Why does the average slashdot user replying to these topics seem to show so much hate towards the ISPs for offering you 20mbps but not intending you to use it all? Have you all thought of the other possibility - the ISPs become honest and ignores their competition overnight, as you want them to, and we all get completely unlimited 512kbps connections for our £20 per month. Newsflash: your monthly broadband fee does not cover the ISPs cost if you use it 24/7. Why is it particularly evil for ISPs, when competing with each other, to have presumed residential connections won't be used to stream multimedia files to the rest of the internet 24/7?
Yes the ISPs should be more clear and include fair use clauses or even limits in their contracts, but then what happens when they do - we all complain that they are cutting our service back. You may want 20mbit for $20 per month, but if that isn't possible, *something* has to give.
I don't think that your story is a very good indicator of how rubbish Alexa is, it just highlights issues with your own system.
This is why you shouldn't use HTTP GET for 'delete links'. Anything that changes content should be POST, which will stop bots crawling your site just by following links from breaking things. We have standards for a reason..
As for alexa crawling your site as a logged in user, what? As far as I know the toolbar itself doesn't do any crawling, only reporting. Maybe it was providing links to Alexa that later got indexed, but if they were properly secured then you wouldn't have any issues. The fact that you seem to be relying on a robots.txt for security indicates bigger issues. The only time I've heard of a 'Toolbar' doing this kind of thing is when Google released their proxy service (which they later withdrew), as it automatically preloaded all pages - and again poorly designed pages using GET to modify data encountered problems just like yours.
cry me a river? upgrading pains are a part of the IT industry, people need to either accept this or get out. Maybe so, but let me translate what you just said slightly:
cry me a river? upgrading pains are a part of the IT industry, my customers need to either accept this or go to a host that hasn't upgraded yet, and stop paying me money. I'm guessing you aren't running a business...
I work for a reasonably large hosting company that held off until a few months ago to announce that we're going to PHP5 in a few weeks. Before this point, we'd had a steady trickle of 1-2 customers a month asking when we are going to PHP5. Since the announcement, we've had up to 4-5 customers a week complaining that they will leave if we dare upgrade, they can't stand companies that change things for the sake of upgrading, etc. etc. The fact is that there are a *lot* of small business websites, designed for them by some employee x years ago, which will break when we go V5 (heck, even disabling register globals screws up most of these client sites) and the customer has no employees capable of fixing it. We've been helping customers with extra hand-holding when it comes to ensuring they will be ok, but it is costing us time to support these customers, and a reasonable percentage will simply leave us a week before the swap.
I really do believe their will be massive demand for a PHP 4 only reliable host rolling their own security updates, after end of life. I know a reasonable percentage of our client base that would likely consider them...
To be honest the fans on mine aren't so bad, it is fairly noisy, but kind of to be expected considering it is such powerful hardware in a small box. But the real issue is the DVD drive. Mine sounds like a jet taking off, non-stop, whenever playing a game. It's actually quite nice to play demos downloaded to the hard disk, as the console seems whisper quiet in comparison.
That the the family of the guy in charge of security just got a bill for a single 9mm round? I imagine they would congratulate the guy - if this is being picked up on commercial (and presumably defence) satellites, it is because the Chinese want it that way.
After all, what is the point in having a submarine acting as a nuclear deterrent if nobody knows you have it? You might not want people to know where it is when it's out on operations, but it's fine to show it off to everyone looking from above when it's at home at the dock.
Why on every mobile phone story do we have to have so many 'insightful' comments complaining that the phone covered in the story has too many features.
If you want a phone that makes calls, and does SMS, there are loads to choose from. Take the world's most popular phone, the Nokia 1100, with over 200 million sold worldwide. Excellent at making calls, sending text messages, brilliant battery life, and the only extra feature being a handy torch. And it'll cost you about £20 in the UK, without a contract, with £10 call time thrown in.
So leave those of us who use our phone for more than making calls to our gadget phones, you can buy the same basic and solid phones that you've always been able to buy.
Don't worry, it's just Zonk again. Is it too much to ask for editors to learn how to use hyperlinks without screwing them up, and failing that, preview before publishing to the front page of one of the top 500 sites in the world?
