Putain de merde, ou je me trouve? C'est bon. Mais pourquoi tu dis "faire de la flatulence" comme cela? Je suggeste dire "laisser souffler un petit vent" ou meme "faire chanter le trou de cul"? Non, c'est plus grossier. Eh bien.....
Just imagine if personal injury lawyers started offering a service whereby they will patent your injury! Not only do you get compensation when you hurt yourself, you get royalty fees the next time someone hurts themself the same way!
I can think of a possible antidote to all this court mania, though. Has a retailer the right to refuse payment, even if it is made in pound notes, if it believes the money was obtained by some means it feels objectionable? I.E. can some methodist-run establishment legally refuse money won on the horses? By extension it would mean NO LAWSUIT MONEY signs in shops and restaurants..... wouldn't be much good if they could get taken to court over it, though!
Alright..... I was quoting a half-remembered Radio Times article from c.1987..... but I'm sure it did refer to some kind of ultrasonic modulation scheme being tested in the late 60s and I'm sure a Beatles LP was involved.
And I know all about connecting a record player to a reel-to-reel tape recorder for a HIGHLY intimate and personal reason!:-)
The problem with your argument is, you're ignoring something pretty huge.
Yes, in theory, LP has a high-end rolloff limited only by the equipment used - up to 40kHz is readily acheivable with a decent magnetic pick-up. CD, by contrast, has a high-end rolloff limited by the quantisation process - the Nyquist Limit of 0.5x the sampling rate. Basically, to know what the frequency of a signal is, you need at least one sample somewhere in the crest and another sample somewhere in the trough. This is a fundamental limitation that no technology will get around.
Changing the sampling rate of a digital signal is non-trivial (except for integer multiples). So the entire mastering process is performed at 44100 samples / second, the ISO9660 red book CD sampling rate, and gives a Nyquist limit of 22.05kHz - above the limit of a child's hearing. In practice no filter can be made with a sharp enough "knee" to fit the limit, so the response typically begins to tail off around 18kHz, in line with an adult's hearing.
So your analogue vinyl LP was recorded and mixed digitally at 44100Ss-1, and therefore contains nothing that wouldn't be on the CD of the same work. Except Vinyl Warmth, of course.
Apple Records tried to copy-protect The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper LP by including a frequency too high to hear, that was meant to beat with the ultrasonic bias of a tape recorder and cause the volume to modulate up and down on playback. One resistor and one capacitor would have got around it. It worked fine in the labs, but most home equipment of the day couldn't reproduce the copy protection signal at all and the album was easily ripped off.....
Try cdparanoia -B; for i in *wav; do lame -h $i && rm $i; done same as usual. I got many - and some +, but (IMMSMC) none of the dreaded V. This was the same drive that crashed with a Sony/EPIC disc. Your results may vary.
Anyway, CD prices are a rip-off. CDs cost less to manufacture than the seriously-inferior cassettes, yet they are sold at a higher price. I guess people wouldn't want to pay more £££ just to get a poorer sound quality, but why sell cassettes at all in that case? CD players are cheap enough now..... and it's not like it's difficult to record a CD onto a cassette or anything.
As long as it's possible to hold a mic up to a speaker. Or to hook up a 2 x audio - 3.5 stereo lead between a standalone player and a PC sound card {but notice how line-in jacks seem to be an endangered species these days..... coincidence?}
Of course that way you won't get bit-perfect digital copies, but there'll be a hard core of audiophiles {Note to News of the World readers: an audiophile is a hi-fi bore, not some kind of pervert} who will be fastidious about the quality of the copies they're making, and these copies will be copiable digitally, so the whole exercise will have been futile from the point of view of the record companies.
Incidentally, I copied a copy of the Norah Jones disc, using the usual method of cdparanoia -B; for i in *wav; do lame -h $i && rm $i; done and it worked. Don't know how the original was protected, but the owner of the disc is a serious hacker. Jennifer Lopez's "J to tha L-O" [Sony/EPIC] didn't copy on that same {read-only} drive - in fact, it actually crashed the drive's firmware requiring a plug-pull {but the kernel and even the X-server survived unscathed}. On a Windoze box, Winamp started but no sound. I remember similar issues with Shakira's "Laundry Service" [Sony/EPIC; same protection], but I've got a drive {Sony, would you adam and eve!} on one of my machines that read it OK with cdparanoia. In the process, though, I learned more than anyone ever needs to know about IDE-SCSI emulation.....
