I wouldn't mind some organically-grown beer, personally.
But I agree: the caveman diet is a good one, if that means lots of fruits, nuts and vegetables. I think our mistake is in assuming that, because we're omnivores, we are therefore equally as well adapted to eating animal products as we are to eating plants. We're not, really. I look at our ability to digest either as an effective survival trait (we can eat anything, if we have to) but when you get right down to it... we're still herbivores at heart. I don't know if I'll ever be able to manage a completely vegetarian diet, frankly, but I'm going to get as close as I can. As I mentioned in my previous post, my fiancee is from Africa and eats very little meat and as little American food as possible, so hopefully I can pull it off. My last girlfriend loved fried foods and steak: not much chance for improving my diet there, but I will say she was a damn good cook and I have the extra body mass to prove it!
So. The evidence is there, has been for a long time, and I don't want to wait until I have my first bypass operation to accept a few facts. Interestingly, there's an international grocery store just down the street from me. I shop there a lot (they have great produce.) Lots of Europeans, Indians and other folks that are looking to get as close to their traditional foods as they can, and I might add that you don't hardly see an obese individual among them.
Note to all the foreign visitors to Slashdot: if you see an American fast-food joint coming near you, be afraid. Be very afraid. And... don't eat there.
As an American I can only say this: focusing on Vitamin D (or any other single nutrient) as a factor in causing disease X or condition Y simply shifts our attention from the real problem. And that is the simple, undeniable, thoroughly-established fact that our diet sucks. Sucks on a Biblical scale. If more of us accepted that and made some (admittedly significant) changes to that dietary intake, there'd be one hell of a lot fewer people with cancers of any kind. Not to mention strokes, and heart attacks, and diabetes, and all of the other diet and obesity-related conditions from which we suffer. My mind is absolutely boggled by the sheer scale of health problems resulting from typical American fare, and I feel sorry for people in other countries that are adopting American food because they think it's better for them. Chances are, compared to their traditional diet... it isn't.
For example, my fiancee is North African, and her traditional meals are largely vegetarian with relatively few percent of calories from animal-derived foods. She's never had a health problem. Her grandmother is 103. Granted, the reason the average person from her country doesn't eat more meat is because they can't afford it, not because they have some inhibition about eating meat. Yet, the wealthier members of the population there are eating more and more American-style foods and guess what... they're already seeing an increase in cancers, strokes, heart attacks and diabetes, but without the drugs and surgical techniques we use to try and compensate for the lifetime abuse of our bodies.
Don't get me wrong: I'm glad they're researching the effects of insufficient Vitamin D reserves on cancer. We can just add that into our total body of knowledge about diet and health. But we really need to keep our minds on the big picture, which clearly says that we don't eat right. Too many people I know have suffered or died from what they ate over their shortened lifetimes. So here I am, now at the age where I have to take a good, hard look at my family history, and take stock of my future health. The conclusion I've reached is this: either I make some serious changes to what I eat, and the way I live... or the outlook will not be good. So, I'm making those changes.
My father died of diabetic complications at the age of 62, and his doctor said to me "that's one possible future for you." It was an awful, painful, degenerative death that lasted several years. I don't want to go that way, and sometimes we have to accept that changing a few little things here and there aren't going to cut it. Taking some Vitamin D supplements, or getting some more Sun, or eating some more broccoli... that's fine so far as it goes. It doesn't go far enough for most of us. Not nearly far enough.
What was once considered a pipe-dream to have a complete home entertainment and communications centre is rapidly appearing over the horizon.
True, but the only thing standing in the way of that Utopian vision is the typical massively under-provisioned ISP who couldn't even begin to handle that level of data transfer. The only thing that could make such a thing possible would be the big boys (Baby Bells, Comcast, Verizon, etc.) setting up edge caching of some kind to keep popular downloads within their respective backbones. Of course, if they do that, believe me they'll want a piece of the action. In fact, they'll probably want to own content distribution on their own networks, with all the limits that will place on the end-user experience.
Personally, I don't see how any commercial service is going to be able to give users the depth and breadth of content available via peer-to-peer, illegal or otherwise. It's the same problem the music industry has: it's not that we aren't willing to pay for what we want (iTunes pretty well put paid to that particular smudge of RIAA FUD) it's that they are only willing to cater to mainstream tastes and there are millions of us that want the kind of things that aren't on the shelves at the local video store or Wal-Mart. P2P gives us that, and better yet, in forms that are versatile enough to be actually useful. I, for one, do not welcome our new DRM-laden overlords.
