From the PC World Article linked to from the article linked to in the summary:
"Mattel values its intellectual property and actively protects its brands and trademarks."
If they don't defend their trademark everytime they see it being used outside of a licensing deal, they can lose it. You may not like it, but that's the way it is. You want it changed, change the law. I'd also like to point out that trademark law, at its best, actually protects consumers from shoddy ripoffs of the product they thought they were buying.
Even though a lot of people are idiots and leave the password at the default, there are still at least 3 or 4 different types of hardware (think Belkin, D-Link, NetGear, etc., and all the different models they each have available) that are in common use. This means that to be fully effective, a virus would need to contain several different firmware images of itself, and would have to store it all in the limited space available in the flash memory of the infected unit.
Of course, you could choose to infect one or two types of common consumer wireless router, but I think that would greatly limit the probability of a full-bore chain reaction spreading across the greater metropolitan area.
Are you kidding? Think about it. What do the Space Shuttle, the American Electoral System, and L.A.'s public transport system have in common? They all suck, and they were all designed by committee. DRM designed by a committee will be easy to break, and take forever to get "fixed" after each break.
Unless they fuck up something fundamental, you cannot spend a decade working on something to have something so-so at the end.
Absolutely you can. It's called feature creep, and if left unchecked, not only do you end up with a pig in a dress. You end up with a pig in a bullet-proof dress with wader boots on each hoof, only the hooves have been replaced with knives, so you had to install a sheathing mechanism for the hoof-knives, which requires a motor buried in the pig's ass.
Then when you deliver the pig to the farmer he's like, "How the hell am I supposed to make bacon out of this pig if it's able to fight back with its hoof-knives, and I can't shoot it because of the bullet-proof dress? And the motor is leaking grease all over the ham meat!"
Huh? If stem cells really have the potential their proselytizers would have us believe, the pharmcos would have their alleged puppet allow them to kill newborns for stem cells, if need be.
It doesn't take the entire nation willing to suicide themselves, it just takes the small core of people in charge of the nuclear arsenal willing to take it on themselves to make that decision for the rest of the nation. Maybe Iranian government isn't as full of jihad-crazies as we're led to believe, but even if they're only a little jihad-crazy, I'm sure they would have no problem creating an "accidental" loss of one or more bombs to terrorists. Smuggling the leaked bomb into the U.S. wouldn't be an issue, just detonate the bomb in N.Y. harbor before you even reach the dock.
Re: 1. The Civil War was, at least, a declared war. It may not have been just, but it was technically legal.
Re: 2 and 3. You effectively argue that corporations have had their way with us since well before the DMCA.
Re: 4. My point about placing U.S. citizens under what is effectively a police state still stands. Yes, we were bombing innocent people in corners of the globe nobody cared about a long time ago. But it is, in fact, a big step from repressing "others" to repressing your own people. It is at least plausible that you're oppressing the "Others" in the name of securing a better future for your own. But oppressing your own (e.g. warrantless wiretaps, subpoenaing your library records without a court order, etc.), even in the name of protecting them from "others" in their midst, changes not only the rules of the game, but the purpose of the game itself. In this case, the purpose was changed from "America controls the world" to "America controls the world, and we control America".
Forgot to address your questions about crowdedness and internet connectivity. At least in Auckland, internet was fine, and judging by the amount of billboards advertising broadband internet, I assume it's available to a wide swath of the general public. As for crowded, the country as a whole is not crowded at all (the South Island is like one big forest). Auckland itself is a good-sized city, comparable to Chicago, I'd say, but you can be in the suburbs and wilderness within 30 minutes.
No nukes (one thing I disagree with, what are you going to use, coal?), Copyrights are longer than I'd like, but better than here (see http://www.med.govt.nz/templates/Page____7290.aspx#P11_1466). I don't know what their enforcement against P2P-type stuff is like. I know there is a FOSS community down there. In fact, the hard drive in my laptop burned up while in Auckland, and I got in touch with the Auckland university LUG, and one of them met me and gave me a Knoppix boot disk to use.
I should state my sense of "Freedom" emanating from the place is nothing substantive, but is a purely subjective feeling I had while there.
Around the turn of this century. The DMCA was the point of no return for the trend of valuing corporate profits over the good of the people (you can argue that was going on for a while, though), and 9/11 provided the excuse for a police state (which you cannot argue the U.S. has historically seen sustained at this level, for this long a period, absent a declared war; the "War on Terror" doesn't count, no act of Congress).
I've been thinking New Zealand. I know they're practically the same, to most outsiders' eyes, but I've been to both Australia and New Zealand, and NZ seems to be more independent, that is to say they care less about what others tell them they should be doing, e.g. Iraq. I'm slightly more hopeful they would hold out longer, or at least give in less, to the kind of international enforcement of US laws the mother country would like to force on the world.
Whoever is making the patch is redistributing it to the affected customers, and therefore may not have the right to require an NDA in the first place, depending on what the patch is.