What I want a wireless set to do, is to monitor several stations at once besides the one I am listening to; and then, if an advert comes on, or a song I've already heard, it will retune itself to another station carrying something more interesting.
That way, I would get the benefit of the BBC (no adverts!) as well as some of the local stations (tho' GWR / 96 Bent / Sheep FM still suck).
I can't be bothered to read through all those posts. Has anybody mentioned Multi Coloured Swap Shop, or the magical number 01-811-8055?
My dad worked for the BBC, so I was never allowed to watch TISWAS - or anything from the Other Channel, The One With The Adverts - at home. I sneaked a couple of watchings at other people's houses, but never really liked it.
Then they kept trying to pretend it was a different programme: they introduced different presenters, different sets and different features, but you could tell it was really Multi Coloured Swap Shop. Saturday Superstore, Going Live, Live and Kicking, whatever they chose to call it: they were the same programme really. And Sarah 'helicopter' Greene's 'five star' moment was an all-time classic.
Thing is, kids grow up faster nowadays, so they're already drinking by the time they're teenagers, and therefore too hung over of a Saturday morning to appreciate scary beards.
You don't need a very sophisticated search engine, all you need are meaningful filenames and a script to pretty up the output from ls -R. It's work to set up, of course, but once up it stays up (unless you're using windoze...)
As long as there are a few users whose IP adresses either are static, or change rarely, then their machines can act as nameservers (or more likely just dispense hosts and/or resolv.conf files) for the more changeable ones. Bots could be used to update these lists; on the static servers to strike off addresses not running the sharey daemons, and on the DHCP victims to auto-detect IP address updates and notify the nameservers.
In fact, somebody probably has already written the scripts to do this.....
Why is anyone making any fuss at all over "peer to peer" sharing companies? What could I do with any of this *-ster software that I can't do with apache and proftpd (which I already have)?
You can light an LED from the mains if you wire another diode "back-to-front" in parallel and a 0.1uF capacitor in series. Ideally put a metal film resistor of a few hundred ohms in series unless the cap is X-rated. (This is to limit the current flow into the capacitor at switch-on; the voltage is above half max for about 2/3 of the time and a discharged capacitor is pretty much a short circuit. The fuse in the plug won't know the difference anyway.) As soon as the voltage gets above 2V the LED strikes, and the excess voltage charges the capacitor. The other diode allows the capacitor to discharge on the negative half-cycle. If it's an LED you'll get more light.
You might not even need the reverse diode since (IMOX) LEDs zener at about 5.6V but in this state are dissipating more power due to the excess voltage (and power dissipation is what kills electronic devices), so if you want to run an LED off unrectified AC you'll need a higher impedance (resistive or capacitive) in series and you'll get less light.
Plus of course you have the satisfaction of knowing you haven't been using those evil polluting batteries -- disposable ones are a waste of energy all round, rechargeable ones have nasty chemicals in them (though traditional lead-acid ones are bordering on 100% recyclability).
I had a mate who was installing some 60X CD-ROM drives. He had a disc *explode* in one of them. With a bang and a shower of glitter. Apparently he was told to download a firmware upgrade to slow it down to 50X.
This would not be the first upgrade ever to cause a piece of hardware to slow down;)
If a person uses DeCSS for its intended purpose, the result is circumvention of a protection measure.
When I use DeCSS, I am using it to watch a movie that I bought, paid for and have the right to use, abuse, enjoy or destroy -- and that nobody has the right to prevent me from watching.
In any case, scrambling content using CSS does not prevent copying. Anyone can reproduce text verbatim in a language they cannot understand. If a bit-for-bit copy is made of the zeros and ones on a DVD, then that will play on a machine that could read the original, whether or not the person managed to make any sense of what they were copying.
