I dislike pirates too... but it's unlikely any of the people downloading from that site were pirates. Pirates don't bother downloading media from some Web site somewhere. They just go buy a legitimate copy and make more, because true piracy generally involves illegal mass-duplication of copyrighted materials which are then sold for money. It's a not-so-subtle distinction that's completely lost on most people, but it's an important one under U.S. copyright law. It's also the reason the people the RIAA has been suing haven't been charged in criminal court.
That's one of my favorite beers (I have a dozen in the fridge right now) and after we get back from the movies I plan to reduce that number substantially.
The real question here is: how corrupt does an Administration have to be before we're allowed to simply shoot them, for the good of the country?
So true. Especially not the top executives, who in many cases have nothing but their own interests at heart. Employees who see the people at the top living large, thoroughly insulated from the consequences of their actions, and see themselves working harder and harder for less and less... well. It's not hard to see why people have little loyalty to their employers anymore.
Now, having said that I have to say that corporate IT departments either impress me with their efficiency or just torque me into a pretzel with their powergrubbing ways. I rarely see a middle ground there.
Um, as far as I'm concerned, trash collectors deserve their money. My point with the teachers was the opposite, they are well educated and yet make fairly crappy pay.
So, teachers who are highly educated and underpaid deserve more money, and trash collectors who are uneducated and overpaid also deserve more money.
Most of the fluid-filled bags at Sony work in their upper management, and frankly I'd like to shock-test more than a few of them. See if they burst when you drop them from the roof. I also don't really care if they leak when I poke some wires into them.
Besides, using a gel or fluid to spread the force of an impact is an ancient idea. Come on, the stench of obviousness can be detected a mile away. Might as well patent using a pointing device for online shopping. There could certainly be some patentable aspects to such an "innovation", but in and of itself it's pretty ridiculous.
Of course, I didn't read the FA... we're heading out to see Silver Surfer in a couple minutes, and I'd rather see a lame sequel than read much of anything about Sony.
Or trash collectors. Where I used to live, it came out a few years ago during a union dispute that our garbagemen make about $75,000 a year. There was quite a ruckus over that, not only because the salaries were so high, but because the union was unbelievably holding out for even more money. They also had some pretty plush bennies, which topped them out over a hundred grand. And then, to add insult to injury, a good portion of those workers were illegals: what is the point of hiring an illegal alien to pick up your trash if you're going to give him more than a senior engineer's pay? Might as well hire an actual citizen, for that kind of money. Hell, for a hundred thousand dollars a year plus benefits, I might consider switching careers.
I don't know what became of it, though. Probably nothing, and I bet they got their money.
In this case since the signal sent is different for every transaction, it is impossible for someone to read the present value of your card and re-use said value later on a copied card.
That's only true so long as details of the algorithm used to generate the codes stay secret. They won't forever, and eventually the bad guys will be able to duplicate the functionality of a legitimate reader. There's a lot of money in credit card fraud, and a lot of very bright people (at least as smart as the folks developing the technology itself) willing and able to crack any scheme. Honestly though, that really won't matter.
This is like any security system: can it be broken? Sure. Will raising the bar keep a lot of lower-level thieves from coming to the party? Absolutely. Take CSS... there are tools out there to crack a commercial DVD in minutes, but CSS is still a perfectly good content protection system because only a small fraction of viewers have any idea how to find or use such programs. If you can make your system good enough that only the really smart ones can get around it, you've won the battle.
Scotty predated Wesley by a couple of hundred years. In the episode "That Which Survives", the Enterprise was beamed a thousand light years away by the ancient Kalandan computer. The ship is about to blow up when Spock instructs Scotty to reverse the polarity of his magnetic probe. Of course, that fixed the problem. I have the feeling that all problems in the Star Trek universe can be fixed by the proper application of reverse polarity.
It's "fox guarding the henhouse" but I take your point.
The primary problem with any indirect services setup (indeed, any system where people make regular payments into the kitty and expect a payout in time of need) is that you've divorced the cost of said services from the ability of people to pay for them. Like any socialist state, that can work, as long as you can trust your foxes.
Whenever people pay for goods or services directly, out of their own pockets, there's a limit on how much can be charged. At a certain point, either people stop buying from you (if what you're selling isn't a necessity) or someone else comes in, undercuts you, and takes your business: in other words, there's a negative feedback loop established between consumers and providers. Much of modern business practice revolves around finding the sweet spot, the price point where you've balanced off the sales price and the number of customers willing to pay that price to maximize profit. It's a tricky proposition.
