This reminds me of the joke about the scientist and the logger working in a forest, when suddenly a grizzly bear appears across the clearing, roars, and charges at them. The logger yells "Run!" The scientist says, "Aren't we supposed to lie down? You can't outrun a grizzly bear." The logger replies, "Yes, but in this case, I only have to outrun YOU."
While that may be the design intent of PDF, it is not the typical use. End users just want to see the content, and don't care about the presentation, as long as it is *usable*.
Funny... I send and recieve PDFs daily, and they're generally used for one of two (or both) reasons: 1) sender wants to ensure that receiver can't trivially modify the document and 2) sender wants document to look the same to the recipient as it did on sender's screen. For everything else, people still use Word documents; even if they shouldn't, and know they shouldn't.
"Copyright in a sound recording protects the particular series of sounds "fixed" (embodied in a recording) against unauthorized reproduction and revision"
Hmm... when I say something, I'm producing sound... when someone hears what I've said, their brain is recording that sound.
So does this law mean that it is illegal for anyone to repeat and/or repeat in modified form what I have said without my express permission? -Excepting satire, "reporting" (which, nowdays, means you have to be a card carrying reporter), or short exerpts for educational use, of course.
Hmm... maybe I should go down to the RIAA offices and tell them a thing or two... suing them for unlawful duplication when they tell their bosses what I said:D
It seems to me that this level of discrimination should automatically cancel their status as a common carrier... after all, they're looking at the actual data they're carrying now.
The GP was talking about an "out of the box" SP1 XP install; this is what I was replying to. I was not discounting his claim that he didn't get hacked, I was saying that without the SP2 upgrade and patches, it was pure luck that he hadn't.
It's easy to discount a "That's BS... that never happens because it didn't happen to me" claim with a "It's not BS, I've seen it happen myself" statement. Nothing odd about it. The whole thread you're replying to was talking about the importance of keeping patched, and how there are a lot of computers out there that are still running pre-SP2 XP. I'm glad to know that your company isn't included in that statistic. After SP2 and the associated patches, it is (currently) very difficult to compromise an XP workstation install without running some extra services or Outlook/IE.
Thank you for the anecdote... count yourself lucky.
As someone who admins a number of gateways and firewalls in different netblocks, I can assure you that there are a number of nasty codestreams out there... I set up one Default XP box outside a firewall as a demonstration, and within 15 minutes, it had already been compromised and joined to a botnet. After isolating it, wiping the drive and reinstalling the OS, installing a firewall and reconnecting it, the attempts at re-compromise on that IP address were near instant.
One thing to keep in mind is that some netblocks are more prone to this than others, because of the way a lot of this automated machine compromising software works. If you find that you get no probes/attacks at your current IP address, keep it -- this is one area where security through obscurity is better than no security at all. --I'd also recommend you get yourself behind a firewall, and run A/V and spamblocking software however, if you're running XP. It's possible that the only reason you think you haven't had your computer compromised is that the attackers did a good job writing their software.
I think we're getting away from the original "Do No Evil" topic... the point is, that according to many people's moral codes, Google is now saying "Do No Evil... according to the rules of the country under discussion."
Personally, I feel that if Google is starting to do this filtering, they should add a few more filtered keywords... like "Communism," "Mao Zedong," "Great Leap Forward," "Zhao Ziyang," "Jiang Zemin," and "state" (in Chinese as well of course). This way, they have an even playing field, where Google China refuses to get involved in ideological content, no matter who it panders to.
The answer is simple: Geeks/Nerds like stories about other geeks/nerds who made it big. I bet there are a lot of people on here who would love to be part of the next Jobs/Woz team.
Of course, I think we should have more Woz/Avi/etc. news articles, but guys like them don't enjoy being in the limelight like Jobs does.
Taco, why not limit the number of greenlighted submissions proportionally from any given slash ID in a given period per editor? In other words, if a slashID's ratio is, let's say, 20 articles greenlighted by ScuttleMonkey in the past month, and 0 by everyone else, ScuttleMonkey can no longer greenlight article submissions from that SlashID until some other editor has greenlighted a few?
