Oh puhleeese what a lame piece this is.
No human institution is perfect, but the church is completely open about what its beliefs are and does countless good works of charity.
Look at the events that this thread are about. I certainly don't see the Catholic Church (or ANY other church) trying to close down Google searches and archives of its critics.
And saying that suicides are caused by depression over not living up to the ideals of the church...you obviously understand very little of church doctrine. A very big part of Catholic doctrine has to do with accepting our flawed nature, accepting divine forgiveness for it and moving ahead from it...not depression.
A lot, justifiably, has been said about the abuse scandals of the church. But two things tend to get overlooked. The first was that psychologists in general were much more optimistic at the time that this sort of thing could be treated and cured. The other thing is that, compared to other religions, the Catholic church has a centralized organization. If in some other christian denomination a pastor was accused of some scandal the church would just dismiss him quietly and hire another pastor. The main reason that you are not seeing the same sort of lawsuit against other churches is that there is no large entity worth suing in most other cases.
Your analogy is interesting, but flawed.
Instead imagine that your discovery about the Ford Pinto did not involve rear-end collisions but something that could be induced by making a few modifications to a garage door remote control.
You publish your findings and some incredibly malajusted person actually builds the device and uses it to blow up every occupied and unoccupied car that he can find. Now the chances of his being able to do this without your having published your discovery are essentially nil. Leaving aside legal responsibility for the moment are you ethically responsible for the harm that has been done?
This goes right to the heart of the Black/Gray/White Hat issue. Knowing that there are Script Kiddies and other malicious forces that will IMMEDIATELY act to turn your published discovery into harmfull results and that there is no way the company could both create a fix and fully distribute it fast enough is it EVER the lesser harm to publish it?
You might say that you are encouraging them to release a fix. But even if they had a fix already created and tested (unlikely) how much harm would occur to machines that did not get a chance to install it fast enough? No, your act of publishing will allways create the greater harm.
On on another level, how can a company be legit when it has to locate on a tiny island in order to avoid criminal prosecution in the countries where it really does business?
That much marketing material in one place is too much temptation for anybody. MS, and every other single sign on provider, swears that they would never sell or use such information. I can't trust them that far. And if it were some sort of open source provider I would have no more reason to trust them, maybe even less (Open source providers are not wealthy, thus more likely to be tempted by the wealth on their hard disks. Even if your trust their current mangagement, that can change overnight.)
If someone learns your single source login then they can easily impersonate you everywhere, not just on one site.
It is real easy to trick ordinary users into giving away their passport login names and user IDs. Create a bogus site. Have the bogus site display a realistic Passport login page that says "Your Passport Login has expired, please re-enter it." Most folks will just follow the instruction. The page then just stores the login name and password in a file. It is the oldest computer Trogan Horse known and it will still work amazingly well because users won't realize that it isn't a Microsoft Login Page.
Now if they had a single sign on solution, possibly also a roming profile, built into a flash memory card in an encrypted form then I might be quite enthusiastic about the idea.
OK, but what if one of the components added with this service pack (lets suppose it is the new control panel applet, but it could be anything) was written using.NET? That is hardly surprizing considering it is Microsoft's programming language of choice now. So then Service Pack 1 would then have the.NET clr as a prerequsite. I guess you could say they had to take the lame approach and require that they download the CLR separately before downloading service pack 1 but what is the pathetic point in that since the CLR has to be installed either way.
As for bundling a current version of Java Microsoft is prevented from distributing a Java Virtual Machine via download so it is not Microsofts fault if you have to go to a Suns site and update the JVM separately.
If you read the article, it WAS checked. In fact in the article Microsoft states that there was a process specifically so that competitors could review the service pack for compliance.
It seems as though this lobbying group found it easier to ignore that process and just issue whining press releases after the fact.
They make the service pack available for free download and they complain that the download is too big?
