No seriously, your problem here is that the holes will be opened in the same heavy handed and ill-informed fashion as the inital screen was created.
Making the whole idea more worthless than not having it, given the false confidence argument.
The real problem we have here is this: People have false expectations from the idea of email. What I mean is, email is by it's nature, open and unlimited. Anyone can send emails to anyone else. It's a bit like walking down a busy road in London, and expecting people not to offer you leaflets. Sure you cannot refuse them, and in some cases make them less likely to give it to you (i find an evil stare helps!), this is like deleting or blocking spam.
To prevent spam at all, the only way is not to walk down that street. Given that your office is at the end, that doesn't work. So instead, don't expect every email to be useful, or relevant, or requested. Sure, you can stay off the main streets (keep your email off Usenet), keep your head down (Use Thunderbird instead of outlook, maybe get a filter like SpamAssassin or whatever), and refuse those leaflets (hit the delete button for 'Work From Home Now! afkasf').
That's just my take on the issue - it's an overblown problem. No-one ever died from too much spam, it's just a modern day hassle, so taking a philosophical approach will help you deal with it, like it does with traffic jams, house prices and fitness club leaflets.
OK, you have two major problems with this otherwise good idea:
1. If, as reported by the AC above, 'The DMCA only prohibits breaking encryption for copyrighted items', you have have some copyrighted info to secure. Your IP address, your net traffic, and someone else's music are 3 good examples of stuff you can't copyright.
2. You would have to sell your encryption software to the most poplular p2p networks (currently Kazaa etc) or create a more popular network. Why do I say sell? Well, you may be releasing your encryption protocol under the GPL, but there are costs involved with implementing it. Sharmen Networks et al are businesses - interested in the bottom line. Therefore, your ideas must increase or retain enough advertising space to pay for the costs involved. Writing and destributing new versions of their software, defending allegations about supporting Copyright Infringement, etc, etc. Think about it from their perspective.
If you can defeat those 2, then you have an idea on your hands.
Internet explorer overwrote the cached content for me with the 'No bandwith' page.
The text (from a mirror):
The marvellous transformation of Bob the Builder
Bob the Builder. A lot of people know him, he is an all round Mr. Fix-it handyman sort of chap. He is the subject of a TV show and videos along with much merchandising. Worshipped by a lot of children gave him confidence, possibly buoyed by these successes he ventured into fresh territory. Hostile territory. Where forces lurked beyond his fixing, forces that warped him into a twisted copy of his former self, made him into something that could change between his former chirpy self and something that looked the same but spoke in many voices most of which are not nice. Here is the tale of how this came to pass. As a morale boosting exercise, Bob the Builder was brought into our office. The idea being that if someone was having a bad day then Bob could help them through it. The model we received has a story book with it and you can read along with Bob by pressing the numbered patches on his body. Bob's voice is bright and chirpy and, above all, all so British. About five minutes after having Bob quite a few people started muttering about making Bob say something else, this just goes to show the danger of lobbing an electronic toy in amongst a mob IS Professionals - the desire to hack things became strong.
So off to google we went to see if anyone else had managed to do the job already. After a bit of a search around we found no hits on hacking a Bob the Builder toy, someone had hacked a talking fish but that was not what we were after. After failing to find anything on Google we did a bit of exploratory surgery by unpicking the stitching. Pulling out the electronic voice box revealed a bit of a setback, the electronics that controlled the voice were sealed under a blob of black epoxy. Evidently, there was no simple way to modify the existing hardware to bend it to our will. Another method needed to be found.
As it happened, not long before Bob turned up we had been digging into our diesel generator voice notification machine with the view to reprogramming it. The voice recorder part of the machine was the APR9600 made by APlus Inc. This chip can provide up to eight short messages, is programmable on the fly and does not need any MPU to perform these functions. In short, the chip was an ideal fit for what we wanted to do. By paralleling the existing switch points used to trigger the original speech segments and switching the speaker outputs between the original chip and the new one we could give Bob a whole new personality but, more importantly, we could keep the original Bob intact which is something we needed to do. We had a plan...
