Just started reading the indictment, and I came across something that struck me as curious. There is a section called "Computer Terminology" that gives the plaintiff's version of a definition of "Internet Service Provider":
...offer their customers access to the Internet using telephone or other... provide e-mail accounts... remotely store electronic files on behalf of their customers, and may provide other services unique to each particular ISP.
(Emphasis mine). I thought the bit about storing electronic files was a little odd when I saw the definition. Then, later, it looks like they use the "store electronic files" part of their ISP definition to claim that MySpace is actually an ISP!
As the operator of [www.myspace.com], [Fox Interactive Media] acted as an Internet Service Provider.
Anyone have any idea why they need to claim Fox Interactive Media is acting as an ISP, instead of just a social networking site?
Ludicrous and practically unenforceable, yes, but that's the way the IRS sees it. And occasionally people do get caught (i.e. if you do it way too much) -- see Ted Stevens, who thought he was being pretty clever.
So, I actually have a little bit of sympathy for whichever public servant's ass is on the line right now, worrying he's going to get fired over this flap. Whatever idiots actually implemented the existing Charlie Card system we're stuck with right now might be long gone by now, along with the consultants that actually put this system in place.
However, as a Boston resident, it's pretty obvious the MBTA has been brought down recently by especially bad mismanagement. We switched 2 years or so ago from plain tokens (one token == one subway ride) to an overly complicated mix of magstripe cards (CharlieTickets) and RFID cards (CharlieCards).
There was a news story a while back in one of the little free Boston newspapers telling the cost of implementing this new system.. I think it was well into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Enough to pay the existing salaries of the MBTA staff for several years.
To top it off, the new cards are really just a drag on everyone's time. Anyone who's had to wait 2 minutes in line while getting on a bus for some fool to fumble around trying to load up value onto one of the stored-value CharlieCards knows what I'm talking about.
I also have a sneaking suspicion that a "feature" of this horrendously expensive, overly complicated system was not only that it would save money through nebulous efficiency improvements (the Charlie Card machines are broken half the time for some reason...) but that it would allow them to make more money by more effectively manipulating the currency. You see, previously, when they would hike up the subway rates, they couldn't stop people from buying $100 of tokens at the old rates just before the rate switch. Now, they can jack up the rates and everyone's forced to pay the new rate.
So anyway, a little long-winded.. but I can see exactly why the MBTA officials are so worried about this. In addition to being stuck with this crazily complicated, expensive system that's run horrendously overbudget (in addition to the MBTA itself being $100M+ in the red every year somehow, despite having a government-funded monopoly and all sorts of advertising revenue flowing in..), they are now faced with the possibility of college students in Boston buying hacked Charlie Cards and not paying any fare. They're probably scared shitless of this. For the people that said they should just fix their system... I honestly doubt they could, even if they wanted to. We're talking about a system that cost several hundred million $ to put in place, with very little thought about security put in at the beginning. And these are government officials, using god-knows-who for contracting out the maintenance of this system. Working for an agency that's severely in the red, year after year. They don't have a snowball's chance in hell of fixing the system the right way, so they're abusing the courts to keep from being ridiculed in public and fired over the whole fiasco.
It's naive to think that you can stay true to your ideas and still become successful [politically]
What's sad is that in the extremely rare instance that we get a successful politician who has held true to his ideals for his entire career, ideals that a surprising number of people confess to agree with, and takes the plunge to run for the highest office in the land, he is shouted down by the chorus of He couldn't possibly win! naysayers. Cf. Ron Paul.
I know, I know beating a dead horse. But I've slowly come to realize that essentially every ill in society that we complain about (government waste, government spying, corporate greed and lawlessness) can be placed directly at our feet. "Our" being We, the people, the citizens and voters and shareholders of this country.
1. Rename to "xxx 18yr old bj strip"
2. Upload to P2P protocol of choice.
That's not quite good enough. When I wanted to back up drafts of my master's thesis, this is what I did.
1.) Assign each revision (or tape, in your case) a unique word combination of bizarre sexual acts. For instance "Ostrich feces smeared by Horny Redhead Orangutan Schoolgirls."
2.) Keep the list of mappings of backed-up files to unique names very, very safe. Keep the list, written down is fine, in a safe deposit box at one or more locations.
3.) Upload the "porn videos" to Usenet, Kazaa, Gnutella, etc.
