...especially considering that Slashdot is read world-wide, and (for example) us Europeans usually do not order from the US onliners (not just the different voltage, but postage and, especially, border taxes).
You might be surprised to learn that even after taxes, most electronic-related items are significantly cheaper in the US. There tends to be a policy to price products equivalently in the number of dollars and euros. Right now, that works out to about a 42% premium for the privilege of paying in euros (and the UK gets it even worse with similar 1:1 pricing but a 76% premium for paying in pounds).
For example - typical song pricing on itunes is 0.99 euros in europe, but 0.99 cents in the USA.
Stay away from Tigerdirect. If they don't screw up your order, then they are as good as any other merchant who does not screw up your order. But, if anything goes wrong, they suck to deal with.
Furthermore, a couple of years ago they engaged in a ridiculously blatant 'carpet-bombing' of reseller-ratings - a site where they had an appropriate bad rating over a number of years of being rated. In like 6 months, the number of people who rated Tigerdirect increased more than 10x of all the previous years of rating, and all of these new 'people' gave the company uncharacteristically high marks.
In short, pirates are the reason that we all have to deal with DRM BS. Pirates are not Robin Hood - They're just people too cheap to pay for what they want and too weak to just go without it.
So, when hollywood paid congress to enact retro-active copyright extensions, essentially stealing from the public domain, that's OK because hollywood is not too cheap to pay for what they want, eh? But when little guys take the matter into their own hands instead of paying off congress they are just a bunch of gutless bastards.
Don't really need flash for those video sites like youtube, and most everything else is just advertising - check out this info about how to download the videos as mp4 files:
However, modern drives have a huge count of spare sectors, and sectors get retired constantly, and there's no way to wipe those with normal reads and writes. So there's a random sampling of everything you've ever written stored in the retired sectors of a hard drive, and no in-band way to wipe those sectors.
Does anyone know, off-hand, a way to query a sata disk for at least a count of how many sectors have been re-allocated, if not an actual map of them?
Also how could the anti Tivoisation GPLv3 clause work if Tivo got to decide which license people used? They could just opt to license code under GPLv2. It only makes sense if the users get to decide to use GPLv3 and thus get the power to compel Tivo to do something it doesn't want to do?
No.
The anti-tivoization clause is about preventing MORE people from exploiting the loophole that Tivo found. It is NOT about stopping Tivo in their tracks, and it never was. The FSF has never been a punitive organization and frankly, copyright law does not work that way either. The GPL is very specific, it explicitly says that it only contains "TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION" -- not use.
License changes are retroactive for packages that have the "version 2 or later" clause. Once version 3 comes out users can decide whether they want to use it, not Tivo.
The GPL limits distribution, not usage. As Tivo is the distributor, the "version 2 or later" clause means tivo, not their users, get to pick if is distributed to the users under "version 2" or under "later."
Some of the user level stuff they rely on will change license terms. In fact most GPL code is licensed under "version 2 or later", so if they use that their users can just treat it as if it were GPLv3 licensed. or GPLv4 when it comes out, which might have additional anti Tivo clauses.
The userland stuff going to GPLv3 ain't going to hurt them, they don't rely on gnu-licensed userland utilities for DRM so the changes in GPLv3 don't impact them.
Face it the FSF and most of the community don't want them to use Linux in the way they do.
Possibly. But since license changes aren't retroactive, you are making a mountain out of a molehill.
They mentioned GPL3 in their annual report to the SEC... in fact they regard GPL3 as a threat to Linux on the same level as SCO's lawsuit.
I don't think you have much experience reading SEC filings. They exist to CYA the company from investor lawsuits by covering all their bases. Just because its mentioned doesn't mean they consider it a significant problem.
I bet they have a Tivo in the works based on an alternate OS just to cover themselves.
One one hand, some people are mad at them. On the other hand, they saved millions in development costs. I don't see them being unhappy unless it is an existential angst.
Those who think that this could ultimately be a good thing from a civil liberties perspective - I know of no CCTV camera which has caught evidence of police misconduct, even when there is strong reason to believe that they should have done so. (Why this should be the case I leave as an exercise to the reader)
Good for you. For me, I dropped $600+ on two cards in order to drive 4 monitors - all based on this supposedly great support they had for linux. The drivers didn't effing work and the 'support' was completely worthless, little better than "did you plug in the cable" level. I had to pay another ~$200 for two gefen "dvi doctors" in order to fix an obvious bug in nvidia's driver, a bug I could have fixed myself faster than it would have taken to recompile the drivers if I had source. Three years later, their drivers still lag without full support for randr.