Then they say that there should be an option to disable the.NET common language runtime because it is a competitor to Java? Just because they are competitors doesn't mean that they are compatible. Java won't step in and run your.net applications. Disabling.net CLR would just mean that your.net applications would all fail.
Microsoft, when it comes to hardware, is almost like a whole different company. They seem quite content to not be the only mouse manufacturer or the only joystick manufacturer, or the only keyboard manufacturer, etc.
Usually when microsoft enters a hardware field it is because there are certain features that it wants to standardize, such as wheels on mice or the two windows keys on keyboards or such. What I am hoping that they are doing with this is encouraging wireless LANs that are out-of-the-box secure to become the standard.
It has been a really old tactic for special interests to create artificially inflated 'letter writing campaigns' and 'petitions' that were just taking names from the phone book or using professional petition circulators.
But it is obvious, If all you are going to do is cut and paste a suggested letter into your e-mail system or click a button on a web site or hit a link do you thing that your action really deserves much attention considering how little effort you put into it? If you really care then take the time to draft your own letter in your own words. Your sincerity and personal effort will come through, just like it did with a personally composed and handwritten letter.
One thing that advertizers look for in an opportunity is how easy it is to ignore it. For example web site banner advertizing and pop-ups may be seen by lots of 'eyeballs' but they are ignored, if not downright detested, by most of them. But in the middle of a movie, or a game it is harder to ignore. But let's take it a bit further. It is already known that in the sims you and some of your friends can create a business. A pizza parlor is given as one example. Now take that one step further and say that instead of just seeing the McDonald's in the game you have the chance to own and run one. Not much different than the pizza parlor, right (or maybe that will be changed to be a Pizza Hut?). Now not only can't you ignore it but a big part of your game is going to be trying to convince other players to buy your McDonald's food. We are talking about a prominence and an inability to ignore that is way outside what advertizers are used to in product placement, and with an increase, not decrease, in the sense of authenticity of the game.
The primary competitor for this sort of technology is pay-per-view cable, so if it works it will be used for movies just before they are released onto DVD, as is done with pay-per-view now.
As far as stripping off the 24 hour limit, yes I guess that it could be done, but that would make it pretty clear that this was a willfull attempt at copyright infringement.
Moreover if I were designing this system I would go one step further. I would include a signature hidden in the least significant bits of the file at widely spread locations. Even changing one bit per megabyte gives you a 700 bit signature. Undetectable to the eye and impossible to find unless you really knew where to look (as one could also spread around a bunch of red herring signatures too). This signature would uniquely identify that download. So when a copy of the film shows up on the P2P networks you could exactly identify who had purchased that copy and prosecute them.
Yes, but what Microsoft didn't say, and has never said, is that computers built after such and such a date will not be able to boot NT or 2000. And yes, a P4 should be able to run Win95, though it makes little sense to do so and I haven't tested it recently.
And, BTW, you have never owned a copy of office, even version 1. You purchased a right-to-use license for it on one computer.
It was the rest of the industry that was saying that applcation servers were the next big thing in business models, not microsoft, and that is where the change in terminology in the EULA came from.
Some thoughts:
1. Your Tivo may go into a deeper standby mode if it is left alone for a while. The act of plugging it into the ampmeter may have caused it to go into an idle rather than standby mode.
2. Consider LCD monitors. Depending on how many hours you use your computers payback for inexpensive LCD monitors may be only about three years.
3. Consider the age of your appliances.
4. More than anything else, if it is feasable to turn off the air conditioner and just open windows and use a fan will cause your utility bills to plummet. I know this from experience.
Re:Wonder what the heck this is all about?
on
Crushing Experience
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· Score: 1
So a 404 error message has become a work of art?
Please Please Please tell me that tax dollars are not going into this!
BTW slashdots slogan is "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters." So could anybody please tell me...
1. Why is this news?
2. Even moreso, why does it matter?
Actually I would take this at a different route. Instead make your own recordings of all your live shows and then offer folks, as they leave, the ability to order a CD of tonights show at a reasonable price. It saves your attendees the trouble of having to smuggle in tape recorders and minidisks AND it lets you have some quality control of what is going out with your band's name on it.
