Couldn't this be considered soliciting bribery from the students? The professor is directly tying students' grades to something that has no academic justification (they would learn just as much writing on a photocopy) but from which the professor receives a direct economic benefit. I wonder what the accreditation board would have to say about this.
2) Legalize everything which creates a huge backlash on the right
This wouldn't just cause a backlash on the right. Many on the left run on pro-censorship platforms (Hillary Clinton and her fight against obscene video games, for example). Also, taking the position that free speech always trumps people's desire not to be offended would definitely cause a backlash among the "hate speech is thoughtcrime and must be banned" faction of the left.
Most of the time call center employees are told not to give out their exact location because some of the customers can get more than a little upset.
I wouldn't really think India, the answer the GP poster was speaking of, really qualifies as an "exact location"... So you've narrowed the call center down to a region of 3.3 million square kilomters. What's the upset customer going to do, go there and beat up a billion people?
Because we all know that if the government really wanted that information from Google, they'd have persued it via Patriot Act style secret warrants... The reason that the Justice Department publicised this rejection from Google is because they thought it helped them. That's what baffles me about this case.
Perhaps the reason they are requesting the information openly instead of through Patriot Act style secret warrants is because of what they are planning to use it for. The point of the data is to prove that there is pr0n on the Internet and justify some sort of CDA / COPA censorship legislation. If they obtained their pr0n evidence through cloak-and-dagger channels, the debate would shift from "OMG! There is pr0n on the Web!" to "OMG! You've been spying on people's Google searches!" when the government presents its findings, and undermine their own case.
If the Governement wanted to know your Web searching habits for their own benefit, sure, they decide secret warrants are the way to go, but not when the data is going to be presented in a highly public forum. Plus, doing it this way sets a convenient precedent for search engines having to cough up data when the Government wants it.
What I would like to know is why firearms is with tobacco and alcohol. Weapon, drug, drug. hmmm..
Because these products are subject to special taxes and special regulations, ATF was originally formed as a branch of the Treasury Department to handle this tax collection. In the post-9/11 govenment restructuring, the law enforcement side of ATF, which had by then become their main activity, moved over to the Justice Department, and the tax collection part remained with Treasury as the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau.
It sounds like they did more than just posing as customers. Regardless, the moment they made an offer of cash for criminal services, they were entrapping -- inciting crime, creating criminals.
That's not how entrapment works. Basically the standard is, would whatever the police did cause an average person to be induced to commit a crime? If it would, then it goes from catching people committing crimes to making them commit them. For instance, if a policeman waves your car through an intersection, then tickets you for running the stop sign there, that would be entrapment. On the other hand, offering money for criminal services in order to catch people who provide those services isn't entrapment, it's a sting operation. To establish entrapment in this spam case, you would want to show that the secret service offered the guy so much money that ANYBODY would agree to send out spam under the circumstances.
...vice president Cheney nonetheless earned plenty of points for his target skills. "I tracked the target across my vision," he said. "When I pulled the trigger however, there was a spammer in my line of fire. I take full responsibility for what I did."
He's already shot a lawyer, if he can bag a spammer and an RIAA executive, Cheney will be a shoo-in for the 2008 presidential election.
It appears TFA is only looking at the top-town approach to OSS getting into the enterprise. CIO is looking for some well-established solution to managing data across the enterprise, so he's not going to go with an immature OSS product.
I think where small OSS projects are most likely to find their way into the enterprise is in a bottom-up scenario. Rather than being the result of some enterprise-wide strategic business partnership, they get going when middle manager goes to developer and says "find a way to get data from X to Y". Often, some immature OSS tool will happen to be the best solution to this specific need. The OSS tool gets used for some particular task, then when another department has a similar need, they look into how the first department did it and the OSS tool gains ground from there.
If it's being deployed on a large enough scale to even be a blip on the CIO's radar, then no, an immature piece of software (OSS or commercial) is not the answer. But that doesn't mean it won't find use in the company somewhere.
There is no reason why shifting into reverse at 80 MPH should completely brickify a car. Result in speed loss? Yeah. Mean you have to start the engine again? That's fine. But render a car utterly incapable of being restored to a usable state by the user? Absolutely not.
