If they are competent enough to own an ipod or iphone you might consider a Mac, because iTunes does not play well with Linux.
If all the anyone wanted was email and the web - then there wouldn't be a market for iTunes - or any other program, would there?
The user knows he is being attacked by the technically competent but amoral geek. He might reasonably ask why the geek isn't policing his own community better.
What he won't take kindly to is being called stupid.
netscape went from total market domination to nothing in a few years. granted MS pulled from under handed moves to make it happen
I remember buying Microsoft's Internet Starter Kit in 1996.
It came with a handsome paperback book and a useful bundle of software, and sold directly for about $10-20.
Bundling IE with AOL was another smart move. Integrating a look-alike - work-alike - e-mail client and a browser into the Windows consumer product was a logical progression that made perfect sense to the user.
Even at that, though, how do we expect Bob, who lives 10 miles from town, to eat if he has to walk, in the middle of Winter to get his food? Would he have been previously banned from riding a horse?
Bob moves into town.
In the old days:
If you weren't able to control your horse, your horse would kill or maim you.
The nice thing about LIDAR is that unlike RADAR, I don't need a license to operate a jamming device. After all, it's just an extra "headlight."
You'll make the cop's day, broadcasting your approach.
You'll make the judge's day trying to explain how your jammer is a practical - plausible - source of illumination - and not interference with a police officer in the lawful performance of this duties.
Congratulations.
You are now in misdemeanor territory. Keep on trucking, and you just might get bumped up to the felony charge.
I'm not saying one should not take human behavior into account, but at least they should get the boundary conditions right, and one of those is that our resources are limited.
But those limits are not so easily fixed or defined.
The microchip is the perfect example.
It doesn't exist before 1958. It's economic, technological and social impact scarcely felt before the 1980s.
A hacker could might have installed a remote access program, downloaded the files manually, and then uninstalled the remote access program. There wouldn't be much evidence to suggest that this guy didn't download the kiddie porn himself.
Child porn becomes an obsession.
There are usually two elements in an arrest and conviction for possession:
Luck as nothing to do with it. Criminal investigation at its most basic isn't about tech, its about people. The frame has to fit or you look elsewhere.
The geek should give up his life of crime. He isn't as smart as he thinks. The schemes he contrives are overly complex and fragile. The human element is ignored.
And you know *why* that is? Because *IT'S NOT THE SAME*
Copyright infringement was being denounced as piracy while the Black Flag still flew over the Caribbean.
The NET act [No Electronic Theft] - passed and signed into law in 1997-98 - is a contemporary example of why the geek cannot hope to win this war on words.
In the American federal system ordinary criminal jurisdiction is state and local.
You'd have to dig quite deep into the federal criminal code to find any mention of theft at all.
If it comforts the geek that he hasn't been charged with theft - conviction on the felony charge still reduces his horizons to a 6x8 cinder block cell and a bunk mate named Big Mike.
Before copyright, there were no artists or writers clamouring for "protection"
Too often and too easily the geek rewrites history to serve his own needs:
In 1842 there was still no international copyright law, a condition that was stunting American letters and depriving authors on both sides of the Atlantic of a living. American letters and depriving authors on both sides of the Atlantic of a living. Britain was willing to recognize the copyright of foreign writers--but only if their countries reciprocated.
This American publishers adamantly refused to do. Instead, they competed in bribing English pressmen to get early sheets of British books. The sheets were rushed by boat over to the United States, where the jolly pirates churned out cheap editions in a matter of hours.
But it was not only British authors they were robbing. Few publishers were willing to pay American authors for books when they could purloin better-known British ones for free. Herman Melville was hurt by the lack of an international copyright, and such eminent American authors as Emerson, Longfellow, and Hawthorne had to pay publishers an advance in order to have their books produced. The early giants of American literature had to scramble for work at customhouses and in other government jobs, and Edgar Allan Poe, according to his biographer Sidney P. Moss, had to raise advance money for one collection of poems by soliciting 75 cents a head from his fellow West Point classmates, to whom he then dedicated the book.
Dickens was never forced into quite such desperate straits, but neither was he so indifferent to "heaps and mines of gold" as he made out in Boston. He had, after all, spent part of his childhood in a debtors' prison, and as the most popular writer in the world, "of all men living I am the greatest loser.
