It'll continue, too. In 2 weeks 11-11-11 falls on Friday. And the week after that is the full Minecraft release at Minecon. Buncha loonies (or is that blockheads?) there, too.
And the 4th amendment comes into play for unreasonable search and seizure. I can see the seizure up to a point, but a lot of times the assets are disposed of at auction before there is a trial, which is just plain conversion.
...they just cozy up to different industries. Republicans favor raw materials and insurers,Democrats favor the entertainment and tech industries. They both suck up to big pharma.
It used to be that when a new party came into power, they'd spend a couple of years investigating the corruption in the previous administration before getting deep into the trough themselves. Nowadays the waiting period is over. Corruption is the one thing they DON'T attack each other over, except on the campaign trail.
If you are doing windows boxes and you are already paying for new Windows OEM / System Builder licenses, I'm pretty sure it's legal for you to use WinPE or a similar tool to install a recovery partition. If you're using pre-existing Windows licenses on the boxes, it might still be legal.
But the easiest option may be to ship the clonezilla image you are already using with a bootable clonezilla partition. Basically instead of installing clonezilla to a flash drive or a DVD, put it on the recovery partition. Put some scripting in the clonezilla partition to configure the clonezilla settings so that it is setup to restore the image to the main OS partition as the default action. This would work for Windows or Linux.
The big problem with dLink is their abysmal tech support. If you know what you're doing as far as setting up the router and the wireless they're fine. I've had 2 dLinks (but not Wireless-N) and the first one had wireless drop issues that were resolved by a firmware flash update, and the other has never given me any trouble at all.
One requirement that you don't mention is IPV6 support. Don't just assume that any home router sold nowadays supports it. Many still don't, or are you planning on getting that support from DDWRT or openWRT? Supposedly dLink is one of the better brands for IPV6 support, although that is just from random news articles (regurgitated press releases?) I've seen around the net.
If they were concerned about cracking and virus creation, they would have proposed this legislation a couple of years ago. The only thing that is different this year has been the summer of networked civil disobedience: it's about Egypt, Tunisia, Anonymous and LulzSec, and keeping the public from realizing how ill-clothed the emperor really is. Sure the public will benefit if the ID theft rings are shut down, but that's not the whole agenda.
Not only do I think they will use this in cases like Anon, I think the law is being pushed BECAUSE of cases like Anon and LulzSec. Not to mention the identity theft rings and the botnet masters. But the botnets and ID theft have been around for years, and it's only after the Anon attacks came in that this law gets proposed. Maybe this was in the pipeline already, but it certainly has more support now than it would without Anon, etc.
There's a core of Anon that is politically driven, but there are enough people in it for the lulz that there might be some effect of this legislation. Anon wouldn't be killed off, but their DDoS attacks wouldn't be so effective without the non-political hangers-on/trolls. And those are the ones likely to drop off if the risk gets too high for the joke to be funny anymore.
The RICO act shouldn't apply unless there is an actual conspiracy. For a certain class of hacker, the RICO act would definitely be relevant, there's no doubt in my mind that the ID theft rings and the botnet rings fall into this category. But if he starts going after the script kiddies who joined Anonymous because they thought it was cool, or even more legitimately because it resonated with their sense of social justice, life will get interesting for both the administration and the parents of said script kiddies. If this law follows the path blazed by the drug seizure laws, folks will have their entire home stripped of computers and smart phones because they were vaguely linked with some kind of hacking crime.
I'll second the recommendation to start small with a library or utility. Preferably a utility so it's easier to see how the pieces are supposed to fit together. With a library you frequently just get a group of classes without a good way to understand the underlying design.
I have to say that I think this is probably one of the best "Ask Slashdot" questions I've ever seen in my years here. It's directed to the right audience (the answers will actually be useful, as opposed to say, answers to a question about copyright law), it will have interest for a lot of of others who also want to learn and contribute, and it isn't a simple question that has only one good answer, so it will generate some useful discussion in addition to the usual/, noise.
I was going to mention that Consumerist has had stories like this for years. Then I noticed that the link in the story is to a Consumerist story...from 2009. Slashdot -- always up on the latest trends in commerce and the internet.
This isn't just a marketing thing, it's an upsale. BB charges you for this system prep "service" and frequently tries to make it look like it's a required bundle with any laptop purchase, which it isn't.
Apart from various technical issues, I'll be interested to see if this ever gains any political traction in the US. This will probably require government investment, so it'll be interesting to see if Alaska Republicans decide the jobs gravy train is more important than their devotion to small government.
