No virus should be truely that damaging. You should never have data on just one hard drive if you intend on keeping it for the long term.
Viruses might be able to wreck a server's software, but they're not very effective at killing hardware... and they're certainly unable to reach offline backups.
Our legal system actually employs actuaries whose primary task is to compute the estimated earning potential and household work potential of a dead person based on what they had done at the time of their death and what statistics indicate what that person would have done in the future.
It's a sick job, but somebody's got to do it in civil cases involving a wrongful death finding in order for there to be a dollar value assigned to the verdict.
Death penality opponents point out that under most state laws, a death sentance generates an automatic grounds for appeal and other safety measures to designed to lower the risk of executing an innocent person... therefore, it actually costs "the system" more to go through the execution process than it does to lock the person up in prison for life.
This article neglects the fact that a death penalty case spends more time in court than a typical case, which would impact the financial values the author is assigning.
Politicians love to associate their names with "get tough on crime" laws that raise the punishment for certain crimes... but you rarely here about anybody supporting lower sentances for crimes.
Is it just me, or is there an inflation effect hitting our criminal justice system as over time the punishments keep getting higher for the same crimes...
So no, copyrights do not need to be asserted for infringement to occur.
The copyright holder must come forward and say that there was an infringement in order for there to be any action taken. It's only an infringement when the copyright owner didn't authorize the copying. If they say nothing on that issue, the presumtion has to be that they had no problem with it. The copyright owner will always at least have to be a complaining witness.
It'd be interesting to see how such a survey affects sites like MapQuest... as it'd be real useful to have the building you're drving to circled on a street-level picture when you're traveling in an unknown-to-you metro area.
Copyrights have to be asserted in order to be infringed upon. Therefore, the Justice Department can't just go accusing people of copyright violation without the copyright owner coming forward to claim the foul.
This is nothing more than the RIAA wanting to shift their legal burden over to the taxpayer...
T-Mobile also has a very generous 14-day no-questions-asked return policy, so had you signed up for service and gotten home to discover "NO SERVICE" at your house, you could have taken the phone right back to the store. Reps at the company owned store know that if they sell to a customer who's going to boomerrang like that on them, they're not going to get comission for that sale so they might as well not waste their time making the sale. Push that non-customer aside nicely, and move on to those who might actually keep the service.
However, the cell system doesn't get any record when a person picks up their phone, and then sees "NO SERVICE" on their screen and gets upset. Dead spots aren't just about dropped calls, they're also about calls that the user wanted to make but their cell phone doesn't even get to learn about.
Where I live, Sprint used to have this territory marked on its maps as a no service zone. They've since moved into town... but are having an awfully tough time convincing people to even set foot in their stores. The impression of being a zero-service carrier in this area is just plain a hard one to shake.
Afterall, it's hard to market an image that says "We're improving."... just saying that implies that you weren't always perfect and that you still aren't.
The FCC rules actually allow a suitable level of interference on any channels coming from a PC, a lightbulb, whatever. However, even if you're within those tolerances, if you're causing harmful interference to a higher-priority service, then the user is responsible for powering down the offending device until you can get rid of the problem.
So, actually, if he wants to complain he is going to get told by the FCC to shut down his PC... I've yet to hear of a case where somebody's been forced to stop using a PC because it bothers somebody's TV, but in theory it could happen.
The two worst D-Spots are easy to fix!
on
Where's Your 'D-Spot?'
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The obsession with the small little handheld cell phone is one I just plain do not understand. Sure, it looks cool from an image standpoint, but it's senseless from a tech standpoint.
I really wish the embeded-in-the-car cell phone hadn't gone out of style. Next time you're in the passenger seat of somebody's car, compare the reception of the car's AM/FM radio to the reception of a handheld Walkman. It's just plain going to be no contest on stations that are not extremely local. The car radio has access to a nice big antenna outside of the car, the handheld device doesn't. Simply put, you'd get better reception in your car if we still had the little swizzle stick on the roof.
The second most annoying dead spot is the home, and exactly the same principle can apply. A roof-mounted mast gets much better TV reception of stations more than 10 miles away than rabbit ears on top of the TV set.
