The shuttle is big. I don't know if there are any rooms/buildings big enough that could hold it (and it could be gotten into them) and could be de-pressurized to anything anywhere close to a vacuum.
Pressurizing the shuttle itself seems a lot simpler...
It's not a popular answer lately -- it's ALWAYS been a popular answer.
Getting legal advice on/. has always been a bad plan. Technical advice, sometimes it's good, but for the most part the `Ask Slashdot' section is full of stuff that you really shouldn't be relying on what Slashdot tells you.
That only works if you have a trademark to be infringed upon. The asker clearly states that he does not.
Really, he should consult a trademark lawyer rather than asking/.. The/. question about `should he deal with domain squatters' has a simple answer -- NO. End of story. Do not deal with domain squatters.
But from a business standpoint, it might make sense to do so, even if the/. community largely sees it as morally wrong. And as for how to handle it, that's for the lawyer to work out -- not/..
I'm not speaking from experience. More speaking from sarcasm, actually.
And really, if your anonymity system *does* pass that secret service muster and you aren't visited by the men in black and blue -- that means you can't use it again. Because if you do, and you make a mistake and they track it back to you, they'll also look at other cases where the system system was used, and so they'll be asking you about why you threatened the president...
If you ever need to test just how anonymous a system is, just use it to send a death threat against the president. Be specific and credible.
They will go to great pains to track you down -- they may not pull out *all* the stops, but they'll come close. So if the police come and ask you questions, you'll know it wasn't good enough, and you'll probably have at least a few years in a federal `pound me in the ass prison' to work out what went wrong...
Well, you could also cut out letters out of newspapers and magazines and reconstruct the document that way.
I know it's popular in the movies, but it sounds even more traceable.
Fingerprints in the glue, they may be able to figure out which magazines were used, cut up magazines in your trash to help prove who it was if they do track you down...
Know of anybody who's ever really worked out how anonymous these sorts of things are?
I've got a Sparcstation 20 with two cpus that can be yours for the low low price of $4000 -- that $4000 spent will get you a discount of $16000 off the price of IBM software and services!
If you need more, I can also provide several Sparcstation IPXs and LXs for $2000 each, which will provide a discount of $8000 each.
A 13 watt light uses (averages) 13 watts, whatever the power factor.
If the power factor if 0.5, then the resistive losses in the lines (and the generator itself, for that matter) is going to be higher than it would be if it was 1.0, but that's the extent of it.
So, if the power plant needed to generate 14 watts -- 13 watts for the light, 1 watt for resistive losses for to get that power there, and the power factor was 1.0, then if you had a power factor of 0.5 instead, the power plant would have to generate 15 watts instead, not 26 or 28.
The only time that a power factor of 0.5 would double the amount of actual power needed vs a power factor of 1.0 would be if the resistive losses (at power factor=1.0) were similar to the losses in the device itself (I haven't done the exact algebra to figure it out) -- which would be incredibly inefficient. The power grid is much better than that.
That's funny, I'd love to see where that's defined in LAW. Link please.
I think I've figured out your problem, at least in regard to this issue. You haven't realized that `what is acceptable' and `what is legal' are two very different things. Acceptable varies from person to person. Legal (which could be seen as `things not deemed so unacceptable as to be prohibited by law') may vary from place to place to some degree, but it generally not up to individuals (except for judges who make rulings based on the law, of course.)
My statement was not about law, it was more about what `plainly visible' meant.
In any event, the law with regards to photography has been pretty well worked out in the actual laws and in the court rulings that followed. Read up on it (at least that's accurate for the US, anyways, I'm not talking about other countries, and yes I realized the incident mentioned in/. was in the UK.) You are certainly welcome to believe that the law hasn't caught up to technology, and there's truth to that, but either way, if it's not illegal, it's not illegal -- no matter what *you* think.
Now, you may be right that if the police want to charge you, they'll find *something*, but that still doesn't make something that's not illegal illegal.