Because the explanations from the people who were attacked by the police and the FBI make more sense.
What is more reasonable:
1) That someone was going to lug 40+ lbs of piss (5 gallon bucket) just to pour on the cops 2) That the water was turned off and they needed a bucket of water in order to manually flush the toilets
Also, which is more verifiable? Allegations of what someone might do, versus verifiable facts (was the water in the theater turned off, was the contents of the 5 gallon buckets actually water)?
Skylab massed 77,088kg; the ISS at present masses 277,598kg, and if ever completed it will mass 419,600kg.
Yeah, but Skylab was made out of the much less dense aluminum, while the ISS is made out of lead to shield against cosmic radiation. So technically, the guy was right, the ISS is smaller than Skylab,
John McCain is 72 years old and has had several cancerous growths removed.
I'm not an actuarial, but I bet the odds are not good that he'd make it through a full term. Then, I'm afraid, li'l Missy's views are going to be of great consequence.
On the other hand, what's the chance that some klansman would assassinate a president Obama? He got secret service protection much sooner in the process than any other candidate has, so it isn't like I'm some lone paranoid poster on slashdot. Biden is pretty anti-freedom too, I really don't think I would want him as president either.
Hundreds of lives now vs. the hypothetical hundreds torture victims in the future? The answer is very simple...
Yeah, and the answer isn't what you think it is.
There has never been a case where waterboarding resulted in saving lives that were in immediate danger. The whole "ticking time bomb" scenario has never happened and is extremely unlikely to ever happen. Furthermore, even if it did happen the whole "oh you have to verify the words of enthusiastic collaborators too" excuse doesn't apply because if there is a ticking time bomb there is no way to verify until too late.
Incidentally, after being explicitly told their company has no permission to access my web servers, their continued attempts amount to unauthorized access.
Bullshit. If the web were to work that way, it would kill it. You don't want them spidering your public website, then don't make it public.
If I were you, I would fuck with them. Pollute their data. You've obviously been able to figure out which accesses are there's - use that knowledge to feed them disinformation. If you are lucky, you might even able to manipulate their clients in a way that can end indirectly making you money.
It is called traffic analysis. An old trick of what used to be called trade craft and probably is by the spooks
They could have figured out the same thing if they had paid attention to the increase in pizza-deliveries to the alaska governor's mansion for the two days beforehand too.
About 35 million cows are slaughtered in the U.S. If you test 1% of them, you get a maximum margin of error of about 0.17%. Testing 10% would only reduce that error margin to 0.05% while increasing the cost 10x. Testing 50% would reduce the error margin to 0.02% while increasing cost by 50x.
You've got a lot of assumptions there.
Like, for example, that testing is distributed uniformly across the population.
And second that cows are discrete.
Yeah, you heard me, cattle are not discrete. Two words -- ground beef. Unless your butcher grinds it himself, chances are that ground beef sold in your local grocery or used in burgers at the local fast-food joint is made out of hundreds, if not thousands of different cattle that have essentially all been tossed into one giant blender. Even if your local butcher does grind it himself, chances are that you'll get pieces from at least a handful of different animals in any particular sample because the machine is not sanitized each time a new piece of meat is ground up and they can't all come from the same animal.
But the only people who decide if bad lawyers deserve to be punished are other lawyers. That's the same bullshit self-regulation that got us the entire credit reporting industry and other systemically fucked up industries.
Slashdot Mirror
...especially considering that Slashdot is read world-wide, and (for example) us Europeans usually do not order from the US onliners (not just the different voltage, but postage and, especially, border taxes).
You might be surprised to learn that even after taxes, most electronic-related items are significantly cheaper in the US. There tends to be a policy to price products equivalently in the number of dollars and euros. Right now, that works out to about a 42% premium for the privilege of paying in euros (and the UK gets it even worse with similar 1:1 pricing but a 76% premium for paying in pounds).
For example - typical song pricing on itunes is 0.99 euros in europe, but 0.99 cents in the USA.