Do you think the shooter would have killed more than one or two people if the people around him were armed? Of course not! The point is, in any country with sensible gun control (I'm speaking from the UK here) - crazy people don't get guns. Yes, we have minimal gun crime, and we sometimes complain about it "getting out of control" (which is normally the odd shooting between idiot gangs every few months, nationally.
Put it this way, if I have a bad year next year, and I decide I want to blow up everyone I hate, I would not know how to get a gun. I am 90% certain that there are 0 guns within a mile or me. Do you know how safe that makes me feel? I don't think any American can truly understand this, which is demonstrated by how obsessive you get about needing to have a gun under your pillow at all times.
Okay, so by your support of it, you contributed to the deaths of these dozens of people. Don't be pathetic. Somebody opposing guns is guilty because someone managed to get a gun and commit mass murder?? Only in America could the solution to a rising amount of people being able to get guns and kill people in moments of madness be to give more people guns.
it is full of DRM crap that keeps you from doing anything No, it isn't. The "DRM crap" only affects content which chooses to use these DRM 'features', it doesn't stop you doing anything else, or playing any other content.
The extra DRM abilities of Vista do not stop you doing *anything* in comparison to any other OS. It simply allows you to play back media which you won't be able to play back on any OS which doesn't have the exact same restrictions. Beyond this, if you don't use this DRM infested media, there is no difference between using Vista, Mac OSX or Linux.
Reputation and respect are insanely important to most developers and being accused in public of stealing someone's stuff is damaging. If you don't want to be accused in public of stealing someone's stuff, then don't steal people's stuff. If you want respect, show other developers respect.
He just lost a developer over what was a mistake because some egotistical coder went public with something that out of respect should have been addressed privately first. He lost a developer because that developer took GPL code and relicensed it without permission under a license that the original authors don't agree with.
Put it this way, if someone took Theo's code and relicensed it under their own license that they happen to prefer, which was against what Theo believes in, do you really think Theo of all people would be the kind of person who'd keep quiet about it?
The UK already have a similar system, registrants who declare themselves to be "individuals" can opt-out of the whois database, and just have their name shown on lookups..eu domains have something similar, except you still need a valid technical contact I believe.
The home directories, logically enough, are all stored in the/home branch of the filesystem. So if your user account name was "cpnabend", your home directory is probably/home/cpnabend In Vista, the home directories, logically enough, are all stored in the c:\Users branch of the filesystem. So if the user account name was "cpnabend", your home directory is probably c:\Users\cpnabend.
In this way the "home directory" concept is more expansive than the "My Documents" concept, which is only for document files (your configs are in the Registry, your apps are in Program Files). I'll agree with you on older versions of Windows (although even in XP, go up one level from My Documents and you have a "user" directory still) - but this article is directly comparing to Vista. And in my c:\Users\username directory (which is where things go as default now) - I have seperate directories such as Documents, Pictures, Music, etc. etc.
Your point on the registry stands I suppose, although a lot of Windows apps save their user level settings in the home dir now. As for programs, most windows programs are in c:\Program Files\ in the same way that most programs in Linux are in/usr/local or whatever (which is fairly confusing, as the grandparent post was trying to say) - you can install your own programs in your own home directory on both OS's.
The newly organised Vista home dirs are one of the things I like most, as someone who has used Debian and then Ubuntu for the last few years. Now just give me a decent terminal please MS..
The Linksys NSLU2 is a nice little device, it's a little ARM based linux box that you're supposed to plug USB disks into and use as a NAS.
But of course you can run linux on it (even normal Debain), and hence you could get the setup that you're looking for going I imagine. And super low power usage.
Only £55 as well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2http://www.nslu2-linux.org/
What reports? I'm running Vista Business with full Aero (on 2 screens, 20" and 17") and loads of silly gadgets, about 10-15 different apps open including two copies of Visual Studio, a local Xming server, firefox, thunderbird, MSN, Acrobat reader, anti-virus etc. etc.
