In the article, the author mentioned a mail server bouncing a message to a bad address with the bounce containing the virus.
What if the server recieving the bounce has one of these alerting virus scanners?
Scenario: 1. Virus sends message to non_existant_user@email.com, forging the from address of user123@free-email.com 2. email.com server bounces the message because non_existant_user doesn't exist. 3. free-email.com receives the (virus containing) bounce from email.com 4. AV software bounces the email, sending the virus back to non_existant_user@email.com 5. Goto 2
I do exactly this. When on long trips in the RV, I just turn on the inverter and change the SSID to my "RVNet [my email address]". I have actually received messages from wardrivers who saw the AP.
If you see this SSID (or my regular "No Beer and No TV Make Homer..."), look around for a large tan/brown striped motorhome. (38' Fleetwood Discovery Diesel for those interested)
I moved the system drive from my friend's old pc to his new one and it worked fine. This was with XP Pro.
The old system was a Duron 700 on a no-name MiniATX board. It had onboard LAN, one DVD drive, and a USB modem.
The new system (AthXP 2000+ on A7N8X-DX mobo) inherited the hard drive, Radeon9200 vidcard, and DVD from the old one, while adding a CD-RW, second hard drive (used to be primary), and an internal modem.
I simply moved the parts over, changed the HD jumpers so the old hard drive was primary, turned it on, and installed drivers. Everything worked.
OTOH, my Linux system has so much hardware-dependant stuff loading at boot time (winmodem/linmodem drivers, ATI All-In-Wonder video cap/TV out, etc.) that I'm sure it would just barf if put in another machine.
PC users in general could be compared to Christians. There sure are a lot of them, but most (typical Windows users) don't know why they do what they do, except for the fact that their friends/family do the same.
BillyG could be compared to the Pope. Leader of a large group trying to maintain a good pubic image, while always seeming subtly evil.
Bored while in conference room at work, start thinking about porn. Machine hooked up to the projector picks up the info from your wireless brain input device.
I think you can figure where it would go from here.
calling up the needed information/documents/applications through hand gestures
This might work better, and for similar reasons. Gesture by making a fist and moving it up and down quickly, the computer opens your fave porn site.
Good for end users? You must be joking. Why woulkd you ever expect anything coming out of the legal system to be good for the people the government is there to serve?/sarcasm
Exact opposite for me. I'll have to get used to Pepsi where there would usually be Jolt or Bawls. Luckily, I have a fresh caffeine candy supply from thinkgeek.
but they can't play without an internet connection because their key will be checked every time they try to play. Or you go the Steam route and download-as-you-play, meaning you never have all of the content to begin with. Of course, I'm not saying this is the ideal method
<angry_rant>You're damn right it's not the ideal method! It's nowhere near ideal!</angry_rant>
What about laptop gamers? With the rise of the Radeon Mobility and Geforce*Go lines, games can go mobile with ease. How are they supposed to play their legally purchased games if they check the key every time you play? What if your internet connection goes down?
How about if the developer decides thay want you to buy the new game?
Valve: "Now that HL2 is out, we can't see any reason you would want to play HL1, so we're disabling the servers that verify keys for online play. Have fun playing alone!" You: "What!?!........How!?!?.....DAMMIT!!!"
(AFAIK, HL1 can't be disabled that easily, but it's just an example.)
Putting the control of your legally purchased games in the hands of the developers is crazy. As you said, they're concerned with profits. People playing the obsolete "Game '99" doesn't make them profits. Purchases of "Game '04" does.
The only situation where this system is acceptable is the MMO game, where the game cannot be played offline anyways. The MMO structure puts all control in the hands of the company anyways. The only caveat I would put is to allow users to download the game for free, as they have to pay to play it anyways.
Patents do cover the ideas, and copyright covers the implementation.
Lets say you came up with a new video codec. You can patent the codec, but the patent process would require releasing nearly all of how it works to be able to prevent a competing implementation.
