You hear a fair bit about the bad PR here, and to be fair I definitely heard a lot of badmouthing vista even among the non-IT crowd, but I still hear a lot of positive things just based on the size of the company etc.
Adding to that, and there's been a lot of good spin around Windows 7 these days, so it seems that their image is improving in that regard. Not many people remember ME, after all.
IANAL, but I believe that regardless of the letter though, they're not allowed to lie in giving a reference.
I wouldn't test things if you *knew* you were let go because you pissed up somebody in upper-admin, but if they told your inquiring employer-possible that you slept on the job, sexually harassed your co-workers, showed up drunk, and and etc etc (and it wasn't true), they'd still be on the line for slander.
If they block by hostname, it would be a bit easier to notify a site so long as it has up-to-date whois info. If it's by IP or something similar, then who knows how many sites are hosted beneath a given address.
My first thought was basically how the heck can people even comply with this if they wanted to. Not all wireless routers have means to export logs, and most lose their logs after a reboot, etc.
Even if you have the space and the will to archive the logs, it doesn't mean that the hardware will allow you to do so.
It *should*, but it doesn't. I can't find the link (perhaps somebody else can supply it) but some of the conversation around Intel's pressuring MS to lower the standards for the "Vista Capable" campaign are pretty eye-opening, especially when they (MS's tech) get to the point of mentioning that the Intel chips at the time were lacking major features in even 3-5yr-old Nvidia/ATI cards.
The PC market may still be growing slowly, but I've noticed a lot of movement in terms of FOSS-OS based (Linux/BSD) proprietary systems.
We've got music players and phones based on BSD. Tivos and various other hardware based on Linux. Big companies such as Sony use a lot of FOSS in the back-end of such things as TV's, etc (Sony also promoted Linux compatibility for the PS3/PS2). Companies are out to save money, so perhaps in the future a new gen gaming console will run on a Linux or BSD base, and in that case it could be a fairly big contract for a graphics manufacturer to include their chipset and a compatible driver.
Well, the thing is that most people equate a good graphics card/chip with games, especially in terms of 3D. However, these days it's more than just games. Whether a good thing or not, modern OS's use 3d graphics.
With the advent of Vista, Intel's chipsets failed so miserably that they had to pressure Microsoft into changing what qualified as "Vista Capable" (and in doing so, MS pissed of a lot of other vendors by breaking their promise to stick by the spec).
Even in the world of Linux, KDE4 and recent versions of Gnome take advantage of 3D accelerated graphics.
So these days, people *should* care about 3D graphics to some extent, at least if they don't their modern GUI to run like crap.
Just out of curiosity, and an honest question, what law did that break? If you get caught lying about something the police can use that in court to incriminate you, but I'm not sure that lying in itself is a crime.
I googled it and found conflicting answers, but I haven't heard of anyone actually being charged with "lying to the police" unless it was part of something that made them an accessory to an actual crime.
The usual recommendation is to not talk to the police at all though, "right to remain silent" and all that.
Not only did she lie about her actions, she repeatedly gave false numbers to the school for contacting her parents, and wasted several hours of the school employees time. She ought to be billed by the school district for the amount of time wasted by her.
In other words, it should be an issue for the school to deal with, and not the police? I fail to see the criminal issue here.
Whoever paid the bribes, and whoever authorized them, and whoever knew about this business model and kept quiet, also need to be tried.
I'm not sure how it started, but it sounds like the judge was demanding kickbacks, and possibly also applying pressure to the lawyers supplying them as well.
âoeAs a lawyer, Bob Powell knew better than most the consequences of his silence, but as a lawyer, was also particularly vulnerable to the pressures that these Judges could bring to bear on him and his clients.â
I wonder if this is a convenient excuse, or whether the judge was actually threatening the lawyer(s) as well?
Apparently taxing "legitimate" movies and music is fine, but a porn tax is bad.
Technically, if you had an overall tax on movies, wouldn't this include pornographic movies. A tax specifically against porn is thus not needed, unless you've got something in particular against the porn industry...
c) By plane, train, or automotive, for which the fuel surtax and others are paid for by the transporter and then considered as part of the bill paid for in (b)
Nice plug, but I'm fairly when people think about games they're thinking about something a little more polished than somebody's hand-drawings.