You could even set things up so that someone trying to greenlight a submission would get a message something like "I'm sorry, you've approved too many stories by this user compared to the other editors. Would you like to send it to another editor for review, or greenlight a similar-looking submission from the list below?"
Another thing I've wondered about is this: would it be possible to add a filter that auto-filters all submissions where the body of the submission is 50% or more verbatim from some googleable site on the internet? This would require submitters to actually write their writeups instead of copy/pasting... it would also reduce the number of dupes, as the search would often turn up the original slashdot post.
Of course, the filter above would have to be one of the last ones applied, otherwise the sheer bandwidth between slashdot and google would be of ludicrous proportions.
So I think their conclusion was that it's "plausible", and if a shark were to bite you, it's certainly not a bad idea to hit it hard in the nose if you're able.
I seem to recall Jamie stating that their noses are *hard* and that he found it much more effective (and easier on the knuckles) to hit them just in front of (or was it behind) the gills.
Sigh... forget to preview your message to make sure that the quoted material is properly italicized, and those who would otherwise be rating you Insightful rate you a troll.
My point exactly; somehow, my quote didn't end up italicized; changing my implied stance on the issue somewhat. Serves me right for not hitting preview;)
Wikipedia is not a reliable source of information.
I hate to break it to you, but any non-primary sources that don't cite their sources accurately aren't reliable sources of information. Not only that, but primary sources are shown to be fallible and subject to interpretation all the time. I'd bet that the majority of school teaching material you used to get to where you are today was on a similar level of reliability with Wikipedia. It just had more entrenched proponents.
Encyclopedias are "first step" sources -- places you go to find out about commonly held generalizations on a topic. From there, if you want accurate information, you follow the listed sources and decide their accuracy for yourself based on the evidence presented. The beauty of Wikipedia is that the more popular a topic, the more likely that the view presented will be a consensus view. More obscure topics will still likely hold the consensus view of those interested, but this view might differ wildly from that of the majority of individuals who are not interested in the topic. The one weak assumption with Wikipedia is that those who are most interested in a topic are also most likely to want the information distributed about that topic to be truthful and accurate.
So, in summary, Wikipedia is a reference, not a teaching source. Secondly, always check the sources and use your critical thinking skills -- even when dealing with teaching sources.
That would be why all non-IE browsers have the ability to change the User Agent string... in Safari it's in the Debug menu, and in Firefox you enter about:config into the URL bar, hit enter, right click to add a new string, and enter general.useragent.override as the string name and whatever you want as the useragent (I prefer the string "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US;) Gecko/20040910" which tends to give pretty good results).
That's about the only situation Timmy could USE such a weapon though. The guns you named aren't hunting weapons, so that's out.
I think you blatantly missed the GP's point. With no gun control, there would be no control of guns. Period. Hunting weapons or otherwise. Gun laws are like seatbelt laws and traffic laws -- put in place to prevent the obvious problems from ever happening. Of course, considering traffic violations kill over 42000 people per year in the US....
Have you seen the current USD price plot against other world currencies? It looks to me like it's already approaching a comparable all-time low based on current US foreign policy and war debt alone.
It's been a while since I've read the DMCA, but I'd like to comment on some of your comments.
For example, if I encrypt my personal data on my hard drive, I think it should be generally illegal for you to break the encryption, just like it's generally illegal to break into my house. That's fair, right?
Yes, that's fair, and that's why it's illegal even without the DMCA. The trick is that most laws don't make methods illegal, they make actions illegal. Accessing your personal property without permission is illegal.
The problem I have with the DMCA is the idea that it might allow someone to lock data that I believe I should have access to, and I have no legal recourse. For example, AFAIK, it's illegal to rip DVDs to your hard drive, even if you have no intention of violating copyrights. To my mind, that's like being forbidden from creating an alternate means of entry into my own house, rather than being forbidden from breaking into someone else's house.
