"When we all thought that the FBI was overstepping their bounds? When we all thought that they were wrong; that an Intel engineer couldn't possibly be guilty?"
When stacks of +5 posts said "The FBI is overstepping its bounds, whether he's guilty or not"? Yes, I remember that.
If he's guilty of "conspiring to provide services to the Taliban" because he plead guilty to it as part of the plea bargain, then I guess he's innocent of "conspiring to levy war against the United States" and "conspiring to provide material support for terrorism" because the government dropped those charges as part of the same bargain. In other words, he's not a terrorist, just someone who tried and failed to fight on the receiving end of a conventional war.
The War on Terror breaks the rules once again to catch yet another non-terrorist.
As I understand it, the law targets people who make and distribute unauthorized copies, but copyright holders who complain about "piracy" are usually talking about the people who recieve the copies. So, do you ever find yourself at odds with the copyright holders over what the problem is and how to deal with it?
"The US is wants to control everything. The US wants to burn fossil fuels until the planet chokes and eveyone dies. The US wants to poison everyone's language with transliterated American English. The US wants to destroy everyone's culture by building McDonalds and Walmarts everywhere. Blah blah blah."
"Stow the rhetoric, please. Not everyone accepts that blather at face value."
Thanks for the straw man, but what if I simply object to expensive, pie-in-the-sky research on new ways to kill people?
"Someday, that knowledge of how to build impressive stuff will be used to build impressive stuff you'll use everyday."
You know, the technological spinoff argument is a lot less compelling when the primary goal is to kill large numbers of people. Why can't they learn how to build impressive stuff by building something fairly benign?
"The Bible clearly states that Jesus is the only way to know God and therefore anyone claiming to following God but denying Jesus is not in fact following him, but rather oppossing him, which is tantamount to being ont he side of the devil, whether the people realise it or not. That is what Lewis understood. But of course these days political correctness rules supreme so you can't hold ideas beliefs that require that of others to be wrong."
You're wrong.
In fact, you're so wrong, it's evidence that you are a servant of pure evil.
Check out the numbers for China (second lowest in terms of average time taken). Their average vacation time taken is exactly the same as the minimum amount that must be offered. Maybe someone made the mistake of collecting that data by asking the Chinese government.
"I thought if Soundex can be used for something as important as "no-fly" lists then certainly we should be able to get some entertainment value out of it!"
Good thing that site lists some of the other names with the same code. It's nice to know that "Scott" matches "Shaheed" on the airline computers.
"So you can imagine our suprise when we were informed by a lawyer that
we would be required to publish our source code for others to use. It
was brought to our attention that Linux is copyrighted under something
called the GPL, or the Gnu Protective License. Part of this license
states that any changes to the kernel are to be made freely available.
Unfortunately for us, this meant that the great deal of time and money
we spent 'touching up' Linux to work for this investment firm would
now be available at no cost to our competitors."
Always ask your lawyer before you sign the deal. Besides, "making the changes freely available" means giving people the source code if you give them the binaries. You don't have to give the binaries or source to anyone except the investment firm. The GPL also makes it clear that you and the investment firm can separately agree that they will not redistribute the binaries or code.
"Furthermore, after reviewing this GPL our lawyers advised us that any
products compiled with GPL'ed tools - such as gcc - would also have to
its source code released. This was simply unacceptable."
Replace your lawyer--he can't read. The GPL does not require you to license things under the GPL simply because they were compiled with gcc.
The reason the government doesn't like phrases like "sex workers", "anal sex" and "men who sleep with men" is because they indicate that AIDS discriminates, which is not what the government would like you to believe.
No, the government thinks those phrases look bad on a list of official government-funded projects. That's the obvious explanation, but I guess it doesn't play into your political view of the issue.
If people stopped doing the things that spread AIDS (it's not exactly airborne), it would eventually go away.
Yes, but what are the things that spread AIDS? Other posters have pointed out that blood transfusions and childbirth spread AIDS. It's also spread by sex. That includes non-anal heterosexual sex with a non-prostitute. If you're married and have 2.5 kids, you've done something that spreads AIDS.
There are wives who have gotten AIDS from their husband and children who have gotten it from their mother. I'm sure they'd love to hear a little sermon from you about personal responsibility.
Of course, some activities are riskier than others, but we could never starve the disease of victims without killing off the human race.