In addition to that, look at all the possible routes to earning money off of your talent. Very few musicians historically have made their livings off of just one aspect of their craft. For example Mozart, for all of his skill as a composer, also had to perform, teach, and conduct in order to make ends (barely) meet.
Some folks are talking about 'stupid network administrators' while many of the articles and quotations talk about driving about affluent neighborhoods.
So, in large part, quite possibly the majority, we are not talking about careless security professionals but people who bought a wireless access point at their local computer store because it seemed to be an easy way to get the computers in their house to be able to share the internet connection and play games or share the printer. These are not security professionals or network administrators in any reasonable definition.
The people that should really have the mud thrown at them are the companies selling these home wireless access points to unsuspecting customers with security set to wide open by default and next to no instructions about how to turn it on (since that would confuse the customer and result in more calls to customer support and/or returns). They are the ones being truly negligent. If they were being honest the boxes would have "Share your internet connection and all the data on your computers with all of your neighbors!" in big bold letters.
Well, pretty close, but I was imagining a device that would be clipped to the belt (like a pager) and would have the frequencies and maximum allowed signal strength built in so that the flight attendant would not have to be distracted from the rest of their work but be alerted as they were otherwise walking up an down the aisles.
But your answer does point out how sensible this approach is, that spending maybe fifty bucks each to put this device on every flight attendant or millions to redesign and retrofit the electronics on all aircraft or try to create a global ban on in-flight electronics that would annoy their best customers.
Global ban on laptops is both overdoing it and most likely ineffective since it is hard to tell if a device was left on accidentally. Retrofitting all existing aircraft is very expensive.
But how difficult would it be to make a pager-sized detector of these signals? One with a strength, and perhaps direction, of signal indicator? Such a device could be worn on the belt of a flight attendant, allowing them to find the device and insure that it is turned off.
In my mind this would be much more convenient to everybody and a better, cheaper, solution to the problem.
It seems to me that the most valuable thing that the peer reviewed journals provide is the rigorous screening and editorial process. It also seems to me that the least valuable thing that they provide is a printed hardcopy edition. This is particularly the case in that these journals are all published in low volume print runs, with the obviously resultant high per-copy cost. Sure the business model of giving it away on the web is done for, but there are plenty of other internet distribution mechanisms (subscription, pay per view, etc) that would work just fine.
After all it would be so much more usefull if the text was searchable, the footnotes could be implemented as popups and the references could be hyperlinked to the actual articles! And the whole idea is to have the articles be usefull to researchers, right?
Those 'ones and zeroes' are not free. It cost one hundred million dollars (presuming the costs were shared among all three films) to make those ones and zeroes.
And if they are making money off of having a truly spectacular bunch of ones and zeroes it is going to be what is going to make them want to make more of those ones and zeroes, particularly since only a minority of films makes money. Investing in movies is highly speculative. Sure it is easy to see in hindsight that Spiderman was a super hit and that Pluto Nash was a mistake, but could you have told that when they were just a few pages of writeup about a movie based on a comic book? (Pluto Nash was an obscure independent book, but so was Men in Black!) That is, however, the point where somebody has to put down 100 million dollars to get the ball rolling. When they smack down those 100 million dollars you can bet that they regard those ones and zeroes to be worth selling and that anybody who thinks that they should be free to broadcast around the world (which is really what this 'sharing' is)is a thief.
The majority of films lose money and quite a number do not begin to make money until they hit the home market, which is exactly where these folks believe that they aren't 'stealing' if they just download the movie rather than buying or renting it or getting pay-per-view. If folks are downloading the movie it cuts into DVD sales, rentals, and cable TV revenues. Those are real revenues that make the difference between profit and loss for most movies.
Then there is the fact that most of what you pay at the theatre and at the video store does NOT go to the film company...it goes to the movie theatre or the video store.
