No, there is no real difference, because Americans - well, at least lot of them - know how big is North Korean army that casualties will be too high at American side to take any war with NK
I hate to say this, but you're talking about the same country where a large percentage of young Americans can't even find New York on a map? (Source 11% couldn't even find the US on a map.) Maybe a good percentage of your older generations do, but I'm in my mid 30s and I doubt that more than half of the people I graduated with have any clue about North Korea's army or how hard it'd be to invade. So don't count on that to stop the government if it decides to invade, all the majority of people are going to think is "they have nukes, their leader's insane, we've got to stop them". I won't be surprised if we both invade and the draft is brought back in short order.
All hail World War III, it seems to be just around the corner anymore. If North Korea having nukes doesn't start it in Asia then Iraq collapsing into civil war and dragging in its neighboring countries will.
The same thing with wrongful termination. While empolyers have the right to not hire you, once you are hired theyre not allowed to fire you for things like the hobbies you keep in your spare time or your political affiliation.
Ahh, but if you live in an "at will" employment state they can. They'll be sure to terminate you for some imagined slight, or simply not give a reason, instead of the real reason to avoid those pesky laws, but at will employment allows them to fire you at any time for any/no reason. There have been many people who've lost their jobs in this manner when the real reason was health (should have been protected by the ADA), age (age discrimination), etc.
Corporations pretty much have an end-run around all the laws nowadays and employees have absolutely zero rights or protections.
As long as the money made from this is going to the goverment of Cameroon and not some registrar, why is this an issue? The.cm ccTLD belongs to Cameroon. Why can't they decide what they want to do with it?
Same reasons that Verisign's wildcard service was decried, among other things this will cause every name.cm to resolve so it's going to at least screw with some spam blocking methods. If other countries follow suit then it gets even messier.
You're right that it belongs to them but there is such a thing as playing nicely. Also it's a bit of a spammy trick, so it's already making me associate Cameroon with spammers and their ilk. Was that their intention? Will they be happy with that? If you lived in Cameroon would you like the fact that your government (since the government assigns who runs the ccTLD) is making your country look like that?
When I was in school (5 years ago), schools were trying to block well known proxies, but were unsuccessful at blocking those of us with 'home brewed' proxy servers. This wasn't really such a problem, because the policy was "get caught looking at sites x, y or z and you lose your computer privileges", why does this approach not work with advent myspace et al?
Because before the first month of school was over with nearly every student in the school would have lost computer privileges. Kids are so fucking desperate to access MySpace that they completely ignore all the rules and keep hunting for new and creative ways to do so. It's like a drug or something and they experience withdrawal if they can't access MySpace every other hour or so. (Really all your friends are in school too, has anything really happenned to any of them while you're all in school?)
Proxies aren't such a big deal anyway, I worry more about the possibility of a savvy user with a bootable USB flash drive and OpenVPN.
That's easier to defeat than proxies actually. Just lock down BIOS settings and password protect them from being changed. Proxies keep popping up all the time so they're harder to defeat.
and arn't these networks paid for by the tax payers anyway?:/
Ultimately they are at public school systems. Honestly though, do you want your tax dollars spent so kids can surf MySpace at school when they're supposed to be learning? The laws for E-Rate funding in the US require school systems to block inappropriate material to qualify for the funding. I don't find this unreasonable as the kids are there to learn, not play on MySpace. If they want their friends to know what they're going to do after school they can tell them during class breaks or at lunch.
No, I believe parents simply teach their kids about the dangers of going there, and before they're old enough to understand that, the parents simply don't allow them to go there.
That's all well and good but this article's talking about schools blocking MySpace, not parents. There are a lot of good reasons for schools to block schools, especially K-12 systems. One very large reason is allowing access to sites with inappropriate content (generally defined as non-educational but usually focuses on porn and sites that can be dangerous to kids -- like MySpace) can cause systems to lose their E-Rate funding. Most public school systems rely on E-Rate funding for their Internet access so if they don't block things like MySpace they may lose Internet access completely, a situation that'll be much more harmful to the kids than being banned from MySpace while at school.
The article of course talks about a community college blocking MySpace due to bandwidth concerns and that's a legitimate reason as well. The networks at colleges are there primarily to facilitate learning. You pay to go to school to learn, not so you can play on MySpace or other sites. I think the important point in this is that students abused their ability to access MySpace to the point that they started degrading the entire network campus-wide. The college blocked MySpace only after the students proved they couldn't control their usage of the site while on campus.
I certainly understand the frustration that one can feel when blocked from accessing sites from school/work/etc. but there are often very good reasons for those sites to be blocked. In this particular case the students upset about MySpace being blocked should direct their anger at themselves and their fellow students who abused the network. If they hadn't done that, they'd still be able to access MySpace on campus.
It's because you're condescending and because you can't fathom that some people don't have the time or the desire to learn to maintain their computers.