Your implementation of your idea can then be copyrighted.
A good example is Ogg Vorbis. The developers have released the spec in to the public domain and thus not patented it. The implementation, however, is copyrighted (Not that it's a big deal, the BSD-like license has nearly no restrictions on code use.).
The reason for this is that the software serving these other non-Apple protocols is open source. What's the benefit to Apple of wasting programmer time modifying the Apache code to limit it to 10 users. Anyone could easily download the source and build their own.
Basically, all this would do is give Apple a seriously bad image among admins.
OTOH, the support for Apple developed protocols is probably not open source. This allows them to do whatever they want with it.
and still pay the same amount to the store, distributor, label and artists.
In this scenario, the label or artist runs the store and distributor. This cuts out two or three middlemen who would otherwise want a cut. This brings the costs down further.
Here's a hypothetical example:
Let's say that a major artist records and produces the content for one CD at a cost of $1 million (not unusual nowadays). It will be distributed in three formats: 160kbps MP3, FLAC, and regular CDs. As the recording is likely already in digital form for tome work in Pro Tools, let's say the cost of encoding to the three formats is $0.
From here, the online formats are placed on a server operated by the label at basically no cost, with a connection costing $4 per gigsbyte. This means that the MP3 albums cost around $.40 in bandwidth, with the FLAC albums costing slightly more than $1.
Compare this to the physical CDs, where the packaging and media costs roughly $2, and there are shipping costs between the manufacturer and the distributor, and also between the distributor and the store. The manufacturer, distributor, and store are also marking up the product to make a profit. This means that the cost of the CD by the time it reaches your hands is in the $10-$15 range.
If the label is making $1 for every CD sold, they need to sell one million copies to turn a profit.
With the digital distribution, if they charged $3 for a reasonable quality MP3 version (around $1.50 profit), and $5 for a FLAC version ($2.50 profit), they could be just as profitable with less sales than the $10+ CDs
Obviously I didn't get all the costs involved, as I am not a music industry insider, but the point remains: Digital distribution costs less to the content provider. The only notable cost involved in digital content distribution is bandwidth, and this is still not much.
The media companies like the current system with physical media, so they do not want to let online distribution succeed.
Do you really believe that the music industry is running on such thin profit margins that the 99 cents charged by iTunes is a cheap as they can go? I wouldn't demand $0.05, but $0.50 is very reasonable for a high quality file (320kbps MP3, FLAC, etc.)
The music industry can cut prices far more than they have. A download costs them next to nothing when compared to producing and distributing physical media.
This is something I have never understood about some P2P users. Why rename a file to something it isn't? I can understand the (RI/MP)AA placing fake files out there, but why do people put another copyrighted work out there under a bad name?
The worst offender I have seem so far was a file named Mandrake9.2(1of3).iso that turned out to be WinXP Home. What did the ~20 KaZaA users I downloaded this from have to gain from me wasting both bandwidth (mine and theirs) and time to get something I didn't want?
are you willing to state, here, in public, that you believe cybersex involving minors "does no harm"?
Got karma to burn, so here goes.
I would ask that if the minor chooses to play a prostitute online, what is it that you are trying to censor it for? To "protect an innocent child"? Obviously this minor was not very innocent.
I believe that the idea of censorship "to protect the children" is wrong. Unlike what those pushing censorship products want people to believe, you can't easliy just stumble upon porn when using the net. Those who find the censored materials were likely looking for it. They will find a way around the filters, while the others using the 'net for "legitimate" research get restricted.
The last paragraph was entirely from my experience. The filter used at my school ("Bess" by N2H2) couldn't stop porn and bomb-making instructions from regularly showing up on the school's computers. Meanwhile, when I would do research on network security for one of my classes, I am regularly blocked from going to security sites which get labeled as "Illegal" (or "Loophole" if the site also happens to run an open proxy)
This said, I believe that while EA probably regrets their actions (I doubt they lost any sales because of this guy) due to the bad press it had generated (this does cause lost sales, while bringing even more attention to this guy), they had every right to cancel his account. In a virtual world run by a private company, you have only the rights given to you by the company. Period. They can censor you when, why, and how they want to.
