Of course, the legality of installing Microsoft fonts if you haven't a Windows license is doubtful.
HPUX 11.0, and probably 11.11, come with the ubiquitous ms truetype fonts. They also come with a license that boils down to "distribute these however you want, as long as this license file is included." I believe the license that HP uses is one of the earliest that microsoft ever applied to those fonts, long before they realized that linux and XFree86 would ride along for free. If I were at work, I'd post the actual text of the license. But I'm not, so you'll just have to believe me. You should believe me, it is something I have double, triple and quadruple checked because everytime this discussion comes up about MS's license of those fonts I start to have doubts and go and re-read the HP license again.
I think, to be on the safe side, next time I remember to look, I'm going to tar the whole thing up and archive it in case an "upgrade" from HP silently replaces that license file.
Uh, can your BB gun permanently damage the eyes of pilots from the ground? Didn't think so.
Unless those pilots happen to be standing on the ground, not moving around, this laser can't hurt them either.
It takes sophisticated tracking equipment to keep a laser aimed at a distant moving target like a plane or a car - significantly beyond the capabilities of human eye-hand coordination.
Given the divergence of the beam over a couple of thousand feet, the "dot" will probably be about the size of a CD, thus significantly reducing the amount of energy per square inch. Combine that with the near impossibility of tracking a distant moving target by hand there is no way Joe Blow could keep this laser aimed at an airplane cockpit long enough to damage a pilot's eyes. That's assuming the pilot was too stupid to turn his head away either.
Now, if this laser's output was in the 10s or 100s of watts, then you'd have another story. But, at a max of 0.2 watts, you are just being a hysterical pussy.
With libraries, you don't retain a permanent copy of the original work. There is a convenience factor as well.
How many people read a book more than once? Same thing with a DVD - you watch it once and then 99.9% of the time it sits on the shelf doing nothing. In other words, retaining a permanent copy is of trifling little value to the vast majority of consumers. The value is in the first watching or reading of it. Sure there are technical books, but you walk into any public library and you'll find that the books meant for "entertainment" outnumber the reference manuals by at least 100 to 1.
Thus, libraries do definitely "hurt" the market for books (and increasingly for DVDs) which is why you get things like Pat Schroeder attacking librarians.
Years ago when we developed a replacement CRM application for a large telco ISP, we did something unheard of - we integrated the customer service reps into the development process.
Smart companies do custom development by involving the end users in all steps of the process.
Stupid companies off-shore development to somewhere as far away from the end users as possible and think they are saving money by doing so. All they end up doing is shifting the cost from the development group to the end users, often multiplying those costs by an order of magnitude.
When people are stealing my stuff, I would do everything in my power to stop them whether I was a large company or a single individual.
The various Ass.'s of America are stealing MY STUFF. They are using the law to starve the public domain.
Given the corporatist nature of the American government, voting won't make a difference. The only way to have even a marginal effect on their actions is to do whatever I can to kill (bankrupt) them. Giving away their lifeblood for free is pretty much the only way that we, as non-corporate entities, have to stop them from continuing to steal our stuff.
Ok, i actually own a Sony WEGA 36", and its NOT 250lbs. Its still heavy, weighing in at 100lbs, but lets not over exaggerate here.
Sorry, I meant the Sony WEGA 34" model which, as you can see is spec'd at 194lbs unpacked. Packed it is in the 240-250 range. I know this, because a friend, against my counseling, bought one last month.
However, unlike CDs, DVDs have an extra layer of plastic on the back/top, so worries of ink eating away at the reflective layer in a CD-R do not apply to DVD*Rs. You also don't have to worry so much about scratching them and scraping away the reflective layer either.
I still think that CRTs offer the best picture out there, at least for the price.
They also offer the most efficient hernia creation out there too, at any price. 36" Sony WEGA =~ 250lbs @ US$2100 vs 100" Optoma 939 front projector & screen =~ 20lbs @ US$1700
For less than $200 total you can get an epson r200 and a continuos ink system that includes about 20 refills worth of ink for all cartridges (20*6, not 20/6). Replacement ink for the continuous ink system is dirt cheap.