Bluetooth or WiFi would be a great tool to use in order to make the "last mile" link between the handset and the actual RF transmitter and reciever. Why should the user be expected to walk around their own home because one side of the house has coverage but the bathroom doesn't? It'd do wonders for apparent coverage and battery life if our handsets would pass off the task of actually speaking to the cell network to hard-mounted devices that have access to either grid power or at least the car battery, so the device in our hands can save its battery life for the times that we're really out on the road and need the handheld transmitter.
The dead spot that's most likely to make a user switch carriers isn't the airport, it's the places where the user spends the most of their non-working time... their home and their car. If they're getting cell calls on company time, then the company's responsible for picking and paying a carrier that works at the work site. Still, a localized dead spot can usually be solved simply by using a short last-mile connection to get to a high point outdoors where radio signals usually are clearer...
That's actually a "sitting on it" situation. There's nothing that stops the Sci-Fi channel from sub-licensing the right to air the show to any broadcaster it choses to in Canada, or for Global to insist that they're not going to produce a show using one of their units if they can't have Canadian broadcast rights to the show.
The rightsholders have chosen not to broadcast that show in Canada... they most certainly could if they wanted to.
Guess what... there's no requirement even here in the USA that OTA TV broadcasts always be unencrypted or unscrambled. Sure, they have to broadcast some "public interest" or "educational" content to keep their licenses, but the rest of their broadcast day could be entirely pay-to-watch.
Subscription analog TV went out of style when cable came along since cable had an easier time distributing decoder boxes. Now, even cable analog scrabling is on the way out due to the fact that it's way too easy to break. However, diigtal TV stations can simply broadcast one highly compressed MPEG stream in the clear, and use the rest of their bandwidth to stream pay-to-watch stations. There are already some DTV stations stateside doing just that.
The Fox News Channel is pointing out frequently now that although both CNN and MSNBC have permission to air their entire US-made programming lineup, FNC has not been added to the list of American networks with exemption to the "Canadian Content" or "CanCon" rules. (MSNBC is at the moment publishing a seperate Canadian schedule with no differences from the USA lineup as of now because during the Olypmics period MSNBC will be airing NBC-produced coverage that cannot be exported from the USA, so MSNBC will have to feed replacement news programming to all territories outside the USA that they're seen in while Olympic coverage airs. Live production times for their main shows will be shifted around such timeslots.)
This means that if FNC wants to get their programming into Canada at the moment, they'd have to syndicate their shows on a standalone basis, or partner with a Canadaian comapny to create a channel that is half Fox News USA content, and also airs made-in-Canada content half the time. Fox isn't willing to do that, they're holding out for the right to send their 24 full hour day over the border.
Therefore, there's presently no legal way to watch any FNC-made show in Canada.
If a show was broadcast in your territory and is continuing production but is not continuing to be broadcast in your territory one of two things happened.
- Nobody bought the broacast rights to the show in your area... meaning that the station/network that used to pay the producers for the right for you to see the show with their ads inserted stopped paying. You should be complaining to either that station to start paying again, or telling another station in your area to pick up the show instead. - Somebody has the rights to the show, but are sitting on it... meaning that the station that was airing the show is likely still getting the exclusive rights to the show, but is simply not using them. Yeah, that's a selfish thing to do, but one that stations and networks often do to assure that nobody can run a program that happens to be similar to one they are showing against it. In effect, they're paying the producers to make sure you can't see their show.
If there is no price on how much it costs to see the show where you are, then that's interpreted as positive infinity... no matter how much money you have, it's not enough. Things without a price tag aren't always free...
Actors and singers actually love for their work to appear on TV and for it to be as much in the open as possible. Afterall, only the most elite actors and singers (who are so rich most of them don't care how much money they get... their biggest problems in life are not money-based) are paid based on the gross of the movie, or ever get positive royaties from the record companies.
It's the major copyright holders, who just happen to also be better known as the MPAA and RIAA member companies, who don't want to see movies and songs copied. Major actors and singers might go along with their handlers in backing anti-copying campaigns, but if they didn't want to take part in TV, then there'd be hundreds of people glad to take their place.