If people don't take the time to learn to maintain their car the engine will eventually lock up on them. I can't change my own oil (well I probably could if I felt like reading up on it, I don't want to though) but I know how often it's supposed to be changed and take my car to someone to have it changed for me at the appropriate times. I didn't have to take the time to learn how to change my oil to know that it must be changed regularly to maintain my car. People don't have to learn programming or deep systems administration skills to know when an E-mail sounds funny (phishing), when it's obviously not an up-and-up merchant offering (spam), or that some prince in Nigeria died and now someone wants to give you a big chunk of their money illegally (401 scams). These are things that should be common sense. I think that's more what the grandparent was after, people should have to learn some basic, common sense skills in school both to protect them and others from them online.
Besides, people don't want to pay to get their computers worked on. They'll wait till it's so hosed it's not repairable without a clean wipe then expect you to only charge them $20 to recover their data and reinstall their OS. People simply don't want to do the bare minimum maintenance to keep their PC running properly, yet they wouldn't think of skipping out on having their oil changed for a year.
And really, most of the phishing E-mails are pretty blatantly not real. I get them all the time for banks I've never even heard of. When I, on rare occasion, see one show up for my actual bank it's still obvious it's not from them. Spam's even worse, to evade spam filters the content barely resembles English any longer. Would you buy from a store that mispelled every one of their signs? I know I wouldn't, I'd figure something fishy was going on. Likewise if some guy comes up to me on the street and tells me my mortgage that I never applied for has been approved I sure as hell wouldn't give him my financial information, yet people do it every day online.
I don't think it's snobbish of me, or anyone else, to feel that people who fall for blatantly obvious fraud don't deserve any sympathy and should learn some common sense. I also don't think it's condescending to expect people to have some common sense with what they do online. Just because you're not on a street corner doesn't mean you can check all your common sense at the door, yet this is exactly what most people seem to do.
Re:And this is indeed a serious problem with EBay.
on
How to Win on Ebay: Snipe
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Wouldn't eBay's automatic bidding prevent that? If you were willing to bid $20 and it was currently at $10, th esniper needs to bid $21 to win, which is in theory more than you were willing to pay. Personally I'm suspicious of such tools, but the idea is in the event of a tie the earliest bidder wins, right?
As long as you bid your maximum amount whenever you bid then sniping isn't an issue. The thing is human nature is to not bid the max at first, but to just test the waters and bid the minimum or a bit over it. I think people are thinking they can always bid higher later. (I've seen people who know about sniping do this too, so it's human nature not just newbies to eBay.)
You are correct, in the event of a tie the earliest bid wins. Also the increments can get odd when eBay's automatic bidding decides things, so you can lose by a penny if the other person's max bid is even a penny more than yours. The set increments only matter when placing a bid, you have to bid at least one set increment higher than the current winning bid, but the final winning bid doesn't have to be by a set increment, just higher than any other bids.
Often it does, it depends on the other bidders and human nature.
The whole point of eBay's bidding system is that you supply your maximum bid, and they bid for you up to that amount. Thus, you spend less time spamming F5, and you get the best possible price (assuming your max is high enough). Sniping is best used for snatching rare items for which money is no object and using it on any old item is both a waste of time and possibly money.
Ahh, but the thing is human nature is to not bid your absolute maximum bid right away but to test the waters. Generally people who bid early bid only the minimum, or a small amount above the minimum even if they're willing to pay much more than that. Sniping just takes advantage of human nature to try and win the auction cheaper. Snipers generally do bid their absolutely maximum bid but do it at the last moment. The people who bidded earlier and didn't put in their max lose and are dissapointed, but it's their own fault that they lost. You can quite easily beat a sniper as long as you're willing to pay more than they are and you bid your maximum bid, no matter when you place it. That's the key, you have to bid your real maximum.
Incidentally sniping doesn't always result in low winning bids, especially not if multiple people snipe the same auction. The bid can jump up significantly in the last few seconds that way. So occasionally sniping benefits the seller as well.
The next problem is the price of a standalone version of Windows*. Something like 250. No wonder everyone's pirating that. Why is there such a huge cost difference between a standalone and an OEM version? Does MS conspire with computer manufacturers to make sure that building your own rig is too expensive?
Part of it is volume discounts. You or I are buying just one copy, Dell buys thousands of copies so it makes sense that they'd negotiate with Microsoft to get a lower price thanks to their volume. Granted there may be a bit more going on since MS has been accused of sneaky stuff in their OEM contracts in the past but even without that an OEM copy would cost less than retail just because of volume.
No, no, no... that doesn't mean the government needs to butt in. The government is already too big and powerful anyway. They legislate everything, even if they have no jurisdiction over it... The last thing we need is the courts getting involved in the contents of people's personal (and personally funded) computers.
OK, the grandparent was talking about suing them and you go off on a tangent about the size of government. They weren't suggesting legislation, they were suggesting that someone sue these companies to make them start behaving better. And why did he suggest that? Because frankly with many companies it's the only way to get them to listen or change things. Why shouldn't the courts be involved in "people's personal (and personally funded) computers"? If the software coming on those "personally funded" computers is making it damn near impossible for a normal user to remove it to put on whatever they prefer then people have every right to be mad and demand change. If the companies don't change then they have every right to sue. It's their computer after all, not McAfee's or Symantec's.