I think you'll find this backup method more than sufficient to withstand fire, flood, meteors, and other acts of God. It sure saved my butt several times when I needed to find old versions of my thesis to build on in future work. If you want to see the final draft of my thesis, just search for "Crazy teen Lllama Sucking Blonde Elephant". There's about a million copies out there, just rename to.pdf.
For extra points, is anyone out there willing to write automated software to perform such backups? I'm thinking, you have the user enter a few dozen unique animal names, sexual acts, etc. Then, everytime you do an SVN commit, the backup manager chooses a unique combination of words, renames to.avi, and uploads to the usual locations.
I have long distrusted these shady stats companies that provide these figures with absolutely no way to check their validity. I poked around a bit on netapplications.com, and although they don't actually tell you outright, I gather that their Firefox statistics come from corporate websites that they host(?). Needless to say, there might be a huge bias here (e.g. the types of companies in bed with NetApplications might be biased towards having a large influx of corporate users on IE, or something like that).
So what to do about this lack of statistics? A couple months ago I wrote a bot that crawled webalizer statistics pages, harvested the results, loaded them into MySQL, and produced aggregate browser statistics by month. To make a long story short, I had difficulty getting enough Webalizer pages to make for a really good study (my bot was just scraping Google), but I showed around ~20% Firefox usage. Results here. If there's interest in this project, it could easily be revived.
I 'stole' one copy of Metallica's album. Here's 10k copies in return.
You know.. You can get blank CDs these days for under $0.05-$0.10 cents per disk, and USPS Media Mail lets you mail CDs for dirt cheap. Anyone up for a massive campaign of "returning" pirated MP3s to the RIAA, on hundreds of CDs, via USPS? Maybe with a return address of "Lars Ulrich,..."
A really great book. Under the GNU FDL, not CC. And the authors maintained pretty strict control over incorporating user comments (i.e. not like wikibooks), so progress was kind of slow, but the quality is good. Last I checked some sections were still unfinished, but it's more than enough to learn all you need to get started with Django.
So she won't let them make a Harry Potter RPG. Big deal. There are plenty of reasons to dislike JKR, but this is not one.
Bill Watterson never let anyone (legally) produce Calvin and Hobbes merchandise, although it probably would have been a huge hit and made him a pretty penny. He didn't want to destroy the art that he considered his comic to be by selling out. Does that make him a "douchebag" as well?
Don't feel bad. I just did a search for "sitetruth" on sitetruth.com, and it rates all of its own pages with a yellow question mark ("Site ownership identified but not verified").
I don't think anyone actually uses SiteTruth anyway.
However, I'm not sure I'd characterize the cuts as a "funding SNAFU". According to the NYTimes article, the cuts were "to meet bottom-line spending targets demanded by Mr. Bush, Congress rolled back the planned increases for the Energy Department and other science agencies." If I were more cynical I'd say that money just got funneled into Iraq.
Oh well. Long as we're busy fighting terrorists, who cares if we have a $1T/year deficit, a weakened dollar, one of the civilized world's worst public education systems, an expensive, inefficient healthcare system, AND are cutting out the roots from future scientific progress in the USA. God bless America.
The vast majority of auto mechanics are expected to provide their own hand tools
Is this even true? Source?
To relate a story along the same lines, an old EE prof of mine told me twenty years or so ago they tried mandating that all students bring their own tools to the Electronics lab -- soldering irons, wire cutters, pliers, etc. -- because the department was trying to pinch pennies, and because inevitably some of the lab equipment would get "borrowed" and never returned. Despite these apparent benefits, the program was canceled within a year because the poor students were bringing in any tool they could get their hands on to meet the requirements, such as a huge pipe wrench instead of the teeny little pliers you really needed.
You really don't want workers/students responsible for providing for their own tools. With companies paying the least they can for labor, and schools nickel and diming students for every cent... many students or even white collar workers couldn't afford to provide for their own good tools even *if* they could be trusted to actually buy what they needed. I for one would hate to have to provide my own computer for work. My company buys every new employee pretty much whatever laptop or desktop they want . Our newest hire just got a MacBook Air.. I'm a teensy jealous, although I got a surprisingly nice Dell Latitude for myself. And we alone have root on our machines, of course. I would've really hated to plop down ~$1k for a decent laptop for myself just for work.
