I have a list! A list of 57 communists in the State Department. (or was it RIAA/MPAA?) err...I mean a list of seemingly random numbers grouped in four sets of one to three numbers separated by periods and I have no way of proving the authenticity and/or credibility of the list or tell you anything about it and only vaguely explain how it was made and I got it. But I will say that you're on it but I won't let you look at the list to verify that you're accually on the list.
Sure, that will work. Yes, I'm sure enough people who visited those sights did so for legally questionable reasons, but they may have had forums, like slashdot, but also having.torrent files. That would be like guilty through association. or something like that. Showing that a list created by people doing illegal things showed someone visited a website doesn't carry much weight with me. For all we know the operators of those sights could have made a list of every IP in California or Texas and turned that over.
oh look, apple's making more ipods, with larger capacities and maybe thinner nothing new to see here. How long until all that flash memory makes its way into a part flash, part magnetic hdd. The kind that can have almost instant standby and resume. Will need to have at least 6-10gb of flash memory. It will be nice when we can finally buy a 10/500gb hdd (10 flash, 500 magnetic)
good when there aren't that many. TOS and TAS were liked after their time, then 10yrs after the series the movies started, one every 2-4yrs which wasn't uncommon in the 80s, but they weren't remakes and remakes havn't been doing very well. Then there were the new series, dofferent enough to not be considered remakes, bu there were 25 seasons in 18yrs with most overlapping, a little overkill. Cut back on the number of movies and go back to when the acting was mostly good and the special effects, done with models, suplemented the plot and the acting. I've read rumors of an A-Team movie, Rambo 4 and Rocky 6, they should not be made, they were good, mostly, in thier time and should be left that way, possibly also true with Indiana Jones 4. Why not make a Caddyshack 3 with a CGI gopher?
"I'm sure that will help tremendously when it comes to protecting soldiers and civilians from getting blown to smithereens by roadside bombs and/or suicide bombers."
You're right, it won't stop anything stationary like roadside IEDs or very hard to detect suicide bombers, but may be able to protect soldiers and ships from RPGs and rockets, like the ones fired at Navy ships in Jordan last week, I don't think firing a Phalanx in a crowded harbor whould be a good idea. If it's a moving car bomb it may be able to melt through the engine and/or detonate the explovsives.
The 30mm cannon on an A-10 is a little larger than a refrigerator and most combat jets carry ordinance in excess of 2000lbs, this will be no problem. For the stealth effect the F-22 has an internal ordinance bay, it should be easy enough to modify the bay to carry the laser. I wouldn't be surprised if it was designed to be carried by the F-22. I wonder what one of those will do to a T-72.
I'd like to see a similar system on a ground vehicle, something like the Avenger in C&C Generals. Put one in a convoy for defence against RPG rounds and mortars. Don't like the looks of that van speding towards your checkpoint? An easy way of taking shooting out the tires, should be able to adjust the power enough so it will melt the rubber but not burn human skin that much or if you think they want to detonate their van near you, increase the power and melt the engine block.
Yes, I've seen HD tv shows and DVDs on an HD tv, it was on a friend's cheap projection HD-ready tv which looked bad if viewed at the wrong angle and probably an equally cheap dvd player. The composite video, I'll use s-video again when I get a longer cable, connection is for tv-out-ing Mythbusters encoded for minimal file size, I don't think it's even broadcast in HD. The dvd player with year old Toshiba CRT, the best 27" I could find uses component, it looks very good. If HD is as good as you say, I'm guessing it's from personal use, I'll consider it when the prices drop and there are more HD channels available around here.
"but I still prefer a good book to staring at my retina-burning CRT monitor"
good point, they better have decent monitors, not the cheap Dell LCDs going at barely 60Hz and after a while the text looks like a big blur. I noticed this when my school got it's annual 1/3 replacement/upgrade from its Dell contract. The monitors went from a nice 17" flat CRT at 85Hz+ to cheap 17" LCD at 60Hz. The screens are clean so I knoe it's not dirt, it seems like it takes more effort to focus on the screen after an hour or two. Yes, that will also happen with a book, but usually because you're starting to get tired/bored after 5 or 6hrs and want to do something else.