Sourcing the APR9600 was surprisingly difficult but we managed to locate one place that sold them locally which saved us importing one from overseas. We needed a container of some sort to hold the circuitry, given the APR9600 is a 28 pin DIP, an old film canister made a reasonable sized container to provide protection for the circuitry. A piece of veroboard was cut to fit into the canister, the very few passive components required for the operation of the APR9600 fitted fairly easily into the restricted space. The circuit is almost exactly the same as the example given in the applications notes for a eight segment recorder, the only difference is that the input is fed via an external active source (clamped by a couple of paralleled diodes) instead of an electret microphone. The APR9600 is a wonderful device, it handles all the anti-aliasing filtering, AGC, digitisation, storage and playback of the sound samples by itself, the passive components are only there to set the sample rate and the AGC time constant. Once the circuit was built, it was tested on the bench - interestingly enough, the first segment of the APR9600 appears to be factory programmed someone saying some Taiwanese - probably as a factory test. After a short debug the device was fully operational and was mounted into the film
DAMN DAMN DAMN I'm a subscriber, so I read the while, stupidly failed to copy it, surfed away and lost it to the geocites cap.
Basically the jist of the story is, the PHB installs this stuffed, talking, toy. They experiment on it, discover voice box to be un-moddable, and buy a replacement one, using their experience with the voice unit of their diesel generator(?), then program and insert said unit. Site includes more details, and cute pictures of toy, including toy with extracted entrails.
Yeah it's like the whole 'No-one ever got fired for choosing Oracle' thing. In this case 'No-one ever got fired for choosing Common Criteria software'. The important thing to remember here is that a lot of central government positions and even more local government positions are taken by people who could not support their employment in the private sector. Another interesting point in this article is that statement that the Linux market is expected to grow from $2 billion to more than $5 billion in 2006. That's a very important increase in a short period of time. Definitly something for Microsoft to be worried about.
The answer to "Why do you have to click 'Start' to stop" has been answered more than adequatly by Raymond Chen here: http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/raymondc/categor yview.a spx/History
To sum up his answer: While trying to create a simple yet space efficient design, they decided on a single button in the bottom left. This was called the 'System' button. However users would boot the system and look at it with a puzzled expression. So they called it 'Start'. Then they asked the users to shut down the system, and guess where they clicked? Yeah. The start button. So that's why it is.
RTFA, you linked to it. It's a Dell Latitude. Good article though, I needed a laugh.
Re:calling clueful car manufacturers
on
Pods Unite
·
· Score: 1
drum roll!!!
Car manufacturers have been at this one for years. I know for a fact that Ford, Vauxhall (GMC) and Citroen have had non standard stereo units for at least 5 years, probably others too.
It is designed to reduce vehicle theft (because people always go for manufacturers standard systems) but mainly to increase sales of stereo upgrades, which are one of the more profitable add ons for a new car. Some manufacturers make over 50% profit on stereo upgrades.
This is actually very important information! This very commen ADSL modem from PC World UK causes random hangups with Athlons running the VIA chipset. Simply insert a PCI USB card and watch your problems go away. This one was a cast-iron MF of a problem to solve July 2002, before this article and many like it were written. I went through 2 modems, 2 leads, 7 phone calls to my ISP, the very helpful Demon Internet, 4 trips to PC World, 3 full system re-installs and an upgrade, and many hours of work to solve this one. The internals of this modem belong to a Fujistu model too, and at the time, there was sod all information online about it. So watch out!
Europeans typically pay about the equivalent of a modern day 19" color TV per year per TV in their household for the right to have and watch that TV. Wrong, Wrong, Wrong! This post is completely incorrect, in almost every detail! 1. This applies only in the UK AFAIK, and certainly does not apply across Europe. 2. The license fee as payable for an entire household. In my house we have 5 televisions, and one license. 3. The fee covers the reception of public and commercial broadcast television. Merely owning a TV set does NOT make you liable for a license fee. The one element of truth in this may be the price - we pay £116/year for a license. That may cover the cost of a cheap TV. However UK citizens in general do not feel that this is particularly bad value for money. While it may be expensive on a per-channel basis, the quality of the channels is very high, and there are many additional services provided by the BBC, such as the excellent bbc.co.uk, the UK's most visited website IIRC. For anyone wanting to know more about the subject, try these sources of real facts: TV Licensing BBCi, The UK's #1 most visited website and to balance the debate: BBC Resistance - the campaign to abolish the TV License and for a laugh: 19" Televisions for under £116
no no no rtfa it's not capitalism, anything like that. i don't care if microsoft gives away windows free with cereal, the point is it deliberatly co-ercing one particular company into accepting it's products by using underhand tactics. They can't simply target their competition with hostile action in this way. sure they can undercut them, but not brute-force them.
