We're talking about Canada, not the US... in Canada things are not decided by suing people, they're decided by people sitting down and discussing the issue until a solution is found... and then debating it for years before putting it into law. Since the PIPEDA already exists, this study will be enough of a deterrent for most individuals and companies -- except maybe some US companies who think they're above the law and can do what they want. At which point, the Canadian Government steps in and sues them on behalf of the people.
One thing I forgot to mention: in this case, there shouldn't be any charge that has anything to do with terrorism or bombs; I would think the charge would be public mischief or something similar.
As I have often gone into an airport forgetting I had a knife in my pocket (it has always got past security, oddly enough), I can empathize with her and the fact that she wasn't thinking about how threatening what she was wearing could be to some people. What I can't figure out is the lack of response when questioned by someone in a position of authority (the ticket booth person).
But, she did NOT make any kind of bomb threat. She didn't do anything to provoke a bomb threat alert. And since when is ANY citizen obligated to talk to anyone they don't wish to? She ignored some ticket counter person....maybe not the most polite thing to do, but, certainly not unlawful.
EVERYONE with a badge in an airport must be treated as airport staff. If she had worn this to the theater and been asked about it by the ticket person (when she was just asking about show times), I'd expect the same sort of response, even though that response probably wouldn't be forthcoming.
This isn't about actual threat, this is about public perception of threat, in a society where all the movies show bombs as having a bunch of wires and flashing lights.
That said, there didn't seem to be any mass panic resulting from her attire.
I dunno, like I said, I guess I'm not that scared of getting blown up by a terrorists. Certainly not one looking and dressing like this girl.
When I visit the US, I'm much more afraid of being shot at by red blooded Americans or run over by an SUV than I am of getting blown up by terrorists. However, I find this security action just as reasonable as mass fingerprinting and strip searches in airports of people who are actually being cooperative.
It is a criminal act to make bomb threats in an airport, just as it is a criminal act to shout "fire" in a movie theater. They obviously considered what she was doing to be a bomb threat, as she refused to tell them what it was she was wearing.
This isn't about her being an actual threat (I doubt security was worried she might blow something up) -- this is about the possibility of causing panic in a crowded public area. There are rules about such things for a reason.
Seriously, I was smart enough not to wear such stuff to the airport 20 years ago; 15 years ago I was asked not to use the "b" word by airport security. I think I had said in too loud a loud voice that some show I had been to had bombed.
I give him kudos for admitting he was wrong; I give him a tsk tsk for the way in which he did it. He labels the group at Groklaw as "amateur sleuths" which, in my book, implies that he is a professional sleuth. Why, then, did the "amateur sleuths" who are a collection of individuals, ranging from slashdot geeks in basements through to paralegals, lawyers, software architects, engineers, and probably even a few journalists and PIs, do due dilligence, while he plainly states that he did not?
I have to admit that I stopped thinking of him as a viable journalist shortly after he started covering this case. In his article, he mentions that he based his writing on what SCO told him, and that he'd been burned once before by not bothering to cover the whole DOS lawsuit. If I had been in his shoes, I would have immediately done a search on Unix, and found out about the BSD/AT&T lawsuit, and how that turned out. At which point, I would have (had I not already known anything about the situation) thought, "Hmm. Sounds like there might be another side to this story," and, being a technical journalist for a financial rag, used my contacts at, say, IBM, or even some uninvolved third party like Red Hat or Novell to try and get a full picture before reporting.
Corporate Feed Reporting has got so bad nowadays that unless I see evidence in the first paragraph of an article that it is either an opinion piece, or that the reporter has consulted multiple parties, not just copied and pasted some text out of some document provided to them by some other party, I just skip over the rest of the article and do a search on the topic for an article that at least clings to a shred of journalistic integrity.
An idea I came up with after reading this yesterday: Why not apply a rating system to journalists similar to that being used on Wikipedia by the UCSC crew? A journalist's rating is affected by whether they follow journalistic procedures in their writing, who they sell their article to (separate rating system for publishers based on the ratings of journalists who publish throgh them), accuracy of factual reporting, whether they include large blocks of text found to be non original, etc.