Well, I was serious -- but more in the sense that Minecraft is emblematic of the overall Indie gaming movement grabbing mindshare among gamers over the big commercial productions like WoW. Interesting that it was Minecraft in particular that pulled you off of WoW. I agree that I like the community experience on Minecraft servers over MMOs. Just the fact that anybody with a paid license to MC can set up their own server makes a big difference in the type of community you get.
Actually, the "Great Recession" probably has even more to do with the decline -- when people do have money to spend on games, they won't be spending it on a monthly subscription. They'll buy a cheap pickup game like Terraria and get a couple months worth of entertainment out of it for the price of a single month on WoW. Or they'll play a "free-to-play" MMO that is more geared toward their style of play.
Actually, there is a whole class of patents for biological inventions. In the good old days, these were derived by breeding and hybridization, and Luther Burbank and George Washington Carver got their fame by inventing new plants and animals. So patenting a gene that occurs naturally is related to this type of patent. The thing is, the law doesn't say you can patent isolated genes, it says you can patent new plants and animals. i.e., all of the DNA and genes that distinguish the new breed from others and allow it to breed true.
On the other hand, the fact that this ruling narrows the patent to a patent on the gene itself should mean that these guys can't try to collect royalties from anyone or anything for which the gene appears as part of their DNA sequence. In that case the gene is NOT isolated and does not exist "separately". So what we have here is a ruling designed to allow the patent(s) on genetic tests while not allowing patents of (human) genes in sequence. Why these clowns couldn't just patent their test and not the gene is beyond me. Maybe it's too similar to an existing test and is considered "obvious".
If Google had come clean about gathering device information other than for access points back when the story originally broke, I'd buy their story. But even when presented with the opportunity to come clean about the scope of their data gathering they elected to hide that information until they were outed.
If it's an accident, you don't try to hide it under the rug, you clean it up properly.
So, if a corporation would do that, it's OK, but if a govt. does it, it's not?
Actually yes that's correct. What do you think would happen to that corporation if it came out they were tracking everybody like this? They'd be run out of business quite fast. (mobile phones are a different story as people receive significant benefit from said 'tracking'; i.e. the mobile connectivity).
The 'government' can't be 'boycotted' in the manner of a corporation so yes they aren't supposed to be allowed to do such things. Corporations also don't enforce the laws (theoretically anyway) so they don't have the leverage the government does over your freedoms either.
You mean like AT&T and Verizon have been run out of business for turning call records over to the government without a warrant? You mean the way Facebook has been run out of business for tracking every damn thing its users do on the web?
Methinks you need to change the tinting on your glasses to something a little less rosy.
We may have to take this as a trade-off for being able to film cops on public streets. They're not placing a tracking device on individual vehicles, they're filming a (presumably) public location and interpreting the data. Personally, I think the right of anyone (including the cops) to film a public view is important. The storage of the data "indefinitely" is my biggest concern about this.
But in that case, someone should start a similar archive tracking all police vehicles and store that data indefinitely. There's probably just as much "interesting" information in that data set as there is in the Massachusetts official data, and if they have the right, so do we.
Boy are you in the wrong place...Instead of asking a group of internet junkies like Slashdot, try asking people who actually live without internet, say at the library or in your community. You know, the people you'll be associating with once you unplug.
As a practical suggestion, in addition to trying to create your own personal intranet with a clone of Wikipedia, go back to print technology. Help keep your local newspaper in business for an extra 3 months by subscribing. Learn to appreciate and leverage your public library.
As it stands now, your plans don't actually disconnect you from the internet, they are just making your internet access more public and less frequent. If the influence of the net is really that negative for you, you'll have to be very careful not to fall into your habitual internet behavior in the public WiFi and other sites.
So couple the "rolling release" cycle with releases that have a long term support commitment. This is something like what Ubuntu does. The slow-moving, check everything twice, cover-your-ass enterprise customers use the LTS releases and the developers and hackers use the latest bleeding edge stuff.
Corporate processes can't be run on a 6 week software lifecycle where the product needs to be replaced every 6 weeks to comply with internal and governmental regulations. The cost/benefit just doesn't work. Give corporate a release that will be supported for a year or two and they'll be happy, regardless of what version number you call it.
Slashdot Mirror
It'll continue, too. In 2 weeks 11-11-11 falls on Friday. And the week after that is the full Minecraft release at Minecon. Buncha loonies (or is that blockheads?) there, too.
Well, the first part of your prediction came true. They are claiming it generated 473 kW for 5.5 hours in self-looping mode. Not near 1 MW, as you predicted.
http://pesn.com/2011/10/28/9501940_1_MW_E-Cat_Test_Successful/
I'll believe this one when Al-Jazeera starts picking it up...
