(The British discovered this when the fifth broadcast channel started up at the same frequency as a few million Nintendos and a few million more VCRs. This was the ultimate in DDoS attacks, with each and every one of those devices acting as a jamming device. It cost the Government of the day a small fortune to repair, though I'm not sure their solution of re-tuning every household electronic device was the most practical of the options.)
Btw, it is called Van Eck phreaking after the guy who discovered it. As usual wikipedia has some info:
I used to be an O2 customer until about 8 months ago when they silently changed my (sim only) contract that I paid an extra £7.50 per month to get unlimited data. This was on top of the £15 pound I paid for calls and text messages. They silently amended the "fair use" policy from 4Gb per month to 500Mb. They did not reduce the £7.50. I immediately jumped to a different company and told them why after having been a customer for about 5 years or so.
There network in the UK has been hopelessly overloaded since they got the exclusive deal on the iPhone. In central London you would be unable to get a line quite regularly. They are desperately trying to keep their network alive without spending any money since they know most people will now be leaving them since the iPhone is available from other networks.
For fuck sake, they're ARGUING OVER THE RIGHTS TO PUT FUCKING ADS ON OUR PERSONAL DEVICES.
Are we supposed to feel sorry for them? Fuck them and their ads. Do not want.
Remember that this is actually about developers being able to embed adverts in applications or websites. This helps the developers of said applications get paid for the hard work they put in without charging the user directly.
These companies do not force their adverts into unsuspecting websites, applications or devices. They are able to do it because it provides another revenue stream for the people producing whatever it is that enables them to keep there costs down. Why the hell should people be forced into developing useful products for free and doing it purely as a hobby or charging the end user to use them. This seems to me to be the only choice until the world stops revolving around money.
I would love to go back to developing free, open source applications but unfortunately I have rent to pay. I could try solely asking for donations and hoping enough people paid me that I could survive, but I got fed up with seeing all my friends earning enough money to buy stuff while I was permanently skint.
Like it or not there are far too many people who will only pay for something they find useful if you force them into it by charging up front. Even then there are plenty of people who will try and bypass the payment and use what you spend your time producing without giving you a thing back.
By moving to an advert supported model you can at least be sure the company that supply the adverts will pay you a nominal fee that increases the more people find your application useful and download it. If you really want to avoid looking at any adverts on your phone, then you can avoid using any advert supported applications or buying a phone where the cost of the handset is subsidised by the money they make back by showing you adverts.
Most newspapers or magazines contain adverts to keep the cost of them down, in future things like the iphone and ipad will be no different.
The issue is not Apple leverage. The issue is Google leverage. Google is the one who wants to both receive ad data from iPhone users and compete with iPhone at the same time.
The problem is that this is legally very shaky ground in some countries. They are trying to encourage Google to drop development of a competing product (Android) or they will exclude them from a different market (modile Ads). The idea is that Google's core business is advertising and they might cave in simply so they get chance to be part of the mobile ad market at the most important time, its inception.
Apples big hope is that if this is ruled anti-competitive it will be years down the line and they will have to pay a small fine. By then however Google will have not been allowed to participate in a growing mobile ad market or they will have stopped directly competing with them in a different market. Google know how important mobile ads are going to be to their business in 5 or 10 years so may actually be considering selling its Android dept in order to not be excluded early on. There is no way they will let the mobile advertising market drop is it is just going to be too valuable in future, whoever controls it.
This is exactly what Microsoft did years ago, they knew that charging resellers for a MS-DOS licence for each machine they sold, regardless of how many of them had MS-DOS on them was going to be ruled anti-competitive, but they also knew that by then DR-DOS would be dead. It was worth them paying the fine later in order to be rid of a competitor early on. This may be a different type of anti-competitive behaviour, but there are many.
Quite often companies can get away with doing things that are blatantly anti-competitive providing they can rely on the wheels of justice turning slowly. They may get fined, but a fine is a small price to pay for a monopoly or even just becoming the dominant player in a new market that will one day be worth billions.
This is not to say that Apple have a monopoly now, but you can be damn sure they would like to have one. Almost all companies do for far too many reasons to list here.
The only way to prevent this type of behaviour is to allow the relevant government bodies that police anti-competitive business practices to impose immediate injunctions against this sort of behaviour via some sort of fast track process. Although in this case this is so borderline that an injunction would be unlikely.
