Well, that will only work if you're a person with a seemingly unlimited supply of money. Sadly, that is not the case with so many people. They will almost always listen to the lobbyist over the poor civilian.
It also might be that there are more civilians on the other side wanting the law to stay.
Not everyone thinks all elements of the DMCA are evil by the way. The core part of the act is about preventing people from profiting from selling a device which is solely used to bypass technical restrictions on copying. Many people actually think that this a worthwhile aim since their livelihoods rely on producing some sort of content that can be easily copied so needs to be protected via some sort of digital protection.
I am not entirely convinced the numbers would come out on our side on a question of whether the DMCA should be repealed. It would probably depend heavily on how the question was put to them.
Oh, no! Money that only exists in the future of an alternate dimension where the artist/business made more money was 'stolen'!
Actually the losses suffered by the copyright owner through people using illegal copies are quite real. This is because some of the people playing illegally copied games are doing so instead of buying a legitimate copy for themselves. There are also some though who would not have paid the amount asked for a legitimate copy so these are the fictitious losses you are referring to. There is some debate as to how much is which but certainly some of each is going on.
Like it or not though, both are happening to a degree so Crippen did enable some in his actions and hence deprive poor MS of at least one copy of some crappy overpriced game.
This is almost as bad as that time when I decided not to buy a product from a store, thereby depriving them of profit that they could, potentially, have had!
The difference quite clearly being that in that case you left the store and deprived yourself of the enjoyment of the game. It is not the same thing if you play it anyway and then say "Screw them, I would have paid for it if it was better" after you have gained at least some enjoyment from it.
I am not trying to say that all software piracy is evil, far from it. But there are people on both sides of the fence who are in the wrong. The companies on one side clearly overstate their losses and lobby congress to pass stupid laws for other reasons but there are also people on the other side who just do whatever they can to avoid paying for something even if they find it incredibly useful or entertaining. I am not a great fan of either camp.
The kind of law "sponsored" by Microsoft, Sony, and other industry lobbyists.
Actually, this is about illegal copying funnily enough.
The iPhone protection was plainly about stopping you use the device on a different network. This is a right that is very difficult to take away from the person who bought the device though as it fairly protected.
The protection on the Xbox does have an element to it which is about not allowing the device to play games from copied disks. Unfortunately this element of the protection is also removed by jailbreaking your xbox so it clearly falls foul of this law.
I've found the Desktop tab in the version of ESX we use (3.5 I think) to be very slow for anything involving graphics (of course its over a network). Usually we just use it for a remote console to some Linux box.
It is much more usable in ESXi4 providing you have all the VMWare graphics drivers installed on the guest OS. This can be somewhat tricky to get working though from what I remember. Even then there are still some bugs unless you make the console resolution no bigger then the window size you have for it on the clients.
It is certainly fine for most graphical stuff though and can be a god send if you have a server application that needs to be configured graphically.
For text console access though I find their overbloated slow client pretty worthless though and will just open putty sessions via SSH. This has the advantage of not taking all the memory on the client machine like vSphere does with it's >100Mb memory footprint in ESX4.
Putty also loads in seconds unlike the few minutes I have sometimes had to wait for vSphere on my DualCore 2Ghz Intel running XP (no exaggeration).
The final decider though is the lack of vSphere under Linux so I have to open the SSH ports on the guest so I can always connect from my Laptop. I know I could probably use Wine but as I already mentioned vSphere is slow enough already running native under XP.
I'll second ESX being a SERVER VIRTUALIZATION ONLY. We use it at work, and it doesn't give you a "Desktop". You need to use RDC, or SSH (or direct connect through their Windows client) to get a desktop on the Virtual Machines.
ESXi 4.02 seems to have a console tab in the vSphere client that contradicts this statement unless I am misunderstanding you.
The only problem I have with ESXi is its piss poor handling of USB disks. For me this would rule it out as desktop virtualisation platform.
Agreed. Facebook won't give up invading users' privacy until they get replaced by a site that cares about user privacy. And I can guarantee that that caring attitude will last precisely long enough to bury Facebook as a competitor before they start doing exactly the same thing. Users just have to accept they can have privacy or Facebook, but not both.
I don't think this is limited to facebook.
Our privacy has been successively eroded over the past 20 years since companies realised how valuable information about their customers could be. We have gained many "free" services as a result of this that we otherwise would have had to pay for, but we have don so under the small print proviso that we would be allowing them to make money by selling information gleaned from watching us.
Even before the current days of the web customer loyalty cards were built on this premise. They could give us a small discount on our shopping in return for the data they could gather on us as a result of us identifying ourselves every time we purchased something.
The only way facebook would ever be overtaken by another company that did not behave this way would be if people cared enough to leave because of it, I have sneaky feeling that most people do not.
The answer is to eliminate the names on ballots. The ballot is a list of offices. To vote for someone, you have to correctly spell their name. If you look into a candidate well enough to spend the time to learn to spell his name correctly, you will be doing much more that the average voter of today. This will make voter self-selecting.
Certainly an interesting idea. Might be a bit harsh on dyslexics though. This might just tip the balance towards people who were great at spelling rather than decent scientists or economists. I have know a few scientists and doctors whoe could barely spell their own name, let alone someone elses.
I was thinking more about only allowing people to vote in a more confined field of expertise. So if you are a farmer you get to elect a farmers representative for the whole country. Like wise for people are teachers and so on. This way we would only have to vote on issues that were in a more smaller more attainable area of knowledge. The overall leadership would then be elected internally by the representatives of different professions.
It is high time we stop letting corporate butt kissers tell us that being nationalistic is "not PC" or is racist. what do you think China is doing in TFA. They are looking after their own and so is India, which if you think we tried to ship our masses of unemployed tech workers over there they would allow it I have a bridge to sell you, and we should do the same, or suffer the consequences. Hell I'd say the ONLY reason we aren't dealing with rioting right now this minute is they keep extending unemployment so those tons of out of work folks are sitting at home instead of taking to the streets. But they simply can't keep printing money, because sooner or later (I vote sooner) nobody outside the USA will accept it and when that happens? See Zimbabwe. It is high time we put OUR OWN PEOPLE ahead of the interests of multinational corporations who have NO allegiance to this great nation.