Anyway, what's to stop me making a device like a sawn-off CRT, that fits in a telly; but with A-to-D converters analysing the red, green and blue grid voltages (for the RGB levels) and the scan coil currents (for the timing), and reconstructing the video signals using that? (oh yeah, another 6 A-to-Ds for the audio, with input terminals that look like the ones on speakers). Show me a movie I couldn't copy with *that* baby.
Any copy protection scheme is flawed because the vendor does not, and cannot, know what is happening to the data once it has been read from the storage medium. And what I have described above would get around even one-time-read media (which I experimented with myself once: I mounted a small magnet in an audio cassette, downstream of the sound head, to overwrite the signal before the tape got to the take-up spool. Self-destructing messages were kind of amusing to an 8-year-old, which I was at the time.)
I presume we're all familiar with the tale of the Emperor's New Clothes..... the DMCA strikes me as being like a law making it an offence to point out public nudity.
Most probably this case will get thrown out of court, and people will realise what has been going on the whole time.
I've never paid for a piece of PC software in my life, ever, and I can't begin to imagine why anyone would pay money for software like Microsoft SQL server when MySQL is free and, AFAIK, does everything Microsoft's proprietary server does (after all, SQL is an ISO standard). You'd still have to learn SQL, after all, and I hardly think typing apt-get install mysql is any more complicated than substituting the letter of a CD-ROM drive for "D:". Hell, it's probably easier on non-geeky Linux distros.
Maybe the people who paid for software thought that it would be under some kind of guarantee, but if you look at any end user licence agreement, they specifically bar you from suing the software company. (In fact, even attempting to sue might well terminate your right to use the software).
If the courts rule for Microsoft, and the possibility to sue was the only reason -- or even the main reason -- why people used Microsoft as opposed to Free Software, then expect a lot of people to abandon MS and go with MySQL, or some other Free server.
If the courts rule against Microsoft, some have said there could be negative implications for Free Software. However, I can't see any attempt to sue a Free Software author sticking. After all, the source code is open to independent expert scrutiny - which is not the case with proprietary software. The analogy would be more like something built from a kit of parts - you get the opportunity to examine it, assess its suitability for application and make any alterations you deem necessary before you build and deploy it.
Whichever way the courts decide, these look set to be Interesting Times.
Unfortunately the last person to use the number before me (A Mr. Brown) seems to have signed up to everything in the universe, given them his phone number and not ticked the "Oh God, please do not phone me" box on them all.
So now I get lots of calls that go like this:
spammer: is that mr. brown?
me: no. This has not been mr. brown's number for at least 3 years.
spammer: well, i wonder if you might be interested anyway. we're doing a promotion on gym membership...
me: please remove my number from your database and do not call it again.
So you see, the problem is that the phone number was "tainted" by this Mr. Brown; now all these calls are not technically "unsolicited", because he signed up and gave permission for them to call him.
..... and THAT's why Megan's Law is a BAD idea.
Coming back to topic, yes, Britain is in the EU, but there isn't an EU-wide police force so member states still have to make their own laws. Um, that wasn't the topic either.
How enforceable is any new law going to be? At one extreme, if the spammers are outside the EU in a country where spamming is not illegal, then they could never be brought to trial as there would be no grounds for extradition. At the other extreme, if a partner dumps you, will you be sent to prison for e-mailing them to find out what is going on? [movie plot developing.....]
Phone numbers do get re-used; it's unavoidable. So do IP addresses, but e-mail addresses are (fairly) unique. Well,
this is my own attempt at a way of making e-mail addresses *completely* unique when displayed on a Web page - thereby preventing harvesting of addresses from websites.
It doesn't stop you getting the first spam sent to a particular unique address, but it does stop spammers from selling addresses on because you can just set procmail recipes on your POP3 host to block known harvested addresses to which no legitimate user is ever going to send mail.
You know those adverts you get on Sky One et al, for law firms offering to help you sue anyone and everyone for big compensation payouts?
How about this..... imagine some sweaty scuzzball with one eye on your wallet..... maybe a few shots of idiots doing stupid things, and big stacks of pound notes..... you know the kind of advert I'm talking about.
