Not if you ever visit any of the 'intellectual property' threads here, where you're likely to see hordes of posters who haven't the slightest clue about the differences between patents, trademarks, and copyrights; nor the slightest desire to learn. You're lucky if you actually find a poster who's willing to look up primary documents rather than repeat mere rumors and bogosities, even when the documents are obvious (ex -- the US Code regarding Federal statutes) and the myths debunked years ago (ex -- the alleged legal validity of the 'abandonware' concept; the myth that copyright infringement is only infringement if it involves money, no matter the scope or scale; or the US sending $30M to the Taliban pre-2001. They're both bogus. If you believe 'em, do the research.).
You'll also find people that seem to think "I patent patents! Ha ha!" is +1 Funny or Insightful, instead of ludicruously stale and inane. How droll.
For most discussions, I think one will nowadays find more insight and genuine debate with less groupthink on Fark, with more references to informative sources and a lack of moderator bias since the mods are few and very, very rarely intervene. These are large reasons why I'm rarely on this site.
If memory serves, at my alma mater, the possible penalties for cheating included expulsion from the university. This was rare, but permissible; lesser sanctions included failing that particular exam, or failing the entire course.
This was one of the things I considered when helping to write a final exam (as a TA) for an undergraduate course. One of the less straightforwards questions described a novel, nontrivially different variation on an algorithm that they'd already seen, and asked them to (a) decide whether it work for the original problem, and (b) explain why. If they didn't understand the original algorithm, this would have been quite difficult despite the exam being open-book.
There were other questions with that direction, as well -- forcing the students to apply what they'd theoretically learned, rather than regurgitate, and to analyze such things.
The first is the practice of cut-and-paste without attribution; this is considered a fairly serious matter in academia, considering that academia typically has a publish-or-perish mentality under which having your papers cited is important. Online resources are far easier to cut-and-paste than paper documents. This is particularly true for Wikipedia in so much as citations are theoretically present already.
The second is that Wikipedia is not a reliable source, considering that the whole reason for its existence is as a community-edited model. Ergo, vandalism can occur much more easily than it can be in any remotely reputable encyclopaedia. So even if you ARE willing to cite it, you shouldn't use it unless you're specifically using it as an example of, say, online culture, rather than as a source of reliable information.
The third bit is that an education is not merely about information recall, but information processing. In other words, mere practice with a search engine is no substitute for the analytical skills to decide what the hell is going on in a situation and to assess possible courses of action. Raw data and rules, if you've never actually done anything with them, are useless. After all, in the Real World you're not there to regurgitate facts or theories; you're supposed to use them. If you're spending all your time searching on fundamentals because you don't know what the hell you're doing, you don't deserve the job.
Linux is not secure when in the hands of people who have always-on connections, but zero interest in working to keep their machines secure. Has there been a distribution yet shipped which did not have significant security issues, especially for people who want to -use- their computer, not learn about it?
I know quite a few people who -do- like computers, got their degrees in the field, continue to work in that field, who are the sort of person who'd build their computer rather than buying pre-made, and who still get pwn3d due to not keeping up with all the updates, especially when distributions shipped with entirely too permissive configurations. It's no panacea.
If you're an unethical vendor who's offering cheap-ass downloads purporting to be of major software products, what's to stop you from crossing one more line and including rootkits? If the customer wants to sue you, he's going to have to also admit committing obvious copyright infringement -- obvious in that no reasonable person is going to believe that the latest version of Adobe Creative Suite is being legitimately downloaded for $20, when it normally lists for many, many times that.
You don't need a signature for an online transaction. What, is PG&E going to demand that their customers use a Wacom tablet before paying them?
All you need from the person who's money is being transferred is (a) the routing number of the institution, and (b) the account number. Both, of necessity, are found on every check. These serve for an ACH -- automated clearing house -- transaction.
It is up to the person to promptly report any unauthorized ACH debits to his financial institution, which is then to provisionally credit the amount pending investigation. If the investigation determines that no error occurred, the customer is entitled to copies of the supporting documents. I've actually gone through this when a typographical error at a financial institution resulted in a debit from one of my acconts; I reported it the next day, signed an affidavit indicating that I didn't authorize it, got it provisionally credited back to me, and then the credit was made permanent after a brief investigation.