I'm fortunate enough to live in a broadband-competitive area (I can get various DSL providers plus Comcastoff, and there are other options as well) so none of them risk complaining too much about so-called bandwidth-hogs. Isn't competition wonderful? But I know people that live in places around here serviced only by a single provider, and the outlook for video streaming/downloading is much grimmer. Stick to your Web browsing, email, and Windows Update and they'll leave you alone, but just try anything bandwidth-intensive and you'll start getting letters.
Blockbuster is crumbling, I suppose, but I think that's more due to their management than anything else. Blockbuster has... well, it has problems at the top. The rental business itself doesn't seem to be hurting, I mean, Netflix is still doing gangbusters, I understand. It may just be that there's only room for one or two big boys in that business, I don't know. It does seem like Netflix has sewn it up pretty tight for the moment, but that could change.
Wouldn't they attract more people and thus make more money if they completely gave up on the ads?
You'd think so, wouldn't you? I dunno... but what they're doing now is definitely causing me to lose interest. And that's too bad, because there are few things I like better than to watch a good film on the big screen.
I think the point is this: the initial cash outlay for a solar system is substantial and most people aren't going to want to shell out that kind of money. For existing homes, it would be completely unreasonable to force people to spend tens of thousands of dollars on such a system, unless the government somehow subsidized it. Now, if you were talking about new construction, where you could amortize the cost of the system (including maintenance) over a typical 30-year fixed APR mortgage, that might be different. It would, however, force many people to accept a smaller home than they could otherwise afford which would not be popular.
And sure, from society's perspective the home-sized solar power system might make sense, but for the individual forced to own one... the answer isn't so clear. It's just like alternative fuels for cars: none of them will ever see widespread application until they are much cheaper than conventional fuels or when those existing fuels become considerably more expensive. So yes, if power from the grid becomes prohibitively expensive (or becomes unreliable because of insufficient capacity) alternative setups will naturally start to proliferate. Hopefully, by the time that happens, photovoltaic and storage battery technology will have dropped in price enough to be truly competitive.
For me, the theater experience has been deteriorating because they insist on making me watch, on average, about thirty to fifty minutes of advertising before the movie starts. That often includes a slide show of one-page ads from local used car dealers and so forth. If I want that crap I can get it at home on any of the regular broadcast channels.
Some DVDs are starting to do the same thing (unskippable adverts) and that "deteriorates" the experience for me there as well.
I contrast that to the experience I got growing up in the sixties. Sound systems were nothing like what we have today, and the iMax wasn't even a gleam in some engineer's eye. However, there were no advertisements, and you got to watch a few well-produced theater -quality cartoons. Those served to get you in the right mood before the main feature even started... it worked, too. Hell, I wouldn't mind if they just brought back some good old Tom & Jerry cartoons as a lead-in. Better than what they're doing now.
Contrast that having to watch commercials. I've walked out a couple of times and got my money back after almost an hour of previews and ads. I told them why, too, and even when I stick around to watch the movie, at that point I'm so irritated that it's hard to really get into the film.
So yeah, it's deteriorated. I'm putting together a projection system for my living room, and odds are that once I have that available to me I'll be going to the theater less often. I wouldn't have bothered if I weren't so annoyed at the way my local theaters have been operated lately.
I know that the theater owner associations have complained that the studios don't leave them enough money to operate without those ad placements. Now, maybe that's true, I don't know, and frankly I don't care. I just want to leave the show not feeling like I just pissed away nine bucks.
And outlaw services like the pirate Web sites that use BitTorrent technology demonstrated that digital piracy, which had consumed the music business first, now posed a real problem for Hollywood.
Which is crap on both fronts. Peer-to-peer has hardly "consumed" the music business, last I heard they were still in business and making money. Unless he means that P2P has consumed an unreasonable amount of attorney's fees lately. I'd agree with that.
This guy is just trying to make this appear to be a proactive solution to a problem the movie houses really aren't experiencing yet, hoping that one or more of them will jump on the bandwagon.
The success of iTunes was also proving that the digital transition was inevitable and that one powerful player, Apple, could control the market if Hollywood did not find other viable partners.