I like books and I like electronics, I am reading Slashdot. I'm yet a find a reasonably priced display device as versitile as a book, try in a bus/train laying in bed or sitting back in a nice reclining chair and reading a few dozen pages of electronic text. A laptop needs too awkward a position to get that ideal angle and heats up sensitive areas after a little while. You could try moving the chair near a large monitor and increase the font or zoom in and use a wireless keyboard or mouse, that only works a home where you can freely move the furnature. A PDA works, but the screen size is too small, seeems like I'm scrooling down more than reading. A 10-12" tablet or laptop with rotating display seems like it would work, but they're 2-3k, a little on the expensive side for college students. An ebook reader has limited uses and are a few hundred for one with a decent display, if it can open anything other DRMed proprietary format it was decigned for. Let me know when the PADD gets invented, then I'll think about it.
The title's all wrong! All they did was turn one of their many libraries into 250 machine a computer lab and made 75 laptops available for borrowing.
"How many of these students will print out reams of paper that they would not have done if they had the book infront of them?"
From working in a college's computer labs I can say thit is very true, especially in the library lab. I've seen people walk out with boxes of paper because they had to read a 300pg book, only available electronically. As far as physical size, 300pgs in book form is smaller than 300pgs of laser printer paper.
Yes, I see some advantages of using electronic copies, nearly unlimited copies of a book.
Are they saying they now have an electronic copy of every book in the library? No, they just moved them, "This summer, 90,000 volumes were transferred to other collections in the campus's massive library system." They didn't get rid of the books, they just moved the library and used the building space for more/new computing facilities. I've never been to the University of Texas, but I heard it's big and they have the space to move entire libraries, and that's what they did.
"if your working television sits on top of your non-working television you might be a redneck" -Jeff Foxworthy
Now picture this: "if your working HD-DVD player sits on top of your other working, but less used, Blue-Ray DVD player which sits on top of your other working standard DVD player you might be a pissed off consumer."
Having too many formats is just going to result in unhappy consumers and I'm going to get calls from the people who know I make things work because they bought a HD-DVD player but a movie on a BlueRay disk and BestBuy won't take it back because it's opened and since it's a DVD it can only be exchanged to exactly the same thing, not a different disk format.
As an earlier post mentioned there are no movies that need more than 480. There are very few movies filmed with digital cameras and not many theaters with difital projectors, except Star Wars and maybe another one I don't know about. I'm very happy with my high quality CRT and standard dvd player with component video. The only upgrade I'm considering is a DivX capable dvd player or a 15' s-video cable so I can tv-out with something better than composite video. For some reason I don't think the everyday tv show is going to look that much better in HD-TV. I have no problems waiting until this great new format "war" is over or there are quad-format(HD-DVD +/-R, BlueRay +/-R) quad-layer hd-dvd recorders and enough movies that use the additional 200GB-190GB per disk. As for use as data disks, I'm going to go with the one that holds more. And hope that some how DRM gets killed off.
"before joining them at tables stacked with laptops and fetal pigs reeking of preservatives."
I hope they realize how much bacon they could gotten from those pigs had they been raised to maturity
I think the setup in my HS was nice, about two dozen computers in the library, a nice locked down wired network and another three to four dozen in the computer classroom. There were also 6 in the chemistry and physics labs used to enter the results of our experiments, check for errors and make sure we understood a concept, at least a little. For any type of classroom demonstration there was the blackboard and overhead projector, there's not much you can't do with an overhead projector and a few transparencys, they're just swapping that with powerpoint on a big monitor. There's no need to be wasting money giving every kid a laptop. There have been enough posts to prove that, the kids will just try to bypass any security and use it to play games and use IM instead of paying attention in class.
This isn't going to work because CONSUMERS HAVE RIGHTS! Yes, we do, we can make one(1) backup copy for archival use, for when that HD-DVD of "Cowboy Neil goes to Vegas" gets watched so many times it ends up with more scratches than a scratch-off lottery ticket, so there has to be a legal way for us to make that legal backup copy. And time shifting, we can record something off the radio or tv for our own personal use and viewing at a later time.
Is it just me or is this getting out of hand? Why not just make an HD cable subscription cheap enough for someone who can already afford a broadband connection. Since we know most Internet based "piracy" (ARRRRRG!) is done over broadband connections. If everyone is paying for it then there's no reason to "pirate" it. I just got a $20 tv card so do this the legal way, record the shows myself instead of downloading them the next day. DRMed monitors, what is this crap!? Unless Dell starts selling them cheaply someone is going to have a lot of very pissed off people to deal with. If they want to mess with software DRM, fine, but leave the hardware alone, what happens when this new "briliant" scheme fails miserably? A lot of people spent many thousands of dollars on new HD plasma tvs, what happens when they can't watch the HD-TV signal they're paying a few hundred a month for?
