EFF's lawyers charged $400,000 for checking to confirm that the video was covered under fair use then writing one letter to that effect? That's not legal advice, that's extortion.
Not at all uncommon with big ISPs, alas. British Telecom are doing something similar - which to my mind suggests there may well be more than one layer of NAT going on for quite a few customers....
My wife is a therapeutic radiographer - not that this means I'm qualified to understand it, but it does mean I hear of some of the incidents.
Radiation therapy is potentially dangerous. So is all cancer treatment - the reason we use it is because it's a sight less dangerous than letting nature take its course. The main solution is a combination of two things:
Machinery which won't let you make the most obvious screwups like putting an extra zero into the dosage.
Processes which involve double and triple checking every step of the way. These processes are followed religiously.
However, neither of these are foolproof. The machinery has to be calibrated - it doesn't magically give out the correct dose when told to when it leaves the factory. Calibration errors have caused people to receive much higher doses than intended - and usually the first you hear about it is when a patient complains of significantly worse side effects than you were expecting significantly earlier. Other times patient errors have very nearly resulted in the wrong treatment altogether.
Patient errors? Yep, it can happen. Two patients with a similar name in the waiting room, the next patient is called for and the wrong person gets up. You're supposed to check the patients' date of birth every time but a lot of people seem to lapse into just nodding and agreeing with everything the person in uniform says, so if the patient is asked "Is your date of birth 1st March 1960?" (rather than "Can you confirm your date of birth for me please?"), they just mindlessly agree. My wife's suggestion to help reduce this risk was that photographs of patients be taken on their first treatment and kept with their records - frankly, the only amazing thing about this is it was 2009 when it was made and it wasn't standard practise.
Paradoxically, one of the ways errors are dealt with is to instigate a firm "no blame" policy. The reason for this is so people aren't tempted to try and cover up errors.
If the UK is anything to go by, it doesn't necessarily help much. O2 and Orange both sell the iPhone for virtually the same price on very similar contracts.
Knowing Apple, it wouldn't surprise me at all if they're responsible for this.
In essence, if you use a receiver without support for this DRM tech, the only thing you're going to lose access to is the Programme Listing data - it's the BBC's way of placating the drooling media execs with as little direct impact on consumers as possible
ICBW but don't most DVRs depend on program listing data to know when to record?
The use of the word "free" in both Freeview and Freesat is deceptive IMHO as in the UK (as many of you know) you _have_ to pay for a TV License, if you don't you can't have a TV or anything resembling a terrestrial (analog or digital) receiver. So no TV cards for your computer either. It really is not even an issue of quality anymore, I used to use the argument that the only thing I watched on the BBC was Top Gear and local news and that's still true but I'd gladly pay a token amount per view for each of those I just have a moral objection to being forced to pay for a service that I largely do not use. The fact is that if I stop paying my license I would eventually face prison time and a criminal record. Is this right?
First, if it were me doing the "quieting of an unfavorable", I would seek anything to discredit him first. Get to his family to discredit him as a person, probably with threat of force and some other bribe. Then I would pressure his bosses to show he was on a termination list for something else, like paedophilia or something else quite heinous.
The Russian authorities have already demonstrated that they have absolutely no qualms about killing an unfavourable in a fairly high-profile fashion.
Yes. I conjecture that the only reason my current counter-measures (and that of GP) work reasonably well is because so many people use worse counter-measures -- which makes it less necessary for spammers to outsmart them (yet). It's not a solution, and by definition only works for a relatively small part of the population of email users.
Mine WERE working reasonably well! Or so I thought - I was blocking well over 90% of incoming email to spam but I didn't have a mechanism for end users to check "may be, may not be" spam - and I didn't want to crank up the sensitivity without that.
But when the people worst affected are the executives who agree the pay every month, you have to ask yourself "how married am I to running my own email system in its entirety?". I can easily see a future where most sysadmins decide the answer is "not very" and wind up outsourcing at least the spam filtering.
There's a big secret that some managers don't seem to get. (It's mercifully less common here in the UK, but I have seen it).
Now, this is a huge secret. I'm not sure I should be posting it here. But anyway - listen closely...
A man working for 60 hours per week will not necessarily produce 50% more than a man working for 40 hours per week. In fact, it's very likely that once he gets tired, he'll make mistakes which he'll then have to fix once rested - and time spent fixing mistakes made through exhaustion is time not being spent on new features.
There, I said it. If you'll excuse me, I have a bunch of managers with torches and pitchforks at my door and I need to set the dog on them.
Well, that article is somewhat about captchas and I couldn't see any direct quotes from billy, considering that most email providers, live/gmail etc. use that tech. and my spam has virtually been reduced to zero in the last few years... No one can stop spammers from sending spam, but you can always filter it out.
