"we have a story of a lady leaving a 2-year old in her apartment for days while she was in jail, never mentioned to the cops that a child was left home alone!"
I don't know where you're getting the "never mentioned" part, other than by inference from the reports.
I hope for the sake of the authorities that they have a record of an interrogation where they asked her specifically if she had any children, etc. Because if she did try to mention this and the authorities ignored it, the consequences would be dire if there was any justice.
Doesn't help a bit that this is a black woman in Florida, and surpise, the father is suddenly some kind of saintly hero?
If you've been arrested, you know there's damned little opportunity to explain how your detention constitutes a life or death situation for anyone or anything outside the jail. More likely they'll say "you had your phone call, you should have used it to call someone to take care of your baby."
She is doing the right thing by keeping her mouth shut now. If she gets a hearing, and waits until then to explain how she tried desperately to tell the police, jailers, other inmates, her court appointed lawyer, etc., how there was this child alone... and explains to the jury how these heartless (racist!) people ignored her... Get a white jury to decide against her and watch for coast-to-coast riots maybe.
You're only getting one side of the story, the "father" together with the "State". You haven't heard a word from the mother (as it should be... she needs to keep her mouth SHUT, but she needs some publicity on her hearing.)
You are still "house people" with running water, electricity, your children haven't been taken from you by the State because of your inability to care for them.
You may have been ripped off, gone into bankruptcy, made poor decisions, etc., but you have not yet dropped into poverty.
Like I said, I want to hear how tolerable unemployment is from someone who is still there AFTER the benefits run out, AFTER they've been through all the options.
I have a feeling I can just ask the guy sleeping at the bus stop, but I don't want to find out he has a PhD in Physics and worked for a defense contractor until a couple of years ago, etc.,etc.
I want to hear about the benefits of being unemployed from someone who has been unemployed for long enough that the bank foreclosed on their mortgage, then had the car they were living in stolen, then had to move to the greyhound station because there's a limit to the number of days that you can sleep at the salvation army...
This guy's still living indoors, with electricity, running water, has a friggin DVD player, and even a spouse that hasn't left him for someone with job prospects.
He's not really qualified to comment on the perks of unemployment yet. He's living better than 90% of the world. Money is coming from SOMEWHERE. Write back when that runs out...
Cygwin comes with rxvt also, and it's good, and I use it.
But you don't seem to know what I'm referring to when I say I want framebuffer consoles.
I want a straight-to-the-metal terminal, just like I get with Linux. I don't want an xterm, an rxvt, or any other terminal hosted by the xserver or by windows. (It's okay if it's hosted, as long as I can't tell).
I don't think I'm being that picky, and I do think this is a feature that is provided by linux that is NOT provided by windows.
I don't understand why high-res virtual consoles is such a tall order though. Like I said, it's the main reason I'm still using linux (and it's not perfect there -- I still have to be careful about what video card I use, and, it's broken for Radeon cards in 2.6.)
If anyone on the mission had actually said "re-entry now will cause total destruction of the orbiter and kill the crew", we would be discussing it today with comments from the astronauts and whoever was involved in the rescue.
But nobody ever said that. A few people had a suspicion that there might be a problem, but nobody ever expressed it with any certainty.
Pretty hard, actually. Don't take this for granted.
>Or point a telescope at the shuttle?
There really aren't many telescopes that can offer the necessary resolution. I wonder why the shuttle doesn't deploy cameras covering every conceivable angle the whole time it's in orbit.
>A picture is a thousand words? The people who >stoped that from happening should be SHOT!!!
Some individual is responsible for denying the request. The request was denied on the basis of security clearance. I don't know if I'd go as "should be shot", but 10 years in Leavenworth would not be unreasonable for this sort of misuse of authority by a military officer.
The sad thing is, that person probably sleeps just fine, and doesn't think he did anything wrong.
"I must have missunderstood the purpose of copyright, if it isn't self-serving, what is it for?"
