Sure they can. The video cameras taping everything you do pick up the serial numbers as the bills are being handed to you. However, the technology isn't perfect; I find that the glare coming off a well-constructed tin-foil hat creates lens flares on the cameras that can obfuscate the serial numbers.
I stand corrected. On the other hand, I think I was right in saying that you can't do it "easily", as the system you descibe is going to require checking a lot of permutations one by one instead of coming up with some quick fuzzy check of similarity. I guess if you've got the processing power to do it, that's a good solution to the problem.
If they're saving your password in a format where they can easily tell if your new password is some permutation of the characters in the original password (i.e., they're either storing the original password as plaintext or in a format that they can easily decrypt to check for permutations, rather than using a one-way hash function), then they're sacrificing actual security for the illusion of security. Nice.
In any event, the issue isn't whether it's natural for a new web service to have outages, it's whether anyone wants to switch to using a word processor that even has the potential for scheduled downtime. Can you imagine if Microsoft forced people to upgrade their copies of Word at a specific time based on the developers' schedule rather than allowing customers to apply patches at a convenient time?
Actually, I switched to Verizon from an ISP with no PPPoE, static IPs, and who let me run whatever servers I wanted on my machine because the regular residential service is much cheaper than I was paying. Well, it's also 4x faster, which was a bigger factor in finally getting around to giving up running my own mail and web servers and switiching.
First of all, GP poster was obviously making a point about how stupid the previous posters point was, not advocating stopping public financing of roads.
More to the point, a retailer passes on the cost of transporting the goods they sell to the people buying them. If I accept that public financing of infrastructure (whether network or physical) is an unacceptable use of taxpayer money, why would I want to subsidize other people's purchasing of retail goods? Let the stores build their own roads, and pass on the cost to people who shop there.
To be fair to Verizon DSL, their tech support line does ask you if you're using Windows, a Mac, Linux, or something else before transferring you to the appropriate person. I recently switched my DSL service and I was shocked that they actually acknowledge the existence of non-Windows computers.
Of course, their tech support people once I got through were fairly clueless, insisting first that my old DSL provider hadn't shut off my service yet, despite the fact that a Verizon page stating that my PPPoE password was wrong came up when I fired up a browser (and weren't easily persuaded that it would be really difficult for their site to hijack all http traffic if I wasn't actually on their network), and then when I finally convinced them to give me a password, informed me that the server that generates passwords was down and I'd have to call back later.
But three calls later when the server was back up, they did seem to know how to start setting up the Network preference pane, before I interrupted them because I actually knew what I was doing (and, of course, because I have a router that doesn't care whether I'm using a Mac or Windows box while I'm configuring it)
Yeah, but Google's betas are actually labelled as such and given to the people testing them for free. That's a lot different than selling something as a release and letting your paying customers do the testing for you.
You must get really steamed that every single native speaker of English thinks that the English word "or" usually denotes an exclusive or rather than the Boolean OR operator.
I've read in many places that the nationwide unemployment rate issued by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics counts only people who are drawing unemployment insurance
Then "many places" are printing incorrect information.
Unemployment numbers count people who are not employed and who are looking for work, regardless of whether they're receiving money from unemployment insurance. The rate does decline when people can't find work and give up looking, but it includes recent graduates who are looking for work.
More information than most people could even find interesting is available here.
Subtle cues? It's tracking what mood LiveJournal users pick from a drop-down menu. It's not that hard to come up with an algorithm to determine what someone's mood is when they explicitly tell you what their mood is.
Let's see, you're asking for legal advice on Slashdot and the reason you need the advice is that you don't know how to use a computer? You're about 19 days too late.
The assertion is that using a wheel to steer a car is "natural". I'd argue that no method of controlling the motion of a car is "naturally" more intuitive to humans, and unless you can show me a randomized trial using people who were raised by wolves and never saw a car before that shows a human with no preconceptions about how a car should be controlled prefers one method of control over all others, I'm not going to accept it.
