True, but they also use "seizing of computer equipment" (or anything, for that matter) as a sort of pre-conviction punishment. They tend to grab everything they are legally allowed to grab and it'll be a long, long time before they finish "examining" it.
I had a friend this happened to many years ago, for entirely different reasons, and by the time he got his stuff back (much of it damaged) it was so obsolete as to be not worth using.
Basically, cops typically have a "get the perp" mentallity and will do anything legally allowed to make "the perp's" life less fun. So if the warrant says "all computer equipment", they'll grab all computer equipment. They'll grab the playstation in the corner, not because they think it might have evidence, but because they want to make the guy's life less fun. And once they have it, they'll keep their mits on it until they absolutely have to give it back.
It is no different from other crimes, BTW. Accused drug dealers don't get their cars back real soon...
The basic problem is that while the legal system assumes innocence, cops have been trained to assume guilt, and they often try to cram as much punishment in there as they can just in case the guy gets off. (Partly because all too often, guilty guys with good lawyers get off on technicalities, but that's a different story.)
What it really does is put Universal at risk for having every artist with a disk on my.mp3.com sue them. It means that all of a sudden the prospect of a few thousand lawsuits, all asking for different amounts of money. And what that means is a whole lot of noise, all showing the public that the RIAA doesn't give a damn about the artists it "represents". Yeah, mp3.com is screwed either way, but this way, RIAA is a lot worse off in the PR war.
Unfortunately, Microsoft is very good and creating wildly confusing API names. "ActiveX" is what is used to be called "COM", mostly, sort of. (Or maybe it is now called COM again. I can never keep up.) That checkbox just says that you don't want IE to use ActiveX controls embedded in web-pages, This doesn't mean that other programs can't use the IE ActiveX control.
It goes something like this:
A financial money manager program wants to have cool looking reports. Rather than write them from scratch, they decide to use the IE control. They embedd this control in their app and write the reports in HTML. Makes gobs of sense from their point of view. Less work. Now they are manually embedded the control, so whether or not they want to make this a user option is entirely up to them. It has nothing o do with any internet security options. The only way you could prevent them from doing this is either physically deleting the DLL or removing the control's CLSID from the registry.
It is not as easy as you think. The IE ActiveX control is pretty much built into the OS. This makes it pretty much a given that anyone who wants to render HTML in their app is going to be using IE. We aren't necessarily talking obvious browser apps, either. It is very, very likely that you are using IE at times and not even knowing it.
Unless I am mistaken (IANAL), the fact that he signed over any inventions only means that he cannot legally patent those inventions himself. It does not mean that they can force him to sign patent documents that he disagrees with.
Traffic stats according to PC Data, the authority on Internet traffic:
o Ranked #2250 of all sites on the Internet and climbing
o 124,000 unique users per week
o 2,646,000 page views per week
o Users spend an average 46 minutes per week on the site
From the article:Mock and his team built the 2.13 x 2.22 x 0.35-inch MP3 module around a 74-MHz ARM7 processor from Cirrus Logic Inc., 64 Mbytes of NAND flash memory and a 1-bit D/A converter from Cirrus' Crystal division, at 24-bit resolution and a 96-kHz sample rate.
64 Mb -> 10 hours of listening? Uh, yeah, they must be talking about a bit rate of something like 24...
And I could swear that there are other mp3 players out there with as much memory for the same or better price that don't need a handspring.
Two CDs worth of music at 192 bits for under $200 That's what I've got to see before I buy one.
Damn kids, not realizing that there was a day when we didn't have new fangled things like dynamic libraries, and when saving a couple K by keeping printf() from being linked was a real big deal.
Hell yeah! The first rule of success on any project is that one person gets the say-so. If the CEO wants it done different, then he damn-well has to go tell that one person to say so before anything gets done.
I've been on too many disasterous projects that didn't work that way.
Here's what I just sent. (Starting with the HRRC boilerplate and expanding on it.)
I understand the Commission soon will be deciding whether VCRs can be hooked up to digital cable systems, and whether home recording from digital cable will be allowed. Hollywood studios apparently claim that home recording is the same as theft of service and that this justifies limiting home taping. Your agency should protect consumers' rights to record and view DTV signals. The Commission should respect the Supreme Court's ruling in the Betamax case, and not equate private, noncommercial home recording with theft of service! In short, the Commission should take action to protect the interests of consumers in this proceeding.
