Ultimately it doesn't matter whether you have a right to privacy or not. It's not a right you can rely on. Expect the monkeys to paw through your private photos & videos regardless of where you get your PC repaired.
I was going to use my last mod point to mark this insightful but I wanted to post in the discussion.
If you're stupid enough to load up your computer with child porn and take it in to the local kids at circuit city then you deserve to get caught - sure they'll punish him for kiddy porn but we can think of it as someone being punished for his own stupidity.
That said, we had a guy come into the computer store where I was working a summer job once. He looked like the stereotypical pedophile. He ordered a computer that was very bizarre - lots and lots of disks. That computer came back for the installation of a CD burner or some such and of course we happened to turn it on to do a test burn. He'd set it up to auto-load paintshop in thumbnail mode and we got an eyeful of all the guys "teen" porn. Not sure if it was legal or not but we just handed it to the boss and said "deal with it". I don't know what actually came of that.
He'll probably end up winning the privacy argument because consenting to installing a DVD drive is not consenting to having some local kid go through your personal files. He'll probably end up trying the tact of "but i had other things on there that are personal like banking records" or "i didn't put it there, the kids at the shop must have done it, really they must have, prove they didn't".
I guess it's his own fault really for not getting some smart mate to come round and do it instead and watching like a hawk to make sure he wasn't discovered.
The answer is routine encryption, but let's face it - if you need help installing a DVD drive, you're unlikely to have any idea what encryption even is....
Encryption is a double edged sword. In this case nobody would have noticed except for a few large files that they ended up burning to DVD and taking away. They wouldn't have been able to do anything with them and probably would have tossed the DVD in the bin unknowingly.
Encryption draws attention to you, particularly if you get into the habit of passing around large encrypted files. They can't do anything on that basis alone because there are legitimate uses for passing around encrypted files (perhaps I'm emailing my tax summary documents to my accountant) but they will certainly flag you as interesting if they ever see encrypted content.
There are laws in several countries now (UK, notably) that allow them to lock you up if you refuse to supply the key so that they can decrypt content they found. You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't in some places, really.
That's great...why don't you try that with a bookstore?
But if you make a photocopy of your novel or scan it and convert it to an ebook or download it from the Internet...
Walking in and stealing the physical CD is wrong, same as for the book. They paid money to make the CD and book; they are tangible items that can be sold. Taking it from the store deprives the store of one and only one sale.
I own a number of large and cumbersome reference books. Yes, I could carry them round everywhere but my physio would be laughing all the way to the bank. It's much easier for me to find copies of the books electronically and "pirate" them into my PDA's ebook reader. Nobody kicks up a fuss that I've done that. Sure, the quality of the pirated copy is less -- It's either transcribed text with errors or dodgy scans in low resolution but it is useful enough for me and I can always go home and access the full text if I really need to.
Q: Why can't music and movies be the same? I have a large CD and DVD collection that would be useful on my iPod while travelling (something I do enough of to be annoying, unfortunately)!
A: Because the *IAAs are greedy cunts who want to extort every last dollar out of the little guy in the quest for infinite profit.
I just can't bring myself to be outraged about this.
I can - Hellstra is nothing more than a communications provider. Why should they start getting in on the online application space? Their analog phone service offering works most of the time but their service to their customers is ratshit when it doesn't work.
Hellstra as a company put in artificial blocks at their wholesale dept to screw over the competition and help out BigPong. Their whole "it won't do 1500kbps" rule was a farce. I couldn't get ADSL at my property for years because of that crappy rule. Now I have an ADSL2 plan that's locked to ADSL1 and syncs at 4.5-5Mbit with supreme stability.
They are a phone company. Let them be a phone company and not try and trample on every other type of business with half-arsed offerings. Microsoft springs to mind here; they were an OS company who decided to trample other types of software areas as well with half-arsed offerings.
It sounds like Slashdot is advocating security through obscurity...
Why not? Almost every IT "professional" I have to deal with on a daily basis advocates the same. It seems that since every n00b and his dog is advocating it then it must work!
See, that makes no sense to me. I would like to see EVERYTHING (everything that is legal of course) in Wikipedia.
Who decided what is legal? We have this curly argument where the Internet crosses national boundaries. What is illegal where you are may be legal where I am.
I agree that if you're going to have a site that purports to be an encyclopedia then that site should include everything that is submitted, so long as the submissions are factual and accurate.