AFAIK, the DMCA says nothing about ripping DVDs; they can be easily imaged to a HDD. The trick is that you get into copyright trouble (DeCSS) when trying to convert them to a new format playable by software not originally designed to play the DVD. Also, the DMCA says nothing about region encoding. Your thoughts on the subject are still valid however.
I guess what I'm saying is, if the US government wants to give stiffer penalties for copyright infringement if the act includes bypassing copy protection, that doesn't bother me. Insofar as the DMCA does that, I don't mind. It only starts bothering me if it's used to go after private individuals who bypass protection for the purpose of fair use.
It bothers me -- methods should not create stiffer penalties; actions should. People get caught up in the "technology" used to commit pre-defined crimes, and forget that they are already crimes irrespective of how they were committed. We don't need an "Internet auction fraud" law, because we already have a perfectly usable fraud law that applies. If an old law no longer carries appropriate penalties for a crime, the old law needs to be revised.
To sum up, everything illegal under the DMCA that should be illegal already was -- everything else is being overturned on a case-by-case basis, which is putting the onus on the innocent parties to prove they're innocent, instead of putting the onus on the prosecution to prove they're guilty. The DMCA is a "guilty until proven innocent" law.
I gave them my info as they're already my long distance carrier; all they had was a Windows.exe file, even though they claim to be Mac/Windows compatible. At least if they had an OS X.app file, it might be runnable under GnuStep PPC.
How does that not support my claim that it is illegal in Canada to deny the holocaust?
Ever heard the argument that because you saw a black crow, all crows must be black?
The article didn't say he broke the law for denying the holocaust, it says he broke the law for promoting race hate, and the main tool he used to promote it was holocaust denial. In canada, Judges tend to give more weight to intent than they do in the US -- sometimes this is good, sometimes it is a problem. You will also see this issue crop up in Libel claims, among other things.
Re:artists properly compensated?
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It's called a Cartel. Just like the diamond merchants do everything they can to restrict the injection of "other" diamonds into the marketplace, RIAA companies restrict the airplay and venues available to new artists. This means that in most cases, if you want to make a living off of your music, you have to sign with an RIAA member, in order to get the startup financing, airplay, and venues that are generally required to become popular. Most artists eventually give up and sign, even if they don't like the conditions of the contract.
However, with the advent of internet-based human networking (IM, blogs, etc.), this is starting to change. You still can't get the old airplay and venues, but it is now affordable to distribute your music over the internet, using word of mouth to increase demand. Similarly, you might not be able to book the good venues, but with blogs etc., people can find the alternative venues that don't get ad-time in newspapers, on the radio, or on TV.
So in summary, artists often are victims, but with the new technologies of the last 10 years, more and more artists are able to emancipate themselves and survive.
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me of the joke about the scientist and the logger working in a forest, when suddenly a grizzly bear appears across the clearing, roars, and charges at them. The logger yells "Run!" The scientist says, "Aren't we supposed to lie down? You can't outrun a grizzly bear." The logger replies, "Yes, but in this case, I only have to outrun YOU."
Welcome to Socialist America :)
Funny... I send and recieve PDFs daily, and they're generally used for one of two (or both) reasons: 1) sender wants to ensure that receiver can't trivially modify the document and 2) sender wants document to look the same to the recipient as it did on sender's screen. For everything else, people still use Word documents; even if they shouldn't, and know they shouldn't.
Hmm... when I say something, I'm producing sound... when someone hears what I've said, their brain is recording that sound.
So does this law mean that it is illegal for anyone to repeat and/or repeat in modified form what I have said without my express permission? -Excepting satire, "reporting" (which, nowdays, means you have to be a card carrying reporter), or short exerpts for educational use, of course.
Hmm... maybe I should go down to the RIAA offices and tell them a thing or two... suing them for unlawful duplication when they tell their bosses what I said :D
It seems to me that this level of discrimination should automatically cancel their status as a common carrier... after all, they're looking at the actual data they're carrying now.