Consequently, politicians and activist groups would lose a manipulation tool to siphon tax dollars away from issues that are a lot less preventable and affect more people.
You've just accused a whole lot of people of hiding the facts on a fatal disease in exchange for money. Why don't you type "AIDS" into Google and see what these people
areactuallysaying?
Since you're a fan of common sense, consider this: If the government wanted to hide the fact that certain groups are at higher risk, they would reject requests to study those groups, regardless of the wording.
Government regulates temps to try to force companies to hire more full-time workers. Company pushes temps to the margins. Full-time workers given busier workload and longer hours.
Please RTFA. Or, read my handy summary:
Microsoft was inflating its stock price by calling people "temp workers" even though they were not hired to fill a temporary need -- they were hired to do the regular work that always needs to be done, and they were kept on for years. This was a lie, and Microsoft got busted. Now Microsoft has a work-around. People who are called "temp workers" for stock reasons are treated like crap (more than before) and fired and re-hired on regular basis. In other words, Microsoft couldn't continue to inflate its stock price by lying, so now they're lying and using the unemployment line to subsidize their stock.
Giving temp workers a different deal than regular employees is okay. Treating workers like crap and charging it to the government so that you can lie to your shareholders about why they were hired and what type of work they're doing is not okay.
You don't have to like it, but they're going to do whatever it takes. If they need to obfuscate their property, poison P2P networks, sue companies into oblivion, or pass draconian laws to push back the tide, they will. They're being pushed against the wall by the open illegal distribution of their property.
So when individuals play by "Jungle Rules" they're rat bastard pirates who are to blame for any vigilante actions taken in response, but when large corporations do it, it's no big deal? I'm tired of being told that businesses are more important to society than human beings.
I bet that if you got a list of the top ten pirated songs (among those that are also sold in stores) you would find that all of them are also selling very well, and the artists are living in fancy houses. The heads of the record labels probably have three fancy houses.
Are they losing money to criminals? Probably. Are they "being pushed against the wall" and justified in screwing everyone who listens to music? No.
Uh, no. War begats peace. Overwhelming weapons begats non-proliferation.
My god you're right! Every time we've had a major war, as soon as it was over, we had peace. Why didn't I think of that?
I'm not sure about the "overwhelming weapons" thing, though. I guess it depends on what type of "proliferation" you're talking about. Do you mean the spread of already existing weapons (terrorists stealing or buying nuclear material from massive Russian stockpiles) or the drive to build new weapons (India and Pakistan driven by fear of nukes to build nukes)?
Seriously, that type of "aggression is good" attitude is fatally flawed: it assumes that everyone else is a wuss. What if people respond to threats with threats? What if your enemy has some pride? What if (stay with me) your enemy associates righteousness with fighting at a disadvantage? What if they have the same attitude as you?
A world in which everyone is nice is a fantasy. A world in which everyone says "I'm right, you're wrong, therefore I deserve to have way more guns than you and blow the crap out of you if I get scared." is nightmare. I know you think you're special, but everyone else thinks they're special.
So, basically this little trick allows you to copy the system files and other users' files even though, as a security feature, XP tries to prevent you from doing so.
Shame on all those media outlets who assumed that the failure of a security feature constitutes a security flaw! MS didn't implement a feature with holes, they promised an undesirable 'security' feature that can't be implemented. Now it's being grossly mis-characterized as bad security.
We don't need to know anything about Japanese culture to have an opinion on why comics are not popularly accepted in the US. After reading some of the posts about Europe, I would say that this is not a question of "Why is Japan different from the US?" it's a question of "Why is the US different from everyone else?"
I think it has to do with people's expectations of still images. People expect them to serve as descriptions or scene-setters. Some magazines have as much picture space per word as a comic book, but the pictures simply show the person or the place. At most they show a slice-of-life. The words tell you what the person did.
To an American, the idea of explaining a person's actions through images is needlessly cumbersome. If it can't be captured in a single image, show me a video or tell me in words. Drawing a series of pictures to show complex behavior is (in US culture) like miming--a waste of time unless you don't speak the same language.
The whole point of TCPA, as presented in the whitepapers, is that the system (including the OS) can make itself un-hackable.
Besides, a DRM that can be hacked is still a DRM that exists. My original point was that TCPA is well suited to DRM. The whitepapers said it is poorly suited. I said it is well suited.