There is another reason why China has a strategic advantage: They do not let people with no education determine who makes very complicated economic decisions for them. Now let me say right now I have severe distaste for a system that denies the people the right to determine their own destiny. I do however see that letting some uneducated peasant from rural China determine who makes difficult intellectually taxing decisions on their behalf is no better than guesswork based on who seems like the nicer person.
The fact is that making economic or diplomatic decisions for a country has become harder and harder over the course of this century. This is only going to get worse as technology and technological development becomes more and more critical to a countries success.
I suspect a great many people here recognise that castrating science education because it offends certain creationist values is a bad idea if you want to guarantee a future generation of scientists. This is just one example of the mistakes we in the west are making.
Maybe we in the west should restrict who can vote to people who have at least finished school? Maybe it should be necessary to actually read about a parties policies before voting? Our current political systems were designed to cope with a much simpler world that existed 100 years ago.
The founding fathers of America had to deal with a very different set of problems to the ones we will face in the next 100 years, should we not be allowed to update some of their ideas? I know we make some minor changes to the constitution but maybe it should be looked at with a much more critical eye? The fact is that they were willing to tear down what had gone before them and build a new nation based on new ideas and new values.
I cannot help but think that maybe people should be required to have some form of political education before they are allowed to vote. We in the west are given our political education by the media and that is now mostly owned by the very rich elite. China simply has much tighter state control over that education but maybe this is necessary to balance the power of the big corporations.
China seem recently to have found a method of choosing their leadership that allows the brightest elements of their society to flourish. You might have to join "The Party" to have any chance of determining who rules but is this such a bad system per se? I would find it very difficult to live under it but it seems that 1 Billion Chinese do not.
It seems to me as an outsider looking in that they have a generation of young people coming through who believe in the society as it exists. This generation are driving technological development there at a rate that far exceeds our own.
Maybe it will come crashing down from within eventually but are we in the west willing to wait idly until that happens? The way China has absorbed Hong Kong in recent years and turned the economic power house we gave them to work for China as a whole leads me to believe we may be waiting a very long time for China to tear itself apart.
You may notice that there are an awful lot of "maybes" in this post. I am not sure about any of the ideas mentioned here, I am only sure about one thing: China are overtaking us economically and we need to make sure we do not get left behind.
What if we put the shades into a geo stationary orbit hovering only over the deepest parts of the ocean. I don't believe the sun does much over deep ocean. I suppose it could change the warming of certain currents. It could play a major role in hurricane development that way I suppose.
The fact that you put "I suppose" at the end of that comment shows the real problem with it: It's a complete guess.
This is the biggest problem with all atmospheric sciences: There is too much guesswork involved since the science is incredibly complicated and relies on physics we cannot model correctly. Think thermodymics and the fact there is no such thing as an ideal gas and you get the picture about how hard this stuff is to predict on a global scale.
I personally think we should be careful making massive changes to our global climate unless we know exactly what we are doing and what the results will be. Unfortunately the science is so far off being able to tell us that we may be forced to try something before we are ready to safely. There are so many examples of us screwing up things that are set about in a rushed manor and doing more harm than good.
The hilarious irony of your and the GP posts is that we have already seen drastic supply shocks in the oil markets. The last one, in 2008, did bring almost every single economy to it's knees. Oil tripled in price in the span of a few years. It caused double-digit inflation in the US. People who couldn't afford to heat their giant homes or gas up their giant SUVs completely depleted the money markets in just a few months and destroyed the banks that had lent them money for such stupid 'investments' in the first place.
Actually here in the UK it had very little effect. This is because we already taxed petroleum to such a high degree that the relative rise was somewhat small. The price certainly rose, but only by about 10-15%. The prices on this chart in the first column seem roughly accurate: http://www.speedlimit.org.uk/petrolprices.html
Now I do remember the price rise in 2008, and I remember it pissed a lot of my colleagues off (I was lucky enough to be walking to work back then). It did not drive them to actually do anything like change cars (with one exception) or look for a job closer to where they lived. The only person I knew who bought a new more fuel efficient car could have walked to work in about 30 minutes.
You might also notice from that chart that the price we now pay at the pump in the UK is far higher than it ever got to in 2008. To put into US figures, we currently pay an average of $8.50 per gallon at the pump for unleaded petrol. This shows it is not high petrol prices that cause problems, but its when prices rise too quickly for people and companies to budget for those rises in advance.
We are also trying to massively cut government spending like everyone else. When the price of oil jumps like that again, it is quite possible that our government could cut the tax on it and actually keep pump prices the same. They would obviously not like to cope with the loss of revenue from doing this, but if the alternative was a significant recession that would also impact government taxation revenues it would be an option that you in the US do not have open.
In short, your "if anybody could get it for free nobody would buy it" is tripe. Utter bullshit. DAMNED LIES.
Quite right, but I did not say any such thing so go and learn to read.
What I did say was that if nobody pays for something, then the artist makes no money and will have to do something else for a living. I was not actually saying that this was going to happen, I was suggesting that the current situation leaves those people who do pay supporting those who do not and that this is not entirely fair.
Why not find a method where everybody pays a more even amount for something so some of us pay less but those who currently pay nothing actually have to put their hand in their pocket?
Helping companies track down people depriving them of legitimate revenue is not really evil is it? I produce something, I should be able to get paid for it. If you do not want to pay for it: fine, do not use it then.
I think the RIAA's tactics stink. I think some of the law firms going round issuing threats to sue just as money making scheme are even worse.
I do however think that if I produce a product that I choose to charge for an you use it without making that payment then you are the evil one, not me. I am not under a civic duty to work for free any more than you are under a civic duty to feed me for free.
I know some people may make the argument that just by copying something you are not depriving the producer of anything so it is not really theft. Maybe they are right, but fact still remains that if nobody pays for something then the people who make that something are pretty quickly going to have to find something else to do for a living. If only some people are paying for something that is used by many people then how is that fair on the people who are paying when the freeloaders get the same gain for no investment?
I am certainly not saying the current system is perfect, but it still remains that many of us now are in a field where what we produce can be copied for almost no extra effort than that which was put into creating the original. We have to find a way as a society of spreading the cost of creating that original work around all the people who use it so that the creator gets rewarded and is encouraged to carry on producing what they do. That usually means charging per copy so that when you sell a certain volume you recoup the amount invested in creating the original.
So all this leaves is the age old gripe about things being too expensive for some of us to afford so we will not pay. While this is true in a great many cases it is unfortunate that we cannot really determine how expensive something should be unless we know the full costs incurred in its production and how many people are going to pay for it.