You have a link to this book? Does it even exist? I don't pull up anything on Amazon or Google with that title or Author. How did this get modded so highly?
I doubt per-user watermarks will ever catch on for mainstream media, such as mass produced CDs or DVDs, because when you're pressing hundreds of thousands of discs it makes things a hell of a lot easier to have them all be identical. Maybe they'd catch on for downloads.. but if you could just buy and rip a CD of the same song anyway, it's kind of pointless (though the music industry is pretty dumb..)
However, one place they're finally catching on, that I'm amazed has taken them so long, is in pre-release DVD screeners. I hear that if you check out a DVD screener of "I am Legend" floating around, you'll see messages at the bottom saying "This movie is intended only for pre-screening and is digitally watermarked". Perhaps they're also sneaking it into pre-release CDs intended for DJs or production artists as well, I don't know.
Also, to the people claiming you could just download the MP3 from two accounts.. that's a good idea, provided they don't have a simple parity scheme in place. You also can't easily download from two accounts, or get two DVDs, in the case of special pre-releases intended for a very limited audience.
I Just followed the link to
uselessdomain0001.com. Check out the blue globe logo at the top.. now check out this CC licensed SVG image on Wikipedia: Applications-internet.svg. Looks like someone "accidentally" forgot to include the Creative Commons Share Alike license on that page.. hmmmm.
I think it's pretty obvious that NSI is just a scummy company, through and through.
P.S. If uselessdomain0001.com has changed by the time you read this, just check out uselessdomain0002.com or any other similarly tasted domain.
You're not the only one that's been faced with the prospect of swallowing the end result of some dumb/greedy corporate lawyers. You can "comply" with the agreement, if you have to, and possibly keep your job while showing them how idiotic the policy is — especially if you can convince some coworkers to do the same.
You jest.. but I was at FOSSCamp just last weekend in Boston, which was sort of bankrolled by Canonical, and pretty much all the Ubuntu devs were there (I think they tried to schedule a few conferences in the same timeframe for convenience of the attendees, many of whom came from abroad). Basically, everyone there had a laptop running Ubuntu.. except for maybe 10 or 15% who were using OSX. I saw someone had even lugged an iMac in his suitcase up to the conference. Apple has really done a great job in making an OS that's beloved by both newbies and experienced developers.
Having said that, I agree with sibling post about restrictive EULAs being simply unacceptable on an OS. I use Ubuntu.
Actually, somewhat counter intuitively, ballistic motions such as scribbling a signature or swinging a baseball bat are actually more accurate when you perform it quickly and without hesitation (because they're ingrained in muscle memory). I'm not sure if the picture drawing described in TFA would qualify, as it would take a great number of repetitions (1,000+ perhaps) to get ingrained in one's muscle memory.
Yeah.. different methods of signature recognition have been around for quite some time, and never really caught on. A friend just did his senior undergrad thesis on a survey of techniques for signature detection, and it's actually a pretty informative read. Long story short.. even the advanced models have too high false-positive rates, especially from skilled forgers who have time to practice copying your signature at home, or even casual over-the-shoulder copying.
The only real future use of this I see is as one component in a highly secure, long-term, yet convenient, authentication mechanism.. perhaps for accessing a lockbox at a bank, something you'd need to have around for many years without remembering and changing a password. And even then, they'd have to additionally use at least "something you know" (name,SSN, etc that you won't forget) and possibly another "something you have" (fingerprint reading, perhaps) in order to get the false positive and false negative rates acceptably low.
Since Colbert was only running in one state, his campaign was deemed to not be viable.
That's one possible explanation. Another possible explanation is that people have caught on just how easy it is to win elections — at least on a local level. I suspect he might have easily been say, among the top three (if not the top) candidates in South Carolina if he'd tried hard.. and this could have really embarassed the Dems and GOP. Headlines like: "TV Prankster comes in among top in S.C."
For evidence of how feasible this is, and how embarrassing the scenario would be to entrenched politicos, see the Awful Truth episode where Moore and copycats successfully got a Ficus tree to win a seat in (IIRC) the House of Representatives, whereupon the state election officials quietly ignored the results.
Torrent. P.S. Don't feel guilty about downloading the series.. Moore has publicly stated he doesn't mind people pirating his movies.
