I had a number of family members in jail that were sent to facilities around the US. I had looked into Pigeonly because of their telephone service rates. Calling inmates is ridiculous - either on their books or calling collect - it's a ransom to call long-distance. What I ended up doing instead was signing up for 3 different google voice numbers in the area codes of the prisons my family were all in and had them call me at the local numbers. While still a lot more than a traditional call, it was astronomically cheaper than long-distance, and cheaper than the plans offered by Pigeonly.
The federal prisons system has email access, and was the cheapest way for all of us to stay in touch. Snail-mail was bad. Sorting and scanning at the prisons is kind of a crap shoot. Sometimes letters wouldn't arrive until 4-6 weeks after we'd sent them. Sometimes they'd show up in 3 days. I think a few showed up 3-4 months latter. The intake office rejects all kinds of letters for arbitrary reasons. They sent back a picture we included with a letter, that my 3 year old had drawn for her uncle. Their note said it was returned because it was an "unsigned card".
My mom's prison had access to video chat. $20 for 15 minutes I think. We tried it 2 times. The latency and lag was really bad. Kind of felt like I was video chatting on an old 320x240 from the early 00s. The apps didn't have any kind of noise canceling / mute function with the mic so unless we chatted on headphones you start an infinite feedback loop. I tried once on computer and once on an iPhone. Because we were only doing it some my mom could see her grandkid, and this 3 year old wasn't into headphones we gave up the video chatting too.
Good on him for helping out people not savvy enough to setup VOIP lines in local area codes and making letter writing easier. Keeping up with people in prison is hard and expensive.
For a long time I ran an AppleTV and lived in the iTunes world. It was fine, a long time ago, but new/cheaper/better options exist. I personally rip all of my media to a Synology NAS and have started working with 4K media files. If I didn't have the 4k HDR h.265 media and the large digital collection I've amassed, I'd probably have gotten a FireTV - incredibly capable, plenty of streaming options, and cheap. But the 4k files that I have require a whole lot of horsepower, and I wanted to try to future-proof myself for a few years so I got an Nvidia Shield. Love the Android app options (it's fully rootable if you wanna get real custom with it), I run Plex on my Synology NAS with my own media, Kodi/Netflix/Prime all stream well, RetroArch works flawlessly with the Shield game controller so game emulation is super easy. All in all the Shield is pretty much a MPC replacement for fraction of the cost.
I'm not sure where you are located but I've never seen a bartender or waitress refuse to serve a paying customer and even if they did, many times the person doing the ordering is grabbing something for a friend, ordering for the entire group, etc...
I've seen it happen at bars and clubs, though it's more common that the person is being 86'd by the bouncer because they couldn't keep their head off the table/bar or were obnoxiously drunk. I've also seen liquor store clerks turn sales away because they could smell alcohol on the customer's breath. I've also seen flight attendants refuse to serve drunk passengers on airplanes. Lots of US state and cities have what are called SIP (Sales to Intoxicated Person) laws.
An interesting viewpoint and experience I'd never considered. Are you open to the idea then of the offenders' having the same capacity of deleting their names and information of their offenses off the internet?
I've personally lost 2 fake name accounts on Facebook. I live in an ultra-conservative state governed by a majority conservative religious electorate (Utah), and I personally hold some liberal views. I changed my Facebook account from my real name, to a fake name years ago specifically to stop any potential employers from seeing any of my social media activity (even with stringent privacy settings) and then causing me employment issues. On two separate occasions Facebook shutdown my fake name accounts, so I just don't use Facebook anymore.
Anyone else notice that tons of apps on SourceForge (owned by the same great overlord as/.) are bundling MacKeeper with the installer? Seriously, I've tried to grab a few apps from SourceForge recently only to find the app I'm trying to grab wrapped with some kind of crap-ware installer. Apparently it's wrapped at random and doesn't always happen to everyone. After seeing a few installers that I got from SF fail or never install my app or attempt to connect to the internet (and thankfully able to be stopped by Little Snitch), I did a few google searches to figure out WTF... Apparently SF has been doing this for a while now - and so really, I partially blame them for the fact that so many people have this kind of crap installed on their machines... See the reviews on FileZilla for some reviewers complaining about this very thing.
