The proposal is an amendment to the agreement that all DVD hardware manufacturers must agree to to get access to the DVD standard's specifications. The proposed text FTA:
"DVD Products, alone or in combination with other DVD Products, shall not be designed to descramble scrambled CSS Data when the DVD Disc containing such CSS Data and associated CSS Keys is not physically present in the DVD Player or DVD Drive (as applicable), and a DVD Product shall not be designed to make or direct the making of a persistent copy of CSS Data that has been descrambled from such DVD Disc by such DVD Product."
This, as the article notes, is at essence designed to put Kaleidescape out of business. This is bad; however, the real idiocy might be with the latter half about "persistent copy" making. It is trivial (although not trivially cheap) for a consumer to assemble a dedicated computer with a DVD drive, massive storage, TV video output, and free open-source software to duplicate the functioning of a Kaleidescape Jukebox. The DVD-CCA might use this to try and retroactively remove this capability from the market... despite that I don't see how it might be possible to do so without removing either DVD drives or TV-out computer components.
Of course, I'm not sure that this amendment can prevent someone from making a Kaleidescape-like jukebox; while less elegant, it wouldn't be hard to redesign the Jukebox to use a standard 1-bay 5.25" DVD drive -- at which point, a manufacturer need not be a signatory to the DVD-CCA agreement, but merely buys (bulk, OEM) DVD drives as a component. Therefore, the only impact of this amendment (unless they try to ban the DVD drive — which I don't rule out) is a slight delay (until someone does this) and to try and put Kaleidescape out of business... which, as the company president notes, is likely to be held unlawful.
I suspect it boils down to someone stupidly and criminally trying to be vindictive against Kaleidescape for having previously beaten the DVD-CCA in court. This should go well....
The only way to remove the president is to put him on trial.
Imprecise. That is merely the only practical way for an external agency to remove the president while maintaining the rule of law. A president may also be pressured into resigning (Nixon), assassinated (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy), or removed during an overthrow of the constitutional government by coup d'état (military or otherwise, without US precedent thus far; Amendment to the Constitution such as to remove the office might fall in this category while remaining lawful, but as you note is impractical due to greater political obstacles than impeachment).
Impeachment was considered a really bad option by many of the founding fathers, but left in (partly from Benjamin Franklin's advocacy) as preferable to these alternatives. The Republicans in the US Senate are betting that two more years of the Bush presidency will continue to seem less dangerous than the alternatives to impeachment, and that they, their party, and/or the country will be less damaged than by encouraging impeachment and removal of President Bush and Vice President Cheney from office. I consider the stakes high enough that I would fold rather than take that bet... but then, I'm far too liberal in my secular, sexual, and anti-corporate attitudes to be a Republican.
While China is clearly a growing world power, nearly all of this power is derived from pure manpower and numbers.
Actually, their natural resources aren't too miserable. Not great, but not miserable.
Really though, stopping them shouldn't be hard, if someone is willing to be ruthless enough. Their prime blind spot is a near-complete lack of concern for environmental safety. Ergo, Evil Geniuses for a Better Tommorrow (Inc.) should set up a few shell companies to start manufacturing products for within the Chinese that are legal but not safe, and which maximize toxic releases during manufacture. Ideally, this should be done as close as possible to major population clusters of high Communist Party leadership, and prefer stable bioaccumulative toxins. ("Plutonium may give you grief for thousands of years, but arsenic is forever." Good Omens) A toxin leading to widespread male sterility as well would be perfect. And the companies might even be profitable, which would help the cash flow problems implict from the trade balance. The ideal covert operation: one that not only pays for itself, but turns a profit.
No, I am NOT a nice person. I'm a cautious sociopath with an inclination to long-term planning. Get over it.
Just as long as it doesn't inform the user of how they've got very little freedom and a horrible standard of living, or say anything bad about the Chinese gub'ment!
Aha!
1) Develop one's own virus/bot package to attack vulnerable computers
2) Deploy bot net
3) Program all computers on bot net to begin spamming the world (including the Chinese Secret Police) about China's lousy human rights record, Tiananmen Square, and Falun Gong.
4) All such computers in China are taken out and shot, along with their owners
5) Spam levels reduce
6) Email becomes useful again for respectable commerce
7) Deploy e-commerce site
8) PROFIT!!!!