If you aren't going to be printing enough discs to need to contemplate a continuous ink system, then you can stick with the regular cartridges which get you about 200-300 discs for about $40 of ink.
Either way, you don't have to "spend loads on overpriced ink."
As a counter example - read the yellow pages in any major city in America. Look up "escort services" -- typically you will find multiple pages of listings. It has been this way for at least twenty years (that's when, I as a horny teen, ordered my first call girl on a trip to the big city) and probably a whole lot longer than that.
As escorts are just another name for prostitutes, that would make the yellow pages of every major metropolitan area guilty of conspiracy for solicitation. Yet, these ads continue to run and the yellow pages publishers seem to be completely unmolested by the legal system for their part in it all.
Now, you can't quite download a hooker via bittorrent, but I think the analogy between the call girls in the yellow pages and suprnova is a lot closer than the analogy between the bartender's hitman and suprnova.
While this move may be the top of the iceberg, it is hardly the end of the Itanic. Instead, this looks a whole lot like more of Fiornia's insane plan to divest HP of all technical talent and turn it into one huge organization of sales and contracts people.
According to the article, HP will continue to use itanium chips and will spend at least $3B over the next 3 years on development of systems using it.
If you look at the specfp numbers, Itanium is neck and neck with IBM's Power5 and everything else is significantly slower, like 30-40% slower. So it isn't as if Itanium is a total flop.
We had the Patriot Missile system covering a small area where we knew where missiles were coming from. Even then, it was a massive failure.
Patriot was not designed for that kind of mission, it was drafted into duty with lots of fanfare for PR purposes, which is why there is a lot of bogus PR about how succesful it was. Frontline did a bit on it quite a few years ago.
Despite what all the official propoganda says, this system is primarily an offensive weapon.
As others have pointed out - no two-bit dictator with a nuke is going to launch it at the US (or any of our allies that might be geographically closer) because they know it is a sure ticket to "liberation."
But, what the US military, and anyone who bothers to think about it for 30 seconds, does know is that if the US premptively liberates a country from its two-bit dictator, then any nuke that guy has at his disposal will be launched just as soon as he can hit that red button.
Ballistic missile defense is designed to neutralize that retaliatory threat and thus make it "safe" for the US to liberate a country like Iran or North Korea. That's the reason all the talk about how "it will never work" because of decoys and whatnot doesn't make an impact on development - they don't (plan to) need to deal with a well-funded and well-planned attack, only the last-minute, "if I'm going down, I'm going to take as many of them with me" kind of attack.
Speaking as a US citizen and a WORLD citizen, I tend to think that the less free the US feels to throw its weight around, the better off the planet is in the long run.
Regarding profit - even in the USA, it wasn't until just a few years ago that sharing without the exchange of money was OK. Google on "David LaMacchia" a student at MIT who ran a HUGE warez ftp site. He did not charge any money for access, but (I think) he did have U/D ratios. He was arrested and indicted for wire fraud, but all charges were thrown out because we was not doing it for monetary compensation.
A year or two later, congress passed a law (I *think* it was part of the DMCA) that broadened the definition of compensation to include just about anything, even false promises. So, maybe an Ass. of America slipped something into Finland's laws, or maybe you've still got the same kind of definitions we recently had.
Knowing the way lawyers work, this loophole is already plugged, but just in case... what if:
What if the site needing money for bandwidth/whatever just had a link to another site that sold regular stuff for insanely high prices? Behind the scenes the profit from the insanely high prices would pay the bandwidth costs on the original site.
Kind of the way public radio and other non-profits do charity drives in the USA, if you are familiar with that paradigm.
My brother-in-law has three teenage daughters. The only thing that he has to hold over their head is being online.