The crazy thing is, I'd actually vote for Colbert, no qualms at all.. and I'm fairly serious about politics. (Watch his speech at the Bush dinner if you at all doubt his intelligence and capability). Even if some of the 'real' candidates look alright (Barack, say).. The last eight years have left me so disillusioned with politicians that I don't really trust any of them. Although I personally didn't support Bush in the least back in '00.. I could have in no way predicted that he'd be the power-hungry, numbskull, overarching leader he turned out to be. Sure his past was spotty (drugs, alcohol, some dumb decisions).. but not a whole lot worse than, say, your average college kid.
I'm reminded of a quote (can't find exact quote atm..) Anyone capable of being elected president doesn't deserve the title. Such is the state of money-dominated politics. I'd actually we randomly select a 'president' from a hat of all eligible citizens every six months or so — give 'em a short reign so they can't screw it up too badly.
Interestingly, I know some very bright guys doing research into randomized elections — basically you randomize the outcome somewhat to bypass the restrictions of Arrow's impossiblity theorem.
If the car tells dad you spent the night at your girlfriend's house instead of at boy scouts, or tells the department of homeland security you stopped by the mosque, it's broken and should not have been released.
Wow. Yet more of the attitude "the user is too dumb to make moral decisions on their own, so we have to make them for him". And you wonder why the government illegally seizes power in the name of a higher cause.
Keep in mind the exact same GPS unit could be used for keeping track of where you left your key ring as well as by the government to spy on you. Technology is neutral. How it's used is the problem. Your guillotine example is overly contrived, but let's look at it. According to wikipedia:
The basis for the machine's success was the belief that it was a humane form of execution, contrasting with the methods used in pre-revolutionary, ancien régime (old regime) France. In France, before the guillotine, members of the nobility were beheaded with a sword or axe, while commoners were usually hanged
Imagine if, in your ideal world, the guillotine had never been invented, or deployed, because anyone capable of inventing it thought like you. The french revolutionaries would have simply hanged/axed 'offenders'. And you would have to contrive an argument suggesting that the only useful purpose of a length of rope or an axe is for killing people. Nice troll.
Slashdot Mirror
Just started reading the indictment, and I came across something that struck me as curious. There is a section called "Computer Terminology" that gives the plaintiff's version of a definition of "Internet Service Provider":
(Emphasis mine). I thought the bit about storing electronic files was a little odd when I saw the definition. Then, later, it looks like they use the "store electronic files" part of their ISP definition to claim that MySpace is actually an ISP!
Anyone have any idea why they need to claim Fox Interactive Media is acting as an ISP, instead of just a social networking site?
In the USA, it's unfortunately a myth that you can't be taxed on bartered goods and services. See here: http://money.howstuffworks.com/bartering4.htm
Ludicrous and practically unenforceable, yes, but that's the way the IRS sees it. And occasionally people do get caught (i.e. if you do it way too much) -- see Ted Stevens, who thought he was being pretty clever.
So, I actually have a little bit of sympathy for whichever public servant's ass is on the line right now, worrying he's going to get fired over this flap. Whatever idiots actually implemented the existing Charlie Card system we're stuck with right now might be long gone by now, along with the consultants that actually put this system in place.
However, as a Boston resident, it's pretty obvious the MBTA has been brought down recently by especially bad mismanagement. We switched 2 years or so ago from plain tokens (one token == one subway ride) to an overly complicated mix of magstripe cards (CharlieTickets) and RFID cards (CharlieCards).
There was a news story a while back in one of the little free Boston newspapers telling the cost of implementing this new system.. I think it was well into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Enough to pay the existing salaries of the MBTA staff for several years.
To top it off, the new cards are really just a drag on everyone's time. Anyone who's had to wait 2 minutes in line while getting on a bus for some fool to fumble around trying to load up value onto one of the stored-value CharlieCards knows what I'm talking about.
I also have a sneaking suspicion that a "feature" of this horrendously expensive, overly complicated system was not only that it would save money through nebulous efficiency improvements (the Charlie Card machines are broken half the time for some reason...) but that it would allow them to make more money by more effectively manipulating the currency. You see, previously, when they would hike up the subway rates, they couldn't stop people from buying $100 of tokens at the old rates just before the rate switch. Now, they can jack up the rates and everyone's forced to pay the new rate.