WIth the health insurance system, there is no direct connection between what the consumer pays for health care, and what the health care providers charge the insurance company. The feedback loop is open, which is great because it means that you get to set your own sweet spot and who cares what the patient can pay! What's even worse, though, is that the same people that sit on the boards of hospitals also sit on the boards of insurance companies and pharmaceutical outfits, so we don't even benefit from an adversarial relationship between those three. How much people can pay (and how much suppliers can charge) have no intrinsic relationship to each other anymore. Whether or not the insurance company even bothers to pay for a given individual's needs has no relationship to how much that person paid into that company. "I've been paying you guys for thirty years! Can't you help me?" "We don't cover that." Tough.
Normal economic incentives and controls simply don't apply in the insurance business, the people running the show don't really care if you live or die, and providing health care is, at best, a secondary objective.
They probably did, but their lawyer may not have understood the ramifications of GPL'ed or LGPL'ed software. Software/IP law is pretty specialized, and your average business attorney might not be aware of the consequences of using such software.
Yeah, no kidding. Although, when you get right down to it, the media people aren't necessarily stupid or ignorant... what they are is self-serving. They have numerous sources they could use to check their content, and I'm sure they do. But they go ahead and publish that unfounded nonsense anyway because it makes money, and it makes money because We, The People, would rather be entertained than informed. That's going to cost us.
They say we get the government we deserve: I guess that also applies to our news organizations. Not that I perceive much difference between the two any longer, given the number of serious domestic issues we're facing right now that get little or no coverage in mainstream media. Or if they do get covered, they get it exactly wrong.
Back on topic, ScienceHack is an interesting idea, with some promise. I mean, wow, a site with science videos reviewed by actual scientists? Well, maybe almost scientists (grad students and so forth), but still, that's pretty cool. Granted, all scientists are not of equal caliber, but nevertheless having at least the obvious crap weeded out is a good thing for anyone interested in the subject. Certainly YouTube isn't going to bother filtering out the baloney.
I hope Professor Miller has exceptional server capacity. Thanks to your posting that link he's probably over his bandwidth allotment for the month. I got one video out of ScienceHack just now, and that was that.
Digital Rights Management does not intrinsically require remote authentication: DRM is simply a technological measure intended to limit the customer's use of a product. Copy protection is just one form of DRM, and it's been around for a long time. Interestingly, HP printer drivers have already been caught phoning home (for what purpose I don't know) so it's not hard to imagine printer vendors eventually requiring remote "activation" of cartridges. Maybe they already do, for all I know. My own printer predates all this crap, which is why I'm not inclined to replace it just yet.
Personally, I dislike software which does not require Internet access to perform its function (such as a printer driver) automatically assuming that it's ok to connect to a remote server for undisclosed activity. If I catch a program doing that, odds are it gets uninstalled and something else takes its place.
I look at petroleum this way: it is civilization's flying start. If we're smart, we'll look at black gold for what it is, a highly useful but problematic natural resource that is strictly limited. Before it runs out for good, we need to find something better or civilization will collapse.
Petroleum has a myriad of important applications: power is only one of them. In the long run, not even the most important one, because we will find other power sources, but it'll be tough to replace everything else Texas tea does for us. Plastics, medicines, cosmetics, a bewildering array of industrial compounds and processes are based upon the stuff. Until we do find a way to replace that utility, raw crude is far and away too valuable a resource to be merely burned as an energy source. The fact that we do so is criminal, and future generations will curse us for it.
Slashdot Mirror
I dislike pirates too ... but it's unlikely any of the people downloading from that site were pirates. Pirates don't bother downloading media from some Web site somewhere. They just go buy a legitimate copy and make more, because true piracy generally involves illegal mass-duplication of copyrighted materials which are then sold for money. It's a not-so-subtle distinction that's completely lost on most people, but it's an important one under U.S. copyright law. It's also the reason the people the RIAA has been suing haven't been charged in criminal court.
That's one of my favorite beers (I have a dozen in the fridge right now) and after we get back from the movies I plan to reduce that number substantially.
The real question here is: how corrupt does an Administration have to be before we're allowed to simply shoot them, for the good of the country?