No, the success of iTunes has, if anything, taught the movie industry that the very last thing it wants is content distribution run by a high-powered technology company with both the money and the balls to tell the studios "here's the deal - take it or leave it."
Both the music and the movie industries have long shown themselves to be anti-technology control freaks. Unless they can own this technology they'll never go for it, and if they did own it they'd lock it down so tightly that we would never go for it.
I can't argue that the DVD was a phenomenal success, but that was because the average user wasn't left feeling too restricted. The reason he felt that way was because he generally just played his movies on his living room TV, and never needed to rip his data to some other format. That's changing, not to the level that music reproduction has changed but it's happening, and when enough people can't legally or practically move their movies to other devices the same problems will arise.
It's interesting how secure IT departments try to make things - the harder they try to make it, the easier it actually becomes to bypass it.
Yes indeedy.
Again, way back in 1981 or thereabouts, I was contracted by a local hospital to write a terminal emulator for the Apple ][. This was to allow comparatively inexpensive Apple systems to replace the expensive Burroughs terminals that the hospital used with their Burroughs mainframe.
Anyway, as part of that project I had to work with one of their in-house programmers. They had just finished a comprehensive "security audit" from Arthur-Andersen, and were (of course) found to be woefully inadequate in that area. So they followed AA's recommendations, and he showed me how they were now required to type in three separate passwords on three separate screens. Secure as it might be it was really annoying.
What the Arthur-Andersen folks had failed to realize was that these were smart terminals, with little things called "macro keys". So everyone in the department agreed to use one particular key as the universal login key, and programmed this key to spit out the user name and three passwords in rapid succession on every terminal. So all you had to do to log in anywhere in the department was press one key.
Sure, from a security perspective that was foolish: but then again, no system can be made foolproof because fools are so damned ingenious.
I find it pretty sad that they backed off actually, because being among the 'best and brightest' shouldn't be a 'get out of jail free' card.
The law in question was directed at real white-collar criminals (the kind that crack bank computers and clean out accounts) and just incidentally, due to bad wording, would have ensnared a lot of other people who really weren't performing criminal activity. You can say, with apparent ease, that you're sad they backed off: but a felony conviction is a hell of a thing to lay on someone who was probably just showing off. That is why the lawmakers backed off: that wasn't what they were trying to do.
Furthermore, I'm dead set against this idea that we need to bitch-slap anyone that steps even a little off the beaten path. That's not right: people (even smart ones) make mistakes. Lives can be ruined when an errant legal system driven by irrational fears and political posturing goes overboard and crushes a young person like a bug.
Question for you: How do you spin this statement so it doesn't appear as if, using your special knowledge, you in turn shafted all the other users of the system?
You don't. We weren't trying to analyze the school's security, we weren't trying to be helpful and do their security people's job for them. We did it because wanted more time, and if anyone had asked us that's what we'd have told them because that's exactly what we were doing.
See, back then all students were granted 2,000 minutes each quarter whether they used it or not, and all were required to login once and change their default password. So, by the end of the first quarter anyone that still had, say, 1,997 minutes left was probably not a heavy user and we only only used those accounts. Admittedly, that was less because we weren't trying to screw over anyone as we figured those people would never notice. And they didn't.
And how exactly does this apply in this case? From your story, you did not go to the administration and point out the flaws--you exploited them for personal gain. In TFA the student did not attempt to improve the security of the system and is obviously lying about it. Not very trustworthy, either of you.
I'm just trying to elucidate the changes in the legal/educational climate in the past thirty years. When I was in college, even if I had been caught the most that would have happened would have been a wrist-slap. Now, that would have been more than enough because neither me or the other guy that was involved were exactly hardened criminals. That did happen to other students that did things with the mainframe they weren't supposed to and they, too, learned to behave. I suppose the guy that did the same thing on the administration system might have gotten in more trouble... but probably not. I don't know of any cases where a student was expelled or otherwise suffered serious academic harm. Like me, they went on to finish their studies and get real jobs and that is what school is all about. Severe punishment for minor transgressions (first offenses, at that) serves no purpose.
Things were, in many respects, a lot more relaxed in the seventies than they are now. A lot more. You could get pulled over and be a little drunk, or even a little high, and the cop would ask "how far do you have to go?" and you'd answer "just a couple of miles, officer." and they'd laugh and send you on your way. Try that now and you end up in the clink on a serious drug charge. Hell, in my State right now the cops are using high-gain microphones to listen in to conversations in passing cars: if they hear words like "pot" or "marijuana" or "joint" they pull you over and search your car.