Before MySQL 5.1, if the master node went down, you had to bring down the entire cluster and restart it. That could take upwards of 15 - 20 minutes or more on any database of size.
Only if you wanted to keep the same master as before. The trick was to let the slave that failed over into being the new master stay that way permanently and then concentrate on bringing the the old master up as a slave.
The fact is he hacked into government servers he had no business accessing. We can argue motives and harm done all we want but it doesn't change the fact a crime was committed.
Calling what he did hacking is joke, he found DoD machines where the admin password was blank. This is what was so embarrassing, he showed just what anyone who has worked with DoD IT staff already knows, that they used to get the bottom of the barrel with the best going to the NSA, CIA or more likely private industry.
Yes, especially when I say the words: interstate, autobahn, and highways that are like interstates. These are mostly if not all limited access roads. i.e. Cars only. Pedestrians are not allowed on these roads... at least anywhere I've ever lived or driven; and I've driven in 44 of the 50 American states, 6 of the 10 Canadian provinces, and Austria and Germany.
Yes, and if you went back and read my original post you relied to you would see I specifically exempted highways from my comment since I actually think the German system of greater flexibility with regard to top speed on these roads is better. I was making a point about urban roads, sorry you missed it. Below is a quote from my original post which you obviously failed to read:
"I understand why people speed on highways, but on some residential roads in built up areas the speed limit is essential to keep people safe."
On this page, there are duplicates that are not UA restricted, which you can test with whatever browser you like, and download the implementation code.
Great, so they provide a fail over standards compliant version in addition to their mac only all bells and whistles version. This is not really embracing web standards though is it?
User agent detection is appropriate on the consumer (www.apple) page, since that's an executive summary.
I really dont understand why you are saying this, since something being an "executive summary" does not in my count give you an excuse for using poor deign techniques. Sniffing the user agent and trying to use this to determine what my browser supports is a poor approach since it relies on Apple knowing the development roadmap of all competing browsers. A better approach is to fail over each individual element of the page that you know to be suspect.
Now in this case you are going to be showing an incomplete experience since these will be new techniques that without HTML5 are not possible but that is easily explained without resorting to a "Go download our browser" box before even attempting to figure out what the users browser actually supports. This is the key point, this is not an HTML5 showcase, it is an Apple Safari showcase designed to get more people to use their browser.
Conditions and vehicle types would be better for determining speed than set limits. Really, limits should be posted only as advisories for curves or for when bad weather sets in, or for when traffic congestion is high.
This assumes you do not have to share the roads with pedestrians. Unfortunately you do as they have to cross them regularly and you cannot always use a marked crossing. It is very difficult to cross a busy road if every driver is trying to tank along it at the maximum speed his car can hold the road at in the current conditions.
If I can afford the fine and there are no points involved, I speed.
Do you feel at all guilty about the increased chances of killing someone when you have accident? Do you think that we should just do away with speed limits entirely and let everyone drive as fast as they please?
Surely speed limits are there to keep as all safer. I understand why people speed on highways, but on some residential roads in built up areas the speed limit is essential to keep people safe.
I have to cross a road on my way back from work every day that is used as a cut through to avoid a contraflow system that is a PITA. I can see why people use it as it makes certain journeys a lot quicker, but they just need to remember that the road in question is not a main road, it is a quiet residential back street where loads of children live and is only a few blocks down from a school. There are also no crossings so if it is busy, you have to wait for a motorist to stop and let you cross safely.
Sooner or later almost everyone has an accident of some kind, and it may well be the other persons fault. But even so, how would you feel if you were involved in an accident where someone died? It is not always very easy to dismiss the fact that the other person died if you know that they might have lived had you done something different, regardless of who was actually to blame.
So you WANT stuff to be lost when that publisher decides its not worth the auth. servers anymore?
Please re-read my post and check for the bit where I was saying DRM is a good thing. You wont find it because it was not there. All I was trying to say was that if you object to DRM your only legal option is to avoid software containing it. You cannot bitch about it stealing rights that your never had in the first place. Publishers choose what rights to give you when you enter into a licence agreement to use their software.
Personally I try and avoid DRM'd crap when ever possible, but I fully recognise why companies use it. I also recognise that they are probably only enforcing what their licence has always said anyway. If you do not like a products licensing terms, your only legal recourse is to not use that product.
IDIOT!
Since you seem unable to read maybe you should be more careful about bandying around insults.
Especially when chicken shit companies abuse it to revoke rights we already have.