So true. Especially not the top executives, who in many cases have nothing but their own interests at heart. Employees who see the people at the top living large, thoroughly insulated from the consequences of their actions, and see themselves working harder and harder for less and less ... well. It's not hard to see why people have little loyalty to their employers anymore.
Now, having said that I have to say that corporate IT departments either impress me with their efficiency or just torque me into a pretzel with their powergrubbing ways. I rarely see a middle ground there.
Um, as far as I'm concerned, trash collectors deserve their money. My point with the teachers was the opposite, they are well educated and yet make fairly crappy pay.
So, teachers who are highly educated and underpaid deserve more money, and trash collectors who are uneducated and overpaid also deserve more money.
Okay, sure.
Most of the fluid-filled bags at Sony work in their upper management, and frankly I'd like to shock-test more than a few of them. See if they burst when you drop them from the roof. I also don't really care if they leak when I poke some wires into them.
... we're heading out to see Silver Surfer in a couple minutes, and I'd rather see a lame sequel than read much of anything about Sony.
Besides, using a gel or fluid to spread the force of an impact is an ancient idea. Come on, the stench of obviousness can be detected a mile away. Might as well patent using a pointing device for online shopping. There could certainly be some patentable aspects to such an "innovation", but in and of itself it's pretty ridiculous.
Of course, I didn't read the FA
Or trash collectors. Where I used to live, it came out a few years ago during a union dispute that our garbagemen make about $75,000 a year. There was quite a ruckus over that, not only because the salaries were so high, but because the union was unbelievably holding out for even more money. They also had some pretty plush bennies, which topped them out over a hundred grand. And then, to add insult to injury, a good portion of those workers were illegals: what is the point of hiring an illegal alien to pick up your trash if you're going to give him more than a senior engineer's pay? Might as well hire an actual citizen, for that kind of money. Hell, for a hundred thousand dollars a year plus benefits, I might consider switching careers.
I don't know what became of it, though. Probably nothing, and I bet they got their money.
I'd be more interested in a look inside the NSA ... of course, the lights might not be on.
In this case since the signal sent is different for every transaction, it is impossible for someone to read the present value of your card and re-use said value later on a copied card.
... there are tools out there to crack a commercial DVD in minutes, but CSS is still a perfectly good content protection system because only a small fraction of viewers have any idea how to find or use such programs. If you can make your system good enough that only the really smart ones can get around it, you've won the battle.
That's only true so long as details of the algorithm used to generate the codes stay secret. They won't forever, and eventually the bad guys will be able to duplicate the functionality of a legitimate reader. There's a lot of money in credit card fraud, and a lot of very bright people (at least as smart as the folks developing the technology itself) willing and able to crack any scheme. Honestly though, that really won't matter.
This is like any security system: can it be broken? Sure. Will raising the bar keep a lot of lower-level thieves from coming to the party? Absolutely. Take CSS
Who is going to commute Bush's sentence?
The GP's point, I think, is that the IT department's goals are not necessarily aligned with those of the company as a whole.
Basically, the bad-guy in this story is SBC.
Has the Southern Bastards Club ever been the good guy in a story?
If only that were true. Well, the shutting down the **AA part, anyway.
Thanks. Who's the President of the U.S. again? Never can remember. And my girlfriend is having this problem with her ... uh, nevermind about that.
So, go ahead, mod me off-topic, but I am hoping to at least also get to be modded as interesting as well.
If I were you, I'd stop worrying about being modded. Just try to be relevant. And yes, I know I'm off-topic again.
Microsoft agreed to give then a cut of the Zune hardware sales.
... fifty bucks?
So that was, what
but what's the internal impedance of these things? What's the maximum charge/discharge rate? And no I didn't RTFA.
Scotty predated Wesley by a couple of hundred years. In the episode "That Which Survives", the Enterprise was beamed a thousand light years away by the ancient Kalandan computer. The ship is about to blow up when Spock instructs Scotty to reverse the polarity of his magnetic probe. Of course, that fixed the problem. I have the feeling that all problems in the Star Trek universe can be fixed by the proper application of reverse polarity.
It's "fox guarding the henhouse" but I take your point.
The primary problem with any indirect services setup (indeed, any system where people make regular payments into the kitty and expect a payout in time of need) is that you've divorced the cost of said services from the ability of people to pay for them. Like any socialist state, that can work, as long as you can trust your foxes.