That's "well suited to", not "designed for." I don't care if IBM had something else in mind; TCPA can and will be used for DRM. DRM can be done without TCPA, but TCPA makes DRM stronger.
This chip sounds like it's very well suited to DRM. The RIAA will know what hashes go with WindowsXP Service Pack 10. They can encrypt a key under that hash and, separately, under other approved hashes. Then they encrypt all their content with those keys. Then they sign a deal with MS blocking unauthorized programs from accessing the encrypted keys on Windows.
As a result:
You can only decrypt the keys on Windows.
On Windows, only RIAA approved apps can get the key file in order to decrypt it.
That's my understanding of the Evil Master Plan, and nothing in the whitepapers showed that it couldn't happen. Turning off TCPA would just mean that you couldn't access DRMed data at all.
Most home users don't do backups, and they store information that is much more valuable to the user than to virus writers. Most viruses that attack Windows PCs (which means most PCs) do not steal data, they send spam or do DDoS, which might not even be prevented by TCPA.
TCPA might be great for a corporate server. But for home users, one system restore per idiot virus sounds like a reduction in security.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but TCPA seems to work by encrypting files (including files for booting) and then refusing to decrypt them if the system (hardware, OS) is different from when they were encrypted. These whitepapers point out that you can turn off the encryption or set whatever you want as the 'safe' system state.
The problem is that if you are using the encryption, any change in the system will lock you out of your encrypted files. If a virus installs itself on your computer--even if it's only designed to display an irritating popup message--you could be locked out of your files, or maybe even booting the system, until you restore everything from a backup.
That doesn't sound like a good idea for home PCs, especially not if they're running Windows.
I could see them offering a course that uses anime as a sort of 'case study' for some real academic field, the way art majors examine a particular period or movement and fit it into their overall study of art.
Unfortunately, that's not what seems to be happening here. This looks like another pop-culture cop-out course.
I know people will get upset and point out that entertainment and pop-culture are worthy of study. That's true, but it should be serious study. If you want to teach a 100-level course on pop-culture, keep it broad and stress the basic themes and concepts of pop-culture with a variety of examples. If you want to focus on a specific medium/time-period/region combination, make an upper-level class that takes a specific academic perspective and targets a particular major.
In other words:
bad: Sociology 110 -- Sit-coms
good: Sociology 428 -- Sit-coms and wartime escapism in America
That was funny. Your basic point was that Europeans are cooperative people who don't like war. You gave two reasons:
They learned their lesson after all those horrible wars they fought.
They have a history of cooperation. For example, during those horrible wars they fought.
The US is pretty bad, but Europe is the Hall of Fame for arrogant nationalism. The fact that they cooperate with people who they feel they have something in common with, against people who they see as different, doesn't make them broad-minded or enlightened.
The US probably has more friends on the other side of the world than the EU has outside of Europe. (More enemies too, but this is about being willing to cooperate, not being popular.)
As far as I can see, Europe has changed its tune but not its dance. Failing to completely dominate the world doesn't make you mister nice guy. How many nukes does France have again? (Yes, I know it's less than the US has. It's also more than enough to certify their "ethical opposition to US policy" as BS.)
Slashdot Mirror
When stacks of +5 posts said "The FBI is overstepping its bounds, whether he's guilty or not"? Yes, I remember that.
If he's guilty of "conspiring to provide services to the Taliban" because he plead guilty to it as part of the plea bargain, then I guess he's innocent of "conspiring to levy war against the United States" and "conspiring to provide material support for terrorism" because the government dropped those charges as part of the same bargain. In other words, he's not a terrorist, just someone who tried and failed to fight on the receiving end of a conventional war.
The War on Terror breaks the rules once again to catch yet another non-terrorist.
Yes, apparently we both are.
As I understand it, the law targets people who make and distribute unauthorized copies, but copyright holders who complain about "piracy" are usually talking about the people who recieve the copies. So, do you ever find yourself at odds with the copyright holders over what the problem is and how to deal with it?
I believe those are known as "jokes."
Thanks for the straw man, but what if I simply object to expensive, pie-in-the-sky research on new ways to kill people?
You know, the technological spinoff argument is a lot less compelling when the primary goal is to kill large numbers of people. Why can't they learn how to build impressive stuff by building something fairly benign?
