How many "this could be the cure for AIDS/Cancer/Virginity" articles get posted on/. every month?
Virginity doesn't fit in that group. AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease. Increase cancer risk can be inherited, you get it from your parents therefore also involving sex, Virginity on the other hand is certainly not passed along through sex
One may be less worse than the other, but both suck, and both take control away from you and I and place it firmly in the hands of others.
There is a subtle difference. In the case of tagging, as opposed to simply blocking the broadcasting, of material that some may find inappropriate you can choose to trust the judgement of the people doing the tagging, or not. Control is not being taken away from you, you are giving away control willingly, and if you decide not to trust the taggers you can choose to ignore them.
You could argue that you've already done that collectively by electing and giving control to the government deciding what to censor, but this would allow you as an individual to choose what censoring you want applied to your tv, you could choose to keep control for yourself by going the "tape everything the kids want to see and watch it yourself first" route, but many simply won't have the time to spend on that.
Now in a (closer to) perfect system your tv should be connected to the internet and every program should have a uniqe ID transmitted. Then you could configure your box who to get ratings from ("Cristian conservatives for a moral USA", "Communist anarchists against everything" or whoever)
Replying to myself here with another bit of information.
Another reson why wood may be preferable in cold climates is the expanding and contacting of materials from different temperatures (think 50 celcius or 122 fahrenheit difference between inside and outside). A rigid brick or concrete structure would be more suceptible to cracking than a more flexible wooden one.
In northern europe, the situation is pretty much reversed. In norway the majority of houses are built out of wood. As are they in the parts of sweden and finland I've been to.
I imagine this is because of wood beeing much more available (plenty of forests here, but it would be expensive to transport enouch wood for a house to central/south europe) and brick or concrete beeing harder and/or more expensive to insulate against the winter cold. As insulation becomes better/cheaper the ratio of wood to brick should probably change, and it seems (no hard statistice to show) that concrete and brick is more comman among newer houses. Big multistry buildings like apartment complexes are exclusively concrete since wood building becomes impractical once you get big enough.
Obviously tradition plays a big role here too, as I grew up in a traditional wooden house that's probably what I would build if price and all other factors were equal, don't know how big a price difference the tipping point would be as I'm not seriously considering building anything at the moment.
I'm curious what building style is in use in iceland which is further north and thus has a colder climate, but also less wood suitable for building (if any), if someone could enlighten me please do. Also how does Canada compare to the USA (colder but also more forests)?
Unfortunately, most of it has been processed through astronaut intestines.
And that has it's uses too. If they ever decide to experiment with greenhouses in space (or on the moon or whatever) sterilizing that shit (pun intended) could conceivably be cheaper than bringing up dirt and fertilizer from earth. They would have to get over the psychological factor of knowing where your space tomatoes came from though, but since the water already is recycled from human "byproducs" that are already dealing with that.
The original restiction was bad, this new change is good. Kudos to Microsoft for doing that. But I have no illusions that they would have made that change without all the "bitching", and I'm glad consumer pressure still workes sometimes. I was considering not upgrading because of that restriction, atleast holding off until after the next major upgrade, now with this change they may still see my money while my current hardware is still in use.
Now if they actually thought that lisence term was going to stop any kind of piracy they were deluded. The two possible reasons I can imagine for that original clause would be stupidity (they didn't really think it through) or an attempt to extract more money from consumers (by making them pay again when doing a major upgrade).
And even if you could pull of a one sided surprise attack and nuke the enemy back to the stone age without any bombs landing on your own soil there will be consequences beside any environmental effects.
Civil war on the attacking side doesn't seem that unlikely (I for one would like to see the our leaders heads on a stick if they did something like this).
Also anyone that survived the initial bombings would be potential suicide bombers, especially since they wouldn't have much to lose seeing as lots of them would die from radiation damage anyway. (and I believe that against whoever attacked first anything in the terrorist vocabulary would be justifiable.
Then there's the economic fallout, the rest of the unbombed world would likely hate you, and afaik both the old superpowers are dependant on certain imports.
What I'm wondering is how many of their potential customer will actually be surfing the web? We all know the internet is the root of all good porn^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hevil, and so do they.
Riiiiiight, but, uh... You do realize that the testicles (I mean the OEM stuff, not Neuticles) perform certain biological functions that I'm guessing Neuticles can't perform. And if they can, wow, those are some impressive fake balls. But if they could (which they can't), what's the point of going through all this in the first place?
I bet he does. I bet he also knows that a dog having only one OEM testicle isn't that uncommon, and would also disqualify from breeding. So if you have this great dog that would otherwise earn you lots of money through breeding, but lacks one nut, what will you do?
