I'm sorry, but if the MPAA wants to create a legal model for distributing movies realtime over I2 then I'm all for it. While I definately realize that an attempt to get into I2 is probably at least partly to track content, I think they're also eyeing the potential big bucks when it becomes a replacement for current modes of television transmission. Why go to blockbuster when you can stream a movie to your TV realtime? Hell, why go to the theatre to see Spider Man 5 and sit through the obnoxious kids in the back throwing popcorn... DVD quality instantly.
Yes, I realize that both the MPAA and RIAA severely in lawyers pockets when it comes to enforcement, but of the two the MPAA seems to adapt a little better to technology once they realize the battle is lost.
This is assuming the warezed copy runs. Not hard to make something called "Half Life 2 installer.zip", with a bunch of large files inside but all it does it send a message to the HL2 blacklist (or install something on your machine to make HL2 blacklist you).
For those that match against your name, it's more important to them to have your address as well - so they can send you flyers (some actually aimed towards the stuff you buy, not always a bad thing)
The other use is of course to profile you, so they can target people like you. Again, the parent's card had foiled this as there is no age/gender or other information.
Indeed, the parent was a horrible analogy! Torture would imply that the animal being hunted is intentional pain.
Perhaps you should go to Iraq for awhile, then you might learn what it's like to be a torture victim. When you hunt, one does better to get a clean shot off, killing the prey as quickly as possible (without ruining the meat). If one has the skill and opportunity, a head-shot is probably best in many cases. Anybody who would deliberately shoot to injure and animal as opposed to kill is not a hunter but a sadist.
As for the "food" animals, their lives are often ones of terrible neglect. As you say, I'd rather be a buck living a happy life of grass and rutting and then suddenly *blam*, than be a pig stuck in a small pen, hearing the painful squeels and smelling the blood as others are taken off to be processed and knowing somehow that my turn is next...
Sorry, but I find the "interaction" one of the more annoying parts. The character personalities definately are interesting, as is some of the background, but the interaction seems to take familiar turns such as the "love interest" between Grissom and Sidle is a useless sideline.
I'm sorry, but I'd rather watch CSI for the interesting pseudo-science than watch the cool bug guy hint at his deep feelings for his attractive female co-worker.
I'm actually a fairly avid CSI fan, at least for the "Las Vegas" series. I don't know about the others, but there have been several times where Las Vegas where an episode ends with the criminal getting away or getting off on technicality. One involves a young female rape victim coming in to finger the suspect in a lineup, and getting killed for it later.
Others involve killers for which there simply isn't enough evidence to track, or to convict. Some involve cases where the prime suspect turns out to be wrong.
Yeah, they generally tend to wrap up in the hour slot, but it's not always a "happy ending" (though most are, otherwise the show wouldn't sell). Keep in mind also that the hour span can entail days or weeks in TV-time
And as for Star Trek, many plotlines run several days, not really as comparable.
As a debian user, I'm a big fan of apt-get. And as far as most things go, it's fairly easy to automate. Perhaps a script that does that apt-get update every night at a given time, and then an apt-get upgrade (but only downloads packages). Next time a privilaged user logs in, it could let you know that new updates are available and let you choose to install them (or choose which ones).
Alternately, Synaptic (screenshot is a bit dated) does a good job of this itself. You have to run the app, but if your packages list is too out-of-date the newer versions will tell you so, at which point you can update and upgrade.
There is definately a difference between how easily one could have a fingerprint "lifted" vs a retinal trace, but as noted it isn't that much more secure. Just like somebody can stick a little scanner device over the debit-card hole on a cash-machine, so could somebody easily enough steal your retinal scan whilst you are being authorized at a legit service - particularly if such services become more commonplace.
Of course, with such an imprint it wouldn't exactly be as easy to create a new retina as a new thumbprint, but I'm sure that if such technology became popular it wouldn't be that long before somebody found a way (some form of non-opaque contacts, perhaps?)
It depends also on the destination though. While an front-page article in the local newpaper might be particularly damaging, sending emails to a person's co-workers going into details accusations of something such as child molestation, for example, can have disasterous consequences. The gravity of the accusation would quite likely leave some wondering as to whether or not the accused individual is guilty. I've often wondered about this and slander though, as it's not uncommon for divorced/divorcing mothers and fathers will use the "my spouse molests children" tactic to smear the other or try to win custody.