ISA server on Windows would be difficult to get around, if the server is in a more secure location. I'm not sure you can boot to safe mode and still play vidoes, although I suppose pictures would still work. At any rate, I think there are some loggers that can get around this. Wireless can be secure, if you use RADIUS. My home network does not allow access to wireless unless the computer was previously joined to the Windows domain.
This sidesteps most of the issue: children are quick learners with a lot of time on their hands. If they aren't taught to respect your wishes (don't do these kinds of things on this computer hardware), all it takes is one slip in your security measures (letting them follow you into the secure server room once, letting them actually know how you've implemented security, etc.) and they'll be able to undo pretty much anything you've done. As far as WiFi goes, I think my original argument was that all they have to do is switch to your NEIGHBOUR'S unsecured access point, and they've sidestepped all of your filters and server/gateway security.
What's wrong with an interest and curiosity about sex? Maybe if we taught kids earlier, we wouldn't have the teenage pregnancy problems and other issues today.
I don't think this issue was ever raised in this part of the thread. The thread was based on the assumption that children were being intentionally censored, and asked how to do it effectively. Whether this censorship is a bad approach to our current social problems is neither here nor there in this discussion.
In order to see anything useful, you should also plot the Euro and the Yen. While the CAD has increased slightly in buying power in recent years, the bigger news is that the USD has plummeted, likely due to bad fiscal policy (war debt).
Explaining shit in the Lucasverse is what gave us midichlorians.
...and here I always thought midichlorians were funky chlorine-based molecules that acted as a digital interface for musical instruments.
I thought the lame explanation was that some other Jedi (or the force trying to balance itself) was helping him control the saber.
Evidently, it's also useful to narrow down "touch" to the sense of pressure in the skin, so things like pain, temperature, nausea, the gag reflex, and the sense of having to go to the bathroom are separate senses entirely.
Actually, the gag reflex and the full bladder signal aren't senses, they're sensory reflexes/responses, triggered by the pressure sense. As the GP noted, "touch" is actually a collection of pressure and pain senses.
Nausea is more interesting, as it is caused by a combination of a memory effect, the pressure sense, the pain sense, the balance sense, the sense of smell, and the senses of taste. If conditioned correctly, it can also be triggered by the senses of sight and the sense of sound (seeing/hearing someone else vomit, for instance).
Since, in Lucas' fictional universe, the saber is a high energy power source that is controlled purely by the force, it seems to me it could be placed in sunglasses, a beanie or a belt buckle.
For that matter, someone who is an advanced enough Jedi should be able to make it curve, not just shoot out in a straight line and stop at a specified distance.
Having a pulse setting would also be interesting, for numerous applications.
However, it doesn't appear George ever came up with any of this, so it doesn't exist in his universe; he stuck to a straight beam of fixed distance, with the one exception being 2 beams.
entrapment involves the use of a technique that ends up in a crime being committed that under normal conditions would not have happened. would the crime have been committed without mediadefender setting up a trap? in all probabiliy it would. It would just happen elsewhere. it isn't strictly entrapment but it sure is evil.
If they hadn't set up the website, this specific "crime" COULDN'T have happened.
Think about what you said, with respect to, for example, VICE squads:
"Would Joe have been busted for possession of marijuana if the cop didn't sell it to him? In all probability he would have; it would just have happened elsewhere."
This is incorrect. It would NOT have happened; he MIGHT have been busted for possession of OTHER marijuana sold by someone else. On the other hand, he might not.
All of this is moot anyway, as you can't be entrapped in civil court. If they passed federal charges (under the DMCA), then an entrapment suit might possibly be in order if those entrapping were operating "above the law". Otherwise, either THEY were committing a crime by distributing the content, or those downloading weren't committing a crime as they would have been given legal permission to download the data. The worst thing they could be asked to do if those distributing the data didn't have permission to do so would be to remove their copy from their computer by the court. Of course, in most sane countries, possession of copywritten data isn't a crime, infringement, or anything similar; only distribution is. All you can be sued for is breach of contract in civil court (assuming there was some sort of contract).
I think the point with this thing is that you don't have to eject; you release the wings (with fuel and jets) from your pack, and descend with the parachute as usual.
The one thing I'm wary about is that the device will contain both jet fuel and oxygen, both in close quarters to your body. In the time it would take for the oxygen tank to explode in an equipment malfunction, you likely wouldn't have time to release the jets from the pack. At least with a jet there's a bit of shielding.