Besides, I believe that Darl himself is the "Weapons of Mass Destruction".
Maybe Darl is being a "Weapon of Mass Distraction". How many people are reading the latest horseshit from SCO when they could be contributing to open source projects?
Great example. Only problem is that running anything through babelfish is like taking HDTV in to VHS. The content's still there, but it is really fuzzy.
You lose enough information during the first translation with babelfish.
Of course Legos are great, but there are some other good ones.
K'NEX - Can build some really cool stuff with these. The big yellow gears driven by the small blue ones make for insane torque
Capsela - Somehow I got these to run underwater. The floats fell off alot, so my but 8x8 "trucks" that I built with these sank in my pool. I've got a lot of rusted up batteries from those experiments.
Construx - Simple and sweet. Recently seeming to come back with new kits.
Erector - The obvious grandaddy of them all. I'll bet money that most gearheads had a set of these, turning wrenches before even starting school. I even used some of these to rig a fan next to my video card and hold in a second HD.
All children need to experience these great toys. I started when I was around 3 and I'm still playing with them now (I'm 17). They really get your mind going.
Slashdot Mirror
In the article, the author mentioned a mail server bouncing a message to a bad address with the bounce containing the virus.
What if the server recieving the bounce has one of these alerting virus scanners?
Scenario:
1. Virus sends message to non_existant_user@email.com, forging the from address of user123@free-email.com
2. email.com server bounces the message because non_existant_user doesn't exist.
3. free-email.com receives the (virus containing) bounce from email.com
4. AV software bounces the email, sending the virus back to non_existant_user@email.com
5. Goto 2
Anyone else see a problem here?
I do exactly this. When on long trips in the RV, I just turn on the inverter and change the SSID to my "RVNet [my email address]". I have actually received messages from wardrivers who saw the AP.
If you see this SSID (or my regular "No Beer and No TV Make Homer..."), look around for a large tan/brown striped motorhome. (38' Fleetwood Discovery Diesel for those interested)
My experience has been entirely the opposite.
I moved the system drive from my friend's old pc to his new one and it worked fine. This was with XP Pro.
The old system was a Duron 700 on a no-name MiniATX board. It had onboard LAN, one DVD drive, and a USB modem.
The new system (AthXP 2000+ on A7N8X-DX mobo) inherited the hard drive, Radeon9200 vidcard, and DVD from the old one, while adding a CD-RW, second hard drive (used to be primary), and an internal modem.
I simply moved the parts over, changed the HD jumpers so the old hard drive was primary, turned it on, and installed drivers. Everything worked.
OTOH, my Linux system has so much hardware-dependant stuff loading at boot time (winmodem/linmodem drivers, ATI All-In-Wonder video cap/TV out, etc.) that I'm sure it would just barf if put in another machine.
Imagine random people getting AOL CDs in the mail. See what that did for their image?
ROFL....oops....
Wow what a comparison.
PC users in general could be compared to Christians. There sure are a lot of them, but most (typical Windows users) don't know why they do what they do, except for the fact that their friends/family do the same.
BillyG could be compared to the Pope. Leader of a large group trying to maintain a good pubic image, while always seeming subtly evil.
Any takers for continuing this?
thinking of opening an application or document
This would never catch on. Imagine this scenario:
Bored while in conference room at work, start thinking about porn.
Machine hooked up to the projector picks up the info from your wireless brain input device.
I think you can figure where it would go from here.
calling up the needed information/documents/applications through hand gestures
This might work better, and for similar reasons.
Gesture by making a fist and moving it up and down quickly, the computer opens your fave porn site.