The problem with facts is that they aren't "truth" unless all the facts are presented.
I could write a big blurb about "CmdrTaco walks around naked," and make it sound like he is a flasher or something similar... when in reality he does walk around naked but only in the privacy of his own home.
I could see reasons for such a law, I just hope it's clear enough that it isn't abused.
Really, it wouldn't have to work by having ads in the clients, but rather on the network itself. Already we have P2P pollution with a number of misnamed files up for download, how much harder would it be for an advertiser to seed several machines with "Britney Spears - Greatest Hits.mp3" which is really an audio-ad for cosmetics, or "Nude Swedish Maids" which is a video ad for some viagara alternative...
jpegs and other images are even easier to use as ads.
Many P2P programs already have filters and such to stream out the crapulance, but if an onslaught of advertising such as is hitting the email world comes along it will be a lot harder to filter/block.
At some points one may be laughing at common idiosyncracies that one shares with the "obsessed," at other points it might be a case of saying "I'm bad, but this guy is worse"
Most companies have a way around this though, they just make your life hell, or in the case of EA I suppose more hell than it already is. Move your desk to the back room with no windows, perhaps near a noisy AC unit and with a power plug that overloads regularly so your PC reboots itself. Throw in some lighting and other conditons that make your work area look more like a level from doom3, and basically you're put in the position of quit or suffer hell for years until legal retaliations can be made.
Warcraft III on battle.net seems to have something similar, where it tries to group players of similar skill. Lately it doesn't seem to work quite as well as it used to (they've changed the way it interprets player stats over time), but perhaps I'm just not seeing the background categorization.
Also, the level system is rather nice... a certain amount of experience points gets you to a higher level, which probably means almost nothing anyhow but I have found myself playing "just one more deathmatch" to try and raise to lvl14 from lvl13. There's also stats based on kills (50 kills for a new personal icon, 150 for the next step, etc), and various other goodies that reward playing.
If anything, I've found the levelling rather interesting as a reward structure (even if you lose a match but do better in points than some opponents it seems that you can gain rather than lose), and it's definately interesting to gauge my win/loss ratio to see how I've improved as a player (a lot).
Hmmm, well I'm not sure if a can of spray paint or even some black tape count as far as tampering, but as far as killing detection it's just as effective (and unless they're monitoring with a person realtime, likely more effective).
It might be worthy of note that XMMS does support Winamp skins (the 2.x variety at least, not sure about the newer ones). And in addition to it's former name of LinAmp I'm guessing it was in many ways made to be a semi-clone of Winamp.
Of course, with many of its own plugins and featurse etc it's advanced beyond WinAmp now, with Winamp having advanced in different directions as well in Winamp5... but many of the simulatities do remain.
Sometimes I wish they were more cross-compatible though, as there are some nice winamp vis plugins that I would love to have in XMMS...
VIA Epia M-10000. OpenGL goodness for nifty GL-based visualizations. XMMS (building a custom frontend to that soon), lilliput touchscreen, 12V DC PSU+ITPS so it can go in the car (and less room taken by the PSU)
DVD-ROM means that I can fit over a days worth of straight music on a single-disc... and I've made an autoplay script so that it will detect if the disc inserted is a DVD, audio disc, or contains mp3 files (and play appropriately using Xine, XMMS, etc etc).
I'm thinking of getting an audigy for it if I can cram one in the already tight-packed box I whipped up for it using an old re-cut and welded PC casing...
It's not about confusing OS with public domain, that would imply a mistake or misinterpretation. These folks are knowingly violating copyright. They're changing things to make it look like it's an unrelated product to hide that fact (especially if the "fdc.sys" statement is true)
With apparently violations across the board for Ekush, I wonder what it would be like to have GPL-using companies and MS in the same courtroom, sueing the same defendant...
Well, if you're viewing kiddy porn then I'm probably not feeling sorry for you if you're nailed anyhow - however there are other factors. I think the easiest place to get nailed is cache. Either your browser cache or whatever. Unless you're pointing *that* to an encrypted FS (or the whole thing is encrypted, which is super-high overhead) you'll probably have something in there.