The reason your inbox - or anyone's, for that matter - is not overflowing with so much spam that "just hit delete" is no longer an option is not because nobody's sending spam.
Neither is it because the magic email fairies are ensuring that you only receive legitimate email.
It's because some poor bastard is attempting to stop it. But for every counter-measure we take against spam, the spammers work on anti-counter-measures.
For those anti-counter-measures, we take contra-anti-counter-measures.
This doesn't work for very long, however. Before long the spammers have developed dis-contra-anti-counter-measures.
So the mail admins of this world devise un-dis-contra-anti-counter-measures.
I've run out of prefixes meaning "un", but you can see where this is going. It's a game you only win if you don't take part - which is pretty crap if you actually want to use email.
Quite correct. The secondary MX wasn't for load balancing - Postfix can handle more mail than I could ever throw at it - the secondary MX was to minimise the risk of NDRs.
It actually caused as many problems as it solved because spammers seem to think "secondary MX == no spam filtering".
I was seeing more like 97% (once you excluded system generated internal emails - CVS and Bugzilla between them can generate a fair bit of mail).
The killer for running our own mail system in its entirety was when I did the arithmetic and our co-hosted secondary mail server was costing more than buying Google for Domains. That's before you even consider the document management Google for domains offers, which was just icing on the cake.
But the Red Hat support team is a phone call away.
Your boss doesn't like being wholly dependent on his resident geek.
The support contract and the bog standard enterprise distribution are his insurance policy. His recovery plan.
I personally guarantee you that by the time the average server OS has had all the necessary tweaks set up to bed it down into a company's systems, along with accounting for little things like "can't use this patch because it clashes with this other app we need, so instead we workaround using this, that other server is so critical to the business that we haven't dared patch it in five years (and I don't care how anal you'd like to be, every business with a significant IT department has at least one server like this)" there is nobody on the planet who can support significant issues over the phone.
It's perhaps less of an issue now than it was 5 or 10 years ago, but it still exists. It's the reason that paid consultants can make a good living on short-term contracts at short notice and potentially being out of work for three to six months of the year.
You're comparing apples and oranges. RHEL is more likely to be used on a server, whereas Windows 7 pro will be on a workstation.
Where most Linux distributions clear up on the server is client access licenses. If you compare Windows licensing with a typical commercial Linux, the two will cost a very similar amount - but Linux distributions don't tend to charge for client access.
The number of people who actually need anything near as sophisticated as Photoshop is minute. If it weren't, Adobe wouldn't charge as much as they do (largely because there'd be a lot more competition at that end of the market) and Photoshop Elements wouldn't need to exist.
Stealing is a poor choice of words, but yours is a poor choice of analogy.
It'd be more accurate to compare it to stealing the CD from WalMart, setting up a rig of several CD writers and making many copies then standing outside WalMart giving those copies away. Suddenly the lost revenue isn't (cost of CD), it's (cost of CD multiplied by number of CDs you gave away). Of course nobody really knows how many you made or gave away so they work out how many it's physically possible for you to have made and given away and work on the back of that.
(There is the bijou issuette that a free CD will attract many more takers than a CD on the shelf at $12-15 ever will....)
The best lawyers will tell you to drop this idea before it costs you even more money - and time.
Which in the gaming industry would mean that on average every single person involved in the whole industry (with one or two exceptions) should drop almost every idea they ever have.
I've installed countless ubuntu systems on people with little technical expertise that don't understand why they have 10 browser tool bars in their IE install and wonder why their computers run like shit.
In that case, wouldn't the easier solution be to install firefox on windows?
Not necessarily - a lot of toolbars are starting to support Firefox.
It would be like Google, but the only button would be the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.
Which, to be fair, would work perfectly well 98% of the time. But you'd wind up with one group of people who ignored the 2% of the time it didn't, claiming it to be totally infallible and another group which focused on the 2% of the time it didn't work to denounce it as a lousy product.
OK, who paid for this and what's in it for them? I've yet to see a piece of so-called "business research" of this nature which was produced with no ulterior motive.
The most obvious thoughts that spring to mind are:
AT&T paid for it. They want an excuse to be able to add another "extra" onto the bill of all their customers (or get a government subsidy).
Verizon paid for it. They want to be able to say "Don't use AT&T, their network is obsolete and they can't afford to upgrade it".
Slashdot Mirror
Three words for you: Natural Language Generation.
Do the record labels even make Compact Discs anymore? I thought they all switched to non-conforming discs compatible with some CD players.
I haven't bought much new release stuff but the Killers album Day & Age is definitely a normal CD.
