They have been spying on the Quakers, for fuck's sake. You know - the Protestant sect best known for militant PACIFICISM?!??
Um, yeah. Oddly, a lot of "pacifists" seem to have no problem with the other side waging war. There's no way a true pacifist would support either al Qaeda or the illegitimate government of Saddam Hussein.
You're arguing with yourself. You first state that "a company's purpose should not be to make money at any cost, legal or otherwise." In the next paragraph, you argue that a company can make more money in the long-term by being ethical. I thought making money didn't matter.
So, I shall help you.
A public company has a fiduciary (read: legal) duty to the shareholders to maximize its profits and therefore the value of their investments. One of the best ways that they can do that over the long-term is to act ethically and foster a sense of "goodwill" among their customers.
This isn't a new idea. Even SCO put a dollar value on "goodwill" that was lost after one of their acquisitions.
The argument is that there are often opportunities for short-term gain which would cost more in the long-term due to loss of goodwill. I can buy that argument, but most people nowadays are short-term thinkers.
You are correct that ethics matter. But, in a corporation, ultimately the bottom line is what matters.
I find this incomprehensible. Right now, Comcast is attacking BellSouth continuously in TV commercials over the incredible speed difference between cable and DSL. Yeah, I'm sure you can find someone with a shitty cable connection, but right now I'm getting 6Mb/s from Comcast. I've seen downloads at night of 850KB/s sustained, and regularly get 500KB/s during the day. They are continuously working to speed up their network and advertise that fact.
BellSouth is stuck with technology that cannot compete on speed, so their response is to make the speed worse? Only in a monopoly telecom would that make any sense.
Comcast is also doing an all-out assault on "the dish", which BellSouth pushes as an alternative to cable. I think Comcast is winning that battle, too.
I'm waiting for the next step where BellSouth tries to buy some legislation to shore up their failing internet business.
Personally, I'm more impressed by a "God" that can design the rules to the universe and start the big bang more than one who just created everything "as is", in motion.
You've hit the nail on the head.
I say this as a Christian. The whole ID argument can be boiled down to "evolution is possible, but for the really hard parts God had to wave a magic wand and give it a nudge." Worse yet, it deifies humans by stating that those parts just happens to be the parts whose evolution humans cannot fathom, putting God on equal footing.
I'm far more impressed by a universe that was created with such physical laws that life- and indeed, me- comes into existence by the very nature of that universe.
ID is nothing more than an insult to God. Nothing more.
All they have to do is provide some sort of incentive for switching to the new format, and before long there will be more people using the new over the old.
There are no incentives left. CDs last virtually forever (close enough for me) and sound great. And they'll sound as good 30 years from now. I replaced a sizable LP collection with CDs in the 90's, before I became disgusted with the music industry.
There have been a couple of high-end music formats suggested in the last few years, and they've all flopped badly. Don't expect anything to change soon. People are not going to dump their CD collection for something that will sound identical on 99% of the equipment in use in homes.
It would have taken a lot of gall from Sony to sue anyone who would blow the whistle on their rootkit. Their public image has been damaged enough as it is with the rootkit scandal to damage it even more with a stupid lawsuit.
IANAL, but my belief is that the clean hands doctrine would keep them out of court. They have lawyers to explain all of that to them, hopefully they'll be smart enough to hire techies to explain rootkits to them.
Microsoft is not alone and joins companies such as American Airlines, Ford and General Motors, Wal-Mart and more that have engaged in practices that while good for their stockholders, have not been good for the competition.
Right. No company cares to do what's good for their competition. Actually, each company has a fiduciary duty to do what's right for their stockholders, even if that is at the expense of their competition (which it normally is). I don't know why people seem so confused about this concept.
Microsoft's sins are related to anti-competitive practices which have been deemed illegal in the US and other parts of the world. Those practices are harmful not only to the competition, but indeed to consumers. That's a big difference.
In particular I refer to a show where you were examining fuel mileage on SUVs with windows open vs. air conditioning. As an engineer, I believe that you failed to conduct adequate experimentation to demonstrate anything other than results at a single data point and you didn't make that clear to your viewers.