You do not have any right to use a piece of software until the creator publishes it and then they decide what rights they want to give you. If they say you cannot transfer the licence from one machine to another and your local laws allow those licensing terms then that is their right as the creator of the software. Your only legal option is to refuse to use it on moral grounds. Using it anyway is not a legal right.
So for this reason DRM cannot be used to revoke rights unless they can force it into software you already have via an autoupdate process of some kind. If you buy software with DRM already in it, then you need to pay attention to the shrink wrap licence as the DRM may well enforce the terms in the licence. Do not be too surprised if it does since this is the main point of DRM, to force users to abide by a software publishers licensing terms.
If you leave everything set to auto-login, then you are asking for trouble.
I set all my machines to autologin if they primarily use local storage. Without disk encryption there is always the possibility that anyone who gains local access can just image the hard disk. I generally lock my PC's down to disallow all remote access so why bother logging in when anyone who sees the login screen is already sat down at my desk anyway. The only PC I used to keep on a login basis was my old linux box that also used ReiserFS to encrypt the entire home partition.
Logging in is only any form of protection if you have secure network storage that users do not have physical access to or if you use the password as an encryption key to access a local disk.
Just because I buy a product from an exploititive company, particularly when that's the only option, doesn't make me an exploiter.
I think that entirely depends on the product. If it is an absolute essential then you are right but if it is a product you could quite easily have done without, then surely you should have done without if you actually cared enough about the person who was exploited in the production of the product.
A great many of the things today that we cannot think of doing without were once considered luxuries. I think a pretty good test is to work out if it was sustainable for every member of the entire worlds population to have the product. If not, it is clearly a luxury since we in the west will always have to deprive someone else in order to ensure we have it.
I'm going to call you out on the Police's ability to find out who you are when making a stop and search. The right the search you does not normally extend to opening and searching your wallet. You also don't have to identify yourself verbally when stopped and searched.
A Quote from the page describing a stop and search:
"STOP AND SEARCH - when a police officer stops and then searches you, your clothes and anything you are carrying."
This seems to imply they can search your wallet. I would be very surprised if they neglected to do so since it is a likely place for drugs to be found. There is certainly no legal exemption to prevent them from using stop and search to obtain your identity via your wallet. so yes, you do not have to identify yourself verbally, but they can search you to get around this providing they can find some legal grounds. The problem is that you have very little recourse after you have been searched to appeal if the grounds they used were somewhat spurious.
Nokia hardware rocks. Nokia's software as of late (S60) is buggy to hell and back. If they both got together they could make it big. Nokia making their superior phone hardware, Microsoft ditching the joke that is their mobile OS and starting over with a REAL os that has potential (and design it so carriers cant cripple it) they could give the other two a real run for their money.
Err, no they couldn't. The problem is that the carriers pay most of the cost of the phone so if it is completely crippled they will not subsidise it. If they do not subsidise it then most people will not buy it as it would take several hundred dollars up front.
Apple tried to dictate terms to the carriers, but then soon realised this was not possible and changed their tune. See the lack of tethering unless the iPhone is jailbroken or the carrier expressly allows it.
Isn't the photo part only valid with the separate paper part too?
Yup, but it doesn't really matter if it is valid or not in the context of proving who you are if stopped and searched. It also does not stop most people keeping their nice, credit card sized driving licence in with their credit cards for convenience. I am convinced this was the main reason for moving to a credit card sized photo driving licence anyway. It made perfect sense in my mind to do away with a driving licence completely one we were all legally forced to carry a photo ID.
I would have been happy to carry a single piece of state provided ID if it allowed me the freedom to travel anywhere in Europe without a passport and removed my need to pay for a new photo driving licence every ten years. ID cards in theory could have my life easier, but not in the form they were being implemented.
My point still stands though, most people just carry their photo driving licence with them anyway. How many people out there are really walking around with no form of ID? The licencing laws here in Britain now requires all people under the age of 25 to be required to produce ID to buy booze as well.
The fact is that the national ID card was going to cost us all a fortune, but not really make any other difference to our everyday lives since most law abiding citizens have loads proovable ID on them at all times anyway. It might not all be legally recognised, but it is still a pretty sure way to prove who you are just by searching your wallet.
It was also irrelevant anyway since the vast majority of people in britain now have a photo driving licence that performs the same function. You are already legally required to tell the DVLA where you live, and they immediately inform the police to update on the Police National Computer.