Enough of the form letter. To say it in my own words, it seems as if certain corporations hold the mistaken view that the public airwaves are not public, but are instead owned by them. As we all know, this is not the case. Restrictions are put on the use of the airwaves only in order to prevent uses not in the interest of the public and not, as many of these large corporations seem to think, in order to enhance their profits. Enhancing of profits is fine, as long as it is done in a fair manner. It is not fine when it crosses into anti-social territory.
In the past, both the courts and the FCC have taken a reasonable, balanced view, not trampling on the rights of the the true owners of the airwaves while also preventing the sort of anarchy that would prevent individuals and corporations from being fairly compensated for their creations. It is my hope that both the FCC and the courts will continue to find that balance, protecting profits, but not at the expense of completely reasonable use of the airwaves by private citizens.
And in my mind, that fair and reasonable use is quite simply. If I pay, either explicitly, or implicitly through watching advertising, for signals to be sent to my house, I have the right to view those signals in any way and at any time that I see fit, provided I do not transfer those signals to someone who hasn't so paid. That is fair and reasonable. It imposes no onus on the private citizen and yet provides a fair profit to the creator of those signals.
I really wish someone would create a "fixed" C/C++. New sorts of languages like Java, Perl, etc. are all nice, but what I'd really like is a systems language mostly like C++, but with all the problems fixed.
There are so many really cool things you could do to make C++ an easier language without sacrificing power if you just bailed on backwards compatibility. I'd like a language pretty much like C++ in general, but with things like arrays that are bounds checked and built-in strings.
It annoys me that when there are so many widely acknowledged annoyances in C/C++, that people keep creating "successors" to C/C++ that simply don't fill the same niche. Java/Perl/Python all have their place, but they it is simply a different niche from C++. So while Java fixed a lot of C/C++ problems, it did so in a different context. What I'd really like to see is someone create a compiled, fast C++-like language.
Exactly! Most of us live in houses that can be entered by anyone with a large brick. Does that mean that we give up and just leave our doors sitting wide open when we go to work?
Exactly. I'm sure a determined person could break into my house. But I don't give up, because moderate security means that such a person will have to go to a lot of effort to do so. That's really the best we can hope for. To make it hard enough that it isn't worth an attacker's time.
I'm sure that the NSA could break into my home box, no problems. I don't really care about that. There's not much I can do about that. That doesn't mean I won't put up enough security to keep the script-kiddies out.
The same applies for a corporate box. You don't give up just because you can't keep everyone out. It is good enough to have enough security that any attacker is highly skilled enough that he wouldn't bother with your site.
Or the coder throws in a 1024 byte buffer and says to himself "I'll go make this more robust once it is working". A couple days latter, he's got the system working, so he runs off, shows it to his boss, and moves on to the next project, forgetting about the work he has left to do on the program that "works".
Usually the tradeoff isn't program performance vs. security but coding time vs. security/performance/whataver.
Well, I don't think either US power or money is the driving force, here. India is a great example. Why is the universal language of trade there English? Not because of US involvement there, but because the British Empire ran the place for over a hundred years. That created (at the time) a society where English speaking was a way to get ahead. After the British left, this was no longer the case, however, having a "common tongue" is very useful, and English, being known be a lot of people in a variety of peoples there, was ready made. In cases like this, a language that is not the first language is actually preferable in many ways, as if it were, say, hindi, non-native hindi speakers would feel disadvantaged. But since there are few native English speakers, it is actually a very good compromise.
That is pretty much the same as with what happened with Latin. It was the "common tongue" long after native Latin speaking society fell.
If the English speaking countries "fell", you'd probably still see English as a "common tongue" in a large number of places, and it probably would not dim the chances for English becoming such world-wide. After all, if a Chinese person wants to talk to an Indian, they are most likely to share only English in common, and you are more likely to convince them both to learn English than you are to convince the Indian to use chinese or the Chinese person to use Indian and thereby work on the other's "turf".
Actually, I'd say that it has more to do with the previous "World Empire" (tm) that made English de rigeur for the elite in such societies as India and China.
Actually, China is a great example. At the time when "everyone" spoke Latin in Europe, "everyone" (the intellectual elite, that is) spoke some chinese dialect (I forget which) in places like Korea and Japan.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but they also use "seizing of computer equipment" (or anything, for that matter) as a sort of pre-conviction punishment. They tend to grab everything they are legally allowed to grab and it'll be a long, long time before they finish "examining" it.
I had a friend this happened to many years ago, for entirely different reasons, and by the time he got his stuff back (much of it damaged) it was so obsolete as to be not worth using.