Whenever people pay for goods or services directly, out of their own pockets, there's a limit on how much can be charged. At a certain point, either people stop buying from you (if what you're selling isn't a necessity) or someone else comes in, undercuts you, and takes your business: in other words, there's a negative feedback loop established between consumers and providers. Much of modern business practice revolves around finding the sweet spot, the price point where you've balanced off the sales price and the number of customers willing to pay that price to maximize profit. It's a tricky proposition.
WIth the health insurance system, there is no direct connection between what the consumer pays for health care, and what the health care providers charge the insurance company. The feedback loop is open, which is great because it means that you get to set your own sweet spot and who cares what the patient can pay! What's even worse, though, is that the same people that sit on the boards of hospitals also sit on the boards of insurance companies and pharmaceutical outfits, so we don't even benefit from an adversarial relationship between those three. How much people can pay (and how much suppliers can charge) have no intrinsic relationship to each other anymore. Whether or not the insurance company even bothers to pay for a given individual's needs has no relationship to how much that person paid into that company. "I've been paying you guys for thirty years! Can't you help me?" "We don't cover that." Tough.
Normal economic incentives and controls simply don't apply in the insurance business, the people running the show don't really care if you live or die, and providing health care is, at best, a secondary objective.
They probably did, but their lawyer may not have understood the ramifications of GPL'ed or LGPL'ed software. Software/IP law is pretty specialized, and your average business attorney might not be aware of the consequences of using such software.
... I'll bet he does now.
But
Then Joe Average is an idiot. But ... we already knew that.
No offense, Joe, but you've made a lot of boneheaded maneuvers lately. I just call 'em as I see 'em.
Yeah, no kidding. Although, when you get right down to it, the media people aren't necessarily stupid or ignorant ... what they are is self-serving. They have numerous sources they could use to check their content, and I'm sure they do. But they go ahead and publish that unfounded nonsense anyway because it makes money, and it makes money because We, The People, would rather be entertained than informed. That's going to cost us.
They say we get the government we deserve: I guess that also applies to our news organizations. Not that I perceive much difference between the two any longer, given the number of serious domestic issues we're facing right now that get little or no coverage in mainstream media. Or if they do get covered, they get it exactly wrong.
Back on topic, ScienceHack is an interesting idea, with some promise. I mean, wow, a site with science videos reviewed by actual scientists? Well, maybe almost scientists (grad students and so forth), but still, that's pretty cool. Granted, all scientists are not of equal caliber, but nevertheless having at least the obvious crap weeded out is a good thing for anyone interested in the subject. Certainly YouTube isn't going to bother filtering out the baloney.
I hope Professor Miller has exceptional server capacity. Thanks to your posting that link he's probably over his bandwidth allotment for the month. I got one video out of ScienceHack just now, and that was that.
DDOS at it's finest.
Digital Rights Management does not intrinsically require remote authentication: DRM is simply a technological measure intended to limit the customer's use of a product. Copy protection is just one form of DRM, and it's been around for a long time. Interestingly, HP printer drivers have already been caught phoning home (for what purpose I don't know) so it's not hard to imagine printer vendors eventually requiring remote "activation" of cartridges. Maybe they already do, for all I know. My own printer predates all this crap, which is why I'm not inclined to replace it just yet.
Personally, I dislike software which does not require Internet access to perform its function (such as a printer driver) automatically assuming that it's ok to connect to a remote server for undisclosed activity. If I catch a program doing that, odds are it gets uninstalled and something else takes its place.
True, or which three-letter agency is going to trawl Slashdot looking for targets.
I look at petroleum this way: it is civilization's flying start. If we're smart, we'll look at black gold for what it is, a highly useful but problematic natural resource that is strictly limited. Before it runs out for good, we need to find something better or civilization will collapse.
Petroleum has a myriad of important applications: power is only one of them. In the long run, not even the most important one, because we will find other power sources, but it'll be tough to replace everything else Texas tea does for us. Plastics, medicines, cosmetics, a bewildering array of industrial compounds and processes are based upon the stuff. Until we do find a way to replace that utility, raw crude is far and away too valuable a resource to be merely burned as an energy source. The fact that we do so is criminal, and future generations will curse us for it.