There are plenty of decent, DRM-less games though. It was recently noted to me that world of goo (which I'm not affiliated with) even has a Linux version available, so for those that are anti-windows in addition to anti-DRM... have at 'er.
Copy protection is a different issue though. Games were published, games got copied, publishers implemented DRM
But it hasn't stopped games from being copied, not by a long shot. As for sales. Well, sales=money/profit. For the most part, this is what these companies care abou: getting the most people they can to pay for the game. DRM does not help that. In fact, DRM has in some cases contributed to people not buying games, because nobody wants a game that will screw up their computer.
Now if there was no "pirated" version, would people still buy the game? No. So no profit there.
Back in the day, I know a lot of people who pirated games - liked them - and then bought them. This still happens nowadays, and nobody has really been able to nail whether "piracy" helps or hinders sales.
In a perfect world, there would be no "pirating" games. But the fact is, it's not possible to stop, and most of the measures taken to do so cause more grief for the customer than for the copier. It's a system without a strong benefit to *anyone*, especially when it comes to things that pretty much cripple users' machines in order to prevent possible "piracy"
Sadly, it seems I can trust the hackers and crackers these days more (in terms of not killing my computer) than I can trust those selling games, movies, or music. What I really wish was that there was some way to really express to the publishers that "I really like your game, and I'll buy it without DRM." Often enough I'll still lean towards buying the game, but then installing the cracked version, which keeps me legit while keeping my computer DRM-free.
You have to be shitting me. Game sales (of good games) have been on the up for years despite any sort of piracy/copying.
As for region-encoding, who do you think is to blame for that? Do you know why it exists? Purely to increase profit and control, which is the same reason to release retarded copy-protection methods: (supposed).
In the early days the cellular companies dishes out cheap semi-unlimited data plans for the early iPhone adopters. Nowadays the best I could get was $30 for a 1GB/month plan, or $25 for 500Mb. Better than my buddy, he gets all of 5MB for the sample price I pay for a gig!
This is old tech. It's been in place in Toronto, Ontario for ages and is used for the express highway. You can take the normal highway, or you can rent a transceiver and use the express. If you don't have a transceiver, cameras will snap your license plate and you will be billed at a higher rate.
It is serious, and that's why it should be approached in an organized and serious manner. An IP address is not an overly strong link to a person, and using it on that basis, possibly seizing a person's assets and putting them through a media circus, is a serious thing. Whether or not they're found guilty - because of the seriousness of the accusation - there will be long-lasting reputation damage to that individual.
If you have a friend accused of being a CP trader - even if he was later found not guilty - would you allow him to mind your kids?
While I don't do it so often these days, I used to fairly regularly fix other people's computers at home. Part of the process generally involved testing the internet connection, and often monitoring for spews of unusual traffic (all my connections are routed through a 'nix box).
While I haven't seen anything outright illegal on a client machine (or not that they put there, if you're counting spyware crap), but there have been some pretty weird things on there, not to mention the rather borderline popups that seem to infest the PC's of those who downloaded trojans from warez/pr0n sites.
I wonder how much material it would take to tip you over the line into becoming a suspect. I'd imagine that a few rogue popups aren't going to do in the average user if there's a fair bit of work involved in tracing down their identify, but if the police have a click-of-the-button system to tag people there may be more incentive to do so, and possibly a lot more collateral damage in the process.
Recently, there have been a bunch of bills being pushed through to allow the police sweeping powers. I've also noticed a lot more in the paper about the police busting illegal pornography peddlers.
Seems that this is a pretty common pattern. If you're trying to push privacy-invading laws into effect, focus on a group that's rather universally disliked, generated a lot of publicity, and then say it's all part of the fight against (group X).
Slashdot Mirror
You hear a fair bit about the bad PR here, and to be fair I definitely heard a lot of badmouthing vista even among the non-IT crowd, but I still hear a lot of positive things just based on the size of the company etc.
Adding to that, and there's been a lot of good spin around Windows 7 these days, so it seems that their image is improving in that regard. Not many people remember ME, after all.
IANAL, but I believe that regardless of the letter though, they're not allowed to lie in giving a reference.