Since we already are required by law to carry our driving licence while driving most people just keep it in their wallet. This allows the police to stop and search you at any time and find out who you are. Stop and search in the UK does not require a warrant.
The ID card scheme was basically a way of legally requiring something which we already have pretty much by stealth anyway for most law abiding citizens. The difference is that they could have used it to hassle illegal immigrants and people who have something to hide more if it was more rigidly codified in law. We all are forced to carry our bankcards and god knows what else that proves who we are so who cares about on more piece of ID being forced upon us. I only objected to being charged for it, via txation or directly.
If the new government really want to sort out the crap Labour passed they need to repeal the Regulation of Investigatory Powers and Terrorism Acts. I have a feeling those are both here to stay though.
This still made it a decentralised system. Any normal peer connected to the network could be promoted to an ultrapeer if it had long enough uptime, a decent amount of available bandwidth and fulfilled certain other criteria that I cannot remember. The result of this was that if your client was on 24x7 you could find you were running an ultrapeer without knowing it until you looked at the protocol section of whatever client you were using.
Gnutella was designed to bypass the problems that resulted in Napster being shut down so was built to ensure it could not be taken out by closing down a single server. In many ways it was built on the Internet's strengths.
And nothing of value was lost. Seriously, who uses an inefficient cruddy program like Limewire when you've got bit torrent?
I always wondered why everyone uses a centralised system like bittorrent to illegally download other peoples hard work when the gnutella network existed. It might be less efficient and slightly slower to find what you want, but at least they will never be able to shut it down completely. I know this may result in the death of Limewire, but that was not exactly the only Gnutella client in existence.
The fact is the gnutella's inefficencies are also in many ways its benefits.
I don't care if it's shiny, it's not my fault HTC churn out devices with 1GHz processors but no hardware acceleration on the UI, Palm can't put a decent SDK out to save their lives, or Google have only just started to get their act together.
Whereas Apple release devices with a 600Mhz CPU and then prevent any sort of Multitasking so you do not notice how dismal this is. Apple are very good at using interface design to cover up for the hardware failing of their own devices. Ok, the new 3GS model has new rendering chip to help with the display so it will get multitasking eventually but I always thought this was stroke of genius on their part by not releasing any hardware specs on their iPhone.
This way people did not reach their own conclusions about what caused the lag that the 1st generation suffered from until it was updated. They all blamed it on a slow processor in the HTC Hero because the specification was widely available, even though it was also fixed by a software update, the same as in the early iPhones.
Apple can do this as they completely control the iPhone platform and develop the hardware and software in house. Companies like HTC that use other companies operating systems have no choice but be a little more open about the harware spec of their devices.
The employer may be committing a GPL violation. You should bring that up with your employer and also inform them that it can cause a lot of badwill.
The problem with this is that they paid you to write the code. If a developer who worked for me suddenly started saying I had to release the code he had written as he had taken from a GPL project I would insist he went reworked the code to not use any contaminated code.
The problem is that this may still not allow the university to close source the project and keep what they think they already own . If this was the case, then wave goodbye to your first graduate job as your manager is going to be pissed, even if it was his fault for not realising this was an issue sooner.
The moral of this story is that you have to be very careful before you appropriate code from open source projects when doing commercial development. If you are being contracted to write something, it all depends on whether you will have copyright on the code after the work is finished or if it will belong to the client. If you working by the hour, then you employer will certainly expect to own 100% of the code after you finish so you need to check with management whether they mind publishing the source.
Generally, the answer is that you should never even look at GPL code at work in case it gives you ideas. The employer can never usurp the GPL, but they can fire people or maybe even sue for damages if they think you have been dishonest about whether you were writing the code in the first place. I know that legally some of these thing may be arguable, but who wants to as legal arguments get expensive real quick.
That brings up loads of stuff about Google the search engine. I was more interested in Android Security Concerns since we are talking about the mobile phone platform here.
At some point, we as consumers need to step back from the glossy black surfaces, and sleek lines, and realize that the tools we buy should be stylish, but they should be functional first.
Not likely. Certain car manufacturers have been selling us pretty looking cars that broke down left right and centre for years and people have still bought them. Cars also cost far more than iPhones.
As strange as it may seem many people care more about looks and being trendy than they do about boring things like functionality, especially when it comes to things we are seen frequently in public with.
