I was chatting with some folks on the Vista team, and it turns out the bug is actually fairly interesting. Apparently the latest version of Windows Media Player infects the NT kernel with some DRM, and the only way to unlock them is to download your authorized user code from Microsoft.com... which unfortunately you can't do if you have a locked kernel. Who woulda guessed?
Hey, this is great news! I was trolling on the net the other day, and I found a mod that turns my original "Doom" into a nudefest... hundreds of young, naked women, some of whom may be underage! So this whole case is going to be a great precendent.
So, who wants to get in on the "ID" lawsuit with me? I mean, I got the game, then downloaded something that made the game do a naughty, within the game mechanics. That's close enough.
I'll agree with your definition of "Enemy combatants", but under a condition.
It only applies to enemy soldiers in your/own/ country. If you send your army to invade another country and destroy their military, you can't complain because some of the people fighting to free their country don't wear a recognizable uniform. YOU are the invader, and everyone in the country you've invaded is "the enemy". You can't have your cake and eat it too.
If you shout "pig" at every cop you pass in the street, pretty soon you will find somone who takes it to heart and will give you a bad time. Maybe this is a violation of your freedom of speech. But why do it in the first place?
The measure of your rights in a society is whether or not you can actually use them. Yes, it's a dickish thing to do, and yes, the cop, like any other citizen, is allowed to come over and discourage you from calling him names. However, unless you've actually broken the law, he's shouldn't be allowed to frisk you, arrest you, and throw you in jail for a few days without charge. Unfortunately, that seems to be an increasingly popular way for the police to deal with people they don't like, protestors, naer-do-wells, and anyone else deemed "Naughty in Their Sight".
Oh, wait, actually, it's perfectly by the book legal for you to be thrown in jail for a weekend for no reason whatsoever, with no lawyer, contact with anyone, etc. All they have to do is let you out Monday morning and say "oops, sorry", and you have no recourse. What does that say about the Land of the Free (tm)?
More often then not, it is directly the opposite of my own desires and preferences... When a site asks for my personal information... I have no problem at all about lying to them. I give a fake name, a fake zip code and a fake email.
I think I may have found out why your advertisements don't always match up with your desires and preferences...;)
Of course they were happy to approve this. It'll take effect just as the Republicans are getting relegated to "Minority Party" status, and then they can use it to sit around for the next 4 years going "I looked at this website, which a Republican President created, and found that for the last 9 years we've been paying Haliburton $500 per second in 'Consultant Fees'. For shame, Democrats, for shame!" Really, Joe Q Public won't know that Item X was actually attached to a spending bill in 1998 and is legislated to be in there for 20 years. He'll just go in, see "Hammer - $500" and blame the current Democratic administration.
I'd have thought/. would want to highlight the blogs' contribution to this event.
Don't worry, the dupe will take care of that. Look for it about 2 stories up, right under "Magic car can drive right into power substation, recharges 500 mile battery in 5 minutes while downloading 1.2 Libraries of Congress worth of music"
Like, for example, the way that the USA made the French invent a word for "inch" (France has used a mètre divided into 100 centimètres since time immemorial) rather than relabel disk drives and monitors being exported to France?
So, the French, living in France, a stones throw away from Britain, home of the Imperial system, never bothered inventing a french word for "inch", in spite of the millions of Brits passing through for hundreds of years.
The reason these guys will save us is not because they're funny. It's because they represent that most popular of rights, the right to a dissenting opinion, and they do it on a grand platform. They are reminding us all that it's important to question authority, to poke fun at the talking heads, and to not sit idly by and absorb the crap that spews from the "News" shows. I hope they get more viewers, that they get on earlier, on more stations, with a wider audience. Because one thing I've observed, is that watching the Daily Show and the Colbert Report encourages people to think, and we damn well need some more of that.
Yeah, because if you want to keep people from reading something except by your explicitly defined methods, putting it on the Internet is a great way to keep it locked down.
Idiots. Everything posted on the net is fair game, imho. Suggesting otherwise is just silly.
Funny how someone can misread this two different ways.
First, I skimmed it, and thought someone had snuck a pr0n story through. (Cox...laptop... exploding)
Then, I noticed the particular use of the apostrophe, and figured Cox had has enough Linux and was blowing up his laptop. (Alan Cox is exploding laptop)
Either way, I RTFA and it was a letdown. Though the pix were still cool. Fire is our friend. That's what my friend Ralph says.