This is nothing more than someone's crusade to hold on to their monopoly on cable service and keep their price fixing legal and squeeze every last penny out of the paying customers who are trying to do everything the legal way.
The violence in society is not the result of violence in vidoe games, it is unfortunately the inspiration of violence in video games.
I see more violence and destruction on the evening news than in video games. I live just outside NYC, probably the same in&near every urban area. Everyday there's coverage about someone getting shot, stabbed, mugged, store or home robbed or burned, someone shooting a cop or getting shot while attacking the police, etc. In the 1920s in Chicago there were drive-bys with full automatic weapons. How about a GTA: Chicago 1920s, a historical fiction where you take orders the likes of Al Capone and other mob bosses. Or GTB(oat) where your a modern day pirate seizing ships in the seas off Southeast Asia.
The best way to have violence in video games and not attract attention is to not have it in (almost)real places in the current time period. Liberty City is NYC, Vice City is Miami and San Andreas is LA and they've all happened in the last 20yrs. There's nothing wrong with massacring thousands of Covenant Aliens, but don't shoot humans when playing a human character.
Kids doing bad things is nothing new. I knew people who shot at cars with BB guns and threw rocks and snowballs at buses many years before GTA existed. As far as I'm concerned, make ready the tin foil hat, all the hype about GTA being the direct cause of those violent actions was a publicity stunt part of someone's plan for a big class-action lawsuit against video games, then the politicians got involved and the media circus.//end tin foil hat
It probably started with a parent or random person in some small town in the middle of no where blaming a kid's "bad" behavior on a video game(GTA), lame excuse for 'kids will be kids' to a local reporter during a slow news week. Then the comment got picked by another station/paper and got put on the AP wire and the story got loose. And somewhere it was accepted as truth and became popular and used by kids trying to get off easy for something they did, having nothing to do with the game. This could be something for Mythbusters or Penn & Teller
I can remember sitting around playing Goldeneye on random weekend nights after a couple hours of playing football or whiffle ball in the middle of the street. I'm sure playing that FPS kept us off the streets and out of trouble at night.
"Why do you omit the third option, namely, getting your hands on a Mac?"
Now that Apple is moving to X86 it would be nice to see how it would work on the hardware I already have, getting a mac, new or used, isn't going to do that.
I'm going to call small town politc-ing and witch hunt on this one. According to the cutusabreak.org comments there were around 160 students caught doing something they should not have been doing. And none of them were seniors, no reason to keep them out of college, or the child of someone who worked for that school or the board of ed. or was part of a family that had any influence in their town. Looks like they're going after those who wouldn't have the money fight back. But it doesn't say what was done, simply logging in with the provided pword or changing software or even looking at porn. There's currently no way of knowing who did what, if those 13 did the worst or they were the lucky 13 not liked by the school administration. I'd like to see the signed agreements, the one the parents got and the parent approved version signed by the students, can't have minors entering into legally binding contracts without parental approval. I'm guessing if there was one it was as full of holes as a bad shrink/click-wrapped EULA. What happens next year if parents refuse to allow their kid to accept the school's iFelony machine? Will they scrap the program and sell the used ones for $49.99?
"You're assuming that people will pay for the OS, instead of pirating it."
Some of us will pay for an OS, if the price is right. I found Win2000 for $85 and would be willing to pay up to $100 for OS X for x86 if I knew it was going to work a customized machine and be able to install to partition, no way it's going to get a whole drive to itself. But it's not for sale, leaving anyone who wants to try it the options of not using it or pirating it, ARRRRG!
At least in NJ there's there are these legal phrases called "in plain sight" and "just cause" at least for police. If you get pulled over the officer cannot search your car without asking, you legally can and should say no (in most cases they have nothing on you and need to meet their monthly quota of tickets) or they must have a very good reason for a search which they must be able to prove in court. If they think they see part of a firearm sticking out from under the seat that's good enough. If you open the door or window and they smell pot that's also good enough.
The repair tech didn't meet either of those, with a computer, in plain sight would be the desktop wallpaper or any directories they need to access and it's set to thumbnail view, the guy kept his porn in winnt\system32 and the view was set to thumbnails and the pictures were clearly instantly visable. Anything other was an illegal search/snooping, could have been looking for stuff to pirate from a paying customer.