So anyway, a little long-winded.. but I can see exactly why the MBTA officials are so worried about this. In addition to being stuck with this crazily complicated, expensive system that's run horrendously overbudget (in addition to the MBTA itself being $100M+ in the red every year somehow, despite having a government-funded monopoly and all sorts of advertising revenue flowing in..), they are now faced with the possibility of college students in Boston buying hacked Charlie Cards and not paying any fare. They're probably scared shitless of this. For the people that said they should just fix their system... I honestly doubt they could, even if they wanted to. We're talking about a system that cost several hundred million $ to put in place, with very little thought about security put in at the beginning. And these are government officials, using god-knows-who for contracting out the maintenance of this system. Working for an agency that's severely in the red, year after year. They don't have a snowball's chance in hell of fixing the system the right way, so they're abusing the courts to keep from being ridiculed in public and fired over the whole fiasco.
What's sad is that in the extremely rare instance that we get a successful politician who has held true to his ideals for his entire career, ideals that a surprising number of people confess to agree with, and takes the plunge to run for the highest office in the land, he is shouted down by the chorus of He couldn't possibly win! naysayers. Cf. Ron Paul.
I know, I know beating a dead horse. But I've slowly come to realize that essentially every ill in society that we complain about (government waste, government spying, corporate greed and lawlessness) can be placed directly at our feet. "Our" being We, the people, the citizens and voters and shareholders of this country.
That's not quite good enough. When I wanted to back up drafts of my master's thesis, this is what I did.
1.) Assign each revision (or tape, in your case) a unique word combination of bizarre sexual acts. For instance "Ostrich feces smeared by Horny Redhead Orangutan Schoolgirls."
2.) Keep the list of mappings of backed-up files to unique names very, very safe. Keep the list, written down is fine, in a safe deposit box at one or more locations.
3.) Upload the "porn videos" to Usenet, Kazaa, Gnutella, etc.
I think you'll find this backup method more than sufficient to withstand fire, flood, meteors, and other acts of God. It sure saved my butt several times when I needed to find old versions of my thesis to build on in future work. If you want to see the final draft of my thesis, just search for "Crazy teen Lllama Sucking Blonde Elephant". There's about a million copies out there, just rename to .pdf.
For extra points, is anyone out there willing to write automated software to perform such backups? I'm thinking, you have the user enter a few dozen unique animal names, sexual acts, etc. Then, everytime you do an SVN commit, the backup manager chooses a unique combination of words, renames to .avi, and uploads to the usual locations.
I have long distrusted these shady stats companies that provide these figures with absolutely no way to check their validity. I poked around a bit on netapplications.com, and although they don't actually tell you outright, I gather that their Firefox statistics come from corporate websites that they host(?). Needless to say, there might be a huge bias here (e.g. the types of companies in bed with NetApplications might be biased towards having a large influx of corporate users on IE, or something like that).
So what to do about this lack of statistics? A couple months ago I wrote a bot that crawled webalizer statistics pages, harvested the results, loaded them into MySQL, and produced aggregate browser statistics by month. To make a long story short, I had difficulty getting enough Webalizer pages to make for a really good study (my bot was just scraping Google), but I showed around ~20% Firefox usage. Results here. If there's interest in this project, it could easily be revived.
You know.. You can get blank CDs these days for under $0.05-$0.10 cents per disk, and USPS Media Mail lets you mail CDs for dirt cheap. Anyone up for a massive campaign of "returning" pirated MP3s to the RIAA, on hundreds of CDs, via USPS? Maybe with a return address of "Lars Ulrich,..."
Djangobook.com
A really great book. Under the GNU FDL, not CC. And the authors maintained pretty strict control over incorporating user comments (i.e. not like wikibooks), so progress was kind of slow, but the quality is good. Last I checked some sections were still unfinished, but it's more than enough to learn all you need to get started with Django.
So she won't let them make a Harry Potter RPG. Big deal. There are plenty of reasons to dislike JKR, but this is not one.
Bill Watterson never let anyone (legally) produce Calvin and Hobbes merchandise, although it probably would have been a huge hit and made him a pretty penny. He didn't want to destroy the art that he considered his comic to be by selling out. Does that make him a "douchebag" as well?
Correct Attribution:
Artist: MC Frontalot
Title: Secrets from the Future
Full lyrics: here.
Parent omits the second half of the song.