Question. What's better than getting money when you hurt yourself? Answer. Getting money when other people hurt themselves!
If you've been injured in an accident that wasn't your fault - or even if it was your fault - just call Dewey, Cheetham and Howe solicitors. Not only can we arrange a substantial compensation package, we can even patent your injury on your behalf. Then the next time anyone else suffers the same kind of injury, you could be eligible for a handsome royalty fee!
Dewey, Cheetham and Howe solicitors - don't just blame - claim!
3.- An invention shall be taken to involve an inventive step if it is not obvious to a person skilled in the art, having regard to any matter which forms part of the state of the art by virtue only ofsection 2(2) above (and disregarding section 2(3) above).
If it isn't "obvious" to you that a static link in one frame can affect a dynamic document in another, then I put it tyo you that you are not "skilled in the art" of Web design. This patent is null and void.
Under a proposed EU law (WEEE directive), this would be illegal -- manufacturers are specifically forbidden to comporomise the recyclability of products. Protecting the environment is more important than protecting corporate profits.
Under UK law, it's already illegal. If I have bought an ink cartridge, I own that cartridge and I have the right to use, abuse, enjoy or destroy it. If the manufacturers, or anyone for that matter, do something to it to prevent me using it, then that is criminal damage. No need even to call a solicitor, since it's a criminal act you should just be able to dial 999.....
Changing the subject slightly now. Me and a mate fished an Apple ImageWriter out of a skip. We found a power lead, cobbled up a serial cable and got the thing to print. Bit faint, but we got a new ribbon (purple!) and wound it into the cassette (it split open easily enough and the old ribbon was unlikely to stain much). No manual, though. So I found an ImageWriter II driver for the Amiga, stuck my faithful Citizen 120D [now that really was an excellent printer!] into Hex Dump mode, and rattled off a document with various text effects in it. Even managed to suss out bit image mode, and in the end we used the printer to print forged bus tickets. We must have had the best part of £2000 worth of free travel. We had to stop doing it when the bus company changed all their ticket machines, but the printer does still print, if a bit faintly.
Perhaps we should start a new forum for Printers We Have Known and Loved?
Why is anyone surprised that it is possible to run engines on other substances than those sold especially for the purpose?
The Diesel engine (or to give it its proper name, the compression-ignition internal combustion engine) was named after its inventor, Rudolph Diesel, who conceived a modified form of internal combustion engine that could run on heavier fuel than previous models. Initially this would have meant plant oils -- I believe the first Diesel engine was actually run on peanut oil.
It works by using a piston to compress the air in a cylinder (incidentally heating it; the Ideal gas Equation says PV=nRT); then squirting in a quantity of fuel. The trick being simply that the fuel must undergo spontaneous combustion at the temperature of the air in the cylinder. The resulting explosion forces the piston back out.
Once a suitable substance to run these compression-ignition engines was found in the form of a petroleum fraction, it naturally became known as Diesel oil.
But *any* substance which explodes when mixed with air at the temperature achieved inside a Diesel engine at TDC (I haven't got one here to measure) will fire such an engine. The closer its other physical properties to the designed fuel, then the less modification will be required to the fuel pump system. In fact, older Ford and Peugeot engines run fine on cooking oil. Strain it first if it's been used.
By the way: Don't pay the duty. Vegetable oil is not producing extracyclical CO2 (the kind that contributes to climate change) - every carbon atom in the plant came from CO2 in the atmosphere in the first place. But, we are told, the duty was levied to reduce the amount of carbon entering the cycle. Let yourself get taken to Crown court, and then you only have to convince two people out of twelve to acquit you on the basis that the law is unjust.....
kerb = the edge between the pavement and the roadway.
curb = put a stop to.
Using both words in sentences: "My sister often strikes the kerb when parking her car." - "Judicious use of explosives would soon curb that habit!"
Whilst we're at it, meter = instrument for measuring something, metre = the unit of distance.
i know this will be controversial but
on
The Virus Did It
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I really can't see anything objectionable with just looking at pictures and jacking off. Frankly, if these people have to get their rocks off, isn't it better they do so into a box of Kleenex? If some nonce is at home having a w@nk then he's not out there doing any *real* damage; nor is he likely to be capable of any real damage for a few hours.