Are you suggesting there wasn't a better outcome that could have been negotiated without having a war?
Plausibly, there was. Might also have prevented the horrid mess of the US Civil War, too.
I'm advocating the construction of a future in which we don't slaughter each other anymore. We are human beings, not lions or baboons. We're able to exchange knowledge to better ourselves and thereby avoid conflict through negotiation and compromise.
We're still animals. And, yes, while we have the abilities to exchange knowledge, negotiate, and compromise, the use of the first does not assure the latter two will be used, nor does anything assure that we'll even exchange knowledge.
For example... say you have a bundle of cash and a couple of cute college age daughters. (Unlikely combination, but just barely imaginable; Warren Buffett might have managed it if his daughter had had an identical twin.) I'm a sociopath who'd like to kill you, take your money, brainwash the girls, and add them to the harem of human sex toys I keep locked in my basement. It's not in my interest to exchange knowledge with you (since you probably don't know if they're carrying any STD's); even if I'm crazy enough to do so, I'm not sure there's any "compromise" to my "proposal" we'd agree on.
The problem with many idealists is they assume everyone will choose to be good, rather than selfishly evil. Evil is always a possibility; society tries to discourage it, and increases the probabilities of undesirable consequences. However, no matter how many meddling kids it throws at the problem, there's always a chance of getting away with it... and often the chance is perceived wider than it is. If the outcomes posed by being good are sufficiently undesirable (like being born black and poor in a ghetto), the potential gains of being evil (like becoming a violent crack dealing pimp) become more palatable. The nature of evolution is that almost any possible strategy gets tried, and it only needs to prosper slightly and sometimes to continue on down towards eternity.
Yeah, it would be nice if we didn't kill each other. However, we're still a pretty stupid species, and the societies we run around in (which are also subject to evolutionary pressures) are universally moronic. War isn't going away any time soon.
There is no *real* harm done to anyone if their account is terminated.
Just like there is no "real" harm done if J. Random Blackhat changes the computer records of your bank account to indicate you spent the past month withdrawing it all as cash overseas? After all, it's only numbers in a computer; the fact that they're directly equivalent to and exchangeable with "real" money is irrelevant.
To misquote Philip K. Dick, "Reality is that which, just because you don't believe in it, doesn't go away."
What if a player/group of players find a bug in the game and are able to use it to cheat?
Then suspend the accounts of players who use the bug, instead of terminating them; restore the access after you patch the damn bug. As compensation, be sure to credit the account for the time lost due to suspension; possibly credit a extra percentage to reduce arguments. If you want incentive, give your coders a quarterly bonus equal 20% of their base salary... but with the bonus pool being reduced by the value of that extra percentage that has to be given out due to bugs. (That would certainly get ME paying more attention to my code.)
Or worse, use it to gain access to the personal computers of OTHER players without their permission?
That can probably be prosecuted under several federal laws. Get the FBI involved, suspend as above when ready to make an arrest. Include in the TOS clauses stating that conviction (or guilty or nolo contendere pleas) of a federal criminal offense using their servers will result in account termination and ban — all digital assets forfeit for liquidation to cover damages, internal investigation costs, with any residual to be paid to the US treasury. If the corporate lawyers feel cautious, the proceeds of liquidation might be escrowed while any appeals get filed.
Approaches with more subtlety, finesse, and equity are more likely to gain public approbation and to stand up in court... and to avoid going there in the first place.
"Dangerous!" cried Gandalf. "And so am I, very dangerous: more dangerous than anything you will ever meet, unless you are brought alive before the seat of the Dark Lord. And Aragorn is dangerous, and Legolas is dangerous. You are beset with dangers, Gimli son of Gloin; for you are dangerous yourself, in your own fashion."
Sigh... can someone please point me to the part(s) of the US Federal Code that makes advocating a federal politician's assassination unlawful?
The EULA states that: "...you may use the software only as expressly permitted in this agreement. In doing so you must comply with any technical limitations in the software that only allow you to use it in certain ways... You may not work around any technical limitations in the software."