Are you kidding? With all the exploding laptop batteries lately, people are going to snort at how unrealistic an electric car that doesn't explode is!
X: Hey did you see Electric Death (perpetual copyright 2020)?
Y: Yeah, but I had trouble suspending disbelief when the electric car drove over that little bump and didn't burst into a flaming ball of death.
X: I know, those Hollywood guys think you'll believe anything. A nearby Li-Ion laptop explodes, burning X and Y beyond recognition.
Despite what Howard Stringer says, it seems obvious that there is much more than just prestige on the line for Sony. Specifically, if Blu-Ray loses to HD-DVD, the PlayStation 3, which is already overly expensive, would lose it's secondary selling point - as a Blu-Ray player. This would be disastrous for Sony, as even more people would choose the 360, which can be made to play HD-DVDs for a relatively small premium over the basic package.
It depended on the PC model. Where I work, we have a small business account with Dell. We could get XP on higher-end workstations we use for 3-D modeling and the like, but we had to get Vista on the lower-end PCs we use on the factory floor, until Dell relented a month or so after Vista hit. I know our IT guy sent some very strongly worded emails to our Dell sales rep asking for XP on all computers, and I'm sure they were getting the same from many of their business customers.
This particular issue isn't about the Patriot Act, it's the "Protect America" act. And it's not about intelligence sharing between agencies. Actually the U.S. military shared intelligence pretty well with German authorities, not even a domestic agency, in this case. This issue is about the government overreaching its constitutional limits in eavesdropping on private conversations.
I actually do agree with you that our agencies need to share more intelligence more efficiently. After all, if the CIA sees J.Q. Terrorist get on a plane in London headed for the U.S., shouldn't they inform the FBI of the potential threat he now poses inside their jurisdiction?
This isn't like switching from one recognized language to another so more of your audience can understand. This is intentionally using bad grammar that's likely to make it harder for your audience to understand, in the name of spicing up boring science/getting attention daddy never gave you/looking cool to people who don't get it anyway/some other stupid reason.
How does one stop Google desktop from indexing executables? When I open the Google Desktop preferences, exe files aren't even listed as something I can index, but search for an executable like hypertrm.exe on Google desktop, and it shows up anyway, which is the 'meat' of this vulnerability.
Slashdot Mirror
From the PC World Article linked to from the article linked to in the summary:
If they don't defend their trademark everytime they see it being used outside of a licensing deal, they can lose it. You may not like it, but that's the way it is. You want it changed, change the law. I'd also like to point out that trademark law, at its best, actually protects consumers from shoddy ripoffs of the product they thought they were buying.
GP's probably running NoScript in FireFox. I had to temporarily allow scripts from gawker.com to see the pictures and video.
Even though a lot of people are idiots and leave the password at the default, there are still at least 3 or 4 different types of hardware (think Belkin, D-Link, NetGear, etc., and all the different models they each have available) that are in common use. This means that to be fully effective, a virus would need to contain several different firmware images of itself, and would have to store it all in the limited space available in the flash memory of the infected unit.
Of course, you could choose to infect one or two types of common consumer wireless router, but I think that would greatly limit the probability of a full-bore chain reaction spreading across the greater metropolitan area.
Are you kidding? Think about it. What do the Space Shuttle, the American Electoral System, and L.A.'s public transport system have in common? They all suck, and they were all designed by committee. DRM designed by a committee will be easy to break, and take forever to get "fixed" after each break.
Microsoft's answer to Flash.
Or does the linked article say nothing about TB sized drives, only the flash drive?
Unless they fuck up something fundamental, you cannot spend a decade working on something to have something so-so at the end.
Absolutely you can. It's called feature creep, and if left unchecked, not only do you end up with a pig in a dress. You end up with a pig in a bullet-proof dress with wader boots on each hoof, only the hooves have been replaced with knives, so you had to install a sheathing mechanism for the hoof-knives, which requires a motor buried in the pig's ass.
Then when you deliver the pig to the farmer he's like, "How the hell am I supposed to make bacon out of this pig if it's able to fight back with its hoof-knives, and I can't shoot it because of the bullet-proof dress? And the motor is leaking grease all over the ham meat!"
Now, would you buy that pig?
Is the domain name for your old email address available?
Huh? If stem cells really have the potential their proselytizers would have us believe, the pharmcos would have their alleged puppet allow them to kill newborns for stem cells, if need be.
It doesn't take the entire nation willing to suicide themselves, it just takes the small core of people in charge of the nuclear arsenal willing to take it on themselves to make that decision for the rest of the nation. Maybe Iranian government isn't as full of jihad-crazies as we're led to believe, but even if they're only a little jihad-crazy, I'm sure they would have no problem creating an "accidental" loss of one or more bombs to terrorists. Smuggling the leaked bomb into the U.S. wouldn't be an issue, just detonate the bomb in N.Y. harbor before you even reach the dock.