Here ya go, from the site. The short answer is no, you can't be shot for having the FuzzyBunnies porn site. However, if someone makes a kids show called Fuzzy Bunnies, registers the site, but you register FuzyBunies.com for porn, then yes, you could go to BOHICA Club Fed. HTH, HAND.
Truth in Domain Names Act of 2003
As a part of the massive 2003 PROTECT Act (Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to end the Exploitation of Children Today Act), which included the AMBER Alert legislation, Congress passed the Truth in Domain Names Act. The Truth in Domain Names Act is an attempt to thwart the use of deceitful domain names for the purpose of attracting surfers to pornographic websites. A demonstration of the usefulness of the law is quite simple. Go to whitehouse.gov and you will find out information concerning the President of the United States; go to whitehouse.com and, well, you will find out something else; it may deal with White House interns but it is probably not what you are looking for if you meant to find out information concerning the latest executive order.
The legislation is straight forward. Those who use domain names in order to trick people into viewing obscenity will land up in the slammer; trick kids into viewing material harmful to minors and you end up in the slammer for longer (see discussion of obscenity and material harmful to minors).
The Department of Justice broke this new law in with a bang in 2003, arresting John Zuccarini. Zuccarini reportedly was a notorious typo squatter, taking advantage of individuals who type domain names incorrectly. Zuccarini apparently was the owner of Teltubbies.com and Bobthebiulder.com which directed individuals to a porn site known as Hanky Panky College . For these actions, Zuccarini, the first individual arrested under the Act, was sentanced to two and a half years comteplation of his deeds behind bars.
Robert Cannon. Updated March 4, 2004.
18 U.S.C. 2252B. Misleading domain names on the Internet
(a) Whoever knowingly uses a misleading domain name on the Internet with the intent to deceive a person into viewing material constituting obscenity shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both.
(b) Whoever knowingly uses a misleading domain name on the Internet with the intent to deceive a minor into viewing material that is harmful to minors on the Internet shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 4 years, or both.
(c) For the purposes of this section, a domain name that includes a word or words to indicate the sexual content of the site, such as `sex' or `porn', is not misleading.
(d) For the purposes of this section, the term `material that is harmful to minors' means any communication, consisting of nudity, sex, or excretion, that, taken as a whole and with reference to its context--
(1) predominantly appeals to a prurient interest of minors;
(2) is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community as a whole with respect to what is suitable material for minors; and
(3) lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.
(e) For the purposes of subsection (d), the term `sex' means acts of masturbation, sexual intercourse, or physcial contact with a person's genitals, or the condition of human male or female genitals when in a state of sexual stimulation or arousal.'.
Re:You can't charge laptop batteries via USB.
on
USB Batteries
·
· Score: 1
He's right. It's a good idea to blast through college and not spend much money (hell, he got a degree and made a profit!). Post-secondary is insanely expensive these days, and it's leading to many people refusing to take it. After all, why should you spend $40,000 to get a degree that might get you an extra few grand a year, but will take you 20 years to pay off? If anything, you should work for a while, then go take your degree(s) in your late 20's or 30's. It seems to be becoming less and less valuable to have a degree. Sure, my first few years of IT, I would have been better off... but now that I'm > 13y in the industry and still going, employers see that number, and they don't care if I got my BA-IT a decade ago. And I agree with them there, experience is worth more than some piece of paper (Microsoft Certified Solitaire Expert, anyone?)
He's wrong. I blew through high-school in a year, and I'll never get back what I missed. You can repay loans, but you can never get back the social learning that you missed because you had your head burried in a book. It's worth all the money in the world if you know what to say when a beautiful woman suddenly appears in front of you. Oh, yeah, and, uh, friends and stuff too. Yanno. But mostly the women.
Now, I'm not saying that the superhero movies, comic books, novels, novellas, and plot cliches had it right... it would just seem to me, if you're going to make something as potentially dangerous, destructive, and nifty, as a black hole... you should work on how to UNmake it first.
This is a free market society. Why don't you create a cell phone manufacturing company that's very clear about how to wipe a phone? If the market wants or needs this then you'll get rich.