Don't feel bad. I just did a search for "sitetruth" on sitetruth.com, and it rates all of its own pages with a yellow question mark ("Site ownership identified but not verified").
I don't think anyone actually uses SiteTruth anyway.
I was a little shocked to read the parent post, but he's absolutely right. See the story (from December) here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/22/science/22fermi.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
However, I'm not sure I'd characterize the cuts as a "funding SNAFU". According to the NYTimes article, the cuts were "to meet bottom-line spending targets demanded by Mr. Bush, Congress rolled back the planned increases for the Energy Department and other science agencies." If I were more cynical I'd say that money just got funneled into Iraq.
And it's not just Fermilab.. many other important domestic science programs are being cut, including the NIH: http://www.the-scientist.com/news/home/53858/ which many have been complaining to Congress about, such as Harvard pres. Faust recently: http://harvardscience.harvard.edu/culture-society/articles/president-faust-testifies-increase-nih-fundingOh well. Long as we're busy fighting terrorists, who cares if we have a $1T/year deficit, a weakened dollar, one of the civilized world's worst public education systems, an expensive, inefficient healthcare system, AND are cutting out the roots from future scientific progress in the USA. God bless America.
Thanks for the very informative reply. I never knew all that :)
True, the Linux kernel does make heavy use of GCC specific directives. However, interestingly, Intel's compiler has copied enough of the GCC directives that it's actually (sort of) possible to compile the Kernel with ICC, and apparently has been for several years. See here: http://blog.janik.cz/archives/2004/03/11/T23_04_41/ or here: http://www.intel.com/support/performancetools/c/linux/sb/cs-007713.htm
Is this even true? Source?
To relate a story along the same lines, an old EE prof of mine told me twenty years or so ago they tried mandating that all students bring their own tools to the Electronics lab -- soldering irons, wire cutters, pliers, etc. -- because the department was trying to pinch pennies, and because inevitably some of the lab equipment would get "borrowed" and never returned. Despite these apparent benefits, the program was canceled within a year because the poor students were bringing in any tool they could get their hands on to meet the requirements, such as a huge pipe wrench instead of the teeny little pliers you really needed.
You really don't want workers/students responsible for providing for their own tools. With companies paying the least they can for labor, and schools nickel and diming students for every cent... many students or even white collar workers couldn't afford to provide for their own good tools even *if* they could be trusted to actually buy what they needed. I for one would hate to have to provide my own computer for work. My company buys every new employee pretty much whatever laptop or desktop they want . Our newest hire just got a MacBook Air.. I'm a teensy jealous, although I got a surprisingly nice Dell Latitude for myself. And we alone have root on our machines, of course. I would've really hated to plop down ~$1k for a decent laptop for myself just for work.
You have a link to this book? Does it even exist? I don't pull up anything on Amazon or Google with that title or Author. How did this get modded so highly?
I doubt per-user watermarks will ever catch on for mainstream media, such as mass produced CDs or DVDs, because when you're pressing hundreds of thousands of discs it makes things a hell of a lot easier to have them all be identical. Maybe they'd catch on for downloads.. but if you could just buy and rip a CD of the same song anyway, it's kind of pointless (though the music industry is pretty dumb..)
However, one place they're finally catching on, that I'm amazed has taken them so long, is in pre-release DVD screeners. I hear that if you check out a DVD screener of "I am Legend" floating around, you'll see messages at the bottom saying "This movie is intended only for pre-screening and is digitally watermarked". Perhaps they're also sneaking it into pre-release CDs intended for DJs or production artists as well, I don't know.
Also, to the people claiming you could just download the MP3 from two accounts.. that's a good idea, provided they don't have a simple parity scheme in place. You also can't easily download from two accounts, or get two DVDs, in the case of special pre-releases intended for a very limited audience.
I Just followed the link to uselessdomain0001.com. Check out the blue globe logo at the top.. now check out this CC licensed SVG image on Wikipedia: Applications-internet.svg. Looks like someone "accidentally" forgot to include the Creative Commons Share Alike license on that page.. hmmmm.
I think it's pretty obvious that NSI is just a scummy company, through and through.
P.S. If uselessdomain0001.com has changed by the time you read this, just check out uselessdomain0002.com or any other similarly tasted domain.