When in reverse, the differential and layshaft spin in opposite directions relative to each other than in normal driving because reverse has a small idler gear not present on the other gears which reverses the direction of motion. If you try to shift into reverse on a car already revved up and/or in motion, the gears will be spinning the wrong way and the dog teeth on them unable to engage. Rather than bricking your car or causing the transmission to explode, you get a horrible grinding noise and stay in neutral.
there should be an anti-totalitarian variant of the GPL that denies repressive states and their institutions any license under which they can legally run the software or use the source.
I disagree. This would break with two of the best things about the GPL. Firstly, that you don't need to adhere to any licence to use software, only to copy and distribute it. The other is that the GPL does not discriminate against persons, groups, or fields of endeavor. Free software does not stipulate that it can't be used in commercial use, genetic research, munitions plants, gay porn web sites, or any other area the software creator may have an axe to grind against.
This does not mean that people who make free software endorse all the activities others may use it for, only that they make their software available to all on free and equal terms. Contrast this to Microsoft, who are not just making Windows available to the Chinese government, but actively helping them by closing down blogs, filtering out references to democracy, and so on.
If Joe writes a text editor and some guy happens to download it and write a death threat with it, Joe isn't the one being unethical. On the other hand, if Joe tells the guy, "become business partners with me, and I'll write really good death threats for you" then his active participation makes him an accessory who is directly contributing to and facilitating what's going on.
You raise good points. I'm pretty sure I'm an outlier and in no way representative of anime watchers as a whole, but your earlier post specifically asked about anecdotal evidence of someone who watches lots of fansubs and still buys lots of DVDs, and as someone who meets that description, I wanted to reply to it.
As for your questions, without the benefit of fansubs, I would still buy a frightning amount of anime. I'd wind up with a few more volume 1 of series that I decide not to pick up the rest of, a lot less artboxes since I wouldn't know if I would be filling them or not, and I'd miss out on some series that didn't quite make it onto my radar through word of mouth / reviews / trailers / etc., but in the end life would go on.
On a side note, establishing buzz for a series that has no pre-existing domestic fan base takes time. I might finally decide I've heard enough good things about a show to pick it up about the time the cheapo box set comes out, but if instead I am like "OMG I love this show I must buy each volume the day it comes out over here" that's a lot more money being made by the studios. Of course you could argue the reverse, someone who has seen a fansub might say "That's a good show and I plan to buy it sometime, but I've already seen it so I'll wait for a good price."
As for the net economics of it all, who knows? How many "might have been sold" DVDs is one that actually did get sold worth? If there were no fansubbers, would less honorable downloaders buy licensed DVDs instead? Chinese bootlegs? Download DVD rips? Download some other form of entertainment entirely? There's enough intertwining causation and conflicting positive and negative results that it's hard to say for sure whether on the whole it's a good or bad thing. That's why I framed my comments as purely an example of my own case being one where fansubs are a net benefit to the Japanese studios and U.S. licensors, with no conclusions jumped to about what it bodes for the rest of anime fandom.
Recently I was also shopping around for a storage solution. At the store, I saw a promising looking device called the Netgear SC101. You pop any two IDE drives into it, plug an Ethernet and power cable in the back, and you have yourself a NAS. Because you can pick out your own drives, you can even do a terabyte in a cheaper and much smaller unit than 4 x 250 GB units like the Buffalo Terastation.
Unfortunately, where this device failed for me was that it doesn't just share the stuff as a SMB share like a real NAS box does. It uses some weird proprietary protocol, and only machines with the right drivers installed can talk to it at all. Such drivers aren't available for Linux, or Mac, or BSD... even versions of Windows that are old (98, ME, etc.) or 64-bit won't work. It has to be a 32 bit version of Win 2k3, XP, or 2k with the right service pack level for the drivers or no data for you.
No self-respecting geek would want a device with such limited compatibility. If a piece of network equipment only lists Windows in its compatibility, that normally means the manufacturer only officially supports Windows, or maybe you need Windows to set up and administer the thing. When even many versions of Windows can't access the device, it's a junker. I took it back the next day, and will start researching hardware purchases more carefully in the future.
In short, Netgear's short-sighted decision to use some strange proprietary protocol instead of SMB turns this unit from something I would have strongly recommended into that gets a definite thumbs down.