This might arguably be translated from Lawyer into the Queens English as "you aren't allowed to try to use the product for anything we tried to design it to be unable to do." From an engineering standpoint, that just seems morally wrong — not to mention if one desires "to promote the progress of science and useful arts"... although that's an ocean away from the current legal case.
UK law seems to recognize the concept of Unconscionability. IAmNotALawyer, but it seems an relevant angle of approach.
Yes, but you become "a legal owner of a copy of software" only if you agree to the license. Any software you get close to in the US and EU is implicitly (i.e. by default) protected by copyright. You must first acquire rights to use the copyrighted work.
Quibble: No. You must first agree to the license required, in order to make the copy to the computer that is necessary for use of the software, in order to become a legal user of the software.
I am a legal owner of a copy of the game Half Life. It was one of a dozen or so available choices on sale for $0.01 when I bought a full price copy of GalCivII. It didn't particularly interest me, as I'm not a big fan of the FPS genre, but I'm told it's one of the finest (non PvP) FPS out there, and the other choices for this sale were all ones that I would be willing to pay at least a few cents NOT to have take. (I believe "Barbie and the Pegasus Adventure" was the next most paletable.)
The box sits on a shelf, waiting for a day that I feel I have enough time to waste to try playing it through.
The copy is mine. I can sell the copy to you, dissolve it in sulfuric acid, or microwave the CD for adding to a piece of sculpture. If someone breaks into my home and steals it, I can file a police report, bring charges of theft if the person is caught, and possibly deduct the fair market value of it from my taxes if not. However, I've never installed the game, and thus never had to agree to the license.
All this is mostly irrelevant to the larger issue at hand, save that one must be precise when considering questions of the law.
Well, for a very broad definition of "security", it certainly is. To wit, information getting to the hands of Bad People using it for Evil Purposes. However, your question raises a good point: is the security issue a technological exploit, or a social or legal loophole that's being used for wandering in and out of the database.
Why can't it be a revenue stream problem? ie they're selling the addresses?
However, it's possible that there may be an "affiliate" with a leak. The next test should be for someone (ideally in California or Vermont) to set up another such account, immediately send the requisite email to optout@tdameritrade.com, and see if the stock spam again comes through. (As a control, another account should be set up without the email to insure initial conditions remain unchanged.) If the spam arrives to the new account, the problem is internal to Ameritrade's operations; if no, then the problem is with an Ameritrade partner. In the latter situation, you might try contacting Ameritrade and asking for a list of their current partners, affiliates, and whatnots; however, I'd not expect to get much response from them.
On the other hand, such stock spams have been alleged linked to scams for sucking dry retirement investment accounts and the like. The FBI was investigating those last I heard. While J. Random Slashdotter may have trouble getting a response out of a big company, J. Edgar Feebie, Special Agent can convincingly incant words like "accessory after the fact" to become much harder to ignore whilst asking for that list, and might possibly appreciate being informed of the results of this particular experiment.
Hello! We are not in a movie or a video game. We live in The Real World. People realy die, people realy suffer. We can't just rewind the movie or restart the game.
Well, we can. A full scale global nuclear exchange should have things pretty much reset to about the end of the Proterozoic within three or four Pu-239 half-lives. However, I'd prefer a less drastic solution, myself.
But suppose the mayor of your town comes and burns down your house one night.
You're falling prey to a linguistic trap in English. I refer you to Larry Niven's short story "Grammar Lesson" (collected most recently in The Draco Tavern) to help you understand the important difference between the intrinsic, extrinsic, and relation possessives in the Chirpsithra's native Lottl. Grasping that can really alter your worldview.
Now, how does one alter the climate for an internet site...?
People who accuse the United States of trying to "conquer" Iraq or Afghanistan don't know what true conquest is.
Only those here in the US; those abroad (and especially local to those areas) do know what it is, but don't think we have the balls to outrage the whole world by doing it. The complaints are a politicalploy.
if science is necessarily naturalistic, then how do we know that a naturalistic explanation like "big bang + evolution" is true, as opposed to a credible falsehood?