In private he sarcastically mimicked his hosts: "The Americans read him; the free, enlightened, independent Americans; and what more would he have?... As to telling them they will have no literature of their own, the universal answer (out of Boston) is, 'We don't want one. Why should we pay for one when we can get it for nothing.'"
Before copyright, artists considered it a complement that their work was replayed and enjoyed by others.
Before you can write or draw, you must eat.
Before copyright, the writer had a substantial independent income or he had a sponsor or patron.
The church. The government. The merchant price. Each with their own agenda.
A J.R.R Tolkien or C. S. Lewis can navigate that environment and thrive.
But the American writer - particularly the writer of genre fiction - mystery, sci-fi, fantasy, horror, suspense, the thriller - and so on - tends to be an outsider. He and she didn't come into this business to serve their betters - to win their way into the Establishment.
If you cure cancer you have killed your profit because the patient only needs the cure once. If you treat cancer you have a steady income stream. So why search for cures when treatments bring home the bacon.
The treatment keeps your customers alive six months to five years.
The cure, ten, twenty, thirty, or forty years. Which do you think yields the greater long-term return?
Did you really expect to "circumvent" the locks that cable companies put in place and nothing was going to happen?
Did you expect your cable TV and Internet service to be free before the DMCA?
165.15 Theft of services. A person is guilty of theft of services when:
4. With intent to avoid payment by himself or another person of the lawful charge for any telecommunications service, including, without
limitation, cable television service,...., telegraph or telephone service which is provided for a charge or compensation, he obtains or attempts to obtain such service for himself or another person or avoids or attempts to avoid payment therefor by himself or another person by means of (a) tampering or making connection with the equipment of the supplier, whether by mechanical, electrical, acoustical or other means, or (b) offering for sale or otherwise making available, to anyone other than the provider of a telecommunications service for such service provider's own use in the provision of its service, any telecommunications decoder or descrambler, a principal function of which defeats a mechanism of electronic signal encryption, jamming or individually addressed switching imposed by the provider of any such telecommunications service to restrict the delivery
of such service,----
Slashdot Mirror
No. Try Ubuntu.
Try looking at what software your family runs.
Try thinking more about how they use a computer and less - much, much less - about how you use a computer.
Because no one is going to bend willingly to your needs and values.
No one is going to sacrifice a ten to fifteen year investment in Windows hardware, software and peripherals just to keep you happy.
Too many of the "conversion" stories on Slashdot have been tainted by hints of coercion:
Your Mom agrees to this to keep peace in the family, not because it something she wanted or needed.
It becomes easy to convince yourself that you were only trying to help.
All they really want is web and email anyway.
If they are competent enough to own an ipod or iphone you might consider a Mac, because iTunes does not play well with Linux.
If all the anyone wanted was email and the web - then there wouldn't be a market for iTunes - or any other program, would there?
The user knows he is being attacked by the technically competent but amoral geek. He might reasonably ask why the geek isn't policing his own community better.
What he won't take kindly to is being called stupid.
problem solved.. at least until linux malware becomes prevalent
This assumes your family doesn't have a ten to fifteen year investment in Windows hardware, software, and peripherals.
The peripheral can be anything from a multifunction printer to an embroidery machine or an Orion telescope.
The geek makes the computer his hobby. For others it's a tool.
If you break it, you've bought it.
The HTPC plays the Blu-Ray disk it was designed for.
iTunes. Rhapsody.
The gamer won't trade-in his ticket to Dragon's Age or WOW for the joys of Nethack.
You have to make it work. You have to make all of it work - or you won't be welcomed back.
the beating heart of every openSUSE system.
Linux as the love object of a Harlequin romance.
KNetworkManager, Amarok, Digikam, k3b, Konversation and more.
I suppose the geek learns to live with this sort of thing. But words like Korny and Konfusing also come to mind,
netscape went from total market domination to nothing in a few years. granted MS pulled from under handed moves to make it happen
I remember buying Microsoft's Internet Starter Kit in 1996.
It came with a handsome paperback book and a useful bundle of software, and sold directly for about $10-20.
Bundling IE with AOL was another smart move. Integrating a look-alike - work-alike - e-mail client and a browser into the Windows consumer product was a logical progression that made perfect sense to the user.
Even at that, though, how do we expect Bob, who lives 10 miles from town, to eat if he has to walk, in the middle of Winter to get his food? Would he have been previously banned from riding a horse?