And the 4th amendment comes into play for unreasonable search and seizure. I can see the seizure up to a point, but a lot of times the assets are disposed of at auction before there is a trial, which is just plain conversion.
they've finally found an accurate name for big media copyright holders. e-Parasites indeed.
I see a great future for this technology in the porn industry and in strip clubs.
Nothing there says he's a denier. Most /. threads are wankfests, and copyright and global warming threads are wankier than most.
...they just cozy up to different industries. Republicans favor raw materials and insurers,Democrats favor the entertainment and tech industries. They both suck up to big pharma.
It used to be that when a new party came into power, they'd spend a couple of years investigating the corruption in the previous administration before getting deep into the trough themselves. Nowadays the waiting period is over. Corruption is the one thing they DON'T attack each other over, except on the campaign trail.
If you are doing windows boxes and you are already paying for new Windows OEM / System Builder licenses, I'm pretty sure it's legal for you to use WinPE or a similar tool to install a recovery partition. If you're using pre-existing Windows licenses on the boxes, it might still be legal.
But the easiest option may be to ship the clonezilla image you are already using with a bootable clonezilla partition. Basically instead of installing clonezilla to a flash drive or a DVD, put it on the recovery partition. Put some scripting in the clonezilla partition to configure the clonezilla settings so that it is setup to restore the image to the main OS partition as the default action. This would work for Windows or Linux.
Good stuff. Too bad you got buried as "Anonymous Coward".
The big problem with dLink is their abysmal tech support. If you know what you're doing as far as setting up the router and the wireless they're fine. I've had 2 dLinks (but not Wireless-N) and the first one had wireless drop issues that were resolved by a firmware flash update, and the other has never given me any trouble at all.
One requirement that you don't mention is IPV6 support. Don't just assume that any home router sold nowadays supports it. Many still don't, or are you planning on getting that support from DDWRT or openWRT? Supposedly dLink is one of the better brands for IPV6 support, although that is just from random news articles (regurgitated press releases?) I've seen around the net.
If they were concerned about cracking and virus creation, they would have proposed this legislation a couple of years ago. The only thing that is different this year has been the summer of networked civil disobedience: it's about Egypt, Tunisia, Anonymous and LulzSec, and keeping the public from realizing how ill-clothed the emperor really is. Sure the public will benefit if the ID theft rings are shut down, but that's not the whole agenda.
Not only do I think they will use this in cases like Anon, I think the law is being pushed BECAUSE of cases like Anon and LulzSec. Not to mention the identity theft rings and the botnet masters. But the botnets and ID theft have been around for years, and it's only after the Anon attacks came in that this law gets proposed. Maybe this was in the pipeline already, but it certainly has more support now than it would without Anon, etc.
There's a core of Anon that is politically driven, but there are enough people in it for the lulz that there might be some effect of this legislation. Anon wouldn't be killed off, but their DDoS attacks wouldn't be so effective without the non-political hangers-on/trolls. And those are the ones likely to drop off if the risk gets too high for the joke to be funny anymore.
As you say, we will watch and see.
The RICO act shouldn't apply unless there is an actual conspiracy. For a certain class of hacker, the RICO act would definitely be relevant, there's no doubt in my mind that the ID theft rings and the botnet rings fall into this category. But if he starts going after the script kiddies who joined Anonymous because they thought it was cool, or even more legitimately because it resonated with their sense of social justice, life will get interesting for both the administration and the parents of said script kiddies. If this law follows the path blazed by the drug seizure laws, folks will have their entire home stripped of computers and smart phones because they were vaguely linked with some kind of hacking crime.
I'll second the recommendation to start small with a library or utility. Preferably a utility so it's easier to see how the pieces are supposed to fit together. With a library you frequently just get a group of classes without a good way to understand the underlying design.
I have to say that I think this is probably one of the best "Ask Slashdot" questions I've ever seen in my years here. It's directed to the right audience (the answers will actually be useful, as opposed to say, answers to a question about copyright law), it will have interest for a lot of of others who also want to learn and contribute, and it isn't a simple question that has only one good answer, so it will generate some useful discussion in addition to the usual /, noise.
I was going to mention that Consumerist has had stories like this for years. Then I noticed that the link in the story is to a Consumerist story...from 2009. Slashdot -- always up on the latest trends in commerce and the internet.
This isn't just a marketing thing, it's an upsale. BB charges you for this system prep "service" and frequently tries to make it look like it's a required bundle with any laptop purchase, which it isn't.