I did something similar a few years back. I worked for a certain "fruit"-based tech company that has (had?) a policy in place that said if we repaired the same piece of hardware, through no detectable fault of the owner, 3 times in a 12 month period, that the customer was to get a brand new current model computer for free. So in an effort to get upgraded stuff for my family and friends, I spliced an AC power plug to a Cat5 ethernet cable. When I'd plug them all together, it would usually trip the breaker on the electrical panel and sometimes blow sparks out of the ethernet port, but within one or two attempts the logic board (or motherboard for you non-"fruit" techs) would be fried and no one was ever the wiser. o.0
I graduated from the Y too - and while most of my professors were not irrational about science, much of the student body was. I had a professor in a 100 level geology class who would start off most of his lectures by saying, "Now I know for some of you, your testimonies may tell you the earth is only such and such many years old. I'm not here to rock your testimonies or shake your faith, but simply to present scientific evidence as we understand it today."
I laughed every time he had to make a disclaimer to the believers about the validity of his lectures (and then face-palmed myself for going to a school where so much of the student body sticks their heads in the sand).
Simplest solution - use the ISBNs - plenty of bar code scanning apps exist to scan these in...
For books without the ISBNs - create your own QR codes to catalog/scan them all...
Linux servers have become a favorite home for memory- resident rootkits because they're so reliable. Rebooting a computer resets its memory. When you don't have to reboot, you don't clear the memory out, so whatever is there stays there, undetected.
I don't mean to sound like a moron or naive but are Linux rootkits really that prevalent? After doing a quick google search for "rootkits for linux", I found a few for the old 2.0 and 2.2 Linux kernels... Have updates that have since come out made life that much harder for the hacking community? Anyone have an idea of what's going on here, because I'm really surprised to see them make the claim that Linux servers are a new favorite home for rootkits...
Just saw this wonderful little tid-bit in the press release
SCO owns the core UNIX operating system, originally developed by AT&T/Bell Labs and is the exclusive licensor to Unix-based system software providers. To the death they'll defend that claim... And now they're in for a delisting... Let's all keep our fingers crossed until Oct. 22, then it's official!
Just to shed a little light on Ralph Yarro and this subject as well (as I posted earlier I went to church with Yarro for about 2 years and had a lot of very interesting conversations with him)...
ThinkAtomic was actually given/borrrowed funding against it's SCO stocks. At the time they were worth over $100 million!; now after two reverse splits, Yarro is sitting on MAYBE about $100k in SCO stock... Oooooh I bet his investors and banks are just frothing at the mouth to tear him apart... After the Norda family helped to get Yarro out of Canopy Ventures, all he was left with was SCO, one massively tanked law suite, and a pile of debt up to his eye-balls...
Just a little FYI, I used to live down in Provo Utah and actually went to church every Sunday with Ralph Yarro. Crazy Mormon jokes aside (Ahhhh it's the suites and ties on bikes coming to convert us!!!!), Yarro lives in a complete dream-world. While I was attending BYU *gag*, his new start-up Think Atomic and the lobby group CP80 would constantly put full 2 page spreads in the student papers, asking students to lobby their congressmen to help stop internet pornography (using the technical solutions from Think Atomic of course). After talking with him at church about it all, I got the notion he's basically trying to create a virtual "xxx" domain type of filtering system (put all the porn in one place and we can then filter out that place if we choose).
Basically it goes something like, someone somewhere decides what sites are and aren't porn. Based on the tags they assign those sites, parents are able to block whatever they choose not to allow their children to view. The thing is, Yarro wants the government (eventually) to mandate that all internet sites use Think Atomic's ratings system and filtering setup.
How you mandate this kind of ratings system beyond U.S. borders is beyond me. I would assume that the majority of porn on the net comes from (or is at least hosted in) countries other than the U.S. (Russian spammers and their bot-nets?). Anyways, like I said Yarro is in a dream-world, SCO is in the death throws (next quarter expect the NASDAQ to de-list them as they've already filed for a reverse split a year or so ago), and Ralphie needs to realize that *PUBLIC* wi-fi spots are the last place teenagers wanna be looking at porn...
What 'holy grail' can come from hordes of 16 year old girls and boys and an ENORMOUS army of porn/spam bots all voting on what's the most important news of the day...
