You assume. He could very well have copied the files from somewhere else to the digital media card.
It's unlikely, I know, but you can't assume that this is the only copy of the pictures.
Re:Victim does online gambling; shady = vulnerable
on
Fighting Online Extortion
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If everyone involved is a consenting adult, they shouldn't have anything to fear from using the legal system for defense.
In theory, you are correct. In practice, it's not so simple. Often law enforcement members themselves don't care for porn and won't take such complaints very seriously. Or they may see this as an opportunity to scrutinize the business and make their life difficult as they look for illegal things to bust them for (and even if there aren't any, that doesn't mean it's not a big problem for the business.)
Last I heard, Hustler magazine spent over one million dollars per year just on legal expenses, and generally they do not violate the law. This is probably an extreme example, but I imagine that lots of porn business spend above average amounts on legal expenses just because of the nature of their business. Anything that draws attention to you could very well increase that...
I'm currently getting about 3000 spams per day now. Fortunately, 99.9% are filtered properly (I love Spamassassin and the SURBL rocks!)
Lately my big pain in the ass has been these `cheapsoft' f*ckers joe-jobbing me -- gotten a few thousand bounces from that.
Why do I get so much? I still have the same addresses I had 10 years ago, and I regularly post to Usenet, refusing to obfuscate my address. And my address is on web sites too...
It's a legitimate law, in spite of the first site that google gave me that talks about it being a joke site -- there's a lot more sites out there if you want to look yourself.
It may not be the law anymore, but it was the law at one point, and I mentioned it just to suggest that silly laws have been found on the books before.
Lawmakers will happily outlaw owning certain tools if they feel it's in their interests to do so, and often groups will lobby them to make sure it's in their interests.
Well, they're likely FCC certified, but the spectrum they use is unlicensed, so...
Obviously there are, but what are those limits?
For most of the unlicensed bands, under 1 watt. The WiFi `shootouts' and the like typically do not use amplifiers at all (microwave amplifiers are expensive), just high gain antennas, though I don't think the Part 15 rules (which is what things like this and WiFi are allowed under) allow the use of high gain antennas for transmitting. (If correct, this is very often violated, though obviously the FCC doesn't care that much.)
As for encryption, it's only the ham rules (part 97) that prohibit encryption. They also require that you ID yourself at the end of each message (and at least every 10 minutes) and that the usage be non-commercial. The FCC itself doesn't frown upon encryption, at least not publically.
I guess I need to read up on my FCC rules
Yup. This link might be an interesting place to start.
How can we change the system so people have the choice between multiple canidates and not just two?
That's actually pretty easy. 1) you require that the winner be elected by 50+% of the vote, rather than just a simple majority, and 2) You allow people to vote for (or rank) multiple candidates, with varying ways of handling these votes depending on the exact plan.
It's a bit more complicated than that, but that's the general idea. I don't see this ever getting passed in the US, but it's certainly possible to set up an election where you can vote for the 3rd party candidate and yet your vote isn't really wasted.
Who's Woody Williams, you might ask? Don't have a clue. But his post from Oct 5, 2000 to rec.hunting came up first when I searched for that phrase in Google's Usenet archive. .
Or, more precisely, this link looks for all posts in Usenet for 2000 that say `most important election ever'. Of course, there are different ways of saying the same thing, and we're not searching for all of them, just this one phrase.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing -- it looks a lot like Crimson Skies, made into a movie.
Not that I've seen this movie yet, but the previews look so similar that I wonder if they wanted to make a Crimson Skies movie, but couldn't get the movie rights.
Either way, it looks like it's right up my alley. Alas, with kids, going to the movies is hard.:)
TV stations typically use a lot more than 5 kW of power. UHF stations in the US can use up to 5 MW (megawatts) of power, though the actual amount of bandwidth used is the same.
The old Boeing 601 satellites used 24 mHz of bandwidth. (No idea what the new ones do.) That's more than a TV channel, but not that much more.
Yes, as a general rule of thumb, doubling the bandwidth doubles the power requirements.