Things are very different now, and if I were eighteen again, there's no way in hell I'd pull that stunt.
When I was in college thirty-odd years ago, my University only allocated 2,000 minutes per quarter per student of mainframe time. Not enough (obviously) and they refused to give me any more. So I wrote a simple fake-login program that would log the user's name and password, and cough up a realistic "system is down" message. Matter of fact, I exactly duplicated the normal logon procedure, including any nominal pauses and delays that occurred. Even fooled the system operators a couple of times. I ran the thing on forty or fifty terminals simultaneously, and I would watch in case someone called one of the admins over to ask why the system wasn't working. Whenever that happened, I'd hit a key on my terminal that would immediately log all the other systems off, so it would work normally at the next login attempt. It wasn't often: most people just shrugged, got up and left to go about their business. Occasionally some busybody would call an administrator over, so I had to keep an eye on things.
In under a week I had captured the accounts of every active student user on the system, plus all the supervisory accounts. It was pretty unbelievable (as in, "holy SHIT Jesus Mary mother of God" unbelievable) and I couldn't understand why there were no precautions taken against that sort of thing. Needless to say I had no problems with account time after that. That was on the one mainframe: there was another guy, pretty sharp coder, that figured out what I was doing. At first I thought I was screwed, but he was delighted by the idea and duplicated it on the bigger system (this was years before the word "pwned" came in to the popular lexicon but it's no less applicable.) No surprise, a few days later and he had the run of that machine. So far as I'm aware, nobody ever figured out what we'd done. The big system was the one that had everything administrative on it from student grades to paper clips and we could have wreaked havoc if we'd wanted to. As it was, though, we just wanted more computer time to do our homework.
A couple of years later my father testified in front of my State's legislature regarding a new "computer crime" bill they were shopping around. It was one of those ridiculous "zero tolerance" laws that make the lawmakers look "tough on crime" but end up shafting a lot of people that don't deserve it. Dad pointed out to these idiots that, if passed, their brain-child would immediately criminalize 90% of the best and brightest students in our engineering and computer science curricula. They backed off in a hurry and came back with a more reasonable bill, which never got passed anyway.
That was then. Nowadays, I don't think our lawmakers would bat an eye if they put half our smartest engineering students in jail. They're just engineers, after all, and... who the fuck needs those.
I made the decision never to buy an RIAA-backed production in 1981. Blood-sucking leeches. I've made only one exception since then, and that was for a gift. And that's too bad, because I used to buy a lot of albums and 45's in those days, but once I did a little research on how that particular business is run, I decided it wasn't worth it. Now, I've never had a problem buying used records, and in fact that's where I've acquired most of my music since then.
Frankly, if you buy CDs you're buying product from an organization that is not much better, in principle (or should I say, lack of principle), than the average drug cartel. I have better things to do with my money than support people that I already know are criminals.
No. He wasn't merely misguided... he was a never-to-be-sufficiently damned CROOK, a self-righteous, self-serving bloodsucker who deserves no respect whatsoever.
Personally, I think we should just capture atmospheric carbon, turn it back into coal, and bury it again. Then we can gainfully employ legions of coal miners to dig it up so we can burn it to make electricity again, thus completing the cycle.
Can't really disagree with you, but I wasn't slamming teachers... well, not all of them. The actual teachers are at the bottom rung of the administrative pyramid and have no effective control of the situation or how resources are spent.
I am, however, severely critical of the political system which has grown up around the process of education. It's defective, it's deficient, it doesn't work and it is hurting us badly. Matter of fact, if you want to run a high-tech industrial civilization you should not allow the proliferation of tiny minds to infiltrate your educational system. It's bad enough when those types run your government.
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I wouldn't mind some organically-grown beer, personally.
... we're still herbivores at heart. I don't know if I'll ever be able to manage a completely vegetarian diet, frankly, but I'm going to get as close as I can. As I mentioned in my previous post, my fiancee is from Africa and eats very little meat and as little American food as possible, so hopefully I can pull it off. My last girlfriend loved fried foods and steak: not much chance for improving my diet there, but I will say she was a damn good cook and I have the extra body mass to prove it!