Phishing damage can be somewhat mitigated, 'tho, by requiring the use of such devices as SecurID for personal internet banking. Even if the person types in the number currently in the SecurID window, it's only valid for a fairly short time -- and they're not valid twice even within that window. In other words, if you pass the user through the actual login system, so that he doesn't get tipped off immediately that something is very wrong, you cannot re-use that number to log in yourself.
There is a march of several hundred angry protesters converging on your squad, which is tasked with protecting a government ministry. They are mostly adult males, but include women and children. As is not unusual in the country, a number of the men are carrying AK-47s.
*Somebody* in the crowd fires his weapon. It may have been in your approximate direction. Or, it may just have been gunfire into the air... which is also not unusual. Somebody else just lobbed a Molotov in your direction. The crowd is angry, chanting anti-American slogans... but is mostly *not* attacking you.
Do you shoot into the crowd and (a) hope that you kill just the shooters, and (b) hope that the rest of the crowd immediately understands the miraculous precision of your targeting and does not belive that you're trying to kill *them* all? Do you write them ALL off as enemy combatants... and then reap the benefits as they decide to act that way?
There are few good options in this situation. Using a nonlethal wide-area weapon to disrupt the crowd, hopefully getting the innocents out of the freakin' way, would make a better option (targeting those who actually ARE trying to hurt you) easier.
Y'know, sometimes the answer to an angry crowd that includes a few people shooting at you or firing RPGs isn't shooting back into the crowd and risking a bloodbath.
It's a potential issue at, say, globalization-related conferences where you have large groups of nonviolent protesters (possibly goofy-ass protesters blocking traffic while singing, dancing, and dressing up as "frankenfood" rather than making cogent arguments, but nonviolent ones nontheless); you have a smaller group going on vandalism sprees; and you have the hard-core violent people who lash out at police and so forth. It'd be useful to be able to disrupt a possibly hot-tempered crowd -without- causing them permanent harm.
And since these events, and therefore the protests, are planned well in advance, they may come prepared to deal with tear gas. Tasers don't work as a crowd-control device (they're really a one-Taser, one-suspect sort of thing); rubber-coated bullets are very capable of killing or crippling; and the traditional shield/baton wall can escalate into broken heads fairly easily.
"He must have lied to me! He took advantage of me! That's why I'm still suing." -- disgruntled customer
Bringing along somebody else should stand up a bit easier in court. After all, if it's a Big Bad Evil Company, the employee could have been intentionally deceiving the Innocent Clueless Senior Citizen when "explaining" the contract. It's less plausible to make that claim if the explainer is a trusted person brought by the customer.
If the potential customer is extremely clueless and likely to spend much time calling technical support, he could generate enough costs that it's not worth it to have him as a customer. Likewise, if he's so clueless that his machine is likely to be a zombie without constant babysitting, he could help get the whole ISP blacklisted or so forth. Bad customer.
The logic differs if it's a government monopoly provided as a public service, 'tho, as then there are rights issues.
Might be they're hoping to turn something up in a fishing expedition, in case somebody in Limewire was stupid enough to keep an e-mail or other document discussing how they might capitalize on copyright infringement, or if their advertising ever crossed that line.
In addition, they're considered neutral as they aren't based on encouraging the infringement. If Limewire built a business model around users' infringement and encouraged it, they've got problems.
It is quite consistent with a small potential market. After all, if there were huge demand for machines with Linux pre-installed, and there were only minor vendors offering them, you'd expect that these minor vendors would have benefited significantly -- since there wouldn't be so much competition for these customers.
Your comparison is not particularly relevant since
(small Linux-based vendor) vs. (non-existent large Linux-based vendor)
gives the former a better chance than
(small Windows-based vendor) vs (several very large Windows-based vendors)
if customers actually care about getting a Linux desktop.
It in fact -could- be different, in deliberate, subtle and dangerous ways. One could produce a version with a particular security holes preinstalled... with software that gets anywhere near valuable data or systems, trust is indeed an issue.