Slashdot Mirror
(The British discovered this when the fifth broadcast channel started up at the same frequency as a few million Nintendos and a few million more VCRs. This was the ultimate in DDoS attacks, with each and every one of those devices acting as a jamming device. It cost the Government of the day a small fortune to repair, though I'm not sure their solution of re-tuning every household electronic device was the most practical of the options.)
Btw, it is called Van Eck phreaking after the guy who discovered it. As usual wikipedia has some info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking
I used to be an O2 customer until about 8 months ago when they silently changed my (sim only) contract that I paid an extra £7.50 per month to get unlimited data. This was on top of the £15 pound I paid for calls and text messages. They silently amended the "fair use" policy from 4Gb per month to 500Mb. They did not reduce the £7.50. I immediately jumped to a different company and told them why after having been a customer for about 5 years or so.
There network in the UK has been hopelessly overloaded since they got the exclusive deal on the iPhone. In central London you would be unable to get a line quite regularly. They are desperately trying to keep their network alive without spending any money since they know most people will now be leaving them since the iPhone is available from other networks.
For fuck sake, they're ARGUING OVER THE RIGHTS TO PUT FUCKING ADS ON OUR PERSONAL DEVICES.
Are we supposed to feel sorry for them? Fuck them and their ads. Do not want.
Remember that this is actually about developers being able to embed adverts in applications or websites. This helps the developers of said applications get paid for the hard work they put in without charging the user directly.
These companies do not force their adverts into unsuspecting websites, applications or devices. They are able to do it because it provides another revenue stream for the people producing whatever it is that enables them to keep there costs down. Why the hell should people be forced into developing useful products for free and doing it purely as a hobby or charging the end user to use them. This seems to me to be the only choice until the world stops revolving around money.
I would love to go back to developing free, open source applications but unfortunately I have rent to pay. I could try solely asking for donations and hoping enough people paid me that I could survive, but I got fed up with seeing all my friends earning enough money to buy stuff while I was permanently skint.
Like it or not there are far too many people who will only pay for something they find useful if you force them into it by charging up front. Even then there are plenty of people who will try and bypass the payment and use what you spend your time producing without giving you a thing back.
By moving to an advert supported model you can at least be sure the company that supply the adverts will pay you a nominal fee that increases the more people find your application useful and download it. If you really want to avoid looking at any adverts on your phone, then you can avoid using any advert supported applications or buying a phone where the cost of the handset is subsidised by the money they make back by showing you adverts.
Most newspapers or magazines contain adverts to keep the cost of them down, in future things like the iphone and ipad will be no different.
The issue is not Apple leverage. The issue is Google leverage. Google is the one who wants to both receive ad data from iPhone users and compete with iPhone at the same time.
The problem is that this is legally very shaky ground in some countries. They are trying to encourage Google to drop development of a competing product (Android) or they will exclude them from a different market (modile Ads). The idea is that Google's core business is advertising and they might cave in simply so they get chance to be part of the mobile ad market at the most important time, its inception.
Apples big hope is that if this is ruled anti-competitive it will be years down the line and they will have to pay a small fine. By then however Google will have not been allowed to participate in a growing mobile ad market or they will have stopped directly competing with them in a different market. Google know how important mobile ads are going to be to their business in 5 or 10 years so may actually be considering selling its Android dept in order to not be excluded early on. There is no way they will let the mobile advertising market drop is it is just going to be too valuable in future, whoever controls it.
This is exactly what Microsoft did years ago, they knew that charging resellers for a MS-DOS licence for each machine they sold, regardless of how many of them had MS-DOS on them was going to be ruled anti-competitive, but they also knew that by then DR-DOS would be dead. It was worth them paying the fine later in order to be rid of a competitor early on. This may be a different type of anti-competitive behaviour, but there are many.
Quite often companies can get away with doing things that are blatantly anti-competitive providing they can rely on the wheels of justice turning slowly. They may get fined, but a fine is a small price to pay for a monopoly or even just becoming the dominant player in a new market that will one day be worth billions.
This is not to say that Apple have a monopoly now, but you can be damn sure they would like to have one. Almost all companies do for far too many reasons to list here.
The only way to prevent this type of behaviour is to allow the relevant government bodies that police anti-competitive business practices to impose immediate injunctions against this sort of behaviour via some sort of fast track process. Although in this case this is so borderline that an injunction would be unlikely.
Before MySQL 5.1, if the master node went down, you had to bring down the entire cluster and restart it. That could take upwards of 15 - 20 minutes or more on any database of size.