"everyone is making the assumption that it's child porn"
it is kiddy porn, it's in the "friend-of-the-court brief" pdf linked to in the article
"I'm wondering how the slashdot clime would change if it was the Lord of the Rings Trilogy the tech suspected of being illegal."
good point, replace JPEG of kiddy porn with MP3 or AVI/MPEG. In this case it's THAT the tech was going through the files, not WHAT was in the files. If the tech found music or movies, both could be illegal, but they could also be legal, MP3s could be CD rips for use with his MP3 player and DVD rips for taking on the road with his laptop, that's what I do. It seems the point here is child porn is universally illegal in the US by federal law(I think) while other file types can be legal or illegal to have, on a case by case basis. The technician is still wrong for going through "private files".
Yes, the contents of the files turned out to be illegal and the guy was legally wrong to have them. I think the question the EFF is after is "Why was the tech staff going through the customer's files if it was not on the work order?" For all I know they could have been looking for apps and media to copy for themselves, stealing, or files containing personal data, ID theft or credit card fraud or a calendar/schedule showing when no one whould be home so someone can stop by and clean out their house or they were looking for kiddy porn for themselves and copied it before calling the police. So we're left with guy having kiddy porn is wrong and tech staff browsing through the guys files are also wrong, through chance they found kiddy porn. As far as the issue with the police search, I've only had two criminal justice couses and watched a few eps of COPS and these things may varry between states. The police can accept tips from ordinary citizens, the inital picture shown to the officer by the repair techs would be fine, but the officer could not open additional files herself without a warrant. The first picture might be enough to obtain the warrant, depends on the judge signing the warrant. The EFF wants to make it illegal for repair techs to browse through users files without their permission or reason to work on the files, I see none for image files. And this will result in a guilty person going free because of an illegal and everything found is not usable in a court of law. Then there's that old legal quote that goes something like "better to let 100 guilty people walk than to punnish one innocent person" He walks so others may stay free.
Not specifically on this article, the ipod as a (bootable) external/removable drive from this one and the more recent postings of OS X being usable on X86 hardware. If I wasn't distracted by the 2nd showing of the Daily Show I may have remembered to mention that.
How about booting to OSX86 from a 4GB iPod mini as an external bootable drive? From the little I've had time to read on it, it appears to need an entire hard drive and the only usable spare drive I have is my 2gen 4GB mini, easily backed up and restored with itunes. I've can boot to DamnSmallLinux from an old spare 128mb usb drive, I'd think OSX needs a little more space, at least a gig or two, leaving my MiniPod as the only option. No, I'm not going to spend money on another drive just to try running it maybe a dozen times.
with ctrl+enter and shift+enter and ctrl+shift+enter used what's going to be the keyboard shortcut to add 'www.' and '.xxx' It maybe useful for some filtering, schools, florida libraries, parents of under 18 kids, but that's about it. Wow, a whole 6000 letters, were they all from members of the same religous parents group, like the one responsible for over 90% of the letters condeming the Janet Jackson breast at the Super Bowl? Last I heard the porn industry has a lot of money and infulence, where would the VCR and Internet be without the interest of the adult entertainment industry? Giving the industry its own upper level domain will be recognizing that it does exist and is more popular than those with their self proclaimed higher morals may want to accept. If they're going to try it, it had better be very well regulated, allow the owners of.com to keep the name part, until there's aconflict between.com and.net or some other one. Another domain is another chance for massive domain/type-o squatting and all the media attention. So what happens when all the "good" names are used, sex.xxx, porn.xxx, whitehouse.xxx maybe even slashdot.xxx featuring nek'd mother boards, or not? They're just going to go back to.com once all the popular names are taken, unless they want to have.x.xx and.xxx, who said the domain has to have three letters. It's either going to work or be a big mess.
Was the sale advertised as a "laptop sale" or an "Apple ibook sale"? I wonder how many people got home turned it on and saw a completely unfamiliar OS? $50 is still a good deal for even a 4yr old laptop if you need one that just turns on, has an Internet connection, browser, email, a word processor and maybe a few games. A few months ago I gave my mother my 5yr old gateway laptop and she's had no problems with it, but not before spending $65 on a few upgrades and repairs to make it little more usable. the required Star Wars ref- maybe they should have hired some Star Wars fans to teach a "waiting in line class" first.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a list! A list of 57 communists in the State Department. (or was it RIAA/MPAA?)