Damn my mind is in the gutter tonight!
Good for end users? You must be joking. Why woulkd you ever expect anything coming out of the legal system to be good for the people the government is there to serve? /sarcasm
Exact opposite for me. I'll have to get used to Pepsi where there would usually be Jolt or Bawls. Luckily, I have a fresh caffeine candy supply from thinkgeek.
but they can't play without an internet connection because their key will be checked every time they try to play. Or you go the Steam route and download-as-you-play, meaning you never have all of the content to begin with. Of course, I'm not saying this is the ideal method
<angry_rant>You're damn right it's not the ideal method! It's nowhere near ideal!</angry_rant>
What about laptop gamers? With the rise of the Radeon Mobility and Geforce*Go lines, games can go mobile with ease. How are they supposed to play their legally purchased games if they check the key every time you play? What if your internet connection goes down?
How about if the developer decides thay want you to buy the new game?
Valve: "Now that HL2 is out, we can't see any reason you would want to play HL1, so we're disabling the servers that verify keys for online play. Have fun playing alone!"
You: "What!?!........How!?!?.....DAMMIT!!!"
(AFAIK, HL1 can't be disabled that easily, but it's just an example.)
Putting the control of your legally purchased games in the hands of the developers is crazy. As you said, they're concerned with profits. People playing the obsolete "Game '99" doesn't make them profits. Purchases of "Game '04" does.
The only situation where this system is acceptable is the MMO game, where the game cannot be played offline anyways. The MMO structure puts all control in the hands of the company anyways. The only caveat I would put is to allow users to download the game for free, as they have to pay to play it anyways.
So that's how the BSA got their name!!!
Nope. You are the one who is wrong.
Patents do cover the ideas, and copyright covers the implementation.
Lets say you came up with a new video codec. You can patent the codec, but the patent process would require releasing nearly all of how it works to be able to prevent a competing implementation.
Your implementation of your idea can then be copyrighted.
A good example is Ogg Vorbis. The developers have released the spec in to the public domain and thus not patented it. The implementation, however, is copyrighted (Not that it's a big deal, the BSD-like license has nearly no restrictions on code use.).
The reason for this is that the software serving these other non-Apple protocols is open source. What's the benefit to Apple of wasting programmer time modifying the Apache code to limit it to 10 users. Anyone could easily download the source and build their own.
Basically, all this would do is give Apple a seriously bad image among admins.
OTOH, the support for Apple developed protocols is probably not open source. This allows them to do whatever they want with it.
...claiming that SCO holds the rights to anything having to do with lying.
and still pay the same amount to the store, distributor, label and artists.
In this scenario, the label or artist runs the store and distributor. This cuts out two or three middlemen who would otherwise want a cut. This brings the costs down further.
Here's a hypothetical example:
Let's say that a major artist records and produces the content for one CD at a cost of $1 million (not unusual nowadays). It will be distributed in three formats: 160kbps MP3, FLAC, and regular CDs. As the recording is likely already in digital form for tome work in Pro Tools, let's say the cost of encoding to the three formats is $0.
From here, the online formats are placed on a server operated by the label at basically no cost, with a connection costing $4 per gigsbyte. This means that the MP3 albums cost around $.40 in bandwidth, with the FLAC albums costing slightly more than $1.
Compare this to the physical CDs, where the packaging and media costs roughly $2, and there are shipping costs between the manufacturer and the distributor, and also between the distributor and the store. The manufacturer, distributor, and store are also marking up the product to make a profit. This means that the cost of the CD by the time it reaches your hands is in the $10-$15 range.
If the label is making $1 for every CD sold, they need to sell one million copies to turn a profit.
With the digital distribution, if they charged $3 for a reasonable quality MP3 version (around $1.50 profit), and $5 for a FLAC version ($2.50 profit), they could be just as profitable with less sales than the $10+ CDs
Obviously I didn't get all the costs involved, as I am not a music industry insider, but the point remains: Digital distribution costs less to the content provider. The only notable cost involved in digital content distribution is bandwidth, and this is still not much.