P.S. Does anyone else other than coders use nested parenthesis in writing something in English?
Well, the official way to do it (when you do it in English [writing, that is])is to alternate curved and square parentheses. This is similar to using nested quotes (alternating double and single quotes) where the rule tends to match in programming languages. Personally, I think that this would be useful in programming languages as well, but I don't recall seeing any that do it.
I tried iTunes a couple of years ago, and it was lame, but workable. I tried it again just last week, and it is now completely unusable.
Strange; I can put music on iTunes in a number of ways: 1) let it search for new music when first installed
2) drag the music into whatever playlist I want from the OS file browser. I can choose to have it either move the file into the iTunes library, or copy it and leave the original.
3) double-click a file in Explorer/Finder and have it either copy or move the file into the library.
I presume you're using the Windows version, as I found it less intuitive than the MacOS version.
I use iTunes, but up until Apple started offering DRM-free files, I didn't use iTMS/iTS. I use a PDA instead of an iPod, and sync with an iTunes playlist.
Personally, while the iPod has always been easy to use, it's always had too many things that weren't quite right for me (no removeable storage, can't drag-n-drop files onto it in USB drive mode to get them to play, no touch screen [fixed], hard-to-replace battery, no way to easily develop my own software for it, etc.). This being said, the iTouch almost has me... all it's missing is an HDSC slot and BlueTooth.
The only thing in your post that I can't see a determined teenager getting around is the "computer in public area" bit -- that seems to be the best solution.
The proxy server is easy to bypass, as are the logging programs (on windows, boot up in safe mode with network support), wireless is not secure, and teenagers are inventive.
Think about it: all they need to do is get a USB drive from a friend that has a win32-bootable OS on it, boot the computer into safe mode, and run the OS in a window.
Of course, with too much lockdown, you'll find your kids spending more time at their friends'.
The best way to keep such stuff away from kids is to keep them busy with other things that interest them more... difficult for some kids, but possible.
I mean, if an American corporation went overseas somewhere, and funded a bunch of lawyers to begin suing the pants of the locals, you can bet there'd be an uproar.
Ever heard of The Pirate Bay?
Unfortunately, there IS an uproar in many countries about the goings-on of American-funded entities in the rest of the world. It just doesn't make US (or other national) headlines for some reason.
Maybe he doesn't, but I do. And I completely agree with him. Installing a background task just to deal with license keys is bad juju.
I also agree -- Working for a hardware company that also sells support software, we've found a very elegant solution that has worked quite well while not being too cumbersome: 1. Tie the version of the software you're using to the hardware they have -- basically, sell more than one part of the solution, and make them depend on each other. 2. Provide a "serial number activation" field during install. Any number entered will work as long as it fits the right hash and is the right length. The number is encoded in such a way that it contains the product version, date of sale, and some piece of information about the customer (eg. last 4 digits of contact phone number). This information shows up in the about box of the installed software. 3. Whenever anyone calls in for support, we ask for the serial number. If the phone number doesn't match, we ask for further verification that the person is a legitimate customer.
So far, the "enter a serial number" step seems to be enough to keep piracy down, when combined with the hardware+service model. If we ever went out of business, the software would continue working. No serial number (old Apple style) tends to not stop the average person from pirating, but making licensing more than a simple step will cause at least one person to decide it is easier to crack the software than to jump through all the hoops -- at which point you lose control.
Think of it as "newspaper box" level security. Sure... someone could put in their money and take ALL the papers, but they have little incentive to do so. Make it difficult to get that first paper (sign up and provide SSN, credit card, etc.) and someone will break into the box and take the whole stack. This seems to be the human condition.
I tend to agree... Opera, Eudora/Pegasus and ssh/web svn are cleaner and zippier.
For those using FoxIt PDF Reader, it is small and zippy, but it also fails to load a bunch of PDF types (missing fonts, hit-and-miss encryption handling, etc.). I used Foxit for about 2 months, and then eventually went to Adobe Reader 8 -- it's slightly bloated, but it always gets the job done, and unlike 7.x, it launches as quickly as Foxit.