I accept that early automotive engineers knew what they were doing and that the steering wheel is a good design. I may even accept that they are objectively the best solution for the problem of how to steer a car. Neither of these implies that using a steering wheel or a particular kind of controller for a video game is "natural".
The broadcast flag never would have mandated the use of DRM by broadcasters. The broadcasters were always free to not use it. It's true that it was proposed that hardware manufacturers be required to support it, but unless you can show me one company that's been coerced into producing compliant hardware (hint: the regulation never went into effect, so you're going to have trouble), I'll stick by my assertion that the government hasn't outlawed any equipment based on not using DRM.
As for HR 4569, it was referred to committee 4 months ago. It's not a law. In using the word "has" I refer to actions the government has already taken, not hypothetical or proposed actions it may take in the future.
I fail to see how they'll earn money in the long term, save for an aquisition.
You just answered your own question. They hope to be bought by someone big who thinks they can purchase the brand loyalty of the existing userbase and shift it to their own brand.
Plus, in Facebook's case, don't overlook the value of marketing data on millions of college students. Credit card companies alone will no doubt pay enough to reach these kids to make a healthy profit for the site.
When the government (men with guns) steps in to mandate DRM, outlaw non-DRM technologies, and criminalize circumvention (as with the DMCA), people have no choice.
The government has neither mandated DRM or outlawed non-DRM technologies. You are free to record music as MP3s and sell it to whomever is willing to purchase it. You're also free to build and sell music players that only play standard MP3s and won't play any DRMed content.
As for criminalizing circumvention of DRM, that's got nothing to do with the market. People can choose whether or not they want to purchase DRMed content, which is how the market works. Making it legal to break DRM after you've purchased something with DRM would only encourage people to buy DRMed content, knowing they can just remove the DRM, thus helping DRM in the market. Outlawing the circumvention of DRM actually gives content without DRM a huge competitive advantage in the market.
Judging from the amount of spam I get from Chinese zombie PCs, it's going to take them years to track them all down to throw them in jail. Doesn't seem like a very effective way to get revenge on someone.
What happened to let this situation become possible is that when we formed the constitution we had no laws on the book.
I think you'll find that the 13 original states had plenty of laws before the US Constitution was written, and if you read the Constitution you'll see that it took very little power away from the states, and nearly all of their existing law was still valid.
America under the Articles of Confederation (or, for that matter, before that) was hardly in Rousseau's "state of nature".
This is one of the nice things about Camino (as a Cocoa application, it gets access to OS X's builtin spellchecking), but it might not stack up will against the current build of Firefox in terms of other features.
Anyone who has used both extensively have an opinion on the comparison?
If there's only one user of a piece of software, a bug that allows execution of arbitary code is still critical.
Next you'll be telling us that any bug in Windows is merely "serious", not "critical", as the DoD isn't running Windows on the systems used to control nuclear weapons launching, and that "critical" is too strong a word to describe anything that couldn't possible result in the annihilation of all life on the planet.
While we're at it, why not redefine "bug" as "a flaw in software that will literally kill the user" and claim that Firefox is completely bug-free?
What you don't get is that the article author is an idiot. Despite the headline, the tax man isn't coming after iTunes. (Strangely enough, the Slashdot story somehow managed to avoid mentioning the completely inaccurate iTunes connection in that headline. For all the condemnation for inaccurate stories they get, I think the editors and/or submitter deserve a lot of praise here). The doesn't affect iTunes at all; Apple's already been collecting sales tax on its internet sales.
Who it does affect is any company that doesn't have a wide physical presence all over the place, and who sells content on the Internet. Like people selling physical goods through mail order catalogs for years, these companies have traditionally not been responsible for collecting sales tax for interstate sales. Many states have laws requiring the consumer to pay the taxes anyway (except they call it "Use Tax" instead of "Sales Tax"), but naturally it's almost impossible for the states to prove how much they're owed.