Apologies for attacking your good name:) I also don't know much about Lindows, but if it is a simple close replacement than microsoft clearly are aiming for the market that chose lindows on cost (and possibly those that regretted their choice). Those who make a policy decision on non cost reasons may well simply buy their system from their favourite dealer then have a barbeque with the windows CD...
If you had bought a Lindows system, why would you wanna buy XP. Assuming you are not trolling: This is an frontal attack on the company and it's policies. They hope to make it more profitable for the company to sell windows than linux, thereby killing off another competitor. It's just the first stage of knocking out consumer decision making.
plus one extra use: at home, my desk with my PC, my laptop, my scanner, my pile of CDs and my glass of beer is out of capacity for a printer. I have no space to left or right, due to a inconvinent bed and door, but immediatly behind is a handy chest of drawers. Now, I can't and wouldn't want to run an enourmous USB cable around 3 walls of the room - it would have to be at least 8m long or go over the door, or under the carpet or something like that. That's where my bluetooth adapter comes in. It's cheap, simple and reliable. Now my printer has lots of space and I can put my beer down again.
The New Scientist report is both inaccurate and out of date. A more timely report was published last week at the BBC. All the same, this is a very interesting move for the ESA, and for Europe. A challenging move here could well help our efforts towards a more united Europe. This is a rare 'carrot' for UK residents, more used the threat of monetory union and other unpleasent symptoms of a united Europe.
The moon's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there
There are some areas of China like that...
Seriously though, there are loads of potential advantages to a permanant moonbase - if anything, more advantages than the bases in the artic/antartic that several countries maintain. And it does mean that the rest of the world will have to take them somewhat more seriously - although their technology may be a little more crude that the US, with money, time, and lives to throw at projects like these, they may will pull ahead of the US in some fields. The potential advances in technology from a mission like this may just leave the rest of the world a little green still. Don't forgot how the US itself started, with blood, sweat and patriotism - and you don't need to 3G mobile phones to supply those qualities.
Whereas an identical flat within 1 1/2hrs commute costs £120-£350k. UK average salary: £27,000 Minimum salary to buy the cheapest as a first time buyer: £35,000.
Is there any link between 9% voting turnout in 20-24 yr old bracket and UK government total ignorance of issues that affect this group? Hell yeah.
Another interesting fact: the group most likely to vote, 50-55 yr old bracket, own the high %age of property in the UK.
Current soaring UK house prices are not an accident - they are a deliberate government policy.
The ratio of house prices to salaries in the UK is now at it's highest since records began in 1900.
Flippancy aside, that's actually a vaguely interesting question - 'Are there any Slashdot members who have never directly used any variant of MS Windows?' I think close to every Slashdot user has at some point in their life sat in front of a Windows variant PC. There's probably a poll on it somewhere. To stay roughly on-topic, I think DVD+Rs sometimes work in Samsung 709s, for all the owners of that popular model.
Save your mod points. No need to click on the article, it compares Bruce Almighty's first week with TMR's second week. A noticebly more scientific study is available at IMDB.com. To be fair to CNN, they do point out their article is crap, with a quote from Warner Bros. You can't compare an R-rated movie over a holiday period with movies that appeal to a broad family audience. This would appear to be what they have done - and further bias it by comparing chalk with cheese.
This has been proved by the Slashdot effect in the past. For example, the latest Doom 3 video, although just 31mb, was almost impossible to get hold of by regular download, yet I found that BitTorrent maxed out my connection, giving me 60k/sec all through. The days of smoking servers are over, Slashdot is powering the age of fast downloads. Well, with a bit of imagination anyway.
while they cannot prove you are a student, they will try and enforce the rule on anyone of typical student age. obviously hidiously inaccurate, but it serves the purpose to reduce vandalism/theft/staff abuse in stores near schools/colleges/universities. Where I live shops near primary & secondary schools use this rule to prevent kids shoplifting sweets, fags, booze and porn mags.
This article doesn't really add anything new IMHO. There is one sure way to keep yourself free of such an attack, which also helps to protect you against more common attacks such as burglary, car theft and mugging. Keep a low profile. It sounds blase but it is one of the simplest and most effective defenses. In this case, the target has set himself up for attack, and IMHO deserved it. For more common attacks, you can avoid notice by not flaunting stealable possessions, avoiding dangerous areas where possible, and not provoking other members of the public. All of the above apply well to target in question. Just my £0.02
Slashdot Mirror
Kinda like free speech?
No seriously, your problem here is that the holes will be opened in the same heavy handed and ill-informed fashion as the inital screen was created.
Making the whole idea more worthless than not having it, given the false confidence argument.