I love the entire premise: if you vote FOR anything MS related... your country is corrupt. If you vote against it... your country isn't corrupt.
Pretty... um... "interesting" worldview you FOSSies have going on there.
Teh Lunix is all about choice... you can choose any application teh FOSSies want you to. But don't you DARE choose Microsoft.
I think you might win an award for missing the point not only of the story, but also of the summary and the headline. There is no premise... there was a correlation (not causation) found between countries found to be corrupt and countries backing MS on OOXML. The vote has absolutely no bearing (I hope) on the corruptness index.
If they can achieve that (by 2009, not too hard), the phone system is done.
Only problem? the cell towers.
Once they have regulatory backing, cell towers are no biggie. Modern honeycomb towers are fairly inexpensive to build, and are also fairly unobtrusive -- all Google needs to do is lease a few million rooftops, which shouldn't be too difficult (especially if they throw in free access as a park).
It's basically a law that makes you guilty of "breaking and entering" into your own home. It's worse than redundant.
Well, to be fair, it makes you guilty of a federal crime if you break into your rental dwelling (since you don't actually own the property, you just have the right to use it).
A half decent metaphor would be your landlord putting in your agreement that you couldn't have more than 5 people in your apartment at any given time, and putting special locks on the doors that monitor how many people enter at any given time.
Being an intelligent person, when you host thanksgiving dinner and have 5 family members over, you decide that to avoid the lockdown situation, you'll leave a window open and climb in that way yourself. The landlord spots you doing this, and brings criminal charges against you for breaking and entering the premises.
Slashdot Mirror
We're talking about Canada, not the US... in Canada things are not decided by suing people, they're decided by people sitting down and discussing the issue until a solution is found... and then debating it for years before putting it into law. Since the PIPEDA already exists, this study will be enough of a deterrent for most individuals and companies -- except maybe some US companies who think they're above the law and can do what they want. At which point, the Canadian Government steps in and sues them on behalf of the people.
One thing I forgot to mention: in this case, there shouldn't be any charge that has anything to do with terrorism or bombs; I would think the charge would be public mischief or something similar.
As I have often gone into an airport forgetting I had a knife in my pocket (it has always got past security, oddly enough), I can empathize with her and the fact that she wasn't thinking about how threatening what she was wearing could be to some people. What I can't figure out is the lack of response when questioned by someone in a position of authority (the ticket booth person).
EVERYONE with a badge in an airport must be treated as airport staff. If she had worn this to the theater and been asked about it by the ticket person (when she was just asking about show times), I'd expect the same sort of response, even though that response probably wouldn't be forthcoming.
This isn't about actual threat, this is about public perception of threat, in a society where all the movies show bombs as having a bunch of wires and flashing lights.
That said, there didn't seem to be any mass panic resulting from her attire.
When I visit the US, I'm much more afraid of being shot at by red blooded Americans or run over by an SUV than I am of getting blown up by terrorists. However, I find this security action just as reasonable as mass fingerprinting and strip searches in airports of people who are actually being cooperative.
It is a criminal act to make bomb threats in an airport, just as it is a criminal act to shout "fire" in a movie theater. They obviously considered what she was doing to be a bomb threat, as she refused to tell them what it was she was wearing.
This isn't about her being an actual threat (I doubt security was worried she might blow something up) -- this is about the possibility of causing panic in a crowded public area. There are rules about such things for a reason.
Seriously, I was smart enough not to wear such stuff to the airport 20 years ago; 15 years ago I was asked not to use the "b" word by airport security. I think I had said in too loud a loud voice that some show I had been to had bombed.
I give him kudos for admitting he was wrong; I give him a tsk tsk for the way in which he did it. He labels the group at Groklaw as "amateur sleuths" which, in my book, implies that he is a professional sleuth. Why, then, did the "amateur sleuths" who are a collection of individuals, ranging from slashdot geeks in basements through to paralegals, lawyers, software architects, engineers, and probably even a few journalists and PIs, do due dilligence, while he plainly states that he did not?