The purpose of copyright is to stimulate creative people to publish works of art in order to ultimately benefit society as those works enter the public domain. The incentive for them to do so is supposed to be provided by offering a period of time where the creator has exclusive rights to his creation. Some people seem to have the idea that the main purpose of copyright is the period of exclusive rights, but the spirit of the concept has historically been more on the lines of creating and preserving a public domain. The monopoly granted to the creator is a compromise made by the people to ensure a steady supply of works to the public domain.
The whole notion of copyright has been completely turned on its head in the last fifty years, and the current generation is the first one to really notice the difference. Unfortunately they do not see the change as being worthy of major action, even though some people talk big.
You already have to go back to the 1920's or so to find any truly public domain works. It hasn't always been this way, and it was never meant to be this way. Some things that I consider classical, are still covered by copyright! Other things that should NOT be covered under copyright, according to either the letter or the spirit of the law, carry copyright notice and under the DMCA might even be encumbered in such a way as to to violate your rights to view a work that is truly within the public domain. I recently watched a Marx Brothers film that has long been free of any copyright... and yet, the media clearly stated that the contents were under copyright. That sort of thing just makes me angry.
If arts and entertainment were as important to us as sports and sex, we'd have abolished the government already for the DMCA.
"quantitative operations done to non-quantitative data have NO MEANING. NONE."
Thank you, but of course the people who need to get the message, won't. They *want* to be influenced.
To me there are two levels of audio/video quality. Good Enough for the only copy of the Master, and Not Good Enough.
If I can have 32-bit waves sampled at >=96kHz, that's what I want. (And I get very, very tired of hearing about why I don't need that much digital headroom.)
I'm old enough that I'm not supposed to care about freq's above 15khZ, but I hear them just fine. And I definitely hear the quality loss of MP3, even at 128b.
I won't say I can tell 44.1khz/16bit from 44khz/16-24bit, but I bet I can tell which one is degrading faster after a few unclocked copies and probably after the first resampling.
For listening to music, I'm pretty happy with cassette tape... For producing music (which I do), I'm not happy with *anything*, but I'll settle for the current state of the art:-)
The main difference between your example (gasoline) and the hard drive size is that the "gallon" of gasoline is defined by a federal regulation, strictly enforced by the US Department of Agriculture. You'll notice a seal on the gas pump that indicates it's been inspected and certified by a weights and measures authority. (They want every tenth of a penny of their tax money!)
If you screwed this up, you'd stand to lose more than your right to sell gasoline!
There's no regulation like this on hard drive measurements.
I think a lot more people know how many ounces in a gallon, or even how much mass in a kg or volume in a litre, than you give them credit for. But when they're buying ice cream, they don't care. They're getting whatever amount of ice cream they've decided is reasonable for a given price. And they're not interested in weighing it out to the ounce, because it's "by the box" not by the ounce.
So what I suspect is, the *container* is a half gallon by volume. But the contents are measured by weight.
Why don't they just pump the ice cream full of air and make it fill up a bigger container?
Why didn't this info leak before VS turned on the switch? That's the most surprising thing about the whole deal to me.
The backlash against VS should have started BEFORE they went through with this decision -- and that backlash should have been OVERWHELMING, as in, every sysadmin with DNS should have been complaining, ISP's should have been filing motions for restraining orders, and ICANN should have been ready to pull the gTLD contract once and for all.
"They can shut off *EVERY* non subscribed card this way. They don't though...why?"
Could it be because advertising still works?
Or could it be that because a whole lot of people have DTV (legal or illegal), a lot more get exposed to it (and simply purchase it rather than jump through hoops?)
It's too bad that most of the people named as defendants are guilty. They want to be found not guilty because of a loophole in a gray area, but not because they are innocent.
If the truth was closer to being "more people bought these cards for other things than television hacking", the suits would be very interesting, and might even end up with DTV being liquidated and their suits going into prison.
But the truth is, people were buying the cards because they wanted free tv.
Now maybe ethically they were entitled to it, and maybe eventually, the law will say so as well.