Can anyone provide links to the economic effects of piracy in this market, the corporate responses to piracy, or provide me with at least anecdotal evidence of someone who seriously follows the "download lots of fan subs, but still spends thousands on anime" model?
I'm probably not too representative of all anime fans, but I can definitely provide anecdotal evidence. I've downloaded about half a terabyte of fansubs in all, and also have hundreds of anime DVDs (all legit nonbootleg R1's).
The real distinction is whether a person is downloading anime just to save a few bucks, or because they want to watch shows that are not yet licenced and commercially available in their language/country. For me, downloading is not so much a way to get out of buying something, as a chance to preview it. It's a bit like a radio - some people will listen to it to discover new artists whose albums they want to buy, others might just tape songs off the radio and avoid buying albums.
When I find anime shows I like, I will still buy them as they get released in the U.S. Having gotten to see them as they aired in Japan, it's not a blind buy so I know what I'll be getting - a show that I already like, plus the packaging, an English dub, a chance to support an industry that actually deserves it (unlike the RIAA / MPAA), etc. Because it's a more informed purchase, one could point out that I'm less likely to buy shows that I already know suck. But for every one of those, there is a show I've discovered that I might not have watched if I had to put money down up front, but when it's just a matter of taking the time to watch, I end up enjoying and buying.
Plus as a watcher of fansubs, there are some great shows out there that will probably never be licensed in the U.S., but I've gotten to enjoy nonetheless. This may not seem like much of an economic effect, but if enough other people had seen and enjoyed the same shows, there would be enough of a pre-existing fan base clamoring for the release of a show to make licensing it a sure bet for the U.S. studios.
1) The Sony rootkit contains pirated open source code, and
2) The RIAA finds nothing wrong about the Sony rootkit
It follows that RIAA does not consider the piracy of copyrighted material wrong... Well, I'm off to go copy a few CDs, with the cartel's blessing this time.
MegaBlock clearly is in violation. IMHO this has less to do with Canadian law, and more to do with playing a game of tit for tat with the US over the Blackberries. That is not only a dangerous road to go down, but a foolish one.
And how exactly would ruling against a Denmark company like Lego help Canada get back at the USA?
Are we suddenly interested in the rights of game cheaters? Whose rights are being impacted here?
The "rights" issue is with peoples' right to listen to music they've bought without the CD compromising their system and infecting it with rootkits. This article is signifigant more as a new development in that story, than as a "a victory for the rights of online cheaters everywhere!" thing.
To underscore the point, consider that yesterday on GlobeAndMail.com, we have:
The company dismissed the prospect of hackers exploiting its rootkits for their own purposes as an "academic" concern.
I've always found it amusing how DC has those license plates protesting "Taxation Without Representation", yet keeps proposing these commuter taxes on people who can't vote in DC elections, which is a much more flagrant example of that concept than the issue the plates were meant to allude to.
The warden then uses the GetWindowTextA function to read the window text in the titlebar of every window. These are windows that are not in the WoW process, but any program running on your computer.
I'm not really familiar with how The Warden works, but if all it is doing is checking the titlebars of windows, wouldn't someone just make the title bar of their app say "Document1 - Microsoft Word" instead of "7337 G0ld Farm B0t Script"?
How is this any more historical than overclocking it to 993 mhz?
What if Apollo 11 had travelled 99.3% of the way to the moon? What if the Manhattan Project built a bomb with only 99.3% of a critical mass of Uranium in it? What if the Continental Congress had gotten 99.3% of the votes to declare independence, but then decided just to stay a British colony?
History is made by those who achieve something, not by those who just come really close and then fail. Centuries from now, when this event is looked back upon and judged by posterity, it is these brave souls who dared to break the 1 GHz barrier who will be rightfully lauded, not some poor failure of a man who could only get his video card to go 933 MHz.
In related news, the NRA is fighting to allow children to purchase guns too. After all, it's not the guns themselves that kill people right?
Do you have an actual example of them campaigning against any minimum age to buy firearms laws, or was this just a bizairre analogy for the sake of trolling?
In the meantime, Fox News publishes an opinion piece in the guise of a news story from an organization whose has a founding member named Microsoft.