And there is the heart of the matter. I you only want to play games a console will probably give you better value for money (unless FPS and RTS is all that counts). OTOH if you need/want a computer anyway for other tasks (word processing/spreadsheets/photo editing/video editing +++) adding on the cost of a decent (not top of the line) video card will allow you to play games at a reasonable cost (atleast when compared to the ps3)
Unless like the rest of us gadget junkies you end up getting both to get your regular fix of shiny new electronics.
The whole model makes the user violate GPL in principle
Actually, since the end user doesn't distribute anything there is no violation there. So the end user is still in the white. Depending on the interpretation of the GPL Nvidia may be in a gray/black area.
Once the battery is devoid of charge, the landmine is safe for handling by a small child.
I'll believe that sales pitch when the weapon manufacturers remove batteries from their mines, and give those mines to their own children to play with.
But yes I agree that if you absolutely have to use mines these are better than "old fashioned ones. The lesser of two evils and all that.
Couldn't they also add a secondary battery and a small radio transmitter, so when the mine goes inactive it gives away it's position so it can be safely removed before the explosives grow unstable?
So if I sell pencils called 'Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Edition' for $200 bucks each over the internet, then I am not violating trademark law?
That depends on trademark law where you come from. Seeing as I could legally sell a product called "Windows" (the kind you use to look outside without leaving that annoying hole in the wall), without infringing on Microsofts trade mark. Your suggested name is a little more specific and may be targetted by the law, but as it isn't a product in the realm of the trademarked item (operating systems, computer programs) it may technically be legal in some parts of the world. And you'd have to make sure your internet site only sells to the countries where you could get away with it.
But you should make damn sure that your buyer knows that the actual product is a pencil, or you could get run over by different kinds of consumer protection laws, even if that particular countrys trademark laws didn't target you
This is not legal advice, I am obviously not a lawyer, or you would never have seen the bullshit above
If you distributed your code to me under the terms of the GPL, and I made a derivative work, and I distributed my derivative work (under the terms of the GPL also, because this would be mandatory)
This would be a case like the linux kernel, only simplified to involve only two developers
hen a third work, derivative of my work, can only be licensed under the terms of the GPL regardless of any change in the license of the original code.
But this isn't entirely accurate. A third work can be lisenced under any lisence, but only with the permission of all the copyright holders (that would be you, the orignal developer and the developer of the third version. No problem if you all agreed on the new lisence
The problem with the linux kernel is that there is an awful lot of copyright holders. Tracking down and getting permission from all of them (or whoever inherited/bought/was given the copyright) would be an awful lot of work, and the more people involved the smaller the chance would be of reaching a consensus on a new lisence that all of them would accept (which would be required to legally change the lisence)
The thing that I'm not really sure about is the legality of releasing under a new lisence after removing/replacing the work of one developer, the code done after his/her version might still be bound by his lisence (as a derivative work) and a change of lisence could be copyright infringement.
Well I wouldn't expect the internal battle to have been about ethics. It was probably over the cost of bad press vs the value of this particular tool for spying on your customers.
In the end I believ microsoft will have their own browsing tracking and ad targeting system built into windows, explorer, office and media-player. The difference beeing that they will make it themselves or buy fom another company than claria. The downside will be that there will be no way yo remove it without removeing the actual OS. (linux is looking better and better) Te upside is that if it is part of the os they might make it more efficient and less error prone, but given Microsofts bug and security history I wouldn't count on it.
Our orders were to take the bill even if we had doubts,
Good orders.
Assuming the bill was real you'd be losing one or more customers
Assuming the bill was a fake you'd be confronting a criminal (or perhaps someone that got tricked himself) wich might be dangerous.
I'd say even if you were sure the bill was a fake you should take it. And then let the police do its job with the surveillance tapes. It simply isn't worth it to check if the forgerer is also a mental case carrying a cun.
The action of modifying web pages containing addresses or ISBN to drive click through traffic seems pretty low to me.
Actually you seem to have misunderstood. This is something the user has to actively choose to install. The modification to the web pages is no more dirty play than supressing popups or blocking ads. (Although the copyright holders of those pages may have a thing or two to say on the matter) This is not something they force on the user without his knowledge.
This is basic economics, you provide something to the user (extra links adde automagically to websites) that he wants. Usually a business expects something of value in return, in this case it's the ability to choose where those links lead, eg links on locations leading to maps.google.com giving google advertising revenue. If the user isn't happy with where the links lead he can choose not install/use the product.
