Its nice that MS has fixed this already... and annoying that Yahoo hasn't acknowledged it yet......but when will MS address this problem at the true source, i.e. by patching the bug in IE that allows this exploit to work? Or are they just trying to make Yahoo look bad?
MS, having the IE and Hotmail source code, knows the exact details of the bug. By fixing it only on the Hotmail side, they've left other competing webmail providers vulnerable, who will have a hard time fixing the bug without access to the IE source code? Just a wild guess...
The ruling in the DVD X Copy case didn't state that ALL DVD ripping software is illegal. They only found that in this specific case, the software's primary purpose was copyright infringement, and it didn't have sufficient non-infringing use to support continued sale of the product.
Its possible that other DeCSS products will not be tested in court, or will be found to have sufficient non-infringing (ie fair use) use to justify their existence.
Almost every DVD playback software can play DVD disc layouts from a folder (I know PowerDVD and WinDVD can both do it, to name a few off-the-shelf products, as well as Xine and Ogle), complete with all menus and original features. How do you think people who author DVD content test their menus, etc. before committing to disc?
Of course if the disc was encrypted, you need DeCSS to get the disc contents onto your HD, and that's legally iffy right now (fair use says yes if you own the original disc, DMCA says no). But there's absolutely no problem supporting menus, multiple audio tracks, subtitles, multi-angle, etc etc. from content in a HD folder...
How do you read English words? They're fucking crazy! There are billions of permutations of those weird scriggly things you call letters! And English pronunciation is so irregular, you need to memorize a specific pronunciation for most of those permutations!
Japanese is not THAT difficult... Japan's literacy rate (in Japanese) is much higher than America's literacy rate in English.
Japanese has three writing systems-hiragana and katakana, which are phonetic alphabets just like the Roman alphabet we use (think of it like capital and lower case letters, some characters are similar and some are very different between the two). But unlike English and the Roman alphabet, each Japanese phonetic character has only one, very regular pronunciation.
Then there are kanji, or chinese characters, in which each glyph represents an idea or part of a meaning (but sometimes a character is only used for its sound, not its original meaning). The characters can be broken down into simpler parts called radicals, each of which contributes to either the meaning or the pronunciation of the character. There are thousands of characters, but most are comprised of only a hundred or so radicals.
The RIAA companies probably make a small profit when someone settles with them for a few grand. Lawyers take their cut, but a settlement contract isn't all that expensive or time consuming for the RIAA.
But unless they win HUGE punitive damages (and the loser actually has the money to pay and doesn't declare bankruptcy) they probably lose money when it comes down to a lawsuit. And that takes a long time and involves a lot of up-front legal expenses, for questionable return.
If enough people start counter-suing the RIAA, or at least going to court instead of settling, then the lawsuits will soon become a huge financial burden on the RIAA, even when they win.
The number of endangered and protected species slaughtered by Japan's massive fishing industry is appaling. And the Japanese government thinks its A-O-K, as long as the price of sushi stays down. Maybe this system could help stop overfishing/killing of certain species which aren't harvested for food anyway.
Not sure if they would even bother though. Japan is one of only two countries that refuses to respect the international whaling treaty. Endangered whale meat is sold on store shelves, and sometimes even in public school food.
Recently, a pair of foreigners were given extremely harsh jail sentences after documenting on video a local town's annual slaughter of thousands of protected dolphins. The local superstition blamed the dolphins for the ever-diminishing stocks of native fish. No, overfishing couldn't have anything to do with it, could it?
(A bit off-topic, but the Japanese government is also constantly raising the considered-safe mercury level, due to heavy industry runoff of mercury into the sea. By international health standards, eating one fish from the Japan sea can contain as much as one month's safe mercury dose. Pretty scary, to those of us who live there.)
Some geeks got together, put a "levitator" into a crude vacuum jar, and discovered it still works. Magic anti-gravity, woohoo!?