The big problem I see is that you can have such things in your cache without being a pedo. How many pr0n sites advertise lolita pics, and there are fuzzy banners etc. I've had a few times where my normal pr0n-browsing misadventures have ended up with all sort of interesting popups (moz helps this, mind, but not always)... anything from animals to underage and other types of filth. Even if I haven't viewed it, the bazillion popups it spawns have probably nicely laced my browser caching will also sorts of incriminating crud.
I've always wondered if those things would be used against you, but it probably depends on how bad they want to nail you or if they just don't like you. Hopefully I'll never have to find out, and lately moz has been doing a good job of blocking the popups.
Almost all jobs are out to solve a problem. IT just tends not to be based around a renewable problem.
IT creates and destroys work. Somebody to connect the cable that hits your house to connect you to that network. Somebody has to dig the holes that the poles go into that the cables run along. Somebody has to build the communications sattelites, etc etc
Yes, many of these jobs require technical knowledge and may nuke the less-technical jobs. Some of them are fairly simple though, and/or redundant.
I'd prefer to think about how IT has enhanced other industries. Doctors wouldn't have advanced medical equipment, scientists wouldn't have advanced analysis equipment, even geologists and many other seemingly unrelated fields would be much different if not from IT.
I think the same way, though not in the sense that I'm avoiding commitments because I might decide to eat lead one day. While you're young, starting a family can be locationally limiting. At the moment I have no marital committments, if a great job comes up halfway across the globe I can take it. If I bank enough days off and cash I can take a holiday
Too many people have this vision of the future with a beautiful wife and perfect kids, a leave-it-to-beaver life that greets you when you get home from work. I'm not saying you shouldn't settle down when the time's right, but there's a lot of world to see beforehand.
Part of it's about how much time you've got and how much you're willing to risk.
I'm a tech, but I'm also a dabbler in other fields. I can do basic repairs on my car (brake jobs, body work, sensor diagnosis, etc) or my house.
My old man's in highway design, but he's also skilled enough that he built the majority of an large addition to his house.
It's not hard to fix a broken pipe, the problem is mostly in knowing what *not* to do (like stick a lead pipe fitting in to fix your leaking sink, or using lead solder, etc). Certainly I don't recommend trying anything risky on your own (like fixing a gas-line), but the watch-and-learn approach can apply to anything. Next time you have something that needs repairing, schedule it for when you can see what's going on. Might cost more, but in the end the knowledge is worth the cost... just don't get in the way while somebody is trying to fix your plumbing or you might receive an accidental pipewrench to the skull:-)
Where I work, and in many situations I've seen, once quite often becomes "the computer guy." Unless you're actually in a company that does strictly software (and even then things may change if you show relevant skills), you may not be doing just one job.
Here at work I often enough code scripts, sometimes apps. Lots of web stuff on various occasions. My primary function though I would say is "System Administrator," because nobody else can really handle that part of my job. But, as a good sysadmin, the systems are usually running well enough that I'm also able to code up webapps to handle odd functions. I'm also required often enough to do hardware work (swapping parts/machines/etc, running new CAT5 through the ceiling, blah blah blah).
So what *would* you call my job? Likely I would list the individual positions that my job encompasses if doing a resume, but in the end "IT Support" is slightly better than my "techie" designation on paper here.
This doesn't seem quite right to me though. If you're being offered a good wage, why would you take a bribe? And if you've got good credit and are doing financially well, it probably stands to reason that you would expect a good wage or not go for the job
In cases of embezzling, etc in corporate environments, how often is it the indebted indivual vs the greedy one? Look at big companies like Enron... once you've hit a certain bar - you have lots of money but for some reason can't get enough.
So yeah, perhaps the guy who's going to have his legs broken by "Vinny" for gambling debts might take a bribe, but your regular haven't-worked-in-awhile credit-card-debt type would probably rather keep his regular wage and perhaps take out a loan or credit extension in hopes of paying off the debts (rather than lose the job and have no monentary future).
Of course, at a certain point, it doesn't really matter if you're in debt or not if you're getting a $250,000 (or similar high amount) bribe offer. At that point it's purely about morals...