... don't eat there.
But I agree: the caveman diet is a good one, if that means lots of fruits, nuts and vegetables. I think our mistake is in assuming that, because we're omnivores, we are therefore equally as well adapted to eating animal products as we are to eating plants. We're not, really. I look at our ability to digest either as an effective survival trait (we can eat anything, if we have to) but when you get right down to it
So. The evidence is there, has been for a long time, and I don't want to wait until I have my first bypass operation to accept a few facts. Interestingly, there's an international grocery store just down the street from me. I shop there a lot (they have great produce.) Lots of Europeans, Indians and other folks that are looking to get as close to their traditional foods as they can, and I might add that you don't hardly see an obese individual among them.
Note to all the foreign visitors to Slashdot: if you see an American fast-food joint coming near you, be afraid. Be very afraid. And
As an American I can only say this: focusing on Vitamin D (or any other single nutrient) as a factor in causing disease X or condition Y simply shifts our attention from the real problem. And that is the simple, undeniable, thoroughly-established fact that our diet sucks. Sucks on a Biblical scale. If more of us accepted that and made some (admittedly significant) changes to that dietary intake, there'd be one hell of a lot fewer people with cancers of any kind. Not to mention strokes, and heart attacks, and diabetes, and all of the other diet and obesity-related conditions from which we suffer. My mind is absolutely boggled by the sheer scale of health problems resulting from typical American fare, and I feel sorry for people in other countries that are adopting American food because they think it's better for them. Chances are, compared to their traditional diet ... it isn't.
... they're already seeing an increase in cancers, strokes, heart attacks and diabetes, but without the drugs and surgical techniques we use to try and compensate for the lifetime abuse of our bodies.
... or the outlook will not be good. So, I'm making those changes.
... that's fine so far as it goes. It doesn't go far enough for most of us. Not nearly far enough.
For example, my fiancee is North African, and her traditional meals are largely vegetarian with relatively few percent of calories from animal-derived foods. She's never had a health problem. Her grandmother is 103. Granted, the reason the average person from her country doesn't eat more meat is because they can't afford it, not because they have some inhibition about eating meat. Yet, the wealthier members of the population there are eating more and more American-style foods and guess what
Don't get me wrong: I'm glad they're researching the effects of insufficient Vitamin D reserves on cancer. We can just add that into our total body of knowledge about diet and health. But we really need to keep our minds on the big picture, which clearly says that we don't eat right. Too many people I know have suffered or died from what they ate over their shortened lifetimes. So here I am, now at the age where I have to take a good, hard look at my family history, and take stock of my future health. The conclusion I've reached is this: either I make some serious changes to what I eat, and the way I live
My father died of diabetic complications at the age of 62, and his doctor said to me "that's one possible future for you." It was an awful, painful, degenerative death that lasted several years. I don't want to go that way, and sometimes we have to accept that changing a few little things here and there aren't going to cut it. Taking some Vitamin D supplements, or getting some more Sun, or eating some more broccoli
What was once considered a pipe-dream to have a complete home entertainment and communications centre is rapidly appearing over the horizon.
... well, it has problems at the top. The rental business itself doesn't seem to be hurting, I mean, Netflix is still doing gangbusters, I understand. It may just be that there's only room for one or two big boys in that business, I don't know. It does seem like Netflix has sewn it up pretty tight for the moment, but that could change.
True, but the only thing standing in the way of that Utopian vision is the typical massively under-provisioned ISP who couldn't even begin to handle that level of data transfer. The only thing that could make such a thing possible would be the big boys (Baby Bells, Comcast, Verizon, etc.) setting up edge caching of some kind to keep popular downloads within their respective backbones. Of course, if they do that, believe me they'll want a piece of the action. In fact, they'll probably want to own content distribution on their own networks, with all the limits that will place on the end-user experience.
Personally, I don't see how any commercial service is going to be able to give users the depth and breadth of content available via peer-to-peer, illegal or otherwise. It's the same problem the music industry has: it's not that we aren't willing to pay for what we want (iTunes pretty well put paid to that particular smudge of RIAA FUD) it's that they are only willing to cater to mainstream tastes and there are millions of us that want the kind of things that aren't on the shelves at the local video store or Wal-Mart. P2P gives us that, and better yet, in forms that are versatile enough to be actually useful. I, for one, do not welcome our new DRM-laden overlords.