Personally, I think having the sellers collect the tax is a good thing, and the article is alarmist nonsense. We're not talking about a new tax here, we're talking about making it easier to collect an existing tax. Why should it be easier for a consumer to evade taxes on purchases made from a company with no physical presence in his or her state, when the same purchase made from a company in the state would have the tax collected automatically at the point of sale? This basically amounts to the state subsidizing out-of-state businesses by driving sales to them and taking a hit in revenue.
The fact that the items being purchased are digital content is kind of a red herring here. If you go to the local computer store and buy software, you're going to pay sales tax. If you buy a CD full of music in digital form, you're going to pay sales tax, too. Why should it matter if you're downloading it instead of buying it in a box?
The issue of whether items purchased from out of state should be taxed at all is also orthogonal to the issue at hand. They're already taxed; state governments just want to be able to actually collect those taxes. I personally think that sales taxes are a pretty bad idea, but I think that having them paid only by people who are virtuous (even if that virtue is a result of fear of getting caught) enough to not lie on their tax returns is much worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent funny.
Sure they can. The video cameras taping everything you do pick up the serial numbers as the bills are being handed to you. However, the technology isn't perfect; I find that the glare coming off a well-constructed tin-foil hat creates lens flares on the cameras that can obfuscate the serial numbers.
I stand corrected. On the other hand, I think I was right in saying that you can't do it "easily", as the system you descibe is going to require checking a lot of permutations one by one instead of coming up with some quick fuzzy check of similarity. I guess if you've got the processing power to do it, that's a good solution to the problem.
If they're saving your password in a format where they can easily tell if your new password is some permutation of the characters in the original password (i.e., they're either storing the original password as plaintext or in a format that they can easily decrypt to check for permutations, rather than using a one-way hash function), then they're sacrificing actual security for the illusion of security. Nice.
In any event, the issue isn't whether it's natural for a new web service to have outages, it's whether anyone wants to switch to using a word processor that even has the potential for scheduled downtime. Can you imagine if Microsoft forced people to upgrade their copies of Word at a specific time based on the developers' schedule rather than allowing customers to apply patches at a convenient time?
Actually, I switched to Verizon from an ISP with no PPPoE, static IPs, and who let me run whatever servers I wanted on my machine because the regular residential service is much cheaper than I was paying. Well, it's also 4x faster, which was a bigger factor in finally getting around to giving up running my own mail and web servers and switiching.
More to the point, a retailer passes on the cost of transporting the goods they sell to the people buying them. If I accept that public financing of infrastructure (whether network or physical) is an unacceptable use of taxpayer money, why would I want to subsidize other people's purchasing of retail goods? Let the stores build their own roads, and pass on the cost to people who shop there.
Of course, their tech support people once I got through were fairly clueless, insisting first that my old DSL provider hadn't shut off my service yet, despite the fact that a Verizon page stating that my PPPoE password was wrong came up when I fired up a browser (and weren't easily persuaded that it would be really difficult for their site to hijack all http traffic if I wasn't actually on their network), and then when I finally convinced them to give me a password, informed me that the server that generates passwords was down and I'd have to call back later.
But three calls later when the server was back up, they did seem to know how to start setting up the Network preference pane, before I interrupted them because I actually knew what I was doing (and, of course, because I have a router that doesn't care whether I'm using a Mac or Windows box while I'm configuring it)
Yeah, but Google's betas are actually labelled as such and given to the people testing them for free. That's a lot different than selling something as a release and letting your paying customers do the testing for you.
You must get really steamed that every single native speaker of English thinks that the English word "or" usually denotes an exclusive or rather than the Boolean OR operator.
Then "many places" are printing incorrect information.
Unemployment numbers count people who are not employed and who are looking for work, regardless of whether they're receiving money from unemployment insurance. The rate does decline when people can't find work and give up looking, but it includes recent graduates who are looking for work.
More information than most people could even find interesting is available here.
Subtle cues? It's tracking what mood LiveJournal users pick from a drop-down menu. It's not that hard to come up with an algorithm to determine what someone's mood is when they explicitly tell you what their mood is.