So the person that you are most stealing from when you download the movie rather than buying or renting the DVD is the video store.
Back when I was in high school we taped our albums (yeah, I'm old, the vinyl things) onto cassettes and shared them around with friends. We could share with maybe a half dozen friends at most and, most importantly, we were spending as much as our various part time jobs, allowances, etc. would spare. One album was serving about six of us and, this is the important part, we were spending as much as we felt we could budget from our incomes.
With the current generation of high school students, a great many of them think 'why spend ANY money on recorded music at all?' They get all of their music off of the internet and divert their recreational dollars to video games or DVDs or whatever. One albun sale is not being shared among a half dozen friends but 'shared' among ten thousand strangers.
I am not meaning to be a microsoft apologist here, but to suggest, as some of the replies here did, that users should NOT install the patches that DO come out as some sort of protest against MS is misguided. And to make sinister allustions like 'Be sure to read the EULA first' as if the EULA on this patch is somehow different than the EULA on the original Windows or any other patch that has come out for it (and thus to hint that persons should not apply MS security patches) is irresponsible.
Yes, if MS was doing its job perfectly there would be no holes and no need for patches.
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Oh puhleeese what a lame piece this is. No human institution is perfect, but the church is completely open about what its beliefs are and does countless good works of charity. Look at the events that this thread are about. I certainly don't see the Catholic Church (or ANY other church) trying to close down Google searches and archives of its critics. And saying that suicides are caused by depression over not living up to the ideals of the church...you obviously understand very little of church doctrine. A very big part of Catholic doctrine has to do with accepting our flawed nature, accepting divine forgiveness for it and moving ahead from it...not depression. A lot, justifiably, has been said about the abuse scandals of the church. But two things tend to get overlooked. The first was that psychologists in general were much more optimistic at the time that this sort of thing could be treated and cured. The other thing is that, compared to other religions, the Catholic church has a centralized organization. If in some other christian denomination a pastor was accused of some scandal the church would just dismiss him quietly and hire another pastor. The main reason that you are not seeing the same sort of lawsuit against other churches is that there is no large entity worth suing in most other cases.
Yes but if it takes that long to download it watching it streaming would have impossible delays for buffering, completely pointless.
You publish your findings and some incredibly malajusted person actually builds the device and uses it to blow up every occupied and unoccupied car that he can find. Now the chances of his being able to do this without your having published your discovery are essentially nil. Leaving aside legal responsibility for the moment are you ethically responsible for the harm that has been done?
This goes right to the heart of the Black/Gray/White Hat issue. Knowing that there are Script Kiddies and other malicious forces that will IMMEDIATELY act to turn your published discovery into harmfull results and that there is no way the company could both create a fix and fully distribute it fast enough is it EVER the lesser harm to publish it?
You might say that you are encouraging them to release a fix. But even if they had a fix already created and tested (unlikely) how much harm would occur to machines that did not get a chance to install it fast enough? No, your act of publishing will allways create the greater harm.
On on another level, how can a company be legit when it has to locate on a tiny island in order to avoid criminal prosecution in the countries where it really does business?
If someone learns your single source login then they can easily impersonate you everywhere, not just on one site.
It is real easy to trick ordinary users into giving away their passport login names and user IDs. Create a bogus site. Have the bogus site display a realistic Passport login page that says "Your Passport Login has expired, please re-enter it." Most folks will just follow the instruction. The page then just stores the login name and password in a file. It is the oldest computer Trogan Horse known and it will still work amazingly well because users won't realize that it isn't a Microsoft Login Page.
Now if they had a single sign on solution, possibly also a roming profile, built into a flash memory card in an encrypted form then I might be quite enthusiastic about the idea.
As for bundling a current version of Java Microsoft is prevented from distributing a Java Virtual Machine via download so it is not Microsofts fault if you have to go to a Suns site and update the JVM separately.