I'm fortunate enough to live in a broadband-competitive area (I can get various DSL providers plus Comcastoff, and there are other options as well) so none of them risk complaining too much about so-called bandwidth-hogs. Isn't competition wonderful? But I know people that live in places around here serviced only by a single provider, and the outlook for video streaming/downloading is much grimmer. Stick to your Web browsing, email, and Windows Update and they'll leave you alone, but just try anything bandwidth-intensive and you'll start getting letters.
Blockbuster is crumbling, I suppose, but I think that's more due to their management than anything else. Blockbuster has
Wouldn't they attract more people and thus make more money if they completely gave up on the ads?
... but what they're doing now is definitely causing me to lose interest. And that's too bad, because there are few things I like better than to watch a good film on the big screen.
You'd think so, wouldn't you? I dunno
I think the point is this: the initial cash outlay for a solar system is substantial and most people aren't going to want to shell out that kind of money. For existing homes, it would be completely unreasonable to force people to spend tens of thousands of dollars on such a system, unless the government somehow subsidized it. Now, if you were talking about new construction, where you could amortize the cost of the system (including maintenance) over a typical 30-year fixed APR mortgage, that might be different. It would, however, force many people to accept a smaller home than they could otherwise afford which would not be popular.
... the answer isn't so clear. It's just like alternative fuels for cars: none of them will ever see widespread application until they are much cheaper than conventional fuels or when those existing fuels become considerably more expensive. So yes, if power from the grid becomes prohibitively expensive (or becomes unreliable because of insufficient capacity) alternative setups will naturally start to proliferate. Hopefully, by the time that happens, photovoltaic and storage battery technology will have dropped in price enough to be truly competitive.
And sure, from society's perspective the home-sized solar power system might make sense, but for the individual forced to own one
For me, the theater experience has been deteriorating because they insist on making me watch, on average, about thirty to fifty minutes of advertising before the movie starts. That often includes a slide show of one-page ads from local used car dealers and so forth. If I want that crap I can get it at home on any of the regular broadcast channels.
... it worked, too. Hell, I wouldn't mind if they just brought back some good old Tom & Jerry cartoons as a lead-in. Better than what they're doing now.
Some DVDs are starting to do the same thing (unskippable adverts) and that "deteriorates" the experience for me there as well.
I contrast that to the experience I got growing up in the sixties. Sound systems were nothing like what we have today, and the iMax wasn't even a gleam in some engineer's eye. However, there were no advertisements, and you got to watch a few well-produced theater -quality cartoons. Those served to get you in the right mood before the main feature even started
Contrast that having to watch commercials. I've walked out a couple of times and got my money back after almost an hour of previews and ads. I told them why, too, and even when I stick around to watch the movie, at that point I'm so irritated that it's hard to really get into the film.
So yeah, it's deteriorated. I'm putting together a projection system for my living room, and odds are that once I have that available to me I'll be going to the theater less often. I wouldn't have bothered if I weren't so annoyed at the way my local theaters have been operated lately.
I know that the theater owner associations have complained that the studios don't leave them enough money to operate without those ad placements. Now, maybe that's true, I don't know, and frankly I don't care. I just want to leave the show not feeling like I just pissed away nine bucks.
And outlaw services like the pirate Web sites that use BitTorrent technology demonstrated that digital piracy, which had consumed the music business first, now posed a real problem for Hollywood.
Which is crap on both fronts. Peer-to-peer has hardly "consumed" the music business, last I heard they were still in business and making money. Unless he means that P2P has consumed an unreasonable amount of attorney's fees lately. I'd agree with that.
This guy is just trying to make this appear to be a proactive solution to a problem the movie houses really aren't experiencing yet, hoping that one or more of them will jump on the bandwagon.
The success of iTunes was also proving that the digital transition was inevitable and that one powerful player, Apple, could control the market if Hollywood did not find other viable partners.
No, the success of iTunes has, if anything, taught the movie industry that the very last thing it wants is content distribution run by a high-powered technology company with both the money and the balls to tell the studios "here's the deal - take it or leave it."
Both the music and the movie industries have long shown themselves to be anti-technology control freaks. Unless they can own this technology they'll never go for it, and if they did own it they'd lock it down so tightly that we would never go for it.