The UK law stipulates that councils are not allowed to simply charge for parking as a revenue stream, there has to be some benefit to the local population/businesses such as relieveing congestion, and as bikes don't cause congestion we're currently fighting Westminster Counsil in the European Courts of the legality of the charges.
I am curious, how does a bike not cause any congestion? Granted they take up far less space than a car but they still take up space on the road so if there are enough bike riders going down the same road then you can still have congestion. Or were you referring to when they are parked? Not that this makes any difference because a parked bike takes up about 20 percent of the physical space of a car so it could still cause congestion if inconsiderately parked. So bikes CAN cause congestion just nowhere near as much as cars do.
I am a regular cyclist in Central London and you even get bicycle congestion now during rush hour. The fact is that central london has far too many people who work here and need to travel in from the surrounding area so any form of transport will suffer congestion during rush hour. Even pedestrians suffer congestion now due to the sheer number of people who all start work at 9am so all need to get into the center of london just before then.
I guess the obvious solution is to electrify the fences with 20,000 volts.
Actually, the obvious (and cheaper) solution is simply to make sure the front of the train is fairly sturdy and won't get dented by morons walking along the track looking for their Darwin award. You might want to make it easy to clean too:)
Unfortunately this comment is an example of one of the problems with Slashdot, and the one to which, I think, you allude in your signature: people confidently making statements about matters of which they have either no or next-to-no knowledge. It is also, I believe, an illustration of the danger when making such statements: others may assume them to be accurate and authoritative and repeat them to a wider audience, inevitably with the effect that eventually the comments begin, as here, to resemble the confused results of a game of Chinese whispers.
I should begin by pointing out that the law to which you refer is "libel". Liable is an adjective.
Secondly, it is not in any way correct to say that "any other form of accusation in a public forum can get your arse sued into last week unless you can 100% prove that every word you say is true". This implies a level of rigidity of the law that quite simply is not correct. Moreover it ignores the provisions of the Defamation Act 1996 which can act to shield the defendant who has accidentally defamed a third party.
Thirdly it is not correct to imply as you do that a "damage limitation exercise" is necessitated to avoid legal action for defaming the people on the list. Defamation being a matter of fact for a jury it is not possible to say with certainty that they will not be held liable, but I would suggest that a reasonable person would not consider the list, accidentally published, to imply guilt. The case of Lewis v Daily Telegraph (1964) AC 234 might be a useful starting point to understand the courts' view in similar cases.
I don't propose here to set out the actual state of British defamation law, nor to explain the situation of the law firm here involved. My point was simply to point out that repeating Slashdot "wisdom" results in the perpetuation of ideas that are incorrect, sometimes dramatically.
Replying as an AC replied to my post with some damn useful and interesting info.
Firstly, a little aside: Many people on Slashdot will simply never see posts like this as they apply a -5 modifier to all posts from an AC and browse at a score of 1 or above only.
Secondly, thanks for the correction and the references to case law. I did actually study law many years ago but not libel (Law of Contract and Legal History).
I was trying to say in post that if the director of the company in question were to stand up and say "the people on the list all illegally downloaded porn" on national TV he would have certainly libelled the people contained on this list. This would open him up to a libel case from every person contained on this list which they stood every chance of winning. I do know enough about English libel law to state this with some degree of certainty. He could simply say he had no comment regarding this list but this would have made for a very short interview that would unlikely have been published.
I also know that damages in libel cases can run into large amounts of money very quickly if the plaintiff can prove they suffered measurable losses to that amount as a result of statement in question. Being the large number of people on the list this could drive a single defendant into personal bankruptcy very quickly. People who have been declared bankrupt and not discharged their debts are banned from acting as company directors and may even be sent to prison for doing so.
Now it is true under the Defamation Act 1996 that he may avoid being sued for libel if he chooses to make amends, but this is simply ridiculous as to use in this contact as it would still involve paying the aggrieved party any damages they felt they suffered.
I do concede though that my original post was pure junk, filled with misused words and piss poor grammatical errors. It was also very poorly written in terms of getting across my main point. Hopefully this one corrects that.
One of the more interesting aspects of this story is the attempt at damage control that ACS:Law are trying to pull. To quote their statement to the BBC: "All our evidence does is identify an internet connection that has been utilised to share copyright work," he told BBC News when pressed about the BSkyB database. "In relation to the individual names, these are just the names and addresses of the account owner and we make no claims that they themselves were sharing the files," he added.
Seems a pretty sharp turnaround from threatening legal action against those people based on that same evidence, doesn't it?
British liable law is a bitch. Threatening legal action is protected but any other form of accusation in a public forum can get your arse sued into last week unless you can 100% prove that every word you say is true.
ACS Law know that and know that if a competing law firm started going round down list and offering people a no win, no fee deal then ACS Law could be defending itself from liable cases on a permanent basis. If the director of ACS Law stood up on TV and said that every person on this list had downloaded porn or even implied it he could suddenly find himself on the receiving end of one legal summons for every person on that list and they would be demanding a shit load more than £500. Liable cases for defamation in England have the damages set by home much the person who was defamed lost, and this can be a shit load if they lost some sort of contract or job as a result of appearing on this list.
This would not just bankrupt his company, this would be a bye bye house type scenario as he could be sued into personal bankruptcy. This would also shit all over him ever being the director of a company ever again and may well prevent him from being a solicitor.
So yes, what a surprise, he engages in a massive damage limitation exercise that desperately tries to keep him and his worthless little company just above water rather than so far underwater he was actually turning into oil.
If it takes advantage of holes that exists un-patched then the windows firewall will not stop it.
Actually, it might. If I firewall off my machine using the crappy windows firewall and get it to drop all incoming unsolicited traffic then a malicious packet coming in to port 80 looking to exploit a 0day unpatched vulnerability in IIS is not going to work. This is because IIS never see's the incoming packet even if it is installed and running.
Likewise for windows shares, if I am telling my windows firewall to drop all traffic on ports 137-139 even if they have ACK set then the windows sharing service never gets to see any traffic it could be vulnerable to.
This is how firewalls work! They prevent traffic from getting to a running service.
If someone has any information on how you can send traffic to a firewalled port on a windows machine and still get the service to receive it please let me know as even I did not know MS were that incompetent.
Flash may suck, but there's little evidence that standards bodies do any better. Perhaps HTML 5 can wait until the DOM is cleaned up.