Only if you wanted to keep the same master as before. The trick was to let the slave that failed over into being the new master stay that way permanently and then concentrate on bringing the the old master up as a slave.
The fact is he hacked into government servers he had no business accessing. We can argue motives and harm done all we want but it doesn't change the fact a crime was committed.
Calling what he did hacking is joke, he found DoD machines where the admin password was blank. This is what was so embarrassing, he showed just what anyone who has worked with DoD IT staff already knows, that they used to get the bottom of the barrel with the best going to the NSA, CIA or more likely private industry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_McKinnon
Yes, especially when I say the words: interstate, autobahn, and highways that are like interstates. These are mostly if not all limited access roads. i.e. Cars only. Pedestrians are not allowed on these roads... at least anywhere I've ever lived or driven; and I've driven in 44 of the 50 American states, 6 of the 10 Canadian provinces, and Austria and Germany.
Yes, and if you went back and read my original post you relied to you would see I specifically exempted highways from my comment since I actually think the German system of greater flexibility with regard to top speed on these roads is better. I was making a point about urban roads, sorry you missed it. Below is a quote from my original post which you obviously failed to read:
"I understand why people speed on highways, but on some residential roads in built up areas the speed limit is essential to keep people safe."
On this page, there are duplicates that are not UA restricted, which you can test with whatever browser you like, and download the implementation code.
Great, so they provide a fail over standards compliant version in addition to their mac only all bells and whistles version. This is not really embracing web standards though is it?
User agent detection is appropriate on the consumer (www.apple) page, since that's an executive summary.
I really dont understand why you are saying this, since something being an "executive summary" does not in my count give you an excuse for using poor deign techniques. Sniffing the user agent and trying to use this to determine what my browser supports is a poor approach since it relies on Apple knowing the development roadmap of all competing browsers. A better approach is to fail over each individual element of the page that you know to be suspect.
Now in this case you are going to be showing an incomplete experience since these will be new techniques that without HTML5 are not possible but that is easily explained without resorting to a "Go download our browser" box before even attempting to figure out what the users browser actually supports. This is the key point, this is not an HTML5 showcase, it is an Apple Safari showcase designed to get more people to use their browser.
Conditions and vehicle types would be better for determining speed than set limits. Really, limits should be posted only as advisories for curves or for when bad weather sets in, or for when traffic congestion is high.
This assumes you do not have to share the roads with pedestrians. Unfortunately you do as they have to cross them regularly and you cannot always use a marked crossing. It is very difficult to cross a busy road if every driver is trying to tank along it at the maximum speed his car can hold the road at in the current conditions.
If I can afford the fine and there are no points involved, I speed.
Do you feel at all guilty about the increased chances of killing someone when you have accident? Do you think that we should just do away with speed limits entirely and let everyone drive as fast as they please?
Surely speed limits are there to keep as all safer. I understand why people speed on highways, but on some residential roads in built up areas the speed limit is essential to keep people safe.
I have to cross a road on my way back from work every day that is used as a cut through to avoid a contraflow system that is a PITA. I can see why people use it as it makes certain journeys a lot quicker, but they just need to remember that the road in question is not a main road, it is a quiet residential back street where loads of children live and is only a few blocks down from a school. There are also no crossings so if it is busy, you have to wait for a motorist to stop and let you cross safely.
Sooner or later almost everyone has an accident of some kind, and it may well be the other persons fault. But even so, how would you feel if you were involved in an accident where someone died? It is not always very easy to dismiss the fact that the other person died if you know that they might have lived had you done something different, regardless of who was actually to blame.
So you WANT stuff to be lost when that publisher decides its not worth the auth. servers anymore?
Please re-read my post and check for the bit where I was saying DRM is a good thing. You wont find it because it was not there. All I was trying to say was that if you object to DRM your only legal option is to avoid software containing it. You cannot bitch about it stealing rights that your never had in the first place. Publishers choose what rights to give you when you enter into a licence agreement to use their software.
Personally I try and avoid DRM'd crap when ever possible, but I fully recognise why companies use it. I also recognise that they are probably only enforcing what their licence has always said anyway. If you do not like a products licensing terms, your only legal recourse is to not use that product.
IDIOT!
Since you seem unable to read maybe you should be more careful about bandying around insults.
Especially when chicken shit companies abuse it to revoke rights we already have.