As the naturalistic explanation describes a greater diversity of the observed data compactly, it's more probably the truth. (See Minimum Description Length Induction, Bayesianism, and Kolmogorov Complexity", by Paul M. B. Vitányi and Ming Li [subscription PDF, free PS] for the math to prove this.) You can write the equations for all the most complicated models in physics (which describe pretty well all observed phenomena) and put them legibly on a one square meter poster, with the worst inconsistency being between quantum mechanics and relativistic gravity. The bible takes longer and presents more internal contradictions (or as the Catholic Church prefers to call them, "Mysteries of Faith").
This whole "falsification" thing seems a little two-edged to me. Please demonstrate that it cuts creationists but not evolutionists in light of "creationism as an attempt to falsify evolution".
Simple; falsification means that some hypothetical data might be found to prove the theory wrong. For example, Evolution (on Earth) might be proven false (and Intelligent Design true) by, say, the landing of UFO's and the appearance of the immortal alien designers who have been engineering the Earth's ecology for the past four billion years or so. "Yes, we've been doing this for entertainment. If you want, we can give you a courtesy copy of the 'Making Of' special to watch. We nearly went broke when the giant reptillians market went bust and have been struggling frantically to catch up with the competition ever since. One of our VP's for marketing has a possible comeback idea that he thinks will appeal to the same key demographic, though he won't say where he got it; your females won't need much modification, but the males of your species are going to need to grow a lot more tentacles over the next couple generations...."
Shortly before the collapse of civilization into a bad Hentai piece, the scientists admit that, yes, evolution is a crock, that whole thing (at least hearabouts) was "intelligently designed", allowing for the loose value of "intelligent" that "entertainment executive" gives us.
However, there is no* possible datum that might appear that would disprove their proposition "life was intelligently designed". It might become an observed fact (if they get really miraculously lucky), but it won't ever be a theory, because it's not falsifiable. Intelligent design isn't merely wrong, it isn't even wrong.
* I suppose the appearance of God announcing "Say, I thought I left an nice damp chunk of iron here; where'd all this wet carbon-based goo wandering about come from?" shortly before correcting the problem might change a few minds before wiping them out, but technically that doesn't rule out that the whole thing is one of Satan's practical jokes.
I think it's newsworthy that despite campaigning on the promise to rid the congress of corruption and the appearance of any unethical carrying-on, that Pelosi chose to put the congressman from Louisiana, freshly caught with $90k of marked bribe CASH in his freezer, on the homeland security oversight committee.
Not really; since the idiot reorg that created Homeland Security put FEMA under it, and since Katrina still hasn't been cleaned up, putting the Louisiana Democrat from 'Nawlins on the committee makes sense, even if he is a crook.
Now, not screaming about why he isn't being investigated harder... that's a bit more iffy, as is the lack of the intelligence committee reorg you also pointed out.
Well the whole thing about God being perfect, but making humans flawed, blaming humans for being flawed, and then punishing someone else to make up for those flaws.....that seems a tad silly as well.
It's just evidence that the Divine sense of humor is beyond human comprehension. =)
"These Christian zealots point to the book and say the word of God states that creation took place in six days. This was written in the Old Testament, which is the book of my people, the Jewish people. Anyone who knows the Jewish people knows that we are good at bullshitting. It was just a great story for people who were wandering the desert and needed to be distracted from the lack of air-conditioning."
Use the kiosk to go pretty much ANYWHERE on the BestBuy website. Click the link to "careers", near the bottom of the webpage. Appropriately, we're only going into the career to get somewhere better as fast as we can. Clicking this opens a pop-up IE rendered Kiosk window (still without an address bar, the standard browser buttons, or the standard "File/Edit" toolbar of every windows program) at the Best Buy career site.
Click the "about Minneapolis" link on the right; think of your own "want to get somewhere better" jokes from now on, it's only getting worse.
Click the "www.state.mn.us" link towards the bottom.
Click the "Education" link near the top.
Under "Quick Links" off to the right, click "Minnesota State Colleges and Universities".
To the left, click the state's picture to select a campus.
Click for the "A-Z Institution List"
Under the two year colleges, click "Lake Superior College".
Ooooh -- a Google Search form! Toggle to seach Google instead of locally, and go to the real Google website, BestBuy.com, or CircuitCity.com, as you prefer.