I was/am a big Sony fan-boy because of the library of games the Playstation has always sported... I'm an RPG addict, and the Playstation enabled my addiction to no end. But after the wonderful Sony root-kit adventure and the current $600 price tag, I don't think I'll be buying a PS3 any time soon. Let's not forget to mention that Next-Gen game prices have all gone up another $10. All in all they basically priced me out of the market and I am refusing to save up for one.
The only Next-Gen system I own right now is the Nintendo Wii. Why? The controls are incredibly innovative (much like the DS, and I thoroughly enjoyed my experience with it). The price tag was ONLY $250 and current games are still set at the $44.99-49.99 price... Oh yeah, and let's not forget Zelda and the Twilight Princess... All in all this spells one happy Wii gamer who will be waiting until those PS3 systems drop in price, and up-coming RPG releases become Best Seller titles and the prices drop to $19.99 - 29.99
Parents can't beat or abuse their children...
There should be limits to corporally punishing your children. I was spanked as a kid, and feel no worse off for it. I'll probably spank my little ones as well. But as an adult I have to understand that there is a certain amount of corporal punishment that is acceptable and some that is not. Open-handed spank on the butt / Close-handed crack in the jaw... There's a big difference...
Parents can't arm their children and let them go running about in public...
I am an Eagle Scout. The first two merit badges I received on my first 2 week long Scout Camp trip were Shotgun Shooting and Rifle Shooting. The entire time I was under the supervision of trained adults who were there to insure that I safe my gun in a safe and sane manner (NO GOOFING OFF AT ALL AT THE RANGE!). As responsible as I was with guns, I still believe children should not have unsupervised access to weapons and ammunition. I'm sorry, but you wait until you have a son or a daughter, that at the tender age of 14-15 goes through his/hers first true-love break-up... Watch as the mass hysteria ensues... Then explain to us again why arming teenagers is such a great idea...
Parents can't let their children become under-age alcoholics...
Ever watched a sober 16 year old girl (with the stereo blasting, three friends in the car jumping around, and texting at the time) drive? Care to allow that same 16 year old girl the legal ability to purchase alcohol and then trust her to make the *right* decision about drinking and driving?
And we're the feral uncivilized human beings?
Back to the topic at hand, I worked as a teenager in GameStop (back then it was Software Etc) for a number of years. Company policy was that no one under the age of 17 could buy an M rated game. Would we get in much trouble if we, as store clerks, didn't follow that policy? Not really, maybe at worst a slight reprimand. Many times, it was a judgment call on ourselves... I had several 8-12 year olds try to buy the GTA-III series games, and I told them their parents needed to be there to buy the game. When parents would come with young ones like this, I'd explain the game in detail (always used the example, sleep with a hooker in you car, pay her, kill her, get your money back and leave)... Some parents were ok with that, some weren't... Most older teenagers (16+), I'd give a free pass to without really worrying about it...
I don't have a problem with store policies such as these, but IMO if parents are concerned for their children's well-being then it is their responsibility, as PARENTS, to ensure their children are viewing the things they believe appropriate... Store policies like that, only help to ensure that my children don't get their hands on objectionable material without my say-so (if the store clerks are really doing their jobs)...
"No single company "owns" DVD. The official specification was developed by a consortium of ten companies: Hitachi, JVC, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Philips, Pioneer, Sony, Thomson, Time Warner, and Toshiba. Representatives from many other companies also contributed in various working groups. In May 1997, the DVD Consortium was replaced by the DVD Forum , which is open to all companies, and as of February 2000 had over 220 members. Time Warner originally trademarked the DVD logo, and has since assigned it to the DVD Format/Logo Licensing Corporation (DVD FLLC)."
Looks like there isn't any kind of single company that can really rule on this and say, those aren't officially formatted DVDs... The fact that Sony was a main developer in the consortium would also probably make it that much harder to revoke any kind of "DVD" stamp from these disks...
I think on a corporate level, anti-virus is a *must*, you're dealing with 100s of millions of dollars in transactions and any downtime is money lost... For the tech-savvy home user though, I really don't think anti-virus is essential.