And they don't seem to be remastering older stuff to DRM'd CDs.
In which case the spamming process will change to make it practical to update the template hundreds of times a day.
Run this by me again.
EFF's lawyers charged $400,000 for checking to confirm that the video was covered under fair use then writing one letter to that effect? That's not legal advice, that's extortion.
Well, no, but this is BT we're talking about here. If they told me the sky was blue I'd look outside.
Not at all uncommon with big ISPs, alas. British Telecom are doing something similar - which to my mind suggests there may well be more than one layer of NAT going on for quite a few customers....
My wife is a therapeutic radiographer - not that this means I'm qualified to understand it, but it does mean I hear of some of the incidents.
Radiation therapy is potentially dangerous. So is all cancer treatment - the reason we use it is because it's a sight less dangerous than letting nature take its course. The main solution is a combination of two things:
However, neither of these are foolproof. The machinery has to be calibrated - it doesn't magically give out the correct dose when told to when it leaves the factory. Calibration errors have caused people to receive much higher doses than intended - and usually the first you hear about it is when a patient complains of significantly worse side effects than you were expecting significantly earlier. Other times patient errors have very nearly resulted in the wrong treatment altogether.
Patient errors? Yep, it can happen. Two patients with a similar name in the waiting room, the next patient is called for and the wrong person gets up. You're supposed to check the patients' date of birth every time but a lot of people seem to lapse into just nodding and agreeing with everything the person in uniform says, so if the patient is asked "Is your date of birth 1st March 1960?" (rather than "Can you confirm your date of birth for me please?"), they just mindlessly agree. My wife's suggestion to help reduce this risk was that photographs of patients be taken on their first treatment and kept with their records - frankly, the only amazing thing about this is it was 2009 when it was made and it wasn't standard practise.
Paradoxically, one of the ways errors are dealt with is to instigate a firm "no blame" policy. The reason for this is so people aren't tempted to try and cover up errors.
If the UK is anything to go by, it doesn't necessarily help much. O2 and Orange both sell the iPhone for virtually the same price on very similar contracts.
Knowing Apple, it wouldn't surprise me at all if they're responsible for this.
In essence, if you use a receiver without support for this DRM tech, the only thing you're going to lose access to is the Programme Listing data - it's the BBC's way of placating the drooling media execs with as little direct impact on consumers as possible
ICBW but don't most DVRs depend on program listing data to know when to record?
The use of the word "free" in both Freeview and Freesat is deceptive IMHO as in the UK (as many of you know) you _have_ to pay for a TV License, if you don't you can't have a TV or anything resembling a terrestrial (analog or digital) receiver. So no TV cards for your computer either. It really is not even an issue of quality anymore, I used to use the argument that the only thing I watched on the BBC was Top Gear and local news and that's still true but I'd gladly pay a token amount per view for each of those I just have a moral objection to being forced to pay for a service that I largely do not use. The fact is that if I stop paying my license I would eventually face prison time and a criminal record. Is this right?
No, the worst they'd give you is a fine.
First, if it were me doing the "quieting of an unfavorable", I would seek anything to discredit him first. Get to his family to discredit him as a person, probably with threat of force and some other bribe. Then I would pressure his bosses to show he was on a termination list for something else, like paedophilia or something else quite heinous.
The Russian authorities have already demonstrated that they have absolutely no qualms about killing an unfavourable in a fairly high-profile fashion.
Yes. I conjecture that the only reason my current counter-measures (and that of GP) work reasonably well is because so many people use worse counter-measures -- which makes it less necessary for spammers to outsmart them (yet). It's not a solution, and by definition only works for a relatively small part of the population of email users.
Mine WERE working reasonably well! Or so I thought - I was blocking well over 90% of incoming email to spam but I didn't have a mechanism for end users to check "may be, may not be" spam - and I didn't want to crank up the sensitivity without that.
But when the people worst affected are the executives who agree the pay every month, you have to ask yourself "how married am I to running my own email system in its entirety?". I can easily see a future where most sysadmins decide the answer is "not very" and wind up outsourcing at least the spam filtering.
There's a big secret that some managers don't seem to get. (It's mercifully less common here in the UK, but I have seen it).
Now, this is a huge secret. I'm not sure I should be posting it here. But anyway - listen closely...
A man working for 60 hours per week will not necessarily produce 50% more than a man working for 40 hours per week. In fact, it's very likely that once he gets tired, he'll make mistakes which he'll then have to fix once rested - and time spent fixing mistakes made through exhaustion is time not being spent on new features.
There, I said it. If you'll excuse me, I have a bunch of managers with torches and pitchforks at my door and I need to set the dog on them.