.torrent files. That would be like guilty through association. or something like that. Showing that a list created by people doing illegal things showed someone visited a website doesn't carry much weight with me. For all we know the operators of those sights could have made a list of every IP in California or Texas and turned that over.
err...I mean a list of seemingly random numbers grouped in four sets of one to three numbers separated by periods and I have no way of proving the authenticity and/or credibility of the list or tell you anything about it and only vaguely explain how it was made and I got it. But I will say that you're on it but I won't let you look at the list to verify that you're accually on the list.
Sure, that will work. Yes, I'm sure enough people who visited those sights did so for legally questionable reasons, but they may have had forums, like slashdot, but also having
oh look, apple's making more ipods, with larger capacities and maybe thinner nothing new to see here.
How long until all that flash memory makes its way into a part flash, part magnetic hdd. The kind that can have almost instant standby and resume. Will need to have at least 6-10gb of flash memory. It will be nice when we can finally buy a 10/500gb hdd
(10 flash, 500 magnetic)
good when there aren't that many.
TOS and TAS were liked after their time, then 10yrs after the series the movies started, one every 2-4yrs which wasn't uncommon in the 80s, but they weren't remakes and remakes havn't been doing very well. Then there were the new series, dofferent enough to not be considered remakes, bu there were 25 seasons in 18yrs with most overlapping, a little overkill.
Cut back on the number of movies and go back to when the acting was mostly good and the special effects, done with models, suplemented the plot and the acting. I've read rumors of an A-Team movie, Rambo 4 and Rocky 6, they should not be made, they were good, mostly, in thier time and should be left that way, possibly also true with Indiana Jones 4. Why not make a Caddyshack 3 with a CGI gopher?
"I'm sure that will help tremendously when it comes to protecting soldiers and civilians from getting blown to smithereens by roadside bombs and/or suicide bombers."
You're right, it won't stop anything stationary like roadside IEDs or very hard to detect suicide bombers, but may be able to protect soldiers and ships from RPGs and rockets, like the ones fired at Navy ships in Jordan last week, I don't think firing a Phalanx in a crowded harbor whould be a good idea. If it's a moving car bomb it may be able to melt through the engine and/or detonate the explovsives.
The 30mm cannon on an A-10 is a little larger than a refrigerator and most combat jets carry ordinance in excess of 2000lbs, this will be no problem. For the stealth effect the F-22 has an internal ordinance bay, it should be easy enough to modify the bay to carry the laser. I wouldn't be surprised if it was designed to be carried by the F-22. I wonder what one of those will do to a T-72.
I'd like to see a similar system on a ground vehicle, something like the Avenger in C&C Generals. Put one in a convoy for defence against RPG rounds and mortars. Don't like the looks of that van speding towards your checkpoint? An easy way of taking shooting out the tires, should be able to adjust the power enough so it will melt the rubber but not burn human skin that much or if you think they want to detonate their van near you, increase the power and melt the engine block.
Yes, I've seen HD tv shows and DVDs on an HD tv, it was on a friend's cheap projection HD-ready tv which looked bad if viewed at the wrong angle and probably an equally cheap dvd player. The composite video, I'll use s-video again when I get a longer cable, connection is for tv-out-ing Mythbusters encoded for minimal file size, I don't think it's even broadcast in HD. The dvd player with year old Toshiba CRT, the best 27" I could find uses component, it looks very good. If HD is as good as you say, I'm guessing it's from personal use, I'll consider it when the prices drop and there are more HD channels available around here.
"but I still prefer a good book to staring at my retina-burning CRT monitor"
good point, they better have decent monitors, not the cheap Dell LCDs going at barely 60Hz and after a while the text looks like a big blur.
I noticed this when my school got it's annual 1/3 replacement/upgrade from its Dell contract. The monitors went from a nice 17" flat CRT at 85Hz+ to cheap 17" LCD at 60Hz. The screens are clean so I knoe it's not dirt, it seems like it takes more effort to focus on the screen after an hour or two. Yes, that will also happen with a book, but usually because you're starting to get tired/bored after 5 or 6hrs and want to do something else.