From the FoxNews.com front page:
Dangerous Software Opinion: Mass. endorsement of
'open' file format bad for America
While the piece itself is poorly written Microsoft propaganda filled with logical fallicies, and should never have been published in the first place, one thing you really can't fault them for is running it "in the guise of a news story" when it is clearly labelled on the front page in bold as an "opinion", and on the page with the article itself as being from the "views" section.
"Separately, the U.S. Attorney also charged Ronald Redding, 37, of Linthicum Heights, Maryland, with misdemeanor copyright infringement for giving away his "screener" copy of "Million Dollar Baby," which was sent to him for Academy Awards voting. He agreed to plead guilty, the U.S. Attorney said."
So why is this guy charged with "copyright infringement", when copyright law is supposed to deal with who has to right to create additional copies of a protected work? Mr. Redding lent out an existing copy of the work that had been lawfully created by the studio; he did not copy anything himself. That's not to say he is in the right, he loaned the work in violation of the non-disclosure terms he agreed to to receive the screener disc. He should face civil liability for breech of contract, but the misdemeanor criminal charge for copyright infringement sounds completely inappropriate for the situation.
TFA mentions that IR filters "present some challenges... though it turns out that the camera detector can spot lenses cloaked with infrared filters." However, I think if someone intentionally tried to secure a camera against this device, they would have a lot more luck. The filters they tested against probably had similar glare properties to a camera lens. So take a camera with an IR filter, give the filter itself a good non-glare coating, put something like the Leopold Anti-Reflective Device on it, and a nice lens hood/shade to keep it from catching any periphrial light. If the device still detect the camera without its sensitivity being turned up so much that it blinds everybody with glasses, then I will be a lot more impressed with their technology.
Er, why is it always about politics with some people? It's not like stupid ideas only come from one political party.... And don't anyone say that it's "always" or "mostly" one party, because it's not.
When people hear about stupid censorship like this, there is a tendency to attribute it to the party they don't like, in order to feel better about their own views. Really though, this type of legislation is just as likely to come from conservatives (religious right, "family values") or from liberals (nanny state advocates, "for the childrern").
Slashdot Mirror
Couldn't this be considered soliciting bribery from the students? The professor is directly tying students' grades to something that has no academic justification (they would learn just as much writing on a photocopy) but from which the professor receives a direct economic benefit. I wonder what the accreditation board would have to say about this.
I believe the word Apple is looking for is "Privateer". A state-sponsored pirate is a privateer.
I like it! Maybe France will start granting people Letters of Marque.
2) Legalize everything which creates a huge backlash on the right
This wouldn't just cause a backlash on the right. Many on the left run on pro-censorship platforms (Hillary Clinton and her fight against obscene video games, for example). Also, taking the position that free speech always trumps people's desire not to be offended would definitely cause a backlash among the "hate speech is thoughtcrime and must be banned" faction of the left.
Most of the time call center employees are told not to give out their exact location because some of the customers can get more than a little upset.
I wouldn't really think India, the answer the GP poster was speaking of, really qualifies as an "exact location"... So you've narrowed the call center down to a region of 3.3 million square kilomters. What's the upset customer going to do, go there and beat up a billion people?
Because we all know that if the government really wanted that information from Google, they'd have persued it via Patriot Act style secret warrants ... The reason that the Justice Department publicised this rejection from Google is because they thought it helped them. That's what baffles me about this case.
Perhaps the reason they are requesting the information openly instead of through Patriot Act style secret warrants is because of what they are planning to use it for. The point of the data is to prove that there is pr0n on the Internet and justify some sort of CDA / COPA censorship legislation. If they obtained their pr0n evidence through cloak-and-dagger channels, the debate would shift from "OMG! There is pr0n on the Web!" to "OMG! You've been spying on people's Google searches!" when the government presents its findings, and undermine their own case.
If the Governement wanted to know your Web searching habits for their own benefit, sure, they decide secret warrants are the way to go, but not when the data is going to be presented in a highly public forum. Plus, doing it this way sets a convenient precedent for search engines having to cough up data when the Government wants it.
What I would like to know is why firearms is with tobacco and alcohol. Weapon, drug, drug. hmmm..