I say - decriminalise mere *possession* of images and concentrate resources on the *real* problems. For a start, find out what the real problems *are* instead of going around in denial (which is what the vigilante mobs are doing; they set out to attack suspected paedophiles to reinforce the idea that they themselves couldn't possibly entertain such a notion).
The amount of harm done to a child by the manufacture of one pornographic picture of them is the same whether one person or a million people look at it -- as long as looking is all they do. Remember the old rule of "innocent until proven guilty" - it used to be a principle of British justice.
Slashdot Mirror
Putain de merde, ou je me trouve? C'est bon. Mais pourquoi tu dis "faire de la flatulence" comme cela? Je suggeste dire "laisser souffler un petit vent" ou meme "faire chanter le trou de cul"? Non, c'est plus grossier. Eh bien .....
Just imagine if personal injury lawyers started offering a service whereby they will patent your injury! Not only do you get compensation when you hurt yourself, you get royalty fees the next time someone hurts themself the same way!
..... wouldn't be much good if they could get taken to court over it, though!
I can think of a possible antidote to all this court mania, though. Has a retailer the right to refuse payment, even if it is made in pound notes, if it believes the money was obtained by some means it feels objectionable? I.E. can some methodist-run establishment legally refuse money won on the horses? By extension it would mean NO LAWSUIT MONEY signs in shops and restaurants
Alright ..... I was quoting a half-remembered Radio Times article from c.1987 ..... but I'm sure it did refer to some kind of ultrasonic modulation scheme being tested in the late 60s and I'm sure a Beatles LP was involved.
:-)
And I know all about connecting a record player to a reel-to-reel tape recorder for a HIGHLY intimate and personal reason!
The problem with your argument is, you're ignoring something pretty huge.
.....
Yes, in theory, LP has a high-end rolloff limited only by the equipment used - up to 40kHz is readily acheivable with a decent magnetic pick-up. CD, by contrast, has a high-end rolloff limited by the quantisation process - the Nyquist Limit of 0.5x the sampling rate. Basically, to know what the frequency of a signal is, you need at least one sample somewhere in the crest and another sample somewhere in the trough. This is a fundamental limitation that no technology will get around.
Changing the sampling rate of a digital signal is non-trivial (except for integer multiples). So the entire mastering process is performed at 44100 samples / second, the ISO9660 red book CD sampling rate, and gives a Nyquist limit of 22.05kHz - above the limit of a child's hearing. In practice no filter can be made with a sharp enough "knee" to fit the limit, so the response typically begins to tail off around 18kHz, in line with an adult's hearing.
So your analogue vinyl LP was recorded and mixed digitally at 44100Ss-1, and therefore contains nothing that wouldn't be on the CD of the same work. Except Vinyl Warmth, of course.
Apple Records tried to copy-protect The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper LP by including a frequency too high to hear, that was meant to beat with the ultrasonic bias of a tape recorder and cause the volume to modulate up and down on playback. One resistor and one capacitor would have got around it. It worked fine in the labs, but most home equipment of the day couldn't reproduce the copy protection signal at all and the album was easily ripped off
Try cdparanoia -B; for i in *wav; do lame -h $i && rm $i; done same as usual. I got many - and some +, but (IMMSMC) none of the dreaded V. This was the same drive that crashed with a Sony/EPIC disc. Your results may vary.
..... and it's not like it's difficult to record a CD onto a cassette or anything.
Anyway, CD prices are a rip-off. CDs cost less to manufacture than the seriously-inferior cassettes, yet they are sold at a higher price. I guess people wouldn't want to pay more £££ just to get a poorer sound quality, but why sell cassettes at all in that case? CD players are cheap enough now
As long as it's possible to hold a mic up to a speaker. Or to hook up a 2 x audio - 3.5 stereo lead between a standalone player and a PC sound card {but notice how line-in jacks seem to be an endangered species these days..... coincidence?}
.....