Well, that article is somewhat about captchas and I couldn't see any direct quotes from billy, considering that most email providers, live/gmail etc. use that tech. and my spam has virtually been reduced to zero in the last few years... No one can stop spammers from sending spam, but you can always filter it out.
The reason your inbox - or anyone's, for that matter - is not overflowing with so much spam that "just hit delete" is no longer an option is not because nobody's sending spam.
Neither is it because the magic email fairies are ensuring that you only receive legitimate email.
It's because some poor bastard is attempting to stop it. But for every counter-measure we take against spam, the spammers work on anti-counter-measures.
For those anti-counter-measures, we take contra-anti-counter-measures.
This doesn't work for very long, however. Before long the spammers have developed dis-contra-anti-counter-measures.
So the mail admins of this world devise un-dis-contra-anti-counter-measures.
I've run out of prefixes meaning "un", but you can see where this is going. It's a game you only win if you don't take part - which is pretty crap if you actually want to use email.
Quite correct. The secondary MX wasn't for load balancing - Postfix can handle more mail than I could ever throw at it - the secondary MX was to minimise the risk of NDRs.
It actually caused as many problems as it solved because spammers seem to think "secondary MX == no spam filtering".
I was seeing more like 97% (once you excluded system generated internal emails - CVS and Bugzilla between them can generate a fair bit of mail).
The killer for running our own mail system in its entirety was when I did the arithmetic and our co-hosted secondary mail server was costing more than buying Google for Domains. That's before you even consider the document management Google for domains offers, which was just icing on the cake.
You may not always be there.
But the Red Hat support team is a phone call away.
Your boss doesn't like being wholly dependent on his resident geek.
The support contract and the bog standard enterprise distribution are his insurance policy. His recovery plan.
I personally guarantee you that by the time the average server OS has had all the necessary tweaks set up to bed it down into a company's systems, along with accounting for little things like "can't use this patch because it clashes with this other app we need, so instead we workaround using this, that other server is so critical to the business that we haven't dared patch it in five years (and I don't care how anal you'd like to be, every business with a significant IT department has at least one server like this)" there is nobody on the planet who can support significant issues over the phone.
It's perhaps less of an issue now than it was 5 or 10 years ago, but it still exists. It's the reason that paid consultants can make a good living on short-term contracts at short notice and potentially being out of work for three to six months of the year.
You're comparing apples and oranges. RHEL is more likely to be used on a server, whereas Windows 7 pro will be on a workstation.
Where most Linux distributions clear up on the server is client access licenses. If you compare Windows licensing with a typical commercial Linux, the two will cost a very similar amount - but Linux distributions don't tend to charge for client access.
How is this flamebait?
The number of people who actually need anything near as sophisticated as Photoshop is minute. If it weren't, Adobe wouldn't charge as much as they do (largely because there'd be a lot more competition at that end of the market) and Photoshop Elements wouldn't need to exist.
How accurate can that sort of gun be?
It cannot be accurate at all, but the cops will become convinced that it is laser-like.
Not just that, the manufacturer will swear blind that it's perfect.
Which means if your car is caught in the crossfire, getting some bugger to admit to it and pay for repairs will be well-nigh impossible.
Stealing is a poor choice of words, but yours is a poor choice of analogy.
It'd be more accurate to compare it to stealing the CD from WalMart, setting up a rig of several CD writers and making many copies then standing outside WalMart giving those copies away. Suddenly the lost revenue isn't (cost of CD), it's (cost of CD multiplied by number of CDs you gave away). Of course nobody really knows how many you made or gave away so they work out how many it's physically possible for you to have made and given away and work on the back of that.
(There is the bijou issuette that a free CD will attract many more takers than a CD on the shelf at $12-15 ever will....)
Good lawyers cost money.
The best lawyers will tell you to drop this idea before it costs you even more money - and time.
Which in the gaming industry would mean that on average every single person involved in the whole industry (with one or two exceptions) should drop almost every idea they ever have.
I've installed countless ubuntu systems on people with little technical expertise that don't understand why they have 10 browser tool bars in their IE install and wonder why their computers run like shit.
In that case, wouldn't the easier solution be to install firefox on windows?
Not necessarily - a lot of toolbars are starting to support Firefox.
>a Jobs search engine.
It would be like Google, but the only button would be the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.
Which, to be fair, would work perfectly well 98% of the time. But you'd wind up with one group of people who ignored the 2% of the time it didn't, claiming it to be totally infallible and another group which focused on the 2% of the time it didn't work to denounce it as a lousy product.
OK, who paid for this and what's in it for them? I've yet to see a piece of so-called "business research" of this nature which was produced with no ulterior motive.
The most obvious thoughts that spring to mind are:
Any others?