A shorter path exists, using the search function on the www.state.mn.us website, but might change. Bonus points for anyone who (using this starting point) figures out how to get (a) a full fledged IE window with address bar (b) a command prompt (c) system level privileges and/or (d) a way to reinstall the hard drive with Linux from the kiosk environment. Changing the kiosk webbrowser home to CircuitCity.com would be another nice hack in several senses of the word.
Slashdot Mirror
The proposal is an amendment to the agreement that all DVD hardware manufacturers must agree to to get access to the DVD standard's specifications. The proposed text FTA:
This, as the article notes, is at essence designed to put Kaleidescape out of business. This is bad; however, the real idiocy might be with the latter half about "persistent copy" making. It is trivial (although not trivially cheap) for a consumer to assemble a dedicated computer with a DVD drive, massive storage, TV video output, and free open-source software to duplicate the functioning of a Kaleidescape Jukebox. The DVD-CCA might use this to try and retroactively remove this capability from the market... despite that I don't see how it might be possible to do so without removing either DVD drives or TV-out computer components.
Of course, I'm not sure that this amendment can prevent someone from making a Kaleidescape-like jukebox; while less elegant, it wouldn't be hard to redesign the Jukebox to use a standard 1-bay 5.25" DVD drive -- at which point, a manufacturer need not be a signatory to the DVD-CCA agreement, but merely buys (bulk, OEM) DVD drives as a component. Therefore, the only impact of this amendment (unless they try to ban the DVD drive — which I don't rule out) is a slight delay (until someone does this) and to try and put Kaleidescape out of business... which, as the company president notes, is likely to be held unlawful.
I suspect it boils down to someone stupidly and criminally trying to be vindictive against Kaleidescape for having previously beaten the DVD-CCA in court. This should go well....
The only way to remove the president is to put him on trial.
Imprecise. That is merely the only practical way for an external agency to remove the president while maintaining the rule of law. A president may also be pressured into resigning (Nixon), assassinated (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Kennedy), or removed during an overthrow of the constitutional government by coup d'état (military or otherwise, without US precedent thus far; Amendment to the Constitution such as to remove the office might fall in this category while remaining lawful, but as you note is impractical due to greater political obstacles than impeachment).
Impeachment was considered a really bad option by many of the founding fathers, but left in (partly from Benjamin Franklin's advocacy) as preferable to these alternatives. The Republicans in the US Senate are betting that two more years of the Bush presidency will continue to seem less dangerous than the alternatives to impeachment, and that they, their party, and/or the country will be less damaged than by encouraging impeachment and removal of President Bush and Vice President Cheney from office. I consider the stakes high enough that I would fold rather than take that bet... but then, I'm far too liberal in my secular, sexual, and anti-corporate attitudes to be a Republican.
So now we can add "Secrecy is Transparency" to the list.
Can we add "Assassination is a Political Contribution" yet?
While China is clearly a growing world power, nearly all of this power is derived from pure manpower and numbers.
Actually, their natural resources aren't too miserable. Not great, but not miserable.
Really though, stopping them shouldn't be hard, if someone is willing to be ruthless enough. Their prime blind spot is a near-complete lack of concern for environmental safety. Ergo, Evil Geniuses for a Better Tommorrow (Inc.) should set up a few shell companies to start manufacturing products for within the Chinese that are legal but not safe, and which maximize toxic releases during manufacture. Ideally, this should be done as close as possible to major population clusters of high Communist Party leadership, and prefer stable bioaccumulative toxins. ("Plutonium may give you grief for thousands of years, but arsenic is forever." Good Omens) A toxin leading to widespread male sterility as well would be perfect. And the companies might even be profitable, which would help the cash flow problems implict from the trade balance. The ideal covert operation: one that not only pays for itself, but turns a profit.
No, I am NOT a nice person. I'm a cautious sociopath with an inclination to long-term planning. Get over it.
Just as long as it doesn't inform the user of how they've got very little freedom and a horrible standard of living, or say anything bad about the Chinese gub'ment!
Aha!
1) Develop one's own virus/bot package to attack vulnerable computers
2) Deploy bot net
3) Program all computers on bot net to begin spamming the world (including the Chinese Secret Police) about China's lousy human rights record, Tiananmen Square, and Falun Gong.
4) All such computers in China are taken out and shot, along with their owners
5) Spam levels reduce
6) Email becomes useful again for respectable commerce
7) Deploy e-commerce site
8) PROFIT!!!!