Of course that way you won't get bit-perfect digital copies, but there'll be a hard core of audiophiles {Note to News of the World readers: an audiophile is a hi-fi bore, not some kind of pervert} who will be fastidious about the quality of the copies they're making, and these copies will be copiable digitally, so the whole exercise will have been futile from the point of view of the record companies.
Incidentally, I copied a copy of the Norah Jones disc, using the usual method of cdparanoia -B; for i in *wav; do lame -h $i && rm $i; done and it worked. Don't know how the original was protected, but the owner of the disc is a serious hacker. Jennifer Lopez's "J to tha L-O" [Sony/EPIC] didn't copy on that same {read-only} drive - in fact, it actually crashed the drive's firmware requiring a plug-pull {but the kernel and even the X-server survived unscathed}. On a Windoze box, Winamp started but no sound. I remember similar issues with Shakira's "Laundry Service" [Sony/EPIC; same protection], but I've got a drive {Sony, would you adam and eve!} on one of my machines that read it OK with cdparanoia. In the process, though, I learned more than anyone ever needs to know about IDE-SCSI emulation
What I want a wireless set to do, is to monitor several stations at once besides the one I am listening to; and then, if an advert comes on, or a song I've already heard, it will retune itself to another station carrying something more interesting.
That way, I would get the benefit of the BBC (no adverts!) as well as some of the local stations (tho' GWR / 96 Bent / Sheep FM still suck).
I can't be bothered to read through all those posts. Has anybody mentioned Multi Coloured Swap Shop, or the magical number 01-811-8055?
My dad worked for the BBC, so I was never allowed to watch TISWAS - or anything from the Other Channel, The One With The Adverts - at home. I sneaked a couple of watchings at other people's houses, but never really liked it.
Then they kept trying to pretend it was a different programme: they introduced different presenters, different sets and different features, but you could tell it was really Multi Coloured Swap Shop. Saturday Superstore, Going Live, Live and Kicking, whatever they chose to call it: they were the same programme really. And Sarah 'helicopter' Greene's 'five star' moment was an all-time classic.
Thing is, kids grow up faster nowadays, so they're already drinking by the time they're teenagers, and therefore too hung over of a Saturday morning to appreciate scary beards.
You don't need a very sophisticated search engine, all you need are meaningful filenames and a script to pretty up the output from ls -R. It's work to set up, of course, but once up it stays up (unless you're using windoze...)
.....
As long as there are a few users whose IP adresses either are static, or change rarely, then their machines can act as nameservers (or more likely just dispense hosts and/or resolv.conf files) for the more changeable ones. Bots could be used to update these lists; on the static servers to strike off addresses not running the sharey daemons, and on the DHCP victims to auto-detect IP address updates and notify the nameservers.
In fact, somebody probably has already written the scripts to do this
Why is anyone making any fuss at all over "peer to peer" sharing companies? What could I do with any of this *-ster software that I can't do with apache and proftpd (which I already have)?
You can light an LED from the mains if you wire another diode "back-to-front" in parallel and a 0.1uF capacitor in series. Ideally put a metal film resistor of a few hundred ohms in series unless the cap is X-rated. (This is to limit the current flow into the capacitor at switch-on; the voltage is above half max for about 2/3 of the time and a discharged capacitor is pretty much a short circuit. The fuse in the plug won't know the difference anyway.) As soon as the voltage gets above 2V the LED strikes, and the excess voltage charges the capacitor. The other diode allows the capacitor to discharge on the negative half-cycle. If it's an LED you'll get more light.
You might not even need the reverse diode since (IMOX) LEDs zener at about 5.6V but in this state are dissipating more power due to the excess voltage (and power dissipation is what kills electronic devices), so if you want to run an LED off unrectified AC you'll need a higher impedance (resistive or capacitive) in series and you'll get less light.
Plus of course you have the satisfaction of knowing you haven't been using those evil polluting batteries -- disposable ones are a waste of energy all round, rechargeable ones have nasty chemicals in them (though traditional lead-acid ones are bordering on 100% recyclability).