That was a joke, dude. Compare what you were complaining about with how I responded. Laugh or forget.
You're wrong.
In fact, you're so wrong, it's evidence that you are a servant of pure evil.
There now, does that make you feel better?
Check out the numbers for China (second lowest in terms of average time taken). Their average vacation time taken is exactly the same as the minimum amount that must be offered. Maybe someone made the mistake of collecting that data by asking the Chinese government.
Always ask your lawyer before you sign the deal. Besides, "making the changes freely available" means giving people the source code if you give them the binaries. You don't have to give the binaries or source to anyone except the investment firm. The GPL also makes it clear that you and the investment firm can separately agree that they will not redistribute the binaries or code.
Replace your lawyer--he can't read. The GPL does not require you to license things under the GPL simply because they were compiled with gcc.
If you don't believe me, read it yourself.
And stop trolling.
Really? I heard that they sometimes explode when you use them.
Of course, this story is about things landing in the wrong place--so I guess we don't need to worry about all those defensive nuclear missiles.
That was totally outrageous.
No, the government thinks those phrases look bad on a list of official government-funded projects. That's the obvious explanation, but I guess it doesn't play into your political view of the issue.
Yes, but what are the things that spread AIDS? Other posters have pointed out that blood transfusions and childbirth spread AIDS. It's also spread by sex. That includes non-anal heterosexual sex with a non-prostitute. If you're married and have 2.5 kids, you've done something that spreads AIDS. There are wives who have gotten AIDS from their husband and children who have gotten it from their mother. I'm sure they'd love to hear a little sermon from you about personal responsibility.
Of course, some activities are riskier than others, but we could never starve the disease of victims without killing off the human race.
You've just accused a whole lot of people of hiding the facts on a fatal disease in exchange for money. Why don't you type "AIDS" into Google and see what these people are actually saying?
Since you're a fan of common sense, consider this: If the government wanted to hide the fact that certain groups are at higher risk, they would reject requests to study those groups, regardless of the wording.
Please RTFA. Or, read my handy summary:
Microsoft was inflating its stock price by calling people "temp workers" even though they were not hired to fill a temporary need -- they were hired to do the regular work that always needs to be done, and they were kept on for years. This was a lie, and Microsoft got busted. Now Microsoft has a work-around. People who are called "temp workers" for stock reasons are treated like crap (more than before) and fired and re-hired on regular basis. In other words, Microsoft couldn't continue to inflate its stock price by lying, so now they're lying and using the unemployment line to subsidize their stock.
Giving temp workers a different deal than regular employees is okay. Treating workers like crap and charging it to the government so that you can lie to your shareholders about why they were hired and what type of work they're doing is not okay.
So when individuals play by "Jungle Rules" they're rat bastard pirates who are to blame for any vigilante actions taken in response, but when large corporations do it, it's no big deal? I'm tired of being told that businesses are more important to society than human beings.
I bet that if you got a list of the top ten pirated songs (among those that are also sold in stores) you would find that all of them are also selling very well, and the artists are living in fancy houses. The heads of the record labels probably have three fancy houses.
Are they losing money to criminals? Probably. Are they "being pushed against the wall" and justified in screwing everyone who listens to music? No.
My god you're right! Every time we've had a major war, as soon as it was over, we had peace. Why didn't I think of that?
I'm not sure about the "overwhelming weapons" thing, though. I guess it depends on what type of "proliferation" you're talking about. Do you mean the spread of already existing weapons (terrorists stealing or buying nuclear material from massive Russian stockpiles) or the drive to build new weapons (India and Pakistan driven by fear of nukes to build nukes)?
Seriously, that type of "aggression is good" attitude is fatally flawed: it assumes that everyone else is a wuss. What if people respond to threats with threats? What if your enemy has some pride? What if (stay with me) your enemy associates righteousness with fighting at a disadvantage? What if they have the same attitude as you?
A world in which everyone is nice is a fantasy. A world in which everyone says "I'm right, you're wrong, therefore I deserve to have way more guns than you and blow the crap out of you if I get scared." is nightmare. I know you think you're special, but everyone else thinks they're special.
So, basically this little trick allows you to copy the system files and other users' files even though, as a security feature, XP tries to prevent you from doing so.