Patent pending, of course...
Are you suggesting there wasn't a better outcome that could have been negotiated without having a war?
Plausibly, there was. Might also have prevented the horrid mess of the US Civil War, too.
I'm advocating the construction of a future in which we don't slaughter each other anymore. We are human beings, not lions or baboons. We're able to exchange knowledge to better ourselves and thereby avoid conflict through negotiation and compromise.
We're still animals. And, yes, while we have the abilities to exchange knowledge, negotiate, and compromise, the use of the first does not assure the latter two will be used, nor does anything assure that we'll even exchange knowledge.
For example... say you have a bundle of cash and a couple of cute college age daughters. (Unlikely combination, but just barely imaginable; Warren Buffett might have managed it if his daughter had had an identical twin.) I'm a sociopath who'd like to kill you, take your money, brainwash the girls, and add them to the harem of human sex toys I keep locked in my basement. It's not in my interest to exchange knowledge with you (since you probably don't know if they're carrying any STD's); even if I'm crazy enough to do so, I'm not sure there's any "compromise" to my "proposal" we'd agree on.
The problem with many idealists is they assume everyone will choose to be good, rather than selfishly evil. Evil is always a possibility; society tries to discourage it, and increases the probabilities of undesirable consequences. However, no matter how many meddling kids it throws at the problem, there's always a chance of getting away with it... and often the chance is perceived wider than it is. If the outcomes posed by being good are sufficiently undesirable (like being born black and poor in a ghetto), the potential gains of being evil (like becoming a violent crack dealing pimp) become more palatable. The nature of evolution is that almost any possible strategy gets tried, and it only needs to prosper slightly and sometimes to continue on down towards eternity.
Yeah, it would be nice if we didn't kill each other. However, we're still a pretty stupid species, and the societies we run around in (which are also subject to evolutionary pressures) are universally moronic. War isn't going away any time soon.
And you had a problem with this because...?
Probably put off by the company's mandating a blood test even before the job interview. Some people just don't like needles.
There is no *real* harm done to anyone if their account is terminated.
Just like there is no "real" harm done if J. Random Blackhat changes the computer records of your bank account to indicate you spent the past month withdrawing it all as cash overseas? After all, it's only numbers in a computer; the fact that they're directly equivalent to and exchangeable with "real" money is irrelevant.
To misquote Philip K. Dick, "Reality is that which, just because you don't believe in it, doesn't go away."
What if a player/group of players find a bug in the game and are able to use it to cheat?
Then suspend the accounts of players who use the bug, instead of terminating them; restore the access after you patch the damn bug. As compensation, be sure to credit the account for the time lost due to suspension; possibly credit a extra percentage to reduce arguments. If you want incentive, give your coders a quarterly bonus equal 20% of their base salary... but with the bonus pool being reduced by the value of that extra percentage that has to be given out due to bugs. (That would certainly get ME paying more attention to my code.)
Or worse, use it to gain access to the personal computers of OTHER players without their permission?
That can probably be prosecuted under several federal laws. Get the FBI involved, suspend as above when ready to make an arrest. Include in the TOS clauses stating that conviction (or guilty or nolo contendere pleas) of a federal criminal offense using their servers will result in account termination and ban — all digital assets forfeit for liquidation to cover damages, internal investigation costs, with any residual to be paid to the US treasury. If the corporate lawyers feel cautious, the proceeds of liquidation might be escrowed while any appeals get filed.
Approaches with more subtlety, finesse, and equity are more likely to gain public approbation and to stand up in court... and to avoid going there in the first place.
Perhaps the CIO happened to witness a BSOD on board an aircraft carrier's control systems one day?
Sigh... can someone please point me to the part(s) of the US Federal Code that makes advocating a federal politician's assassination unlawful?
The EULA states that: "...you may use the software only as expressly permitted in this agreement. In doing so you must comply with any technical limitations in the software that only allow you to use it in certain ways... You may not work around any technical limitations in the software."
This might arguably be translated from Lawyer into the Queens English as "you aren't allowed to try to use the product for anything we tried to design it to be unable to do." From an engineering standpoint, that just seems morally wrong — not to mention if one desires "to promote the progress of science and useful arts"... although that's an ocean away from the current legal case.