I run an iMac with OSX 10.4.7, and an IBM (Lenovo) Thinkpad with Windows XP SP2 and all the latest updates and hot-fixes. I refuse to put anti-virus on it because I think it sucks up too many of my resources. Since switching from IE to Firefox (back in the 0.4 Fire phoenix days) I have no had 1 single issue of spyware, malware, or virus problems on my machine. I keep everything up-to-date and I know who, what, when, and where I'm downloading all my files from the internet. I'll be honest, I pirate plenty and still haven't had any problems... The more I see these anti-virus solutions, it seems that they are designed to keep dumb people from from doing dumb things...
So from TFA about the insects controlling the ghosts, this doesn't sound as ground-breaking as the first FA... I mean sure the insects are "controlling the ghosts with their brains" but there really is no interaction with the computer at all... The insects are just recognized by the camera who then moves the ghosts in the game correspondingly... Isn't that just optical recognition of colors? Why over-hyped...
Though I'm glad to see the advances being made towards better prosthetic limbs. My roommate lost his arm (right below the elbow) in a rock-crusher accident about 8 months ago and we're all still waiting for the day when we get the Star Wars quality prosthetic limbs...:D
Well if it came down to it, don't you think Mr Rumsfeld would claim that you are working to help the war on terrorism and that the Patriot Act over-rides the DMCA?
At the very least I hope Sony is fair when they sue people under the DMCA and that they sue Scotch tape manufacturer 3m... I mean you can use Scotch tape to circumvent copyright protection on Sony CDs and isn't that a violation of the DMCA even though Scotch tape has many legal uses...
We used MythTV here at my work (BYU, Univeristy Library) where we only get cable provided by the university... Quite frankly I was impressed that it was able to grab a program guide for such a chopped up cable feed... We get like 7 or 8 channels... As far as the Live-TV features, I haven't had a single problem yet... Plus I've throughly enjoyed the intrensic DVD ripper built in...
Also it came built-in with a MAME/NES/SNES emulator built in so that on your PC-TV you can also play Nintendo!
All in all though I didn't find it very difficult to set up at all, and was overly impressed...
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I had a number of family members in jail that were sent to facilities around the US. I had looked into Pigeonly because of their telephone service rates. Calling inmates is ridiculous - either on their books or calling collect - it's a ransom to call long-distance. What I ended up doing instead was signing up for 3 different google voice numbers in the area codes of the prisons my family were all in and had them call me at the local numbers. While still a lot more than a traditional call, it was astronomically cheaper than long-distance, and cheaper than the plans offered by Pigeonly.
The federal prisons system has email access, and was the cheapest way for all of us to stay in touch. Snail-mail was bad. Sorting and scanning at the prisons is kind of a crap shoot. Sometimes letters wouldn't arrive until 4-6 weeks after we'd sent them. Sometimes they'd show up in 3 days. I think a few showed up 3-4 months latter. The intake office rejects all kinds of letters for arbitrary reasons. They sent back a picture we included with a letter, that my 3 year old had drawn for her uncle. Their note said it was returned because it was an "unsigned card".
My mom's prison had access to video chat. $20 for 15 minutes I think. We tried it 2 times. The latency and lag was really bad. Kind of felt like I was video chatting on an old 320x240 from the early 00s. The apps didn't have any kind of noise canceling / mute function with the mic so unless we chatted on headphones you start an infinite feedback loop. I tried once on computer and once on an iPhone. Because we were only doing it some my mom could see her grandkid, and this 3 year old wasn't into headphones we gave up the video chatting too.
Good on him for helping out people not savvy enough to setup VOIP lines in local area codes and making letter writing easier. Keeping up with people in prison is hard and expensive.
For a long time I ran an AppleTV and lived in the iTunes world. It was fine, a long time ago, but new/cheaper/better options exist. I personally rip all of my media to a Synology NAS and have started working with 4K media files. If I didn't have the 4k HDR h.265 media and the large digital collection I've amassed, I'd probably have gotten a FireTV - incredibly capable, plenty of streaming options, and cheap. But the 4k files that I have require a whole lot of horsepower, and I wanted to try to future-proof myself for a few years so I got an Nvidia Shield. Love the Android app options (it's fully rootable if you wanna get real custom with it), I run Plex on my Synology NAS with my own media, Kodi/Netflix/Prime all stream well, RetroArch works flawlessly with the Shield game controller so game emulation is super easy. All in all the Shield is pretty much a MPC replacement for fraction of the cost.