The problem with that is that the "Free market society" only applies to features that the general consumer can easily see and readily appreciate. For instance, no-one that I know of has made great leaps in the marketplace just by having their car where the gaskets wear out in 100,000KM instead of 90,000... but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't put that innovation in. I don't recall buying a computer soley because they advertised "Now with new CD drive designed to protect you from flying shards of broken CD!", but again, it's still something that should be done.
This isn't a case of free-market adjustments required. The cell programmers need to put in a "wipe" function, regardless of market pressure. The problem isn't that they aren't doing it right, and someone else should... the problem is just "They aren't doing it right". It wouldn't be a cost factor for them to do it right, it would just take some attention and thought into how they word and present it.
I will agree with you though, there is a large portion of responsibility that goes on the reseller who doesn't understand what he's doing or how to wipe it. I myself have bought second-hand computers that still have data, laptops, handhelds, used HDs, and yes, even cell phones where they weren't even cleared... still had the old owners numbers in it and everything. If people want to make money selling stuff, they need to understand what they're selling, and understand the risks involved. A used car salesman can't rightly complain about his cars bursting into flame because "I didn't know the Canyonero could do that!". He needs to understand the basics of his job, same as these people do.
I want to blame the sellers for being idiots and not properly clearing their devices... but really, it's the manufacturers who need to be clearer. Having different kind of "wipes" on a device but not labelling them differently is just plain stupid. There needs to be one option called "quick reset", and another called "Secure Wipe - You will lose everything forever, are you really sure???" and then have 5 queries after it. It's bad when a consumer gets misled by thinking "wipe" means "wipe", but I've had devices where I've found that my "wipe" wasn't total either, and it's because the manufacturer is misleading with their instructions.
That said, i remember the good old days, when you didn't loan out your floppies without running a wipe program on them... otherwise the boys found your 'secret stash' that you just deleted.
Slashdot Mirror
I was chatting with some folks on the Vista team, and it turns out the bug is actually fairly interesting. Apparently the latest version of Windows Media Player infects the NT kernel with some DRM, and the only way to unlock them is to download your authorized user code from Microsoft.com... which unfortunately you can't do if you have a locked kernel.
Who woulda guessed?
Hey, this is great news! I was trolling on the net the other day, and I found a mod that turns my original "Doom" into a nudefest... hundreds of young, naked women, some of whom may be underage! So this whole case is going to be a great precendent.
So, who wants to get in on the "ID" lawsuit with me? I mean, I got the game, then downloaded something that made the game do a naughty, within the game mechanics. That's close enough.
Funny how a comment so short, can be so right.
"Participant, Southeast Asian Wargames - Second Place".
See, now that's funny!
I think it has to be measured in "Rest of the World" numbers, because they didn't express it in VW Bug Headlights per Library of Congress.
(yeah, that's kinda lame, but I couldn't think of an Americanized measure of rapidity of movement, so I went with energy insted. Deal.)
I'll agree with your definition of "Enemy combatants", but under a condition.
/own/ country. If you send your army to invade another country and destroy their military, you can't complain because some of the people fighting to free their country don't wear a recognizable uniform. YOU are the invader, and everyone in the country you've invaded is "the enemy". You can't have your cake and eat it too.
It only applies to enemy soldiers in your
If you shout "pig" at every cop you pass in the street, pretty soon you will find somone who takes it to heart and will give you a bad time. Maybe this is a violation of your freedom of speech. But why do it in the first place?
The measure of your rights in a society is whether or not you can actually use them.
Yes, it's a dickish thing to do, and yes, the cop, like any other citizen, is allowed to come over and discourage you from calling him names.
However, unless you've actually broken the law, he's shouldn't be allowed to frisk you, arrest you, and throw you in jail for a few days without charge. Unfortunately, that seems to be an increasingly popular way for the police to deal with people they don't like, protestors, naer-do-wells, and anyone else deemed "Naughty in Their Sight".
Oh, wait, actually, it's perfectly by the book legal for you to be thrown in jail for a weekend for no reason whatsoever, with no lawyer, contact with anyone, etc. All they have to do is let you out Monday morning and say "oops, sorry", and you have no recourse.
What does that say about the Land of the Free (tm)?
More often then not, it is directly the opposite of my own desires and preferences...