It seems as though this lobbying group found it easier to ignore that process and just issue whining press releases after the fact.
Then they say that there should be an option to disable the .NET common language runtime because it is a competitor to Java? Just because they are competitors doesn't mean that they are compatible. Java won't step in and run your .net applications. Disabling .net CLR would just mean that your .net applications would all fail.
Microsoft, when it comes to hardware, is almost like a whole different company. They seem quite content to not be the only mouse manufacturer or the only joystick manufacturer, or the only keyboard manufacturer, etc. Usually when microsoft enters a hardware field it is because there are certain features that it wants to standardize, such as wheels on mice or the two windows keys on keyboards or such. What I am hoping that they are doing with this is encouraging wireless LANs that are out-of-the-box secure to become the standard.
But it is obvious, If all you are going to do is cut and paste a suggested letter into your e-mail system or click a button on a web site or hit a link do you thing that your action really deserves much attention considering how little effort you put into it? If you really care then take the time to draft your own letter in your own words. Your sincerity and personal effort will come through, just like it did with a personally composed and handwritten letter.
One thing that advertizers look for in an opportunity is how easy it is to ignore it. For example web site banner advertizing and pop-ups may be seen by lots of 'eyeballs' but they are ignored, if not downright detested, by most of them. But in the middle of a movie, or a game it is harder to ignore. But let's take it a bit further. It is already known that in the sims you and some of your friends can create a business. A pizza parlor is given as one example. Now take that one step further and say that instead of just seeing the McDonald's in the game you have the chance to own and run one. Not much different than the pizza parlor, right (or maybe that will be changed to be a Pizza Hut?). Now not only can't you ignore it but a big part of your game is going to be trying to convince other players to buy your McDonald's food. We are talking about a prominence and an inability to ignore that is way outside what advertizers are used to in product placement, and with an increase, not decrease, in the sense of authenticity of the game.
The fact is that the majority of slashdotted sites are intentionally taken down in order to conserve bandwidth.
The primary competitor for this sort of technology is pay-per-view cable, so if it works it will be used for movies just before they are released onto DVD, as is done with pay-per-view now. As far as stripping off the 24 hour limit, yes I guess that it could be done, but that would make it pretty clear that this was a willfull attempt at copyright infringement. Moreover if I were designing this system I would go one step further. I would include a signature hidden in the least significant bits of the file at widely spread locations. Even changing one bit per megabyte gives you a 700 bit signature. Undetectable to the eye and impossible to find unless you really knew where to look (as one could also spread around a bunch of red herring signatures too). This signature would uniquely identify that download. So when a copy of the film shows up on the P2P networks you could exactly identify who had purchased that copy and prosecute them.
Yes, but what Microsoft didn't say, and has never said, is that computers built after such and such a date will not be able to boot NT or 2000. And yes, a P4 should be able to run Win95, though it makes little sense to do so and I haven't tested it recently. And, BTW, you have never owned a copy of office, even version 1. You purchased a right-to-use license for it on one computer. It was the rest of the industry that was saying that applcation servers were the next big thing in business models, not microsoft, and that is where the change in terminology in the EULA came from.
Some thoughts: 1. Your Tivo may go into a deeper standby mode if it is left alone for a while. The act of plugging it into the ampmeter may have caused it to go into an idle rather than standby mode. 2. Consider LCD monitors. Depending on how many hours you use your computers payback for inexpensive LCD monitors may be only about three years. 3. Consider the age of your appliances. 4. More than anything else, if it is feasable to turn off the air conditioner and just open windows and use a fan will cause your utility bills to plummet. I know this from experience.
So a 404 error message has become a work of art? Please Please Please tell me that tax dollars are not going into this! BTW slashdots slogan is "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters." So could anybody please tell me... 1. Why is this news? 2. Even moreso, why does it matter?