I'm not sure where you are located but I've never seen a bartender or waitress refuse to serve a paying customer and even if they did, many times the person doing the ordering is grabbing something for a friend, ordering for the entire group, etc...
I've seen it happen at bars and clubs, though it's more common that the person is being 86'd by the bouncer because they couldn't keep their head off the table/bar or were obnoxiously drunk. I've also seen liquor store clerks turn sales away because they could smell alcohol on the customer's breath. I've also seen flight attendants refuse to serve drunk passengers on airplanes. Lots of US state and cities have what are called SIP (Sales to Intoxicated Person) laws.
Selling alcohol to an intoxicated person
An interesting viewpoint and experience I'd never considered. Are you open to the idea then of the offenders' having the same capacity of deleting their names and information of their offenses off the internet?
I've personally lost 2 fake name accounts on Facebook. I live in an ultra-conservative state governed by a majority conservative religious electorate (Utah), and I personally hold some liberal views. I changed my Facebook account from my real name, to a fake name years ago specifically to stop any potential employers from seeing any of my social media activity (even with stringent privacy settings) and then causing me employment issues. On two separate occasions Facebook shutdown my fake name accounts, so I just don't use Facebook anymore.
Anyone else notice that tons of apps on SourceForge (owned by the same great overlord as /.) are bundling MacKeeper with the installer? Seriously, I've tried to grab a few apps from SourceForge recently only to find the app I'm trying to grab wrapped with some kind of crap-ware installer. Apparently it's wrapped at random and doesn't always happen to everyone. After seeing a few installers that I got from SF fail or never install my app or attempt to connect to the internet (and thankfully able to be stopped by Little Snitch), I did a few google searches to figure out WTF... Apparently SF has been doing this for a while now - and so really, I partially blame them for the fact that so many people have this kind of crap installed on their machines... See the reviews on FileZilla for some reviewers complaining about this very thing.
I did something similar a few years back. I worked for a certain "fruit"-based tech company that has (had?) a policy in place that said if we repaired the same piece of hardware, through no detectable fault of the owner, 3 times in a 12 month period, that the customer was to get a brand new current model computer for free. So in an effort to get upgraded stuff for my family and friends, I spliced an AC power plug to a Cat5 ethernet cable. When I'd plug them all together, it would usually trip the breaker on the electrical panel and sometimes blow sparks out of the ethernet port, but within one or two attempts the logic board (or motherboard for you non-"fruit" techs) would be fried and no one was ever the wiser. o.0
I graduated from the Y too - and while most of my professors were not irrational about science, much of the student body was. I had a professor in a 100 level geology class who would start off most of his lectures by saying, "Now I know for some of you, your testimonies may tell you the earth is only such and such many years old. I'm not here to rock your testimonies or shake your faith, but simply to present scientific evidence as we understand it today."
I laughed every time he had to make a disclaimer to the believers about the validity of his lectures (and then face-palmed myself for going to a school where so much of the student body sticks their heads in the sand).
Simplest solution - use the ISBNs - plenty of bar code scanning apps exist to scan these in... For books without the ISBNs - create your own QR codes to catalog/scan them all...
Didn't this happen last leap year to the Zunes... oh yeah...
Why not just set the file permissions to not allow write access - then said director will be forced to work on and save files locally..
Linux servers have become a favorite home for memory- resident rootkits because they're so reliable. Rebooting a computer resets its memory. When you don't have to reboot, you don't clear the memory out, so whatever is there stays there, undetected.
I don't mean to sound like a moron or naive but are Linux rootkits really that prevalent? After doing a quick google search for "rootkits for linux", I found a few for the old 2.0 and 2.2 Linux kernels... Have updates that have since come out made life that much harder for the hacking community? Anyone have an idea of what's going on here, because I'm really surprised to see them make the claim that Linux servers are a new favorite home for rootkits...SCO owns the core UNIX operating system, originally developed by AT&T/Bell Labs and is the exclusive licensor to Unix-based system software providers. To the death they'll defend that claim... And now they're in for a delisting... Let's all keep our fingers crossed until Oct. 22, then it's official!
I was under the impression that China was moving away from Windows...