The real problem we have here is this: People have false expectations from the idea of email. What I mean is, email is by it's nature, open and unlimited. Anyone can send emails to anyone else. It's a bit like walking down a busy road in London, and expecting people not to offer you leaflets. Sure you cannot refuse them, and in some cases make them less likely to give it to you (i find an evil stare helps!), this is like deleting or blocking spam.
To prevent spam at all, the only way is not to walk down that street. Given that your office is at the end, that doesn't work. So instead, don't expect every email to be useful, or relevant, or requested. Sure, you can stay off the main streets (keep your email off Usenet), keep your head down (Use Thunderbird instead of outlook, maybe get a filter like SpamAssassin or whatever), and refuse those leaflets (hit the delete button for 'Work From Home Now! afkasf').
That's just my take on the issue - it's an overblown problem. No-one ever died from too much spam, it's just a modern day hassle, so taking a philosophical approach will help you deal with it, like it does with traffic jams, house prices and fitness club leaflets.
OK, you have two major problems with this otherwise good idea:
1. If, as reported by the AC above, 'The DMCA only prohibits breaking encryption for copyrighted items', you have have some copyrighted info to secure. Your IP address, your net traffic, and someone else's music are 3 good examples of stuff you can't copyright.
2. You would have to sell your encryption software to the most poplular p2p networks (currently Kazaa etc) or create a more popular network. Why do I say sell? Well, you may be releasing your encryption protocol under the GPL, but there are costs involved with implementing it. Sharmen Networks et al are businesses - interested in the bottom line. Therefore, your ideas must increase or retain enough advertising space to pay for the costs involved. Writing and destributing new versions of their software, defending allegations about supporting Copyright Infringement, etc, etc. Think about it from their perspective.
If you can defeat those 2, then you have an idea on your hands.
In other words, you should tax people for having children, to offset education costs?
It's a dumb example, but the point I'm making is that the greatest cost to society usually comes from those least able to afford it.
Welfare, Defense and Education are your biggest bills, and these do not lend themselves to punitive style taxation.
Internet explorer overwrote the cached content for me with the 'No bandwith' page.
The text (from a mirror):
The marvellous transformation of Bob the Builder
Bob the Builder. A lot of people know him, he is an all round Mr. Fix-it handyman sort of chap. He is the subject of a TV show and videos along with much merchandising. Worshipped by a lot of children gave him confidence, possibly buoyed by these successes he ventured into fresh territory. Hostile territory. Where forces lurked beyond his fixing, forces that warped him into a twisted copy of his former self, made him into something that could change between his former chirpy self and something that looked the same but spoke in many voices most of which are not nice. Here is the tale of how this came to pass.
As a morale boosting exercise, Bob the Builder was brought into our office. The idea being that if someone was having a bad day then Bob could help them through it. The model we received has a story book with it and you can read along with Bob by pressing the numbered patches on his body. Bob's voice is bright and chirpy and, above all, all so British. About five minutes after having Bob quite a few people started muttering about making Bob say something else, this just goes to show the danger of lobbing an electronic toy in amongst a mob IS Professionals - the desire to hack things became strong.
So off to google we went to see if anyone else had managed to do the job already. After a bit of a search around we found no hits on hacking a Bob the Builder toy, someone had hacked a talking fish but that was not what we were after. After failing to find anything on Google we did a bit of exploratory surgery by unpicking the stitching. Pulling out the electronic voice box revealed a bit of a setback, the electronics that controlled the voice were sealed under a blob of black epoxy. Evidently, there was no simple way to modify the existing hardware to bend it to our will. Another method needed to be found.
As it happened, not long before Bob turned up we had been digging into our diesel generator voice notification machine with the view to reprogramming it. The voice recorder part of the machine was the APR9600 made by APlus Inc. This chip can provide up to eight short messages, is programmable on the fly and does not need any MPU to perform these functions. In short, the chip was an ideal fit for what we wanted to do. By paralleling the existing switch points used to trigger the original speech segments and switching the speaker outputs between the original chip and the new one we could give Bob a whole new personality but, more importantly, we could keep the original Bob intact which is something we needed to do. We had a plan...