HTML5 will only become as ubiquitous as flash is when some completely non-technical but very arty designer can sit in front of a WYSIWYG Gui and move pixels about until he gets what he wants. This is the thing that most techies miss, the worst uses of Flash are often dreamt up by graphic designers who like it because they can produce stuff without having to pay anyone with technical ability. I am not saying this is a good thing, far from it.
When the next version of DreamWeaver comes out with HTML5 support and will spit out animations without anyone ever having to use code view we will start to see all the bloat problems that plague Flash also plague HTML5.
The only long term solution is for Graphic Designers to recognise the work that highly skilled technical staff do and the value we bring to their companies. The problem though is that they work on a very visual basis and have trouble understanding anything they cannot see visually. They do however generally recognise that we eat into their profit margins.
The time taken for a site to load is always the best angle of attack in this regard but if they have web caching enabled this can be just hard to explain as they do not pay attention the first time a site loads and then say thing like "but that only happens on the first page"
Some graphic designers are very different to this description but in my experience they are definitely in the minority in my experience (3 years of fulltime technical services to numerous design agencies).
It's fairly clear that by "GSM" they actually mean "GSM-related stack of technologies". Of course, the phones will have 3G. I haven't seen a non-3G smartphone in several years.
The last one I can recall was the first iPhone, and that was hopelessly outdated then.
Yes. Here in the UK we are looking at ripping out our 2nd Generation GSM network fairly soon as the 3rd generation and 3.5 gen ones have been going strong for years. It is looking like us in the UK will have 4G next year.
Releasing a GSM only phone in any market other than the states would be suicide for any other company as none of us would bother with anything less the 3G for a smartphone.
I am typing this on an netbook connected to an unrooted tethered Hero that is wobbling between HSDPA and 3G. When it drops to GSM I want to ring up my provider and threaten to withhold payment for the time it takes me to travel past that antenna.
This has to be one of the most laughable things I've read all week. You think you're saying that people in the UK are different, but you're actually saying they're exactly the same.
Actually I was saying the UK media is different to the US media. Subtly different but still different.
Once again, you delude yourself. The Guardian is held up as but one example among several, and actually receives very little of total verbiage.
It is mentioned an awful lot. He mentioned the Guardian first and last, although he does talk about Newsweek in the middle for one paragraph.
Really though, I just picked up on the fact the author was English. Interestingly enough I also just confirmed this and found out he freelances for the Times, a different English newspaper that is considered to be the Guardians more conservative counter part.
By the way, you completely failed to answer my question. If you hate the slashdot demographic so much then why do you bother reading and posting here? Just do us all a favour and leave.
First, like pretty much everyone he's very confused about what journalists do. Journalists write news stories, and the need to feed the public's (including much of Slashdot, though they think otherwise) unending gluttony for input. Seriously, the exceptions are rare and notable - the horsecrap about "what journalists are supposed to do" is a fantasy right alongside Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. I can't understand how anyone over the mental age of twenty can continue to believe in any of the three.
Maybe this is widely accepted as being the case where you live, but here in the UK a great many people still cling to the belief in the concept of journalism. This is especially true of all the Grauniad readers I know since it really does have the image amongst those on the left in the UK as being the last bastion of journalistic integrity.
So why some unknown English paper did not check its facts might be a non-question to someone who has never heard of it (are you American?), but to many people in the UK it is an interesting question. Personally I have not bought the Guardian in years but I do come from a family of ardent fans so will be using this as a stick to beat them with as soon as an opportunity arises:)
The second miss is in understanding why the media leapt all over the story of Haystack. It has nothing to do with the Boy Wizard - and everything to do with the public's (especially[1] including much of Slashdot, though they think otherwise) uncritical desire to hear about anything related to 'fighting back' against Iran.
The full full article made great mention of the Guardian running this story because it is completely unlike your description. It is generally far more Iran friendly then much of the English press. It spends far more column inches on the "evil US of A" and how Iran desperately needs nukes to defend itself from the "terrorist state of Israel". Please note the quotation marks, I am not stating an opinion on Israel at all in this post as it is so far off topic its not even funny.
The only thing you may get slightly right is that the Guardian is apparently popular amongst young techies but since I have not been one of them in many years I am not really qualified to say.
Finally, if you have such a problem with the Slashdot demographic, then just leave. Delete your account and do not come back. Maybe you were just trolling for a million angry responses from the young people you describe, but if that is the case you should try and do more research about things first as the best trolls often know something about the subject.
The full article was less about Haystack, and far more about the Guardian and BBC's coverage of Haystack. Both of these are widely respected news sources in the UK and hence this sort of basic journalism failing is actually worthy of comment, although maybe not to people outside the UK.
I know flash gets much hate around here, but the old 64 bit version actually wokrs pretty well, and I must confess that I didn't uninstall in spite of the security holes.
Lets face it, all software has security holes found in it at some point. If you uninstalled every bit of software that was insecure in some way you machine would be pretty empty and useless.
Now in the case of software that you point at the web it does make sense for it to me treated with a slightly higher threshold but still, if you spend a lot of time browsing untrusted site you are asking for trouble sooner or later if you run still Windows. The main thing that keeps Linux and MAC users safe is not so much the more secure OS, but simply that these OS's have a much lower installed userbase so far fewer bits of malware created for them.
Even under windows the threat seems to be much lower than some people would have you believe. With a small amount of user education a computer becomes much safer. No browsing strange untrusted sites looking for free software or free porn and you are probably pretty safe.
I have never seen a piece of flash malware apart from a proof on concept. I have heard about a few malicious flash apps that activated something on click, but that at least relies on the user clicking on a banner add or something. I learnt not to do that years ago in the days when you could open a never ending stream of popups.
I have recently become more and more convinced that have the security threats that are announced are just a big PR exercise to sell more security software. That is not to say that the internet is totally safe, but it is not as bad as the likes of Kaspersky and Co would like us all to believe and the best solution is certainly not there terrible overpriced crap.
The best solution is always to educate users into not clicking on banner adverts or any other cherries that are dangled there way.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that will only work if you're a person with a seemingly unlimited supply of money. Sadly, that is not the case with so many people. They will almost always listen to the lobbyist over the poor civilian.
It also might be that there are more civilians on the other side wanting the law to stay.