I can't argue that the DVD was a phenomenal success, but that was because the average user wasn't left feeling too restricted. The reason he felt that way was because he generally just played his movies on his living room TV, and never needed to rip his data to some other format. That's changing, not to the level that music reproduction has changed but it's happening, and when enough people can't legally or practically move their movies to other devices the same problems will arise.
But then anyone who would consider Vista equal to it probably spent more time dressing up and playing with swords than reviewing the products anyways.
... dressing up and playing with something, that's for sure.
Well
That's a scary thought ... Ted Stevens actually being prophetic, rather than just wrong.
Is this good, bad, or other?
Other. I'm the guy with the gun.
Well, it's the result of hydrogen fusion, anyway.
Good, bad, I dunno ... but her daughter is rather attractive.
Single-sourcing anything important is risky.
It's interesting how secure IT departments try to make things - the harder they try to make it, the easier it actually becomes to bypass it.
Yes indeedy.
Again, way back in 1981 or thereabouts, I was contracted by a local hospital to write a terminal emulator for the Apple ][. This was to allow comparatively inexpensive Apple systems to replace the expensive Burroughs terminals that the hospital used with their Burroughs mainframe.
Anyway, as part of that project I had to work with one of their in-house programmers. They had just finished a comprehensive "security audit" from Arthur-Andersen, and were (of course) found to be woefully inadequate in that area. So they followed AA's recommendations, and he showed me how they were now required to type in three separate passwords on three separate screens. Secure as it might be it was really annoying.
What the Arthur-Andersen folks had failed to realize was that these were smart terminals, with little things called "macro keys". So everyone in the department agreed to use one particular key as the universal login key, and programmed this key to spit out the user name and three passwords in rapid succession on every terminal. So all you had to do to log in anywhere in the department was press one key.
Sure, from a security perspective that was foolish: but then again, no system can be made foolproof because fools are so damned ingenious.
I find it pretty sad that they backed off actually, because being among the 'best and brightest' shouldn't be a 'get out of jail free' card.
The law in question was directed at real white-collar criminals (the kind that crack bank computers and clean out accounts) and just incidentally, due to bad wording, would have ensnared a lot of other people who really weren't performing criminal activity. You can say, with apparent ease, that you're sad they backed off: but a felony conviction is a hell of a thing to lay on someone who was probably just showing off. That is why the lawmakers backed off: that wasn't what they were trying to do.
Furthermore, I'm dead set against this idea that we need to bitch-slap anyone that steps even a little off the beaten path. That's not right: people (even smart ones) make mistakes. Lives can be ruined when an errant legal system driven by irrational fears and political posturing goes overboard and crushes a young person like a bug.
Question for you: How do you spin this statement so it doesn't appear as if, using your special knowledge, you in turn shafted all the other users of the system?
... but probably not. I don't know of any cases where a student was expelled or otherwise suffered serious academic harm. Like me, they went on to finish their studies and get real jobs and that is what school is all about. Severe punishment for minor transgressions (first offenses, at that) serves no purpose.
You don't. We weren't trying to analyze the school's security, we weren't trying to be helpful and do their security people's job for them. We did it because wanted more time, and if anyone had asked us that's what we'd have told them because that's exactly what we were doing. See, back then all students were granted 2,000 minutes each quarter whether they used it or not, and all were required to login once and change their default password. So, by the end of the first quarter anyone that still had, say, 1,997 minutes left was probably not a heavy user and we only only used those accounts. Admittedly, that was less because we weren't trying to screw over anyone as we figured those people would never notice. And they didn't.
And how exactly does this apply in this case? From your story, you did not go to the administration and point out the flaws--you exploited them for personal gain. In TFA the student did not attempt to improve the security of the system and is obviously lying about it. Not very trustworthy, either of you.
I'm just trying to elucidate the changes in the legal/educational climate in the past thirty years. When I was in college, even if I had been caught the most that would have happened would have been a wrist-slap. Now, that would have been more than enough because neither me or the other guy that was involved were exactly hardened criminals. That did happen to other students that did things with the mainframe they weren't supposed to and they, too, learned to behave. I suppose the guy that did the same thing on the administration system might have gotten in more trouble
Things were, in many respects, a lot more relaxed in the seventies than they are now. A lot more. You could get pulled over and be a little drunk, or even a little high, and the cop would ask "how far do you have to go?" and you'd answer "just a couple of miles, officer." and they'd laugh and send you on your way. Try that now and you end up in the clink on a serious drug charge. Hell, in my State right now the cops are using high-gain microphones to listen in to conversations in passing cars: if they hear words like "pot" or "marijuana" or "joint" they pull you over and search your car.