If you want to go on a "google hunt" you're proably going to be more successful looking at the patent issues.
Securing a stand-alone workstation, either linux, or windows using any kind of OS login scheme is useless today.
Bzzt wrong. Any OS login scheme increases the work and knowledge required of the attacker. You want to keep the cost of breaking in higher than the value of the information you're guarding.
Since I can't imagine anyone interested enough in my private email to physically break in a password is suficcient security. Since I can imagine someone interested in taking control of the machine across the net (read spammers) I use a firewall and virus checker, to make it hard enough that they move on to an easier target
Anyway for you paranoids out there: Encrypt the filesystem with a sufficiently strong key. Leave no unencrypted partitions (they could be tampered with while you're away, someone might leave a trojan to call home when the filesystem is mounted). Put the key on bootable removable media. Boot from that to mount the encrypted filesystem.
That will keep the information safe from people that can't or won't steal your key. You might consider buying a laptop and bring that with you instead, to keep things simple
In order to truly secure the workstation, some sort of boot password is needed.
Most new BIOSes allow you to set a password, but if the attacker has physical access to the machine that password is useless too
It sounds to me like he thinks he should be free to write virii because it's expression and protected under the first amendment?
So please tell me when the first amendment became law in the Czech Republic. When will you people learn that your laws does not apply outside your borders? Besides that as far as I know there is no US law prohibiting writing computer viruses, or any law prohibiting sharing of source code for them. There are however laws that could get you if you release the virus on an unsuspecting third party, either through malice or negligence (like testing your newly aquired virus on a machine connected to the Net), or planning to do so.
Were the actions of this man stupid? Yes. Immoral/wrong? Probably. Illegal according to US law? No. Illegal according to US law had he been in the US? Probably not. Illegal according to Czech law? Dunno, but that's all that matters.
So if some ass decides to SMS-bomb my cell why should I pay for it when my cell company didn't protect me?
What kind of subscription do you have? Here (norway) I haven't seen any cell phone company that charges for incoming SMS. You'd still have to delete the shit but you won't have to pay for it
Slashdot Mirror
How many "this could be the cure for AIDS/Cancer/Virginity" articles get posted on /. every month?
Virginity doesn't fit in that group. AIDS is a sexually transmitted disease. Increase cancer risk can be inherited, you get it from your parents therefore also involving sex, Virginity on the other hand is certainly not passed along through sex
One may be less worse than the other, but both suck, and both take control away from you and I and place it firmly in the hands of others.
There is a subtle difference. In the case of tagging, as opposed to simply blocking the broadcasting, of material that some may find inappropriate you can choose to trust the judgement of the people doing the tagging, or not. Control is not being taken away from you, you are giving away control willingly, and if you decide not to trust the taggers you can choose to ignore them.
You could argue that you've already done that collectively by electing and giving control to the government deciding what to censor, but this would allow you as an individual to choose what censoring you want applied to your tv, you could choose to keep control for yourself by going the "tape everything the kids want to see and watch it yourself first" route, but many simply won't have the time to spend on that.
Now in a (closer to) perfect system your tv should be connected to the internet and every program should have a uniqe ID transmitted. Then you could configure your box who to get ratings from ("Cristian conservatives for a moral USA", "Communist anarchists against everything" or whoever)
Replying to myself here with another bit of information.
Another reson why wood may be preferable in cold climates is the expanding and contacting of materials from different temperatures (think 50 celcius or 122 fahrenheit difference between inside and outside). A rigid brick or concrete structure would be more suceptible to cracking than a more flexible wooden one.
In northern europe, the situation is pretty much reversed. In norway the majority of houses are built out of wood. As are they in the parts of sweden and finland I've been to.
I imagine this is because of wood beeing much more available (plenty of forests here, but it would be expensive to transport enouch wood for a house to central/south europe) and brick or concrete beeing harder and/or more expensive to insulate against the winter cold. As insulation becomes better/cheaper the ratio of wood to brick should probably change, and it seems (no hard statistice to show) that concrete and brick is more comman among newer houses. Big multistry buildings like apartment complexes are exclusively concrete since wood building becomes impractical once you get big enough.
Obviously tradition plays a big role here too, as I grew up in a traditional wooden house that's probably what I would build if price and all other factors were equal, don't know how big a price difference the tipping point would be as I'm not seriously considering building anything at the moment.
I'm curious what building style is in use in iceland which is further north and thus has a colder climate, but also less wood suitable for building (if any), if someone could enlighten me please do. Also how does Canada compare to the USA (colder but also more forests)?
Unfortunately, most of it has been processed through astronaut intestines.