That doesn't change the situation for anyone who is being targeted here.
Wishful thinking is not going to change the fact that you bought a card programmer so you could watch DTV without paying, regardless of whether the card programmer has other uses. What's going to matter is that you did use the programmer to watch DTV without paying, that was illegal when you did it, and the plaintiff has more evidence to support his position than you have to support yours.
Trust me, this is not going to come to court with 99 of 100 people having evidence that they used these prgrammers for something besides DTV.
And I think you geeks know that.
You're a geek right, and you run in geek circles? Count the living rooms with paid-for, 100% square with the DTV agreements DTV.
Now count the living rooms with any variety of hacked H card or whatever they do these days.
Bet you know more people who don't pay, than do.
I certainly do, and not just geek houses either. The hacked DTV thing appears to be quite popular among jocks. Sports fans. That's what TV is all about, and why it's so easy for me to do without it I guess.
>Too make a long story short, he had gotten about >10 of our friends and family with the smartcard >programmer "hook"
I don't have a valid sample, but I do happen to know a lot of people who watch TV. And the number of people who decode their signals through clandestine means wholly outnumbers the number of people who actually pay for it.
It's because of that observation that I have never considered for one moment, getting satellite TV.
It's not because I care whether it's legal or illegal. It's that I just won't pay for something that most people expect for free. Partly because I don't care to be the paying customer who picks up the slack for the people who don't pay, and partly because the whole notion just annoys me. And another part because I'm not going to do business with these people, period, even if they are the only source for the last tv signal on the planet.
Now, I've actually done without TV for years on end too. At least, no incoming broadcasts. To most people, that is an impossible thing to conceive of. Like doing without furniture or electricity, or even food!
"...saying that I can't decode the satellite signals being beamed into my house is like saying that if I happen to walk past a venue that a band is playing, and I can hear the music, I owe them the price of a ticket."
Isn't that the current situation, legally, in Canada?
Your utopian scheme still favors the big fish. Might even make things worse, when the big fish still win the lawsuits and the loser gets to pay millions more for the expensive lawyers.
What's to stop a corporation from having an arrangement with the expensive lawyer that the debts will be excused if the suit is lost, but not if the suit is won and the defendant has to pay?
How is this fair in all conditions, say a huge corp. suing an individual or small business, an individual suing a huge corp, or two indvidiuals suing each other?
The fact is, most of the huge costs associated with a lawsuit are incurred at the party's discretion. It may not be wise to go to trial without counsel, but it's certainly not required. And it's definitely not required to hire expensive counsel!
I don't do any sort of subscription TV, and the reason is that I've witnessed too damned many people with apparatus to get it free.
Face it, there's a LOT of people decoding this signal and not paying the subscription rate. I don't make a right/wrong judgement on that, it's simply that it devalues the service for me when I know that it is routinely gotten free. I sure as hell don't like the idea of paying for it to pick up the slack of others.
Like I said, I don't *care* whether it's legal/illegal/right/wrong. What I care about is the perceived value, which lowers dramatically for me simply because I know so many people are not paying for it.
"It would be like Phizer compaining that a foreigner cured AIDS and then announced to the world how to do it."
I'd like to see a "foreigner" cure whatever big incurable disease, patent the method, and the refuse to license it to any company that does business in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
"we have a story of a lady leaving a 2-year old in her apartment for days while she was in jail, never mentioned to the cops that a child was left home alone!"
I don't know where you're getting the "never mentioned" part, other than by inference from the reports.
I hope for the sake of the authorities that they have a record of an interrogation where they asked her specifically if she had any children, etc. Because if she did try to mention this and the authorities ignored it, the consequences would be dire if there was any justice.
Doesn't help a bit that this is a black woman in Florida, and surpise, the father is suddenly some kind of saintly hero?
If you've been arrested, you know there's damned little opportunity to explain how your detention constitutes a life or death situation for anyone or anything outside the jail. More likely they'll say "you had your phone call, you should have used it to call someone to take care of your baby."