Sourcing the APR9600 was surprisingly difficult but we managed to locate one place that sold them locally which saved us importing one from overseas. We needed a container of some sort to hold the circuitry, given the APR9600 is a 28 pin DIP, an old film canister made a reasonable sized container to provide protection for the circuitry. A piece of veroboard was cut to fit into the canister, the very few passive components required for the operation of the APR9600 fitted fairly easily into the restricted space. The circuit is almost exactly the same as the example given in the applications notes for a eight segment recorder, the only difference is that the input is fed via an external active source (clamped by a couple of paralleled diodes) instead of an electret microphone. The APR9600 is a wonderful device, it handles all the anti-aliasing filtering, AGC, digitisation, storage and playback of the sound samples by itself, the passive components are only there to set the sample rate and the AGC time constant. Once the circuit was built, it was tested on the bench - interestingly enough, the first segment of the APR9600 appears to be factory programmed someone saying some Taiwanese - probably as a factory test. After a short debug the device was fully operational and was mounted into the film
DAMN DAMN DAMN I'm a subscriber, so I read the while, stupidly failed to copy it, surfed away and lost it to the geocites cap.
Basically the jist of the story is, the PHB installs this stuffed, talking, toy. They experiment on it, discover voice box to be un-moddable, and buy a replacement one, using their experience with the voice unit of their diesel generator(?), then program and insert said unit. Site includes more details, and cute pictures of toy, including toy with extracted entrails.
Yeah it's like the whole 'No-one ever got fired for choosing Oracle' thing.
In this case 'No-one ever got fired for choosing Common Criteria software'.
The important thing to remember here is that a lot of central government positions and even more local government positions are taken by people who could not support their employment in the private sector.
Another interesting point in this article is that statement that the Linux market is expected to grow from $2 billion to more than $5 billion in 2006. That's a very important increase in a short period of time. Definitly something for Microsoft to be worried about.
The answer to "Why do you have to click 'Start' to stop" has been answered more than adequatly by Raymond Chen here:r yview.a spx/History
http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/raymondc/catego
To sum up his answer:
While trying to create a simple yet space efficient design, they decided on a single button in the bottom left. This was called the 'System' button. However users would boot the system and look at it with a puzzled expression. So they called it 'Start'. Then they asked the users to shut down the system, and guess where they clicked? Yeah. The start button. So that's why it is.
RTFA, you linked to it. It's a Dell Latitude.
Good article though, I needed a laugh.
drum roll!!!
Car manufacturers have been at this one for years. I know for a fact that Ford, Vauxhall (GMC) and Citroen have had non standard stereo units for at least 5 years, probably others too.
It is designed to reduce vehicle theft (because people always go for manufacturers standard systems) but mainly to increase sales of stereo upgrades, which are one of the more profitable add ons for a new car. Some manufacturers make over 50% profit on stereo upgrades.
This is actually very important information! This very commen ADSL modem from PC World UK causes random hangups with Athlons running the VIA chipset. Simply insert a PCI USB card and watch your problems go away.
This one was a cast-iron MF of a problem to solve July 2002, before this article and many like it were written. I went through 2 modems, 2 leads, 7 phone calls to my ISP, the very helpful Demon Internet, 4 trips to PC World, 3 full system re-installs and an upgrade, and many hours of work to solve this one. The internals of this modem belong to a Fujistu model too, and at the time, there was sod all information online about it. So watch out!
Europeans typically pay about the equivalent of a modern day 19" color TV per year per TV in their household for the right to have and watch that TV.
Wrong, Wrong, Wrong!
This post is completely incorrect, in almost every detail!
1. This applies only in the UK AFAIK, and certainly does not apply across Europe.
2. The license fee as payable for an entire household. In my house we have 5 televisions, and one license.
3. The fee covers the reception of public and commercial broadcast television. Merely owning a TV set does NOT make you liable for a license fee.
The one element of truth in this may be the price - we pay £116/year for a license. That may cover the cost of a cheap TV. However UK citizens in general do not feel that this is particularly bad value for money. While it may be expensive on a per-channel basis, the quality of the channels is very high, and there are many additional services provided by the BBC, such as the excellent bbc.co.uk, the UK's most visited website IIRC.
For anyone wanting to know more about the subject, try these sources of real facts:
TV Licensing
BBCi, The UK's #1 most visited website
and to balance the debate:
BBC Resistance - the campaign to abolish the TV License
and for a laugh:
19" Televisions for under £116
no no no rtfa
it's not capitalism, anything like that.
i don't care if microsoft gives away windows free with cereal, the point is it deliberatly co-ercing one particular company into accepting it's products by using underhand tactics.
They can't simply target their competition with hostile action in this way.
sure they can undercut them, but not brute-force them.
Apologies for attacking your good name :)
I also don't know much about Lindows, but if it is a simple close replacement than microsoft clearly are aiming for the market that chose lindows on cost (and possibly those that regretted their choice).