PSST... the kids appearing on American Idol are not being paid cash for doing so. They're given free accomidations in Hollywood and taken care of nicely while they're with the show, but they're not promised a financially rewarding expirience by the producers. However, people are lining up like crazy to audition for the show because even so-bad-it's-funny suinger William Hung is making money after appearing on the show. The grand prize winner isn't even given a direct cash prize, they're given a recording contract that they're required to agree to as a condition of the contest. It's the people who come in runner-up or even unranked positions who stand to profit more than that...
The "Sony Betamax" Supreme Court decision that allowed the VCR to come into existance really may come up for a challenge when Hollywood tries to push a system like this stateside.
See, the Betamax ruling gave us the right to time-shift programming that comes down from TV stations, but that time-shifting implies that we're not going to keep our copies forever. It's impossible to keep an analog VCR tape forever because it will age and degrade over time, and analog copies are always lossy as well. However, a digital copy that you can recopy to avoid media-aging issues can in fact be kept forever.
There's no such thing at this moment as a law that enumerates all of our "fair use" rights when it comes to media that we have legally obtained. "Fair use" is just the result of things that Hollywood wishes we couldn't do but they can't take us to court over them because they're not (yet) against the law.
Right now, there's really nothing at all that prevents American broadcasters for using encryption on their HDTV broadcasts, and leaving only a low-quality MPEG stream available for those who don't want to play along with their scheme. Some stations in Utah are in the process of proving that with the current cable-over-DTV scheme, where they use their DTV channel to relay only an SD copy of their analog content, and then instead of ever going HD they use the remaining bandwidth to relay pay-to-watch cable channels.
The scary aspect of this story is that the people who are buying the DRM-encumbered TVs don't even seem to understand what they're giving up compared to traditional TV signals. Because, afterall, they CAN record the shows, but just to one copy. It's the second copy that is blocked, and most people don't think of their computer as a video editing device, and as a result they don't even comprehend the need of having anything more than one copy.
The market isn't rejecting the DRM, instead their turning to us geeks and saying "What are you kids making a fuss about?" That's not a good sign for us at all...
Actually, there have been cases of DNA being charged with crimes as a "keep-alive" play when a statue of limitations is about to make it impossible to prosecute a crime. Basically, it's saying "We don't yet know the name of the person who did it, but we're damn sure it's the one person who corelates to this."
That's exactly what these John Doe suits are basically doing. They don't need the name and address of the person you're suing, they just need enough info to uniquely identify the person, and then they can use a subpeona to force the ISP to disclose who that person is. Without the filing of the John Doe case, the ISP wouldn't have to co-operate.
That'll at least dent the problem. Because right now, the zombies are blasting at full speed. If they had to throttle themselves to only using 1% of the potential outbound bandwidth, that'd solve 99% of spam being sent this way...
What I would love to see somebody come out with is a provider-side web configurable firewall. Basically, a way to tell my ISP "If you're getting incoming port 80 requests coming my way, don't bother me with it."
In the default configuration, all ports below 1024 should be blocked, and there should be some explanation to the user that if they want to offer a home-based webserver, they have to visit the designated area on the provider's site to indicate that they want port 80 incoming traffic. That way, ISS-worm-of-the-week traffic will not bother your last mile bandwdith if there's no web server home.
Outgoing ports can be restricted the same way. Outgoing port 25 should only be allowed to official mail servers, unless the user specifically requests otherwise. That way, if a Spam-bot gets in, most users will already be set to not let it out...
AFAIK, Comcast doesn't limit how much outgoing mail you send through their SMTP server so long as you're coming through their wires and they're not getting spam complaints about you. So, even if you ran a mailing list server, you could still configure that server to route all non-local addresses via Comcast's SMTP to the outside world.
There's a real easy way to tell the difference between a zombie and somebody running a home mail server...
The zombie will be sending an insane number of e-mails to an insane number of users constantly. No home mail server should be used to run a listserve with anything more than a hundred people or so. Therefore, bursts of port 25 are okay, camping on port 25 is a sign of trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
No virus should be truely that damaging. You should never have data on just one hard drive if you intend on keeping it for the long term.