And that has it's uses too. If they ever decide to experiment with greenhouses in space (or on the moon or whatever) sterilizing that shit (pun intended) could conceivably be cheaper than bringing up dirt and fertilizer from earth. They would have to get over the psychological factor of knowing where your space tomatoes came from though, but since the water already is recycled from human "byproducs" that are already dealing with that.
The original restiction was bad, this new change is good. Kudos to Microsoft for doing that. But I have no illusions that they would have made that change without all the "bitching", and I'm glad consumer pressure still workes sometimes. I was considering not upgrading because of that restriction, atleast holding off until after the next major upgrade, now with this change they may still see my money while my current hardware is still in use. Now if they actually thought that lisence term was going to stop any kind of piracy they were deluded. The two possible reasons I can imagine for that original clause would be stupidity (they didn't really think it through) or an attempt to extract more money from consumers (by making them pay again when doing a major upgrade).
And even if you could pull of a one sided surprise attack and nuke the enemy back to the stone age without any bombs landing on your own soil there will be consequences beside any environmental effects.
Civil war on the attacking side doesn't seem that unlikely (I for one would like to see the our leaders heads on a stick if they did something like this).
Also anyone that survived the initial bombings would be potential suicide bombers, especially since they wouldn't have much to lose seeing as lots of them would die from radiation damage anyway. (and I believe that against whoever attacked first anything in the terrorist vocabulary would be justifiable.
Then there's the economic fallout, the rest of the unbombed world would likely hate you, and afaik both the old superpowers are dependant on certain imports.
What I'm wondering is how many of their potential customer will actually be surfing the web? We all know the internet is the root of all good porn^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hevil, and so do they.
Riiiiiight, but, uh... You do realize that the testicles (I mean the OEM stuff, not Neuticles) perform certain biological functions that I'm guessing Neuticles can't perform. And if they can, wow, those are some impressive fake balls. But if they could (which they can't), what's the point of going through all this in the first place?
I bet he does. I bet he also knows that a dog having only one OEM testicle isn't that uncommon, and would also disqualify from breeding. So if you have this great dog that would otherwise earn you lots of money through breeding, but lacks one nut, what will you do?
And there is the heart of the matter. I you only want to play games a console will probably give you better value for money (unless FPS and RTS is all that counts). OTOH if you need/want a computer anyway for other tasks (word processing/spreadsheets/photo editing/video editing +++) adding on the cost of a decent (not top of the line) video card will allow you to play games at a reasonable cost (atleast when compared to the ps3) Unless like the rest of us gadget junkies you end up getting both to get your regular fix of shiny new electronics.
The whole model makes the user violate GPL in principle
Actually, since the end user doesn't distribute anything there is no violation there. So the end user is still in the white. Depending on the interpretation of the GPL Nvidia may be in a gray/black area.
Once the battery is devoid of charge, the landmine is safe for handling by a small child.
I'll believe that sales pitch when the weapon manufacturers remove batteries from their mines, and give those mines to their own children to play with.
But yes I agree that if you absolutely have to use mines these are better than "old fashioned ones. The lesser of two evils and all that.
Couldn't they also add a secondary battery and a small radio transmitter, so when the mine goes inactive it gives away it's position so it can be safely removed before the explosives grow unstable?
So if I sell pencils called 'Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate Edition' for $200 bucks each over the internet, then I am not violating trademark law?
That depends on trademark law where you come from. Seeing as I could legally sell a product called "Windows" (the kind you use to look outside without leaving that annoying hole in the wall), without infringing on Microsofts trade mark. Your suggested name is a little more specific and may be targetted by the law, but as it isn't a product in the realm of the trademarked item (operating systems, computer programs) it may technically be legal in some parts of the world. And you'd have to make sure your internet site only sells to the countries where you could get away with it.
But you should make damn sure that your buyer knows that the actual product is a pencil, or you could get run over by different kinds of consumer protection laws, even if that particular countrys trademark laws didn't target you
This is not legal advice, I am obviously not a lawyer, or you would never have seen the bullshit above
If you distributed your code to me under the terms of the GPL, and I made a derivative work, and I distributed my derivative work (under the terms of the GPL also, because this would be mandatory)
This would be a case like the linux kernel, only simplified to involve only two developers
hen a third work, derivative of my work, can only be licensed under the terms of the GPL regardless of any change in the license of the original code.