I like books and I like electronics, I am reading Slashdot. I'm yet a find a reasonably priced display device as versitile as a book, try in a bus/train laying in bed or sitting back in a nice reclining chair and reading a few dozen pages of electronic text. A laptop needs too awkward a position to get that ideal angle and heats up sensitive areas after a little while. You could try moving the chair near a large monitor and increase the font or zoom in and use a wireless keyboard or mouse, that only works a home where you can freely move the furnature. A PDA works, but the screen size is too small, seeems like I'm scrooling down more than reading. A 10-12" tablet or laptop with rotating display seems like it would work, but they're 2-3k, a little on the expensive side for college students. An ebook reader has limited uses and are a few hundred for one with a decent display, if it can open anything other DRMed proprietary format it was decigned for. Let me know when the PADD gets invented, then I'll think about it.
The title's all wrong!
All they did was turn one of their many libraries into 250 machine a computer lab and made 75 laptops available for borrowing.
"How many of these students will print out reams of paper that they would not have done if they had the book infront of them?"
From working in a college's computer labs I can say thit is very true, especially in the library lab. I've seen people walk out with boxes of paper because they had to read a 300pg book, only available electronically. As far as physical size, 300pgs in book form is smaller than 300pgs of laser printer paper.
Yes, I see some advantages of using electronic copies, nearly unlimited copies of a book.
Are they saying they now have an electronic copy of every book in the library? No, they just moved them, "This summer, 90,000 volumes were transferred to other collections in the campus's massive library system." They didn't get rid of the books, they just moved the library and used the building space for more/new computing facilities. I've never been to the University of Texas, but I heard it's big and they have the space to move entire libraries, and that's what they did.
"if your working television sits on top of your non-working television you might be a redneck" -Jeff Foxworthy
Now picture this: "if your working HD-DVD player sits on top of your other working, but less used, Blue-Ray DVD player which sits on top of your other working standard DVD player you might be a pissed off consumer."
Having too many formats is just going to result in unhappy consumers and I'm going to get calls from the people who know I make things work because they bought a HD-DVD player but a movie on a BlueRay disk and BestBuy won't take it back because it's opened and since it's a DVD it can only be exchanged to exactly the same thing, not a different disk format.
As an earlier post mentioned there are no movies that need more than 480. There are very few movies filmed with digital cameras and not many theaters with difital projectors, except Star Wars and maybe another one I don't know about. I'm very happy with my high quality CRT and standard dvd player with component video. The only upgrade I'm considering is a DivX capable dvd player or a 15' s-video cable so I can tv-out with something better than composite video. For some reason I don't think the everyday tv show is going to look that much better in HD-TV. I have no problems waiting until this great new format "war" is over or there are quad-format(HD-DVD +/-R, BlueRay +/-R) quad-layer hd-dvd recorders and enough movies that use the additional 200GB-190GB per disk. As for use as data disks, I'm going to go with the one that holds more. And hope that some how DRM gets killed off.
"didnt the german kid/guy that spread some virus variant get hired by a net secuirty corp?"
don't know, but he created it to boost business at his parent's computer repair shop
"before joining them at tables stacked with laptops and fetal pigs reeking of preservatives."
I hope they realize how much bacon they could gotten from those pigs had they been raised to maturity
I think the setup in my HS was nice, about two dozen computers in the library, a nice locked down wired network and another three to four dozen in the computer classroom. There were also 6 in the chemistry and physics labs used to enter the results of our experiments, check for errors and make sure we understood a concept, at least a little. For any type of classroom demonstration there was the blackboard and overhead projector, there's not much you can't do with an overhead projector and a few transparencys, they're just swapping that with powerpoint on a big monitor.
There's no need to be wasting money giving every kid a laptop. There have been enough posts to prove that, the kids will just try to bypass any security and use it to play games and use IM instead of paying attention in class.
This isn't going to work because CONSUMERS HAVE RIGHTS! Yes, we do, we can make one(1) backup copy for archival use, for when that HD-DVD of "Cowboy Neil goes to Vegas" gets watched so many times it ends up with more scratches than a scratch-off lottery ticket, so there has to be a legal way for us to make that legal backup copy. And time shifting, we can record something off the radio or tv for our own personal use and viewing at a later time.
Is it just me or is this getting out of hand?
Why not just make an HD cable subscription cheap enough for someone who can already afford a broadband connection. Since we know most Internet based "piracy" (ARRRRRG!) is done over broadband connections. If everyone is paying for it then there's no reason to "pirate" it. I just got a $20 tv card so do this the legal way, record the shows myself instead of downloading them the next day. DRMed monitors, what is this crap!? Unless Dell starts selling them cheaply someone is going to have a lot of very pissed off people to deal with. If they want to mess with software DRM, fine, but leave the hardware alone, what happens when this new "briliant" scheme fails miserably? A lot of people spent many thousands of dollars on new HD plasma tvs, what happens when they can't watch the HD-TV signal they're paying a few hundred a month for?