Viruses might be able to wreck a server's software, but they're not very effective at killing hardware... and they're certainly unable to reach offline backups.
Our legal system actually employs actuaries whose primary task is to compute the estimated earning potential and household work potential of a dead person based on what they had done at the time of their death and what statistics indicate what that person would have done in the future.
It's a sick job, but somebody's got to do it in civil cases involving a wrongful death finding in order for there to be a dollar value assigned to the verdict.
Death penality opponents point out that under most state laws, a death sentance generates an automatic grounds for appeal and other safety measures to designed to lower the risk of executing an innocent person... therefore, it actually costs "the system" more to go through the execution process than it does to lock the person up in prison for life.
This article neglects the fact that a death penalty case spends more time in court than a typical case, which would impact the financial values the author is assigning.
Politicians love to associate their names with "get tough on crime" laws that raise the punishment for certain crimes... but you rarely here about anybody supporting lower sentances for crimes.
Is it just me, or is there an inflation effect hitting our criminal justice system as over time the punishments keep getting higher for the same crimes...
Pixar's statistics movie-for-movie are so cool right now because they've yet to release a dud.
Give them time... the law of large numbers will catch up with them eventually.
So no, copyrights do not need to be asserted for infringement to occur.
The copyright holder must come forward and say that there was an infringement in order for there to be any action taken. It's only an infringement when the copyright owner didn't authorize the copying. If they say nothing on that issue, the presumtion has to be that they had no problem with it. The copyright owner will always at least have to be a complaining witness.
It'd be interesting to see how such a survey affects sites like MapQuest... as it'd be real useful to have the building you're drving to circled on a street-level picture when you're traveling in an unknown-to-you metro area.
Copyrights have to be asserted in order to be infringed upon. Therefore, the Justice Department can't just go accusing people of copyright violation without the copyright owner coming forward to claim the foul.
This is nothing more than the RIAA wanting to shift their legal burden over to the taxpayer...
T-Mobile also has a very generous 14-day no-questions-asked return policy, so had you signed up for service and gotten home to discover "NO SERVICE" at your house, you could have taken the phone right back to the store. Reps at the company owned store know that if they sell to a customer who's going to boomerrang like that on them, they're not going to get comission for that sale so they might as well not waste their time making the sale. Push that non-customer aside nicely, and move on to those who might actually keep the service.
However, the cell system doesn't get any record when a person picks up their phone, and then sees "NO SERVICE" on their screen and gets upset. Dead spots aren't just about dropped calls, they're also about calls that the user wanted to make but their cell phone doesn't even get to learn about.
Where I live, Sprint used to have this territory marked on its maps as a no service zone. They've since moved into town... but are having an awfully tough time convincing people to even set foot in their stores. The impression of being a zero-service carrier in this area is just plain a hard one to shake.
Afterall, it's hard to market an image that says "We're improving."... just saying that implies that you weren't always perfect and that you still aren't.
The FCC rules actually allow a suitable level of interference on any channels coming from a PC, a lightbulb, whatever. However, even if you're within those tolerances, if you're causing harmful interference to a higher-priority service, then the user is responsible for powering down the offending device until you can get rid of the problem.
So, actually, if he wants to complain he is going to get told by the FCC to shut down his PC... I've yet to hear of a case where somebody's been forced to stop using a PC because it bothers somebody's TV, but in theory it could happen.
The obsession with the small little handheld cell phone is one I just plain do not understand. Sure, it looks cool from an image standpoint, but it's senseless from a tech standpoint.
I really wish the embeded-in-the-car cell phone hadn't gone out of style. Next time you're in the passenger seat of somebody's car, compare the reception of the car's AM/FM radio to the reception of a handheld Walkman. It's just plain going to be no contest on stations that are not extremely local. The car radio has access to a nice big antenna outside of the car, the handheld device doesn't. Simply put, you'd get better reception in your car if we still had the little swizzle stick on the roof.
The second most annoying dead spot is the home, and exactly the same principle can apply. A roof-mounted mast gets much better TV reception of stations more than 10 miles away than rabbit ears on top of the TV set.