I had a mate who was installing some 60X CD-ROM drives. He had a disc *explode* in one of them. With a bang and a shower of glitter. Apparently he was told to download a firmware upgrade to slow it down to 50X.
;)
This would not be the first upgrade ever to cause a piece of hardware to slow down
In any case, scrambling content using CSS does not prevent copying. Anyone can reproduce text verbatim in a language they cannot understand. If a bit-for-bit copy is made of the zeros and ones on a DVD, then that will play on a machine that could read the original, whether or not the person managed to make any sense of what they were copying.
Anyway, what's to stop me making a device like a sawn-off CRT, that fits in a telly; but with A-to-D converters analysing the red, green and blue grid voltages (for the RGB levels) and the scan coil currents (for the timing), and reconstructing the video signals using that? (oh yeah, another 6 A-to-Ds for the audio, with input terminals that look like the ones on speakers). Show me a movie I couldn't copy with *that* baby.
Any copy protection scheme is flawed because the vendor does not, and cannot, know what is happening to the data once it has been read from the storage medium. And what I have described above would get around even one-time-read media (which I experimented with myself once: I mounted a small magnet in an audio cassette, downstream of the sound head, to overwrite the signal before the tape got to the take-up spool. Self-destructing messages were kind of amusing to an 8-year-old, which I was at the time.)
I presume we're all familiar with the tale of the Emperor's New Clothes
Most probably this case will get thrown out of court, and people will realise what has been going on the whole time.
I've never paid for a piece of PC software in my life, ever, and I can't begin to imagine why anyone would pay money for software like Microsoft SQL server when MySQL is free and, AFAIK, does everything Microsoft's proprietary server does (after all, SQL is an ISO standard). You'd still have to learn SQL, after all, and I hardly think typing apt-get install mysql is any more complicated than substituting the letter of a CD-ROM drive for "D:". Hell, it's probably easier on non-geeky Linux distros.
Maybe the people who paid for software thought that it would be under some kind of guarantee, but if you look at any end user licence agreement, they specifically bar you from suing the software company. (In fact, even attempting to sue might well terminate your right to use the software).
If the courts rule for Microsoft, and the possibility to sue was the only reason -- or even the main reason -- why people used Microsoft as opposed to Free Software, then expect a lot of people to abandon MS and go with MySQL, or some other Free server.
If the courts rule against Microsoft, some have said there could be negative implications for Free Software. However, I can't see any attempt to sue a Free Software author sticking. After all, the source code is open to independent expert scrutiny - which is not the case with proprietary software. The analogy would be more like something built from a kit of parts - you get the opportunity to examine it, assess its suitability for application and make any alterations you deem necessary before you build and deploy it.
Whichever way the courts decide, these look set to be Interesting Times.
Coming back to topic, yes, Britain is in the EU, but there isn't an EU-wide police force so member states still have to make their own laws. Um, that wasn't the topic either.
How enforceable is any new law going to be? At one extreme, if the spammers are outside the EU in a country where spamming is not illegal, then they could never be brought to trial as there would be no grounds for extradition. At the other extreme, if a partner dumps you, will you be sent to prison for e-mailing them to find out what is going on? [movie plot developing.....]
Phone numbers do get re-used; it's unavoidable. So do IP addresses, but e-mail addresses are (fairly) unique. Well, this is my own attempt at a way of making e-mail addresses *completely* unique when displayed on a Web page - thereby preventing harvesting of addresses from websites.
It doesn't stop you getting the first spam sent to a particular unique address, but it does stop spammers from selling addresses on because you can just set procmail recipes on your POP3 host to block known harvested addresses to which no legitimate user is ever going to send mail.
You know those adverts you get on Sky One et al, for law firms offering to help you sue anyone and everyone for big compensation payouts?
..... imagine some sweaty scuzzball with one eye on your wallet ..... maybe a few shots of idiots doing stupid things, and big stacks of pound notes ..... you know the kind of advert I'm talking about.
How about this
Question. What's better than getting money when you hurt yourself?
Answer. Getting money when other people hurt themselves!