Not everyone thinks all elements of the DMCA are evil by the way. The core part of the act is about preventing people from profiting from selling a device which is solely used to bypass technical restrictions on copying. Many people actually think that this a worthwhile aim since their livelihoods rely on producing some sort of content that can be easily copied so needs to be protected via some sort of digital protection.
I am not entirely convinced the numbers would come out on our side on a question of whether the DMCA should be repealed. It would probably depend heavily on how the question was put to them.
Oh, no! Money that only exists in the future of an alternate dimension where the artist/business made more money was 'stolen'!
Actually the losses suffered by the copyright owner through people using illegal copies are quite real. This is because some of the people playing illegally copied games are doing so instead of buying a legitimate copy for themselves. There are also some though who would not have paid the amount asked for a legitimate copy so these are the fictitious losses you are referring to. There is some debate as to how much is which but certainly some of each is going on.
Like it or not though, both are happening to a degree so Crippen did enable some in his actions and hence deprive poor MS of at least one copy of some crappy overpriced game.
This is almost as bad as that time when I decided not to buy a product from a store, thereby depriving them of profit that they could, potentially, have had!
The difference quite clearly being that in that case you left the store and deprived yourself of the enjoyment of the game. It is not the same thing if you play it anyway and then say "Screw them, I would have paid for it if it was better" after you have gained at least some enjoyment from it.
I am not trying to say that all software piracy is evil, far from it. But there are people on both sides of the fence who are in the wrong. The companies on one side clearly overstate their losses and lobby congress to pass stupid laws for other reasons but there are also people on the other side who just do whatever they can to avoid paying for something even if they find it incredibly useful or entertaining. I am not a great fan of either camp.
The kind of law "sponsored" by Microsoft, Sony, and other industry lobbyists.
Actually, this is about illegal copying funnily enough.
The iPhone protection was plainly about stopping you use the device on a different network. This is a right that is very difficult to take away from the person who bought the device though as it fairly protected.
The protection on the Xbox does have an element to it which is about not allowing the device to play games from copied disks. Unfortunately this element of the protection is also removed by jailbreaking your xbox so it clearly falls foul of this law.
Who is this Vince you speak of and why are we blaming him instead?
No idea but it wasn't me :)
I've found the Desktop tab in the version of ESX we use (3.5 I think) to be very slow for anything involving graphics (of course its over a network). Usually we just use it for a remote console to some Linux box.
It is much more usable in ESXi4 providing you have all the VMWare graphics drivers installed on the guest OS. This can be somewhat tricky to get working though from what I remember. Even then there are still some bugs unless you make the console resolution no bigger then the window size you have for it on the clients.
It is certainly fine for most graphical stuff though and can be a god send if you have a server application that needs to be configured graphically.
For text console access though I find their overbloated slow client pretty worthless though and will just open putty sessions via SSH. This has the advantage of not taking all the memory on the client machine like vSphere does with it's >100Mb memory footprint in ESX4.
Putty also loads in seconds unlike the few minutes I have sometimes had to wait for vSphere on my DualCore 2Ghz Intel running XP (no exaggeration).
The final decider though is the lack of vSphere under Linux so I have to open the SSH ports on the guest so I can always connect from my Laptop. I know I could probably use Wine but as I already mentioned vSphere is slow enough already running native under XP.
I'll second ESX being a SERVER VIRTUALIZATION ONLY. We use it at work, and it doesn't give you a "Desktop". You need to use RDC, or SSH (or direct connect through their Windows client) to get a desktop on the Virtual Machines.
ESXi 4.02 seems to have a console tab in the vSphere client that contradicts this statement unless I am misunderstanding you.
The only problem I have with ESXi is its piss poor handling of USB disks. For me this would rule it out as desktop virtualisation platform.
Agreed. Facebook won't give up invading users' privacy until they get replaced by a site that cares about user privacy. And I can guarantee that that caring attitude will last precisely long enough to bury Facebook as a competitor before they start doing exactly the same thing. Users just have to accept they can have privacy or Facebook, but not both.
I don't think this is limited to facebook.
Our privacy has been successively eroded over the past 20 years since companies realised how valuable information about their customers could be. We have gained many "free" services as a result of this that we otherwise would have had to pay for, but we have don so under the small print proviso that we would be allowing them to make money by selling information gleaned from watching us.
Even before the current days of the web customer loyalty cards were built on this premise. They could give us a small discount on our shopping in return for the data they could gather on us as a result of us identifying ourselves every time we purchased something.
The only way facebook would ever be overtaken by another company that did not behave this way would be if people cared enough to leave because of it, I have sneaky feeling that most people do not.
The answer is to eliminate the names on ballots. The ballot is a list of offices. To vote for someone, you have to correctly spell their name. If you look into a candidate well enough to spend the time to learn to spell his name correctly, you will be doing much more that the average voter of today. This will make voter self-selecting.
Certainly an interesting idea. Might be a bit harsh on dyslexics though. This might just tip the balance towards people who were great at spelling rather than decent scientists or economists. I have know a few scientists and doctors whoe could barely spell their own name, let alone someone elses.
I was thinking more about only allowing people to vote in a more confined field of expertise. So if you are a farmer you get to elect a farmers representative for the whole country. Like wise for people are teachers and so on. This way we would only have to vote on issues that were in a more smaller more attainable area of knowledge. The overall leadership would then be elected internally by the representatives of different professions.
It is high time we stop letting corporate butt kissers tell us that being nationalistic is "not PC" or is racist. what do you think China is doing in TFA. They are looking after their own and so is India, which if you think we tried to ship our masses of unemployed tech workers over there they would allow it I have a bridge to sell you, and we should do the same, or suffer the consequences. Hell I'd say the ONLY reason we aren't dealing with rioting right now this minute is they keep extending unemployment so those tons of out of work folks are sitting at home instead of taking to the streets. But they simply can't keep printing money, because sooner or later (I vote sooner) nobody outside the USA will accept it and when that happens? See Zimbabwe. It is high time we put OUR OWN PEOPLE ahead of the interests of multinational corporations who have NO allegiance to this great nation.
There is another reason why China has a strategic advantage: They do not let people with no education determine who makes very complicated economic decisions for them. Now let me say right now I have severe distaste for a system that denies the people the right to determine their own destiny. I do however see that letting some uneducated peasant from rural China determine who makes difficult intellectually taxing decisions on their behalf is no better than guesswork based on who seems like the nicer person.