You do not have any right to use a piece of software until the creator publishes it and then they decide what rights they want to give you. If they say you cannot transfer the licence from one machine to another and your local laws allow those licensing terms then that is their right as the creator of the software. Your only legal option is to refuse to use it on moral grounds. Using it anyway is not a legal right.
So for this reason DRM cannot be used to revoke rights unless they can force it into software you already have via an autoupdate process of some kind. If you buy software with DRM already in it, then you need to pay attention to the shrink wrap licence as the DRM may well enforce the terms in the licence. Do not be too surprised if it does since this is the main point of DRM, to force users to abide by a software publishers licensing terms.
If you leave everything set to auto-login, then you are asking for trouble.
I set all my machines to autologin if they primarily use local storage. Without disk encryption there is always the possibility that anyone who gains local access can just image the hard disk. I generally lock my PC's down to disallow all remote access so why bother logging in when anyone who sees the login screen is already sat down at my desk anyway. The only PC I used to keep on a login basis was my old linux box that also used ReiserFS to encrypt the entire home partition.
Logging in is only any form of protection if you have secure network storage that users do not have physical access to or if you use the password as an encryption key to access a local disk.
Just because I buy a product from an exploititive company, particularly when that's the only option, doesn't make me an exploiter.
I think that entirely depends on the product. If it is an absolute essential then you are right but if it is a product you could quite easily have done without, then surely you should have done without if you actually cared enough about the person who was exploited in the production of the product.
A great many of the things today that we cannot think of doing without were once considered luxuries. I think a pretty good test is to work out if it was sustainable for every member of the entire worlds population to have the product. If not, it is clearly a luxury since we in the west will always have to deprive someone else in order to ensure we have it.
I'm going to call you out on the Police's ability to find out who you are when making a stop and search. The right the search you does not normally extend to opening and searching your wallet. You also don't have to identify yourself verbally when stopped and searched.
Just check and found this page from the Metropolitan Police: http://www.met.police.uk/stopandsearch/what_is.htm
A Quote from the page describing a stop and search:
"STOP AND SEARCH - when a police officer stops and then searches you, your clothes and anything you are carrying."
This seems to imply they can search your wallet. I would be very surprised if they neglected to do so since it is a likely place for drugs to be found. There is certainly no legal exemption to prevent them from using stop and search to obtain your identity via your wallet. so yes, you do not have to identify yourself verbally, but they can search you to get around this providing they can find some legal grounds. The problem is that you have very little recourse after you have been searched to appeal if the grounds they used were somewhat spurious.
Nokia hardware rocks. Nokia's software as of late (S60) is buggy to hell and back. If they both got together they could make it big. Nokia making their superior phone hardware, Microsoft ditching the joke that is their mobile OS and starting over with a REAL os that has potential (and design it so carriers cant cripple it) they could give the other two a real run for their money.
Err, no they couldn't. The problem is that the carriers pay most of the cost of the phone so if it is completely crippled they will not subsidise it. If they do not subsidise it then most people will not buy it as it would take several hundred dollars up front.
Apple tried to dictate terms to the carriers, but then soon realised this was not possible and changed their tune. See the lack of tethering unless the iPhone is jailbroken or the carrier expressly allows it.
Isn't the photo part only valid with the separate paper part too?
Yup, but it doesn't really matter if it is valid or not in the context of proving who you are if stopped and searched. It also does not stop most people keeping their nice, credit card sized driving licence in with their credit cards for convenience. I am convinced this was the main reason for moving to a credit card sized photo driving licence anyway. It made perfect sense in my mind to do away with a driving licence completely one we were all legally forced to carry a photo ID.
I would have been happy to carry a single piece of state provided ID if it allowed me the freedom to travel anywhere in Europe without a passport and removed my need to pay for a new photo driving licence every ten years. ID cards in theory could have my life easier, but not in the form they were being implemented.
My point still stands though, most people just carry their photo driving licence with them anyway. How many people out there are really walking around with no form of ID? The licencing laws here in Britain now requires all people under the age of 25 to be required to produce ID to buy booze as well.
The fact is that the national ID card was going to cost us all a fortune, but not really make any other difference to our everyday lives since most law abiding citizens have loads proovable ID on them at all times anyway. It might not all be legally recognised, but it is still a pretty sure way to prove who you are just by searching your wallet.
It was also irrelevant anyway since the vast majority of people in britain now have a photo driving licence that performs the same function. You are already legally required to tell the DVLA where you live, and they immediately inform the police to update on the Police National Computer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_National_Computer
Since we already are required by law to carry our driving licence while driving most people just keep it in their wallet. This allows the police to stop and search you at any time and find out who you are. Stop and search in the UK does not require a warrant.