Really, the thing that makes this all work without a whole lot of power is good antennas. Even those little dishes have very high gains at the high frequencies used by DirectTV, and the satellite itself has direction antennas that beam their signal right down at the US, often being even more specific than that.
As for the AM band (550-1600 kHz), the reason you can pick them up from so far away is not so much the low bandwidth used (but that is a factor), but the fact that low frequency radio waves will bounce between the Earth and the ionosphere. Ham radio operators regularly talk all the way across the world using only like 200 watts. (Granted, they usually don't use much bandwidth, like 3.6 kHz for phone or less for CW, but still...) [for the record, I dabble in ham radio. I'm AD5RH. Though I don't have much of a HF setup yet.]
This sort of skip (or ducting, which is different but has a similar effect) does happen with the VHF TV channels from time to time as well, which is why they aren't permitted to use so much power. That, and UHF just doesn't propagate as well around hills and such, so more power helps overcome that.
My point is that the power output, while relevent in this discussion, is by no means the only criteria to use while guessing signal strength or reliability of signal.
Of course. But the post I originally replied to said that the way that DTV works is by using lots of power. And I do guess that for a satellite, 4+ kW *is* a lot of power, but it's still nothing compared to what we use down here.
Let's not forget that these sats are geosynchronous, which puts them out at roughly 25K miles. The shadow cast by the Earth is much smaller than near the Earth. And, of course, these sats won't necessarily be in the path of that shadow at all.
I guess I hadn't taken that into consideration. I was thinking that since it rotated along with the Earth (being geosynchronous and all) that it got 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night. Obviously wrong, considering how far it is from the Earth.
Obviously, they must stay in the sun almost all the time -- which is good, because no battery would survive being charged for 12 hours and then discharged for 12 hours, day in and day out, for 10 years.
Still, impressive that they can make it generate and put out that much power. We've come a long way from Sputnik...
I found another link which isn't what I'd call authoritative, but suggests that the (newer? Boeing 701 vs Boeing 601?) DTV satellites put out 3.5 kW of RF power. Which is still a lot, but still nothing compared to a single FM radio station. Of course, it helps not having to go through buildings, trees, etc. And having an antenna with a nice bit of gain over a simple dipole (if you're lucky) for the FM band.
I believe the systems used to talk to submarines using the extremely low frequency bands (ELF) use something like three megawatts of power...
my understanding is that they will do it in the same way that they get away with using the little dishes, pumping a huge amount of power out.
It's a satellite. Powered by solar cells. As much as they'd probably love to pump a `huge amount of power out', they don't have a huge amount of power to pump with.
According to
this link, the solar cells (which are huge!) of this satellite put out 4.3 kW of power. Which is a lot, but I imagine that's peak power, and the satellite cannot be in the sun all the time, so it's got to charge batteries for night time use, and it's transmitters are not 100% efficient...
All in all, I doubt it can put out 1000 watts of RF power 24/7. Compare that to your local FM station that probably broadcasts with 100,000 watts and only serves an area with an 60 mile or so radius. At high frequencies, you don't need a large dish for high gain (doubling the frequency generally doubles the gain), so the little dishes do the job.
Still, that's pretty impressive. 4.3 kW of power for a satellite? And the new ones are likely to be even bigger. (For comparison, Voyager broadcasts with 13 watts of power. Of course, it's power source is probably nuclear.)
With 4.3 kW of power coming in at peak (and never mind that solar cells aren't very efficient, so there's several times that amount of heat being collected by the solar cells), I wonder how they keep it cool. In space, you can't just tack on a big fan... you need to radiate your heat into space.
I could have sworn that I read a similar story somewhere a month or two ago...
In that case, people were writing down the number of a card still on the shelf, or taking pictures of the bar code or something, and then noting what the sequence is (they are in order, after all) and then going home, and using the 1-800 number to see how much money was on the card to see when it was sold.
Once they found a number with money on it, they'd modify a card that they had (printing bar codes and reprogramming magnetic strips is easy) to have that number, and go and spend somebody else's money. Easy.
