Think of the statistics surrounding the future distribution of the console market what you want. It might even hold about at that area. But hanging the lifestyle of a person onto his choice of consoles is a bit silly. What does a console tell about a person? That he plays games. Ok. That's something EVERY console tells about him.
Err, this is a marketing-based study. It doesn't say that if you watch the XBox that you listen to Eminem. The idea is to get an idea of where and how to spend marketing dollars. TV shows and music groups have marketing campaigns that attracts a specific audience. Studies like this tell people like Nintendo that they're being successful at attracting the Gorillaz audience, but unsuccessful at attracting the Nirvana and Eminem audience. That can give them useful information for future marketing campaigns (which could be anything from "We know the Nirvana audience is cheap, so Sony can have 'em" to "The undecided folks like Lost, we should advertise in that time slot").
Interesting that they are saying PC not Windows;-p Apple may be bold but apparently not willing to spell it out.
I also thought it interesting that two of the commericals named Microsoft Office by name. I don't know if that was making a little bit of nice with Microsoft or if it was a "Hey, Office works on a Mac, so you can still do all your work", but it was the only product that was mentioned that doesn't come bundled with OS X or Windows.
You can get a full-length movie at DVD resolution on a single CD using DivX5 with very ilttle loss of quality as compared to a DVD. If you had four minutes at that res taking up more than a CD's worth, it was probably compressed with HuffYUV at best, and may have been full-frame uncompressed video.
I think more important was the 15 MB for 4 minutes of video at near-DVD quality. At that rate, you could fit about 3 hours of video on a CD, which is comparable to other leading compression schemes.
So, since you are not allowed to sell your accounts, it seems pretty hard to tax them.
Actually, the IRS is very clear that you're required to pay taxes on income, regardless of if the income was legal. You're also allowed to, for instance, claim deductions for any bribes you've paid, if such things are a normal cost of doing business in your area.
They would have to retrieve account information from the companies running MMOs and then calculate how much money the accounts are worth at FMV.
They'd probably just tell all those companies to figure out how much it is and issue you a 1099 at the end of the year. That puts the bookkeeping onus on the MMOs, which have all the information necessary to do so.
Maybe most people leave it at whatever the default is. But that doesn't matter.
That's one of the differences between being a company and being an open source project. For a company, it does matter; supporting every filesystem under the sun is a detriment, not a benefit, because there are real incremental costs for each additional one you add.
I'm a trumpet player who is graduating a week from today. So I can tell you, if they can't find a real trumpet player, they can't be trying too hard. The studio at my college is about 40 strong, and even most community colleges have studios. I don't think this is a matter of laziness. I'm thinking they just don't want to pay a real musician for the service.
How many of those trumpet players are willing to enlist in the military? Drive a couple hours to random cemetaries in the area to play for 5 minutes every weekend? It's not exactly like it's a job that's very appealing.
This seems like exactly the sort of thing that should be negotiated when the contract with the client is made to develop the software in the first place. Tell the company what rights to the software you want when you're approached about the job, see what they want, and then proceed from there. There's no one right answer.
Specifically, when did you start needed a database to serve up five static files?
This is the site for all of the applicants, designed to serve up thousands of files and related information that have been uploaded by users. That seems like a good use of a database to me.
The summary is possibly a little misleading. Several safety changes have been made to the foam so far, but there are further changes they'd like to make. It's not like they're flying without any changes whatsoever. That's not to say that I completely agree with the decision, but it's an important point.
But how is a teleco operating one of the net backbones going to know what exactly is inside a packet, if the packet is coming from a paid tier source, and where it's destination is without opening it up and examining it? That sounds like a rather ominious intrusion.
They just need to look at the source and destination IPs on the packet to know where it's going and coming from. And they're already looking at the entire IP header, so it's not exactly an intrusion.
I think we need some sort of blacklist where we keep track of these politicians, and come election time, vote these n00bs out of office. What do you think?
...but I can appreciate the pickle we're in with de-facto standard kernels that allow anything to be loaded into them.