Basically, cops typically have a "get the perp" mentallity and will do anything legally allowed to make "the perp's" life less fun. So if the warrant says "all computer equipment", they'll grab all computer equipment. They'll grab the playstation in the corner, not because they think it might have evidence, but because they want to make the guy's life less fun. And once they have it, they'll keep their mits on it until they absolutely have to give it back.
It is no different from other crimes, BTW. Accused drug dealers don't get their cars back real soon...
The basic problem is that while the legal system assumes innocence, cops have been trained to assume guilt, and they often try to cram as much punishment in there as they can just in case the guy gets off. (Partly because all too often, guilty guys with good lawyers get off on technicalities, but that's a different story.)
What it really does is put Universal at risk for having every artist with a disk on my.mp3.com sue them. It means that all of a sudden the prospect of a few thousand lawsuits, all asking for different amounts of money. And what that means is a whole lot of noise, all showing the public that the RIAA doesn't give a damn about the artists it "represents". Yeah, mp3.com is screwed either way, but this way, RIAA is a lot worse off in the PR war.
Damn! Anybody want to buy some spraypaint?
Unfortunately, Microsoft is very good and creating wildly confusing API names. "ActiveX" is what is used to be called "COM", mostly, sort of. (Or maybe it is now called COM again. I can never keep up.) That checkbox just says that you don't want IE to use ActiveX controls embedded in web-pages, This doesn't mean that other programs can't use the IE ActiveX control.
It goes something like this:
A financial money manager program wants to have cool looking reports. Rather than write them from scratch, they decide to use the IE control. They embedd this control in their app and write the reports in HTML. Makes gobs of sense from their point of view. Less work. Now they are manually embedded the control, so whether or not they want to make this a user option is entirely up to them. It has nothing o do with any internet security options. The only way you could prevent them from doing this is either physically deleting the DLL or removing the control's CLSID from the registry.
It came from Andrew Jackson. He was a famously bad speller.
It is not as easy as you think. The IE ActiveX control is pretty much built into the OS. This makes it pretty much a given that anyone who wants to render HTML in their app is going to be using IE. We aren't necessarily talking obvious browser apps, either. It is very, very likely that you are using IE at times and not even knowing it.
Unless I am mistaken (IANAL), the fact that he signed over any inventions only means that he cannot legally patent those inventions himself. It does not mean that they can force him to sign patent documents that he disagrees with.
Perhaps because
Traffic stats according to PC Data, the authority on Internet traffic:
o Ranked #2250 of all sites on the Internet and climbing
o 124,000 unique users per week
o 2,646,000 page views per week
o Users spend an average 46 minutes per week on the site
From the article:Mock and his team built the 2.13 x 2.22 x 0.35-inch MP3 module around a 74-MHz ARM7 processor from Cirrus Logic Inc., 64 Mbytes of NAND flash memory and a 1-bit D/A converter from Cirrus' Crystal division, at 24-bit resolution and a 96-kHz sample rate.
64 Mb -> 10 hours of listening? Uh, yeah, they must be talking about a bit rate of something like 24...
And I could swear that there are other mp3 players out there with as much memory for the same or better price that don't need a handspring.
Two CDs worth of music at 192 bits for under $200 That's what I've got to see before I buy one.
Ermm....he said "many years ago"....
Damn kids, not realizing that there was a day when we didn't have new fangled things like dynamic libraries, and when saving a couple K by keeping printf() from being linked was a real big deal.
Hell yeah! The first rule of success on any project is that one person gets the say-so. If the CEO wants it done different, then he damn-well has to go tell that one person to say so before anything gets done.
I've been on too many disasterous projects that didn't work that way.
Here's what I just sent. (Starting with the HRRC boilerplate and expanding on it.)
I understand the Commission soon will be deciding whether VCRs can be hooked up to digital cable systems, and whether home recording from digital cable will be allowed. Hollywood studios apparently claim that home recording is the same as theft of service and that this justifies limiting home taping. Your agency should protect consumers' rights to record and view DTV signals. The Commission should respect the Supreme Court's ruling in the Betamax case, and not equate private, noncommercial home recording with theft of service! In short, the Commission should take action to protect the interests of consumers in this proceeding.
Enough of the form letter. To say it in my own words, it seems as if certain corporations hold the mistaken view that the public airwaves are not public, but are instead owned by them. As we all know, this is not the case. Restrictions are put on the use of the airwaves only in order to prevent uses not in the interest of the public and not, as many of these large corporations seem to think, in order to enhance their profits. Enhancing of profits is fine, as long as it is done in a fair manner. It is not fine when it crosses into anti-social territory.