Honestly I suspect it will take losing a class-action lawsuit to get McAfee or Symantec to pay any attention and fix this problem. And it is a problem. Even if you have the knowledge to know about safe mode you shouldn't have to boot into safe mode to uninstall an anti-virus program. Most of the times I've had to boot a PC into safe mode it was to remove the remnants of a virus or some particular annoying spy/ad/malware. In my mind McAfee and Norton needing to be removed from safe mode puts them into that category, and I would hope that's not the category of software they want their products to be in.
To be fair I've not tried removing either product lately personally, I stopped using McAfee and Norton years ago. I discovered that the free alternatives worked better, scanned faster and used less system resources.
They tried that first, it was easily disabled by a simple javascript. Guess they figure this'll be harder to casually defeat.
It's already been defeated (even the latest version). Granted it's getting harder to do, but the odds are they'll never stop those who are absolutely determined not to pay for Windows. All they're doing now is making the security update process insanely annoying and confusing to their legit users.
I'm just waiting for the day they screw up and flag some very large company's corporate key as invalid. I'm sure the resulting outrage from that company having all their PCs claim they weren't running legitimate copies of Windows will do more to stop this nonsense than anything else will. And yes WGA effects the corporate versions too. MS decided that WGA would apply to everybody, probably because everyone figured out that getting a copy of XP Corporate allowed you to get around product activation.
What kind of fucked-up parent lets their 9 year old play XBox Live in the first place?
Let me change that just a bit, make that "play XBox Live unsupervised" and the answer is the same kind of parent who will buy their kid the latest Grand Theft Auto game even though it's rated Mature and the employee at the store points out them it's rated mature and explains what that means then let them play it unsupervised. Then they later discover what they'd already been told is true about the game and they raise hell about their kid being able to play it and blames the store, the game company, some vast conspiracy, aliens, etc. anyone but themselves.
And yes, I speak from experience, worked for a while at a Wal-mart between IT jobs back around the time GTA Vice City came out. Had plenty of parents that I explained to very politely what a Mature rating meant and what was in the game and had them shrug and say "Well he wants it" and them buy it anyway. The reason I modified that is because I ran into a few (very few sadly) parents who knew what the ratings meant and would take the time to read all the info on the game boxes, all the sub-warnings, etc. and decide whether or not they would buy the game. I saw one Dad look through 4 different games and tell his kid "you can't have this one or this one, but either of these will be fine, we'll play it together". Now if only more parents did that.
These regulations seem to have no benefit for the average consumer. The average consumer doesn't care if they use IE or FF, they just want to go online. Why should the average consumer should be burdened with doing this work themselves? Why is it a bad thing to have easily accessible programs installed by default?
You pretty much answer your own questions there. "The average consumer doesn't care if they user IE or FF, they just want to go online." Yeah that's true, so why does it have to be IE that's prebundled? If IE wasn't tied into the OS and OEMs could get Windows without IE as a portion of it and install Firefox to take IE's place the average consumer isn't going to care (they might not even notice.)
"Why should the average consumer should be burdened with doing this work themselves?" Who said they would be? This is about OEMs being able to bundle things other than IE or WMP that will be the default and/or only web browser or music player out of the box. Does the average consumer care if they have iTunes or WMP? Probably not but they won't have to do the work themselves, the OEMs would make sure there was a browser and media player on the PCs they sold.
Why is it a bad thing to have easily accessible programs installed by default? It's not but IE and WMP aren't exactly installed, they're entertwined and impossible to remove without a lot of work (and even then you'll likely break part of the OS).
To throw one of your own points back at you, why should consumers who want to use a more secure browser (anything besides IE basically) or a different media player have to be forced to have IE and WMP on their systems and do all the work to change the programs they use? These things work both ways you know.
In the same way that controls on pornography are constitutional. They're protected speech, but not as protected as most, so legislatures can make laws telling them where they can be, what they can do, who they can admit, etc. As long as there's money in it for someone, congress can have a ball.
You people really need to get over the "first amendment + internet = whatever we want" thing.
I don't have a problem with pornography being regulated, however this law, as it is currently written, isn't trying to regulate porn but any site that "has as its principal or primary business the making available of material that is harmful to minors". As many others have pointed out (and you obviously missed), what exactly does that mean? Porn? Sure, probably. What about sites about how to have safe sex? Hmm, getting a little murkier now, it'd probably fall into the description above. What about sites that talk about breast cancer and show pictures of breasts as part of the info provided? A lot of people would argue that that's harmful to minors, so into the.xxx domain it goes.
And then think about this. Frankly I find extremist religious views extremely harmful to minors (no matter what religion). I doubt I'm alone in that either, so would churchs that have extremist views of their religion have to get a.xxx domain to be online? Starting to see why this IS a free speech issue and not a "'first amendment + internet = whatever we want' thing."?
Even if the final law gets more clearly defined it'll be real fun trying to define what is and isn't porn. Sure most people will say "I know it when I see it", but any two people can easilly disagree on any given image. Porn falls under obscenity laws, which the courts have traditionally found to be defined by the local community, not nationally. The problem with trying to define it nationally is who's standards do you use? The Amish? The Mormons? Devil Worshipers? What about Muslims? (We do have them in the US too.) Do you feel comfortable with any of those groups defining what is and isn't obscene for your kids? I sure as hell don't, that's something I should decide.