Seems easy enough to track, as 1-800 numbers include caller ID type info, so just see what number was called to check the balance of the card before it was depleted of funds, and if the same number shows up a few times, call the police...
To make matters worse, the fine print basically said that this sort of loss was the customer's problem, not the retailer's. So the retailer was refusing to pay people for the lost money...
In any event, giving a gift card sucks, even without this scam. It has *all* the tackiness of giving cash, but with the additional tackiness of telling you where you can spend this money. If you're going to buy me a present, buy me a present. If you want to give me cash, I certainly like cash. But don't spend cash on a gift card... either use it to buy me something, or just give me the cash.
And if this does happen to you, scream bloody murder. Do not accept anything less than all the lost money, even if the fine print says that it's not their responsiblity. Call the local media if you have to. Make a scene in the store. Call the corporate office if you have to... you'll probably eventually get your money.
Anymore? This is the only way Microsoft has ever competed!
That's hardly accurate. At one point, Microsoft was a small company. I've even got a Z-80 card for an Apple II made by them in my garage somewhere. They didn't get to `lock people into their standard' back then. They had to compete just like everybody else.
They got quite a break when they bought DOS and got into the PC OS market, and some time after that, they did get into the habit of `embrace and extend', but there are areas where even today they're putting out fine products.
For example, their optical mice are top notch and well priced to boot. And they don't `lock you into any standard' either -- certainly, they work fine with Xfree86:)
Back to software, Windows (in it's various permutations) may not be perfect, but it's relatively easy for the end user to use, and highly featured. Same goes for Office.
And they have put out some good software titles lately, especially in the game area. Halo was excellent (though they did acquire the company that released Halo, so...), Crimson Skies, the later Mechwarrior games were good (but lacking the `atmosphere' of MW2), etc.
I like to bash Microsoft as much as the next guy, perhaps even more, but not all criticism directed at them is warranted.
Apparantly somebody is. I'd never heard of a `mama san', so I googled for it. Apparantly it refers to a woman who works as a hostess at a bar, but it seems to also mean a geisha or a prostitute.
In Japanese, adding -san to the end of a name is a sign of respect, but in this case, `mama san' is not a nice thing to call somebody. Though I'm not sure why Japanese terms would end up being used for the Vietnam war -- totally differerent countries, different cultures. Though perhaps it's just American stereotypes -- `Japanese, Vietnamese -- what's the difference?'. Dunno.
Looking at some of the war pictures, the mama sans did cleaning and such for the soldiers, and some had sex with them too. And from some of the pictures, the girls were often as young as 13 or 14.
Assuming I'm correct in what I found, somebody certainly was thinking of the children.
Search engines like ht://Dig can accomplish part of this task, however currently it doesn't index the whole file (just portions of the metadata).
Um, ht://Dig WILL do it. As will any of the other search engine packages out there, if you can feed them the text that they work on. It's generally not difficult (on a *nix platform) to convert all of the formats you mentioned into straight text or html and feed those to your favorite search engine platforms.
Useful programs include wvWare, rtf2htm, pdftotext, and yes, even strings.
Oh, I agree that the library is meant to be generally open, and the places I mentioned are generally closed.
But even so, my point was that THIS argument of yours :
The public library is funded with tax dollars, and therefore open to use by the public.
... is completely incorrect -- it does not follow. Now, the library may be open for other reasons (like maybe it's supposed to be open) but merely being paid for by tax dollars is not enough.
That is what you said, after all. If you meant something else, you should have said something else.
If your roommates are anything like my kids (1 and 3 years old), they'll push any buttons and lights and such that they see on your computer, doing things like turning it off, resetting it, opening the CD tray (which they'll then break), etc.
Electrical tape (duct tape works nicely too) over the buttons can help obfuscate their existence, saving both your data and cup holder^H^H^H^H^H^H^H
^H^H^HCD tray, and yet since YOU know where the buttons are, you can still push them through the tape.
At least until the kids/roommates realize how easy the tape is to pull off, or that their cheetos will fit nicely into the floppy slot...