The fact is that making economic or diplomatic decisions for a country has become harder and harder over the course of this century. This is only going to get worse as technology and technological development becomes more and more critical to a countries success.
I suspect a great many people here recognise that castrating science education because it offends certain creationist values is a bad idea if you want to guarantee a future generation of scientists. This is just one example of the mistakes we in the west are making.
Maybe we in the west should restrict who can vote to people who have at least finished school? Maybe it should be necessary to actually read about a parties policies before voting? Our current political systems were designed to cope with a much simpler world that existed 100 years ago.
The founding fathers of America had to deal with a very different set of problems to the ones we will face in the next 100 years, should we not be allowed to update some of their ideas? I know we make some minor changes to the constitution but maybe it should be looked at with a much more critical eye? The fact is that they were willing to tear down what had gone before them and build a new nation based on new ideas and new values.
I cannot help but think that maybe people should be required to have some form of political education before they are allowed to vote. We in the west are given our political education by the media and that is now mostly owned by the very rich elite. China simply has much tighter state control over that education but maybe this is necessary to balance the power of the big corporations.
China seem recently to have found a method of choosing their leadership that allows the brightest elements of their society to flourish. You might have to join "The Party" to have any chance of determining who rules but is this such a bad system per se? I would find it very difficult to live under it but it seems that 1 Billion Chinese do not.
It seems to me as an outsider looking in that they have a generation of young people coming through who believe in the society as it exists. This generation are driving technological development there at a rate that far exceeds our own.
Maybe it will come crashing down from within eventually but are we in the west willing to wait idly until that happens? The way China has absorbed Hong Kong in recent years and turned the economic power house we gave them to work for China as a whole leads me to believe we may be waiting a very long time for China to tear itself apart.
You may notice that there are an awful lot of "maybes" in this post. I am not sure about any of the ideas mentioned here, I am only sure about one thing: China are overtaking us economically and we need to make sure we do not get left behind.
What if we put the shades into a geo stationary orbit hovering only over the deepest parts of the ocean. I don't believe the sun does much over deep ocean. I suppose it could change the warming of certain currents. It could play a major role in hurricane development that way I suppose.
The fact that you put "I suppose" at the end of that comment shows the real problem with it: It's a complete guess.
This is the biggest problem with all atmospheric sciences: There is too much guesswork involved since the science is incredibly complicated and relies on physics we cannot model correctly. Think thermodymics and the fact there is no such thing as an ideal gas and you get the picture about how hard this stuff is to predict on a global scale.
I personally think we should be careful making massive changes to our global climate unless we know exactly what we are doing and what the results will be. Unfortunately the science is so far off being able to tell us that we may be forced to try something before we are ready to safely. There are so many examples of us screwing up things that are set about in a rushed manor and doing more harm than good.
The hilarious irony of your and the GP posts is that we have already seen drastic supply shocks in the oil markets. The last one, in 2008, did bring almost every single economy to it's knees. Oil tripled in price in the span of a few years. It caused double-digit inflation in the US. People who couldn't afford to heat their giant homes or gas up their giant SUVs completely depleted the money markets in just a few months and destroyed the banks that had lent them money for such stupid 'investments' in the first place.
Actually here in the UK it had very little effect. This is because we already taxed petroleum to such a high degree that the relative rise was somewhat small. The price certainly rose, but only by about 10-15%. The prices on this chart in the first column seem roughly accurate: http://www.speedlimit.org.uk/petrolprices.html
Now I do remember the price rise in 2008, and I remember it pissed a lot of my colleagues off (I was lucky enough to be walking to work back then). It did not drive them to actually do anything like change cars (with one exception) or look for a job closer to where they lived. The only person I knew who bought a new more fuel efficient car could have walked to work in about 30 minutes.
You might also notice from that chart that the price we now pay at the pump in the UK is far higher than it ever got to in 2008. To put into US figures, we currently pay an average of $8.50 per gallon at the pump for unleaded petrol. This shows it is not high petrol prices that cause problems, but its when prices rise too quickly for people and companies to budget for those rises in advance.
We are also trying to massively cut government spending like everyone else. When the price of oil jumps like that again, it is quite possible that our government could cut the tax on it and actually keep pump prices the same. They would obviously not like to cope with the loss of revenue from doing this, but if the alternative was a significant recession that would also impact government taxation revenues it would be an option that you in the US do not have open.
In short, your "if anybody could get it for free nobody would buy it" is tripe. Utter bullshit. DAMNED LIES.
Quite right, but I did not say any such thing so go and learn to read.
What I did say was that if nobody pays for something, then the artist makes no money and will have to do something else for a living. I was not actually saying that this was going to happen, I was suggesting that the current situation leaves those people who do pay supporting those who do not and that this is not entirely fair.
Why not find a method where everybody pays a more even amount for something so some of us pay less but those who currently pay nothing actually have to put their hand in their pocket?
It's only evil if you're not getting paid for it.
Helping companies track down people depriving them of legitimate revenue is not really evil is it? I produce something, I should be able to get paid for it. If you do not want to pay for it: fine, do not use it then.
I think the RIAA's tactics stink. I think some of the law firms going round issuing threats to sue just as money making scheme are even worse.
I do however think that if I produce a product that I choose to charge for an you use it without making that payment then you are the evil one, not me. I am not under a civic duty to work for free any more than you are under a civic duty to feed me for free.
I know some people may make the argument that just by copying something you are not depriving the producer of anything so it is not really theft. Maybe they are right, but fact still remains that if nobody pays for something then the people who make that something are pretty quickly going to have to find something else to do for a living. If only some people are paying for something that is used by many people then how is that fair on the people who are paying when the freeloaders get the same gain for no investment?
I am certainly not saying the current system is perfect, but it still remains that many of us now are in a field where what we produce can be copied for almost no extra effort than that which was put into creating the original. We have to find a way as a society of spreading the cost of creating that original work around all the people who use it so that the creator gets rewarded and is encouraged to carry on producing what they do. That usually means charging per copy so that when you sell a certain volume you recoup the amount invested in creating the original.
So all this leaves is the age old gripe about things being too expensive for some of us to afford so we will not pay. While this is true in a great many cases it is unfortunate that we cannot really determine how expensive something should be unless we know the full costs incurred in its production and how many people are going to pay for it.