My CPU usage is idling at 2-6% looking at the little CPU gadget (which is probably using some of that itself..) And RAM usage is at 65%, and I've never ever seen it higher than 80ish. The general experience is easily faster than any version of XP that I've used, and I'm afraid to say significantly faster than any linux experience that I've had (and I've used Debian and then Ubuntu as my primary OS prior to getting this copy of Vista for 2-3 years).
And this is on a 3 year old Athlon64 3000+ with 1gb RAM and an old ATI 9800 graphics card. I seriously call on all the twits who are constantly moaning on about Vista's performance to actually use the damn thing, or shut up.
The summary doesn't say it replaced a $20,000 dish, it says it replaced a $20,000 link. I imagine the 20k number is from asking a networking company to come install a link between Site A and Site B, ie. they would have setup everything, including the systems involved etc, not just the dish.
From TFA:
He discovered satellite dishes were between $100 to $400 retail and that smaller dishes, the same size as a wok, were $80.
Mr Jones thought he could do better.
Along with friend Murray Bobbette they worked out mathematical equations to prove the curved metal face of a wok would have the same effect as a small satellite dish.
So basically they've grown their own wireless solution, using woks. However, instead of spending ages working out mathematical equations and using trial and error, they could have bought the $80 dish and be done with it. Hence the grandparent post's point stands. Saving $20k by spending a few days developing a wireless solution is cool, but for a real world application, saving $60 on that wireless system to use a wok instead of a dish that will likely have years of development behind it is fairly silly. Like someone else has said, what about when the wok starts to rust?
Maybe if you're going to point the finger at people for not reading TFA, you should read TFA.
So if I buy a mac, how does the DRM affect me? Do I have to worry about my computer becoming unusable if I change hardware? Do I have to worry about re-registering? Do I have to worry about registering in the first place? The answers are, of course, no, no, and no. Can you play high definition DRMed content on your mac? No, no, and no. Do you ever need to replace hardware on a Mac to the extent that you might break Vista's restrictions? No. This just isn't a fair comparison, as the parent poster said, Macs are by their very nature a limited platform. They don't have to activate your install or check that the hardware is the same because they know that you must be running it on hardware at least mostly purchased from them. There's no reason to bring software lock in limitations in, when you are hardware locked in.
The fact that people are still making a big thing over the Vista DRM limitations is amazing. Yes MS are spineless and evil for adding what the movie industry wants, but if you want to ever be able to play this content on your Apple, Apple are going to have to add the exact same restrictions. Guess what, if you don't play this DRM content on a Vista PC, which you can't play on an Apple currently anyway, then there is no difference whatsoever. Vista is only evil in it's extra functionality, so if you don't like it, don't use it. I've been using a freely provided copy of Vista for a few weeks now, and I'm happier than I've ever been on a Windows OS (and I'm generally a linux fanboy), which must say something.
As soon as this new crappy DRM starts being used in high def content, the situation will be the same on Vista, OS X, even linux if you want to play it, and assuming you don't go for a "cracked" approach.
However, you do not receive installation media in case your OS installation fails which mine did after 4 months.
You might not have, but I certainly did - and I'm fairly certain most MSDN AA members should be able to. I've got a standard issue MS printed XP CD in a wallet with my own unique license in front of me, which cost me £7 in postage. I've also got an MS supplied Vista business DVD.iso and a copy burned to DVD in front of me, along with a unique Vista Business license key. Infact, I've got two - for some reason they let me order both the CD and DVD download, and have given me two license keys.
Most european establishments that I've encountered seem to give their users access to the MSDN AA e-academy site to manage licenses etc, whereas I've noticed that for some reason most US establishments go for the "lend a CD out to everyone" approach, and often with the same license key. This is where I'm presuming some of the problems might be starting - I'm not entirely sure these places should have been sharing a key for all machines, even if their license agreement with MS allows their students to install copies - they are probably still supposed to have a unique key per student. But I suppose in the pre-genuine advantage crap days, this was less of an issue.
It's true that MSDN AA licenses are "restricted" in that you can't use them for commercial use, and you can't use new licenses/new installs after you leave an institution that is part of an MSDN AA program.