Heh, I saw that one. And they declared the myth busted. But, they were going 45MPH. This was when I actually questioned their scientific background, because it seems common knowledge that the air resistance will increase with the square of the speed while the power consumed by the AC will remain constant. If in fact the windows down increases drag over having the windows up (which is a no-brainer), then it follows that there is some speed at which you're better off running the AC with the windows up. It is apparently above 45MPH for the test vehicle, but given how quickly wind drag increases, I'd imagine that point is far less than highway speeds of 65MPH.
I think they need a few physicists to help them on the show, much like CSI has actual scientists helping them. If they do have people helping them, someone needs a boot in the rear.
Even theoretically, that is impossible with any known technology. When you send an encrypted message to someone, you also have to supply the key if you want them to read the message. No matter how you try to hide or cloak such a key, at some point it has to be used to unlock the message. At that point, both the key and the message can be intercepted.
You're right, but it can be made awfully difficult if you control the hardware that does the decoding. Witness the xbox.
Frankly, I think it's unlikely the css would have been cracked already were it not for software dvd players. Think about that.
The difference with a CD is that the music is on the CD in a raw format. It's a completely different beast.
What I want to know is how two small time startups like First4Internet and SunnComm steal all the publicity from Macrovision.
Where is the analysis of CDS-300? Macrovision is the 800lb gorilla in this business, but nobody cares about them.
Just my opinion, but I believe it's because Macrovision has a reputation and they care about it. What the record companies ultimately want (complete end-to-end control of a set of bits) isn't really possible with CD technology. Period. Macrovision probably told them that.
Meanwhile, F4I is jumping up and down yelling "hey, we can secure your cd's!" Record company execs aren't smart enough to ask the right questions or understand that it's impossible, and so end up selling rootkits. The only reason this hasn't completely blown up yet is that the other labels haven't started selling their own rootkits yet. Dualing rootkits might end up crashing computers, at which point people would be very angry.
Again, just my opinion, but F4I looks pretty shady from reading their website. They also sell an "image filtering" product (look at their homepage, it's featured prominently) which supposedly "accurately detects pornographic and inappropriate images and text in digital data transmission providing effective filtering solutions for email, websites and Internet chatrooms." Direct quote, that. For those of you who don't know this, our current image processing technology isn't capable of detecting a pornographic image. I'm not sure what their software actually does.
What I am sure of is that there are probably more than a couple large companies who really want to make sure their employees aren't surfing porn sites at work. Same thing, different industry.
She worked as an RN making PHP5000/month, about US$120 at the time. It would take an entire year's salary just to afford a plane ticket to the US.
But, have no fear, she lived like a queen because the Philippines uses the metric system so everything there is just dirt cheap. The rent is comparable to your parents' basement...
As you can see none of it was chosen for convenience (at least as far as conversion of units is concerned).
You just proved me right. I never said the conversions were created for convenience, just the units. The metric system has convenient conversions at the expense of inconvenient units.
For scientific measurements, the convenient conversions of the metric system win every time, and in fact that's what we use (note, for instance, that the "volt" is a metric unit). But if I need to measure something around the house, which for most of us constitutes 99.99999999% of all measuring that we'll do in our lives, English units win every single time due to the convenience of the units.
That means that special labeling is done just for us. That also means, our goods are more expensive.
LOL! What a loon. Our goods are dirt cheap. Look, my wife is from the Philippines. I know people like you never get out of your parents' basement, so let me explain this to you in simple terms. A worker at Jollibee gets PHP20/hour (PHP is PHilippine Peso), and a regular value meal is around PHP90. So, if the worker wants to eat there, they work 4.5 hours just to pay for the meal. Compare that to here where McDonald's pays US$7/hour and the meal is US$4.50, about, oh 35 or 40 minutes of work. It's not a fair comparison since the meal at Jollibee is about 2/3 - 3/4 as much food as what you'd get here in a meal.
Minimum wage there is PHP220/day, I think. That's about US$4.
I have no idea what you think is expensive, but, buddy, you have no fucking clue.