This is nothing more than someone's crusade to hold on to their monopoly on cable service and keep their price fixing legal and squeeze every last penny out of the paying customers who are trying to do everything the legal way.
The violence in society is not the result of violence in vidoe games, it is unfortunately the inspiration of violence in video games.
I see more violence and destruction on the evening news than in video games. I live just outside NYC, probably the same in&near every urban area. Everyday there's coverage about someone getting shot, stabbed, mugged, store or home robbed or burned, someone shooting a cop or getting shot while attacking the police, etc. In the 1920s in Chicago there were drive-bys with full automatic weapons.
How about a GTA: Chicago 1920s, a historical fiction where you take orders the likes of Al Capone and other mob bosses. Or GTB(oat) where your a modern day pirate seizing ships in the seas off Southeast Asia.
The best way to have violence in video games and not attract attention is to not have it in (almost)real places in the current time period. Liberty City is NYC, Vice City is Miami and San Andreas is LA and they've all happened in the last 20yrs. There's nothing wrong with massacring thousands of Covenant Aliens, but don't shoot humans when playing a human character.
Kids doing bad things is nothing new. //end tin foil hat
I knew people who shot at cars with BB guns and threw rocks and snowballs at buses many years before GTA existed. As far as I'm concerned, make ready the tin foil hat, all the hype about GTA being the direct cause of those violent actions was a publicity stunt part of someone's plan for a big class-action lawsuit against video games, then the politicians got involved and the media circus.
It probably started with a parent or random person in some small town in the middle of no where blaming a kid's "bad" behavior on a video game(GTA), lame excuse for 'kids will be kids' to a local reporter during a slow news week. Then the comment got picked by another station/paper and got put on the AP wire and the story got loose. And somewhere it was accepted as truth and became popular and used by kids trying to get off easy for something they did, having nothing to do with the game. This could be something for Mythbusters or Penn & Teller
I can remember sitting around playing Goldeneye on random weekend nights after a couple hours of playing football or whiffle ball in the middle of the street. I'm sure playing that FPS kept us off the streets and out of trouble at night.
"Why do you omit the third option, namely, getting your hands on a Mac?"
Now that Apple is moving to X86 it would be nice to see how it would work on the hardware I already have, getting a mac, new or used, isn't going to do that.
I'm going to call small town politc-ing and witch hunt on this one. According to the cutusabreak.org comments there were around 160 students caught doing something they should not have been doing. And none of them were seniors, no reason to keep them out of college, or the child of someone who worked for that school or the board of ed. or was part of a family that had any influence in their town. Looks like they're going after those who wouldn't have the money fight back. But it doesn't say what was done, simply logging in with the provided pword or changing software or even looking at porn. There's currently no way of knowing who did what, if those 13 did the worst or they were the lucky 13 not liked by the school administration.
I'd like to see the signed agreements, the one the parents got and the parent approved version signed by the students, can't have minors entering into legally binding contracts without parental approval. I'm guessing if there was one it was as full of holes as a bad shrink/click-wrapped EULA.
What happens next year if parents refuse to allow their kid to accept the school's iFelony machine? Will they scrap the program and sell the used ones for $49.99?
"You're assuming that people will pay for the OS, instead of pirating it."
Some of us will pay for an OS, if the price is right. I found Win2000 for $85 and would be willing to pay up to $100 for OS X for x86 if I knew it was going to work a customized machine and be able to install to partition, no way it's going to get a whole drive to itself. But it's not for sale, leaving anyone who wants to try it the options of not using it or pirating it, ARRRRG!
At least in NJ there's there are these legal phrases called "in plain sight" and "just cause" at least for police. If you get pulled over the officer cannot search your car without asking, you legally can and should say no (in most cases they have nothing on you and need to meet their monthly quota of tickets) or they must have a very good reason for a search which they must be able to prove in court. If they think they see part of a firearm sticking out from under the seat that's good enough. If you open the door or window and they smell pot that's also good enough.
The repair tech didn't meet either of those, with a computer, in plain sight would be the desktop wallpaper or any directories they need to access and it's set to thumbnail view, the guy kept his porn in winnt\system32 and the view was set to thumbnails and the pictures were clearly instantly visable. Anything other was an illegal search/snooping, could have been looking for stuff to pirate from a paying customer.