However they specifically state that you may continue using already installed software for as long as you wish after you leave your program, as long as you keep to the original non commercial rules - ie. follow the original license requirements. Therefore if they're marking an install as non-genuine, they aren't keeping to their own agreement. What I suspect happened here is that an institution has been giving out the shared media with a shared key, which isn't how it works (or at least not how it works wherever I've seen this) - students can share installation media but should still be granted individual keys by the MSDN AA administrator.
If you don't like iTunes and Apple's DRM scheme, don't buy from the Apple music store.
I like my iPod. I own an iPod.
I don't like the iTunes music store. I'd quite like to try out some of these subscription services, ignoring the DRM aspect (which I'm addressing now) I quite like the idea of paying "rent" to have access to a huge music library. And if someone did the same for films I'd like that too, I'd happily pay a fairly big monthly fee to the music and movie people to get unlimited digital viewing of whatever they produce.
What these countries are trying to do is let you use any music player with any music store, and vice versa, and hopefully get rid of the extra DRM problems created by all of this in the mean time. And it doesn't seem to be exclusive to iTunes, it applies to everyone. I'm certainly hoping for these kind of changes, more choice is nver a bad thing.
Unless they specifically asked him to work overtime, he can't bill them afterwards. You don't decide to work 50 (undocumented) extra hours per week, then declare that your employer owes you thousands.
If this guy spent any time at work on this thing, or had time off work to specifically work on the project - which he himself seems to be saying is true - then he's screwed. Whether he signed a specific licensing agreement or not, most contracts will state that any work done on company time belongs to the company. And even if that isn't specifically in his contract (why would it be, he's a cop) - I'd find it hard to believe that anyone could argue otherwise. And if they did, surely they can fire him at a minimum for not spending his paid time at work doing something useful for his employer.
Currently he has a piece of software that he admits, and his employer can presumably prove, was at least partially worked on during work hours and using their provided equipment. The fact he decided to do a load of work outside of hours is his fault, he should have got this cleared up before putting any of his own time into it. If he wanted to keep it completely his own project, he should have refused their equipment and worked on it 100% in his own time.
On top of all this, TFA seems to state that this is simply addons for another existing system provided from another state, so I can't see how he can argue any of this is his code to sell.
You even answered it yourself, except decided it is of no use as it would be unavailable when your home connection goes down.
So.. get a cheap hosting/email account with IMAP capabilities, so that it's accessible over the net. Every mail client setup to use the IMAP account will see the same folders/inbox, and it'll work from anywhere. If you're paranoid about having your data in someone else's hands, download it to an archive locally with fetchmail or similar.
Something worth pointing out to people who don't want to use gmail, is that you can use gmail as an enterprise grade anti-spam filter for your personal inbox.
Simply forward all of your mail on to gmail, and then either collect it from gmail using POP3, or set gmail to forward it back to a "clean" account on your server that you can pick mail up on. You can set gmail to delete the mail after it forwards it, so you essentially get one of the best anti-spam filters out there, for free.
Of course, what is annoying me is all of the penny stock image spam that gets through most spam filters. It's getting to the point where I really am considering stripping image attachments from messages. See this post further down for a bit more on my thoughts on image spam.
The image spam is the one thing that gets through my (and gmails) spam filtering. I know people are working on OCR solutions, but spammers are already actively avoiding this with all the random dots and lines you see over their stock spam images.
So what I'm wondering, and I'd be interested if anyone on Slashdot knows about or is working on this - surely it wouldn't be too hard to detect the presence of these anti-OCR techniques? The standard way seems to be putting extra lines and edges, and a spotty background to throw OCR recognition off - why not look for those signs in an image, and add to the "Spam" score if this is present?
Slashdot Mirror
Why does the average slashdot user replying to these topics seem to show so much hate towards the ISPs for offering you 20mbps but not intending you to use it all? Have you all thought of the other possibility - the ISPs become honest and ignores their competition overnight, as you want them to, and we all get completely unlimited 512kbps connections for our £20 per month. Newsflash: your monthly broadband fee does not cover the ISPs cost if you use it 24/7. Why is it particularly evil for ISPs, when competing with each other, to have presumed residential connections won't be used to stream multimedia files to the rest of the internet 24/7?