I think it's more that the "pickle" is that the kernels are software, which is inherantly malleable. This type of security architecture isn't designed to protect the user from outside attackers, though it helps with that as a bonus. It's designed to protect the device from the legitimate user doing something the manufacturer doesn't intend (such as, for instance, decrypting movies or games and then saving them to a hard drive or running non-standard operating systems).
Um, it can't be stolen as easily as a identity card, but I'd rather have my identity card stolen than have some serious crook borrow my microchip.
There's been a case or two of a person having their finger cut off to get entry into their fingerprint-openable luxury car, so you can bet a serious criminal would be willing to dig that microchip out of your arm if there was sufficiently valuable material behind whatever door it opened.
The law requires each business to install a firewall or change the default SSID, the name that identifies a wireless network, if the personal information stored has not already been encrypted.
Umm...changing the SSID does nothing, in terms of security. If that's all that's required to satisfy this new law, I'm amazed.
Yeah but that kind of average is too unspecific. Even in the TFA they seemed to try to sell it as something more larger than that. I totally got the impression that their reported mood was supposed to reflect on specific recent events. It's either that or a fun crawler toy you can make in less than an hour. Which one is it?
A bit of both. From what I understood, first, they crawl all the pages and figure out what the general mood profile is. Then, they try to identify unusual mood settings. If they find that some moods are appearing abnormally often, they go through posts with those moods attached and try to find words that don't normally come up, with the idea being that the unusual words are probably the cause of the unusual mood.
I am not hoping for much out of Vista, but from a developers standpoint, it is exciting to see where this new Windows Presentation Layer will go. I am tired of static applications with dull grey buttons. I am looking forward to full 3D hardware acceleration and bringing rich, robust and dynamic GUI into my OS design.
Interestingly, I'm interested in the complete opposite. I think Dashboard (and possibly Windows Sidebar) is a neat idea because it has the potential to make my life easier. At best, animations and colors make my life exactly as easy as it was before, and (as the article mentions in relation to the active window) they have the potential to noticably impede me. I want things that do stuff, I don't really care what they look like.
If Falwell honestly beleives mistakenly going to this site is going to change any of his followers' minds, well, then, their faith must be on pretty shakey foundations to begin with!
in the worst case a court will say "no, that part of the EULA is not valid".
Actually, I was pleased to read a couple years back about People of the State of New York v. Network Associates, where some of the language involved was considered deceptive, and the judge agreed. The Attorney General was asking for a fine of $0.50 per software copy sold with the language involved, which could be a major deterrant to putting unenforcable conditions into an EULA, but I can't find any reference to fines actually being assessed or the result of the appeal that Network Associates vowed to file, so I don't know if it actually amounted to anything. The potential is apparently there to have unenforcable portions of an EULA turn into a fine for deceptive trade practices, though.
Unless it's spelled out in the contract, artificial restrictions should not be allowed.
Just curious, have you ever read the service contract with your ISP? I know I haven't. My guess would be that they include a paragraph to the tune of, "If the user is doing something we don't like, we can do whatever we want about it."
Yes, but this isn't the executive branch bringing somebody to the judicial branch who decides your guilt and sentence in a courtroom... this is a private organization acting as the police, judge, jury and determining the fine. How about if MADD started setting up DUI stops and fining people for their own coffers? How about if they suggested you sell your car if you couldn't pay the fine?
I'm all for prosecuting people who break the law -- but in a court system, not by an under-the-table system that borders on (or may be) blackmail.
I certainly don't support the RIAA's tactics, but that's not exactly an accurate representation. Everyone who the RIAA files a lawsuit against has the option to not settle and get their day in court. They'll probably lose and end up far worse off than they would have been by settling, but they have that option.
It's not (and it can't be, properly used one time pads are perfectly secure). What this does, though, is make it so that you could use a one time pad without predistributing huge blocks of random data. That makes one time pads quite a bit more usable in real world applications.
