It's really very simple. The kilo is evaporating. Everyone knows that even ice in your freezer evaporates over time. The kilogram has been kept there for how many years? Over the last 18 it's lose 50 micrograms. That's not a lot really compared to its mass. It's just evaporated is all.
Just because the practice is winked at doesn't make it legal.
They only winked at it because recording to analog tape is inherrently lossy no matter how good your equipment is. After a few generations it's clearly not as good as the original source. To top it off playing vinyl and analog tape wears out the surface and eventually the quality of your media degrades. It seems only fair that if your expensive vinyl is going to wear out if you play it over and over that you're better off only playing it a few times to record it to high quality tapes each time a tape gets chewed.
Digital copies make (almost) perfect copies of the input. You can make many many generations of copies before there's enough bit errors to even be noticible. Add to that the ease and speed which you can hand out digital copies (16x burning rather than 1:1 for vinyl->tape) and they are scared. Also, it's theoretically impossible to wear out a CD or DVD if you take good care of it so there should be no need to make backup copies to prevent it wearing out as you play it.
The old "it's only illegal if you get caught" really comes into play. If you recorded your vinyl to tape or made mix tapes for your own use then nobody was really any the wiser. The same goes for CDs and DVDs now. It's the ease of widespread distribution that scares them. I just downloaded a 4G DVD image in the space of minutes. Yes it was legal, it was a Linux distro. It may has well have been a movie; it didn't take long to get it and there's hundreds of places you can get movies and music from.
Nobody publicised their music sharing to the world back in the tape days. I am almost certain that the recording industry had a meeting and sat down to work out what they were going to do about these new fangled recorders, decided that nobody would ever want to make a crappy copy of their records and kept on going as they were. THey probably had the same meeting about CDs, DAT, and the Internet.
I wanted to submit my PC to the pool but you must have a static IP *grr* I'm not paying more to get a fixed IP address. It's not like I use all of that enormous data allocation or fat pipe. In fact, if I didn't download 100G of pr0nz each month it wouldn't even get 50% used!
I always thought it would be nice if we had one day a year where people made a conscious effort to turn off all their lights, like "Star's Day" or some other stupid name so people could have one night a year to keep lights off, but that would inevitably just lead to an increase in crime for that night, so... darn.
We had something similar here recently, but it wasn't for the benefit of the stars. There was a "turn off all your lights to save power and reduce global warming" night. I participated mostly because I only ever have on one small light here because I am not up long enough at night to need thousands of watts in lights.
It's amazing the amount of waste. We could pull every second street light in the world and halve the amount of light without really making it visibly darker. I lay in bed with the curtains closed on a shitty overcast night (last night) and there is still enough light from the street lights coming through the curtains that the room is lit up. It's scary the many hundreds of watts of lighting running on my street alone.
All this outdoor lighting doesn't just ruin astronomy. The effects much closer to home are that we are making enormous amounts of waste to produce all these lights, and make the power to run them.
And if Roswell is anything to go by, all this light is just a shining intergalactic beacon telling the little green men where to come and kill us.
must say that it's by far the best IDE I've ever had the pleasure of operating
Too many years working on Windows with crappy MS tools has left you brain damaged.
Eclipse is crap - I can't stand the complexity of its user interface. You spend more time in the Eclipse interface than you do developing good code. VS is much the same, but at least there's not as many useless tabs littered all over the place and only a handful of modes to really come to terms with.
True programmers develop their code in binary and load it into RAM with toggle switches and push buttons. The rest of us prefer Emacs (or Vi if we're feeling sadistic). This IDE thing is for pussies.
the younger you grip this mentality, the faster you will advance.
The younger you grip this mentality the sooner you will be assimilated. There is zero legitimite use for user MS products in the server market. There are dozens of alternatives that provide similar functions are similar or even less cost. Of all the alternatives all are more stable and more secure than the MS POS.
It's been my experience that upper management says "microsoft has a product that does this" not because they like Microsoft, but because they're clueless n00bs and the only computer companies they know are Microsoft and Dell.
The quickest way to advance is to be able to show your boss why MS is a bad choice and why any one of the dozens of alternatives better suits your needs. Telling them that you already know mysql is a good start. Justify it in terms of your cost/hour and number of weeks to learn the MS POS sufficiently to make it work in a sane and secure way. Then tell them after you've learned it and how to secure it you need more time to set it up and configure it. Explain that there are better solutions that you're already proficient with (if this really is the case). I find that at my salary level 1-2 weeks of my time more than offsets the difference in cost between some MS toy and a real piece of software if they really don't want free software.
