public IP address. I think this would be akin to him saying that objects can accelerate to superluminal velocity according to Newton. Not only can he not prove that a NAT wasn't used, he can't prove that it was Ms. Lindor's computer, yet he claims to be able to.
I think you're right here. In a perfect world, an expert would be independent and simply report all of his findings, but I don't think that is required for civil cases in the United States. It seems all right to me since they are willing to concede that the hard drive didn't have any file sharing software or MP3s on it.
His report states the following:
He can't do that. It's impossible. there is no way he can use those materials to prove that a computer owned by the defendant was used. Throughout his deposition he gives misleading and weasly answers. "I'll show the defendant's computer was used", yet he cannot and in fact found no evidence on her hard drive. He's getting paid by the RIAA, but his duty as an expert is to give his accurate interpretation of the evidence. We've all seen on TV (and in the SCO vs. IBM litigation) that some experts will say anything for money. This appears to be another case of that. He not only makes "technical" mistakes in attempting to describe it to a layperson, he makes glaring errors and omissions to further his client's case.
His report has this error shortly after his credentials:
He doesn't mention NAT or proxy servers at all. There can actually be many computers sharing a single public IP address. NAT (Network Address Translation) is when one computer or device separates two networks. On one side of the device, computers can have different addresses. When they want to communicate to the other side of the device, they use the device as a gateway. The NAT device then uses it's own IP address on the other side. There can be many computers on the "internal" side, but they all look the same to computers or devices on the other side of the NAT device. Imagine you live in a house with two friends, Joe and Moe. Joe gets a subscription to Scientific American and Moe gets a subscription to Playboy, but they only fill out the address. When the mail comes, you give Joe the Scientific American and Moe the Playboy because you know they requested them. The magazines only know someone at your address has a subscription. Even though there are three people living at that address, the magazines can't tell.
Proxy servers can also be used to mask the final destination. Think of it almost as a post-office box. Many people can rent PO boxes from one address. They come to that address to get their mail, then they take it home to their personal address. The place with the PO Boxes might not even have your personal address, like a proxy server might not store logs. This is especially the case when someone with nefarious intent got you to install something on your computer without your knowledge to make it act as a proxy s
MediaSentry is the software that detected the sharing of files and provided the initial IP address that was used to subpoena the account information. It's list of files available and the IP address of the computer that was sharing them is central to the case. In Florida, drunken driving cases have been thrown out because the manufacturer of the breathalyser wouldn't disclose the source code or internal workings. I think the defendant should have a right to inspect the MediaSentry source code. Otherwise they could A) purposely make it output certain (or random) numbers or B) have a bug in their application that would lead to improper identification. I don't think this guy even actually used MediaSentry, he was simply provided with logs from MediaSentry that were accumulated by someone else.