There is nothing wrong with including mathematical proofs in wikipedia. The only glaring problem I see with it is when 'amateurs' include proofs and get them wrong or when even the experts make data entry errors and the result on the page is wrong. That kind of thing is less obvious in textual information because the brain can spot spelling errors and the like and almost magically correct them as you're reading. Most people don't do that easily with mathematical formulae.
Worse than that is: the article says that the computer contained thousands of images of adult pornography and a few cartoons depicting adult/child interaction. Now, as I understand it, any crappy anime 'porn' out of Japan pretty much depicts something like that and they are legal (correct me if I'm wrong).
It would seem this is just a fishing expedition by the prosecutor on the grounds that they think his watching cartoons means he likes fiddling with kids. That sounds a bit like "we see you own a computer, let's investigate you for the last unknown port scan on the FBI".
The addition of X11 out of the box makes it more complete, and less of a technicality.
X11 does not make Unix. In fact, X11 apps can run on a machine that DOES NOT have an X-server installed. Shit, my Windows machine could happily run X11 apps and the X server on my Amiga could display them for all I care.
X11 support is an add-on. There is no technicality or incompleteness in getting a proper Unix certification without X11. Saying it's not Unix without X11 is like saying it's not IP without TCP.
I wish I had mod points left and hadn't posted in this thread (erm no matter) because your post is humorous and insightful.
What is to stop ISPs charging an anti-crapification fee to websites? A big ISP would likely be able to extort the fee out of a number of large companies (microsoft/msn, google, etc) and leave the rest of the smaller sites with their data defaced en-route to their customer.
I didn't imply kiddie porn or anything of the like. I said "dubious". Dubious depends on locality and context.
What you find acceptable I might find dubious.
are a lot of corrupt people working all over the place. There are a lot of funky rules in regard to what people are and aren't allowed to look in various countries.
There is nothing to say that a disillusioned worker at an ISP couldn't have himself a little fun by somehow hiding an iframe or something into the extra data that displays the contents of an external site that may cause you to be examined a little more closely by the authorities. It's unlikely, I know, but once the facilities are in place it becomes much easier to manipulate if someone ever wanted to.
Your stupid popup ad thing is one more plausible example. Again, that is dubious content. You might not get in trouble for it but it could cause you trouble if it links to spyware.
This could open up a whole bunch of "but I didn't download that" claims when users are caught with dubious material. They could claim that their ISP modified their download streams and point (at least some of) the blame toward the ISP.
It's all a little dubious if you ask me. I always knew it was possible to fiddle with the stream, but I didn't think anyone would bother because it could possibly break a lot of pages that are held together with fragile HTML-fu.
If the power was knocked out to a cell phone tower due to a natural disaster, wouldn't the phone lines/trunk also be knocked out
That's not strictly true. Power is often trunked in from considerable distance away. If the natural disaster effects the generation area and not the cell tower then the cell tower can be out even though it still has connectivity to the world.
Further, a lot of cell towers use microwave links to the nearby towers and even back to the phone company base; particularly towers in remote areas. Even if the natural disaster killed out the power the UPS/generator could be sufficiently protected as to keep the tower on the air.
I have to agree with all the other sentiments in this thread. With the impending xmas day any new year pay attention to how difficult it is to get a slot on the tower and also a line out of it when everyone is on the phone saying "hey it's new year here but we're an hour ahead of you isn't it cool we're in different years?".
The same would apply in a disaster situation I am imagining with every man, woman and their dog calling every other man, woman and their dog they know to see who is OK and who isn't.
If the system is not designed to meet the needs of the users
If only the users knew what they wanted. I've worked in a few shops now and the one invariable truth about "customers" is that they never know what they want. They agree on something, go away and see Shiny Other Product (TM) and come back to change the requirements; usually more than once.
Depending on how long it takes them to come back you can end up with a design that is no longer applicable to their requirements and require fairly extensive rework.
All the time managers and sales people are out there wanking on about how they have the best programmers (well, they have me so it's not all wrong:p) and that these changes won't possibly effect the schedule at all.
It's no wonder that code is poorly designed and written. For all the formal theory good practice if management are continually moving the target at short notice every good programmer turns into a hacker... make it work yesterday, make it reliable in release 2 (which never comes).
Finally I will be able to know wtf happens during my blackouts and hth do I manage to get home with no cash!
You have not heard of the mythical beer chariot? The powerful have been trying to conceal its very existence but some people remember.
This new device will help those of us with periodic memory loss that seems only to occur on Friday nights. Perhaps we will see conclusive proof that the beer chariot exists after all!
It seems I've seen this on/. in the last couple of weeks (maybe not the same article, but the same MS camera thing). It was tagged "biotech" then too.