Of course, this means you have to know of software to fit a number of needs and be able to quickly dig up documented evidence showing that it performs at least as well as the MS crap (we all know that everything is better, but finding studies that aren't by clueless n00bs that actually prove it is the hard part).
It doesn't take much people to monitor a system like this at all. Computers do most of the screening work to point out the small selection of people who deserve further manual investigation. The quality of the algorithms is becoming such that people will eventually not be required to intervene. The biggest problem is finding space for all the computers and data storage.
I don't think Americans would stand for it.
Americans will stand for anything. Somebody will tell them that it is a way of reducing petty crime, protecting the children, making paying for groceries easier, etc. Nowhere will it be mentioned that the entire reason for the system is to track your asses. The dumb cattle majority of people there (and around the world) will buy the lies hook, line and sinker. the masses will only work out that it's about tracking their asses when it's too late to do anything about it.
The problem is that if you put a pointer of any kind near a security hole you can often expose a bug!
Re:This will NOT raise awareness or work in any wa
on
TimeWarner DNS Hijacking
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Once again, the ISP has punished the good guys for problems crated by the bad guys. The root cause of the botnet is Windoze. Fixing it and raising awareness is as simple as cutting the problem computers off your network and telling their owners why. This is as it should be and pretending otherwise props up third rate software and threatens the stability of the net.
I wish I hadn't run out of mod points; this is gold.
That's a pretty cut and dried way of reducing the number of bots. Cutting the user off forces them to understand what is wrong and why they're cut off. If you just give them information most will just click past it and continue on their merry way. Users don't want information. They want the pr0nz as quick as possible. Didn't you know that?
I can think of one case where a (now ex) friend of mine would email To: every single person in her work address book with SPAM for her work. I started out telling her to use the Bcc: field at least and pointed her to a web page describing why you'd want to do that. she replied "I don't want to read all that technical garbage" then carried on the same. Then I asked her to remove me from her list. She replied "I am going to send you this stuff because I know you want it" (it really was SPAM for her work, it wasn't even jokes or chain mail). There ended our friendship as I reported them to their ISP. They were warned by their ISP and still continued doing what they did. They lost hosting pretty quick after that.
People don't want to learn. They are, by and large, idiots. Heavy handed measures are the only way to force them to realise that fact.
IANAL. Clearly, by your misguided assertions you are not either.
In the twice, while I was a small business owner, I had to litigate I was required by the courts to follow the process I described. You might think the system is broken but have you considered that in all of the high profile examples you list you didn't see all the menial BS that went on before it went to court? Perhaps SCO Group did signal their intent to sue and allow the other parties reasonable time to find a solution before they went to court? I'm not defending SCO - let that be known.
The US system is badly broken, yes. That brokenness comes from high powered corporates using it for their own end with a bunch of high powered expensive lawyers against the little man. Did you ever notice that *usually* they're picking on individuals or smaller companies who haven't a chance to defend themselves against the legal weight of the corporation?
When you wish to take somebody to civil court you must first show them your intention to do so.
You must clearly state your grounds for claim and allow the other party reasonable time (weeks to months, usually) to either counter your argument or settle your claim.
If the other party disputes your claim you should attempt to resolve the issue by negotiation before you file. If you make it to court without proof that you attempted to negotiate and the other party claims you refused to enter into negotiations you'll usually get ordered to seek mediation and lose costs as well.
If you have not made steps to solve the matter out of court then you usually cannot take anyone to the civil court. There are, of course, a few exceptions to this rule. This rule exists to prevent every RIAA, Dick and Head from suing every random person for which they can find a name and residential address.
"pre-litigation" letters are the first step before even attending the court registry to file papers.
That said, you also need to be able to identify the person(s)/entity you are filing against along with their residential address. An IP address is not sufficient information to do that. This seems like another RIAA scheme to kill two birds with one stone; fish for information about IP address holders and also cover the pre-litigation step required to actually haul them into the court.
With all that's going on in this industry it makes me sad that so much is being invested in tracking down people who download copyrighted music and movies yet there's millions of unsolved actual crimes including kidnapping, rape and murder each year. What about the drug dealers on the streets?
Q: Why aren't we investing more time and money into catching all the really bad bastards? A: Because it doesn't help corporate suit-wearing wankers get ever fatter pockets and make ever larger "donations" (s/donations/bribes/) to candidates.
