Serious question here - do you think a class action lawsuit would have any effect on the advertizers?? It's not like you have much of a choice about viewing the ads, because they're all over the place.
Maybe there will be hell to pay, but by the time it really begins to bite the average American, the bill will have sat unopposed for a number of years. How many TVs and VCRs actually honor the broadcast flag already? None, or very few, because the legislation isn't there to support or demand it. How long will it take to get enough market penetration to make a difference? Years, because a new TV isn't something that you absolutely *have* to have every year.
I predict that if the broadcast flag gets passed, it'll be far enough in the future before it really takes effect, that the broadcasters will have a fair chance of claiming, "but it was always there, we just didn't turn it on"...
satellite radio cannot be considered a "public service", as someone else claimed, because you have to pay to hear it.
I have Dish Network right now, because cable was getting stupidly expensive, and I can get a bunch of no-video music channels. I'll bet I could record those to VHS, or even to one of the new DVD recorders, at reasonable quality. I wonder if the RIAA is going after Dish Network and DirectTV next??
Unfortunately, that would simply add another layer of info for the phisher to acquire. "Hi, Mr Banker, this is Joe Blow. My dog just ate my pager. Could you send me another one? Thanks."
It's a good plan though, and I too would pay for something like it.
How about having a photo of you attached to your bank account when you open it?? Update it from time to time - perhaps when the photo is more than 6 months old - when you visit the bank. It needn't be intrusive, or even obvious. A small webcam would do it. The teller brings up your account details on the computer, and right there on screen would be your current stored photo alongside the webcam image. I'm not suggesting an automated "catch-the-scammer" AI system, just the original mark 1 human eyeball/brain combo. If there's a substantial variation from the stored photo, the teller might whip out one of those thumbprint scanners that are becoming popular, or maybe a retina scanner. A scammer would need to bear a *very* close physical resemblance to be able to get around *that*.
Most of the restaurants around here, there's a "checkout" option. You pick up the bill and take it to the cashier. Your credit card need not get more than a couple of feet from you. I prefer to stand for a couple of minutes while dealing with the transaction, rather than give some underpaid waiter/waitress the option of ripping me off.
Dear god, why did I waste my last mod points?? Ms Biker Babe, that's the smartest comment I've seen so far in this thread and I wish I could do it justice with mod points...
Leave it to the EU to decide that they must have control over something that they had nothing to do with creating.
CERN, 1980's, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Ring a bell?? Some whacky Brit invents the World Wide Web at CERN in Switzerland. The US can piss off and create their own hypertext protocols.
Well, part of the problem is that the US didn't run around the world laying wires and fibre for everybody, the US invented the protocols and then each individual country expended millions to lay their own networks. Those network joined together bit by bit to form the global Internet.
What's pissing off the other countries is that some politician they have no control over could cut them off from the root DNS and make their whole country difficult to access. That amounts to an incredible economic sanction. With the US stomping around in the Middle East, inventing WMDs as justification for invasion, and generally bullying people, that's a big concern.
Unless the US ran around the world setting up internet infrastructure, it would be more accurate to say that each country built their own network and connected it to the Internet.
Besides which, if "the US built the Internet with US funds", then the World Wide Web was built by a Briton working at CERN in the 80's. So, the US can keep their Internet, and Europe gets to keep their World Wide Web.
Now, doesn't that sound just about as stupid as what you said??
Or worse, moved from country to country as the UN wants to be fair to all united nations parties.
That would be really, really stupid. There's already enough root servers to put one in each major country. There'd be absolutely nothing to gain from shipping them around the place - just replicate as many as there are host countries that want one.
That's where Netflix cashes in - you're going to check your mailbox most days anyway, so there's no extra effort involved in tossing a just-viewed movie into the box to be picked up later. That'll make no sense to the British, of course, because the mailman only *delivers* to their mailboxes. Outgoing mail needs to be dropped into a post box, which is usually only a short walk down the road.
Yeah, the majority of the disc going to be made out of a special carbon-based material. When you're done watching the movie you can recycle it yourself. Just collect a dozen or so, toss them on the grill, light them and grill some burgers.
And how exactly would that work?? The gov't imposes the tax for cleanup, and the company turns right around and slaps the "clean up" tax back onto the product. The gov't then simply tosses the "disposable" items into the same landfill or incinerator that everything else goes into. It costs the manufacturer nothing and the gov't gets to slap yet another X-pennies tax onto everything, most of which they pocket.