The UK law stipulates that councils are not allowed to simply charge for parking as a revenue stream, there has to be some benefit to the local population/businesses such as relieveing congestion, and as bikes don't cause congestion we're currently fighting Westminster Counsil in the European Courts of the legality of the charges.
I am curious, how does a bike not cause any congestion? Granted they take up far less space than a car but they still take up space on the road so if there are enough bike riders going down the same road then you can still have congestion. Or were you referring to when they are parked? Not that this makes any difference because a parked bike takes up about 20 percent of the physical space of a car so it could still cause congestion if inconsiderately parked. So bikes CAN cause congestion just nowhere near as much as cars do.
I am a regular cyclist in Central London and you even get bicycle congestion now during rush hour. The fact is that central london has far too many people who work here and need to travel in from the surrounding area so any form of transport will suffer congestion during rush hour. Even pedestrians suffer congestion now due to the sheer number of people who all start work at 9am so all need to get into the center of london just before then.
I'm not about to convert back and chip in some cash. I probably would have been OK with chipping in some cash.
Everyone always says that. But they have had a donations button for years and less than 0.001% gave the suggested donation of $7.
The interesting thing I found in his blog post is that most of their donations came from Europe rather than the US.
I guess the obvious solution is to electrify the fences with 20,000 volts.
Actually, the obvious (and cheaper) solution is simply to make sure the front of the train is fairly sturdy and won't get dented by morons walking along the track looking for their Darwin award. You might want to make it easy to clean too :)
Unfortunately this comment is an example of one of the problems with Slashdot, and the one to which, I think, you allude in your signature: people confidently making statements about matters of which they have either no or next-to-no knowledge. It is also, I believe, an illustration of the danger when making such statements: others may assume them to be accurate and authoritative and repeat them to a wider audience, inevitably with the effect that eventually the comments begin, as here, to resemble the confused results of a game of Chinese whispers.
I should begin by pointing out that the law to which you refer is "libel". Liable is an adjective.
Secondly, it is not in any way correct to say that "any other form of accusation in a public forum can get your arse sued into last week unless you can 100% prove that every word you say is true". This implies a level of rigidity of the law that quite simply is not correct. Moreover it ignores the provisions of the Defamation Act 1996 which can act to shield the defendant who has accidentally defamed a third party.
Thirdly it is not correct to imply as you do that a "damage limitation exercise" is necessitated to avoid legal action for defaming the people on the list. Defamation being a matter of fact for a jury it is not possible to say with certainty that they will not be held liable, but I would suggest that a reasonable person would not consider the list, accidentally published, to imply guilt. The case of Lewis v Daily Telegraph (1964) AC 234 might be a useful starting point to understand the courts' view in similar cases.
I don't propose here to set out the actual state of British defamation law, nor to explain the situation of the law firm here involved. My point was simply to point out that repeating Slashdot "wisdom" results in the perpetuation of ideas that are incorrect, sometimes dramatically.
Replying as an AC replied to my post with some damn useful and interesting info.
Firstly, a little aside: Many people on Slashdot will simply never see posts like this as they apply a -5 modifier to all posts from an AC and browse at a score of 1 or above only.
Secondly, thanks for the correction and the references to case law. I did actually study law many years ago but not libel (Law of Contract and Legal History).
I was trying to say in post that if the director of the company in question were to stand up and say "the people on the list all illegally downloaded porn" on national TV he would have certainly libelled the people contained on this list. This would open him up to a libel case from every person contained on this list which they stood every chance of winning. I do know enough about English libel law to state this with some degree of certainty. He could simply say he had no comment regarding this list but this would have made for a very short interview that would unlikely have been published.
I also know that damages in libel cases can run into large amounts of money very quickly if the plaintiff can prove they suffered measurable losses to that amount as a result of statement in question. Being the large number of people on the list this could drive a single defendant into personal bankruptcy very quickly. People who have been declared bankrupt and not discharged their debts are banned from acting as company directors and may even be sent to prison for doing so.
Now it is true under the Defamation Act 1996 that he may avoid being sued for libel if he chooses to make amends, but this is simply ridiculous as to use in this contact as it would still involve paying the aggrieved party any damages they felt they suffered.
I do concede though that my original post was pure junk, filled with misused words and piss poor grammatical errors. It was also very poorly written in terms of getting across my main point. Hopefully this one corrects that.
One of the more interesting aspects of this story is the attempt at damage control that ACS:Law are trying to pull. To quote their statement to the BBC: "All our evidence does is identify an internet connection that has been utilised to share copyright work," he told BBC News when pressed about the BSkyB database. "In relation to the individual names, these are just the names and addresses of the account owner and we make no claims that they themselves were sharing the files," he added.
Seems a pretty sharp turnaround from threatening legal action against those people based on that same evidence, doesn't it?
British liable law is a bitch. Threatening legal action is protected but any other form of accusation in a public forum can get your arse sued into last week unless you can 100% prove that every word you say is true.
ACS Law know that and know that if a competing law firm started going round down list and offering people a no win, no fee deal then ACS Law could be defending itself from liable cases on a permanent basis. If the director of ACS Law stood up on TV and said that every person on this list had downloaded porn or even implied it he could suddenly find himself on the receiving end of one legal summons for every person on that list and they would be demanding a shit load more than £500. Liable cases for defamation in England have the damages set by home much the person who was defamed lost, and this can be a shit load if they lost some sort of contract or job as a result of appearing on this list.
This would not just bankrupt his company, this would be a bye bye house type scenario as he could be sued into personal bankruptcy. This would also shit all over him ever being the director of a company ever again and may well prevent him from being a solicitor.
So yes, what a surprise, he engages in a massive damage limitation exercise that desperately tries to keep him and his worthless little company just above water rather than so far underwater he was actually turning into oil.
If it takes advantage of holes that exists un-patched then the windows firewall will not stop it.
Actually, it might. If I firewall off my machine using the crappy windows firewall and get it to drop all incoming unsolicited traffic then a malicious packet coming in to port 80 looking to exploit a 0day unpatched vulnerability in IIS is not going to work. This is because IIS never see's the incoming packet even if it is installed and running.
Likewise for windows shares, if I am telling my windows firewall to drop all traffic on ports 137-139 even if they have ACK set then the windows sharing service never gets to see any traffic it could be vulnerable to.
This is how firewalls work! They prevent traffic from getting to a running service.
If someone has any information on how you can send traffic to a firewalled port on a windows machine and still get the service to receive it please let me know as even I did not know MS were that incompetent.