How about this, some people need to get over this "having kids + evil exists in the world = the government must do my job as a parent" thing and start being parents. Now there's a novel concept, sure it's only worked for us since the dawn of mankind, but I'm sure we'll work the kinks out of it any day now.
When I hear complacent comments like this one it just makes me sad and it reminds me of a Matthew Good Band song called "advertising on police cars."
Which is yet another area that advertising has already invaded, here's an article from 2002 about a city in Florida starting to use police cars with ads on them.
Early ones didnt have protection so couldnt be cracked. Later ones have all relied on mod chips and the like to run.
It's not exactly cracked but there are non-modchip ways to get games to run on the PS2 at least. HDLoader was the first, although it itself wouldn't allow you to install a game to the hard drive from a non-original game disc. Freeware tools later came out so that you could hook the PS2 hard drive to your PC and inject an image that way and HDLoader would run it just fine as long as you got it on the drive (well with some exceptions, some games wouldn't work under it). Sony had them shut down pretty fast but there are similar programs still available like HDAdvance that do the same thing. It doesn't require any hardware modification whatsoever (and in fact will support hard drives other than the official Sony PS2 hard drive).
I think there might be some ways on the original Xbox to get around the access restrictions without hardware mods. IIRC there was a glitch in some game that allowed you to do this.
I agree however that no other optical-disc based console but the Dreamcast has been hacked to the point where you could just pop in a burned game and it boot and run without doing something beyond downloading an image and burning it. It's just that later consoles haven't required solely mod-chips to get illegal game copies to run on them in all cases.
Oh yeah, I think I saw an emulator for the Saturn once, but that's not quite the same thing as cracking the console/disc.:) I also don't think it worked very well.
How come your comments don't jive with the Register, an article in the Statesman called "The Making Of The Empire" that was published in 26 February 2001, and other sources that basically say they changed log files monitoring time on the system, were caught and that they were banned from the system? Then, weeks later, a deal was struck where they could get time in exchange for documenting bugs?
I cannot personally vouch for the veracity of Gates' early history provided at this site but it seems to show that the events El Reg mentions happenned but that the time between them was several years. Basically they got in trouble in prep school in 1968 and then did the digging through code around that time as well. They wrote Altair Basic in 1974, 6 years later. So while they might have kept the code and copied it, it's also possible they didn't. I have no idea which is true, but it sounds like The Register decided to sensationalize their version a bit.
Personally I can't stand Gates', but I try to be fair. Both seem to indicate that they used PDP-10 time at Harvard to simulate the Altair 8080 in order to make their Altair Basic but nothing says Harvard was upset about it. It probably wasn't terribly kosher to do so but they got away with it.
I dislike Microsoft and the things they (and Bill Gates) do as much as anyone but I have to be fair. The very next paragraph after what you quoted says this:
Bill Gates, Paul Allen and, two other hackers from Lakeside formed the Lakeside Programmers Group in late 1968. They were determined to find a way to apply their computer skills in the real world. The first opportunity to do this was a direct result of their mischievous activity with the school's computer time. The Computer Center Corporation's business was beginning to suffer due to the systems weak security and the frequency that it crashed. Impressed with Gates and the other Lakeside computer addicts' previous assaults on their computer, the Computer Center Corporation decided to hire the students to find bugs and expose weaknesses in the computer system. In return for the Lakeside Programming Group's help, the Computer Center Corporation would give them unlimited computer time [Wallace, 1992, p. 27]. The boys could not refuse. Gates is quoted as saying "It was when we got free time at C-cubed (Computer Center Corporation) that we really got into computers. I mean, then I became hardcore. It was day and night" [Wallace, 1992, p. 30]. Although the group was hired just to find bugs, they also read any computer related material that the day shift had left behind. The young hackers would even pick employees for new information. It was here that Gates and Allen really began to develop the talents that would lead to the formation of Microsoft seven years later.
So yes they ran through the school's yearly allotment of time on the PDP-10, they also caused quite a bit of problems but they ended up fixing those problems in exchange for unlimited time on C-Cubed's computer system. Hardly outright theft of computer time. More like normal hacker curiosity/exploration followed by reforming when caught.
I find it horribly ironic that Gates and Allen helped improve the security of C-Cubed's computer system seeing as their Windows products have done a lot to lower security in the years since though.;)
If the courts refuse to force Google to hand over this data it's going to look really bad for MSN/Yahoo/Etc. Probably nothing anyone can do to the legally since they were complying with a court order but it's the kind of thing that creates a stigma. Somehow I don't think that'll help MSN and Yahoo catch up to Google in the search wars. In fact even if the courts do uphold the subpoena Google still comes out looking better because they tried to fight it. Yes they aren't fighting it on privacy grounds but it won't matter for many people, the perception will still be there.
Obviously I'd have asked some one for more info as it sounds fishy, but the idea of colleges paying for your music through a fee you paid with your tuition isn't entirely left-field, just third base or so.