She is doing the right thing by keeping her mouth shut now. If she gets a hearing, and waits until then to explain how she tried desperately to tell the police, jailers, other inmates, her court appointed lawyer, etc., how there was this child alone... and explains to the jury how these heartless (racist!) people ignored her... Get a white jury to decide against her and watch for coast-to-coast riots maybe.
You're only getting one side of the story, the "father" together with the "State". You haven't heard a word from the mother (as it should be... she needs to keep her mouth SHUT, but she needs some publicity on her hearing.)
You don't get my point...
You are still "house people"
with running water, electricity, your children haven't been taken from you by the State because of your inability to care for them.
You may have been ripped off, gone into bankruptcy, made poor decisions, etc., but you have not yet dropped into poverty.
Like I said, I want to hear how tolerable unemployment is from someone who is still there AFTER the benefits run out, AFTER they've been through all the options.
I have a feeling I can just ask the guy sleeping at the bus stop, but I don't want to find out he has a PhD in Physics and worked for a defense contractor until a couple of years ago, etc.,etc.
Get it?
"Pixellating out the names of products and stores as if they were nudity is annoying."
Not nearly as annoying as pixellating out the
nudity!
I want to hear about the benefits of being unemployed from someone who has been unemployed for long enough that the bank foreclosed on their mortgage, then had the car they were living in stolen, then had to move to the greyhound station because there's a limit to the number of days that you can sleep at the salvation army...
This guy's still living indoors, with electricity, running water, has a friggin DVD player, and even a spouse that hasn't left him for someone with job prospects.
He's not really qualified to comment on the perks of unemployment yet. He's living better than 90% of the world. Money is coming from SOMEWHERE. Write back when that runs out...
Cygwin comes with rxvt also, and it's good, and I use it.
But you don't seem to know what I'm referring to when I say I want framebuffer consoles.
I want a straight-to-the-metal terminal, just like I get with Linux. I don't want an xterm, an rxvt, or any other terminal hosted by the xserver or by windows. (It's okay if it's hosted, as long as I can't tell).
I don't think I'm being that picky, and I do think this is a feature that is provided by linux that is NOT provided by windows.
I don't understand why high-res virtual consoles is such a tall order though. Like I said, it's the main reason I'm still using linux (and it's not perfect there -- I still have to be careful about what video card I use, and, it's broken for Radeon cards in 2.6.)
>True example, the famous hole in cc
That was always a hypothetical case. It never happened. It's folklore, not a true example.
Why I'm NOT switching AWAY from linux:
I cannot get the equivalent of a framebuffer character console on any other OS.
Don't talk to me about Xterms or anything else being equivalent, because they are not.
Give me an EXACT clone of the framebuffer consoles I use, including screen and multiple VC's on windows 2000 or XP, and I'll probably switch.
If anyone on the mission had actually said "re-entry now will cause total destruction of the orbiter and kill the crew", we would be discussing it today with comments from the astronauts and whoever was involved in the rescue.
But nobody ever said that. A few people had a suspicion that there might be a problem, but nobody ever expressed it with any certainty.
>How hard was it to take a fucking picture?
Pretty hard, actually. Don't take this for granted.
>Or point a telescope at the shuttle?
There really aren't many telescopes that can offer the necessary resolution. I wonder why the shuttle doesn't deploy cameras covering every conceivable angle the whole time it's in orbit.
>A picture is a thousand words? The people who >stoped that from happening should be SHOT!!!
Some individual is responsible for denying the request. The request was denied on the basis of security clearance. I don't know if I'd go as "should be shot", but 10 years in Leavenworth would not be unreasonable for this sort of misuse of authority by a military officer.
The sad thing is, that person probably sleeps just fine, and doesn't think he did anything wrong.
"I must have missunderstood the purpose of copyright, if it isn't self-serving, what is it for?"