But this isn't entirely accurate. A third work can be lisenced under any lisence, but only with the permission of all the copyright holders (that would be you, the orignal developer and the developer of the third version. No problem if you all agreed on the new lisence
The problem with the linux kernel is that there is an awful lot of copyright holders. Tracking down and getting permission from all of them (or whoever inherited/bought/was given the copyright) would be an awful lot of work, and the more people involved the smaller the chance would be of reaching a consensus on a new lisence that all of them would accept (which would be required to legally change the lisence)
The thing that I'm not really sure about is the legality of releasing under a new lisence after removing/replacing the work of one developer, the code done after his/her version might still be bound by his lisence (as a derivative work) and a change of lisence could be copyright infringement.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0887308589The Dilbert Principle. He'll love it, I did.
Well I wouldn't expect the internal battle to have been about ethics. It was probably over the cost of bad press vs the value of this particular tool for spying on your customers.
In the end I believ microsoft will have their own browsing tracking and ad targeting system built into windows, explorer, office and media-player. The difference beeing that they will make it themselves or buy fom another company than claria. The downside will be that there will be no way yo remove it without removeing the actual OS. (linux is looking better and better) Te upside is that if it is part of the os they might make it more efficient and less error prone, but given Microsofts bug and security history I wouldn't count on it.
Software also has a more limited lifetime, it becomes obsolete much more quickly than entertainment products
Eh? Name one pice of software that goes obsolete faster than the average "hit".
Our orders were to take the bill even if we had doubts,
Good orders.
Assuming the bill was real you'd be losing one or more customers
Assuming the bill was a fake you'd be confronting a criminal (or perhaps someone that got tricked himself) wich might be dangerous.
I'd say even if you were sure the bill was a fake you should take it. And then let the police do its job with the surveillance tapes. It simply isn't worth it to check if the forgerer is also a mental case carrying a cun.
s/or/and/
The action of modifying web pages containing addresses or ISBN to drive click through traffic seems pretty low to me.
Actually you seem to have misunderstood. This is something the user has to actively choose to install. The modification to the web pages is no more dirty play than supressing popups or blocking ads. (Although the copyright holders of those pages may have a thing or two to say on the matter) This is not something they force on the user without his knowledge.
This is basic economics, you provide something to the user (extra links adde automagically to websites) that he wants. Usually a business expects something of value in return, in this case it's the ability to choose where those links lead, eg links on locations leading to maps.google.com giving google advertising revenue. If the user isn't happy with where the links lead he can choose not install/use the product.
If you want to go on a "google hunt" you're proably going to be more successful looking at the patent issues.
Securing a stand-alone workstation, either linux, or windows using any kind of OS login scheme is useless today.
Bzzt wrong. Any OS login scheme increases the work and knowledge required of the attacker. You want to keep the cost of breaking in higher than the value of the information you're guarding.
Since I can't imagine anyone interested enough in my private email to physically break in a password is suficcient security. Since I can imagine someone interested in taking control of the machine across the net (read spammers) I use a firewall and virus checker, to make it hard enough that they move on to an easier target
Anyway for you paranoids out there: Encrypt the filesystem with a sufficiently strong key. Leave no unencrypted partitions (they could be tampered with while you're away, someone might leave a trojan to call home when the filesystem is mounted). Put the key on bootable removable media. Boot from that to mount the encrypted filesystem.
That will keep the information safe from people that can't or won't steal your key. You might consider buying a laptop and bring that with you instead, to keep things simple
In order to truly secure the workstation, some sort of boot password is needed.
Most new BIOSes allow you to set a password, but if the attacker has physical access to the machine that password is useless too
You want to have your cake but not eat it? I hate to think what you do want to do with it...
Maybe this?
Gates got his money through unethical means, and nothing he does now can make that OK
But an admission of guilt, and then returning the money, would go a long way
It sounds to me like he thinks he should be free to write virii because it's expression and protected under the first amendment?
So please tell me when the first amendment became law in the Czech Republic. When will you people learn that your laws does not apply outside your borders? Besides that as far as I know there is no US law prohibiting writing computer viruses, or any law prohibiting sharing of source code for them. There are however laws that could get you if you release the virus on an unsuspecting third party, either through malice or negligence (like testing your newly aquired virus on a machine connected to the Net), or planning to do so.
Were the actions of this man stupid? Yes. Immoral/wrong? Probably. Illegal according to US law? No. Illegal according to US law had he been in the US? Probably not. Illegal according to Czech law? Dunno, but that's all that matters.
So if some ass decides to SMS-bomb my cell why should I pay for it when my cell company didn't protect me?
What kind of subscription do you have? Here (norway) I haven't seen any cell phone company that charges for incoming SMS. You'd still have to delete the shit but you won't have to pay for it