Yes the ISPs should be more clear and include fair use clauses or even limits in their contracts, but then what happens when they do - we all complain that they are cutting our service back. You may want 20mbit for $20 per month, but if that isn't possible, *something* has to give.
I don't think that your story is a very good indicator of how rubbish Alexa is, it just highlights issues with your own system.
This is why you shouldn't use HTTP GET for 'delete links'. Anything that changes content should be POST, which will stop bots crawling your site just by following links from breaking things. We have standards for a reason..
As for alexa crawling your site as a logged in user, what? As far as I know the toolbar itself doesn't do any crawling, only reporting. Maybe it was providing links to Alexa that later got indexed, but if they were properly secured then you wouldn't have any issues. The fact that you seem to be relying on a robots.txt for security indicates bigger issues. The only time I've heard of a 'Toolbar' doing this kind of thing is when Google released their proxy service (which they later withdrew), as it automatically preloaded all pages - and again poorly designed pages using GET to modify data encountered problems just like yours.
I work for a reasonably large hosting company that held off until a few months ago to announce that we're going to PHP5 in a few weeks. Before this point, we'd had a steady trickle of 1-2 customers a month asking when we are going to PHP5. Since the announcement, we've had up to 4-5 customers a week complaining that they will leave if we dare upgrade, they can't stand companies that change things for the sake of upgrading, etc. etc. The fact is that there are a *lot* of small business websites, designed for them by some employee x years ago, which will break when we go V5 (heck, even disabling register globals screws up most of these client sites) and the customer has no employees capable of fixing it. We've been helping customers with extra hand-holding when it comes to ensuring they will be ok, but it is costing us time to support these customers, and a reasonable percentage will simply leave us a week before the swap.
I really do believe their will be massive demand for a PHP 4 only reliable host rolling their own security updates, after end of life. I know a reasonable percentage of our client base that would likely consider them...
To be honest the fans on mine aren't so bad, it is fairly noisy, but kind of to be expected considering it is such powerful hardware in a small box. But the real issue is the DVD drive. Mine sounds like a jet taking off, non-stop, whenever playing a game. It's actually quite nice to play demos downloaded to the hard disk, as the console seems whisper quiet in comparison.
After all, what is the point in having a submarine acting as a nuclear deterrent if nobody knows you have it? You might not want people to know where it is when it's out on operations, but it's fine to show it off to everyone looking from above when it's at home at the dock.
Why on every mobile phone story do we have to have so many 'insightful' comments complaining that the phone covered in the story has too many features.
If you want a phone that makes calls, and does SMS, there are loads to choose from. Take the world's most popular phone, the Nokia 1100, with over 200 million sold worldwide. Excellent at making calls, sending text messages, brilliant battery life, and the only extra feature being a handy torch. And it'll cost you about £20 in the UK, without a contract, with £10 call time thrown in.
So leave those of us who use our phone for more than making calls to our gadget phones, you can buy the same basic and solid phones that you've always been able to buy.
Don't worry, it's just Zonk again. Is it too much to ask for editors to learn how to use hyperlinks without screwing them up, and failing that, preview before publishing to the front page of one of the top 500 sites in the world?
Frankly, it's embarrassing.
Put it this way, if I have a bad year next year, and I decide I want to blow up everyone I hate, I would not know how to get a gun. I am 90% certain that there are 0 guns within a mile or me. Do you know how safe that makes me feel? I don't think any American can truly understand this, which is demonstrated by how obsessive you get about needing to have a gun under your pillow at all times. Okay, so by your support of it, you contributed to the deaths of these dozens of people. Don't be pathetic. Somebody opposing guns is guilty because someone managed to get a gun and commit mass murder?? Only in America could the solution to a rising amount of people being able to get guns and kill people in moments of madness be to give more people guns.
The extra DRM abilities of Vista do not stop you doing *anything* in comparison to any other OS. It simply allows you to play back media which you won't be able to play back on any OS which doesn't have the exact same restrictions. Beyond this, if you don't use this DRM infested media, there is no difference between using Vista, Mac OSX or Linux.