It's easy to discount a "That's BS... that never happens because it didn't happen to me" claim with a "It's not BS, I've seen it happen myself" statement. Nothing odd about it. The whole thread you're replying to was talking about the importance of keeping patched, and how there are a lot of computers out there that are still running pre-SP2 XP. I'm glad to know that your company isn't included in that statistic. After SP2 and the associated patches, it is (currently) very difficult to compromise an XP workstation install without running some extra services or Outlook/IE.
As someone who admins a number of gateways and firewalls in different netblocks, I can assure you that there are a number of nasty codestreams out there... I set up one Default XP box outside a firewall as a demonstration, and within 15 minutes, it had already been compromised and joined to a botnet. After isolating it, wiping the drive and reinstalling the OS, installing a firewall and reconnecting it, the attempts at re-compromise on that IP address were near instant.
One thing to keep in mind is that some netblocks are more prone to this than others, because of the way a lot of this automated machine compromising software works. If you find that you get no probes/attacks at your current IP address, keep it -- this is one area where security through obscurity is better than no security at all. --I'd also recommend you get yourself behind a firewall, and run A/V and spamblocking software however, if you're running XP. It's possible that the only reason you think you haven't had your computer compromised is that the attackers did a good job writing their software.
Personally, I feel that if Google is starting to do this filtering, they should add a few more filtered keywords... like "Communism," "Mao Zedong," "Great Leap Forward," "Zhao Ziyang," "Jiang Zemin," and "state" (in Chinese as well of course). This way, they have an even playing field, where Google China refuses to get involved in ideological content, no matter who it panders to.
Of course, I think we should have more Woz/Avi/etc. news articles, but guys like them don't enjoy being in the limelight like Jobs does.
I take it you've lived in both countries....
You could even set things up so that someone trying to greenlight a submission would get a message something like "I'm sorry, you've approved too many stories by this user compared to the other editors. Would you like to send it to another editor for review, or greenlight a similar-looking submission from the list below?"
Another thing I've wondered about is this: would it be possible to add a filter that auto-filters all submissions where the body of the submission is 50% or more verbatim from some googleable site on the internet? This would require submitters to actually write their writeups instead of copy/pasting... it would also reduce the number of dupes, as the search would often turn up the original slashdot post.
Of course, the filter above would have to be one of the last ones applied, otherwise the sheer bandwidth between slashdot and google would be of ludicrous proportions.
Does Google know something I don't know?
I seem to recall Jamie stating that their noses are *hard* and that he found it much more effective (and easier on the knuckles) to hit them just in front of (or was it behind) the gills.
Sigh... forget to preview your message to make sure that the quoted material is properly italicized, and those who would otherwise be rating you Insightful rate you a troll.
My point exactly; somehow, my quote didn't end up italicized; changing my implied stance on the issue somewhat. Serves me right for not hitting preview ;)
Wikipedia is not a reliable source of information.
I hate to break it to you, but any non-primary sources that don't cite their sources accurately aren't reliable sources of information. Not only that, but primary sources are shown to be fallible and subject to interpretation all the time. I'd bet that the majority of school teaching material you used to get to where you are today was on a similar level of reliability with Wikipedia. It just had more entrenched proponents.
Encyclopedias are "first step" sources -- places you go to find out about commonly held generalizations on a topic. From there, if you want accurate information, you follow the listed sources and decide their accuracy for yourself based on the evidence presented. The beauty of Wikipedia is that the more popular a topic, the more likely that the view presented will be a consensus view. More obscure topics will still likely hold the consensus view of those interested, but this view might differ wildly from that of the majority of individuals who are not interested in the topic. The one weak assumption with Wikipedia is that those who are most interested in a topic are also most likely to want the information distributed about that topic to be truthful and accurate.