I wouldn't test things if you *knew* you were let go because you pissed up somebody in upper-admin, but if they told your inquiring employer-possible that you slept on the job, sexually harassed your co-workers, showed up drunk, and and etc etc (and it wasn't true), they'd still be on the line for slander.
Vasaline on the lense. Worked for the pr0n industry to blur out unsightly blemishes, and enough would probably blur faces well enough too....
If they block by hostname, it would be a bit easier to notify a site so long as it has up-to-date whois info. If it's by IP or something similar, then who knows how many sites are hosted beneath a given address.
My first thought was basically how the heck can people even comply with this if they wanted to. Not all wireless routers have means to export logs, and most lose their logs after a reboot, etc.
Even if you have the space and the will to archive the logs, it doesn't mean that the hardware will allow you to do so.
It *should*, but it doesn't. I can't find the link (perhaps somebody else can supply it) but some of the conversation around Intel's pressuring MS to lower the standards for the "Vista Capable" campaign are pretty eye-opening, especially when they (MS's tech) get to the point of mentioning that the Intel chips at the time were lacking major features in even 3-5yr-old Nvidia/ATI cards.
The PC market may still be growing slowly, but I've noticed a lot of movement in terms of FOSS-OS based (Linux/BSD) proprietary systems.
We've got music players and phones based on BSD. Tivos and various other hardware based on Linux. Big companies such as Sony use a lot of FOSS in the back-end of such things as TV's, etc (Sony also promoted Linux compatibility for the PS3/PS2). Companies are out to save money, so perhaps in the future a new gen gaming console will run on a Linux or BSD base, and in that case it could be a fairly big contract for a graphics manufacturer to include their chipset and a compatible driver.
Well, the thing is that most people equate a good graphics card/chip with games, especially in terms of 3D. However, these days it's more than just games. Whether a good thing or not, modern OS's use 3d graphics.
With the advent of Vista, Intel's chipsets failed so miserably that they had to pressure Microsoft into changing what qualified as "Vista Capable" (and in doing so, MS pissed of a lot of other vendors by breaking their promise to stick by the spec).
Even in the world of Linux, KDE4 and recent versions of Gnome take advantage of 3D accelerated graphics.
So these days, people *should* care about 3D graphics to some extent, at least if they don't their modern GUI to run like crap.
Just out of curiosity, and an honest question, what law did that break? If you get caught lying about something the police can use that in court to incriminate you, but I'm not sure that lying in itself is a crime.
I googled it and found conflicting answers, but I haven't heard of anyone actually being charged with "lying to the police" unless it was part of something that made them an accessory to an actual crime.
The usual recommendation is to not talk to the police at all though, "right to remain silent" and all that.
If you configured it to never send any completed file (although file fragments would work), did you actually upload a copyrighted work?
Not that I'd care to try it myself, but it's something I've wondered.
I suppose it's still "contributing" one way or the other?
Stop texting right now or I'm going to shove that phone right up your a.... oh nevermind.
Not only did she lie about her actions, she repeatedly gave false numbers to the school for contacting her parents, and wasted several hours of the school employees time. She ought to be billed by the school district for the amount of time wasted by her.
In other words, it should be an issue for the school to deal with, and not the police? I fail to see the criminal issue here.
What a waste of time and resources.
And obvious gestures are usually the easiest ones to get caught using.
Whoever paid the bribes, and whoever authorized them, and whoever knew about this business model and kept quiet, also need to be tried.
I'm not sure how it started, but it sounds like the judge was demanding kickbacks, and possibly also applying pressure to the lawyers supplying them as well.
âoeAs a lawyer, Bob Powell knew better than most the consequences of his silence, but as a lawyer, was also particularly vulnerable to the pressures that these Judges could bring to bear on him and his clients.â
I wonder if this is a convenient excuse, or whether the judge was actually threatening the lawyer(s) as well?
Apparently taxing "legitimate" movies and music is fine, but a porn tax is bad.
Technically, if you had an overall tax on movies, wouldn't this include pornographic movies. A tax specifically against porn is thus not needed, unless you've got something in particular against the porn industry...