Those who make a policy decision on non cost reasons may well simply buy their system from their favourite dealer then have a barbeque with the windows CD...
If you had bought a Lindows system, why would you wanna buy XP.
Assuming you are not trolling:
This is an frontal attack on the company and it's policies.
They hope to make it more profitable for the company to sell windows than linux, thereby killing off another competitor.
It's just the first stage of knocking out consumer decision making.
probably just time to get a couple of pints and some peanuts then.
keep the change.
plus one extra use:
at home, my desk with my PC, my laptop, my scanner, my pile of CDs and my glass of beer is out of capacity for a printer. I have no space to left or right, due to a inconvinent bed and door, but immediatly behind is a handy chest of drawers. Now, I can't and wouldn't want to run an enourmous USB cable around 3 walls of the room - it would have to be at least 8m long or go over the door, or under the carpet or something like that.
That's where my bluetooth adapter comes in.
It's cheap, simple and reliable.
Now my printer has lots of space and I can put my beer down again.
The New Scientist report is both inaccurate and out of date.
A more timely report was published last week at the BBC.
All the same, this is a very interesting move for the ESA, and for Europe. A challenging move here could well help our efforts towards a more united Europe.
This is a rare 'carrot' for UK residents, more used the threat of monetory union and other unpleasent symptoms of a united Europe.
The moon's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there
There are some areas of China like that...
Seriously though, there are loads of potential advantages to a permanant moonbase - if anything, more advantages than the bases in the artic/antartic that several countries maintain.
And it does mean that the rest of the world will have to take them somewhat more seriously - although their technology may be a little more crude that the US, with money, time, and lives to throw at projects like these, they may will pull ahead of the US in some fields.
The potential advances in technology from a mission like this may just leave the rest of the world a little green still.
Don't forgot how the US itself started, with blood, sweat and patriotism - and you don't need to 3G mobile phones to supply those qualities.
Whereas an identical flat within 1 1/2hrs commute costs £120-£350k.
UK average salary: £27,000
Minimum salary to buy the cheapest as a first time buyer: £35,000.
Is there any link between 9% voting turnout in 20-24 yr old bracket and UK government total ignorance of issues that affect this group? Hell yeah.
Another interesting fact: the group most likely to vote, 50-55 yr old bracket, own the high %age of property in the UK.
Current soaring UK house prices are not an accident - they are a deliberate government policy.
The ratio of house prices to salaries in the UK is now at it's highest since records began in 1900.
Flippancy aside, that's actually a vaguely interesting question - 'Are there any Slashdot members who have never directly used any variant of MS Windows?'
I think close to every Slashdot user has at some point in their life sat in front of a Windows variant PC.
There's probably a poll on it somewhere.
To stay roughly on-topic, I think DVD+Rs sometimes work in Samsung 709s, for all the owners of that popular model.
Save your mod points.
No need to click on the article, it compares Bruce Almighty's first week with TMR's second week.
A noticebly more scientific study is available at IMDB.com.
To be fair to CNN, they do point out their article is crap, with a quote from Warner Bros.
You can't compare an R-rated movie over a holiday period with movies that appeal to a broad family audience.
This would appear to be what they have done - and further bias it by comparing chalk with cheese.
This has been proved by the Slashdot effect in the past.
For example, the latest Doom 3 video, although just 31mb, was almost impossible to get hold of by regular download, yet I found that BitTorrent maxed out my connection, giving me 60k/sec all through.
The days of smoking servers are over, Slashdot is powering the age of fast downloads.
Well, with a bit of imagination anyway.
Cool! Mine has 8 sockets. Let's get together!
while they cannot prove you are a student, they will try and enforce the rule on anyone of typical student age.
obviously hidiously inaccurate, but it serves the purpose to reduce vandalism/theft/staff abuse in stores near schools/colleges/universities.
Where I live shops near primary & secondary schools use this rule to prevent kids shoplifting sweets, fags, booze and porn mags.
This article doesn't really add anything new IMHO.
There is one sure way to keep yourself free of such an attack, which also helps to protect you against more common attacks such as burglary, car theft and mugging.
Keep a low profile.
It sounds blase but it is one of the simplest and most effective defenses.
In this case, the target has set himself up for attack, and IMHO deserved it.
For more common attacks, you can avoid notice by not flaunting stealable possessions, avoiding dangerous areas where possible, and not provoking other members of the public.
All of the above apply well to target in question.
Just my £0.02