It's the Slashdot editors own version of this memory product. They repeat every story at least once so that even those of us with permanently shot memories can remember them.
The voiceover is excellent. I felt that was the most involved I've even been watching any movie.
There's been a lot of debate whether this is about perfecting the movie or making a boatload more cash. I don't think that there's that many die-hard fans out there who would just go out and purchase yet another release of the movie. Would they really continue to milk it for all it was worth?
Someone elsewhere in the thread compares it to the revised Starwars movies. At least Lucas only really only did one major revision to bring the film more in line with his original dreams. It could be more easily argued that Lucas did that to fanfare the three new movies he was making and probably make a boatload of cash along the way to help pay for them. For me, being comparatively young, I was glad to see the movies on the big screen again being old enough to actually enjoy the experience properly.
If Blade Runner makes a serious worldwide theatrical release with the new version I'll go see it just for the sake of watching it on the big screen and enjoying it. If it stays on DVD I'll just skip it as will probably a lot of people.
What kind of sad world is it when a manufacturer makes a device that can share files on the Internet. Joe puts his files on there and puts it on the Internet. Jane (and everyone) can access all of Joe's private files because he was too lazy/ignorant to bother securing them. Joe and record companies sue product maker because product performed AS EXPECTED!
There's been a lot of using the legal system to get compensation for people's own stupidity lately. It's sad that it's spilled over to products that now carry spurious warning labels (the frisbee that says "do not throw toward people") or functionality so limited as to make it not worth buying in the first place.
Of course, this whole post is based on the postulation that WD have implemented this blocking of files to cover their asses from legal action.
Objectively, however, creationism and evolution are not necessarily at odds as they describe distinct processes.
The Pope has recently acknowledged this very fact. I do not recall the exact arguments they used but basically God created the whole shebang and the "free will" part that the bible says we have let the rest happen.
Okay, leaving tongue-in-cheek mode to make a technical point: Back in the VHS days, you had to translate media between PAL and NTSC. Today, there's no reason a DVD player can't handle both. The DVD players can already rescale the video, frame rate no longer has anything to do with "tracking" or "synching." So the PAL -vs- NTSC excuse doesn't hold water any more. Especially since that conversion can be done in real time on a midrange PC these days.
Towards the end of the VHS era multi-format units were practically everywhere. There was no need to recode because the video player would extract the signal from tape just fine regardless of format. The only issue was that back then televisions that played many standards were less common than they are now.
What really shits me is that most DVD players can output PAL60 (PAL coding at 60Hz) and most televisions will sync to it. So really there isn't even a frame rate conversion rather than a small colour adjustment.
What shits me even more than that is that most DVD players and most modern (within the last 10-15 years) televisions will handle practically any TV standard you can throw at them in the interest of the manufacturer being able to make one model and sell it in many places rather than many different models.
There is nothing stopping them just whacking the NTSC video on a disk and calling it region zero (play anywhere) and being done with it.
Slashdot Mirror
ROFL!
I was going to use my last mod point to mark this insightful but I wanted to post in the discussion.
If you're stupid enough to load up your computer with child porn and take it in to the local kids at circuit city then you deserve to get caught - sure they'll punish him for kiddy porn but we can think of it as someone being punished for his own stupidity.
That said, we had a guy come into the computer store where I was working a summer job once. He looked like the stereotypical pedophile. He ordered a computer that was very bizarre - lots and lots of disks. That computer came back for the installation of a CD burner or some such and of course we happened to turn it on to do a test burn. He'd set it up to auto-load paintshop in thumbnail mode and we got an eyeful of all the guys "teen" porn. Not sure if it was legal or not but we just handed it to the boss and said "deal with it". I don't know what actually came of that.
He'll probably end up winning the privacy argument because consenting to installing a DVD drive is not consenting to having some local kid go through your personal files. He'll probably end up trying the tact of "but i had other things on there that are personal like banking records" or "i didn't put it there, the kids at the shop must have done it, really they must have, prove they didn't".
I guess it's his own fault really for not getting some smart mate to come round and do it instead and watching like a hawk to make sure he wasn't discovered.
Encryption is a double edged sword. In this case nobody would have noticed except for a few large files that they ended up burning to DVD and taking away. They wouldn't have been able to do anything with them and probably would have tossed the DVD in the bin unknowingly.
Encryption draws attention to you, particularly if you get into the habit of passing around large encrypted files. They can't do anything on that basis alone because there are legitimate uses for passing around encrypted files (perhaps I'm emailing my tax summary documents to my accountant) but they will certainly flag you as interesting if they ever see encrypted content.