Somehow you think there's a major difference between driving slowly with a with a bunch of high-resolution digital cameras and staying still with one. I'd love to see the court ruling that said this.
You figured that all out about me based simply on the idea that if you need a telescope to see it it's not plainly visible? Impressive. In any event, what is legal has generally been worked out by the law and court cases is this --
From Wikipedia: Filming of private property from within the public domain is is legal, with the exception of an area that is generally regarded as private, such as a bedroom, bathroom, or hotel room. In some states, there is no definition of "private," in which case there is a general expectation of privacy. Should the individual not attempt to conceal their private affairs, their actions immediately become public if using an average lens or video camera. Although this may make the action legal, it does not make the action moral in which case it is left to the photographer to utilize moral senses.
If you want to find the law/court cases that led up to this, fee free -- I don't feel the need.
The argument being made here is like making the argument that just beacuse taking one "free" newspaper is legal, driving around and taking ALL the free newpapers in the city is legal.
Bad analogy, for several reasons. One, you've described something that's probably legal (certainly, it would be difficult to charge somebody with theft of something that was given away, though it's possible that there are specific laws in certain areas that cover this very scenario, perhaps dealing more with denying the use of the paper to others rather than theft?) Two, you're not taking anything but pictures. A better analogy would be to go around taking pictures of all the free newspaper kiosks.
Just because it's considered generally acceptable to take one picture from a car for your own use, does not make it acceptable to take as many pictures as you want of a specific target for commerical use.
Again, the law regarding photography is well worked out. You may not think something is *acceptable*, but for now, what google is doing is *legal*, and it's not just because google is a big company.
Its pretty sad that 'acceptable behaviour' is defined by 'is it legal?'.
But it's not. Many legal things are considered unacceptable. And some acceptable things are illegal.
Also consider that `legal' and `illegal' generally don't very from person to person, but `unacceptable' and `acceptable' most certainly do.
You can think of the laws as the lowest common denominator of what society as a whole considers unacceptable enough to actually assign a punishment to doing. Not everybody agrees, but enough do that it's been made against the law.
In any event, read up on the law (at least in the US.) Google can't really publish pictures of you nude in your bedroom touching your special place any more than anybody else.
We have already reached the understanding that it's acceptable to systematically photograph everyone/everthing and upload it into a for profit geo-tagged database, at least in the US. (No idea about the UK.)
Granted, this understanding was reached before it was really feasable to do this, but the understanding is there. It's called the law, and it doesn't prohibit this. And if it's not illegal, it's legal. Moral, fair, etc. -- that's another matter entirely.
Google is being nice and letting people `opt out', but legally it's not obligated to do so (again, in the US) in the vast majority of cases.
Want to change it? Change the law.
Still, these people just told the world `Hey! Come rob us! We must have nice stuff!'
1TB of Linux ISOs? Assuming full DVDs, that's about 200 DVDs, or over six per day. TYou know, you can install the same DVD (or image) on *multiple* computers, right?:)
Are you saying you do this on a regular basis, or that you *could* do it?
The probability of a cosmic ray at precisely the right angle and speed to cause a single bit error and cause an app to crash is somewhere on the same order as your chances of getting hit by a car, getting struck by lightning, getting torn apart by rabid wolves, and having sex in the back of a red 1948 Buick convertible at a drive-in movie theater on Tuesday night, Feb. 29th under a blue moon... all at the same time....
Nice analogies, but there are never any blue moons in February, as the lunar month is 29.53 days and the longest February is only 29 days...
(For somebody who doesn't know, a blue moon is when you get two full moons in one month.)
If you have to go to the other building anyways, it's not so much work.
Offsite backups are needed in case your building burns down. (A nuke would take out your other building too, but at that point you may not care.)