Re: 1. The Civil War was, at least, a declared war. It may not have been just, but it was technically legal.
Re: 2 and 3. You effectively argue that corporations have had their way with us since well before the DMCA.
Re: 4. My point about placing U.S. citizens under what is effectively a police state still stands. Yes, we were bombing innocent people in corners of the globe nobody cared about a long time ago. But it is, in fact, a big step from repressing "others" to repressing your own people. It is at least plausible that you're oppressing the "Others" in the name of securing a better future for your own. But oppressing your own (e.g. warrantless wiretaps, subpoenaing your library records without a court order, etc.), even in the name of protecting them from "others" in their midst, changes not only the rules of the game, but the purpose of the game itself. In this case, the purpose was changed from "America controls the world" to "America controls the world, and we control America".
Forgot to address your questions about crowdedness and internet connectivity. At least in Auckland, internet was fine, and judging by the amount of billboards advertising broadband internet, I assume it's available to a wide swath of the general public. As for crowded, the country as a whole is not crowded at all (the South Island is like one big forest). Auckland itself is a good-sized city, comparable to Chicago, I'd say, but you can be in the suburbs and wilderness within 30 minutes.
No nukes (one thing I disagree with, what are you going to use, coal?), Copyrights are longer than I'd like, but better than here (see http://www.med.govt.nz/templates/Page____7290.aspx#P11_1466). I don't know what their enforcement against P2P-type stuff is like. I know there is a FOSS community down there. In fact, the hard drive in my laptop burned up while in Auckland, and I got in touch with the Auckland university LUG, and one of them met me and gave me a Knoppix boot disk to use. I should state my sense of "Freedom" emanating from the place is nothing substantive, but is a purely subjective feeling I had while there.
Around the turn of this century. The DMCA was the point of no return for the trend of valuing corporate profits over the good of the people (you can argue that was going on for a while, though), and 9/11 provided the excuse for a police state (which you cannot argue the U.S. has historically seen sustained at this level, for this long a period, absent a declared war; the "War on Terror" doesn't count, no act of Congress).
I've been thinking New Zealand. I know they're practically the same, to most outsiders' eyes, but I've been to both Australia and New Zealand, and NZ seems to be more independent, that is to say they care less about what others tell them they should be doing, e.g. Iraq. I'm slightly more hopeful they would hold out longer, or at least give in less, to the kind of international enforcement of US laws the mother country would like to force on the world.
Pak Chooie Unf!
RTFA
Whoever is making the patch is redistributing it to the affected customers, and therefore may not have the right to require an NDA in the first place, depending on what the patch is.
Are you kidding? With all the exploding laptop batteries lately, people are going to snort at how unrealistic an electric car that doesn't explode is!
X: Hey did you see Electric Death (perpetual copyright 2020)?
Y: Yeah, but I had trouble suspending disbelief when the electric car drove over that little bump and didn't burst into a flaming ball of death.
X: I know, those Hollywood guys think you'll believe anything.
A nearby Li-Ion laptop explodes, burning X and Y beyond recognition.
Despite what Howard Stringer says, it seems obvious that there is much more than just prestige on the line for Sony. Specifically, if Blu-Ray loses to HD-DVD, the PlayStation 3, which is already overly expensive, would lose it's secondary selling point - as a Blu-Ray player. This would be disastrous for Sony, as even more people would choose the 360, which can be made to play HD-DVDs for a relatively small premium over the basic package.
It depended on the PC model. Where I work, we have a small business account with Dell. We could get XP on higher-end workstations we use for 3-D modeling and the like, but we had to get Vista on the lower-end PCs we use on the factory floor, until Dell relented a month or so after Vista hit. I know our IT guy sent some very strongly worded emails to our Dell sales rep asking for XP on all computers, and I'm sure they were getting the same from many of their business customers.
This particular issue isn't about the Patriot Act, it's the "Protect America" act. And it's not about intelligence sharing between agencies. Actually the U.S. military shared intelligence pretty well with German authorities, not even a domestic agency, in this case. This issue is about the government overreaching its constitutional limits in eavesdropping on private conversations.
I actually do agree with you that our agencies need to share more intelligence more efficiently. After all, if the CIA sees J.Q. Terrorist get on a plane in London headed for the U.S., shouldn't they inform the FBI of the potential threat he now poses inside their jurisdiction?
This isn't like switching from one recognized language to another so more of your audience can understand. This is intentionally using bad grammar that's likely to make it harder for your audience to understand, in the name of spicing up boring science/getting attention daddy never gave you/looking cool to people who don't get it anyway/some other stupid reason.
My /. gets 50 comments to the hogshead, and that's the way I likes it!
How does one stop Google desktop from indexing executables? When I open the Google Desktop preferences, exe files aren't even listed as something I can index, but search for an executable like hypertrm.exe on Google desktop, and it shows up anyway, which is the 'meat' of this vulnerability.