Then some NASA guys put one of them into a REAL vacuum chamber, and guess what, it didn't work. As they slowly increased the air pressure in the chamber, it started to work again.
Turns out that all these things do is push charged air around. They work at low air pressure, possibly low enough to be useful on a LEO satellite, but not in outer space. Their energy-lifting capacity efficiency is quite low, much lower than using a fan. But it might have some use in a device which can't have moving parts.
We'll probably see each device vendor come up with their own proprietary format (especially Sony, since they love making their own proprietary formats), which can only be read by their own software (which will likely be Windows only...)
And the new formats will probably include DRM features, so you're breaking the law if you try to reverse-engineer their format to get Linux/Mac support...
Unless Dell is the one who runs Ad-Aware on the user's machine, how can Dell possibly be held accountable over the terms of a EULA which they've never heard of, never seen, and certainly never agreed to?
What Dell is saying is the equivalent of a Best Buy employee telling you "I can't tell you where we keep the CD-Rs, because you might use them to commit a crime and then I'd be liable."
I've seen the pictures from this camera. It's truly awful. It may have a 2MP sensor, but the images are worse than the 640x480 webcams you can get for $10 after rebate...
PC-to-PC VOIP, such as you're describing, has been around for a long time, but it isn't very interesting or useful. You can't call to a regular POTS phone number, nor receive calls from POTS network users. As you say, its just a matter of paying for your ISP's bandwidth.
What they want to regulate is PC-to-phone or phone-to-PC or phone-to-phone VOIP. In all of those cases, there is some gateway which sits between the Internet (or some private IP network) and the POTS system. Those gateways cost money to run, and it costs money to route all the traffic onto the POTS network; that's what you're paying a VOIP service provider for.
So, the question under potential regulation is: how much do those VOIP service providers have to pay the telcos for their use of the POTS network (VOIP users calling POTS users), and how much do the telcos have to pay for their use of the VOIP provider's gateways (POTS users calling VOIP users or other POTS users routed via VOIP)?
I showed this type of paragraph to several of my Japanese co-workers, who are very good at English but not quite native level yet. They had an extremely difficult time making out the words and couldn't grasp the meaning of the whole paragraph at all.
A lot of reading comprehension comes from how you learned the language in the first place. Your ability to understand a given second language depends on how similar it is to your native language.
I think in this case its mostly a vocabulary problem. Native speakers know that "wlohe" and "raed" are not English words, and our minds can easily search for possible alternatives, but non-native speakers would need a dictionary to confirm that those aren't actually words they didn't know.
"I once worked for one of the most evil telemarketing companies ever. We would call people and ask them all kinds of personal questions. Things like where they worked, how many children they had, and so on. Then we would call their neighbors and have them confirm what they just told us.
More often than not, people would tell me to fuck off. Then I'd call their neighbors, and their neighbors would sell them out and tell me everything I wanted to know in a heartbeat. "Bob still works at Sears? Thanks. Two kids living at home? Thanks. I appreciate your help, Mister."
Muahahahaha.
We were allowed to do anything we wanted to get that data -- anything at all. I lied about my identity a lot. Sometimes I was a detective for the local police department. Sometimes I worked for the Social Security Agency. Sometimes I was confirming entries for that sweepstakes company. Anything to get the data. If that didn't work, I would harass people until they cracked. I had neighbors ratting on each other. I'd swap project books with a co-worker and we'd call each other's contacts, pretending to be "supervisors."
I was working in the belly of evil, and I became evil. I reveled in my evilness. I laughed and laughed at the things I did. I was like an evil god with a phone and a license to harass. I couldn't get fired because I got results. Nothing I did was too outrageous. It was a good time to be alive.
So now, when telemarketers call me, I know exactly where they are coming from, and I cut them no slack whatsoever."