So, in summary, Wikipedia is a reference, not a teaching source. Secondly, always check the sources and use your critical thinking skills -- even when dealing with teaching sources.
That would be why all non-IE browsers have the ability to change the User Agent string... in Safari it's in the Debug menu, and in Firefox you enter about:config into the URL bar, hit enter, right click to add a new string, and enter general.useragent.override as the string name and whatever you want as the useragent (I prefer the string "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US;) Gecko/20040910" which tends to give pretty good results).
I think you blatantly missed the GP's point. With no gun control, there would be no control of guns. Period. Hunting weapons or otherwise. Gun laws are like seatbelt laws and traffic laws -- put in place to prevent the obvious problems from ever happening. Of course, considering traffic violations kill over 42000 people per year in the US....
Have you seen the current USD price plot against other world currencies? It looks to me like it's already approaching a comparable all-time low based on current US foreign policy and war debt alone.
There's nothing that get's me more than random apostrophe's that loose there meaning. ;)
For example, if I encrypt my personal data on my hard drive, I think it should be generally illegal for you to break the encryption, just like it's generally illegal to break into my house. That's fair, right?
Yes, that's fair, and that's why it's illegal even without the DMCA. The trick is that most laws don't make methods illegal, they make actions illegal. Accessing your personal property without permission is illegal.
The problem I have with the DMCA is the idea that it might allow someone to lock data that I believe I should have access to, and I have no legal recourse. For example, AFAIK, it's illegal to rip DVDs to your hard drive, even if you have no intention of violating copyrights. To my mind, that's like being forbidden from creating an alternate means of entry into my own house, rather than being forbidden from breaking into someone else's house.
AFAIK, the DMCA says nothing about ripping DVDs; they can be easily imaged to a HDD. The trick is that you get into copyright trouble (DeCSS) when trying to convert them to a new format playable by software not originally designed to play the DVD. Also, the DMCA says nothing about region encoding. Your thoughts on the subject are still valid however.
I guess what I'm saying is, if the US government wants to give stiffer penalties for copyright infringement if the act includes bypassing copy protection, that doesn't bother me. Insofar as the DMCA does that, I don't mind. It only starts bothering me if it's used to go after private individuals who bypass protection for the purpose of fair use.
It bothers me -- methods should not create stiffer penalties; actions should. People get caught up in the "technology" used to commit pre-defined crimes, and forget that they are already crimes irrespective of how they were committed. We don't need an "Internet auction fraud" law, because we already have a perfectly usable fraud law that applies. If an old law no longer carries appropriate penalties for a crime, the old law needs to be revised.
To sum up, everything illegal under the DMCA that should be illegal already was -- everything else is being overturned on a case-by-case basis, which is putting the onus on the innocent parties to prove they're innocent, instead of putting the onus on the prosecution to prove they're guilty. The DMCA is a "guilty until proven innocent" law.
Hmm... they could use the money to fund a meeting of like minded hackers... say, call it "Dark Headcovering"
I gave them my info as they're already my long distance carrier; all they had was a Windows .exe file, even though they claim to be Mac/Windows compatible. At least if they had an OS X .app file, it might be runnable under GnuStep PPC.
Ever heard the argument that because you saw a black crow, all crows must be black?
The article didn't say he broke the law for denying the holocaust, it says he broke the law for promoting race hate, and the main tool he used to promote it was holocaust denial. In canada, Judges tend to give more weight to intent than they do in the US -- sometimes this is good, sometimes it is a problem. You will also see this issue crop up in Libel claims, among other things.
However, with the advent of internet-based human networking (IM, blogs, etc.), this is starting to change. You still can't get the old airplay and venues, but it is now affordable to distribute your music over the internet, using word of mouth to increase demand. Similarly, you might not be able to book the good venues, but with blogs etc., people can find the alternative venues that don't get ad-time in newspapers, on the radio, or on TV.
So in summary, artists often are victims, but with the new technologies of the last 10 years, more and more artists are able to emancipate themselves and survive.