Stay away from Tigerdirect. If they don't screw up your order, then they are as good as any other merchant who does not screw up your order. But, if anything goes wrong, they suck to deal with.
Furthermore, a couple of years ago they engaged in a ridiculously blatant 'carpet-bombing' of reseller-ratings - a site where they had an appropriate bad rating over a number of years of being rated. In like 6 months, the number of people who rated Tigerdirect increased more than 10x of all the previous years of rating, and all of these new 'people' gave the company uncharacteristically high marks.
In short, pirates are the reason that we all have to deal with DRM BS. Pirates are not Robin Hood - They're just people too cheap to pay for what they want and too weak to just go without it.
So, when hollywood paid congress to enact retro-active copyright extensions, essentially stealing from the public domain, that's OK because hollywood is not too cheap to pay for what they want, eh? But when little guys take the matter into their own hands instead of paying off congress they are just a bunch of gutless bastards.
Yeah, you've been drinking the kool-aid alright.
Your anecdote contradicts your premise.
Don't really need flash for those video sites like youtube, and most everything else is just advertising - check out this info about how to download the videos as mp4 files:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/04/download-youtube-videos-as-mp4-files.html
In the comments there are a lot of sites listed that will automate the process for you.
The GPL and Free Software ARE political ideals.
Absolutely. And your point is that we should give up these ideals that got us to where we are now for what, exactly - backsliding?
However, modern drives have a huge count of spare sectors, and sectors get retired constantly, and there's no way to wipe those with normal reads and writes. So there's a random sampling of everything you've ever written stored in the retired sectors of a hard drive, and no in-band way to wipe those sectors.
Does anyone know, off-hand, a way to query a sata disk for at least a count of how many sectors have been re-allocated, if not an actual map of them?
What does that have to do with anything?
Since when have the RIAA lawsuits been about anything other than distribution?
Also how could the anti Tivoisation GPLv3 clause work if Tivo got to decide which license people used? They could just opt to license code under GPLv2. It only makes sense if the users get to decide to use GPLv3 and thus get the power to compel Tivo to do something it doesn't want to do?
No.
The anti-tivoization clause is about preventing MORE people from exploiting the loophole that Tivo found. It is NOT about stopping Tivo in their tracks, and it never was. The FSF has never been a punitive organization and frankly, copyright law does not work that way either. The GPL is very specific, it explicitly says that it only contains "TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION" -- not use.
License changes are retroactive for packages that have the "version 2 or later" clause.
Once version 3 comes out users can decide whether they want to use it, not Tivo.
The GPL limits distribution, not usage.
As Tivo is the distributor, the "version 2 or later" clause means tivo, not their users, get to pick if is distributed to the users under "version 2" or under "later."
Some of the user level stuff they rely on will change license terms. In fact most GPL code is licensed under "version 2 or later", so if they use that their users can just treat it as if it were GPLv3 licensed. or GPLv4 when it comes out, which might have additional anti Tivo clauses.
The userland stuff going to GPLv3 ain't going to hurt them, they don't rely on gnu-licensed userland utilities for DRM so the changes in GPLv3 don't impact them.
Face it the FSF and most of the community don't want them to use Linux in the way they do.
Possibly. But since license changes aren't retroactive, you are making a mountain out of a molehill.
They mentioned GPL3 in their annual report to the SEC ...
in fact they regard GPL3 as a threat to Linux on the same level as SCO's lawsuit.
I don't think you have much experience reading SEC filings. They exist to CYA the company from investor lawsuits by covering all their bases. Just because its mentioned doesn't mean they consider it a significant problem.
I bet they have a Tivo in the works based on an alternate OS just to cover themselves.
I bet they don't. It would be a waste of money.
Well, it seems that their current system is still a 2.4.x kernel which is roughly 8 years old now. I don't see them in a rush to keep current.
In other words, since license changes are not retroactive, they don't have much to worry about even if the kernel were to move to GPLv3.
One one hand, some people are mad at them.
On the other hand, they saved millions in development costs.
I don't see them being unhappy unless it is an existential angst.
Those who think that this could ultimately be a good thing from a civil liberties perspective - I know of no CCTV camera which has caught evidence of police misconduct, even when there is strong reason to believe that they should have done so. (Why this should be the case I leave as an exercise to the reader)
For example, the police murder of Jean Charles de Menezes in the subway in the UK.