Shame on all those media outlets who assumed that the failure of a security feature constitutes a security flaw! MS didn't implement a feature with holes, they promised an undesirable 'security' feature that can't be implemented. Now it's being grossly mis-characterized as bad security.
My heart breaks.
We don't need to know anything about Japanese culture to have an opinion on why comics are not popularly accepted in the US. After reading some of the posts about Europe, I would say that this is not a question of "Why is Japan different from the US?" it's a question of "Why is the US different from everyone else?"
I think it has to do with people's expectations of still images. People expect them to serve as descriptions or scene-setters. Some magazines have as much picture space per word as a comic book, but the pictures simply show the person or the place. At most they show a slice-of-life. The words tell you what the person did.
To an American, the idea of explaining a person's actions through images is needlessly cumbersome. If it can't be captured in a single image, show me a video or tell me in words. Drawing a series of pictures to show complex behavior is (in US culture) like miming--a waste of time unless you don't speak the same language.
The whole point of TCPA, as presented in the whitepapers, is that the system (including the OS) can make itself un-hackable.
Besides, a DRM that can be hacked is still a DRM that exists. My original point was that TCPA is well suited to DRM. The whitepapers said it is poorly suited. I said it is well suited.
That's "well suited to", not "designed for." I don't care if IBM had something else in mind; TCPA can and will be used for DRM. DRM can be done without TCPA, but TCPA makes DRM stronger.
If you don't want DRM-protected data, DRM is never a problem. My point is that DRM can be done using TCPA.
This chip sounds like it's very well suited to DRM. The RIAA will know what hashes go with WindowsXP Service Pack 10. They can encrypt a key under that hash and, separately, under other approved hashes. Then they encrypt all their content with those keys. Then they sign a deal with MS blocking unauthorized programs from accessing the encrypted keys on Windows.
As a result:
- You can only decrypt the keys on Windows.
- On Windows, only RIAA approved apps can get the key file in order to decrypt it.
That's my understanding of the Evil Master Plan, and nothing in the whitepapers showed that it couldn't happen. Turning off TCPA would just mean that you couldn't access DRMed data at all.Most home users don't do backups, and they store information that is much more valuable to the user than to virus writers. Most viruses that attack Windows PCs (which means most PCs) do not steal data, they send spam or do DDoS, which might not even be prevented by TCPA.
TCPA might be great for a corporate server. But for home users, one system restore per idiot virus sounds like a reduction in security.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding this, but TCPA seems to work by encrypting files (including files for booting) and then refusing to decrypt them if the system (hardware, OS) is different from when they were encrypted. These whitepapers point out that you can turn off the encryption or set whatever you want as the 'safe' system state.
The problem is that if you are using the encryption, any change in the system will lock you out of your encrypted files. If a virus installs itself on your computer--even if it's only designed to display an irritating popup message--you could be locked out of your files, or maybe even booting the system, until you restore everything from a backup.
That doesn't sound like a good idea for home PCs, especially not if they're running Windows.
I could see them offering a course that uses anime as a sort of 'case study' for some real academic field, the way art majors examine a particular period or movement and fit it into their overall study of art.
Unfortunately, that's not what seems to be happening here. This looks like another pop-culture cop-out course.
I know people will get upset and point out that entertainment and pop-culture are worthy of study. That's true, but it should be serious study. If you want to teach a 100-level course on pop-culture, keep it broad and stress the basic themes and concepts of pop-culture with a variety of examples. If you want to focus on a specific medium/time-period/region combination, make an upper-level class that takes a specific academic perspective and targets a particular major.
In other words:
bad: Sociology 110 -- Sit-coms
good: Sociology 428 -- Sit-coms and wartime escapism in America
That was funny. Your basic point was that Europeans are cooperative people who don't like war. You gave two reasons:
The US is pretty bad, but Europe is the Hall of Fame for arrogant nationalism. The fact that they cooperate with people who they feel they have something in common with, against people who they see as different, doesn't make them broad-minded or enlightened.
The US probably has more friends on the other side of the world than the EU has outside of Europe. (More enemies too, but this is about being willing to cooperate, not being popular.)
As far as I can see, Europe has changed its tune but not its dance. Failing to completely dominate the world doesn't make you mister nice guy. How many nukes does France have again? (Yes, I know it's less than the US has. It's also more than enough to certify their "ethical opposition to US policy" as BS.)