The problem with a cronjob (only) backup system is that it needs online storage (doesn't matter if it's tape or disk), and if the backup system can alter the backup, then so can a bad guy who gets in (and certain failure types could too, depending on the specifics.) Sure, there's some ways you can obfuscate and harden this, but the only backup that's truly safe from a determined bad guy is locked in a safe, in another building, not online in any way, and was made before he got access to your system. (And yes, I realize that that last thing especially is difficult to guarantee.) And of course, even that's not *truly* safe -- for more safety, you have multiple backups in multiple secure locations, all protected by men with guns...
Also, one set of backups isn't enough. What if things broke before the last backup, and you need to go back further?
Ultimately, depending on how important the data is, backups can be easy, or they can be hard. Copying your work to a flash drive once in a while might be sufficient for some, where a company might spend millions of dollars on a backup system that keeps multiple revisions of stuff in multiple locations across the country.
Seems to me that it would work just the same as a tape.
Yes, it would. I think the guy you're responding to is referring only to drives left accessible (especially mounted) in a computer 24x7.
Of course, a tape drive has the same problem -- if a bad guy gets into your backup server, he can erase any tape in the drive, and if there's an automatic robot, he can tell the system to erase every tape it has access to. (Might take a while, however.)
So, take his rant and replace `HDs are NOT backup media' with `Backups need to be kept offline when not in use for maximum security' and it becomes more accurate. Of course, that totally changes his rant, so maybe it can't be saved...
For every car replaced or added, that must be a new car sale.
... or a car repaired and put back into service.
That car that's been rusting in the back of your property for ten years? You might fix that up rather than buying a new car if money is tight. Or you just had an accident, doing $1500 worth of damage to your $2000 car? You might scrap it and buy a new one if money was better, but it's not, so you suck it up and fix it. Sure, you'd rather have a new car, but what if you lose your job tomorrow? (And if you did buy a new car, you'd sell your old one -- but it's unlikely anybody would spend $300 for it to then drop $1500 in it to maybe sell it for $2000. They'd salvage it for parts instead.)
Ultimately, every car on the road or in the junk yard was once new. But that doesn't mean that a bad economy can't make cars that would have been scrapped get fixed instead, and that effectively `creates' usable cars, reducing the demand for new cars. It can't continue forever, but it can happen for years. Deny it all you want, but I don't think that'll stop people from actually doing it, and I don't think your denial will make GM hurt any less.
And yet, while new car sales are down, used car sales are up. Deny that too, but the facts are there. Granted, people are driving somewhat less (gas sales tell us that) but that's not enough to account for the change in new car sales, not by itself.
Well, as I already pointed out,
many seem to disagree with you.
You're right, to a degree -- eventually all the used cars will wear out, and people will have to buy new ones. But when the economy is bad, people look to used cars more than they used to, at the detriment of new car sales. They also fix up what they have rather than selling it.
This does drive up used car prices, supply and demand, and some cars that were destined for the junk yard get fixed and sold instead.
XXX is not a fixed figure. Cars don't wear out all at once. This breaks, that breaks, and in general the cost of maintaining the car goes up each year. At some point, it's more cost effective to replace the car than to keep fixing it.
However, most people replace the cars long before that point. They want a new car that's more reliable, don't want to put $2k into a car that's worth only $1500 (a sound economic decision, but it's still cheaper to buy another $1500 car that doesn't need $2k in repairs than a new $25k car.)
But if money becomes tight, there is a lot of room to put off buying a new car for several more years. $2000 now is a lot for car repairs, but it's less than that new car which will cost you $400/month.)
When the economy is down, people put off buying new cars. They make do with what they've got instead. When it's not cost effective to fix their car, they scrap it (or sell it to somebody who thinks they can fix it cheaper) and buy another used car. That's happening now.
People might be driving slightly less now, but new car sales are down a lot more than that.
Well, perhaps you should -- PC games are bought and sold there all the time.
An in general, CL and Ebay prices are significantly higher than what Gamestop pays for used games, and significantly lower than what they charge for used games. Cut out the middle man and you get more money for your games and get new ones for less.