There are laws in several countries now (UK, notably) that allow them to lock you up if you refuse to supply the key so that they can decrypt content they found. You're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't in some places, really.
But if you make a photocopy of your novel or scan it and convert it to an ebook or download it from the Internet...
Walking in and stealing the physical CD is wrong, same as for the book. They paid money to make the CD and book; they are tangible items that can be sold. Taking it from the store deprives the store of one and only one sale.
I own a number of large and cumbersome reference books. Yes, I could carry them round everywhere but my physio would be laughing all the way to the bank. It's much easier for me to find copies of the books electronically and "pirate" them into my PDA's ebook reader. Nobody kicks up a fuss that I've done that. Sure, the quality of the pirated copy is less -- It's either transcribed text with errors or dodgy scans in low resolution but it is useful enough for me and I can always go home and access the full text if I really need to.
Q: Why can't music and movies be the same? I have a large CD and DVD collection that would be useful on my iPod while travelling (something I do enough of to be annoying, unfortunately)!
A: Because the *IAAs are greedy cunts who want to extort every last dollar out of the little guy in the quest for infinite profit.
I can - Hellstra is nothing more than a communications provider. Why should they start getting in on the online application space? Their analog phone service offering works most of the time but their service to their customers is ratshit when it doesn't work.
Hellstra as a company put in artificial blocks at their wholesale dept to screw over the competition and help out BigPong. Their whole "it won't do 1500kbps" rule was a farce. I couldn't get ADSL at my property for years because of that crappy rule. Now I have an ADSL2 plan that's locked to ADSL1 and syncs at 4.5-5Mbit with supreme stability.
They are a phone company. Let them be a phone company and not try and trample on every other type of business with half-arsed offerings. Microsoft springs to mind here; they were an OS company who decided to trample other types of software areas as well with half-arsed offerings.
Why not? Almost every IT "professional" I have to deal with on a daily basis advocates the same. It seems that since every n00b and his dog is advocating it then it must work!
That might explain why I can code Perl so well ;)
Who decided what is legal? We have this curly argument where the Internet crosses national boundaries. What is illegal where you are may be legal where I am.
I agree that if you're going to have a site that purports to be an encyclopedia then that site should include everything that is submitted, so long as the submissions are factual and accurate.
There is nothing wrong with including mathematical proofs in wikipedia. The only glaring problem I see with it is when 'amateurs' include proofs and get them wrong or when even the experts make data entry errors and the result on the page is wrong. That kind of thing is less obvious in textual information because the brain can spot spelling errors and the like and almost magically correct them as you're reading. Most people don't do that easily with mathematical formulae.
Worse than that is: the article says that the computer contained thousands of images of adult pornography and a few cartoons depicting adult/child interaction. Now, as I understand it, any crappy anime 'porn' out of Japan pretty much depicts something like that and they are legal (correct me if I'm wrong).
It would seem this is just a fishing expedition by the prosecutor on the grounds that they think his watching cartoons means he likes fiddling with kids. That sounds a bit like "we see you own a computer, let's investigate you for the last unknown port scan on the FBI".
weft45gvsd'cjascwefgvedfv[jsde0[9rgjh5bdmx s eRWT$Y%^&%^$Rqwedw23WDF34t45^&*Tybdfvsmdnfewf
Oh, the contents of my brain is mostly random noise!
X11 does not make Unix. In fact, X11 apps can run on a machine that DOES NOT have an X-server installed. Shit, my Windows machine could happily run X11 apps and the X server on my Amiga could display them for all I care.
X11 support is an add-on. There is no technicality or incompleteness in getting a proper Unix certification without X11. Saying it's not Unix without X11 is like saying it's not IP without TCP.
I wish I had mod points left and hadn't posted in this thread (erm no matter) because your post is humorous and insightful.
What is to stop ISPs charging an anti-crapification fee to websites? A big ISP would likely be able to extort the fee out of a number of large companies (microsoft/msn, google, etc) and leave the rest of the smaller sites with their data defaced en-route to their customer.
I didn't imply kiddie porn or anything of the like. I said "dubious". Dubious depends on locality and context.
What you find acceptable I might find dubious.
are a lot of corrupt people working all over the place. There are a lot of funky rules in regard to what people are and aren't allowed to look in various countries.