...maybe they can acquire it by eminent domain.
Apart from various technical issues, I'll be interested to see if this ever gains any political traction in the US. This will probably require government investment, so it'll be interesting to see if Alaska Republicans decide the jobs gravy train is more important than their devotion to small government.
Well, I was serious -- but more in the sense that Minecraft is emblematic of the overall Indie gaming movement grabbing mindshare among gamers over the big commercial productions like WoW. Interesting that it was Minecraft in particular that pulled you off of WoW. I agree that I like the community experience on Minecraft servers over MMOs. Just the fact that anybody with a paid license to MC can set up their own server makes a big difference in the type of community you get.
..and Indie gaming in general.
Actually, the "Great Recession" probably has even more to do with the decline -- when people do have money to spend on games, they won't be spending it on a monthly subscription. They'll buy a cheap pickup game like Terraria and get a couple months worth of entertainment out of it for the price of a single month on WoW. Or they'll play a "free-to-play" MMO that is more geared toward their style of play.
Actually, there is a whole class of patents for biological inventions. In the good old days, these were derived by breeding and hybridization, and Luther Burbank and George Washington Carver got their fame by inventing new plants and animals. So patenting a gene that occurs naturally is related to this type of patent. The thing is, the law doesn't say you can patent isolated genes, it says you can patent new plants and animals. i.e., all of the DNA and genes that distinguish the new breed from others and allow it to breed true.
On the other hand, the fact that this ruling narrows the patent to a patent on the gene itself should mean that these guys can't try to collect royalties from anyone or anything for which the gene appears as part of their DNA sequence. In that case the gene is NOT isolated and does not exist "separately". So what we have here is a ruling designed to allow the patent(s) on genetic tests while not allowing patents of (human) genes in sequence. Why these clowns couldn't just patent their test and not the gene is beyond me. Maybe it's too similar to an existing test and is considered "obvious".
If Google had come clean about gathering device information other than for access points back when the story originally broke, I'd buy their story. But even when presented with the opportunity to come clean about the scope of their data gathering they elected to hide that information until they were outed.
If it's an accident, you don't try to hide it under the rug, you clean it up properly.
So, if a corporation would do that, it's OK, but if a govt. does it, it's not?
Actually yes that's correct. What do you think would happen to that corporation if it came out they were tracking everybody like this? They'd be run out of business quite fast. (mobile phones are a different story as people receive significant benefit from said 'tracking'; i.e. the mobile connectivity).
The 'government' can't be 'boycotted' in the manner of a corporation so yes they aren't supposed to be allowed to do such things. Corporations also don't enforce the laws (theoretically anyway) so they don't have the leverage the government does over your freedoms either.
You mean like AT&T and Verizon have been run out of business for turning call records over to the government without a warrant? You mean the way Facebook has been run out of business for tracking every damn thing its users do on the web?
Methinks you need to change the tinting on your glasses to something a little less rosy.
We may have to take this as a trade-off for being able to film cops on public streets. They're not placing a tracking device on individual vehicles, they're filming a (presumably) public location and interpreting the data. Personally, I think the right of anyone (including the cops) to film a public view is important. The storage of the data "indefinitely" is my biggest concern about this.
But in that case, someone should start a similar archive tracking all police vehicles and store that data indefinitely. There's probably just as much "interesting" information in that data set as there is in the Massachusetts official data, and if they have the right, so do we.
Boy are you in the wrong place...Instead of asking a group of internet junkies like Slashdot, try asking people who actually live without internet, say at the library or in your community. You know, the people you'll be associating with once you unplug.
As a practical suggestion, in addition to trying to create your own personal intranet with a clone of Wikipedia, go back to print technology. Help keep your local newspaper in business for an extra 3 months by subscribing. Learn to appreciate and leverage your public library.
As it stands now, your plans don't actually disconnect you from the internet, they are just making your internet access more public and less frequent. If the influence of the net is really that negative for you, you'll have to be very careful not to fall into your habitual internet behavior in the public WiFi and other sites.
So couple the "rolling release" cycle with releases that have a long term support commitment. This is something like what Ubuntu does. The slow-moving, check everything twice, cover-your-ass enterprise customers use the LTS releases and the developers and hackers use the latest bleeding edge stuff.
Corporate processes can't be run on a 6 week software lifecycle where the product needs to be replaced every 6 weeks to comply with internal and governmental regulations. The cost/benefit just doesn't work. Give corporate a release that will be supported for a year or two and they'll be happy, regardless of what version number you call it.
If the version number were 4.0.2, Mozilla wouldn't be putting 4.0 at end of life.