Slashdot Mirror
The shuttle is big. I don't know if there are any rooms/buildings big enough that could hold it (and it could be gotten into them) and could be de-pressurized to anything anywhere close to a vacuum.
Pressurizing the shuttle itself seems a lot simpler ...
It's not a popular answer lately -- it's ALWAYS been a popular answer.
Getting legal advice on /. has always been a bad plan. Technical advice, sometimes it's good, but for the most part the `Ask Slashdot' section is full of stuff that you really shouldn't be relying on what Slashdot tells you.
That only works if you have a trademark to be infringed upon. The asker clearly states that he does not.
Really, he should consult a trademark lawyer rather than asking /.. The /. question about `should he deal with domain squatters' has a simple answer -- NO. End of story. Do not deal with domain squatters.
But from a business standpoint, it might make sense to do so, even if the /. community largely sees it as morally wrong. And as for how to handle it, that's for the lawyer to work out -- not /..
And really, if your anonymity system *does* pass that secret service muster and you aren't visited by the men in black and blue -- that means you can't use it again. Because if you do, and you make a mistake and they track it back to you, they'll also look at other cases where the system system was used, and so they'll be asking you about why you threatened the president ...
If you ever need to test just how anonymous a system is, just use it to send a death threat against the president. Be specific and credible.
They will go to great pains to track you down -- they may not pull out *all* the stops, but they'll come close. So if the police come and ask you questions, you'll know it wasn't good enough, and you'll probably have at least a few years in a federal `pound me in the ass prison' to work out what went wrong ...
Well, you could also cut out letters out of newspapers and magazines and reconstruct the document that way.
I know it's popular in the movies, but it sounds even more traceable.
Fingerprints in the glue, they may be able to figure out which magazines were used, cut up magazines in your trash to help prove who it was if they do track you down ...
Know of anybody who's ever really worked out how anonymous these sorts of things are?
No problem!
I've got a Sparcstation 20 with two cpus that can be yours for the low low price of $4000 -- that $4000 spent will get you a discount of $16000 off the price of IBM software and services!
If you need more, I can also provide several Sparcstation IPXs and LXs for $2000 each, which will provide a discount of $8000 each.
128 Kb ISDN could do it in 4.3 days ...
So, TWRR cut this guy off for using about half the bandwidth available from ISDN ...
Flamebait seems more accurate.
If the power factor if 0.5, then the resistive losses in the lines (and the generator itself, for that matter) is going to be higher than it would be if it was 1.0, but that's the extent of it.
So, if the power plant needed to generate 14 watts -- 13 watts for the light, 1 watt for resistive losses for to get that power there, and the power factor was 1.0, then if you had a power factor of 0.5 instead, the power plant would have to generate 15 watts instead, not 26 or 28.
The only time that a power factor of 0.5 would double the amount of actual power needed vs a power factor of 1.0 would be if the resistive losses (at power factor=1.0) were similar to the losses in the device itself (I haven't done the exact algebra to figure it out) -- which would be incredibly inefficient. The power grid is much better than that.
That's funny, I'd love to see where that's defined in LAW. Link please.
I think I've figured out your problem, at least in regard to this issue. You haven't realized that `what is acceptable' and `what is legal' are two very different things. Acceptable varies from person to person. Legal (which could be seen as `things not deemed so unacceptable as to be prohibited by law') may vary from place to place to some degree, but it generally not up to individuals (except for judges who make rulings based on the law, of course.)
My statement was not about law, it was more about what `plainly visible' meant.
In any event, the law with regards to photography has been pretty well worked out in the actual laws and in the court rulings that followed. Read up on it (at least that's accurate for the US, anyways, I'm not talking about other countries, and yes I realized the incident mentioned in /. was in the UK.) You are certainly welcome to believe that the law hasn't caught up to technology, and there's truth to that, but either way, if it's not illegal, it's not illegal -- no matter what *you* think.
Now, you may be right that if the police want to charge you, they'll find *something*, but that still doesn't make something that's not illegal illegal.