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I'm sorry, but if the MPAA wants to create a legal model for distributing movies realtime over I2 then I'm all for it. While I definately realize that an attempt to get into I2 is probably at least partly to track content, I think they're also eyeing the potential big bucks when it becomes a replacement for current modes of television transmission. Why go to blockbuster when you can stream a movie to your TV realtime? Hell, why go to the theatre to see Spider Man 5 and sit through the obnoxious kids in the back throwing popcorn... DVD quality instantly.
Yes, I realize that both the MPAA and RIAA severely in lawyers pockets when it comes to enforcement, but of the two the MPAA seems to adapt a little better to technology once they realize the battle is lost.
This is assuming the warezed copy runs. Not hard to make something called "Half Life 2 installer.zip", with a bunch of large files inside but all it does it send a message to the HL2 blacklist (or install something on your machine to make HL2 blacklist you).
Basically it would be a trojan.
For those that match against your name, it's more important to them to have your address as well - so they can send you flyers (some actually aimed towards the stuff you buy, not always a bad thing)
The other use is of course to profile you, so they can target people like you. Again, the parent's card had foiled this as there is no age/gender or other information.
Indeed, the parent was a horrible analogy! Torture would imply that the animal being hunted is intentional pain.
Perhaps you should go to Iraq for awhile, then you might learn what it's like to be a torture victim. When you hunt, one does better to get a clean shot off, killing the prey as quickly as possible (without ruining the meat). If one has the skill and opportunity, a head-shot is probably best in many cases. Anybody who would deliberately shoot to injure and animal as opposed to kill is not a hunter but a sadist.
As for the "food" animals, their lives are often ones of terrible neglect. As you say, I'd rather be a buck living a happy life of grass and rutting and then suddenly *blam*, than be a pig stuck in a small pen, hearing the painful squeels and smelling the blood as others are taken off to be processed and knowing somehow that my turn is next...
Sorry, but I find the "interaction" one of the more annoying parts. The character personalities definately are interesting, as is some of the background, but the interaction seems to take familiar turns such as the "love interest" between Grissom and Sidle is a useless sideline.
I'm sorry, but I'd rather watch CSI for the interesting pseudo-science than watch the cool bug guy hint at his deep feelings for his attractive female co-worker.
I'm actually a fairly avid CSI fan, at least for the "Las Vegas" series. I don't know about the others, but there have been several times where Las Vegas where an episode ends with the criminal getting away or getting off on technicality. One involves a young female rape victim coming in to finger the suspect in a lineup, and getting killed for it later.
Others involve killers for which there simply isn't enough evidence to track, or to convict. Some involve cases where the prime suspect turns out to be wrong.
Yeah, they generally tend to wrap up in the hour slot, but it's not always a "happy ending" (though most are, otherwise the show wouldn't sell). Keep in mind also that the hour span can entail days or weeks in TV-time
And as for Star Trek, many plotlines run several days, not really as comparable.
As a debian user, I'm a big fan of apt-get. And as far as most things go, it's fairly easy to automate. Perhaps a script that does that apt-get update every night at a given time, and then an apt-get upgrade (but only downloads packages). Next time a privilaged user logs in, it could let you know that new updates are available and let you choose to install them (or choose which ones).
Alternately, Synaptic (screenshot is a bit dated) does a good job of this itself. You have to run the app, but if your packages list is too out-of-date the newer versions will tell you so, at which point you can update and upgrade.
Because everyone *knows* that companies weren't coming up with whacked-out registration schemes before valve was hacked...
There is definately a difference between how easily one could have a fingerprint "lifted" vs a retinal trace, but as noted it isn't that much more secure. Just like somebody can stick a little scanner device over the debit-card hole on a cash-machine, so could somebody easily enough steal your retinal scan whilst you are being authorized at a legit service - particularly if such services become more commonplace.
Of course, with such an imprint it wouldn't exactly be as easy to create a new retina as a new thumbprint, but I'm sure that if such technology became popular it wouldn't be that long before somebody found a way (some form of non-opaque contacts, perhaps?)
It depends also on the destination though. While an front-page article in the local newpaper might be particularly damaging, sending emails to a person's co-workers going into details accusations of something such as child molestation, for example, can have disasterous consequences. The gravity of the accusation would quite likely leave some wondering as to whether or not the accused individual is guilty. I've often wondered about this and slander though, as it's not uncommon for divorced/divorcing mothers and fathers will use the "my spouse molests children" tactic to smear the other or try to win custody.