Buying an illegitimate copy was his action, and nothing to do with any fault of Microsoft. Getting tricked does not entitle you to recompense from an uninvolved third party, unless third party has previously promised you this.
Would you suggest that if some moron pays $20 to download a "legitimate" copy of Adobe Photoshop CS 2 from any of the probably scores of vendors claiming to offer "OEM" software (note: a cursory search shows that there is no legitimate OEM Adobe Creative Suite 2... from the horse's mouth; and furthermore, how clueless do you have to be to think that $20 for a product with a market price well above $500 isn't indicative of a problem?), that Adobe owes anything to that loser other than a sharp rebuke?
Melee types have their chance to get close enough in crowds, buildings, and densely covered areas such as jungle -- depending on the level of sensing equipment.
Might be you were thinking of IA-64. Its reception seems to have been somewhat less warm than desired, and part of that is probably because taking full advantage of it is fairly complicated (at least for the compiler author).
Doesn't sound like he has much of a cushion to absorb risk. If he had significantly more and this weren't borrowed money, sure... but ugh.
Plus, many mutual funds have minimum purchases of $3-5K, quite a few are $10K+, and there's a non-trivial risk of decline in principal due to market fluctuations, sales charges, fund expenses, brokerage commissions, and perhaps minimum trading fees.
HSBCdirect Internet Savings. No fees, no minimum balance, no service -- but 5.05% APY. Six ACH transfers per period, I believe. Needs to be tied to an existing account somewhere -- e.g. mine's linked to an account at a credit union.
There are higher-yielding CDs, but they do tend to come with minimums, as noted.
The odds of getting nailed for shoplifting -- which, incidentally, is a criminal offense, not merely a civil tort -- are probably far, far higher than the the odds of even getting sued, let alone sued succesfully, for P2P-based infringement.
If the penalty of the latter were, say, only $250 and at most a minor stigma (compared to a criminal conviction), and the odds of being caught remained infinitesimal, than it would be worth it to freely indulge.
Slashdot Mirror
Not if you ever visit any of the 'intellectual property' threads here, where you're likely to see hordes of posters who haven't the slightest clue about the differences between patents, trademarks, and copyrights; nor the slightest desire to learn. You're lucky if you actually find a poster who's willing to look up primary documents rather than repeat mere rumors and bogosities, even when the documents are obvious (ex -- the US Code regarding Federal statutes) and the myths debunked years ago (ex -- the alleged legal validity of the 'abandonware' concept; the myth that copyright infringement is only infringement if it involves money, no matter the scope or scale; or the US sending $30M to the Taliban pre-2001. They're both bogus. If you believe 'em, do the research.).
You'll also find people that seem to think "I patent patents! Ha ha!" is +1 Funny or Insightful, instead of ludicruously stale and inane. How droll.
For most discussions, I think one will nowadays find more insight and genuine debate with less groupthink on Fark, with more references to informative sources and a lack of moderator bias since the mods are few and very, very rarely intervene. These are large reasons why I'm rarely on this site.
If memory serves, at my alma mater, the possible penalties for cheating included expulsion from the university. This was rare, but permissible; lesser sanctions included failing that particular exam, or failing the entire course.
This was one of the things I considered when helping to write a final exam (as a TA) for an undergraduate course. One of the less straightforwards questions described a novel, nontrivially different variation on an algorithm that they'd already seen, and asked them to (a) decide whether it work for the original problem, and (b) explain why. If they didn't understand the original algorithm, this would have been quite difficult despite the exam being open-book.
There were other questions with that direction, as well -- forcing the students to apply what they'd theoretically learned, rather than regurgitate, and to analyze such things.
Three reasons.
The first is the practice of cut-and-paste without attribution; this is considered a fairly serious matter in academia, considering that academia typically has a publish-or-perish mentality under which having your papers cited is important. Online resources are far easier to cut-and-paste than paper documents. This is particularly true for Wikipedia in so much as citations are theoretically present already.
The second is that Wikipedia is not a reliable source, considering that the whole reason for its existence is as a community-edited model. Ergo, vandalism can occur much more easily than it can be in any remotely reputable encyclopaedia. So even if you ARE willing to cite it, you shouldn't use it unless you're specifically using it as an example of, say, online culture, rather than as a source of reliable information.