The purpose of copyright is to stimulate creative people to publish works of art in order to ultimately benefit society as those works enter the public domain. The incentive for them to do so is supposed to be provided by offering a period of time where the creator has exclusive rights to his creation. Some people seem to have the idea that the main purpose of copyright is the period of exclusive rights, but the spirit of the concept has historically been more on the lines of creating and preserving a public domain. The monopoly granted to the creator is a compromise made by the people to ensure a steady supply of works to the public domain.
The whole notion of copyright has been completely turned on its head in the last fifty years, and the current generation is the first one to really notice the difference. Unfortunately they do not see the change as being worthy of major action, even though some people talk big.
You already have to go back to the 1920's or so to find any truly public domain works. It hasn't always been this way, and it was never meant to be this way. Some things that I consider classical, are still covered by copyright! Other things that should NOT be covered under copyright, according to either the letter or the spirit of the law, carry copyright notice and under the DMCA might even be encumbered in such a way as to to violate your rights to view a work that is truly within the public domain. I recently watched a Marx Brothers film that has long been free of any copyright... and yet, the media clearly stated that the contents were under copyright. That sort of thing just makes me angry.
If arts and entertainment were as important to us as sports and sex, we'd have abolished the government already for the DMCA.
"quantitative operations done to non-quantitative data have NO MEANING. NONE."
:-)
Thank you, but of course the people who need to get the message, won't. They *want* to be influenced.
To me there are two levels of audio/video quality. Good Enough for the only copy of the Master, and Not Good Enough.
If I can have 32-bit waves sampled at >=96kHz, that's what I want. (And I get very, very tired of hearing about why I don't need that much digital headroom.)
I'm old enough that I'm not supposed to care about freq's above 15khZ, but I hear them just fine. And I definitely hear the quality loss of MP3, even at 128b.
I won't say I can tell 44.1khz/16bit from 44khz/16-24bit, but I bet I can tell which one is degrading faster after a few unclocked copies and probably after the first resampling.
For listening to music, I'm pretty happy with cassette tape... For producing music (which I do), I'm not happy with *anything*, but I'll settle for the current state of the art
"is it possible to create a truly secure product when there's no opportunity for public code review? "
My answer would be "yes" but, nobody should be interested in buying it. It should fail in the marketplace.
The main difference between your example (gasoline) and the hard drive size is that the "gallon" of gasoline is defined by a federal regulation, strictly enforced by the US Department of Agriculture. You'll notice a seal on the gas pump that indicates it's been inspected and certified by a weights and measures authority. (They want every tenth of a penny of their tax money!)
If you screwed this up, you'd stand to lose more than your right to sell gasoline!
There's no regulation like this on hard drive measurements.
I think a lot more people know how many ounces in a gallon, or even how much mass in a kg or volume in a litre, than you give them credit for. But when they're buying ice cream, they don't care. They're getting whatever amount of ice cream they've decided is reasonable for a given price. And they're not interested in weighing it out to the ounce, because it's "by the box" not by the ounce.
So what I suspect is, the *container* is a half gallon by volume. But the contents are measured by weight.
Why don't they just pump the ice cream full of air and make it fill up a bigger container?
Why didn't this info leak before VS turned on the switch? That's the most surprising thing about the whole deal to me.
The backlash against VS should have started BEFORE they went through with this decision -- and that backlash should have been OVERWHELMING, as in, every sysadmin with DNS should have been complaining, ISP's should have been filing motions for restraining orders, and ICANN should have been ready to pull the gTLD contract once and for all.
"We were the very first customer to run DB2 in production (quiz- you know which one?) "
Mobil Exploration & Producing U.S.?
"We should all go vote republican because they pose the biggest threat to our worst enemy? "
No, we should actually *join the Republican Party"
and rise to positions of authority within the organization.
>Well that's not a very nice thing to say. Many
>innocent people would die as a result
Exactly as is happening today, with the pharm companies refusing to budge on pricing in order to save people's lives in poor countries.
So it's okay to kill innocent people as long as they aren't americans?
"They can shut off *EVERY* non subscribed card this way. They don't though...why?"
Could it be because advertising still works?