Not even that, as at least a few universities now have agreements with Napster/etc. to do just that. They pay them so much per student (out of the activities fees) and students can use those sites to get music from "free" without breaking any laws. Granted most of them have it setup so when you leave the school your entire music library expires but the idea isn't anywhere near left-field, not even third base, at least not anymore.
Granted the time frame when this was happening may have been before any universities did this so maybe it was a bit out there then.
Something similar happened to a friend of mine while we were in school. Someone stole a printout of his program from the printer, since the labs (all of them) shared a single printer it wasn't uncommon for people to accidentally walk off with your printouts so he didn't realize what had happened.
The TA noticed though, the cheater copied the program VERBATIM, including comments and structure. Fortunately when they confronted the cheater he broke down and confessed, otherwise they were going to give both of them a zero on the assignment, even though my friend was a straight A student who never broke any of the rules.
It's sad but cheaters don't always just hurt themselves, they sometimes go too far and hurt others.
Is it possible that most of that $88K went to legit computer purchases?
It's possible but not likely, the article notes this:
General Services maintains the Capitol Complex grounds and buildings, among other duties. Yet Schafer's memo shows that it purchased $51,000 worth of computers during the 2005 budget year alone, compared to the $45,726 worth bought by the state auditor's office.
Doesn't sound like they really need more computer equipment than the state auditor's office would given the department's duties. That alone makes it seem unlikely that all that was spent on legit purchases. The clincher though is this from the article:
Not all the purchased computers and gear can be located, Ferguson said.
If they'd been purchased legitimately they'd probably have found them by now, it sounds like this corruption probe has been going on for a while and even as badly disorganized as many government departments tend to be it wouldn't take more than a few weeks to find and inventory all the computer equipment still on site. The rest has gone home with people, and of that the legitimate stuff probably had paperwork filled out so they know where it is too.
You failed to mention the biggest side effect of all -- Companies will just move to another state with sane laws and companies that don't currently have operations in Tennessee will mark TN off their list when it comes to building new sites for manufacturing, etc.
Tennessee already has some of the highest sales tax rates in the country and all our food is taxed (even things like bread, flour, vegetables) unlike some more progressive states that tax non-essentials fairly high but leave unprepared food items untaxed so the poor don't get shafted as badly. Sure the tax is a tad lower on food (about 2 cents per dollar) but it's still horribly high. Where I live sales tax is 9.5%, it's just insane.
Tennessee's congress can't seem to get past their "Tax more" mentality to solving all our problems. The problem is that mentality is going to start causing more problems, like driving away business, that'll lead to the amount collected dropping even with new taxes. In fact I'm not so sure that they turning point hasn't been passed and we're about to entire a tax death spiral. *sigh*
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to say this, but you're talking about the same country where a large percentage of young Americans can't even find New York on a map? (Source 11% couldn't even find the US on a map.) Maybe a good percentage of your older generations do, but I'm in my mid 30s and I doubt that more than half of the people I graduated with have any clue about North Korea's army or how hard it'd be to invade. So don't count on that to stop the government if it decides to invade, all the majority of people are going to think is "they have nukes, their leader's insane, we've got to stop them". I won't be surprised if we both invade and the draft is brought back in short order.
All hail World War III, it seems to be just around the corner anymore. If North Korea having nukes doesn't start it in Asia then Iraq collapsing into civil war and dragging in its neighboring countries will.
Ahh, but if you live in an "at will" employment state they can. They'll be sure to terminate you for some imagined slight, or simply not give a reason, instead of the real reason to avoid those pesky laws, but at will employment allows them to fire you at any time for any/no reason. There have been many people who've lost their jobs in this manner when the real reason was health (should have been protected by the ADA), age (age discrimination), etc.
Corporations pretty much have an end-run around all the laws nowadays and employees have absolutely zero rights or protections.
Same reasons that Verisign's wildcard service was decried, among other things this will cause every name.cm to resolve so it's going to at least screw with some spam blocking methods. If other countries follow suit then it gets even messier.
You're right that it belongs to them but there is such a thing as playing nicely. Also it's a bit of a spammy trick, so it's already making me associate Cameroon with spammers and their ilk. Was that their intention? Will they be happy with that? If you lived in Cameroon would you like the fact that your government (since the government assigns who runs the ccTLD) is making your country look like that?
Because before the first month of school was over with nearly every student in the school would have lost computer privileges. Kids are so fucking desperate to access MySpace that they completely ignore all the rules and keep hunting for new and creative ways to do so. It's like a drug or something and they experience withdrawal if they can't access MySpace every other hour or so. (Really all your friends are in school too, has anything really happenned to any of them while you're all in school?)
That's easier to defeat than proxies actually. Just lock down BIOS settings and password protect them from being changed. Proxies keep popping up all the time so they're harder to defeat.
Ultimately they are at public school systems. Honestly though, do you want your tax dollars spent so kids can surf MySpace at school when they're supposed to be learning? The laws for E-Rate funding in the US require school systems to block inappropriate material to qualify for the funding. I don't find this unreasonable as the kids are there to learn, not play on MySpace. If they want their friends to know what they're going to do after school they can tell them during class breaks or at lunch.