Bluetooth or WiFi would be a great tool to use in order to make the "last mile" link between the handset and the actual RF transmitter and reciever. Why should the user be expected to walk around their own home because one side of the house has coverage but the bathroom doesn't? It'd do wonders for apparent coverage and battery life if our handsets would pass off the task of actually speaking to the cell network to hard-mounted devices that have access to either grid power or at least the car battery, so the device in our hands can save its battery life for the times that we're really out on the road and need the handheld transmitter.
The dead spot that's most likely to make a user switch carriers isn't the airport, it's the places where the user spends the most of their non-working time... their home and their car. If they're getting cell calls on company time, then the company's responsible for picking and paying a carrier that works at the work site. Still, a localized dead spot can usually be solved simply by using a short last-mile connection to get to a high point outdoors where radio signals usually are clearer...
That's actually a "sitting on it" situation. There's nothing that stops the Sci-Fi channel from sub-licensing the right to air the show to any broadcaster it choses to in Canada, or for Global to insist that they're not going to produce a show using one of their units if they can't have Canadian broadcast rights to the show.
The rightsholders have chosen not to broadcast that show in Canada... they most certainly could if they wanted to.
Guess what... there's no requirement even here in the USA that OTA TV broadcasts always be unencrypted or unscrambled. Sure, they have to broadcast some "public interest" or "educational" content to keep their licenses, but the rest of their broadcast day could be entirely pay-to-watch.
Subscription analog TV went out of style when cable came along since cable had an easier time distributing decoder boxes. Now, even cable analog scrabling is on the way out due to the fact that it's way too easy to break. However, diigtal TV stations can simply broadcast one highly compressed MPEG stream in the clear, and use the rest of their bandwidth to stream pay-to-watch stations. There are already some DTV stations stateside doing just that.
The Fox News Channel is pointing out frequently now that although both CNN and MSNBC have permission to air their entire US-made programming lineup, FNC has not been added to the list of American networks with exemption to the "Canadian Content" or "CanCon" rules. (MSNBC is at the moment publishing a seperate Canadian schedule with no differences from the USA lineup as of now because during the Olypmics period MSNBC will be airing NBC-produced coverage that cannot be exported from the USA, so MSNBC will have to feed replacement news programming to all territories outside the USA that they're seen in while Olympic coverage airs. Live production times for their main shows will be shifted around such timeslots.)
This means that if FNC wants to get their programming into Canada at the moment, they'd have to syndicate their shows on a standalone basis, or partner with a Canadaian comapny to create a channel that is half Fox News USA content, and also airs made-in-Canada content half the time. Fox isn't willing to do that, they're holding out for the right to send their 24 full hour day over the border.
Therefore, there's presently no legal way to watch any FNC-made show in Canada.
If a show was broadcast in your territory and is continuing production but is not continuing to be broadcast in your territory one of two things happened.
- Nobody bought the broacast rights to the show in your area... meaning that the station/network that used to pay the producers for the right for you to see the show with their ads inserted stopped paying. You should be complaining to either that station to start paying again, or telling another station in your area to pick up the show instead.
- Somebody has the rights to the show, but are sitting on it... meaning that the station that was airing the show is likely still getting the exclusive rights to the show, but is simply not using them. Yeah, that's a selfish thing to do, but one that stations and networks often do to assure that nobody can run a program that happens to be similar to one they are showing against it. In effect, they're paying the producers to make sure you can't see their show.
If there is no price on how much it costs to see the show where you are, then that's interpreted as positive infinity... no matter how much money you have, it's not enough. Things without a price tag aren't always free...
Actors and singers actually love for their work to appear on TV and for it to be as much in the open as possible. Afterall, only the most elite actors and singers (who are so rich most of them don't care how much money they get... their biggest problems in life are not money-based) are paid based on the gross of the movie, or ever get positive royaties from the record companies.
It's the major copyright holders, who just happen to also be better known as the MPAA and RIAA member companies, who don't want to see movies and songs copied. Major actors and singers might go along with their handlers in backing anti-copying campaigns, but if they didn't want to take part in TV, then there'd be hundreds of people glad to take their place.