Because these products are subject to special taxes and special regulations, ATF was originally formed as a branch of the Treasury Department to handle this tax collection. In the post-9/11 govenment restructuring, the law enforcement side of ATF, which had by then become their main activity, moved over to the Justice Department, and the tax collection part remained with Treasury as the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau.
It sounds like they did more than just posing as customers. Regardless, the moment they made an offer of cash for criminal services, they were entrapping -- inciting crime, creating criminals.
That's not how entrapment works. Basically the standard is, would whatever the police did cause an average person to be induced to commit a crime? If it would, then it goes from catching people committing crimes to making them commit them. For instance, if a policeman waves your car through an intersection, then tickets you for running the stop sign there, that would be entrapment. On the other hand, offering money for criminal services in order to catch people who provide those services isn't entrapment, it's a sting operation. To establish entrapment in this spam case, you would want to show that the secret service offered the guy so much money that ANYBODY would agree to send out spam under the circumstances.
He's already shot a lawyer, if he can bag a spammer and an RIAA executive, Cheney will be a shoo-in for the 2008 presidential election.
It appears TFA is only looking at the top-town approach to OSS getting into the enterprise. CIO is looking for some well-established solution to managing data across the enterprise, so he's not going to go with an immature OSS product.
I think where small OSS projects are most likely to find their way into the enterprise is in a bottom-up scenario. Rather than being the result of some enterprise-wide strategic business partnership, they get going when middle manager goes to developer and says "find a way to get data from X to Y". Often, some immature OSS tool will happen to be the best solution to this specific need. The OSS tool gets used for some particular task, then when another department has a similar need, they look into how the first department did it and the OSS tool gains ground from there.
If it's being deployed on a large enough scale to even be a blip on the CIO's radar, then no, an immature piece of software (OSS or commercial) is not the answer. But that doesn't mean it won't find use in the company somewhere.
There is no reason why shifting into reverse at 80 MPH should completely brickify a car. Result in speed loss? Yeah. Mean you have to start the engine again? That's fine. But render a car utterly incapable of being restored to a usable state by the user? Absolutely not.
When in reverse, the differential and layshaft spin in opposite directions relative to each other than in normal driving because reverse has a small idler gear not present on the other gears which reverses the direction of motion. If you try to shift into reverse on a car already revved up and/or in motion, the gears will be spinning the wrong way and the dog teeth on them unable to engage. Rather than bricking your car or causing the transmission to explode, you get a horrible grinding noise and stay in neutral.
there should be an anti-totalitarian variant of the GPL that denies repressive states and their institutions any license under which they can legally run the software or use the source.
I disagree. This would break with two of the best things about the GPL. Firstly, that you don't need to adhere to any licence to use software, only to copy and distribute it. The other is that the GPL does not discriminate against persons, groups, or fields of endeavor. Free software does not stipulate that it can't be used in commercial use, genetic research, munitions plants, gay porn web sites, or any other area the software creator may have an axe to grind against.
This does not mean that people who make free software endorse all the activities others may use it for, only that they make their software available to all on free and equal terms. Contrast this to Microsoft, who are not just making Windows available to the Chinese government, but actively helping them by closing down blogs, filtering out references to democracy, and so on.
If Joe writes a text editor and some guy happens to download it and write a death threat with it, Joe isn't the one being unethical. On the other hand, if Joe tells the guy, "become business partners with me, and I'll write really good death threats for you" then his active participation makes him an accessory who is directly contributing to and facilitating what's going on.
You raise good points. I'm pretty sure I'm an outlier and in no way representative of anime watchers as a whole, but your earlier post specifically asked about anecdotal evidence of someone who watches lots of fansubs and still buys lots of DVDs, and as someone who meets that description, I wanted to reply to it.
As for your questions, without the benefit of fansubs, I would still buy a frightning amount of anime. I'd wind up with a few more volume 1 of series that I decide not to pick up the rest of, a lot less artboxes since I wouldn't know if I would be filling them or not, and I'd miss out on some series that didn't quite make it onto my radar through word of mouth / reviews / trailers / etc., but in the end life would go on.