Put it this way, if someone took Theo's code and relicensed it under their own license that they happen to prefer, which was against what Theo believes in, do you really think Theo of all people would be the kind of person who'd keep quiet about it?
The UK already have a similar system, registrants who declare themselves to be "individuals" can opt-out of the whois database, and just have their name shown on lookups. .eu domains have something similar, except you still need a valid technical contact I believe.
The 360 isn't locked for homebrew at all - it's easily the best homebrew gaming development platform out there right now. Have you never heard of XNA?
Your point on the registry stands I suppose, although a lot of Windows apps save their user level settings in the home dir now. As for programs, most windows programs are in c:\Program Files\ in the same way that most programs in Linux are in
The newly organised Vista home dirs are one of the things I like most, as someone who has used Debian and then Ubuntu for the last few years. Now just give me a decent terminal please MS..
The Linksys NSLU2 is a nice little device, it's a little ARM based linux box that you're supposed to plug USB disks into and use as a NAS. But of course you can run linux on it (even normal Debain), and hence you could get the setup that you're looking for going I imagine. And super low power usage. Only £55 as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSLU2 http://www.nslu2-linux.org/
What reports? I'm running Vista Business with full Aero (on 2 screens, 20" and 17") and loads of silly gadgets, about 10-15 different apps open including two copies of Visual Studio, a local Xming server, firefox, thunderbird, MSN, Acrobat reader, anti-virus etc. etc.
My CPU usage is idling at 2-6% looking at the little CPU gadget (which is probably using some of that itself..) And RAM usage is at 65%, and I've never ever seen it higher than 80ish. The general experience is easily faster than any version of XP that I've used, and I'm afraid to say significantly faster than any linux experience that I've had (and I've used Debian and then Ubuntu as my primary OS prior to getting this copy of Vista for 2-3 years).
And this is on a 3 year old Athlon64 3000+ with 1gb RAM and an old ATI 9800 graphics card. I seriously call on all the twits who are constantly moaning on about Vista's performance to actually use the damn thing, or shut up.
From TFA:
He discovered satellite dishes were between $100 to $400 retail and that smaller dishes, the same size as a wok, were $80. Mr Jones thought he could do better. Along with friend Murray Bobbette they worked out mathematical equations to prove the curved metal face of a wok would have the same effect as a small satellite dish.
So basically they've grown their own wireless solution, using woks. However, instead of spending ages working out mathematical equations and using trial and error, they could have bought the $80 dish and be done with it. Hence the grandparent post's point stands. Saving $20k by spending a few days developing a wireless solution is cool, but for a real world application, saving $60 on that wireless system to use a wok instead of a dish that will likely have years of development behind it is fairly silly. Like someone else has said, what about when the wok starts to rust?
Maybe if you're going to point the finger at people for not reading TFA, you should read TFA.
The fact that people are still making a big thing over the Vista DRM limitations is amazing. Yes MS are spineless and evil for adding what the movie industry wants, but if you want to ever be able to play this content on your Apple, Apple are going to have to add the exact same restrictions. Guess what, if you don't play this DRM content on a Vista PC, which you can't play on an Apple currently anyway, then there is no difference whatsoever. Vista is only evil in it's extra functionality, so if you don't like it, don't use it. I've been using a freely provided copy of Vista for a few weeks now, and I'm happier than I've ever been on a Windows OS (and I'm generally a linux fanboy), which must say something. As soon as this new crappy DRM starts being used in high def content, the situation will be the same on Vista, OS X, even linux if you want to play it, and assuming you don't go for a "cracked" approach.
You might not have, but I certainly did - and I'm fairly certain most MSDN AA members should be able to. I've got a standard issue MS printed XP CD in a wallet with my own unique license in front of me, which cost me £7 in postage. I've also got an MS supplied Vista business DVD
Most european establishments that I've encountered seem to give their users access to the MSDN AA e-academy site to manage licenses etc, whereas I've noticed that for some reason most US establishments go for the "lend a CD out to everyone" approach, and often with the same license key. This is where I'm presuming some of the problems might be starting - I'm not entirely sure these places should have been sharing a key for all machines, even if their license agreement with MS allows their students to install copies - they are probably still supposed to have a unique key per student. But I suppose in the pre-genuine advantage crap days, this was less of an issue.