The third bit is that an education is not merely about information recall, but information processing. In other words, mere practice with a search engine is no substitute for the analytical skills to decide what the hell is going on in a situation and to assess possible courses of action. Raw data and rules, if you've never actually done anything with them, are useless. After all, in the Real World you're not there to regurgitate facts or theories; you're supposed to use them. If you're spending all your time searching on fundamentals because you don't know what the hell you're doing, you don't deserve the job.
Gosh, a fanboy.
Linux is not secure when in the hands of people who have always-on connections, but zero interest in working to keep their machines secure. Has there been a distribution yet shipped which did not have significant security issues, especially for people who want to -use- their computer, not learn about it?
I know quite a few people who -do- like computers, got their degrees in the field, continue to work in that field, who are the sort of person who'd build their computer rather than buying pre-made, and who still get pwn3d due to not keeping up with all the updates, especially when distributions shipped with entirely too permissive configurations. It's no panacea.
Possibly -- it doesn't have to.
If you're an unethical vendor who's offering cheap-ass downloads purporting to be of major software products, what's to stop you from crossing one more line and including rootkits? If the customer wants to sue you, he's going to have to also admit committing obvious copyright infringement -- obvious in that no reasonable person is going to believe that the latest version of Adobe Creative Suite is being legitimately downloaded for $20, when it normally lists for many, many times that.
You don't need a signature for an online transaction. What, is PG&E going to demand that their customers use a Wacom tablet before paying them?
All you need from the person who's money is being transferred is (a) the routing number of the institution, and (b) the account number. Both, of necessity, are found on every check. These serve for an ACH -- automated clearing house -- transaction.
It is up to the person to promptly report any unauthorized ACH debits to his financial institution, which is then to provisionally credit the amount pending investigation. If the investigation determines that no error occurred, the customer is entitled to copies of the supporting documents. I've actually gone through this when a typographical error at a financial institution resulted in a debit from one of my acconts; I reported it the next day, signed an affidavit indicating that I didn't authorize it, got it provisionally credited back to me, and then the credit was made permanent after a brief investigation.
Phishing damage can be somewhat mitigated, 'tho, by requiring the use of such devices as SecurID for personal internet banking. Even if the person types in the number currently in the SecurID window, it's only valid for a fairly short time -- and they're not valid twice even within that window. In other words, if you pass the user through the actual login system, so that he doesn't get tipped off immediately that something is very wrong, you cannot re-use that number to log in yourself.
There is a march of several hundred angry protesters converging on your squad, which is tasked with protecting a government ministry. They are mostly adult males, but include women and children. As is not unusual in the country, a number of the men are carrying AK-47s.
*Somebody* in the crowd fires his weapon. It may have been in your approximate direction. Or, it may just have been gunfire into the air... which is also not unusual. Somebody else just lobbed a Molotov in your direction. The crowd is angry, chanting anti-American slogans... but is mostly *not* attacking you.
Do you shoot into the crowd and (a) hope that you kill just the shooters, and (b) hope that the rest of the crowd immediately understands the miraculous precision of your targeting and does not belive that you're trying to kill *them* all? Do you write them ALL off as enemy combatants... and then reap the benefits as they decide to act that way?
There are few good options in this situation. Using a nonlethal wide-area weapon to disrupt the crowd, hopefully getting the innocents out of the freakin' way, would make a better option (targeting those who actually ARE trying to hurt you) easier.
Y'know, sometimes the answer to an angry crowd that includes a few people shooting at you or firing RPGs isn't shooting back into the crowd and risking a bloodbath.
It's a potential issue at, say, globalization-related conferences where you have large groups of nonviolent protesters (possibly goofy-ass protesters blocking traffic while singing, dancing, and dressing up as "frankenfood" rather than making cogent arguments, but nonviolent ones nontheless); you have a smaller group going on vandalism sprees; and you have the hard-core violent people who lash out at police and so forth. It'd be useful to be able to disrupt a possibly hot-tempered crowd -without- causing them permanent harm.