Things are very different now, and if I were eighteen again, there's no way in hell I'd pull that stunt.
When I was in college thirty-odd years ago, my University only allocated 2,000 minutes per quarter per student of mainframe time. Not enough (obviously) and they refused to give me any more. So I wrote a simple fake-login program that would log the user's name and password, and cough up a realistic "system is down" message. Matter of fact, I exactly duplicated the normal logon procedure, including any nominal pauses and delays that occurred. Even fooled the system operators a couple of times. I ran the thing on forty or fifty terminals simultaneously, and I would watch in case someone called one of the admins over to ask why the system wasn't working. Whenever that happened, I'd hit a key on my terminal that would immediately log all the other systems off, so it would work normally at the next login attempt. It wasn't often: most people just shrugged, got up and left to go about their business. Occasionally some busybody would call an administrator over, so I had to keep an eye on things.
... who the fuck needs those.
In under a week I had captured the accounts of every active student user on the system, plus all the supervisory accounts. It was pretty unbelievable (as in, "holy SHIT Jesus Mary mother of God" unbelievable) and I couldn't understand why there were no precautions taken against that sort of thing. Needless to say I had no problems with account time after that. That was on the one mainframe: there was another guy, pretty sharp coder, that figured out what I was doing. At first I thought I was screwed, but he was delighted by the idea and duplicated it on the bigger system (this was years before the word "pwned" came in to the popular lexicon but it's no less applicable.) No surprise, a few days later and he had the run of that machine. So far as I'm aware, nobody ever figured out what we'd done. The big system was the one that had everything administrative on it from student grades to paper clips and we could have wreaked havoc if we'd wanted to. As it was, though, we just wanted more computer time to do our homework.
A couple of years later my father testified in front of my State's legislature regarding a new "computer crime" bill they were shopping around. It was one of those ridiculous "zero tolerance" laws that make the lawmakers look "tough on crime" but end up shafting a lot of people that don't deserve it. Dad pointed out to these idiots that, if passed, their brain-child would immediately criminalize 90% of the best and brightest students in our engineering and computer science curricula. They backed off in a hurry and came back with a more reasonable bill, which never got passed anyway.
That was then. Nowadays, I don't think our lawmakers would bat an eye if they put half our smartest engineering students in jail. They're just engineers, after all, and
I made the decision never to buy an RIAA-backed production in 1981. Blood-sucking leeches. I've made only one exception since then, and that was for a gift. And that's too bad, because I used to buy a lot of albums and 45's in those days, but once I did a little research on how that particular business is run, I decided it wasn't worth it. Now, I've never had a problem buying used records, and in fact that's where I've acquired most of my music since then.
Frankly, if you buy CDs you're buying product from an organization that is not much better, in principle (or should I say, lack of principle), than the average drug cartel. I have better things to do with my money than support people that I already know are criminals.
Scary site.
My sig is from the book The Great Time Machine Hoax by Keith Laumer.
No. He wasn't merely misguided ... he was a never-to-be-sufficiently damned CROOK, a self-righteous, self-serving bloodsucker who deserves no respect whatsoever.
Personally, I think we should just capture atmospheric carbon, turn it back into coal, and bury it again. Then we can gainfully employ legions of coal miners to dig it up so we can burn it to make electricity again, thus completing the cycle.
Unless they continue to get away with the encrypted-chip business to keep clone makers out.
Do you have a Steve Jobs I can borrow?
No, but I can throw a couple of Joe Jobs your way. Just gimme your Social and I'll take care of it.
Can't really disagree with you, but I wasn't slamming teachers ... well, not all of them. The actual teachers are at the bottom rung of the administrative pyramid and have no effective control of the situation or how resources are spent.
I am, however, severely critical of the political system which has grown up around the process of education. It's defective, it's deficient, it doesn't work and it is hurting us badly. Matter of fact, if you want to run a high-tech industrial civilization you should not allow the proliferation of tiny minds to infiltrate your educational system. It's bad enough when those types run your government.
"What are we going to do today, Brin?"
... try and take over the world."
"Same thing we always do, Sergei