They think my iPod is a bomb half the time. If I have it in my carry-on when I fly I get pulled aside for the explosives residue test every single time. Take the iPod out and they let me pass without issue. Add to the fact that I look nothing like your stereotypical "terrorist"...
I deal with this kind of crap in embedded Linux installs daily. Managers and marketoids want to do all sorts of insanely stupid things under the guise of "making it easy for the customer to configure the device within a maximum of 5 minutes with no technical knowledge", etc.
In the mean time the fallout from all the insane things that "need" to be done is gaping security holes all over the place and a bunch of manager types saying 'but it doesn't matter, nobody will ever want to hack us'.
For the record I used to work for a company which built Internet-accessible security products. Whenever there was a breach it was always my fault even though I told them that enabling a particular service to the greater world was risky and would require constant attention by a qualified Linux admin and also require a regular mandatory update schedule and code reviews to continue some level of security. They never wanted to do the regular updates or code reviews because it was so costly and updates inconvenience the customer (I'm sure less than a r00ted box, but explain that to marketoids).
Suffice to say I quit that job and am starting another with a company that actually cares about security over customer friendliness (and cares about their employees at least as much as their profit margin).
It comes with the title of being Manager. It's not a daily thing. The head-ass interraction period begins the day they receive the letter with the words "promotion' and "manager" in it. The first thing most managers try and do each day after that is shove head FURTHER up their ass. It's also the second, third,... , nth thing they do as well.
Parody is a protected right under almost all fair use provisions. I'm sure that will change in time as the money hungry industry realises that there's good money to be made from people who parody, use for education or critical review. Weird Al is safe for the time-being, but I doubt it will last forever.
when was the last time you heard of ASCAP suing old grannies?
Actually, they went after a friend of my ex's recently for some silly reason. He was probably being a tool (he is that kind) but he certainly wasn't running a business.
Slashdot Mirror
It's really very simple. The kilo is evaporating. Everyone knows that even ice in your freezer evaporates over time. The kilogram has been kept there for how many years? Over the last 18 it's lose 50 micrograms. That's not a lot really compared to its mass. It's just evaporated is all.
It's all "somebody think of the children" so that people would read his article.
Just because the practice is winked at doesn't make it legal.
They only winked at it because recording to analog tape is inherrently lossy no matter how good your equipment is. After a few generations it's clearly not as good as the original source. To top it off playing vinyl and analog tape wears out the surface and eventually the quality of your media degrades. It seems only fair that if your expensive vinyl is going to wear out if you play it over and over that you're better off only playing it a few times to record it to high quality tapes each time a tape gets chewed.
Digital copies make (almost) perfect copies of the input. You can make many many generations of copies before there's enough bit errors to even be noticible. Add to that the ease and speed which you can hand out digital copies (16x burning rather than 1:1 for vinyl->tape) and they are scared. Also, it's theoretically impossible to wear out a CD or DVD if you take good care of it so there should be no need to make backup copies to prevent it wearing out as you play it.
The old "it's only illegal if you get caught" really comes into play. If you recorded your vinyl to tape or made mix tapes for your own use then nobody was really any the wiser. The same goes for CDs and DVDs now. It's the ease of widespread distribution that scares them. I just downloaded a 4G DVD image in the space of minutes. Yes it was legal, it was a Linux distro. It may has well have been a movie; it didn't take long to get it and there's hundreds of places you can get movies and music from.
Nobody publicised their music sharing to the world back in the tape days. I am almost certain that the recording industry had a meeting and sat down to work out what they were going to do about these new fangled recorders, decided that nobody would ever want to make a crappy copy of their records and kept on going as they were. THey probably had the same meeting about CDs, DAT, and the Internet.
I wanted to submit my PC to the pool but you must have a static IP *grr* I'm not paying more to get a fixed IP address. It's not like I use all of that enormous data allocation or fat pipe. In fact, if I didn't download 100G of pr0nz each month it wouldn't even get 50% used!
I always thought it would be nice if we had one day a year where people made a conscious effort to turn off all their lights, like "Star's Day" or some other stupid name so people could have one night a year to keep lights off, but that would inevitably just lead to an increase in crime for that night, so... darn.
We had something similar here recently, but it wasn't for the benefit of the stars. There was a "turn off all your lights to save power and reduce global warming" night. I participated mostly because I only ever have on one small light here because I am not up long enough at night to need thousands of watts in lights.