Bob moves into town.
In the old days:
If you weren't able to control your horse, your horse would kill or maim you.
Problem solved.
The raw features somehow make the $1500 seem odd.
The geek can hack out a gadget and call it an aid for the disabled.
That doesn't mean that any public or private agency will be able to buy one for their clients.
Without proof that the thing actually works as described and has real and substantial benefits.
The first question that needs to be answered is how easy will it be for a visually - and perhaps physically - impaired reader to use the camera.
I have my own doubts about this one.
The nice thing about LIDAR is that unlike RADAR, I don't need a license to operate a jamming device. After all, it's just an extra "headlight."
You'll make the cop's day, broadcasting your approach.
You'll make the judge's day trying to explain how your jammer is a practical - plausible - source of illumination - and not interference with a police officer in the lawful performance of this duties.
Congratulations.
You are now in misdemeanor territory. Keep on trucking, and you just might get bumped up to the felony charge.
That's why people get consoles - because while you "only" get the resolution of HD, you never have to worry about upgrading anything.
Consoles have a life-span, same as a PC.
The Wii tops out with composite video at 480p - and that is not going to cut it the next time around.
I'm not saying one should not take human behavior into account, but at least they should get the boundary conditions right, and one of those is that our resources are limited.
But those limits are not so easily fixed or defined.
The microchip is the perfect example.
It doesn't exist before 1958. It's economic, technological and social impact scarcely felt before the 1980s.
As a society we simply need to find a way to make sure people like Pranav Mistry have gainful employment while they devlop things like this.
Herman Melville found "gainful employment" in a New York customs house. Herman Melville's Obituary Notices
It simply would not do for the government to offer an aging artist a pension or employ him full time as a writer.
The fundamental difference between the amateur and the pro is that the pro is being paid to master his skills and work full time at what he does best.
It's an equation that the geek intent on his free movie fix has not been able to solve.
A hacker could might have installed a remote access program, downloaded the files manually, and then uninstalled the remote access program. There wouldn't be much evidence to suggest that this guy didn't download the kiddie porn himself.
Child porn becomes an obsession.
There are usually two elements in an arrest and conviction for possession:
1 The number of files retrieved is enormous.
In the thousands or tens or thousands. Authorities arrest 64-year-old man for child pornography
In this case, 40,000 photos and videos.
2 The defendant's behavior was reckless and self-destructive.
He'll try to slip his porn stash through customs. Va. man headed to prison for child porn It will be found on the cell phone he left behind at Starbucks. The laptop he brought into his grade school classroom. Pike High School teacher charged with possession of child porn
This guy was lucky.
Luck as nothing to do with it. Criminal investigation at its most basic isn't about tech, its about people. The frame has to fit or you look elsewhere.
The geek should give up his life of crime. He isn't as smart as he thinks. The schemes he contrives are overly complex and fragile. The human element is ignored.
Sell it and be done with it.
And you know *why* that is? Because *IT'S NOT THE SAME*
Copyright infringement was being denounced as piracy while the Black Flag still flew over the Caribbean.
The NET act [No Electronic Theft] - passed and signed into law in 1997-98 - is a contemporary example of why the geek cannot hope to win this war on words.
In the American federal system ordinary criminal jurisdiction is state and local.
You'd have to dig quite deep into the federal criminal code to find any mention of theft at all.
If it comforts the geek that he hasn't been charged with theft -
conviction on the felony charge still reduces his horizons to a 6x8 cinder block cell and a bunk mate named Big Mike.
hint: in economical downturn even serious press are easy to buy - this is only a half joke.
In hard times stories this trivial have no value even as filler.
What the geek ought to be talking - and thinking - long and hard - about this week is Win 7 entering the market with a 4% share of the desktop.
Before copyright, there were no artists or writers clamouring for "protection"
Too often and too easily the geek rewrites history to serve his own needs:
In 1842 there was still no international copyright law, a condition that was stunting American letters and depriving authors on both sides of the Atlantic of a living. American letters and depriving authors on both sides of the Atlantic of a living. Britain was willing to recognize the copyright of foreign writers--but only if their countries reciprocated.
This American publishers adamantly refused to do. Instead, they competed in bribing English pressmen to get early sheets of British books. The sheets were rushed by boat over to the United States, where the jolly pirates churned out cheap editions in a matter of hours.