:-/
Just to shed a little light on Ralph Yarro and this subject as well (as I posted earlier I went to church with Yarro for about 2 years and had a lot of very interesting conversations with him)...
ThinkAtomic was actually given/borrrowed funding against it's SCO stocks. At the time they were worth over $100 million!; now after two reverse splits, Yarro is sitting on MAYBE about $100k in SCO stock... Oooooh I bet his investors and banks are just frothing at the mouth to tear him apart... After the Norda family helped to get Yarro out of Canopy Ventures, all he was left with was SCO, one massively tanked law suite, and a pile of debt up to his eye-balls...
It's called KARMA, bitch!
Just a little FYI, I used to live down in Provo Utah and actually went to church every Sunday with Ralph Yarro. Crazy Mormon jokes aside (Ahhhh it's the suites and ties on bikes coming to convert us!!!!), Yarro lives in a complete dream-world. While I was attending BYU *gag*, his new start-up Think Atomic and the lobby group CP80 would constantly put full 2 page spreads in the student papers, asking students to lobby their congressmen to help stop internet pornography (using the technical solutions from Think Atomic of course). After talking with him at church about it all, I got the notion he's basically trying to create a virtual "xxx" domain type of filtering system (put all the porn in one place and we can then filter out that place if we choose).
Basically it goes something like, someone somewhere decides what sites are and aren't porn. Based on the tags they assign those sites, parents are able to block whatever they choose not to allow their children to view. The thing is, Yarro wants the government (eventually) to mandate that all internet sites use Think Atomic's ratings system and filtering setup.
How you mandate this kind of ratings system beyond U.S. borders is beyond me. I would assume that the majority of porn on the net comes from (or is at least hosted in) countries other than the U.S. (Russian spammers and their bot-nets?). Anyways, like I said Yarro is in a dream-world, SCO is in the death throws (next quarter expect the NASDAQ to de-list them as they've already filed for a reverse split a year or so ago), and Ralphie needs to realize that *PUBLIC* wi-fi spots are the last place teenagers wanna be looking at porn...
What 'holy grail' can come from hordes of 16 year old girls and boys and an ENORMOUS army of porn/spam bots all voting on what's the most important news of the day...
I agree with this 100%!
I was/am a big Sony fan-boy because of the library of games the Playstation has always sported... I'm an RPG addict, and the Playstation enabled my addiction to no end. But after the wonderful Sony root-kit adventure and the current $600 price tag, I don't think I'll be buying a PS3 any time soon. Let's not forget to mention that Next-Gen game prices have all gone up another $10. All in all they basically priced me out of the market and I am refusing to save up for one.
The only Next-Gen system I own right now is the Nintendo Wii. Why? The controls are incredibly innovative (much like the DS, and I thoroughly enjoyed my experience with it). The price tag was ONLY $250 and current games are still set at the $44.99-49.99 price... Oh yeah, and let's not forget Zelda and the Twilight Princess... All in all this spells one happy Wii gamer who will be waiting until those PS3 systems drop in price, and up-coming RPG releases become Best Seller titles and the prices drop to $19.99 - 29.99
So...
Parents can't beat or abuse their children...
There should be limits to corporally punishing your children. I was spanked as a kid, and feel no worse off for it. I'll probably spank my little ones as well. But as an adult I have to understand that there is a certain amount of corporal punishment that is acceptable and some that is not. Open-handed spank on the butt / Close-handed crack in the jaw... There's a big difference...
Parents can't arm their children and let them go running about in public...
I am an Eagle Scout. The first two merit badges I received on my first 2 week long Scout Camp trip were Shotgun Shooting and Rifle Shooting. The entire time I was under the supervision of trained adults who were there to insure that I safe my gun in a safe and sane manner (NO GOOFING OFF AT ALL AT THE RANGE!). As responsible as I was with guns, I still believe children should not have unsupervised access to weapons and ammunition. I'm sorry, but you wait until you have a son or a daughter, that at the tender age of 14-15 goes through his/hers first true-love break-up... Watch as the mass hysteria ensues... Then explain to us again why arming teenagers is such a great idea...
Parents can't let their children become under-age alcoholics...