After nVidia's falling out with them over the Xbox chipset pricing, its likely MS changed the DX9 spec mid-development and only gave the new specs to ATI. Thats why ATI's cards are perfectly designed to run DX9 but nVidia's specs are off. For example, DX9 calls for 24bit FP, which ATI does, while nVidia only supports 16 or 32bit, forcing developers to choose between correct rendering or improved performance.
Also nVidia is to blame for their driver cheating fiasco, which makes developers especially weary to trust beta or "optimized" drivers, and for expecting every game company to optimize for their cards just because they're the biggest.
Actually, a glass master is a physical object... it's a glass disc etched with the negative "cast," which is pressed into the polycarbonate layer to form the pits and lands of the CD during manufacturing.
A glass master is very fragile, fairly expensive to make (~$500 depending on the pressing plant), and obviously won't play in your CD player.;-)
The longest lasting picture medium is good old B&W silver halide film, printed onto silver halide paper. You can still buy the film and develop/print it yourself in a home darkroom. If done and stored correctly, they should be good for at least 150 years. A lot of the early film pictures are still around today.
The longest lasting color process, AFAIK, is pigment-based ink, such as the prints from an Epson 2200P inkjet printer (about $700). Printed onto archival matte paper, it should be good for about 70 years if stored in museum conditions (sealed behind glass, proper temperature, humidity, and not exposed to light).
C-prints (standard photo developing) and color negative film probably won't make it past 40 years without significant fading, and Cibachrome (the best option before pigment ink printers were available) isn't much better.
Right after the Sony Playstation 2 launch, there was a big shortage. Several media stories blamed it on some "unnamed" Middle East country buying them all up to power their missles and supercomputers (because, the rumor claimed, the PS2 was just so powerful).
Wonder if Apple is trying to "pull a Sony" here...
Let me start off by saying I've tried to use Linux a few times, but always switched back to Windows. Why? Because there was always some technology I need or want that isn't supported well enough in Linux yet. Just look at the sad state of USB support in Linux. I never did get my PDA (Sony Clie), MP3 player (IOData Exrouge), or printer (Epson PM930C) to work. I'm not switching to Linux if my purchasing decisions are going to be limited to a few of yesteryear's inferior devices.
The problem with this "who cares about the masses; Linux is for us geeks" attitude, is that Linux will be in a perpetual state of falling behind, both technologically and in market share. For example, I personally know 3 people who switched back to Windows because of the poor state of WiFi (especially 11g) in Linux now, not to mention a horde of current and upcoming technologies which will never see Linux support.
Maybe you don't care about Linux's market share, but when everyone else in the office is surfing the net at 802.11xxx speeds and you're stuck at 802.11b, or when everyone is watching the latest Blueray HDTV movies and you're stuck with DVD, or when they're printing out 60 megapixel digital images from their smartphone on their 24-color inkjet (none of which will run under Linux), you'll be tempted to give up Linux too.
Without competitive support for new technologies and innovations in use by the masses, Linux will suffer from a shrinking support base and die a slow lingering death. The way to prevent Linux from falling behind in new technologies is to ensure that it has a large, stable user base which hardware manufactureres and driver authors CAN'T afford to ignore.
No matter how devoted the Linux gods of geeks are to their cause, there's no way they can keep up with rapid industry progress, unless Linux has a large user base of "Joe Sixpack and his unwashed masses." It doesn't mean you can't have Linux the way you want it, but it does mean you can't make it a "geeks only club" either.
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Its nice that MS has fixed this already... and annoying that Yahoo hasn't acknowledged it yet... ...but when will MS address this problem at the true source, i.e. by patching the bug in IE that allows this exploit to work? Or are they just trying to make Yahoo look bad?
MS, having the IE and Hotmail source code, knows the exact details of the bug. By fixing it only on the Hotmail side, they've left other competing webmail providers vulnerable, who will have a hard time fixing the bug without access to the IE source code? Just a wild guess...
Aha! So that's why AutoZone was sued by SCO... the conspiracy puzzle pieces are fitting together nicely... yes... yes...