The summary for this article is a little misleading. One time pads aren't new, and good sources of natural randomness aren't new either.
The interesting part of this article is the fact that quasars could be used as a natural source of randomness for one time pads, yet can be accessed by both parties simultaneously. The historical problem with one time pads (and the reason they're rarely used in practice) is that it's a huge pain to distibute sufficient random data to all parties involved in a communication. Being able to use a natural source of randomness that's available to everyone at once would be a major increase in the usability of one time pads.
I figure I could answer some of these. I am not a lawyer, by the way, I just took a look at the laws in California.
For example, what's the penalty for shoplifting a CD, where you've stolen actual physical property and downloading the same songs from bittorrent or wherever.
The former would be petty theft, which is a criminal offense punishable by a fine of up to $1000 and/or up to six months in jail. Since the value is less than $50, the prosecutor could reduce it to a misdemeanor, which is punishable by a fine of $250, at his discretion. Downloading songs is copyright violation, which is a civil offense, thus you're only able to be sued. The government doesn't actually prosecute such things, it's considered an issue between you and whoever owns the copyright.
Likewise what are the penalties for staging a DDOS, which is temporary, versus, say, a Miltonesque burning down of the building, which isn't?
In the UK, it would appear you could get up to 10 years for a DDoS attack. In California, the penalty for burning down a building is 3-8 years; 5-9 years if "great bodily injury" was caused; and an additional 3-5 years is tacked on for several things (such as injuring emergency personnel). "Aggrivated arson", which is arson committed by a person who has a previous arson conviction, arson which causes more than $5.65 million in damage, or arson which damages 5 or more buildings, is 10 years to life, with a minimum of 10 years before parole.
And are the penalties for dumpster diving and stealing thousands of credit card numbers any more or less than phishing for them on the internet.
I believe both of these are the same crime (identity theft), so they'd be the same. The former might have a charge of trespassing or theft tacked on as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Think of the statistics surrounding the future distribution of the console market what you want. It might even hold about at that area. But hanging the lifestyle of a person onto his choice of consoles is a bit silly. What does a console tell about a person? That he plays games. Ok. That's something EVERY console tells about him.
Err, this is a marketing-based study. It doesn't say that if you watch the XBox that you listen to Eminem. The idea is to get an idea of where and how to spend marketing dollars. TV shows and music groups have marketing campaigns that attracts a specific audience. Studies like this tell people like Nintendo that they're being successful at attracting the Gorillaz audience, but unsuccessful at attracting the Nirvana and Eminem audience. That can give them useful information for future marketing campaigns (which could be anything from "We know the Nirvana audience is cheap, so Sony can have 'em" to "The undecided folks like Lost, we should advertise in that time slot").
Interesting that they are saying PC not Windows ;-p Apple may be bold but apparently not willing to spell it out.
I also thought it interesting that two of the commericals named Microsoft Office by name. I don't know if that was making a little bit of nice with Microsoft or if it was a "Hey, Office works on a Mac, so you can still do all your work", but it was the only product that was mentioned that doesn't come bundled with OS X or Windows.
You can get a full-length movie at DVD resolution on a single CD using DivX5 with very ilttle loss of quality as compared to a DVD. If you had four minutes at that res taking up more than a CD's worth, it was probably compressed with HuffYUV at best, and may have been full-frame uncompressed video.
I think more important was the 15 MB for 4 minutes of video at near-DVD quality. At that rate, you could fit about 3 hours of video on a CD, which is comparable to other leading compression schemes.
So, since you are not allowed to sell your accounts, it seems pretty hard to tax them.
Actually, the IRS is very clear that you're required to pay taxes on income, regardless of if the income was legal. You're also allowed to, for instance, claim deductions for any bribes you've paid, if such things are a normal cost of doing business in your area.
They would have to retrieve account information from the companies running MMOs and then calculate how much money the accounts are worth at FMV.
They'd probably just tell all those companies to figure out how much it is and issue you a 1099 at the end of the year. That puts the bookkeeping onus on the MMOs, which have all the information necessary to do so.