;)
When a site asks for my personal information... I have no problem at all about lying to them. I give a fake name, a fake zip code and a fake email.
I think I may have found out why your advertisements don't always match up with your desires and preferences...
Of course they were happy to approve this. It'll take effect just as the Republicans are getting relegated to "Minority Party" status, and then they can use it to sit around for the next 4 years going "I looked at this website, which a Republican President created, and found that for the last 9 years we've been paying Haliburton $500 per second in 'Consultant Fees'. For shame, Democrats, for shame!"
Really, Joe Q Public won't know that Item X was actually attached to a spending bill in 1998 and is legislated to be in there for 20 years. He'll just go in, see "Hammer - $500" and blame the current Democratic administration.
I'd have thought /. would want to highlight the blogs' contribution to this event.
Don't worry, the dupe will take care of that. Look for it about 2 stories up, right under "Magic car can drive right into power substation, recharges 500 mile battery in 5 minutes while downloading 1.2 Libraries of Congress worth of music"
Like, for example, the way that the USA made the French invent a word for "inch" (France has used a mètre divided into 100 centimètres since time immemorial) rather than relabel disk drives and monitors being exported to France?
So, the French, living in France, a stones throw away from Britain, home of the Imperial system, never bothered inventing a french word for "inch", in spite of the millions of Brits passing through for hundreds of years.
Wow, how unlikely.
The reason these guys will save us is not because they're funny. It's because they represent that most popular of rights, the right to a dissenting opinion, and they do it on a grand platform. They are reminding us all that it's important to question authority, to poke fun at the talking heads, and to not sit idly by and absorb the crap that spews from the "News" shows. I hope they get more viewers, that they get on earlier, on more stations, with a wider audience. Because one thing I've observed, is that watching the Daily Show and the Colbert Report encourages people to think, and we damn well need some more of that.
Yeah, because if you want to keep people from reading something except by your explicitly defined methods, putting it on the Internet is a great way to keep it locked down.
Idiots. Everything posted on the net is fair game, imho. Suggesting otherwise is just silly.
Funny how someone can misread this two different ways.
First, I skimmed it, and thought someone had snuck a pr0n story through. (Cox...laptop... exploding)
Then, I noticed the particular use of the apostrophe, and figured Cox had has enough Linux and was blowing up his laptop. (Alan Cox is exploding laptop)
Either way, I RTFA and it was a letdown. Though the pix were still cool. Fire is our friend. That's what my friend Ralph says.
Maybe we can use the 160 megapixel camera to take pictures of the servers hosting the Sidney image exploding, just like the Cox laptop.
Well...
I bet the terrorists will just love these.
Here ya go, from the site. The short answer is no, you can't be shot for having the FuzzyBunnies porn site. However, if someone makes a kids show called Fuzzy Bunnies, registers the site, but you register FuzyBunies.com for porn, then yes, you could go to BOHICA Club Fed. HTH, HAND.
Truth in Domain Names Act of 2003
As a part of the massive 2003 PROTECT Act (Prosecutorial Remedies and Other Tools to end the Exploitation of Children Today Act), which included the AMBER Alert legislation, Congress passed the Truth in Domain Names Act. The Truth in Domain Names Act is an attempt to thwart the use of deceitful domain names for the purpose of attracting surfers to pornographic websites. A demonstration of the usefulness of the law is quite simple. Go to whitehouse.gov and you will find out information concerning the President of the United States; go to whitehouse.com and, well, you will find out something else; it may deal with White House interns but it is probably not what you are looking for if you meant to find out information concerning the latest executive order.
The legislation is straight forward. Those who use domain names in order to trick people into viewing obscenity will land up in the slammer; trick kids into viewing material harmful to minors and you end up in the slammer for longer (see discussion of obscenity and material harmful to minors).
The Department of Justice broke this new law in with a bang in 2003, arresting John Zuccarini. Zuccarini reportedly was a notorious typo squatter, taking advantage of individuals who type domain names incorrectly. Zuccarini apparently was the owner of Teltubbies.com and Bobthebiulder.com which directed individuals to a porn site known as Hanky Panky College . For these actions, Zuccarini, the first individual arrested under the Act, was sentanced to two and a half years comteplation of his deeds behind bars.
Robert Cannon. Updated March 4, 2004.