There is nothing to say that a disillusioned worker at an ISP couldn't have himself a little fun by somehow hiding an iframe or something into the extra data that displays the contents of an external site that may cause you to be examined a little more closely by the authorities. It's unlikely, I know, but once the facilities are in place it becomes much easier to manipulate if someone ever wanted to.
Your stupid popup ad thing is one more plausible example. Again, that is dubious content. You might not get in trouble for it but it could cause you trouble if it links to spyware.
This could open up a whole bunch of "but I didn't download that" claims when users are caught with dubious material. They could claim that their ISP modified their download streams and point (at least some of) the blame toward the ISP.
It's all a little dubious if you ask me. I always knew it was possible to fiddle with the stream, but I didn't think anyone would bother because it could possibly break a lot of pages that are held together with fragile HTML-fu.
That's not strictly true. Power is often trunked in from considerable distance away. If the natural disaster effects the generation area and not the cell tower then the cell tower can be out even though it still has connectivity to the world.
Further, a lot of cell towers use microwave links to the nearby towers and even back to the phone company base; particularly towers in remote areas. Even if the natural disaster killed out the power the UPS/generator could be sufficiently protected as to keep the tower on the air.
I have to agree with all the other sentiments in this thread. With the impending xmas day any new year pay attention to how difficult it is to get a slot on the tower and also a line out of it when everyone is on the phone saying "hey it's new year here but we're an hour ahead of you isn't it cool we're in different years?".
The same would apply in a disaster situation I am imagining with every man, woman and their dog calling every other man, woman and their dog they know to see who is OK and who isn't.
You have not heard of the mythical beer chariot? The powerful have been trying to conceal its very existence but some people remember.
This new device will help those of us with periodic memory loss that seems only to occur on Friday nights. Perhaps we will see conclusive proof that the beer chariot exists after all!
It's the Slashdot editors own version of this memory product. They repeat every story at least once so that even those of us with permanently shot memories can remember them.
The voiceover is excellent. I felt that was the most involved I've even been watching any movie.
There's been a lot of debate whether this is about perfecting the movie or making a boatload more cash. I don't think that there's that many die-hard fans out there who would just go out and purchase yet another release of the movie. Would they really continue to milk it for all it was worth?
Someone elsewhere in the thread compares it to the revised Starwars movies. At least Lucas only really only did one major revision to bring the film more in line with his original dreams. It could be more easily argued that Lucas did that to fanfare the three new movies he was making and probably make a boatload of cash along the way to help pay for them. For me, being comparatively young, I was glad to see the movies on the big screen again being old enough to actually enjoy the experience properly.
If Blade Runner makes a serious worldwide theatrical release with the new version I'll go see it just for the sake of watching it on the big screen and enjoying it. If it stays on DVD I'll just skip it as will probably a lot of people.
Didn't Jurassic Park teach us anything. Instead of T-Rex eating our lawyers we'll have our lawyers keeling over dead from fossil viri.
I knew there was a reason that there's almost no gopher servers left: Computers kill gophers!
What kind of sad world is it when a manufacturer makes a device that can share files on the Internet. Joe puts his files on there and puts it on the Internet. Jane (and everyone) can access all of Joe's private files because he was too lazy/ignorant to bother securing them. Joe and record companies sue product maker because product performed AS EXPECTED!
There's been a lot of using the legal system to get compensation for people's own stupidity lately. It's sad that it's spilled over to products that now carry spurious warning labels (the frisbee that says "do not throw toward people") or functionality so limited as to make it not worth buying in the first place.
Of course, this whole post is based on the postulation that WD have implemented this blocking of files to cover their asses from legal action.
The Pope has recently acknowledged this very fact. I do not recall the exact arguments they used but basically God created the whole shebang and the "free will" part that the bible says we have let the rest happen.
How can you remain neutral on such a topic? You either believe one way or the other.
It's nice how they call it "design" implying that there is actually some science behind the whole thing.
I want to be the first to welcome our new GPL overlord to the commercial software world.
Towards the end of the VHS era multi-format units were practically everywhere. There was no need to recode because the video player would extract the signal from tape just fine regardless of format. The only issue was that back then televisions that played many standards were less common than they are now.
What really shits me is that most DVD players can output PAL60 (PAL coding at 60Hz) and most televisions will sync to it. So really there isn't even a frame rate conversion rather than a small colour adjustment.
What shits me even more than that is that most DVD players and most modern (within the last 10-15 years) televisions will handle practically any TV standard you can throw at them in the interest of the manufacturer being able to make one model and sell it in many places rather than many different models.
There is nothing stopping them just whacking the NTSC video on a disk and calling it region zero (play anywhere) and being done with it.