The problem with facts is that they aren't "truth" unless all the facts are presented.
I could write a big blurb about "CmdrTaco walks around naked," and make it sound like he is a flasher or something similar... when in reality he does walk around naked but only in the privacy of his own home.
I could see reasons for such a law, I just hope it's clear enough that it isn't abused.
This is already in effect in some ways but:
Really, it wouldn't have to work by having ads in the clients, but rather on the network itself. Already we have P2P pollution with a number of misnamed files up for download, how much harder would it be for an advertiser to seed several machines with "Britney Spears - Greatest Hits.mp3" which is really an audio-ad for cosmetics, or "Nude Swedish Maids" which is a video ad for some viagara alternative...
jpegs and other images are even easier to use as ads.
Many P2P programs already have filters and such to stream out the crapulance, but if an onslaught of advertising such as is hitting the email world comes along it will be a lot harder to filter/block.
At some points one may be laughing at common idiosyncracies that one shares with the "obsessed," at other points it might be a case of saying "I'm bad, but this guy is worse"
Most companies have a way around this though, they just make your life hell, or in the case of EA I suppose more hell than it already is. Move your desk to the back room with no windows, perhaps near a noisy AC unit and with a power plug that overloads regularly so your PC reboots itself. Throw in some lighting and other conditons that make your work area look more like a level from doom3, and basically you're put in the position of quit or suffer hell for years until legal retaliations can be made.
Warcraft III on battle.net seems to have something similar, where it tries to group players of similar skill. Lately it doesn't seem to work quite as well as it used to (they've changed the way it interprets player stats over time), but perhaps I'm just not seeing the background categorization.
Also, the level system is rather nice... a certain amount of experience points gets you to a higher level, which probably means almost nothing anyhow but I have found myself playing "just one more deathmatch" to try and raise to lvl14 from lvl13. There's also stats based on kills (50 kills for a new personal icon, 150 for the next step, etc), and various other goodies that reward playing.
If anything, I've found the levelling rather interesting as a reward structure (even if you lose a match but do better in points than some opponents it seems that you can gain rather than lose), and it's definately interesting to gauge my win/loss ratio to see how I've improved as a player (a lot).
Hmmm, well I'm not sure if a can of spray paint or even some black tape count as far as tampering, but as far as killing detection it's just as effective (and unless they're monitoring with a person realtime, likely more effective).
It might be worthy of note that XMMS does support Winamp skins (the 2.x variety at least, not sure about the newer ones). And in addition to it's former name of LinAmp I'm guessing it was in many ways made to be a semi-clone of Winamp.
Of course, with many of its own plugins and featurse etc it's advanced beyond WinAmp now, with Winamp having advanced in different directions as well in Winamp5... but many of the simulatities do remain.
Sometimes I wish they were more cross-compatible though, as there are some nice winamp vis plugins that I would love to have in XMMS...
VIA Epia M-10000. OpenGL goodness for nifty GL-based visualizations. XMMS (building a custom frontend to that soon), lilliput touchscreen, 12V DC PSU+ITPS so it can go in the car (and less room taken by the PSU)
DVD-ROM means that I can fit over a days worth of straight music on a single-disc... and I've made an autoplay script so that it will detect if the disc inserted is a DVD, audio disc, or contains mp3 files (and play appropriately using Xine, XMMS, etc etc).
I'm thinking of getting an audigy for it if I can cram one in the already tight-packed box I whipped up for it using an old re-cut and welded PC casing...
It's not about confusing OS with public domain, that would imply a mistake or misinterpretation. These folks are knowingly violating copyright. They're changing things to make it look like it's an unrelated product to hide that fact (especially if the "fdc.sys" statement is true)
With apparently violations across the board for Ekush, I wonder what it would be like to have GPL-using companies and MS in the same courtroom, sueing the same defendant...
Well, if you're viewing kiddy porn then I'm probably not feeling sorry for you if you're nailed anyhow - however there are other factors. I think the easiest place to get nailed is cache. Either your browser cache or whatever. Unless you're pointing *that* to an encrypted FS (or the whole thing is encrypted, which is super-high overhead) you'll probably have something in there.