*twiddles thumbs evilly*
A: It takes a HD format to remove their software.
Sadly, Microsoft has already taken over even the HD format.
(okay, wrong HD format, then how about this?) ;-)
You know at first, I thought you were talking about CHERNOBYL, not "Holly Bijesus."
But if you think about it, CHERNOBYL would be a pretty good name for a transsexual porn star.
"Is it Cher? No, Bill!"
The ruling in the DVD X Copy case didn't state that ALL DVD ripping software is illegal. They only found that in this specific case, the software's primary purpose was copyright infringement, and it didn't have sufficient non-infringing use to support continued sale of the product.
Its possible that other DeCSS products will not be tested in court, or will be found to have sufficient non-infringing (ie fair use) use to justify their existence.
Who modded this insightful?
Almost every DVD playback software can play DVD disc layouts from a folder (I know PowerDVD and WinDVD can both do it, to name a few off-the-shelf products, as well as Xine and Ogle), complete with all menus and original features. How do you think people who author DVD content test their menus, etc. before committing to disc?
Of course if the disc was encrypted, you need DeCSS to get the disc contents onto your HD, and that's legally iffy right now (fair use says yes if you own the original disc, DMCA says no). But there's absolutely no problem supporting menus, multiple audio tracks, subtitles, multi-angle, etc etc. from content in a HD folder...
How do you read English words? They're fucking crazy! There are billions of permutations of those weird scriggly things you call letters! And English pronunciation is so irregular, you need to memorize a specific pronunciation for most of those permutations!
Japanese is not THAT difficult... Japan's literacy rate (in Japanese) is much higher than America's literacy rate in English.
Japanese has three writing systems-hiragana and katakana, which are phonetic alphabets just like the Roman alphabet we use (think of it like capital and lower case letters, some characters are similar and some are very different between the two). But unlike English and the Roman alphabet, each Japanese phonetic character has only one, very regular pronunciation.
Then there are kanji, or chinese characters, in which each glyph represents an idea or part of a meaning (but sometimes a character is only used for its sound, not its original meaning). The characters can be broken down into simpler parts called radicals, each of which contributes to either the meaning or the pronunciation of the character. There are thousands of characters, but most are comprised of only a hundred or so radicals.
That would be harakiri--hara (pronounced hah-rah) meaning "belly", and kiri (rhymes with kiwi) meaning "to cut."
You have no idea how much I cringe when I hear people talk about "Harry Karry."
The RIAA companies probably make a small profit when someone settles with them for a few grand. Lawyers take their cut, but a settlement contract isn't all that expensive or time consuming for the RIAA.
But unless they win HUGE punitive damages (and the loser actually has the money to pay and doesn't declare bankruptcy) they probably lose money when it comes down to a lawsuit. And that takes a long time and involves a lot of up-front legal expenses, for questionable return.
If enough people start counter-suing the RIAA, or at least going to court instead of settling, then the lawsuits will soon become a huge financial burden on the RIAA, even when they win.
The number of endangered and protected species slaughtered by Japan's massive fishing industry is appaling. And the Japanese government thinks its A-O-K, as long as the price of sushi stays down. Maybe this system could help stop overfishing/killing of certain species which aren't harvested for food anyway.
Not sure if they would even bother though. Japan is one of only two countries that refuses to respect the international whaling treaty. Endangered whale meat is sold on store shelves, and sometimes even in public school food.
Recently, a pair of foreigners were given extremely harsh jail sentences after documenting on video a local town's annual slaughter of thousands of protected dolphins. The local superstition blamed the dolphins for the ever-diminishing stocks of native fish. No, overfishing couldn't have anything to do with it, could it?
(A bit off-topic, but the Japanese government is also constantly raising the considered-safe mercury level, due to heavy industry runoff of mercury into the sea. By international health standards, eating one fish from the Japan sea can contain as much as one month's safe mercury dose. Pretty scary, to those of us who live there.)