UK law seems to recognize the concept of Unconscionability. IAmNotALawyer, but it seems an relevant angle of approach.
Yes, but you become "a legal owner of a copy of software" only if you agree to the license. Any software you get close to in the US and EU is implicitly (i.e. by default) protected by copyright. You must first acquire rights to use the copyrighted work.
Quibble: No. You must first agree to the license required, in order to make the copy to the computer that is necessary for use of the software, in order to become a legal user of the software.
I am a legal owner of a copy of the game Half Life. It was one of a dozen or so available choices on sale for $0.01 when I bought a full price copy of GalCivII. It didn't particularly interest me, as I'm not a big fan of the FPS genre, but I'm told it's one of the finest (non PvP) FPS out there, and the other choices for this sale were all ones that I would be willing to pay at least a few cents NOT to have take. (I believe "Barbie and the Pegasus Adventure" was the next most paletable.)
The box sits on a shelf, waiting for a day that I feel I have enough time to waste to try playing it through. The copy is mine. I can sell the copy to you, dissolve it in sulfuric acid, or microwave the CD for adding to a piece of sculpture. If someone breaks into my home and steals it, I can file a police report, bring charges of theft if the person is caught, and possibly deduct the fair market value of it from my taxes if not. However, I've never installed the game, and thus never had to agree to the license.
All this is mostly irrelevant to the larger issue at hand, save that one must be precise when considering questions of the law.
If there were such a thing as a boogieman, he'd be a Disco Stu lookalike, with a bitchin' afro that won't quit the dancefloor.
Actually, he's more likely to look a lot like Dean Stockwell.
"Who gave you the right to go BUNGLING around in time, putting right what I made wrong?"
Opera has an independent code base, so there's hope. I usually install all three for my users to have on days like this.
(Of course, I worry about it less than many, since half of my people are still using PPC-era Macs.)
Why does everyone assume it's a security problem?
Well, for a very broad definition of "security", it certainly is. To wit, information getting to the hands of Bad People using it for Evil Purposes. However, your question raises a good point: is the security issue a technological exploit, or a social or legal loophole that's being used for wandering in and out of the database.
Why can't it be a revenue stream problem? ie they're selling the addresses?
Because that looks like a direct violation of Ameritrade's Privacy policies.
However, it's possible that there may be an "affiliate" with a leak. The next test should be for someone (ideally in California or Vermont) to set up another such account, immediately send the requisite email to optout@tdameritrade.com, and see if the stock spam again comes through. (As a control, another account should be set up without the email to insure initial conditions remain unchanged.) If the spam arrives to the new account, the problem is internal to Ameritrade's operations; if no, then the problem is with an Ameritrade partner. In the latter situation, you might try contacting Ameritrade and asking for a list of their current partners, affiliates, and whatnots; however, I'd not expect to get much response from them.
On the other hand, such stock spams have been alleged linked to scams for sucking dry retirement investment accounts and the like. The FBI was investigating those last I heard. While J. Random Slashdotter may have trouble getting a response out of a big company, J. Edgar Feebie, Special Agent can convincingly incant words like "accessory after the fact" to become much harder to ignore whilst asking for that list, and might possibly appreciate being informed of the results of this particular experiment.
I couldn't find that Haiku
The article is misleading; the hacker posted the comment, not the site or its editors. I quoted the "Own Integers" Haiku ((copyright 2007 by Edward W. Felten)) as part of an Educational Post on the actual encryption. The F2T blog with the original seems to be Slashdotted... again. Imagine that.
I do admire BtCB sense of technical style.
if(hot_gurl) {
RingBell();
}
I believe you have your bells and whistles mixed up.
Hello! We are not in a movie or a video game. We live in The Real World. People realy die, people realy suffer. We can't just rewind the movie or restart the game.
Well, we can. A full scale global nuclear exchange should have things pretty much reset to about the end of the Proterozoic within three or four Pu-239 half-lives. However, I'd prefer a less drastic solution, myself.
But suppose the mayor of your town comes and burns down your house one night.