That's all well and good but this article's talking about schools blocking MySpace, not parents. There are a lot of good reasons for schools to block schools, especially K-12 systems. One very large reason is allowing access to sites with inappropriate content (generally defined as non-educational but usually focuses on porn and sites that can be dangerous to kids -- like MySpace) can cause systems to lose their E-Rate funding. Most public school systems rely on E-Rate funding for their Internet access so if they don't block things like MySpace they may lose Internet access completely, a situation that'll be much more harmful to the kids than being banned from MySpace while at school.
The article of course talks about a community college blocking MySpace due to bandwidth concerns and that's a legitimate reason as well. The networks at colleges are there primarily to facilitate learning. You pay to go to school to learn, not so you can play on MySpace or other sites. I think the important point in this is that students abused their ability to access MySpace to the point that they started degrading the entire network campus-wide. The college blocked MySpace only after the students proved they couldn't control their usage of the site while on campus.
I certainly understand the frustration that one can feel when blocked from accessing sites from school/work/etc. but there are often very good reasons for those sites to be blocked. In this particular case the students upset about MySpace being blocked should direct their anger at themselves and their fellow students who abused the network. If they hadn't done that, they'd still be able to access MySpace on campus.
If people don't take the time to learn to maintain their car the engine will eventually lock up on them. I can't change my own oil (well I probably could if I felt like reading up on it, I don't want to though) but I know how often it's supposed to be changed and take my car to someone to have it changed for me at the appropriate times. I didn't have to take the time to learn how to change my oil to know that it must be changed regularly to maintain my car. People don't have to learn programming or deep systems administration skills to know when an E-mail sounds funny (phishing), when it's obviously not an up-and-up merchant offering (spam), or that some prince in Nigeria died and now someone wants to give you a big chunk of their money illegally (401 scams). These are things that should be common sense. I think that's more what the grandparent was after, people should have to learn some basic, common sense skills in school both to protect them and others from them online.
Besides, people don't want to pay to get their computers worked on. They'll wait till it's so hosed it's not repairable without a clean wipe then expect you to only charge them $20 to recover their data and reinstall their OS. People simply don't want to do the bare minimum maintenance to keep their PC running properly, yet they wouldn't think of skipping out on having their oil changed for a year.
And really, most of the phishing E-mails are pretty blatantly not real. I get them all the time for banks I've never even heard of. When I, on rare occasion, see one show up for my actual bank it's still obvious it's not from them. Spam's even worse, to evade spam filters the content barely resembles English any longer. Would you buy from a store that mispelled every one of their signs? I know I wouldn't, I'd figure something fishy was going on. Likewise if some guy comes up to me on the street and tells me my mortgage that I never applied for has been approved I sure as hell wouldn't give him my financial information, yet people do it every day online.
I don't think it's snobbish of me, or anyone else, to feel that people who fall for blatantly obvious fraud don't deserve any sympathy and should learn some common sense. I also don't think it's condescending to expect people to have some common sense with what they do online. Just because you're not on a street corner doesn't mean you can check all your common sense at the door, yet this is exactly what most people seem to do.
As long as you bid your maximum amount whenever you bid then sniping isn't an issue. The thing is human nature is to not bid the max at first, but to just test the waters and bid the minimum or a bit over it. I think people are thinking they can always bid higher later. (I've seen people who know about sniping do this too, so it's human nature not just newbies to eBay.)
You are correct, in the event of a tie the earliest bid wins. Also the increments can get odd when eBay's automatic bidding decides things, so you can lose by a penny if the other person's max bid is even a penny more than yours. The set increments only matter when placing a bid, you have to bid at least one set increment higher than the current winning bid, but the final winning bid doesn't have to be by a set increment, just higher than any other bids.
More accurately you can get sniped but unless they're willing to pay more than you are you'll still win.
Often it does, it depends on the other bidders and human nature.
Ahh, but the thing is human nature is to not bid your absolute maximum bid right away but to test the waters. Generally people who bid early bid only the minimum, or a small amount above the minimum even if they're willing to pay much more than that. Sniping just takes advantage of human nature to try and win the auction cheaper. Snipers generally do bid their absolutely maximum bid but do it at the last moment. The people who bidded earlier and didn't put in their max lose and are dissapointed, but it's their own fault that they lost. You can quite easily beat a sniper as long as you're willing to pay more than they are and you bid your maximum bid, no matter when you place it. That's the key, you have to bid your real maximum.
Incidentally sniping doesn't always result in low winning bids, especially not if multiple people snipe the same auction. The bid can jump up significantly in the last few seconds that way. So occasionally sniping benefits the seller as well.
Part of it is volume discounts. You or I are buying just one copy, Dell buys thousands of copies so it makes sense that they'd negotiate with Microsoft to get a lower price thanks to their volume. Granted there may be a bit more going on since MS has been accused of sneaky stuff in their OEM contracts in the past but even without that an OEM copy would cost less than retail just because of volume.