"everyone is making the assumption that it's child porn"
it is kiddy porn, it's in the "friend-of-the-court brief" pdf linked to in the article
"I'm wondering how the slashdot clime would change if it was the Lord of the Rings Trilogy the tech suspected of being illegal."
good point, replace JPEG of kiddy porn with MP3 or AVI/MPEG. In this case it's THAT the tech was going through the files, not WHAT was in the files. If the tech found music or movies, both could be illegal, but they could also be legal, MP3s could be CD rips for use with his MP3 player and DVD rips for taking on the road with his laptop, that's what I do. It seems the point here is child porn is universally illegal in the US by federal law(I think) while other file types can be legal or illegal to have, on a case by case basis. The technician is still wrong for going through "private files".
Yes, the contents of the files turned out to be illegal and the guy was legally wrong to have them.
I think the question the EFF is after is "Why was the tech staff going through the customer's files if it was not on the work order?" For all I know they could have been looking for apps and media to copy for themselves, stealing, or files containing personal data, ID theft or credit card fraud or a calendar/schedule showing when no one whould be home so someone can stop by and clean out their house or they were looking for kiddy porn for themselves and copied it before calling the police. So we're left with guy having kiddy porn is wrong and tech staff browsing through the guys files are also wrong, through chance they found kiddy porn. As far as the issue with the police search, I've only had two criminal justice couses and watched a few eps of COPS and these things may varry between states. The police can accept tips from ordinary citizens, the inital picture shown to the officer by the repair techs would be fine, but the officer could not open additional files herself without a warrant. The first picture might be enough to obtain the warrant, depends on the judge signing the warrant. The EFF wants to make it illegal for repair techs to browse through users files without their permission or reason to work on the files, I see none for image files. And this will result in a guilty person going free because of an illegal and everything found is not usable in a court of law. Then there's that old legal quote that goes something like "better to let 100 guilty people walk than to punnish one innocent person" He walks so others may stay free.
Not specifically on this article, the ipod as a (bootable) external/removable drive from this one and the more recent postings of OS X being usable
on X86 hardware. If I wasn't distracted by the 2nd showing of the Daily Show I may have remembered to mention that.
How about booting to OSX86 from a 4GB iPod mini as an external bootable drive? From the little I've had time to read on it, it appears to need an entire hard drive and the only usable spare drive I have is my 2gen 4GB mini, easily backed up and restored with itunes. I've can boot to DamnSmallLinux from an old spare 128mb usb drive, I'd think OSX needs a little more space, at least a gig or two, leaving my MiniPod as the only option. No, I'm not going to spend money on another drive just to try running it maybe a dozen times.
with ctrl+enter and shift+enter and ctrl+shift+enter used what's going to be the keyboard shortcut to add 'www.' and '.xxx' .com to keep the name part, until there's aconflict between .com and .net or some other one. Another domain is another chance for massive domain/type-o squatting and all the media attention. So what happens when all the "good" names are used, sex.xxx, porn.xxx, whitehouse.xxx maybe even slashdot.xxx featuring nek'd mother boards, or not? They're just going to go back to .com once all the popular names are taken, unless they want to have .x .xx and .xxx, who said the domain has to have three letters.
It maybe useful for some filtering, schools, florida libraries, parents of under 18 kids, but that's about it. Wow, a whole 6000 letters, were they all from members of the same religous parents group, like the one responsible for over 90% of the letters condeming the Janet Jackson breast at the Super Bowl?
Last I heard the porn industry has a lot of money and infulence, where would the VCR and Internet be without the interest of the adult entertainment industry? Giving the industry its own upper level domain will be recognizing that it does exist and is more popular than those with their self proclaimed higher morals may want to accept.
If they're going to try it, it had better be very well regulated, allow the owners of
It's either going to work or be a big mess.
Was the sale advertised as a "laptop sale" or an "Apple ibook sale"? I wonder how many people got home turned it on and saw a completely unfamiliar OS? $50 is still a good deal for even a 4yr old laptop if you need one that just turns on, has an Internet connection, browser, email, a word processor and maybe a few games. A few months ago I gave my mother my 5yr old gateway laptop and she's had no problems with it, but not before spending $65 on a few upgrades and repairs to make it little more usable.
the required Star Wars ref- maybe they should have hired some Star Wars fans to teach a "waiting in line class" first.