Slashdot Mirror
It's unlikely, I know, but you can't assume that this is the only copy of the pictures.
Last I heard, Hustler magazine spent over one million dollars per year just on legal expenses, and generally they do not violate the law. This is probably an extreme example, but I imagine that lots of porn business spend above average amounts on legal expenses just because of the nature of their business. Anything that draws attention to you could very well increase that ...
Quite the troublemaker he was, but he was fun too :)
Lately my big pain in the ass has been these `cheapsoft' f*ckers joe-jobbing me -- gotten a few thousand bounces from that.
Why do I get so much? I still have the same addresses I had 10 years ago, and I regularly post to Usenet, refusing to obfuscate my address. And my address is on web sites too ...
It may not be the law anymore, but it was the law at one point, and I mentioned it just to suggest that silly laws have been found on the books before.
Lawmakers will happily outlaw owning certain tools if they feel it's in their interests to do so, and often groups will lobby them to make sure it's in their interests.
As for encryption, it's only the ham rules (part 97) that prohibit encryption. They also require that you ID yourself at the end of each message (and at least every 10 minutes) and that the usage be non-commercial. The FCC itself doesn't frown upon encryption, at least not publically.
Yup. This link might be an interesting place to start.But for a purely text application, 9600 bps is usually more than enough.
It's a bit more complicated than that, but that's the general idea. I don't see this ever getting passed in the US, but it's certainly possible to set up an election where you can vote for the 3rd party candidate and yet your vote isn't really wasted.
Who's Woody Williams, you might ask? Don't have a clue. But his post from Oct 5, 2000 to rec.hunting came up first when I searched for that phrase in Google's Usenet archive. .
Or, more precisely, this link looks for all posts in Usenet for 2000 that say `most important election ever'. Of course, there are different ways of saying the same thing, and we're not searching for all of them, just this one phrase.
I haven't. At least, I don't think so. Somebody's always saying that.
Not that I've seen this movie yet, but the previews look so similar that I wonder if they wanted to make a Crimson Skies movie, but couldn't get the movie rights.
Either way, it looks like it's right up my alley. Alas, with kids, going to the movies is hard. :)
The old Boeing 601 satellites used 24 mHz of bandwidth. (No idea what the new ones do.) That's more than a TV channel, but not that much more.
Yes, as a general rule of thumb, doubling the bandwidth doubles the power requirements.
Really, the thing that makes this all work without a whole lot of power is good antennas. Even those little dishes have very high gains at the high frequencies used by DirectTV, and the satellite itself has direction antennas that beam their signal right down at the US, often being even more specific than that.
As for the AM band (550-1600 kHz), the reason you can pick them up from so far away is not so much the low bandwidth used (but that is a factor), but the fact that low frequency radio waves will bounce between the Earth and the ionosphere. Ham radio operators regularly talk all the way across the world using only like 200 watts. (Granted, they usually don't use much bandwidth, like 3.6 kHz for phone or less for CW, but still ...) [for the record, I dabble in ham radio. I'm AD5RH. Though I don't have much of a HF setup yet.]
This sort of skip (or ducting, which is different but has a similar effect) does happen with the VHF TV channels from time to time as well, which is why they aren't permitted to use so much power. That, and UHF just doesn't propagate as well around hills and such, so more power helps overcome that.
Of course. But the post I originally replied to said that the way that DTV works is by using lots of power. And I do guess that for a satellite, 4+ kW *is* a lot of power, but it's still nothing compared to what we use down here.Obviously, they must stay in the sun almost all the time -- which is good, because no battery would survive being charged for 12 hours and then discharged for 12 hours, day in and day out, for 10 years.
Still, impressive that they can make it generate and put out that much power. We've come a long way from Sputnik ...
I believe the systems used to talk to submarines using the extremely low frequency bands (ELF) use something like three megawatts of power ...