OK, the grandparent was talking about suing them and you go off on a tangent about the size of government. They weren't suggesting legislation, they were suggesting that someone sue these companies to make them start behaving better. And why did he suggest that? Because frankly with many companies it's the only way to get them to listen or change things. Why shouldn't the courts be involved in "people's personal (and personally funded) computers"? If the software coming on those "personally funded" computers is making it damn near impossible for a normal user to remove it to put on whatever they prefer then people have every right to be mad and demand change. If the companies don't change then they have every right to sue. It's their computer after all, not McAfee's or Symantec's.
Honestly I suspect it will take losing a class-action lawsuit to get McAfee or Symantec to pay any attention and fix this problem. And it is a problem. Even if you have the knowledge to know about safe mode you shouldn't have to boot into safe mode to uninstall an anti-virus program. Most of the times I've had to boot a PC into safe mode it was to remove the remnants of a virus or some particular annoying spy/ad/malware. In my mind McAfee and Norton needing to be removed from safe mode puts them into that category, and I would hope that's not the category of software they want their products to be in.
To be fair I've not tried removing either product lately personally, I stopped using McAfee and Norton years ago. I discovered that the free alternatives worked better, scanned faster and used less system resources.
It's already been defeated (even the latest version). Granted it's getting harder to do, but the odds are they'll never stop those who are absolutely determined not to pay for Windows. All they're doing now is making the security update process insanely annoying and confusing to their legit users.
I'm just waiting for the day they screw up and flag some very large company's corporate key as invalid. I'm sure the resulting outrage from that company having all their PCs claim they weren't running legitimate copies of Windows will do more to stop this nonsense than anything else will. And yes WGA effects the corporate versions too. MS decided that WGA would apply to everybody, probably because everyone figured out that getting a copy of XP Corporate allowed you to get around product activation.
Let me change that just a bit, make that "play XBox Live unsupervised" and the answer is the same kind of parent who will buy their kid the latest Grand Theft Auto game even though it's rated Mature and the employee at the store points out them it's rated mature and explains what that means then let them play it unsupervised. Then they later discover what they'd already been told is true about the game and they raise hell about their kid being able to play it and blames the store, the game company, some vast conspiracy, aliens, etc. anyone but themselves.
And yes, I speak from experience, worked for a while at a Wal-mart between IT jobs back around the time GTA Vice City came out. Had plenty of parents that I explained to very politely what a Mature rating meant and what was in the game and had them shrug and say "Well he wants it" and them buy it anyway. The reason I modified that is because I ran into a few (very few sadly) parents who knew what the ratings meant and would take the time to read all the info on the game boxes, all the sub-warnings, etc. and decide whether or not they would buy the game. I saw one Dad look through 4 different games and tell his kid "you can't have this one or this one, but either of these will be fine, we'll play it together". Now if only more parents did that.
"Why should the average consumer should be burdened with doing this work themselves?" Who said they would be? This is about OEMs being able to bundle things other than IE or WMP that will be the default and/or only web browser or music player out of the box. Does the average consumer care if they have iTunes or WMP? Probably not but they won't have to do the work themselves, the OEMs would make sure there was a browser and media player on the PCs they sold.
Why is it a bad thing to have easily accessible programs installed by default? It's not but IE and WMP aren't exactly installed, they're entertwined and impossible to remove without a lot of work (and even then you'll likely break part of the OS).
To throw one of your own points back at you, why should consumers who want to use a more secure browser (anything besides IE basically) or a different media player have to be forced to have IE and WMP on their systems and do all the work to change the programs they use? These things work both ways you know.
You people really need to get over the "first amendment + internet = whatever we want" thing.
I don't have a problem with pornography being regulated, however this law, as it is currently written, isn't trying to regulate porn but any site that "has as its principal or primary business the making available of material that is harmful to minors". As many others have pointed out (and you obviously missed), what exactly does that mean? Porn? Sure, probably. What about sites about how to have safe sex? Hmm, getting a little murkier now, it'd probably fall into the description above. What about sites that talk about breast cancer and show pictures of breasts as part of the info provided? A lot of people would argue that that's harmful to minors, so into theAnd then think about this. Frankly I find extremist religious views extremely harmful to minors (no matter what religion). I doubt I'm alone in that either, so would churchs that have extremist views of their religion have to get a .xxx domain to be online? Starting to see why this IS a free speech issue and not a "'first amendment + internet = whatever we want' thing."?
Even if the final law gets more clearly defined it'll be real fun trying to define what is and isn't porn. Sure most people will say "I know it when I see it", but any two people can easilly disagree on any given image. Porn falls under obscenity laws, which the courts have traditionally found to be defined by the local community, not nationally. The problem with trying to define it nationally is who's standards do you use? The Amish? The Mormons? Devil Worshipers? What about Muslims? (We do have them in the US too.) Do you feel comfortable with any of those groups defining what is and isn't obscene for your kids? I sure as hell don't, that's something I should decide.
How about this, some people need to get over this "having kids + evil exists in the world = the government must do my job as a parent" thing and start being parents. Now there's a novel concept, sure it's only worked for us since the dawn of mankind, but I'm sure we'll work the kinks out of it any day now.