Let's see, you're asking for legal advice on Slashdot and the reason you need the advice is that you don't know how to use a computer? You're about 19 days too late.
I accept that early automotive engineers knew what they were doing and that the steering wheel is a good design. I may even accept that they are objectively the best solution for the problem of how to steer a car. Neither of these implies that using a steering wheel or a particular kind of controller for a video game is "natural".
As for HR 4569, it was referred to committee 4 months ago. It's not a law. In using the word "has" I refer to actions the government has already taken, not hypothetical or proposed actions it may take in the future.
You just answered your own question. They hope to be bought by someone big who thinks they can purchase the brand loyalty of the existing userbase and shift it to their own brand.
Plus, in Facebook's case, don't overlook the value of marketing data on millions of college students. Credit card companies alone will no doubt pay enough to reach these kids to make a healthy profit for the site.
It's still an abstraction, just a different one.
Yes, we all saw Minority Report. If you think the personalized ads were the scariest thing in the movie, you'd got problems.
The government has neither mandated DRM or outlawed non-DRM technologies. You are free to record music as MP3s and sell it to whomever is willing to purchase it. You're also free to build and sell music players that only play standard MP3s and won't play any DRMed content.
As for criminalizing circumvention of DRM, that's got nothing to do with the market. People can choose whether or not they want to purchase DRMed content, which is how the market works. Making it legal to break DRM after you've purchased something with DRM would only encourage people to buy DRMed content, knowing they can just remove the DRM, thus helping DRM in the market. Outlawing the circumvention of DRM actually gives content without DRM a huge competitive advantage in the market.
Judging from the amount of spam I get from Chinese zombie PCs, it's going to take them years to track them all down to throw them in jail. Doesn't seem like a very effective way to get revenge on someone.
It's even better that their Terms of Use explicitly prohibit you using that "Pro" account for any sort of professional or commercial purpose.
I think you'll find that the 13 original states had plenty of laws before the US Constitution was written, and if you read the Constitution you'll see that it took very little power away from the states, and nearly all of their existing law was still valid.
America under the Articles of Confederation (or, for that matter, before that) was hardly in Rousseau's "state of nature".
Anyone who has used both extensively have an opinion on the comparison?
Next you'll be telling us that any bug in Windows is merely "serious", not "critical", as the DoD isn't running Windows on the systems used to control nuclear weapons launching, and that "critical" is too strong a word to describe anything that couldn't possible result in the annihilation of all life on the planet.
While we're at it, why not redefine "bug" as "a flaw in software that will literally kill the user" and claim that Firefox is completely bug-free?
Who it does affect is any company that doesn't have a wide physical presence all over the place, and who sells content on the Internet. Like people selling physical goods through mail order catalogs for years, these companies have traditionally not been responsible for collecting sales tax for interstate sales. Many states have laws requiring the consumer to pay the taxes anyway (except they call it "Use Tax" instead of "Sales Tax"), but naturally it's almost impossible for the states to prove how much they're owed.
Personally, I think having the sellers collect the tax is a good thing, and the article is alarmist nonsense. We're not talking about a new tax here, we're talking about making it easier to collect an existing tax. Why should it be easier for a consumer to evade taxes on purchases made from a company with no physical presence in his or her state, when the same purchase made from a company in the state would have the tax collected automatically at the point of sale? This basically amounts to the state subsidizing out-of-state businesses by driving sales to them and taking a hit in revenue.
The fact that the items being purchased are digital content is kind of a red herring here. If you go to the local computer store and buy software, you're going to pay sales tax. If you buy a CD full of music in digital form, you're going to pay sales tax, too. Why should it matter if you're downloading it instead of buying it in a box?
The issue of whether items purchased from out of state should be taxed at all is also orthogonal to the issue at hand. They're already taxed; state governments just want to be able to actually collect those taxes. I personally think that sales taxes are a pretty bad idea, but I think that having them paid only by people who are virtuous (even if that virtue is a result of fear of getting caught) enough to not lie on their tax returns is much worse.