Good for you. For me, I dropped $600+ on two cards in order to drive 4 monitors - all based on this supposedly great support they had for linux.
The drivers didn't effing work and the 'support' was completely worthless, little better than "did you plug in the cable" level.
I had to pay another ~$200 for two gefen "dvi doctors" in order to fix an obvious bug in nvidia's driver, a bug I could have fixed myself faster than it would have taken to recompile the drivers if I had source.
Three years later, their drivers still lag without full support for randr.
Your personal experience doesn't mean shit.
Because the explanations from the people who were attacked by the police and the FBI make more sense.
What is more reasonable:
1) That someone was going to lug 40+ lbs of piss (5 gallon bucket) just to pour on the cops
2) That the water was turned off and they needed a bucket of water in order to manually flush the toilets
Also, which is more verifiable? Allegations of what someone might do, versus verifiable facts (was the water in the theater turned off, was the contents of the 5 gallon buckets actually water)?
ISS is a fucking joke, it's smaller than Skylab
Skylab massed 77,088kg; the ISS at present masses 277,598kg, and if ever completed it will mass 419,600kg.
Yeah, but Skylab was made out of the much less dense aluminum, while the ISS is made out of lead to shield against cosmic radiation. So technically, the guy was right, the ISS is smaller than Skylab,
John McCain is 72 years old and has had several cancerous growths removed.
I'm not an actuarial, but I bet the odds are not good that he'd make it through a full term. Then, I'm afraid, li'l Missy's views are going to be of great consequence.
On the other hand, what's the chance that some klansman would assassinate a president Obama? He got secret service protection much sooner in the process than any other candidate has, so it isn't like I'm some lone paranoid poster on slashdot. Biden is pretty anti-freedom too, I really don't think I would want him as president either.
Hundreds of lives now vs. the hypothetical hundreds torture victims in the future? The answer is very simple...
Yeah, and the answer isn't what you think it is.
There has never been a case where waterboarding resulted in saving lives that were in immediate danger. The whole "ticking time bomb" scenario has never happened and is extremely unlikely to ever happen. Furthermore, even if it did happen the whole "oh you have to verify the words of enthusiastic collaborators too" excuse doesn't apply because if there is a ticking time bomb there is no way to verify until too late.
Except lawyers *usually* can be counted on to turn on other lawyers and devour them, just like sharks in a feeding frenzy.
Spoken like someone who has never actually tried to sue a lawyer.
Incidentally, after being explicitly told their company has no permission to access my web servers, their continued attempts amount to unauthorized access.
Bullshit. If the web were to work that way, it would kill it.
You don't want them spidering your public website, then don't make it public.
If I were you, I would fuck with them. Pollute their data. You've obviously been able to figure out which accesses are there's - use that knowledge to feed them disinformation. If you are lucky, you might even able to manipulate their clients in a way that can end indirectly making you money.
It is called traffic analysis. An old trick of what used to be called trade craft and probably is by the spooks
They could have figured out the same thing if they had paid attention to the increase in pizza-deliveries to the alaska governor's mansion for the two days beforehand too.
About 35 million cows are slaughtered in the U.S. If you test 1% of them, you get a maximum margin of error of about 0.17%. Testing 10% would only reduce that error margin to 0.05% while increasing the cost 10x. Testing 50% would reduce the error margin to 0.02% while increasing cost by 50x.
You've got a lot of assumptions there.
Like, for example, that testing is distributed uniformly across the population.
And second that cows are discrete.
Yeah, you heard me, cattle are not discrete. Two words -- ground beef. Unless your butcher grinds it himself, chances are that ground beef sold in your local grocery or used in burgers at the local fast-food joint is made out of hundreds, if not thousands of different cattle that have essentially all been tossed into one giant blender. Even if your local butcher does grind it himself, chances are that you'll get pieces from at least a handful of different animals in any particular sample because the machine is not sanitized each time a new piece of meat is ground up and they can't all come from the same animal.
Know of any others that can do significantly better?
Sometimes the smart choice is to do nothing at all.
Cue apoplexy.
There are good lawyers and bad lawyers.
But the only people who decide if bad lawyers deserve to be punished are other lawyers.
That's the same bullshit self-regulation that got us the entire credit reporting industry and other systemically fucked up industries.