I have to admit that I stopped thinking of him as a viable journalist shortly after he started covering this case. In his article, he mentions that he based his writing on what SCO told him, and that he'd been burned once before by not bothering to cover the whole DOS lawsuit. If I had been in his shoes, I would have immediately done a search on Unix, and found out about the BSD/AT&T lawsuit, and how that turned out. At which point, I would have (had I not already known anything about the situation) thought, "Hmm. Sounds like there might be another side to this story," and, being a technical journalist for a financial rag, used my contacts at, say, IBM, or even some uninvolved third party like Red Hat or Novell to try and get a full picture before reporting.
Corporate Feed Reporting has got so bad nowadays that unless I see evidence in the first paragraph of an article that it is either an opinion piece, or that the reporter has consulted multiple parties, not just copied and pasted some text out of some document provided to them by some other party, I just skip over the rest of the article and do a search on the topic for an article that at least clings to a shred of journalistic integrity.
An idea I came up with after reading this yesterday:
Why not apply a rating system to journalists similar to that being used on Wikipedia by the UCSC crew? A journalist's rating is affected by whether they follow journalistic procedures in their writing, who they sell their article to (separate rating system for publishers based on the ratings of journalists who publish throgh them), accuracy of factual reporting, whether they include large blocks of text found to be non original, etc.
This sidesteps most of the issue: children are quick learners with a lot of time on their hands. If they aren't taught to respect your wishes (don't do these kinds of things on this computer hardware), all it takes is one slip in your security measures (letting them follow you into the secure server room once, letting them actually know how you've implemented security, etc.) and they'll be able to undo pretty much anything you've done. As far as WiFi goes, I think my original argument was that all they have to do is switch to your NEIGHBOUR'S unsecured access point, and they've sidestepped all of your filters and server/gateway security.
I don't think this issue was ever raised in this part of the thread. The thread was based on the assumption that children were being intentionally censored, and asked how to do it effectively. Whether this censorship is a bad approach to our current social problems is neither here nor there in this discussion.
In order to see anything useful, you should also plot the Euro and the Yen. While the CAD has increased slightly in buying power in recent years, the bigger news is that the USD has plummeted, likely due to bad fiscal policy (war debt).
Are people lovingly referring to it as "The Ronald" yet?
Since, in Lucas' fictional universe, the saber is a high energy power source that is controlled purely by the force, it seems to me it could be placed in sunglasses, a beanie or a belt buckle.
For that matter, someone who is an advanced enough Jedi should be able to make it curve, not just shoot out in a straight line and stop at a specified distance.
Having a pulse setting would also be interesting, for numerous applications.
However, it doesn't appear George ever came up with any of this, so it doesn't exist in his universe; he stuck to a straight beam of fixed distance, with the one exception being 2 beams.
If they hadn't set up the website, this specific "crime" COULDN'T have happened.
Think about what you said, with respect to, for example, VICE squads:
"Would Joe have been busted for possession of marijuana if the cop didn't sell it to him? In all probability he would have; it would just have happened elsewhere."
This is incorrect. It would NOT have happened; he MIGHT have been busted for possession of OTHER marijuana sold by someone else. On the other hand, he might not.
All of this is moot anyway, as you can't be entrapped in civil court. If they passed federal charges (under the DMCA), then an entrapment suit might possibly be in order if those entrapping were operating "above the law". Otherwise, either THEY were committing a crime by distributing the content, or those downloading weren't committing a crime as they would have been given legal permission to download the data. The worst thing they could be asked to do if those distributing the data didn't have permission to do so would be to remove their copy from their computer by the court. Of course, in most sane countries, possession of copywritten data isn't a crime, infringement, or anything similar; only distribution is. All you can be sued for is breach of contract in civil court (assuming there was some sort of contract).
I think the point with this thing is that you don't have to eject; you release the wings (with fuel and jets) from your pack, and descend with the parachute as usual.
The one thing I'm wary about is that the device will contain both jet fuel and oxygen, both in close quarters to your body. In the time it would take for the oxygen tank to explode in an equipment malfunction, you likely wouldn't have time to release the jets from the pack. At least with a jet there's a bit of shielding.
Strange; I can put music on iTunes in a number of ways:
1) let it search for new music when first installed
2) drag the music into whatever playlist I want from the OS file browser. I can choose to have it either move the file into the iTunes library, or copy it and leave the original.
3) double-click a file in Explorer/Finder and have it either copy or move the file into the library.