It's amazing the amount of waste. We could pull every second street light in the world and halve the amount of light without really making it visibly darker. I lay in bed with the curtains closed on a shitty overcast night (last night) and there is still enough light from the street lights coming through the curtains that the room is lit up. It's scary the many hundreds of watts of lighting running on my street alone.
All this outdoor lighting doesn't just ruin astronomy. The effects much closer to home are that we are making enormous amounts of waste to produce all these lights, and make the power to run them.
And if Roswell is anything to go by, all this light is just a shining intergalactic beacon telling the little green men where to come and kill us.
must say that it's by far the best IDE I've ever had the pleasure of operating
Too many years working on Windows with crappy MS tools has left you brain damaged.
Eclipse is crap - I can't stand the complexity of its user interface. You spend more time in the Eclipse interface than you do developing good code. VS is much the same, but at least there's not as many useless tabs littered all over the place and only a handful of modes to really come to terms with.
True programmers develop their code in binary and load it into RAM with toggle switches and push buttons. The rest of us prefer Emacs (or Vi if we're feeling sadistic). This IDE thing is for pussies.
the younger you grip this mentality, the faster you will advance.
The younger you grip this mentality the sooner you will be assimilated. There is zero legitimite use for user MS products in the server market. There are dozens of alternatives that provide similar functions are similar or even less cost. Of all the alternatives all are more stable and more secure than the MS POS.
It's been my experience that upper management says "microsoft has a product that does this" not because they like Microsoft, but because they're clueless n00bs and the only computer companies they know are Microsoft and Dell.
The quickest way to advance is to be able to show your boss why MS is a bad choice and why any one of the dozens of alternatives better suits your needs. Telling them that you already know mysql is a good start. Justify it in terms of your cost/hour and number of weeks to learn the MS POS sufficiently to make it work in a sane and secure way. Then tell them after you've learned it and how to secure it you need more time to set it up and configure it. Explain that there are better solutions that you're already proficient with (if this really is the case). I find that at my salary level 1-2 weeks of my time more than offsets the difference in cost between some MS toy and a real piece of software if they really don't want free software.
Of course, this means you have to know of software to fit a number of needs and be able to quickly dig up documented evidence showing that it performs at least as well as the MS crap (we all know that everything is better, but finding studies that aren't by clueless n00bs that actually prove it is the hard part).
of course, a competent architect will know when to use sql server
Never
and when to use oracle.
as long as you're not using SQL server
How very fitting - I was going to post the same comment!
but what kind of infrastructure does
It doesn't take much people to monitor a system like this at all. Computers do most of the screening work to point out the small selection of people who deserve further manual investigation. The quality of the algorithms is becoming such that people will eventually not be required to intervene. The biggest problem is finding space for all the computers and data storage.
I don't think Americans would stand for it.
Americans will stand for anything. Somebody will tell them that it is a way of reducing petty crime, protecting the children, making paying for groceries easier, etc. Nowhere will it be mentioned that the entire reason for the system is to track your asses. The dumb cattle majority of people there (and around the world) will buy the lies hook, line and sinker. the masses will only work out that it's about tracking their asses when it's too late to do anything about it.
Who gives a fuck about the definition of HD in resolution terms.
As long as it's good enough to see Amy's obscene tattoo it's high def enough for Futurama
But can we see Amy's obscene tattoo?
C'mon, fat people aren't fat because of their own fault, it is everyone else's fault that they eat too much and sit on their fat asses.
With 3 or more satellites in view it's technically possible to calculate altitude, I guess.
I bet she was fugly..
Funnily enough, not. She was of european descent and in the good kind of way... too bad she was a farking moron.
The problem is that if you put a pointer of any kind near a security hole you can often expose a bug!
Once again, the ISP has punished the good guys for problems crated by the bad guys. The root cause of the botnet is Windoze. Fixing it and raising awareness is as simple as cutting the problem computers off your network and telling their owners why. This is as it should be and pretending otherwise props up third rate software and threatens the stability of the net.
I wish I hadn't run out of mod points; this is gold.
That's a pretty cut and dried way of reducing the number of bots. Cutting the user off forces them to understand what is wrong and why they're cut off. If you just give them information most will just click past it and continue on their merry way. Users don't want information. They want the pr0nz as quick as possible. Didn't you know that?