Actually I would take this at a different route. Instead make your own recordings of all your live shows and then offer folks, as they leave, the ability to order a CD of tonights show at a reasonable price. It saves your attendees the trouble of having to smuggle in tape recorders and minidisks AND it lets you have some quality control of what is going out with your band's name on it. In addition to that, look at all the possible routes to earning money off of your talent. Very few musicians historically have made their livings off of just one aspect of their craft. For example Mozart, for all of his skill as a composer, also had to perform, teach, and conduct in order to make ends (barely) meet.
He wants a fish. He looks for the free fish stand. There is no free fish stand.
So, in large part, quite possibly the majority, we are not talking about careless security professionals but people who bought a wireless access point at their local computer store because it seemed to be an easy way to get the computers in their house to be able to share the internet connection and play games or share the printer. These are not security professionals or network administrators in any reasonable definition.
The people that should really have the mud thrown at them are the companies selling these home wireless access points to unsuspecting customers with security set to wide open by default and next to no instructions about how to turn it on (since that would confuse the customer and result in more calls to customer support and/or returns). They are the ones being truly negligent. If they were being honest the boxes would have "Share your internet connection and all the data on your computers with all of your neighbors!" in big bold letters.
But your answer does point out how sensible this approach is, that spending maybe fifty bucks each to put this device on every flight attendant or millions to redesign and retrofit the electronics on all aircraft or try to create a global ban on in-flight electronics that would annoy their best customers.
It really does make for a no-brainer to me.
Global ban on laptops is both overdoing it and most likely ineffective since it is hard to tell if a device was left on accidentally. Retrofitting all existing aircraft is very expensive. But how difficult would it be to make a pager-sized detector of these signals? One with a strength, and perhaps direction, of signal indicator? Such a device could be worn on the belt of a flight attendant, allowing them to find the device and insure that it is turned off. In my mind this would be much more convenient to everybody and a better, cheaper, solution to the problem.
After all it would be so much more usefull if the text was searchable, the footnotes could be implemented as popups and the references could be hyperlinked to the actual articles! And the whole idea is to have the articles be usefull to researchers, right?
And if they are making money off of having a truly spectacular bunch of ones and zeroes it is going to be what is going to make them want to make more of those ones and zeroes, particularly since only a minority of films makes money. Investing in movies is highly speculative. Sure it is easy to see in hindsight that Spiderman was a super hit and that Pluto Nash was a mistake, but could you have told that when they were just a few pages of writeup about a movie based on a comic book? (Pluto Nash was an obscure independent book, but so was Men in Black!) That is, however, the point where somebody has to put down 100 million dollars to get the ball rolling. When they smack down those 100 million dollars you can bet that they regard those ones and zeroes to be worth selling and that anybody who thinks that they should be free to broadcast around the world (which is really what this 'sharing' is)is a thief.
The majority of films lose money and quite a number do not begin to make money until they hit the home market, which is exactly where these folks believe that they aren't 'stealing' if they just download the movie rather than buying or renting it or getting pay-per-view. If folks are downloading the movie it cuts into DVD sales, rentals, and cable TV revenues. Those are real revenues that make the difference between profit and loss for most movies.
Then there is the fact that most of what you pay at the theatre and at the video store does NOT go to the film company...it goes to the movie theatre or the video store.
So the person that you are most stealing from when you download the movie rather than buying or renting the DVD is the video store.
With the current generation of high school students, a great many of them think 'why spend ANY money on recorded music at all?' They get all of their music off of the internet and divert their recreational dollars to video games or DVDs or whatever. One albun sale is not being shared among a half dozen friends but 'shared' among ten thousand strangers.
I am not meaning to be a microsoft apologist here, but to suggest, as some of the replies here did, that users should NOT install the patches that DO come out as some sort of protest against MS is misguided. And to make sinister allustions like 'Be sure to read the EULA first' as if the EULA on this patch is somehow different than the EULA on the original Windows or any other patch that has come out for it (and thus to hint that persons should not apply MS security patches) is irresponsible. Yes, if MS was doing its job perfectly there would be no holes and no need for patches.