Or could it be that because a whole lot of people have DTV (legal or illegal), a lot more get exposed to it (and simply purchase it rather than jump through hoops?)
>This is nothing like what you say it is.
It's too bad that most of the people named as defendants are guilty. They want to be found not guilty because of a loophole in a gray area, but not because they are innocent.
If the truth was closer to being "more people bought these cards for other things than television hacking", the suits would be very interesting, and might even end up with DTV being liquidated and their suits going into prison.
But the truth is, people were buying the cards because they wanted free tv.
Now maybe ethically they were entitled to it, and maybe eventually, the law will say so as well.
That doesn't change the situation for anyone who is being targeted here.
Wishful thinking is not going to change the fact that you bought a card programmer so you could watch DTV without paying, regardless of whether the card programmer has other uses. What's going to matter is that you did use the programmer to watch DTV without paying, that was illegal when you did it, and the plaintiff has more evidence to support his position than you have to support yours.
Trust me, this is not going to come to court with 99 of 100 people having evidence that they used these prgrammers for something besides DTV.
And I think you geeks know that.
You're a geek right, and you run in geek circles? Count the living rooms with paid-for, 100% square with the DTV agreements DTV.
Now count the living rooms with any variety of hacked H card or whatever they do these days.
Bet you know more people who don't pay, than do.
I certainly do, and not just geek houses either.
The hacked DTV thing appears to be quite popular among jocks. Sports fans. That's what TV is all about, and why it's so easy for me to do without it I guess.
>A little over three years ago, by my reconing..
At least since the Carter administration, by mine.
>Too make a long story short, he had gotten about
>10 of our friends and family with the smartcard
>programmer "hook"
I don't have a valid sample, but I do happen to know a lot of people who watch TV. And the number of people who decode their signals through clandestine means wholly outnumbers the number of people who actually pay for it.
It's because of that observation that I have never considered for one moment, getting satellite TV.
It's not because I care whether it's legal or illegal. It's that I just won't pay for something that most people expect for free. Partly because I don't care to be the paying customer who picks up the slack for the people who don't pay, and partly because the whole notion just annoys me. And another part because I'm not going to do business with these people, period, even if they are the only source for the last tv signal on the planet.
Now, I've actually done without TV for years on end too. At least, no incoming broadcasts. To most people, that is an impossible thing to conceive of. Like doing without furniture or electricity, or even food!
"...saying that I can't decode the satellite signals being beamed into my house is like saying that if I happen to walk past a venue that a band is playing, and I can hear the music, I owe them the price of a ticket."
Isn't that the current situation, legally, in Canada?
Your utopian scheme still favors the big fish. Might even make things worse, when the big fish still win the lawsuits and the loser gets to pay millions more for the expensive lawyers.
What's to stop a corporation from having an arrangement with the expensive lawyer that the debts will be excused if the suit is lost, but not if the suit is won and the defendant has to pay?
How is this fair in all conditions, say a huge corp. suing an individual or small business, an individual suing a huge corp, or two indvidiuals suing each other?
The fact is, most of the huge costs associated with a lawsuit are incurred at the party's discretion. It may not be wise to go to trial without counsel, but it's certainly not required. And it's definitely not required to hire expensive counsel!
I don't do any sort of subscription TV, and the reason is that I've witnessed too damned many people with apparatus to get it free.
Face it, there's a LOT of people decoding this signal and not paying the subscription rate. I don't make a right/wrong judgement on that, it's simply that it devalues the service for me when I know that it is routinely gotten free. I sure as hell don't like the idea of paying for it to pick up the slack of others.
Like I said, I don't *care* whether it's legal/illegal/right/wrong. What I care about is the perceived value, which lowers dramatically for me simply because I know so many people are not paying for it.
It just makes me not want the thing, get it?
"It would be like Phizer compaining that a foreigner cured AIDS and then announced to the world how to do it."
I'd like to see a "foreigner" cure whatever big incurable disease, patent the method, and the refuse to license it to any company that does business in the US.