The media companies like the current system with physical media, so they do not want to let online distribution succeed.
I'm surprised that nobody has suggested a network of legal content
I believe this is what iRate does.
And if they're wrong, the music business dies.
Do you really believe that the music industry is running on such thin profit margins that the 99 cents charged by iTunes is a cheap as they can go? I wouldn't demand $0.05, but $0.50 is very reasonable for a high quality file (320kbps MP3, FLAC, etc.)
The music industry can cut prices far more than they have. A download costs them next to nothing when compared to producing and distributing physical media.
This is something I have never understood about some P2P users. Why rename a file to something it isn't? I can understand the (RI/MP)AA placing fake files out there, but why do people put another copyrighted work out there under a bad name?
The worst offender I have seem so far was a file named Mandrake9.2(1of3).iso that turned out to be WinXP Home. What did the ~20 KaZaA users I downloaded this from have to gain from me wasting both bandwidth (mine and theirs) and time to get something I didn't want?
are you willing to state, here, in public, that you believe cybersex involving minors "does no harm"?
Got karma to burn, so here goes.
I would ask that if the minor chooses to play a prostitute online, what is it that you are trying to censor it for? To "protect an innocent child"? Obviously this minor was not very innocent.
I believe that the idea of censorship "to protect the children" is wrong. Unlike what those pushing censorship products want people to believe, you can't easliy just stumble upon porn when using the net. Those who find the censored materials were likely looking for it. They will find a way around the filters, while the others using the 'net for "legitimate" research get restricted.
The last paragraph was entirely from my experience. The filter used at my school ("Bess" by N2H2) couldn't stop porn and bomb-making instructions from regularly showing up on the school's computers. Meanwhile, when I would do research on network security for one of my classes, I am regularly blocked from going to security sites which get labeled as "Illegal" (or "Loophole" if the site also happens to run an open proxy)
This said, I believe that while EA probably regrets their actions (I doubt they lost any sales because of this guy) due to the bad press it had generated (this does cause lost sales, while bringing even more attention to this guy), they had every right to cancel his account. In a virtual world run by a private company, you have only the rights given to you by the company. Period. They can censor you when, why, and how they want to.
Besides, I believe that Darl himself is the "Weapons of Mass Destruction".
Maybe Darl is being a "Weapon of Mass Distraction". How many people are reading the latest horseshit from SCO when they could be contributing to open source projects?
Damn You!
Now there's Pepsi all over my laptop and TV!
Great example. Only problem is that running anything through babelfish is like taking HDTV in to VHS. The content's still there, but it is really fuzzy.
You lose enough information during the first translation with babelfish.
In which case, your ISP will charge you out the ass as stated in the TOS. (read "Section 3: Bodily orifices you may be charged from", it's there ;P )
And remember, unlike an EULA, you likely signed the TOS agreement, so as long as there is a clause about business, you're fscked.
Of course Legos are great, but there are some other good ones.
K'NEX - Can build some really cool stuff with these. The big yellow gears driven by the small blue ones make for insane torque
Capsela - Somehow I got these to run underwater. The floats fell off alot, so my but 8x8 "trucks" that I built with these sank in my pool. I've got a lot of rusted up batteries from those experiments.
Construx - Simple and sweet. Recently seeming to come back with new kits.
Erector - The obvious grandaddy of them all. I'll bet money that most gearheads had a set of these, turning wrenches before even starting school. I even used some of these to rig a fan next to my video card and hold in a second HD.
All children need to experience these great toys. I started when I was around 3 and I'm still playing with them now (I'm 17). They really get your mind going.
"If you didn't want to print counterfeit money, why are you using The GIMP?"
Easy: So I don't have to print counterfeit money to pay for Photoshop.