The ID card scheme was basically a way of legally requiring something which we already have pretty much by stealth anyway for most law abiding citizens. The difference is that they could have used it to hassle illegal immigrants and people who have something to hide more if it was more rigidly codified in law. We all are forced to carry our bankcards and god knows what else that proves who we are so who cares about on more piece of ID being forced upon us. I only objected to being charged for it, via txation or directly.
If the new government really want to sort out the crap Labour passed they need to repeal the Regulation of Investigatory Powers and Terrorism Acts. I have a feeling those are both here to stay though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_Investigatory_Powers_Act_2000
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_Act_2000
It required Hubs (or was that Ultrapeers ?)
This still made it a decentralised system. Any normal peer connected to the network could be promoted to an ultrapeer if it had long enough uptime, a decent amount of available bandwidth and fulfilled certain other criteria that I cannot remember. The result of this was that if your client was on 24x7 you could find you were running an ultrapeer without knowing it until you looked at the protocol section of whatever client you were using.
Gnutella was designed to bypass the problems that resulted in Napster being shut down so was built to ensure it could not be taken out by closing down a single server. In many ways it was built on the Internet's strengths.
And nothing of value was lost. Seriously, who uses an inefficient cruddy program like Limewire when you've got bit torrent?
I always wondered why everyone uses a centralised system like bittorrent to illegally download other peoples hard work when the gnutella network existed. It might be less efficient and slightly slower to find what you want, but at least they will never be able to shut it down completely. I know this may result in the death of Limewire, but that was not exactly the only Gnutella client in existence.
The fact is the gnutella's inefficencies are also in many ways its benefits.
I don't care if it's shiny, it's not my fault HTC churn out devices with 1GHz processors but no hardware acceleration on the UI, Palm can't put a decent SDK out to save their lives, or Google have only just started to get their act together.
Whereas Apple release devices with a 600Mhz CPU and then prevent any sort of Multitasking so you do not notice how dismal this is. Apple are very good at using interface design to cover up for the hardware failing of their own devices. Ok, the new 3GS model has new rendering chip to help with the display so it will get multitasking eventually but I always thought this was stroke of genius on their part by not releasing any hardware specs on their iPhone.
This way people did not reach their own conclusions about what caused the lag that the 1st generation suffered from until it was updated. They all blamed it on a slow processor in the HTC Hero because the specification was widely available, even though it was also fixed by a software update, the same as in the early iPhones.
Apple can do this as they completely control the iPhone platform and develop the hardware and software in house. Companies like HTC that use other companies operating systems have no choice but be a little more open about the harware spec of their devices.
The employer may be committing a GPL violation. You should bring that up with your employer and also inform them that it can cause a lot of badwill.
The problem with this is that they paid you to write the code. If a developer who worked for me suddenly started saying I had to release the code he had written as he had taken from a GPL project I would insist he went reworked the code to not use any contaminated code.
The problem is that this may still not allow the university to close source the project and keep what they think they already own . If this was the case, then wave goodbye to your first graduate job as your manager is going to be pissed, even if it was his fault for not realising this was an issue sooner.
The moral of this story is that you have to be very careful before you appropriate code from open source projects when doing commercial development. If you are being contracted to write something, it all depends on whether you will have copyright on the code after the work is finished or if it will belong to the client. If you working by the hour, then you employer will certainly expect to own 100% of the code after you finish so you need to check with management whether they mind publishing the source.
Generally, the answer is that you should never even look at GPL code at work in case it gives you ideas. The employer can never usurp the GPL, but they can fire people or maybe even sue for damages if they think you have been dishonest about whether you were writing the code in the first place. I know that legally some of these thing may be arguable, but who wants to as legal arguments get expensive real quick.
That brings up loads of stuff about Google the search engine. I was more interested in Android Security Concerns since we are talking about the mobile phone platform here.
At some point, we as consumers need to step back from the glossy black surfaces, and sleek lines, and realize that the tools we buy should be stylish, but they should be functional first.
Not likely. Certain car manufacturers have been selling us pretty looking cars that broke down left right and centre for years and people have still bought them. Cars also cost far more than iPhones.
As strange as it may seem many people care more about looks and being trendy than they do about boring things like functionality, especially when it comes to things we are seen frequently in public with.