I guess the moral of the story is, if you're going to use a safe deposit box, get one big enough to hold a waterproof plastic container with all your stuff... Yeah, 20/20 hindsight and all that.
I swap disk space with a friend on a different continent. Any disaster that takes out *both* our systems probably isn't survivable by institutions that would care about our scanned docs...
How about food storage vacuum packaging?? You can get a machine in Walmart that does it. It carries a long tube of plastic on a roll - you pull out as much as you need to hold the object to be wrapped, use the heat sealer to seal across the tube and drop the object in. Put the open end into the heat sealer, kick on the vacuum pump to evacuate as much air as possible, then crimp it with the sealer. It's waterproof and can be opened with a knife or scissors. You could make it tamper-evident also, by signing across the area that gets heat-sealed.
That should work for a Social Security card. The reason an official needs to actual hold the card in his hand is so that he can feel the raised printing. That's why you can't laminate them. Unlike laminating, vacuum packaging would be reversible, while still protecting the card.
Why not also install something like DamnSmallLinux on the USB key, along with TrueCrypt?? You wouldn't need to download anything to access it, just plug it in and boot off it. It's only about 50Mb (last time I looked) so it'll also fit onto one of those 210Mb mini-cds with maybe 150Mb free space for scanned docs, etc.
Something I'd be interested in would be getting the scanned docs officially validated. Perhaps at a Notary Public?? Take the docs along, prove your id in the usual manner (passport, driver's licence), the Notary scans the docs and cryptographically signs them, then burns a CD. I'd pay a reasonable price for a service like that, provided the signing process was well enough accepted by any bank or gov't dept that might need those docs.
Yes, it would. But up till now, I don't think there has been possible to pay for Gentoo support. At least, not from the actual developers, unless some of them do that for their day job. This is why Redhat is so successful as a "pay for support" distro - management wants to be able to give someone a hard time if there's a problem, and Redhat provides that kind of support.
I chose Gentoo because, at the time, it was one of the few Linux distros that support Sparc. Redhat gave up around 6.1, which prompted the switch. I realize now that this is probably a bogus impression, but it seemed back then that Debian was behind the times, with packages older than Redhat's, and several different package managers, all of which struck me as a bit weird. In comparison, Gentoo's emerge seemed amazingly easy to use. So now I've got a bunch of x86 & Sparc systems that present an identical user experience and never mind the radically different architecture underneath.
Apparentl MediaSentry *admitted* to invading this woman's computer, which sounds like "business as usual" for them. That's probably a terrorist act, these days...
It doesn't have to be quite so blatant as using a name like Metallica. If I have a child with a history of repeatedly doing clever/stupid/humorous things, I might make a video and call it Oops-I_Did_It_Again.avi to send to her grandparents. Just because Brittney Spears has a song with that name they might feel justified downloading my copyright material. It would still be a copyright violation, though.
Actually, it would be kinda funny if the video was of two dogs screwing...
Slashdot Mirror
Serious question here - do you think a class action lawsuit would have any effect on the advertizers?? It's not like you have much of a choice about viewing the ads, because they're all over the place.
I predict that if the broadcast flag gets passed, it'll be far enough in the future before it really takes effect, that the broadcasters will have a fair chance of claiming, "but it was always there, we just didn't turn it on"...
Let's hope the giant squid don't get *really* pissed with people dropping reactors into their world...
I guess it could be summed up fairly simply - "What you see is what we got"...
I have Dish Network right now, because cable was getting stupidly expensive, and I can get a bunch of no-video music channels. I'll bet I could record those to VHS, or even to one of the new DVD recorders, at reasonable quality. I wonder if the RIAA is going after Dish Network and DirectTV next??
It's a good plan though, and I too would pay for something like it.
Heh... First time I read that I thought you said
and I thought, "hell yeah! delete those sons of bitches!"
How about having a photo of you attached to your bank account when you open it?? Update it from time to time - perhaps when the photo is more than 6 months old - when you visit the bank. It needn't be intrusive, or even obvious. A small webcam would do it. The teller brings up your account details on the computer, and right there on screen would be your current stored photo alongside the webcam image. I'm not suggesting an automated "catch-the-scammer" AI system, just the original mark 1 human eyeball/brain combo. If there's a substantial variation from the stored photo, the teller might whip out one of those thumbprint scanners that are becoming popular, or maybe a retina scanner. A scammer would need to bear a *very* close physical resemblance to be able to get around *that*.