What you're saying is simply not true.
It's true that MSDN AA licenses are "restricted" in that you can't use them for commercial use, and you can't use new licenses/new installs after you leave an institution that is part of an MSDN AA program.
However they specifically state that you may continue using already installed software for as long as you wish after you leave your program, as long as you keep to the original non commercial rules - ie. follow the original license requirements. Therefore if they're marking an install as non-genuine, they aren't keeping to their own agreement. What I suspect happened here is that an institution has been giving out the shared media with a shared key, which isn't how it works (or at least not how it works wherever I've seen this) - students can share installation media but should still be granted individual keys by the MSDN AA administrator.
If you don't like iTunes and Apple's DRM scheme, don't buy from the Apple music store.
I like my iPod. I own an iPod.
I don't like the iTunes music store. I'd quite like to try out some of these subscription services, ignoring the DRM aspect (which I'm addressing now) I quite like the idea of paying "rent" to have access to a huge music library. And if someone did the same for films I'd like that too, I'd happily pay a fairly big monthly fee to the music and movie people to get unlimited digital viewing of whatever they produce.
What these countries are trying to do is let you use any music player with any music store, and vice versa, and hopefully get rid of the extra DRM problems created by all of this in the mean time. And it doesn't seem to be exclusive to iTunes, it applies to everyone. I'm certainly hoping for these kind of changes, more choice is nver a bad thing.
Unless they specifically asked him to work overtime, he can't bill them afterwards. You don't decide to work 50 (undocumented) extra hours per week, then declare that your employer owes you thousands.
If this guy spent any time at work on this thing, or had time off work to specifically work on the project - which he himself seems to be saying is true - then he's screwed. Whether he signed a specific licensing agreement or not, most contracts will state that any work done on company time belongs to the company. And even if that isn't specifically in his contract (why would it be, he's a cop) - I'd find it hard to believe that anyone could argue otherwise. And if they did, surely they can fire him at a minimum for not spending his paid time at work doing something useful for his employer.
Currently he has a piece of software that he admits, and his employer can presumably prove, was at least partially worked on during work hours and using their provided equipment. The fact he decided to do a load of work outside of hours is his fault, he should have got this cleared up before putting any of his own time into it. If he wanted to keep it completely his own project, he should have refused their equipment and worked on it 100% in his own time.
On top of all this, TFA seems to state that this is simply addons for another existing system provided from another state, so I can't see how he can argue any of this is his code to sell.
Use an IMAP server.
You even answered it yourself, except decided it is of no use as it would be unavailable when your home connection goes down.
So.. get a cheap hosting/email account with IMAP capabilities, so that it's accessible over the net. Every mail client setup to use the IMAP account will see the same folders/inbox, and it'll work from anywhere. If you're paranoid about having your data in someone else's hands, download it to an archive locally with fetchmail or similar.
Something worth pointing out to people who don't want to use gmail, is that you can use gmail as an enterprise grade anti-spam filter for your personal inbox.
Simply forward all of your mail on to gmail, and then either collect it from gmail using POP3, or set gmail to forward it back to a "clean" account on your server that you can pick mail up on. You can set gmail to delete the mail after it forwards it, so you essentially get one of the best anti-spam filters out there, for free.
Of course, what is annoying me is all of the penny stock image spam that gets through most spam filters. It's getting to the point where I really am considering stripping image attachments from messages. See this post further down for a bit more on my thoughts on image spam.
The image spam is the one thing that gets through my (and gmails) spam filtering. I know people are working on OCR solutions, but spammers are already actively avoiding this with all the random dots and lines you see over their stock spam images.
So what I'm wondering, and I'd be interested if anyone on Slashdot knows about or is working on this - surely it wouldn't be too hard to detect the presence of these anti-OCR techniques? The standard way seems to be putting extra lines and edges, and a spotty background to throw OCR recognition off - why not look for those signs in an image, and add to the "Spam" score if this is present?