18 U.S.C. 2252B. Misleading domain names on the Internet
(a) Whoever knowingly uses a misleading domain name on the Internet with the intent to deceive a person into viewing material constituting obscenity shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both.
(b) Whoever knowingly uses a misleading domain name on the Internet with the intent to deceive a minor into viewing material that is harmful to minors on the Internet shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 4 years, or both.
(c) For the purposes of this section, a domain name that includes a word or words to indicate the sexual content of the site, such as `sex' or `porn', is not misleading.
(d) For the purposes of this section, the term `material that is harmful to minors' means any communication, consisting of nudity, sex, or excretion, that, taken as a whole and with reference to its context--
(1) predominantly appeals to a prurient interest of minors;
(2) is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community as a whole with respect to what is suitable material for minors; and
(3) lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.
(e) For the purposes of subsection (d), the term `sex' means acts of masturbation, sexual intercourse, or physcial contact with a person's genitals, or the condition of human male or female genitals when in a state of sexual stimulation or arousal.'.
Joke: ->
/|\
You: O
/ \
He's right. It's a good idea to blast through college and not spend much money (hell, he got a degree and made a profit!). Post-secondary is insanely expensive these days, and it's leading to many people refusing to take it. After all, why should you spend $40,000 to get a degree that might get you an extra few grand a year, but will take you 20 years to pay off? If anything, you should work for a while, then go take your degree(s) in your late 20's or 30's. It seems to be becoming less and less valuable to have a degree. Sure, my first few years of IT, I would have been better off... but now that I'm > 13y in the industry and still going, employers see that number, and they don't care if I got my BA-IT a decade ago. And I agree with them there, experience is worth more than some piece of paper (Microsoft Certified Solitaire Expert, anyone?)
He's wrong. I blew through high-school in a year, and I'll never get back what I missed. You can repay loans, but you can never get back the social learning that you missed because you had your head burried in a book. It's worth all the money in the world if you know what to say when a beautiful woman suddenly appears in front of you.
Oh, yeah, and, uh, friends and stuff too. Yanno. But mostly the women.
+1 Insightful
or +1 Very True, if they had it.
Shame I can't mod your sig....
Now, I'm not saying that the superhero movies, comic books, novels, novellas, and plot cliches had it right... it would just seem to me, if you're going to make something as potentially dangerous, destructive, and nifty, as a black hole... you should work on how to UNmake it first.
The problem with that is that the "Free market society" only applies to features that the general consumer can easily see and readily appreciate. For instance, no-one that I know of has made great leaps in the marketplace just by having their car where the gaskets wear out in 100,000KM instead of 90,000... but that doesn't mean that they shouldn't put that innovation in. I don't recall buying a computer soley because they advertised "Now with new CD drive designed to protect you from flying shards of broken CD!", but again, it's still something that should be done.
This isn't a case of free-market adjustments required. The cell programmers need to put in a "wipe" function, regardless of market pressure. The problem isn't that they aren't doing it right, and someone else should... the problem is just "They aren't doing it right". It wouldn't be a cost factor for them to do it right, it would just take some attention and thought into how they word and present it.
I will agree with you though, there is a large portion of responsibility that goes on the reseller who doesn't understand what he's doing or how to wipe it. I myself have bought second-hand computers that still have data, laptops, handhelds, used HDs, and yes, even cell phones where they weren't even cleared... still had the old owners numbers in it and everything. If people want to make money selling stuff, they need to understand what they're selling, and understand the risks involved. A used car salesman can't rightly complain about his cars bursting into flame because "I didn't know the Canyonero could do that!". He needs to understand the basics of his job, same as these people do.
I want to blame the sellers for being idiots and not properly clearing their devices... but really, it's the manufacturers who need to be clearer. Having different kind of "wipes" on a device but not labelling them differently is just plain stupid. There needs to be one option called "quick reset", and another called "Secure Wipe - You will lose everything forever, are you really sure???" and then have 5 queries after it. It's bad when a consumer gets misled by thinking "wipe" means "wipe", but I've had devices where I've found that my "wipe" wasn't total either, and it's because the manufacturer is misleading with their instructions.
That said, i remember the good old days, when you didn't loan out your floppies without running a wipe program on them... otherwise the boys found your 'secret stash' that you just deleted.
Dangit, now you have me researching the caloric benefits of the average rat.