Most of the restaurants around here, there's a "checkout" option. You pick up the bill and take it to the cashier. Your credit card need not get more than a couple of feet from you. I prefer to stand for a couple of minutes while dealing with the transaction, rather than give some underpaid waiter/waitress the option of ripping me off.
Dear god, why did I waste my last mod points?? Ms Biker Babe, that's the smartest comment I've seen so far in this thread and I wish I could do it justice with mod points...
CERN, 1980's, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Ring a bell?? Some whacky Brit invents the World Wide Web at CERN in Switzerland. The US can piss off and create their own hypertext protocols.
What's pissing off the other countries is that some politician they have no control over could cut them off from the root DNS and make their whole country difficult to access. That amounts to an incredible economic sanction. With the US stomping around in the Middle East, inventing WMDs as justification for invasion, and generally bullying people, that's a big concern.
Unless the US ran around the world setting up internet infrastructure, it would be more accurate to say that each country built their own network and connected it to the Internet.
Besides which, if "the US built the Internet with US funds", then the World Wide Web was built by a Briton working at CERN in the 80's. So, the US can keep their Internet, and Europe gets to keep their World Wide Web.
Now, doesn't that sound just about as stupid as what you said??
That would be really, really stupid. There's already enough root servers to put one in each major country. There'd be absolutely nothing to gain from shipping them around the place - just replicate as many as there are host countries that want one.
That's where Netflix cashes in - you're going to check your mailbox most days anyway, so there's no extra effort involved in tossing a just-viewed movie into the box to be picked up later. That'll make no sense to the British, of course, because the mailman only *delivers* to their mailboxes. Outgoing mail needs to be dropped into a post box, which is usually only a short walk down the road.
Yeah, the majority of the disc going to be made out of a special carbon-based material. When you're done watching the movie you can recycle it yourself. Just collect a dozen or so, toss them on the grill, light them and grill some burgers.
And how exactly would that work?? The gov't imposes the tax for cleanup, and the company turns right around and slaps the "clean up" tax back onto the product. The gov't then simply tosses the "disposable" items into the same landfill or incinerator that everything else goes into. It costs the manufacturer nothing and the gov't gets to slap yet another X-pennies tax onto everything, most of which they pocket.
I guess the moral of the story is, if you're going to use a safe deposit box, get one big enough to hold a waterproof plastic container with all your stuff... Yeah, 20/20 hindsight and all that.
I swap disk space with a friend on a different continent. Any disaster that takes out *both* our systems probably isn't survivable by institutions that would care about our scanned docs...
That should work for a Social Security card. The reason an official needs to actual hold the card in his hand is so that he can feel the raised printing. That's why you can't laminate them. Unlike laminating, vacuum packaging would be reversible, while still protecting the card.
Something I'd be interested in would be getting the scanned docs officially validated. Perhaps at a Notary Public?? Take the docs along, prove your id in the usual manner (passport, driver's licence), the Notary scans the docs and cryptographically signs them, then burns a CD. I'd pay a reasonable price for a service like that, provided the signing process was well enough accepted by any bank or gov't dept that might need those docs.
Yes, it would. But up till now, I don't think there has been possible to pay for Gentoo support. At least, not from the actual developers, unless some of them do that for their day job. This is why Redhat is so successful as a "pay for support" distro - management wants to be able to give someone a hard time if there's a problem, and Redhat provides that kind of support.
I chose Gentoo because, at the time, it was one of the few Linux distros that support Sparc. Redhat gave up around 6.1, which prompted the switch. I realize now that this is probably a bogus impression, but it seemed back then that Debian was behind the times, with packages older than Redhat's, and several different package managers, all of which struck me as a bit weird. In comparison, Gentoo's emerge seemed amazingly easy to use. So now I've got a bunch of x86 & Sparc systems that present an identical user experience and never mind the radically different architecture underneath.
Apparentl MediaSentry *admitted* to invading this woman's computer, which sounds like "business as usual" for them. That's probably a terrorist act, these days...
Actually, it would be kinda funny if the video was of two dogs screwing...