Sadly, at this point, we have raised several whole generations without as much metric as we had in the 60's, and 70's. When we decide to finally change, it will be expensive and hard. reagan's choice was very short-sighted.
Bullshit. We wouldn't save any money by changing all of our signs to metric. Instead, we would waste a bunch of money to "upgrade" a lot of signs that don't need it.
Look, what the metric system does is give us units that are easily converted. So, a meter is 100 centimeters, etc. Our English system uses powers of 2 and 3 instead of 10. But there's a major difference. The units of measure in the English system were chosen for convenience, not because they happen to be a multiple of 10 larger or smaller than something else. I've always said that if you want to get people to use the metric system, make a metric "foot".
If there's a difference in philosphy here then can someone please point it out to me? I can't be the only one befuddled by the difference of opinion between the two issues around here.
Sure, but if you haven't figured this out yet I doubt any of us explaining it to you slowly will help.
The US doesn't control the internet. That's the policy. The US isn't "keeping control", they are instead "keeping it uncontrolled."
Imagine a room full of kids that are doing what a group of unsupervised kids would do, with a really big guy standing at the door watching but not saying anything. Now imagine some other "adults" (and I use the term loosely here) wants to come in and make them stop. The really big guy doesn't let them in.
He's not controlling the kids.
Now, think about this analogy. The nations that are interested in "controlling" the internet include petty 3rd world dictatorships, China, mostly countries that strictly control their own citizens and want to extend that reach. The rest are packaging it as simpletonistic anti-Americanism.
The fact of the matter is that they can go out and create their own little internets and do whatever they want. I won't miss their spam and I rarely visit their web sites. What we're doing is proper, this is a non-issue.
It's an even worse day for first4internet. Their business just got flushed, and they probably have a pack of Sony lawyers negotiating for their firstborn about now.
The people who own copyrights in lame need to go after Sony for $160K/cd that has been shipped. Perhaps they can set up a call center where Sony can call in to "settle".
Yes, I'm serious. It's time to turn this shit back around on these bastards.
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So Bush lied, but Kerry, Clinton (both), et al didn't lie when they said the same things?
Let's start with George Galloway. That was easy.
Um, yeah. Oddly, a lot of "pacifists" seem to have no problem with the other side waging war. There's no way a true pacifist would support either al Qaeda or the illegitimate government of Saddam Hussein.
The entire planet already knows this (and we don't "believe", we "have no doubt"), otherwise the whole "smart nerd" stereotype wouldn't exist.
clear off the rest of the chip, since nobody uses itanium, anyway...
Taco's still trying to get in...
You're arguing with yourself. You first state that "a company's purpose should not be to make money at any cost, legal or otherwise." In the next paragraph, you argue that a company can make more money in the long-term by being ethical. I thought making money didn't matter.
So, I shall help you.
A public company has a fiduciary (read: legal) duty to the shareholders to maximize its profits and therefore the value of their investments. One of the best ways that they can do that over the long-term is to act ethically and foster a sense of "goodwill" among their customers.
This isn't a new idea. Even SCO put a dollar value on "goodwill" that was lost after one of their acquisitions.
The argument is that there are often opportunities for short-term gain which would cost more in the long-term due to loss of goodwill. I can buy that argument, but most people nowadays are short-term thinkers.
You are correct that ethics matter. But, in a corporation, ultimately the bottom line is what matters.
I find this incomprehensible. Right now, Comcast is attacking BellSouth continuously in TV commercials over the incredible speed difference between cable and DSL. Yeah, I'm sure you can find someone with a shitty cable connection, but right now I'm getting 6Mb/s from Comcast. I've seen downloads at night of 850KB/s sustained, and regularly get 500KB/s during the day. They are continuously working to speed up their network and advertise that fact.
BellSouth is stuck with technology that cannot compete on speed, so their response is to make the speed worse? Only in a monopoly telecom would that make any sense.
Comcast is also doing an all-out assault on "the dish", which BellSouth pushes as an alternative to cable. I think Comcast is winning that battle, too.
I'm waiting for the next step where BellSouth tries to buy some legislation to shore up their failing internet business.