And since these events, and therefore the protests, are planned well in advance, they may come prepared to deal with tear gas. Tasers don't work as a crowd-control device (they're really a one-Taser, one-suspect sort of thing); rubber-coated bullets are very capable of killing or crippling; and the traditional shield/baton wall can escalate into broken heads fairly easily.
"He must have lied to me! He took advantage of me! That's why I'm still suing."
-- disgruntled customer
Bringing along somebody else should stand up a bit easier in court. After all, if it's a Big Bad Evil Company, the employee could have been intentionally deceiving the Innocent Clueless Senior Citizen when "explaining" the contract. It's less plausible to make that claim if the explainer is a trusted person brought by the customer.
If the potential customer is extremely clueless and likely to spend much time calling technical support, he could generate enough costs that it's not worth it to have him as a customer. Likewise, if he's so clueless that his machine is likely to be a zombie without constant babysitting, he could help get the whole ISP blacklisted or so forth. Bad customer.
The logic differs if it's a government monopoly provided as a public service, 'tho, as then there are rights issues.
They probably can't outspend the Department of Housing and Urban Development, however.
Might be they're hoping to turn something up in a fishing expedition, in case somebody in Limewire was stupid enough to keep an e-mail or other document discussing how they might capitalize on copyright infringement, or if their advertising ever crossed that line.
In addition, they're considered neutral as they aren't based on encouraging the infringement. If Limewire built a business model around users' infringement and encouraged it, they've got problems.
It is quite consistent with a small potential market. After all, if there were huge demand for machines with Linux pre-installed, and there were only minor vendors offering them, you'd expect that these minor vendors would have benefited significantly -- since there wouldn't be so much competition for these customers.
Your comparison is not particularly relevant since
(small Linux-based vendor) vs. (non-existent large Linux-based vendor)
gives the former a better chance than
(small Windows-based vendor) vs (several very large Windows-based vendors)
if customers actually care about getting a Linux desktop.
That'd sound like a Katarand from Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar".
Software's an odd case.
It in fact -could- be different, in deliberate, subtle and dangerous ways. One could produce a version with a particular security holes preinstalled... with software that gets anywhere near valuable data or systems, trust is indeed an issue.
Would you suggest that if some moron pays $20 to download a "legitimate" copy of Adobe Photoshop CS 2 from any of the probably scores of vendors claiming to offer "OEM" software (note: a cursory search shows that there is no legitimate OEM Adobe Creative Suite 2... from the horse's mouth; and furthermore, how clueless do you have to be to think that $20 for a product with a market price well above $500 isn't indicative of a problem?), that Adobe owes anything to that loser other than a sharp rebuke?
Melee types have their chance to get close enough in crowds, buildings, and densely covered areas such as jungle -- depending on the level of sensing equipment.
Might be you were thinking of IA-64. Its reception seems to have been somewhat less warm than desired, and part of that is probably because taking full advantage of it is fairly complicated (at least for the compiler author).
Doesn't sound like he has much of a cushion to absorb risk. If he had significantly more and this weren't borrowed money, sure... but ugh.
Plus, many mutual funds have minimum purchases of $3-5K, quite a few are $10K+, and there's a non-trivial risk of decline in principal due to market fluctuations, sales charges, fund expenses, brokerage commissions, and perhaps minimum trading fees.
http://www.hsbcdirect.com/1/2/1/bonus.htm?ceprod=E SAV
HSBCdirect Internet Savings. No fees, no minimum balance, no service -- but 5.05% APY. Six ACH transfers per period, I believe. Needs to be tied to an existing account somewhere -- e.g. mine's linked to an account at a credit union.
There are higher-yielding CDs, but they do tend to come with minimums, as noted.
The odds of getting nailed for shoplifting -- which, incidentally, is a criminal offense, not merely a civil tort -- are probably far, far higher than the the odds of even getting sued, let alone sued succesfully, for P2P-based infringement.
If the penalty of the latter were, say, only $250 and at most a minor stigma (compared to a criminal conviction), and the odds of being caught remained infinitesimal, than it would be worth it to freely indulge.