Somehow you think there's a major difference between driving slowly with a with a bunch of high-resolution digital cameras and staying still with one. I'd love to see the court ruling that said this.
You figured that all out about me based simply on the idea that if you need a telescope to see it it's not plainly visible? Impressive. In any event, what is legal has generally been worked out by the law and court cases is this --
If you want to find the law/court cases that led up to this, fee free -- I don't feel the need.
The argument being made here is like making the argument that just beacuse taking one "free" newspaper is legal, driving around and taking ALL the free newpapers in the city is legal.
Bad analogy, for several reasons. One, you've described something that's probably legal (certainly, it would be difficult to charge somebody with theft of something that was given away, though it's possible that there are specific laws in certain areas that cover this very scenario, perhaps dealing more with denying the use of the paper to others rather than theft?) Two, you're not taking anything but pictures. A better analogy would be to go around taking pictures of all the free newspaper kiosks.
Just because it's considered generally acceptable to take one picture from a car for your own use, does not make it acceptable to take as many pictures as you want of a specific target for commerical use.
Again, the law regarding photography is well worked out. You may not think something is *acceptable*, but for now, what google is doing is *legal*, and it's not just because google is a big company.
If you need a high power telescope to see something, it's not plainly viewable.
Its pretty sad that 'acceptable behaviour' is defined by 'is it legal?'.
But it's not. Many legal things are considered unacceptable. And some acceptable things are illegal.
Also consider that `legal' and `illegal' generally don't very from person to person, but `unacceptable' and `acceptable' most certainly do.
You can think of the laws as the lowest common denominator of what society as a whole considers unacceptable enough to actually assign a punishment to doing. Not everybody agrees, but enough do that it's been made against the law.
Of course, that would probably be illegal under stalking laws.
Wait ... was google `perving into windows' ?
In any event, read up on the law (at least in the US.) Google can't really publish pictures of you nude in your bedroom touching your special place any more than anybody else.
We have already reached the understanding that it's acceptable to systematically photograph everyone/everthing and upload it into a for profit geo-tagged database, at least in the US. (No idea about the UK.)
Granted, this understanding was reached before it was really feasable to do this, but the understanding is there. It's called the law, and it doesn't prohibit this. And if it's not illegal, it's legal. Moral, fair, etc. -- that's another matter entirely.
Google is being nice and letting people `opt out', but legally it's not obligated to do so (again, in the US) in the vast majority of cases.
Want to change it? Change the law.
Still, these people just told the world `Hey! Come rob us! We must have nice stuff!'
1TB of Linux ISOs? Assuming full DVDs, that's about 200 DVDs, or over six per day. TYou know, you can install the same DVD (or image) on *multiple* computers, right? :)
Are you saying you do this on a regular basis, or that you *could* do it?
The probability of a cosmic ray at precisely the right angle and speed to cause a single bit error and cause an app to crash is somewhere on the same order as your chances of getting hit by a car, getting struck by lightning, getting torn apart by rabid wolves, and having sex in the back of a red 1948 Buick convertible at a drive-in movie theater on Tuesday night, Feb. 29th under a blue moon... all at the same time....
Nice analogies, but there are never any blue moons in February, as the lunar month is 29.53 days and the longest February is only 29 days ...
(For somebody who doesn't know, a blue moon is when you get two full moons in one month.)
If you have to go to the other building anyways, it's not so much work.
Offsite backups are needed in case your building burns down. (A nuke would take out your other building too, but at that point you may not care.)
The problem with a cronjob (only) backup system is that it needs online storage (doesn't matter if it's tape or disk), and if the backup system can alter the backup, then so can a bad guy who gets in (and certain failure types could too, depending on the specifics.) Sure, there's some ways you can obfuscate and harden this, but the only backup that's truly safe from a determined bad guy is locked in a safe, in another building, not online in any way, and was made before he got access to your system. (And yes, I realize that that last thing especially is difficult to guarantee.) And of course, even that's not *truly* safe -- for more safety, you have multiple backups in multiple secure locations, all protected by men with guns ...