Personally, I'm more impressed by a "God" that can design the rules to the universe and start the big bang more than one who just created everything "as is", in motion.
You've hit the nail on the head.
I say this as a Christian. The whole ID argument can be boiled down to "evolution is possible, but for the really hard parts God had to wave a magic wand and give it a nudge." Worse yet, it deifies humans by stating that those parts just happens to be the parts whose evolution humans cannot fathom, putting God on equal footing.
I'm far more impressed by a universe that was created with such physical laws that life- and indeed, me- comes into existence by the very nature of that universe.
ID is nothing more than an insult to God. Nothing more.
You must be new here. Check out the bluetooth story a couple of days ago.
And an advertisement, all in one convenient package!
It'll be a large grocery store, and they'll each have 100 4-year old kids. Boys, all of them hungry boys.
There are no incentives left. CDs last virtually forever (close enough for me) and sound great. And they'll sound as good 30 years from now. I replaced a sizable LP collection with CDs in the 90's, before I became disgusted with the music industry.
There have been a couple of high-end music formats suggested in the last few years, and they've all flopped badly. Don't expect anything to change soon. People are not going to dump their CD collection for something that will sound identical on 99% of the equipment in use in homes.
IANAL, but my belief is that the clean hands doctrine would keep them out of court. They have lawyers to explain all of that to them, hopefully they'll be smart enough to hire techies to explain rootkits to them.
Right. No company cares to do what's good for their competition. Actually, each company has a fiduciary duty to do what's right for their stockholders, even if that is at the expense of their competition (which it normally is). I don't know why people seem so confused about this concept.
Microsoft's sins are related to anti-competitive practices which have been deemed illegal in the US and other parts of the world. Those practices are harmful not only to the competition, but indeed to consumers. That's a big difference.
In particular I refer to a show where you were examining fuel mileage on SUVs with windows open vs. air conditioning. As an engineer, I believe that you failed to conduct adequate experimentation to demonstrate anything other than results at a single data point and you didn't make that clear to your viewers.
Heh, I saw that one. And they declared the myth busted. But, they were going 45MPH. This was when I actually questioned their scientific background, because it seems common knowledge that the air resistance will increase with the square of the speed while the power consumed by the AC will remain constant. If in fact the windows down increases drag over having the windows up (which is a no-brainer), then it follows that there is some speed at which you're better off running the AC with the windows up. It is apparently above 45MPH for the test vehicle, but given how quickly wind drag increases, I'd imagine that point is far less than highway speeds of 65MPH.
I think they need a few physicists to help them on the show, much like CSI has actual scientists helping them. If they do have people helping them, someone needs a boot in the rear.
Has anyone tried to install the rootkit under Wine?
Even theoretically, that is impossible with any known technology. When you send an encrypted message to someone, you also have to supply the key if you want them to read the message. No matter how you try to hide or cloak such a key, at some point it has to be used to unlock the message. At that point, both the key and the message can be intercepted.
You're right, but it can be made awfully difficult if you control the hardware that does the decoding. Witness the xbox.
Frankly, I think it's unlikely the css would have been cracked already were it not for software dvd players. Think about that.
The difference with a CD is that the music is on the CD in a raw format. It's a completely different beast.
What I want to know is how two small time startups like First4Internet and SunnComm steal all the publicity from Macrovision.
Where is the analysis of CDS-300? Macrovision is the 800lb gorilla in this business, but nobody cares about them.
Just my opinion, but I believe it's because Macrovision has a reputation and they care about it. What the record companies ultimately want (complete end-to-end control of a set of bits) isn't really possible with CD technology. Period. Macrovision probably told them that.
Meanwhile, F4I is jumping up and down yelling "hey, we can secure your cd's!" Record company execs aren't smart enough to ask the right questions or understand that it's impossible, and so end up selling rootkits. The only reason this hasn't completely blown up yet is that the other labels haven't started selling their own rootkits yet. Dualing rootkits might end up crashing computers, at which point people would be very angry.