PSST... the kids appearing on American Idol are not being paid cash for doing so. They're given free accomidations in Hollywood and taken care of nicely while they're with the show, but they're not promised a financially rewarding expirience by the producers. However, people are lining up like crazy to audition for the show because even so-bad-it's-funny suinger William Hung is making money after appearing on the show. The grand prize winner isn't even given a direct cash prize, they're given a recording contract that they're required to agree to as a condition of the contest. It's the people who come in runner-up or even unranked positions who stand to profit more than that...
The "Sony Betamax" Supreme Court decision that allowed the VCR to come into existance really may come up for a challenge when Hollywood tries to push a system like this stateside.
See, the Betamax ruling gave us the right to time-shift programming that comes down from TV stations, but that time-shifting implies that we're not going to keep our copies forever. It's impossible to keep an analog VCR tape forever because it will age and degrade over time, and analog copies are always lossy as well. However, a digital copy that you can recopy to avoid media-aging issues can in fact be kept forever.
There's no such thing at this moment as a law that enumerates all of our "fair use" rights when it comes to media that we have legally obtained. "Fair use" is just the result of things that Hollywood wishes we couldn't do but they can't take us to court over them because they're not (yet) against the law.
Right now, there's really nothing at all that prevents American broadcasters for using encryption on their HDTV broadcasts, and leaving only a low-quality MPEG stream available for those who don't want to play along with their scheme. Some stations in Utah are in the process of proving that with the current cable-over-DTV scheme, where they use their DTV channel to relay only an SD copy of their analog content, and then instead of ever going HD they use the remaining bandwidth to relay pay-to-watch cable channels.
The scary aspect of this story is that the people who are buying the DRM-encumbered TVs don't even seem to understand what they're giving up compared to traditional TV signals. Because, afterall, they CAN record the shows, but just to one copy. It's the second copy that is blocked, and most people don't think of their computer as a video editing device, and as a result they don't even comprehend the need of having anything more than one copy.
The market isn't rejecting the DRM, instead their turning to us geeks and saying "What are you kids making a fuss about?" That's not a good sign for us at all...
Actually, there have been cases of DNA being charged with crimes as a "keep-alive" play when a statue of limitations is about to make it impossible to prosecute a crime. Basically, it's saying "We don't yet know the name of the person who did it, but we're damn sure it's the one person who corelates to this."
That's exactly what these John Doe suits are basically doing. They don't need the name and address of the person you're suing, they just need enough info to uniquely identify the person, and then they can use a subpeona to force the ISP to disclose who that person is. Without the filing of the John Doe case, the ISP wouldn't have to co-operate.
That'll at least dent the problem. Because right now, the zombies are blasting at full speed. If they had to throttle themselves to only using 1% of the potential outbound bandwidth, that'd solve 99% of spam being sent this way...
What I would love to see somebody come out with is a provider-side web configurable firewall. Basically, a way to tell my ISP "If you're getting incoming port 80 requests coming my way, don't bother me with it."
In the default configuration, all ports below 1024 should be blocked, and there should be some explanation to the user that if they want to offer a home-based webserver, they have to visit the designated area on the provider's site to indicate that they want port 80 incoming traffic. That way, ISS-worm-of-the-week traffic will not bother your last mile bandwdith if there's no web server home.
Outgoing ports can be restricted the same way. Outgoing port 25 should only be allowed to official mail servers, unless the user specifically requests otherwise. That way, if a Spam-bot gets in, most users will already be set to not let it out...
AFAIK, Comcast doesn't limit how much outgoing mail you send through their SMTP server so long as you're coming through their wires and they're not getting spam complaints about you. So, even if you ran a mailing list server, you could still configure that server to route all non-local addresses via Comcast's SMTP to the outside world.
There's a real easy way to tell the difference between a zombie and somebody running a home mail server...
The zombie will be sending an insane number of e-mails to an insane number of users constantly. No home mail server should be used to run a listserve with anything more than a hundred people or so. Therefore, bursts of port 25 are okay, camping on port 25 is a sign of trouble.