The big problem I see is that you can have such things in your cache without being a pedo. How many pr0n sites advertise lolita pics, and there are fuzzy banners etc. I've had a few times where my normal pr0n-browsing misadventures have ended up with all sort of interesting popups (moz helps this, mind, but not always)... anything from animals to underage and other types of filth. Even if I haven't viewed it, the bazillion popups it spawns have probably nicely laced my browser caching will also sorts of incriminating crud.
I've always wondered if those things would be used against you, but it probably depends on how bad they want to nail you or if they just don't like you. Hopefully I'll never have to find out, and lately moz has been doing a good job of blocking the popups.
Almost all jobs are out to solve a problem. IT just tends not to be based around a renewable problem.
IT creates and destroys work. Somebody to connect the cable that hits your house to connect you to that network. Somebody has to dig the holes that the poles go into that the cables run along. Somebody has to build the communications sattelites, etc etc
Yes, many of these jobs require technical knowledge and may nuke the less-technical jobs. Some of them are fairly simple though, and/or redundant.
I'd prefer to think about how IT has enhanced other industries. Doctors wouldn't have advanced medical equipment, scientists wouldn't have advanced analysis equipment, even geologists and many other seemingly unrelated fields would be much different if not from IT.
I think the same way, though not in the sense that I'm avoiding commitments because I might decide to eat lead one day. While you're young, starting a family can be locationally limiting. At the moment I have no marital committments, if a great job comes up halfway across the globe I can take it. If I bank enough days off and cash I can take a holiday
Too many people have this vision of the future with a beautiful wife and perfect kids, a leave-it-to-beaver life that greets you when you get home from work. I'm not saying you shouldn't settle down when the time's right, but there's a lot of world to see beforehand.
Part of it's about how much time you've got and how much you're willing to risk.
:-)
I'm a tech, but I'm also a dabbler in other fields. I can do basic repairs on my car (brake jobs, body work, sensor diagnosis, etc) or my house.
My old man's in highway design, but he's also skilled enough that he built the majority of an large addition to his house.
It's not hard to fix a broken pipe, the problem is mostly in knowing what *not* to do (like stick a lead pipe fitting in to fix your leaking sink, or using lead solder, etc). Certainly I don't recommend trying anything risky on your own (like fixing a gas-line), but the watch-and-learn approach can apply to anything. Next time you have something that needs repairing, schedule it for when you can see what's going on. Might cost more, but in the end the knowledge is worth the cost... just don't get in the way while somebody is trying to fix your plumbing or you might receive an accidental pipewrench to the skull
Where I work, and in many situations I've seen, once quite often becomes "the computer guy." Unless you're actually in a company that does strictly software (and even then things may change if you show relevant skills), you may not be doing just one job.
Here at work I often enough code scripts, sometimes apps. Lots of web stuff on various occasions. My primary function though I would say is "System Administrator," because nobody else can really handle that part of my job. But, as a good sysadmin, the systems are usually running well enough that I'm also able to code up webapps to handle odd functions. I'm also required often enough to do hardware work (swapping parts/machines/etc, running new CAT5 through the ceiling, blah blah blah).
So what *would* you call my job? Likely I would list the individual positions that my job encompasses if doing a resume, but in the end "IT Support" is slightly better than my "techie" designation on paper here.
This doesn't seem quite right to me though. If you're being offered a good wage, why would you take a bribe? And if you've got good credit and are doing financially well, it probably stands to reason that you would expect a good wage or not go for the job
In cases of embezzling, etc in corporate environments, how often is it the indebted indivual vs the greedy one? Look at big companies like Enron... once you've hit a certain bar - you have lots of money but for some reason can't get enough.
So yeah, perhaps the guy who's going to have his legs broken by "Vinny" for gambling debts might take a bribe, but your regular haven't-worked-in-awhile credit-card-debt type would probably rather keep his regular wage and perhaps take out a loan or credit extension in hopes of paying off the debts (rather than lose the job and have no monentary future).
Of course, at a certain point, it doesn't really matter if you're in debt or not if you're getting a $250,000 (or similar high amount) bribe offer. At that point it's purely about morals...