But it was not only British authors they were robbing. Few publishers were willing to pay American authors for books when they could purloin better-known British ones for free. Herman Melville was hurt by the lack of an international copyright, and such eminent American authors as Emerson, Longfellow, and Hawthorne had to pay publishers an advance in order to have their books produced. The early giants of American literature had to scramble for work at customhouses and in other government jobs, and Edgar Allan Poe, according to his biographer Sidney P. Moss, had to raise advance money for one collection of poems by soliciting 75 cents a head from his fellow West Point classmates, to whom he then dedicated the book.
Dickens was never forced into quite such desperate straits, but neither was he so indifferent to "heaps and mines of gold" as he made out in Boston. He had, after all, spent part of his childhood in a debtors' prison, and as the most popular writer in the world, "of all men living I am the greatest loser.
In private he sarcastically mimicked his hosts: "The Americans read him; the free, enlightened, independent Americans; and what more would he have?... As to telling them they will have no literature of their own, the universal answer (out of Boston) is, 'We don't want one. Why should we pay for one when we can get it for nothing.'"
Copy Wrong
Before copyright, artists considered it a complement that their work was replayed and enjoyed by others.
Before you can write or draw, you must eat.
Before copyright, the writer had a substantial independent income or he had a sponsor or patron.
The church. The government. The merchant price. Each with their own agenda.
A J.R.R Tolkien or C. S. Lewis can navigate that environment and thrive.
But the American writer - particularly the writer of genre fiction - mystery, sci-fi, fantasy, horror, suspense, the thriller - and so on - tends to be an outsider. He and she didn't come into this business to serve their betters - to win their way into the Establishment.
American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to Now, The Philip K. Dick Collection
Actually, this was some blog poster that screwed up his Hackintosh and blamed it on Apple.
In one line you sum up why Apple has no interest in seeing OSX become the system builder's OS of choice.
3) Listen to any *new* track and figure out if it is like those popular tracks.
The idea is to promote good bands that would have been popular except for the fact that they are not already popular and hence might go unnoticed.
In this scheme, the no-name band that is most successful in cloning the big-band sound will score the highest.
You might as well be hosting the Fat Elvis competition at the state fair grounds.
If you cure cancer you have killed your profit because the patient only needs the cure once. If you treat cancer you have a steady income stream. So why search for cures when treatments bring home the bacon.
The treatment keeps your customers alive six months to five years.
The cure, ten, twenty, thirty, or forty years. Which do you think yields the greater long-term return?
The Linux community, as a whole, needs to get it's story straight
It isn't always a hardware problem: PulseAudio Creator Responds To Critics
Windows 7 had 1.9% market share before launch?
Net Applications and W3Schools have been tracking Win 7 since January:
Top Operating System Share Trend. OS Platform Statistics
October
NA
Win7 2.15%
Linux 0.96%
W3S
Win7 4.4%
Linux 4.2%
In the W3Schools stats it took Linux six years to move from 2% to 4%. Win 7 three months.
i buy it its mine if your going to put me in jail remember thats 40-60K a year to incarcerate and i guarantee you ill do this again and again.
When a federal judge says "ten years" you serve ten years.
That makes your first felony conviction something to be avoided.
The second will be even costlier.
Tech changes. Skills erode. The geek in prison is a declining asset.
It's also illegal to tint your car windows too darkly as someone could have a gun and the police wouldn't be able to see it.
If the police can't see in - you can't see out. That can become a problem, particularly at night.
I never really understand the argument where there are more important things for such and such to be doing.
The bank robber is hunkered down in the New Jersey flats and doesn't know you from Adam.
The guy who sold you a hacked cable box was arrested in his garage two blocks down the street.
Did you really expect to "circumvent" the locks that cable companies put in place and nothing was going to happen?
Did you expect your cable TV and Internet service to be free before the DMCA?
165.15 Theft of services.
A person is guilty of theft of services when:
4. With intent to avoid payment by himself or another person of the lawful charge for any telecommunications service, including, without
limitation, cable television service,
of such service,----
New York Penal Law Section 165.15 - Theft Of Services.
Last revised July 30, 2006.
Selling descramblers will take you into Class E felony territory. Three or four years hard time.
Theft of Services in New York state has a much broader reach than I can suggest here.