There is no debate...
Some geeks got together, put a "levitator" into a crude vacuum jar, and discovered it still works. Magic anti-gravity, woohoo!?
Then some NASA guys put one of them into a REAL vacuum chamber, and guess what, it didn't work. As they slowly increased the air pressure in the chamber, it started to work again.
Turns out that all these things do is push charged air around. They work at low air pressure, possibly low enough to be useful on a LEO satellite, but not in outer space. Their energy-lifting capacity efficiency is quite low, much lower than using a fan. But it might have some use in a device which can't have moving parts.
when will stratospheric be available near me?
:)
Check your backyard after the next thunderstorm?
"Who would've thought inflammable meant flammable?"
-Dr. Nick
We'll probably see each device vendor come up with their own proprietary format (especially Sony, since they love making their own proprietary formats), which can only be read by their own software (which will likely be Windows only...)
And the new formats will probably include DRM features, so you're breaking the law if you try to reverse-engineer their format to get Linux/Mac support...
Unless Dell is the one who runs Ad-Aware on the user's machine, how can Dell possibly be held accountable over the terms of a EULA which they've never heard of, never seen, and certainly never agreed to?
What Dell is saying is the equivalent of a Best Buy employee telling you "I can't tell you where we keep the CD-Rs, because you might use them to commit a crime and then I'd be liable."
No, something more sinister is going on here...
I've seen the pictures from this camera. It's truly awful. It may have a 2MP sensor, but the images are worse than the 640x480 webcams you can get for $10 after rebate...
PC-to-PC VOIP, such as you're describing, has been around for a long time, but it isn't very interesting or useful. You can't call to a regular POTS phone number, nor receive calls from POTS network users. As you say, its just a matter of paying for your ISP's bandwidth.
What they want to regulate is PC-to-phone or phone-to-PC or phone-to-phone VOIP. In all of those cases, there is some gateway which sits between the Internet (or some private IP network) and the POTS system. Those gateways cost money to run, and it costs money to route all the traffic onto the POTS network; that's what you're paying a VOIP service provider for.
So, the question under potential regulation is: how much do those VOIP service providers have to pay the telcos for their use of the POTS network (VOIP users calling POTS users), and how much do the telcos have to pay for their use of the VOIP provider's gateways (POTS users calling VOIP users or other POTS users routed via VOIP)?
I showed this type of paragraph to several of my Japanese co-workers, who are very good at English but not quite native level yet. They had an extremely difficult time making out the words and couldn't grasp the meaning of the whole paragraph at all.
A lot of reading comprehension comes from how you learned the language in the first place. Your ability to understand a given second language depends on how similar it is to your native language.
I think in this case its mostly a vocabulary problem. Native speakers know that "wlohe" and "raed" are not English words, and our minds can easily search for possible alternatives, but non-native speakers would need a dictionary to confirm that those aren't actually words they didn't know.
My friend, an ex-terrormarketer, writes:
"I once worked for one of the most evil telemarketing companies ever. We would call people and ask them all kinds of personal questions. Things like where they worked, how many children they had, and so on. Then we would call their neighbors and have them confirm what they just told us.
More often than not, people would tell me to fuck off. Then I'd call their neighbors, and their neighbors would sell them out and tell me everything I wanted to know in a heartbeat. "Bob still works at Sears? Thanks. Two kids living at home? Thanks. I appreciate your help, Mister."
Muahahahaha.
We were allowed to do anything we wanted to get that data -- anything at all. I lied about my identity a lot. Sometimes I was a detective for the local police department. Sometimes I worked for the Social Security Agency. Sometimes I was confirming entries for that sweepstakes company. Anything to get the data. If that didn't work, I would harass people until they cracked. I had neighbors ratting on each other. I'd swap project books with a co-worker and we'd call each other's contacts, pretending to be "supervisors."