I presume you're using the Windows version, as I found it less intuitive than the MacOS version.
I use iTunes, but up until Apple started offering DRM-free files, I didn't use iTMS/iTS. I use a PDA instead of an iPod, and sync with an iTunes playlist.
Personally, while the iPod has always been easy to use, it's always had too many things that weren't quite right for me (no removeable storage, can't drag-n-drop files onto it in USB drive mode to get them to play, no touch screen [fixed], hard-to-replace battery, no way to easily develop my own software for it, etc.). This being said, the iTouch almost has me... all it's missing is an HDSC slot and BlueTooth.
The only thing in your post that I can't see a determined teenager getting around is the "computer in public area" bit -- that seems to be the best solution.
The proxy server is easy to bypass, as are the logging programs (on windows, boot up in safe mode with network support), wireless is not secure, and teenagers are inventive.
Think about it: all they need to do is get a USB drive from a friend that has a win32-bootable OS on it, boot the computer into safe mode, and run the OS in a window.
Of course, with too much lockdown, you'll find your kids spending more time at their friends'.
The best way to keep such stuff away from kids is to keep them busy with other things that interest them more... difficult for some kids, but possible.
Ever heard of The Pirate Bay?
Unfortunately, there IS an uproar in many countries about the goings-on of American-funded entities in the rest of the world. It just doesn't make US (or other national) headlines for some reason.
I also agree -- Working for a hardware company that also sells support software, we've found a very elegant solution that has worked quite well while not being too cumbersome:
1. Tie the version of the software you're using to the hardware they have -- basically, sell more than one part of the solution, and make them depend on each other.
2. Provide a "serial number activation" field during install. Any number entered will work as long as it fits the right hash and is the right length. The number is encoded in such a way that it contains the product version, date of sale, and some piece of information about the customer (eg. last 4 digits of contact phone number). This information shows up in the about box of the installed software.
3. Whenever anyone calls in for support, we ask for the serial number. If the phone number doesn't match, we ask for further verification that the person is a legitimate customer.
So far, the "enter a serial number" step seems to be enough to keep piracy down, when combined with the hardware+service model. If we ever went out of business, the software would continue working. No serial number (old Apple style) tends to not stop the average person from pirating, but making licensing more than a simple step will cause at least one person to decide it is easier to crack the software than to jump through all the hoops -- at which point you lose control.
Think of it as "newspaper box" level security. Sure... someone could put in their money and take ALL the papers, but they have little incentive to do so. Make it difficult to get that first paper (sign up and provide SSN, credit card, etc.) and someone will break into the box and take the whole stack. This seems to be the human condition.
I tend to agree... Opera, Eudora/Pegasus and ssh/web svn are cleaner and zippier.
For those using FoxIt PDF Reader, it is small and zippy, but it also fails to load a bunch of PDF types (missing fonts, hit-and-miss encryption handling, etc.). I used Foxit for about 2 months, and then eventually went to Adobe Reader 8 -- it's slightly bloated, but it always gets the job done, and unlike 7.x, it launches as quickly as Foxit.
Obviously when he wants to just read the document and not edit it. More or less gets the job done.
I think you might win an award for missing the point not only of the story, but also of the summary and the headline. There is no premise... there was a correlation (not causation) found between countries found to be corrupt and countries backing MS on OOXML. The vote has absolutely no bearing (I hope) on the corruptness index.
I think in the case of cable TV, "a la cart" is more apt.
Once they have regulatory backing, cell towers are no biggie. Modern honeycomb towers are fairly inexpensive to build, and are also fairly unobtrusive -- all Google needs to do is lease a few million rooftops, which shouldn't be too difficult (especially if they throw in free access as a park).
The hard part will be rural coverage.
Well, to be fair, it makes you guilty of a federal crime if you break into your rental dwelling (since you don't actually own the property, you just have the right to use it).
A half decent metaphor would be your landlord putting in your agreement that you couldn't have more than 5 people in your apartment at any given time, and putting special locks on the doors that monitor how many people enter at any given time.
Being an intelligent person, when you host thanksgiving dinner and have 5 family members over, you decide that to avoid the lockdown situation, you'll leave a window open and climb in that way yourself. The landlord spots you doing this, and brings criminal charges against you for breaking and entering the premises.