When I hear complacent comments like this one it just makes me sad and it reminds me of a Matthew Good Band song called "advertising on police cars." Which is yet another area that advertising has already invaded, here's an article from 2002 about a city in Florida starting to use police cars with ads on them.
I think there might be some ways on the original Xbox to get around the access restrictions without hardware mods. IIRC there was a glitch in some game that allowed you to do this.
I agree however that no other optical-disc based console but the Dreamcast has been hacked to the point where you could just pop in a burned game and it boot and run without doing something beyond downloading an image and burning it. It's just that later consoles haven't required solely mod-chips to get illegal game copies to run on them in all cases.
Oh yeah, I think I saw an emulator for the Saturn once, but that's not quite the same thing as cracking the console/disc. :) I also don't think it worked very well.
I cannot personally vouch for the veracity of Gates' early history provided at this site but it seems to show that the events El Reg mentions happenned but that the time between them was several years. Basically they got in trouble in prep school in 1968 and then did the digging through code around that time as well. They wrote Altair Basic in 1974, 6 years later. So while they might have kept the code and copied it, it's also possible they didn't. I have no idea which is true, but it sounds like The Register decided to sensationalize their version a bit.
Personally I can't stand Gates', but I try to be fair. Both seem to indicate that they used PDP-10 time at Harvard to simulate the Altair 8080 in order to make their Altair Basic but nothing says Harvard was upset about it. It probably wasn't terribly kosher to do so but they got away with it.
Bill Gates, Paul Allen and, two other hackers from Lakeside formed the Lakeside Programmers Group in late 1968. They were determined to find a way to apply their computer skills in the real world. The first opportunity to do this was a direct result of their mischievous activity with the school's computer time. The Computer Center Corporation's business was beginning to suffer due to the systems weak security and the frequency that it crashed. Impressed with Gates and the other Lakeside computer addicts' previous assaults on their computer, the Computer Center Corporation decided to hire the students to find bugs and expose weaknesses in the computer system. In return for the Lakeside Programming Group's help, the Computer Center Corporation would give them unlimited computer time [Wallace, 1992, p. 27]. The boys could not refuse. Gates is quoted as saying "It was when we got free time at C-cubed (Computer Center Corporation) that we really got into computers. I mean, then I became hardcore. It was day and night" [Wallace, 1992, p. 30]. Although the group was hired just to find bugs, they also read any computer related material that the day shift had left behind. The young hackers would even pick employees for new information. It was here that Gates and Allen really began to develop the talents that would lead to the formation of Microsoft seven years later.
So yes they ran through the school's yearly allotment of time on the PDP-10, they also caused quite a bit of problems but they ended up fixing those problems in exchange for unlimited time on C-Cubed's computer system. Hardly outright theft of computer time. More like normal hacker curiosity/exploration followed by reforming when caught.I find it horribly ironic that Gates and Allen helped improve the security of C-Cubed's computer system seeing as their Windows products have done a lot to lower security in the years since though. ;)
If the courts refuse to force Google to hand over this data it's going to look really bad for MSN/Yahoo/Etc. Probably nothing anyone can do to the legally since they were complying with a court order but it's the kind of thing that creates a stigma. Somehow I don't think that'll help MSN and Yahoo catch up to Google in the search wars. In fact even if the courts do uphold the subpoena Google still comes out looking better because they tried to fight it. Yes they aren't fighting it on privacy grounds but it won't matter for many people, the perception will still be there.
Granted the time frame when this was happening may have been before any universities did this so maybe it was a bit out there then.
The TA noticed though, the cheater copied the program VERBATIM, including comments and structure. Fortunately when they confronted the cheater he broke down and confessed, otherwise they were going to give both of them a zero on the assignment, even though my friend was a straight A student who never broke any of the rules.
It's sad but cheaters don't always just hurt themselves, they sometimes go too far and hurt others.
Doesn't sound like they really need more computer equipment than the state auditor's office would given the department's duties. That alone makes it seem unlikely that all that was spent on legit purchases. The clincher though is this from the article:
Not all the purchased computers and gear can be located, Ferguson said.If they'd been purchased legitimately they'd probably have found them by now, it sounds like this corruption probe has been going on for a while and even as badly disorganized as many government departments tend to be it wouldn't take more than a few weeks to find and inventory all the computer equipment still on site. The rest has gone home with people, and of that the legitimate stuff probably had paperwork filled out so they know where it is too.
Tennessee already has some of the highest sales tax rates in the country and all our food is taxed (even things like bread, flour, vegetables) unlike some more progressive states that tax non-essentials fairly high but leave unprepared food items untaxed so the poor don't get shafted as badly. Sure the tax is a tad lower on food (about 2 cents per dollar) but it's still horribly high. Where I live sales tax is 9.5%, it's just insane.
Tennessee's congress can't seem to get past their "Tax more" mentality to solving all our problems. The problem is that mentality is going to start causing more problems, like driving away business, that'll lead to the amount collected dropping even with new taxes. In fact I'm not so sure that they turning point hasn't been passed and we're about to entire a tax death spiral. *sigh*