You're not the only one that's been faced with the prospect of swallowing the end result of some dumb/greedy corporate lawyers. You can "comply" with the agreement, if you have to, and possibly keep your job while showing them how idiotic the policy is — especially if you can convince some coworkers to do the same.
Dear Ms. Tarzian
You jest.. but I was at FOSSCamp just last weekend in Boston, which was sort of bankrolled by Canonical, and pretty much all the Ubuntu devs were there (I think they tried to schedule a few conferences in the same timeframe for convenience of the attendees, many of whom came from abroad). Basically, everyone there had a laptop running Ubuntu.. except for maybe 10 or 15% who were using OSX. I saw someone had even lugged an iMac in his suitcase up to the conference. Apple has really done a great job in making an OS that's beloved by both newbies and experienced developers.
Having said that, I agree with sibling post about restrictive EULAs being simply unacceptable on an OS. I use Ubuntu.
Actually, somewhat counter intuitively, ballistic motions such as scribbling a signature or swinging a baseball bat are actually more accurate when you perform it quickly and without hesitation (because they're ingrained in muscle memory). I'm not sure if the picture drawing described in TFA would qualify, as it would take a great number of repetitions (1,000+ perhaps) to get ingrained in one's muscle memory.
Yeah.. different methods of signature recognition have been around for quite some time, and never really caught on. A friend just did his senior undergrad thesis on a survey of techniques for signature detection, and it's actually a pretty informative read. Long story short.. even the advanced models have too high false-positive rates, especially from skilled forgers who have time to practice copying your signature at home, or even casual over-the-shoulder copying.
The only real future use of this I see is as one component in a highly secure, long-term, yet convenient, authentication mechanism.. perhaps for accessing a lockbox at a bank, something you'd need to have around for many years without remembering and changing a password. And even then, they'd have to additionally use at least "something you know" (name,SSN, etc that you won't forget) and possibly another "something you have" (fingerprint reading, perhaps) in order to get the false positive and false negative rates acceptably low.
That's one possible explanation. Another possible explanation is that people have caught on just how easy it is to win elections — at least on a local level. I suspect he might have easily been say, among the top three (if not the top) candidates in South Carolina if he'd tried hard.. and this could have really embarassed the Dems and GOP. Headlines like: "TV Prankster comes in among top in S.C."
For evidence of how feasible this is, and how embarrassing the scenario would be to entrenched politicos, see the Awful Truth episode where Moore and copycats successfully got a Ficus tree to win a seat in (IIRC) the House of Representatives, whereupon the state election officials quietly ignored the results.
Torrent. P.S. Don't feel guilty about downloading the series.. Moore has publicly stated he doesn't mind people pirating his movies.
The crazy thing is, I'd actually vote for Colbert, no qualms at all.. and I'm fairly serious about politics. (Watch his speech at the Bush dinner if you at all doubt his intelligence and capability). Even if some of the 'real' candidates look alright (Barack, say).. The last eight years have left me so disillusioned with politicians that I don't really trust any of them. Although I personally didn't support Bush in the least back in '00.. I could have in no way predicted that he'd be the power-hungry, numbskull, overarching leader he turned out to be. Sure his past was spotty (drugs, alcohol, some dumb decisions).. but not a whole lot worse than, say, your average college kid.
I'm reminded of a quote (can't find exact quote atm..) Anyone capable of being elected president doesn't deserve the title. Such is the state of money-dominated politics. I'd actually we randomly select a 'president' from a hat of all eligible citizens every six months or so — give 'em a short reign so they can't screw it up too badly.
Interestingly, I know some very bright guys doing research into randomized elections — basically you randomize the outcome somewhat to bypass the restrictions of Arrow's impossiblity theorem.
Wow. Yet more of the attitude "the user is too dumb to make moral decisions on their own, so we have to make them for him". And you wonder why the government illegally seizes power in the name of a higher cause.
Keep in mind the exact same GPS unit could be used for keeping track of where you left your key ring as well as by the government to spy on you. Technology is neutral. How it's used is the problem. Your guillotine example is overly contrived, but let's look at it. According to wikipedia:
Imagine if, in your ideal world, the guillotine had never been invented, or deployed, because anyone capable of inventing it thought like you. The french revolutionaries would have simply hanged/axed 'offenders'. And you would have to contrive an argument suggesting that the only useful purpose of a length of rope or an axe is for killing people. Nice troll.