On a side note, establishing buzz for a series that has no pre-existing domestic fan base takes time. I might finally decide I've heard enough good things about a show to pick it up about the time the cheapo box set comes out, but if instead I am like "OMG I love this show I must buy each volume the day it comes out over here" that's a lot more money being made by the studios. Of course you could argue the reverse, someone who has seen a fansub might say "That's a good show and I plan to buy it sometime, but I've already seen it so I'll wait for a good price."
As for the net economics of it all, who knows? How many "might have been sold" DVDs is one that actually did get sold worth? If there were no fansubbers, would less honorable downloaders buy licensed DVDs instead? Chinese bootlegs? Download DVD rips? Download some other form of entertainment entirely? There's enough intertwining causation and conflicting positive and negative results that it's hard to say for sure whether on the whole it's a good or bad thing. That's why I framed my comments as purely an example of my own case being one where fansubs are a net benefit to the Japanese studios and U.S. licensors, with no conclusions jumped to about what it bodes for the rest of anime fandom.
Recently I was also shopping around for a storage solution. At the store, I saw a promising looking device called the Netgear SC101. You pop any two IDE drives into it, plug an Ethernet and power cable in the back, and you have yourself a NAS. Because you can pick out your own drives, you can even do a terabyte in a cheaper and much smaller unit than 4 x 250 GB units like the Buffalo Terastation.
Unfortunately, where this device failed for me was that it doesn't just share the stuff as a SMB share like a real NAS box does. It uses some weird proprietary protocol, and only machines with the right drivers installed can talk to it at all. Such drivers aren't available for Linux, or Mac, or BSD... even versions of Windows that are old (98, ME, etc.) or 64-bit won't work. It has to be a 32 bit version of Win 2k3, XP, or 2k with the right service pack level for the drivers or no data for you.
No self-respecting geek would want a device with such limited compatibility. If a piece of network equipment only lists Windows in its compatibility, that normally means the manufacturer only officially supports Windows, or maybe you need Windows to set up and administer the thing. When even many versions of Windows can't access the device, it's a junker. I took it back the next day, and will start researching hardware purchases more carefully in the future.
In short, Netgear's short-sighted decision to use some strange proprietary protocol instead of SMB turns this unit from something I would have strongly recommended into that gets a definite thumbs down.
Can anyone provide links to the economic effects of piracy in this market, the corporate responses to piracy, or provide me with at least anecdotal evidence of someone who seriously follows the "download lots of fan subs, but still spends thousands on anime" model?
I'm probably not too representative of all anime fans, but I can definitely provide anecdotal evidence. I've downloaded about half a terabyte of fansubs in all, and also have hundreds of anime DVDs (all legit nonbootleg R1's).
The real distinction is whether a person is downloading anime just to save a few bucks, or because they want to watch shows that are not yet licenced and commercially available in their language/country. For me, downloading is not so much a way to get out of buying something, as a chance to preview it. It's a bit like a radio - some people will listen to it to discover new artists whose albums they want to buy, others might just tape songs off the radio and avoid buying albums.
When I find anime shows I like, I will still buy them as they get released in the U.S. Having gotten to see them as they aired in Japan, it's not a blind buy so I know what I'll be getting - a show that I already like, plus the packaging, an English dub, a chance to support an industry that actually deserves it (unlike the RIAA / MPAA), etc. Because it's a more informed purchase, one could point out that I'm less likely to buy shows that I already know suck. But for every one of those, there is a show I've discovered that I might not have watched if I had to put money down up front, but when it's just a matter of taking the time to watch, I end up enjoying and buying.
Plus as a watcher of fansubs, there are some great shows out there that will probably never be licensed in the U.S., but I've gotten to enjoy nonetheless. This may not seem like much of an economic effect, but if enough other people had seen and enjoyed the same shows, there would be enough of a pre-existing fan base clamoring for the release of a show to make licensing it a sure bet for the U.S. studios.
Given that:
1) The Sony rootkit contains pirated open source code, and
2) The RIAA finds nothing wrong about the Sony rootkit
It follows that RIAA does not consider the piracy of copyrighted material wrong... Well, I'm off to go copy a few CDs, with the cartel's blessing this time.
MegaBlock clearly is in violation. IMHO this has less to do with Canadian law, and more to do with playing a game of tit for tat with the US over the Blackberries. That is not only a dangerous road to go down, but a foolish one.