I can think of one case where a (now ex) friend of mine would email To: every single person in her work address book with SPAM for her work. I started out telling her to use the Bcc: field at least and pointed her to a web page describing why you'd want to do that. she replied "I don't want to read all that technical garbage" then carried on the same. Then I asked her to remove me from her list. She replied "I am going to send you this stuff because I know you want it" (it really was SPAM for her work, it wasn't even jokes or chain mail). There ended our friendship as I reported them to their ISP. They were warned by their ISP and still continued doing what they did. They lost hosting pretty quick after that.
People don't want to learn. They are, by and large, idiots. Heavy handed measures are the only way to force them to realise that fact.
IANAL. Clearly, by your misguided assertions you are not either.
In the twice, while I was a small business owner, I had to litigate I was required by the courts to follow the process I described. You might think the system is broken but have you considered that in all of the high profile examples you list you didn't see all the menial BS that went on before it went to court? Perhaps SCO Group did signal their intent to sue and allow the other parties reasonable time to find a solution before they went to court? I'm not defending SCO - let that be known.
The US system is badly broken, yes. That brokenness comes from high powered corporates using it for their own end with a bunch of high powered expensive lawyers against the little man. Did you ever notice that *usually* they're picking on individuals or smaller companies who haven't a chance to defend themselves against the legal weight of the corporation?
When you wish to take somebody to civil court you must first show them your intention to do so.
You must clearly state your grounds for claim and allow the other party reasonable time (weeks to months, usually) to either counter your argument or settle your claim.
If the other party disputes your claim you should attempt to resolve the issue by negotiation before you file. If you make it to court without proof that you attempted to negotiate and the other party claims you refused to enter into negotiations you'll usually get ordered to seek mediation and lose costs as well.
If you have not made steps to solve the matter out of court then you usually cannot take anyone to the civil court. There are, of course, a few exceptions to this rule. This rule exists to prevent every RIAA, Dick and Head from suing every random person for which they can find a name and residential address.
"pre-litigation" letters are the first step before even attending the court registry to file papers.
That said, you also need to be able to identify the person(s)/entity you are filing against along with their residential address. An IP address is not sufficient information to do that. This seems like another RIAA scheme to kill two birds with one stone; fish for information about IP address holders and also cover the pre-litigation step required to actually haul them into the court.
With all that's going on in this industry it makes me sad that so much is being invested in tracking down people who download copyrighted music and movies yet there's millions of unsolved actual crimes including kidnapping, rape and murder each year. What about the drug dealers on the streets?
Q: Why aren't we investing more time and money into catching all the really bad bastards?
A: Because it doesn't help corporate suit-wearing wankers get ever fatter pockets and make ever larger "donations" (s/donations/bribes/) to candidates.
They think my iPod is a bomb half the time. If I have it in my carry-on when I fly I get pulled aside for the explosives residue test every single time. Take the iPod out and they let me pass without issue. Add to the fact that I look nothing like your stereotypical "terrorist"...
I deal with this kind of crap in embedded Linux installs daily. Managers and marketoids want to do all sorts of insanely stupid things under the guise of "making it easy for the customer to configure the device within a maximum of 5 minutes with no technical knowledge", etc.
In the mean time the fallout from all the insane things that "need" to be done is gaping security holes all over the place and a bunch of manager types saying 'but it doesn't matter, nobody will ever want to hack us'.
For the record I used to work for a company which built Internet-accessible security products. Whenever there was a breach it was always my fault even though I told them that enabling a particular service to the greater world was risky and would require constant attention by a qualified Linux admin and also require a regular mandatory update schedule and code reviews to continue some level of security. They never wanted to do the regular updates or code reviews because it was so costly and updates inconvenience the customer (I'm sure less than a r00ted box, but explain that to marketoids).
Suffice to say I quit that job and am starting another with a company that actually cares about security over customer friendliness (and cares about their employees at least as much as their profit margin).
In communist Russia, CAPTCHA breaks you!
It comes with the title of being Manager. It's not a daily thing. The head-ass interraction period begins the day they receive the letter with the words "promotion' and "manager" in it. The first thing most managers try and do each day after that is shove head FURTHER up their ass. It's also the second, third, ... , nth thing they do as well.
Parody is a protected right under almost all fair use provisions. I'm sure that will change in time as the money hungry industry realises that there's good money to be made from people who parody, use for education or critical review. Weird Al is safe for the time-being, but I doubt it will last forever.
when was the last time you heard of ASCAP suing old grannies?
Actually, they went after a friend of my ex's recently for some silly reason. He was probably being a tool (he is that kind) but he certainly wasn't running a business.