In the past, both the courts and the FCC have taken a reasonable, balanced view, not trampling on the rights of the the true owners of the airwaves while also preventing the sort of anarchy that would prevent individuals and corporations from being fairly compensated for their creations. It is my hope that both the FCC and the courts will continue to find that balance, protecting profits, but not at the expense of completely reasonable use of the airwaves by private citizens.
And in my mind, that fair and reasonable use is quite simply. If I pay, either explicitly, or implicitly through watching advertising, for signals to be sent to my house, I have the right to view those signals in any way and at any time that I see fit, provided I do not transfer those signals to someone who hasn't so paid. That is fair and reasonable. It imposes no onus on the private citizen and yet provides a fair profit to the creator of those signals.
Thank you for reading my views.
Sincerely,
Steven R. Burnap
I really wish someone would create a "fixed" C/C++. New sorts of languages like Java, Perl, etc. are all nice, but what I'd really like is a systems language mostly like C++, but with all the problems fixed.
There are so many really cool things you could do to make C++ an easier language without sacrificing power if you just bailed on backwards compatibility. I'd like a language pretty much like C++ in general, but with things like arrays that are bounds checked and built-in strings.
It annoys me that when there are so many widely acknowledged annoyances in C/C++, that people keep creating "successors" to C/C++ that simply don't fill the same niche. Java/Perl/Python all have their place, but they it is simply a different niche from C++. So while Java fixed a lot of C/C++ problems, it did so in a different context. What I'd really like to see is someone create a compiled, fast C++-like language.
Heaven forbid anyone should do anything interesting on Windows.
The most important reason that Cryptonomicon didn't deserve to win a Hugo is that it wasn't science fiction.
Borland may have been a Pascal shop, but they had a damn fine C compiler in the early eighties.
I thought that copyrighted works had to have a copyright notice of some sort. So unless the packets start with:
char Copyright[30];
There may not be an issue.
Of course, IANAL.
Exactly! Most of us live in houses that can be entered by anyone with a large brick. Does that mean that we give up and just leave our doors sitting wide open when we go to work?
The moral argument:
"Who watches the watchmen?"
All the rest is just elaboration on that.
Exactly. I'm sure a determined person could break into my house. But I don't give up, because moderate security means that such a person will have to go to a lot of effort to do so. That's really the best we can hope for. To make it hard enough that it isn't worth an attacker's time.
I'm sure that the NSA could break into my home box, no problems. I don't really care about that. There's not much I can do about that. That doesn't mean I won't put up enough security to keep the script-kiddies out.
The same applies for a corporate box. You don't give up just because you can't keep everyone out. It is good enough to have enough security that any attacker is highly skilled enough that he wouldn't bother with your site.
Or the coder throws in a 1024 byte buffer and says to himself "I'll go make this more robust once it is working". A couple days latter, he's got the system working, so he runs off, shows it to his boss, and moves on to the next project, forgetting about the work he has left to do on the program that "works".
Usually the tradeoff isn't program performance vs. security but coding time vs. security/performance/whataver.
Everyone ought to get their friends to do so as well.
Well, I don't think either US power or money is the driving force, here. India is a great example. Why is the universal language of trade there English? Not because of US involvement there, but because the British Empire ran the place for over a hundred years. That created (at the time) a society where English speaking was a way to get ahead. After the British left, this was no longer the case, however, having a "common tongue" is very useful, and English, being known be a lot of people in a variety of peoples there, was ready made. In cases like this, a language that is not the first language is actually preferable in many ways, as if it were, say, hindi, non-native hindi speakers would feel disadvantaged. But since there are few native English speakers, it is actually a very good compromise.
That is pretty much the same as with what happened with Latin. It was the "common tongue" long after native Latin speaking society fell.
If the English speaking countries "fell", you'd probably still see English as a "common tongue" in a large number of places, and it probably would not dim the chances for English becoming such world-wide. After all, if a Chinese person wants to talk to an Indian, they are most likely to share only English in common, and you are more likely to convince them both to learn English than you are to convince the Indian to use chinese or the Chinese person to use Indian and thereby work on the other's "turf".
Actually, I'd say that it has more to do with the previous "World Empire" (tm) that made English de rigeur for the elite in such societies as India and China.
Actually, China is a great example. At the time when "everyone" spoke Latin in Europe, "everyone" (the intellectual elite, that is) spoke some chinese dialect (I forget which) in places like Korea and Japan.