And how exactly would ruling against a Denmark company like Lego help Canada get back at the USA?
Are we suddenly interested in the rights of game cheaters? Whose rights are being impacted here?
The "rights" issue is with peoples' right to listen to music they've bought without the CD compromising their system and infecting it with rootkits. This article is signifigant more as a new development in that story, than as a "a victory for the rights of online cheaters everywhere!" thing.
To underscore the point, consider that yesterday on GlobeAndMail.com, we have:
The company dismissed the prospect of hackers exploiting its rootkits for their own purposes as an "academic" concern.
I guess it isn't so academic anymore.
I've always found it amusing how DC has those license plates protesting "Taxation Without Representation", yet keeps proposing these commuter taxes on people who can't vote in DC elections, which is a much more flagrant example of that concept than the issue the plates were meant to allude to.
The warden then uses the GetWindowTextA function to read the window text in the titlebar of every window. These are windows that are not in the WoW process, but any program running on your computer.
I'm not really familiar with how The Warden works, but if all it is doing is checking the titlebars of windows, wouldn't someone just make the title bar of their app say "Document1 - Microsoft Word" instead of "7337 G0ld Farm B0t Script"?
How is this any more historical than overclocking it to 993 mhz?
What if Apollo 11 had travelled 99.3% of the way to the moon? What if the Manhattan Project built a bomb with only 99.3% of a critical mass of Uranium in it? What if the Continental Congress had gotten 99.3% of the votes to declare independence, but then decided just to stay a British colony?
History is made by those who achieve something, not by those who just come really close and then fail. Centuries from now, when this event is looked back upon and judged by posterity, it is these brave souls who dared to break the 1 GHz barrier who will be rightfully lauded, not some poor failure of a man who could only get his video card to go 933 MHz.
In related news, the NRA is fighting to allow children to purchase guns too. After all, it's not the guns themselves that kill people right?
Do you have an actual example of them campaigning against any minimum age to buy firearms laws, or was this just a bizairre analogy for the sake of trolling?
In the meantime, Fox News publishes an opinion piece in the guise of a news story from an organization whose has a founding member named Microsoft.
From the FoxNews.com front page:
Dangerous Software
Opinion: Mass. endorsement of
'open' file format bad for America
While the piece itself is poorly written Microsoft propaganda filled with logical fallicies, and should never have been published in the first place, one thing you really can't fault them for is running it "in the guise of a news story" when it is clearly labelled on the front page in bold as an "opinion", and on the page with the article itself as being from the "views" section.
"Separately, the U.S. Attorney also charged Ronald Redding, 37, of Linthicum Heights, Maryland, with misdemeanor copyright infringement for giving away his "screener" copy of "Million Dollar Baby," which was sent to him for Academy Awards voting. He agreed to plead guilty, the U.S. Attorney said."
So why is this guy charged with "copyright infringement", when copyright law is supposed to deal with who has to right to create additional copies of a protected work? Mr. Redding lent out an existing copy of the work that had been lawfully created by the studio; he did not copy anything himself. That's not to say he is in the right, he loaned the work in violation of the non-disclosure terms he agreed to to receive the screener disc. He should face civil liability for breech of contract, but the misdemeanor criminal charge for copyright infringement sounds completely inappropriate for the situation.
TFA mentions that IR filters "present some challenges ... though it turns out that the camera detector can spot lenses cloaked with infrared filters." However, I think if someone intentionally tried to secure a camera against this device, they would have a lot more luck. The filters they tested against probably had similar glare properties to a camera lens. So take a camera with an IR filter, give the filter itself a good non-glare coating, put something like the Leopold Anti-Reflective Device on it, and a nice lens hood/shade to keep it from catching any periphrial light. If the device still detect the camera without its sensitivity being turned up so much that it blinds everybody with glasses, then I will be a lot more impressed with their technology.
Er, why is it always about politics with some people? It's not like stupid ideas only come from one political party.... And don't anyone say that it's "always" or "mostly" one party, because it's not.
When people hear about stupid censorship like this, there is a tendency to attribute it to the party they don't like, in order to feel better about their own views. Really though, this type of legislation is just as likely to come from conservatives (religious right, "family values") or from liberals (nanny state advocates, "for the childrern").