Maybe most people leave it at whatever the default is. But that doesn't matter.
That's one of the differences between being a company and being an open source project. For a company, it does matter; supporting every filesystem under the sun is a detriment, not a benefit, because there are real incremental costs for each additional one you add.
I'm a trumpet player who is graduating a week from today. So I can tell you, if they can't find a real trumpet player, they can't be trying too hard. The studio at my college is about 40 strong, and even most community colleges have studios. I don't think this is a matter of laziness. I'm thinking they just don't want to pay a real musician for the service.
How many of those trumpet players are willing to enlist in the military? Drive a couple hours to random cemetaries in the area to play for 5 minutes every weekend? It's not exactly like it's a job that's very appealing.
This seems like exactly the sort of thing that should be negotiated when the contract with the client is made to develop the software in the first place. Tell the company what rights to the software you want when you're approached about the job, see what they want, and then proceed from there. There's no one right answer.
Specifically, when did you start needed a database to serve up five static files?
This is the site for all of the applicants, designed to serve up thousands of files and related information that have been uploaded by users. That seems like a good use of a database to me.
The summary is possibly a little misleading. Several safety changes have been made to the foam so far, but there are further changes they'd like to make. It's not like they're flying without any changes whatsoever. That's not to say that I completely agree with the decision, but it's an important point.
But how is a teleco operating one of the net backbones going to know what exactly is inside a packet, if the packet is coming from a paid tier source, and where it's destination is without opening it up and examining it? That sounds like a rather ominious intrusion.
They just need to look at the source and destination IPs on the packet to know where it's going and coming from. And they're already looking at the entire IP header, so it's not exactly an intrusion.
I think we need some sort of blacklist where we keep track of these politicians, and come election time, vote these n00bs out of office. What do you think?
You might want to look at ipaction.org.
...but I can appreciate the pickle we're in with de-facto standard kernels that allow anything to be loaded into them.
I think it's more that the "pickle" is that the kernels are software, which is inherantly malleable. This type of security architecture isn't designed to protect the user from outside attackers, though it helps with that as a bonus. It's designed to protect the device from the legitimate user doing something the manufacturer doesn't intend (such as, for instance, decrypting movies or games and then saving them to a hard drive or running non-standard operating systems).
Um, it can't be stolen as easily as a identity card, but I'd rather have my identity card stolen than have some serious crook borrow my microchip.
There's been a case or two of a person having their finger cut off to get entry into their fingerprint-openable luxury car, so you can bet a serious criminal would be willing to dig that microchip out of your arm if there was sufficiently valuable material behind whatever door it opened.
From the article:
The law requires each business to install a firewall or change the default SSID, the name that identifies a wireless network, if the personal information stored has not already been encrypted.
Umm...changing the SSID does nothing, in terms of security. If that's all that's required to satisfy this new law, I'm amazed.
Yeah but that kind of average is too unspecific. Even in the TFA they seemed to try to sell it as something more larger than that. I totally got the impression that their reported mood was supposed to reflect on specific recent events. It's either that or a fun crawler toy you can make in less than an hour. Which one is it?
A bit of both. From what I understood, first, they crawl all the pages and figure out what the general mood profile is. Then, they try to identify unusual mood settings. If they find that some moods are appearing abnormally often, they go through posts with those moods attached and try to find words that don't normally come up, with the idea being that the unusual words are probably the cause of the unusual mood.
I am not hoping for much out of Vista, but from a developers standpoint, it is exciting to see where this new Windows Presentation Layer will go. I am tired of static applications with dull grey buttons. I am looking forward to full 3D hardware acceleration and bringing rich, robust and dynamic GUI into my OS design.
Interestingly, I'm interested in the complete opposite. I think Dashboard (and possibly Windows Sidebar) is a neat idea because it has the potential to make my life easier. At best, animations and colors make my life exactly as easy as it was before, and (as the article mentions in relation to the active window) they have the potential to noticably impede me. I want things that do stuff, I don't really care what they look like.