Flash may suck, but there's little evidence that standards bodies do any better. Perhaps HTML 5 can wait until the DOM is cleaned up.
HTML5 will only become as ubiquitous as flash is when some completely non-technical but very arty designer can sit in front of a WYSIWYG Gui and move pixels about until he gets what he wants. This is the thing that most techies miss, the worst uses of Flash are often dreamt up by graphic designers who like it because they can produce stuff without having to pay anyone with technical ability. I am not saying this is a good thing, far from it.
When the next version of DreamWeaver comes out with HTML5 support and will spit out animations without anyone ever having to use code view we will start to see all the bloat problems that plague Flash also plague HTML5.
The only long term solution is for Graphic Designers to recognise the work that highly skilled technical staff do and the value we bring to their companies. The problem though is that they work on a very visual basis and have trouble understanding anything they cannot see visually. They do however generally recognise that we eat into their profit margins.
The time taken for a site to load is always the best angle of attack in this regard but if they have web caching enabled this can be just hard to explain as they do not pay attention the first time a site loads and then say thing like "but that only happens on the first page"
Some graphic designers are very different to this description but in my experience they are definitely in the minority in my experience (3 years of fulltime technical services to numerous design agencies).
It's fairly clear that by "GSM" they actually mean "GSM-related stack of technologies". Of course, the phones will have 3G. I haven't seen a non-3G smartphone in several years.
The last one I can recall was the first iPhone, and that was hopelessly outdated then.
P.S. Speaking of standards isn't GSM (Groupe Spécial Mobile) fairly out-of-date?
Yes. Here in the UK we are looking at ripping out our 2nd Generation GSM network fairly soon as the 3rd generation and 3.5 gen ones have been going strong for years. It is looking like us in the UK will have 4G next year.
http://www.zath.co.uk/o2-testing-4g-mobile-broadband-network-uk/
Releasing a GSM only phone in any market other than the states would be suicide for any other company as none of us would bother with anything less the 3G for a smartphone.
I am typing this on an netbook connected to an unrooted tethered Hero that is wobbling between HSDPA and 3G. When it drops to GSM I want to ring up my provider and threaten to withhold payment for the time it takes me to travel past that antenna.
This has to be one of the most laughable things I've read all week. You think you're saying that people in the UK are different, but you're actually saying they're exactly the same.
Actually I was saying the UK media is different to the US media. Subtly different but still different.
Once again, you delude yourself. The Guardian is held up as but one example among several, and actually receives very little of total verbiage.
It is mentioned an awful lot. He mentioned the Guardian first and last, although he does talk about Newsweek in the middle for one paragraph.
Really though, I just picked up on the fact the author was English. Interestingly enough I also just confirmed this and found out he freelances for the Times, a different English newspaper that is considered to be the Guardians more conservative counter part.
By the way, you completely failed to answer my question. If you hate the slashdot demographic so much then why do you bother reading and posting here? Just do us all a favour and leave.
First, like pretty much everyone he's very confused about what journalists do. Journalists write news stories, and the need to feed the public's (including much of Slashdot, though they think otherwise) unending gluttony for input. Seriously, the exceptions are rare and notable - the horsecrap about "what journalists are supposed to do" is a fantasy right alongside Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. I can't understand how anyone over the mental age of twenty can continue to believe in any of the three.
Maybe this is widely accepted as being the case where you live, but here in the UK a great many people still cling to the belief in the concept of journalism. This is especially true of all the Grauniad readers I know since it really does have the image amongst those on the left in the UK as being the last bastion of journalistic integrity.
So why some unknown English paper did not check its facts might be a non-question to someone who has never heard of it (are you American?), but to many people in the UK it is an interesting question. Personally I have not bought the Guardian in years but I do come from a family of ardent fans so will be using this as a stick to beat them with as soon as an opportunity arises :)
The second miss is in understanding why the media leapt all over the story of Haystack. It has nothing to do with the Boy Wizard - and everything to do with the public's (especially[1] including much of Slashdot, though they think otherwise) uncritical desire to hear about anything related to 'fighting back' against Iran.
The full full article made great mention of the Guardian running this story because it is completely unlike your description. It is generally far more Iran friendly then much of the English press. It spends far more column inches on the "evil US of A" and how Iran desperately needs nukes to defend itself from the "terrorist state of Israel". Please note the quotation marks, I am not stating an opinion on Israel at all in this post as it is so far off topic its not even funny.
The only thing you may get slightly right is that the Guardian is apparently popular amongst young techies but since I have not been one of them in many years I am not really qualified to say.
Finally, if you have such a problem with the Slashdot demographic, then just leave. Delete your account and do not come back. Maybe you were just trolling for a million angry responses from the young people you describe, but if that is the case you should try and do more research about things first as the best trolls often know something about the subject.
The full article was less about Haystack, and far more about the Guardian and BBC's coverage of Haystack. Both of these are widely respected news sources in the UK and hence this sort of basic journalism failing is actually worthy of comment, although maybe not to people outside the UK.
I know flash gets much hate around here, but the old 64 bit version actually wokrs pretty well, and I must confess that I didn't uninstall in spite of the security holes.
Lets face it, all software has security holes found in it at some point. If you uninstalled every bit of software that was insecure in some way you machine would be pretty empty and useless.
Now in the case of software that you point at the web it does make sense for it to me treated with a slightly higher threshold but still, if you spend a lot of time browsing untrusted site you are asking for trouble sooner or later if you run still Windows. The main thing that keeps Linux and MAC users safe is not so much the more secure OS, but simply that these OS's have a much lower installed userbase so far fewer bits of malware created for them.
Even under windows the threat seems to be much lower than some people would have you believe. With a small amount of user education a computer becomes much safer. No browsing strange untrusted sites looking for free software or free porn and you are probably pretty safe.
I have never seen a piece of flash malware apart from a proof on concept. I have heard about a few malicious flash apps that activated something on click, but that at least relies on the user clicking on a banner add or something. I learnt not to do that years ago in the days when you could open a never ending stream of popups.
I have recently become more and more convinced that have the security threats that are announced are just a big PR exercise to sell more security software. That is not to say that the internet is totally safe, but it is not as bad as the likes of Kaspersky and Co would like us all to believe and the best solution is certainly not there terrible overpriced crap.
The best solution is always to educate users into not clicking on banner adverts or any other cherries that are dangled there way.