Again, just my opinion, but F4I looks pretty shady from reading their website. They also sell an "image filtering" product (look at their homepage, it's featured prominently) which supposedly "accurately detects pornographic and inappropriate images and text in digital data transmission providing effective filtering solutions for email, websites and Internet chatrooms." Direct quote, that. For those of you who don't know this, our current image processing technology isn't capable of detecting a pornographic image. I'm not sure what their software actually does.
What I am sure of is that there are probably more than a couple large companies who really want to make sure their employees aren't surfing porn sites at work. Same thing, different industry.
Does your wife still work at Jollibee?
She worked as an RN making PHP5000/month, about US$120 at the time. It would take an entire year's salary just to afford a plane ticket to the US.
But, have no fear, she lived like a queen because the Philippines uses the metric system so everything there is just dirt cheap. The rent is comparable to your parents' basement...
As you can see none of it was chosen for convenience (at least as far as conversion of units is concerned).
You just proved me right. I never said the conversions were created for convenience, just the units. The metric system has convenient conversions at the expense of inconvenient units.
For scientific measurements, the convenient conversions of the metric system win every time, and in fact that's what we use (note, for instance, that the "volt" is a metric unit). But if I need to measure something around the house, which for most of us constitutes 99.99999999% of all measuring that we'll do in our lives, English units win every single time due to the convenience of the units.
Thanks for playing.
That means that special labeling is done just for us. That also means, our goods are more expensive.
LOL! What a loon. Our goods are dirt cheap. Look, my wife is from the Philippines. I know people like you never get out of your parents' basement, so let me explain this to you in simple terms. A worker at Jollibee gets PHP20/hour (PHP is PHilippine Peso), and a regular value meal is around PHP90. So, if the worker wants to eat there, they work 4.5 hours just to pay for the meal. Compare that to here where McDonald's pays US$7/hour and the meal is US$4.50, about, oh 35 or 40 minutes of work. It's not a fair comparison since the meal at Jollibee is about 2/3 - 3/4 as much food as what you'd get here in a meal.
Minimum wage there is PHP220/day, I think. That's about US$4.
I have no idea what you think is expensive, but, buddy, you have no fucking clue.
Sadly, at this point, we have raised several whole generations without as much metric as we had in the 60's, and 70's. When we decide to finally change, it will be expensive and hard. reagan's choice was very short-sighted.
Bullshit. We wouldn't save any money by changing all of our signs to metric. Instead, we would waste a bunch of money to "upgrade" a lot of signs that don't need it.
Look, what the metric system does is give us units that are easily converted. So, a meter is 100 centimeters, etc. Our English system uses powers of 2 and 3 instead of 10. But there's a major difference. The units of measure in the English system were chosen for convenience, not because they happen to be a multiple of 10 larger or smaller than something else. I've always said that if you want to get people to use the metric system, make a metric "foot".
If there's a difference in philosphy here then can someone please point it out to me? I can't be the only one befuddled by the difference of opinion between the two issues around here.
Sure, but if you haven't figured this out yet I doubt any of us explaining it to you slowly will help.
The US doesn't control the internet. That's the policy. The US isn't "keeping control", they are instead "keeping it uncontrolled."
Imagine a room full of kids that are doing what a group of unsupervised kids would do, with a really big guy standing at the door watching but not saying anything. Now imagine some other "adults" (and I use the term loosely here) wants to come in and make them stop. The really big guy doesn't let them in.
He's not controlling the kids.
Now, think about this analogy. The nations that are interested in "controlling" the internet include petty 3rd world dictatorships, China, mostly countries that strictly control their own citizens and want to extend that reach. The rest are packaging it as simpletonistic anti-Americanism.
The fact of the matter is that they can go out and create their own little internets and do whatever they want. I won't miss their spam and I rarely visit their web sites. What we're doing is proper, this is a non-issue.
It's an even worse day for first4internet. Their business just got flushed, and they probably have a pack of Sony lawyers negotiating for their firstborn about now.
The people who own copyrights in lame need to go after Sony for $160K/cd that has been shipped. Perhaps they can set up a call center where Sony can call in to "settle".
Yes, I'm serious. It's time to turn this shit back around on these bastards.