If Falwell honestly beleives mistakenly going to this site is going to change any of his followers' minds, well, then, their faith must be on pretty shakey foundations to begin with!
Clearly, they need one of his books!
in the worst case a court will say "no, that part of the EULA is not valid".
Actually, I was pleased to read a couple years back about People of the State of New York v. Network Associates, where some of the language involved was considered deceptive, and the judge agreed. The Attorney General was asking for a fine of $0.50 per software copy sold with the language involved, which could be a major deterrant to putting unenforcable conditions into an EULA, but I can't find any reference to fines actually being assessed or the result of the appeal that Network Associates vowed to file, so I don't know if it actually amounted to anything. The potential is apparently there to have unenforcable portions of an EULA turn into a fine for deceptive trade practices, though.
Unless it's spelled out in the contract, artificial restrictions should not be allowed.
Just curious, have you ever read the service contract with your ISP? I know I haven't. My guess would be that they include a paragraph to the tune of, "If the user is doing something we don't like, we can do whatever we want about it."
For those interested, the entire report card is available here.
Yes, but this isn't the executive branch bringing somebody to the judicial branch who decides your guilt and sentence in a courtroom... this is a private organization acting as the police, judge, jury and determining the fine. How about if MADD started setting up DUI stops and fining people for their own coffers? How about if they suggested you sell your car if you couldn't pay the fine?
I'm all for prosecuting people who break the law -- but in a court system, not by an under-the-table system that borders on (or may be) blackmail.
I certainly don't support the RIAA's tactics, but that's not exactly an accurate representation. Everyone who the RIAA files a lawsuit against has the option to not settle and get their day in court. They'll probably lose and end up far worse off than they would have been by settling, but they have that option.
How is this more secure than one-time pads?
It's not (and it can't be, properly used one time pads are perfectly secure). What this does, though, is make it so that you could use a one time pad without predistributing huge blocks of random data. That makes one time pads quite a bit more usable in real world applications.
The summary for this article is a little misleading. One time pads aren't new, and good sources of natural randomness aren't new either.
The interesting part of this article is the fact that quasars could be used as a natural source of randomness for one time pads, yet can be accessed by both parties simultaneously. The historical problem with one time pads (and the reason they're rarely used in practice) is that it's a huge pain to distibute sufficient random data to all parties involved in a communication. Being able to use a natural source of randomness that's available to everyone at once would be a major increase in the usability of one time pads.
In re-reading this I'm coming to terms with the fact that maybe I need to GET A LIFE!
Or a beer.
I figure I could answer some of these. I am not a lawyer, by the way, I just took a look at the laws in California.
For example, what's the penalty for shoplifting a CD, where you've stolen actual physical property and downloading the same songs from bittorrent or wherever.
The former would be petty theft, which is a criminal offense punishable by a fine of up to $1000 and/or up to six months in jail. Since the value is less than $50, the prosecutor could reduce it to a misdemeanor, which is punishable by a fine of $250, at his discretion. Downloading songs is copyright violation, which is a civil offense, thus you're only able to be sued. The government doesn't actually prosecute such things, it's considered an issue between you and whoever owns the copyright.
Likewise what are the penalties for staging a DDOS, which is temporary, versus, say, a Miltonesque burning down of the building, which isn't?
In the UK, it would appear you could get up to 10 years for a DDoS attack. In California, the penalty for burning down a building is 3-8 years; 5-9 years if "great bodily injury" was caused; and an additional 3-5 years is tacked on for several things (such as injuring emergency personnel). "Aggrivated arson", which is arson committed by a person who has a previous arson conviction, arson which causes more than $5.65 million in damage, or arson which damages 5 or more buildings, is 10 years to life, with a minimum of 10 years before parole.
And are the penalties for dumpster diving and stealing thousands of credit card numbers any more or less than phishing for them on the internet.
I believe both of these are the same crime (identity theft), so they'd be the same. The former might have a charge of trespassing or theft tacked on as well.