All in all, I doubt it can put out 1000 watts of RF power 24/7. Compare that to your local FM station that probably broadcasts with 100,000 watts and only serves an area with an 60 mile or so radius. At high frequencies, you don't need a large dish for high gain (doubling the frequency generally doubles the gain), so the little dishes do the job.
Still, that's pretty impressive. 4.3 kW of power for a satellite? And the new ones are likely to be even bigger. (For comparison, Voyager broadcasts with 13 watts of power. Of course, it's power source is probably nuclear.)
With 4.3 kW of power coming in at peak (and never mind that solar cells aren't very efficient, so there's several times that amount of heat being collected by the solar cells), I wonder how they keep it cool. In space, you can't just tack on a big fan ... you need to radiate your heat into space.
In that case, people were writing down the number of a card still on the shelf, or taking pictures of the bar code or something, and then noting what the sequence is (they are in order, after all) and then going home, and using the 1-800 number to see how much money was on the card to see when it was sold.
Once they found a number with money on it, they'd modify a card that they had (printing bar codes and reprogramming magnetic strips is easy) to have that number, and go and spend somebody else's money. Easy.
Seems easy enough to track, as 1-800 numbers include caller ID type info, so just see what number was called to check the balance of the card before it was depleted of funds, and if the same number shows up a few times, call the police ...
To make matters worse, the fine print basically said that this sort of loss was the customer's problem, not the retailer's. So the retailer was refusing to pay people for the lost money ...
In any event, giving a gift card sucks, even without this scam. It has *all* the tackiness of giving cash, but with the additional tackiness of telling you where you can spend this money. If you're going to buy me a present, buy me a present. If you want to give me cash, I certainly like cash. But don't spend cash on a gift card ... either use it to buy me something, or just give me the cash.
And if this does happen to you, scream bloody murder. Do not accept anything less than all the lost money, even if the fine print says that it's not their responsiblity. Call the local media if you have to. Make a scene in the store. Call the corporate office if you have to ... you'll probably eventually get your money.
Hams do this sort of thing all the time (well, broadcasting their location, rather than stalking their girlfriends.)
Here is a list of stations currently broadcasting their coordinates near my house ...
They got quite a break when they bought DOS and got into the PC OS market, and some time after that, they did get into the habit of `embrace and extend', but there are areas where even today they're putting out fine products.
For example, their optical mice are top notch and well priced to boot. And they don't `lock you into any standard' either -- certainly, they work fine with Xfree86 :)
Back to software, Windows (in it's various permutations) may not be perfect, but it's relatively easy for the end user to use, and highly featured. Same goes for Office.
And they have put out some good software titles lately, especially in the game area. Halo was excellent (though they did acquire the company that released Halo, so ...), Crimson Skies, the later Mechwarrior games were good (but lacking the `atmosphere' of MW2), etc.
I like to bash Microsoft as much as the next guy, perhaps even more, but not all criticism directed at them is warranted.
In Japanese, adding -san to the end of a name is a sign of respect, but in this case, `mama san' is not a nice thing to call somebody. Though I'm not sure why Japanese terms would end up being used for the Vietnam war -- totally differerent countries, different cultures. Though perhaps it's just American stereotypes -- `Japanese, Vietnamese -- what's the difference?'. Dunno.
Looking at some of the war pictures, the mama sans did cleaning and such for the soldiers, and some had sex with them too. And from some of the pictures, the girls were often as young as 13 or 14.
Assuming I'm correct in what I found, somebody certainly was thinking of the children.
To be fair, `guilty until proven innocent' applies only in criminal cases. This is not a criminal case, not yet.
Useful programs include wvWare, rtf2htm, pdftotext, and yes, even strings.
But even so, my point was that THIS argument of yours :
That is what you said, after all. If you meant something else, you should have said something else.
Electrical tape (duct tape works nicely too) over the buttons can help obfuscate their existence, saving both your data and cup holder^H^H^H^H^H^H^H ^H^H^HCD tray, and yet since YOU know where the buttons are, you can still push them through the tape.
At least until the kids/roommates realize how easy the tape is to pull off, or that their cheetos will fit nicely into the floppy slot ...