Um? My guess would be:
a) Via the internet, which you pay for
b) Via postal mail, which you pay for
c) By plane, train, or automotive, for which the fuel surtax and others are paid for by the transporter and then considered as part of the bill paid for in (b)
Nice plug, but I'm fairly when people think about games they're thinking about something a little more polished than somebody's hand-drawings.
There are plenty of decent, DRM-less games though. It was recently noted to me that world of goo (which I'm not affiliated with) even has a Linux version available, so for those that are anti-windows in addition to anti-DRM... have at 'er.
Copy protection is a different issue though. Games were published, games got copied, publishers implemented DRM
But it hasn't stopped games from being copied, not by a long shot. As for sales. Well, sales=money/profit. For the most part, this is what these companies care abou: getting the most people they can to pay for the game. DRM does not help that. In fact, DRM has in some cases contributed to people not buying games, because nobody wants a game that will screw up their computer.
Now if there was no "pirated" version, would people still buy the game? No. So no profit there.
Back in the day, I know a lot of people who pirated games - liked them - and then bought them. This still happens nowadays, and nobody has really been able to nail whether "piracy" helps or hinders sales.
In a perfect world, there would be no "pirating" games. But the fact is, it's not possible to stop, and most of the measures taken to do so cause more grief for the customer than for the copier. It's a system without a strong benefit to *anyone*, especially when it comes to things that pretty much cripple users' machines in order to prevent possible "piracy"
Sadly, it seems I can trust the hackers and crackers these days more (in terms of not killing my computer) than I can trust those selling games, movies, or music. What I really wish was that there was some way to really express to the publishers that "I really like your game, and I'll buy it without DRM." Often enough I'll still lean towards buying the game, but then installing the cracked version, which keeps me legit while keeping my computer DRM-free.
You have to be shitting me. Game sales (of good games) have been on the up for years despite any sort of piracy/copying.
As for region-encoding, who do you think is to blame for that? Do you know why it exists? Purely to increase profit and control, which is the same reason to release retarded copy-protection methods: (supposed).
In the early days the cellular companies dishes out cheap semi-unlimited data plans for the early iPhone adopters. Nowadays the best I could get was $30 for a 1GB/month plan, or $25 for 500Mb. Better than my buddy, he gets all of 5MB for the sample price I pay for a gig!
This is old tech. It's been in place in Toronto, Ontario for ages and is used for the express highway. You can take the normal highway, or you can rent a transceiver and use the express. If you don't have a transceiver, cameras will snap your license plate and you will be billed at a higher rate.
Child pornography is serious
It is serious, and that's why it should be approached in an organized and serious manner. An IP address is not an overly strong link to a person, and using it on that basis, possibly seizing a person's assets and putting them through a media circus, is a serious thing. Whether or not they're found guilty - because of the seriousness of the accusation - there will be long-lasting reputation damage to that individual.
If you have a friend accused of being a CP trader - even if he was later found not guilty - would you allow him to mind your kids?
While I don't do it so often these days, I used to fairly regularly fix other people's computers at home. Part of the process generally involved testing the internet connection, and often monitoring for spews of unusual traffic (all my connections are routed through a 'nix box).
While I haven't seen anything outright illegal on a client machine (or not that they put there, if you're counting spyware crap), but there have been some pretty weird things on there, not to mention the rather borderline popups that seem to infest the PC's of those who downloaded trojans from warez/pr0n sites.
I wonder how much material it would take to tip you over the line into becoming a suspect. I'd imagine that a few rogue popups aren't going to do in the average user if there's a fair bit of work involved in tracing down their identify, but if the police have a click-of-the-button system to tag people there may be more incentive to do so, and possibly a lot more collateral damage in the process.
Recently, there have been a bunch of bills being pushed through to allow the police sweeping powers. I've also noticed a lot more in the paper about the police busting illegal pornography peddlers.
Seems that this is a pretty common pattern. If you're trying to push privacy-invading laws into effect, focus on a group that's rather universally disliked, generated a lot of publicity, and then say it's all part of the fight against (group X).
When I look up my phone # in a reverse directory, I get the a result like the following:
Type: Cell Phone
Provider: Someprovider
Location: Somecity, SomeProvince
There are plenty of reasons *NOT* to have your personal information linked to your phone #. The same should apply to your IP.