Also, one set of backups isn't enough. What if things broke before the last backup, and you need to go back further?
Ultimately, depending on how important the data is, backups can be easy, or they can be hard. Copying your work to a flash drive once in a while might be sufficient for some, where a company might spend millions of dollars on a backup system that keeps multiple revisions of stuff in multiple locations across the country.
Seems to me that it would work just the same as a tape.
Yes, it would. I think the guy you're responding to is referring only to drives left accessible (especially mounted) in a computer 24x7.
Of course, a tape drive has the same problem -- if a bad guy gets into your backup server, he can erase any tape in the drive, and if there's an automatic robot, he can tell the system to erase every tape it has access to. (Might take a while, however.)
So, take his rant and replace `HDs are NOT backup media' with `Backups need to be kept offline when not in use for maximum security' and it becomes more accurate. Of course, that totally changes his rant, so maybe it can't be saved ...
For every car replaced or added, that must be a new car sale.
... or a car repaired and put back into service.
That car that's been rusting in the back of your property for ten years? You might fix that up rather than buying a new car if money is tight. Or you just had an accident, doing $1500 worth of damage to your $2000 car? You might scrap it and buy a new one if money was better, but it's not, so you suck it up and fix it. Sure, you'd rather have a new car, but what if you lose your job tomorrow? (And if you did buy a new car, you'd sell your old one -- but it's unlikely anybody would spend $300 for it to then drop $1500 in it to maybe sell it for $2000. They'd salvage it for parts instead.)
Ultimately, every car on the road or in the junk yard was once new. But that doesn't mean that a bad economy can't make cars that would have been scrapped get fixed instead, and that effectively `creates' usable cars, reducing the demand for new cars. It can't continue forever, but it can happen for years. Deny it all you want, but I don't think that'll stop people from actually doing it, and I don't think your denial will make GM hurt any less.
And yet, while new car sales are down, used car sales are up. Deny that too, but the facts are there. Granted, people are driving somewhat less (gas sales tell us that) but that's not enough to account for the change in new car sales, not by itself.
Used car sales doesn't impact new car sales.
Well, as I already pointed out, many seem to disagree with you. You're right, to a degree -- eventually all the used cars will wear out, and people will have to buy new ones. But when the economy is bad, people look to used cars more than they used to, at the detriment of new car sales. They also fix up what they have rather than selling it.
This does drive up used car prices, supply and demand, and some cars that were destined for the junk yard get fixed and sold instead.
Nice, but fundamentally flawed.
XXX is not a fixed figure. Cars don't wear out all at once. This breaks, that breaks, and in general the cost of maintaining the car goes up each year. At some point, it's more cost effective to replace the car than to keep fixing it.
However, most people replace the cars long before that point. They want a new car that's more reliable, don't want to put $2k into a car that's worth only $1500 (a sound economic decision, but it's still cheaper to buy another $1500 car that doesn't need $2k in repairs than a new $25k car.)
But if money becomes tight, there is a lot of room to put off buying a new car for several more years. $2000 now is a lot for car repairs, but it's less than that new car which will cost you $400/month.)
When the economy is down, people put off buying new cars. They make do with what they've got instead. When it's not cost effective to fix their car, they scrap it (or sell it to somebody who thinks they can fix it cheaper) and buy another used car. That's happening now.
People might be driving slightly less now, but new car sales are down a lot more than that.
Or perhaps ... Ebay, but look for people in your city? It has a feature to look for stuff sold within X miles of a given zip code ...
I don't do eBay, Craig's List, and stuff.
Well, perhaps you should -- PC games are bought and sold there all the time.
An in general, CL and Ebay prices are significantly higher than what Gamestop pays for used games, and significantly lower than what they charge for used games. Cut out the middle man and you get more money for your games and get new ones for less.