You're falling prey to a linguistic trap in English. I refer you to Larry Niven's short story "Grammar Lesson" (collected most recently in The Draco Tavern) to help you understand the important difference between the intrinsic, extrinsic, and relation possessives in the Chirpsithra's native Lottl. Grasping that can really alter your worldview.
Now, how does one alter the climate for an internet site...?
People who accuse the United States of trying to "conquer" Iraq or Afghanistan don't know what true conquest is.
Only those here in the US; those abroad (and especially local to those areas) do know what it is, but don't think we have the balls to outrage the whole world by doing it. The complaints are a political ploy.
if science is necessarily naturalistic, then how do we know that a naturalistic explanation like "big bang + evolution" is true, as opposed to a credible falsehood?
As the naturalistic explanation describes a greater diversity of the observed data compactly, it's more probably the truth. (See Minimum Description Length Induction, Bayesianism, and Kolmogorov Complexity", by Paul M. B. Vitányi and Ming Li [subscription PDF, free PS] for the math to prove this.) You can write the equations for all the most complicated models in physics (which describe pretty well all observed phenomena) and put them legibly on a one square meter poster, with the worst inconsistency being between quantum mechanics and relativistic gravity. The bible takes longer and presents more internal contradictions (or as the Catholic Church prefers to call them, "Mysteries of Faith").
This whole "falsification" thing seems a little two-edged to me. Please demonstrate that it cuts creationists but not evolutionists in light of "creationism as an attempt to falsify evolution".
Simple; falsification means that some hypothetical data might be found to prove the theory wrong. For example, Evolution (on Earth) might be proven false (and Intelligent Design true) by, say, the landing of UFO's and the appearance of the immortal alien designers who have been engineering the Earth's ecology for the past four billion years or so. "Yes, we've been doing this for entertainment. If you want, we can give you a courtesy copy of the 'Making Of' special to watch. We nearly went broke when the giant reptillians market went bust and have been struggling frantically to catch up with the competition ever since. One of our VP's for marketing has a possible comeback idea that he thinks will appeal to the same key demographic, though he won't say where he got it; your females won't need much modification, but the males of your species are going to need to grow a lot more tentacles over the next couple generations...."
Shortly before the collapse of civilization into a bad Hentai piece, the scientists admit that, yes, evolution is a crock, that whole thing (at least hearabouts) was "intelligently designed", allowing for the loose value of "intelligent" that "entertainment executive" gives us.
However, there is no* possible datum that might appear that would disprove their proposition "life was intelligently designed". It might become an observed fact (if they get really miraculously lucky), but it won't ever be a theory, because it's not falsifiable. Intelligent design isn't merely wrong, it isn't even wrong .
* I suppose the appearance of God announcing "Say, I thought I left an nice damp chunk of iron here; where'd all this wet carbon-based goo wandering about come from?" shortly before correcting the problem might change a few minds before wiping them out, but technically that doesn't rule out that the whole thing is one of Satan's practical jokes.
I think it's newsworthy that despite campaigning on the promise to rid the congress of corruption and the appearance of any unethical carrying-on, that Pelosi chose to put the congressman from Louisiana, freshly caught with $90k of marked bribe CASH in his freezer, on the homeland security oversight committee.
Not really; since the idiot reorg that created Homeland Security put FEMA under it, and since Katrina still hasn't been cleaned up, putting the Louisiana Democrat from 'Nawlins on the committee makes sense, even if he is a crook.
Now, not screaming about why he isn't being investigated harder... that's a bit more iffy, as is the lack of the intelligence committee reorg you also pointed out.
Well the whole thing about God being perfect, but making humans flawed, blaming humans for being flawed, and then punishing someone else to make up for those flaws .....that seems a tad silly as well.
It's just evidence that the Divine sense of humor is beyond human comprehension. =)
—(Louis Black, during an HBO broadcast show)With or without lighter fluid?
By "lighter fluid" you mean Liquid Oxygen, right?
(Repost)
A shorter path exists, using the search function on the www.state.mn.us website, but might change. Bonus points for anyone who (using this starting point) figures out how to get (a) a full fledged IE window with address bar (b) a command prompt (c) system level privileges and/or (d) a way to reinstall the hard drive with Linux from the kiosk environment. Changing the kiosk webbrowser home to CircuitCity.com would be another nice hack in several senses of the word.