I was working in the belly of evil, and I became evil. I reveled in my evilness. I laughed and laughed at the things I did. I was like an evil god with a phone and a license to harass. I couldn't get fired because I got results. Nothing I did was too outrageous. It was a good time to be alive.
So now, when telemarketers call me, I know exactly where they are coming from, and I cut them no slack whatsoever."
After nVidia's falling out with them over the Xbox chipset pricing, its likely MS changed the DX9 spec mid-development and only gave the new specs to ATI. Thats why ATI's cards are perfectly designed to run DX9 but nVidia's specs are off. For example, DX9 calls for 24bit FP, which ATI does, while nVidia only supports 16 or 32bit, forcing developers to choose between correct rendering or improved performance.
Also nVidia is to blame for their driver cheating fiasco, which makes developers especially weary to trust beta or "optimized" drivers, and for expecting every game company to optimize for their cards just because they're the biggest.
Actually, a glass master is a physical object... it's a glass disc etched with the negative "cast," which is pressed into the polycarbonate layer to form the pits and lands of the CD during manufacturing.
A glass master is very fragile, fairly expensive to make (~$500 depending on the pressing plant), and obviously won't play in your CD player. ;-)
The longest lasting picture medium is good old B&W silver halide film, printed onto silver halide paper. You can still buy the film and develop/print it yourself in a home darkroom. If done and stored correctly, they should be good for at least 150 years. A lot of the early film pictures are still around today.
The longest lasting color process, AFAIK, is pigment-based ink, such as the prints from an Epson 2200P inkjet printer (about $700). Printed onto archival matte paper, it should be good for about 70 years if stored in museum conditions (sealed behind glass, proper temperature, humidity, and not exposed to light).
C-prints (standard photo developing) and color negative film probably won't make it past 40 years without significant fading, and Cibachrome (the best option before pigment ink printers were available) isn't much better.
Right after the Sony Playstation 2 launch, there was a big shortage. Several media stories blamed it on some "unnamed" Middle East country buying them all up to power their missles and supercomputers (because, the rumor claimed, the PS2 was just so powerful).
Wonder if Apple is trying to "pull a Sony" here...
Let me start off by saying I've tried to use Linux a few times, but always switched back to Windows. Why? Because there was always some technology I need or want that isn't supported well enough in Linux yet. Just look at the sad state of USB support in Linux. I never did get my PDA (Sony Clie), MP3 player (IOData Exrouge), or printer (Epson PM930C) to work. I'm not switching to Linux if my purchasing decisions are going to be limited to a few of yesteryear's inferior devices.
The problem with this "who cares about the masses; Linux is for us geeks" attitude, is that Linux will be in a perpetual state of falling behind, both technologically and in market share. For example, I personally know 3 people who switched back to Windows because of the poor state of WiFi (especially 11g) in Linux now, not to mention a horde of current and upcoming technologies which will never see Linux support.
Maybe you don't care about Linux's market share, but when everyone else in the office is surfing the net at 802.11xxx speeds and you're stuck at 802.11b, or when everyone is watching the latest Blueray HDTV movies and you're stuck with DVD, or when they're printing out 60 megapixel digital images from their smartphone on their 24-color inkjet (none of which will run under Linux), you'll be tempted to give up Linux too.
Without competitive support for new technologies and innovations in use by the masses, Linux will suffer from a shrinking support base and die a slow lingering death. The way to prevent Linux from falling behind in new technologies is to ensure that it has a large, stable user base which hardware manufactureres and driver authors CAN'T afford to ignore.
No matter how devoted the Linux gods of geeks are to their cause, there's no way they can keep up with rapid industry progress, unless Linux has a large user base of "Joe Sixpack and his unwashed masses." It doesn't mean you can't have Linux the way you want it, but it does mean you can't make it a "geeks only club" either.
And as long as you don't share that 'illegal' mp3, you won't get caught as you've done nothing wrong... for now that is.