Ever watched a sober 16 year old girl (with the stereo blasting, three friends in the car jumping around, and texting at the time) drive? Care to allow that same 16 year old girl the legal ability to purchase alcohol and then trust her to make the *right* decision about drinking and driving?
And we're the feral uncivilized human beings?
Back to the topic at hand, I worked as a teenager in GameStop (back then it was Software Etc) for a number of years. Company policy was that no one under the age of 17 could buy an M rated game. Would we get in much trouble if we, as store clerks, didn't follow that policy? Not really, maybe at worst a slight reprimand. Many times, it was a judgment call on ourselves... I had several 8-12 year olds try to buy the GTA-III series games, and I told them their parents needed to be there to buy the game. When parents would come with young ones like this, I'd explain the game in detail (always used the example, sleep with a hooker in you car, pay her, kill her, get your money back and leave)... Some parents were ok with that, some weren't... Most older teenagers (16+), I'd give a free pass to without really worrying about it...
I don't have a problem with store policies such as these, but IMO if parents are concerned for their children's well-being then it is their responsibility, as PARENTS, to ensure their children are viewing the things they believe appropriate... Store policies like that, only help to ensure that my children don't get their hands on objectionable material without my say-so (if the store clerks are really doing their jobs)...
Quote from some web-page or another...
"No single company "owns" DVD. The official specification was developed by a consortium of ten companies: Hitachi, JVC, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Philips, Pioneer, Sony, Thomson, Time Warner, and Toshiba. Representatives from many other companies also contributed in various working groups. In May 1997, the DVD Consortium was replaced by the DVD Forum , which is open to all companies, and as of February 2000 had over 220 members. Time Warner originally trademarked the DVD logo, and has since assigned it to the DVD Format/Logo Licensing Corporation (DVD FLLC)."
Looks like there isn't any kind of single company that can really rule on this and say, those aren't officially formatted DVDs... The fact that Sony was a main developer in the consortium would also probably make it that much harder to revoke any kind of "DVD" stamp from these disks...
I think on a corporate level, anti-virus is a *must*, you're dealing with 100s of millions of dollars in transactions and any downtime is money lost... For the tech-savvy home user though, I really don't think anti-virus is essential. I run an iMac with OSX 10.4.7, and an IBM (Lenovo) Thinkpad with Windows XP SP2 and all the latest updates and hot-fixes. I refuse to put anti-virus on it because I think it sucks up too many of my resources. Since switching from IE to Firefox (back in the 0.4 Fire phoenix days) I have no had 1 single issue of spyware, malware, or virus problems on my machine. I keep everything up-to-date and I know who, what, when, and where I'm downloading all my files from the internet. I'll be honest, I pirate plenty and still haven't had any problems... The more I see these anti-virus solutions, it seems that they are designed to keep dumb people from from doing dumb things...
So from TFA about the insects controlling the ghosts, this doesn't sound as ground-breaking as the first FA... I mean sure the insects are "controlling the ghosts with their brains" but there really is no interaction with the computer at all... The insects are just recognized by the camera who then moves the ghosts in the game correspondingly... Isn't that just optical recognition of colors? Why over-hyped... Though I'm glad to see the advances being made towards better prosthetic limbs. My roommate lost his arm (right below the elbow) in a rock-crusher accident about 8 months ago and we're all still waiting for the day when we get the Star Wars quality prosthetic limbs... :D
Well if it came down to it, don't you think Mr Rumsfeld would claim that you are working to help the war on terrorism and that the Patriot Act over-rides the DMCA?
At the very least I hope Sony is fair when they sue people under the DMCA and that they sue Scotch tape manufacturer 3m... I mean you can use Scotch tape to circumvent copyright protection on Sony CDs and isn't that a violation of the DMCA even though Scotch tape has many legal uses...
We used MythTV here at my work (BYU, Univeristy Library) where we only get cable provided by the university... Quite frankly I was impressed that it was able to grab a program guide for such a chopped up cable feed... We get like 7 or 8 channels... As far as the Live-TV features, I haven't had a single problem yet... Plus I've throughly enjoyed the intrensic DVD ripper built in...
Also it came built-in with a MAME/NES/SNES emulator built in so that on your PC-TV you can also play Nintendo!
All in all though I didn't find it very difficult to set up at all, and was overly impressed...