If you've been injured in an accident that wasn't your fault - or even if it was your fault - just call Dewey, Cheetham and Howe solicitors. Not only can we arrange a substantial compensation package, we can even patent your injury on your behalf. Then the next time anyone else suffers the same kind of injury, you could be eligible for a handsome royalty fee!
Dewey, Cheetham and Howe solicitors - don't just blame - claim!
*Ting!* Next please.
Under a proposed EU law (WEEE directive), this would be illegal -- manufacturers are specifically forbidden to comporomise the recyclability of products. Protecting the environment is more important than protecting corporate profits.
.....
Under UK law, it's already illegal. If I have bought an ink cartridge, I own that cartridge and I have the right to use, abuse, enjoy or destroy it. If the manufacturers, or anyone for that matter, do something to it to prevent me using it, then that is criminal damage. No need even to call a solicitor, since it's a criminal act you should just be able to dial 999
Changing the subject slightly now. Me and a mate fished an Apple ImageWriter out of a skip. We found a power lead, cobbled up a serial cable and got the thing to print. Bit faint, but we got a new ribbon (purple!) and wound it into the cassette (it split open easily enough and the old ribbon was unlikely to stain much). No manual, though. So I found an ImageWriter II driver for the Amiga, stuck my faithful Citizen 120D [now that really was an excellent printer!] into Hex Dump mode, and rattled off a document with various text effects in it. Even managed to suss out bit image mode, and in the end we used the printer to print forged bus tickets. We must have had the best part of £2000 worth of free travel. We had to stop doing it when the bus company changed all their ticket machines, but the printer does still print, if a bit faintly.
Perhaps we should start a new forum for Printers We Have Known and Loved?
Why is anyone surprised that it is possible to run engines on other substances than those sold especially for the purpose?
.....
The Diesel engine (or to give it its proper name, the compression-ignition internal combustion engine) was named after its inventor, Rudolph Diesel, who conceived a modified form of internal combustion engine that could run on heavier fuel than previous models. Initially this would have meant plant oils -- I believe the first Diesel engine was actually run on peanut oil. It works by using a piston to compress the air in a cylinder (incidentally heating it; the Ideal gas Equation says PV=nRT); then squirting in a quantity of fuel. The trick being simply that the fuel must undergo spontaneous combustion at the temperature of the air in the cylinder. The resulting explosion forces the piston back out.
Once a suitable substance to run these compression-ignition engines was found in the form of a petroleum fraction, it naturally became known as Diesel oil.
But *any* substance which explodes when mixed with air at the temperature achieved inside a Diesel engine at TDC (I haven't got one here to measure) will fire such an engine. The closer its other physical properties to the designed fuel, then the less modification will be required to the fuel pump system. In fact, older Ford and Peugeot engines run fine on cooking oil. Strain it first if it's been used.
By the way: Don't pay the duty. Vegetable oil is not producing extracyclical CO2 (the kind that contributes to climate change) - every carbon atom in the plant came from CO2 in the atmosphere in the first place. But, we are told, the duty was levied to reduce the amount of carbon entering the cycle. Let yourself get taken to Crown court, and then you only have to convince two people out of twelve to acquit you on the basis that the law is unjust
kerb = the edge between the pavement and the roadway.
curb = put a stop to.
Using both words in sentences: "My sister often strikes the kerb when parking her car." - "Judicious use of explosives would soon curb that habit!"
Whilst we're at it, meter = instrument for measuring something, metre = the unit of distance.
I really can't see anything objectionable with just looking at pictures and jacking off. Frankly, if these people have to get their rocks off, isn't it better they do so into a box of Kleenex? If some nonce is at home having a w@nk then he's not out there doing any *real* damage; nor is he likely to be capable of any real damage for a few hours.
I say - decriminalise mere *possession* of images and concentrate resources on the *real* problems. For a start, find out what the real problems *are* instead of going around in denial (which is what the vigilante mobs are doing; they set out to attack suspected paedophiles to reinforce the idea that they themselves couldn't possibly entertain such a notion).
The amount of harm done to a child by the manufacture of one pornographic picture of them is the same whether one person or a million people look at it -- as long as looking is all they do. Remember the old rule of "innocent until proven guilty" - it used to be a principle of British justice.