I don't think so. There are a lot simpler carrots and sticks available, in order of decreasing importance to the average teenage girl:
1) Telephone privs - no cell phone for you 2) Grounding - no hanging out at the mall for you 3) Allowance - no buying the latest MTV-hyped fad product for you 4) Television privs - no watching MTV-hyped commercials-as-content for you 5) Driving privs - no freedom to move about for you 6) Food - no bulemia practice for you
Watch for the latest copyright legislation to contain a special provision allowing the arbitrary execution of any software developer who creates a new file sharing protocol. It will be made retroactive and the Ass.'s of America will then execute the author of Bittorrent as an example. The create of Gnutella and WASTE will be next.
Sometimes I forget how naive and trusting the average bloke is in America. Thanks for reminding me. Let me return the favor by opening your eyes just a little bit to how the world really works.
Also, establishments that might ask yuo for your ID are doing so for both your protection as well as there own.
I know that's the company line, what they tell you tell the customers, but you should exercise some critical thinking before just blindly repeating it. Verification of ID for credit card purchases is NEVER for the customer's protection -- they are already protected by federal law which makes them liable for no more than $50 of charges on a stolen card and 99% of the issuing banks waive even that $50. Essentially ZERO risk. The store on the other hand generally has to "eat" the cost of a fraudulent transaction and thus it is in their best interest to reduce risk as much as possible. Thus there is no benefit to the customer to having to provide ID, but there is increased risk of identity theft and who knows what else. In other words, the company line is a flat out, bald-faced lie -- Safeway is trying to shift the risk of fraud onto their customers, they should at least be honest about it.
I work for Safeway (grocery store) and it is company policy that all credit card transactions we check for valid ID.
Then Safeway better get ready to lose their merchant account. Such policy is in clear violation of both Visa and Mastercard merchant policies. If Visa and MC get enough complaints, they will eventually cancel the contract. Rather than dig up an online merchant contract - read this soundbite summary. The reasoning behind these contractual clauses is that MC and Visa want their cards to be as easy to use as cash. Cash rarely needs an ID, thus credit cards must also rarely require an ID else they aren't as easy to use. Think of the policy what you will, but that is contract Safeway signed, if they don't like the burden of risk, they are free not to accept credit cards.
Either way it is not done to gather information about our shops for business statistics but rather to make sure whoever is claiming to be you, is in fact you. Also, when many establishments collect information about you through various methods (grocery stores all you club cards now, at least Safeway, Krugers, and Albertson's).
More rote recitation of the company line without the application of critical thinking.
1) Unless you are close to the CIO at Safeway, you have no idea what happens to the data once it is put into the system. No matter what they are doing with it, they would never admit to anything unless caught red handed. Thus such reassurances are meaningless (at least in America, the UK and Europe they have extremely strict data protection laws that would prevent Safeway from lying about it over there).
2) There are data-mining companies that vendors, grocery stores in particular, can get a subscription to where they feed all the information they gather (DL info, CC#, shopping lists, etc) to the data-mining company which then cross-corelates as much of that information as possible among all the subscribing merchants. So, you may avoid using those "club cards" at the grocery store, but if you pay with a credit card they can associate your purchases with your CC# and if you have an account at another subscriber like say, Blockbuster Video, where they require a credit card and personal details then viola! "they" now can connect your personal details to your purchases. They find out that you just rented Shrek 2, so they send you a coupon (only good at the groecery store) for Shrek Cereal. Or maybe the local pharamcy reports that you just filled a subsrcription for a herpes medicine, so the next week you get a coupon for condoms in the mail. At what point does "marketing" cross the line and become invasion of privacy? Or maybe Corporate stalking would be a more
He said saving the cost/headaches of fines for serving to minors more than covers the cost (approx US$2K).
Not to mention the high-quality database he's been able to acquire of information about his patrons. Not just name, sex, height, date of birth, eye-color, home address and DL# -- all highly desirable to someone making forged driver's licenses --- but also the patterns of their comings and goings at his place of business, both individually and group demographics (as in Tuesday night seems to be popular with the yuppies as well as something more devious like Fred and Bob always show up at about the same time together, maybe they are having an affair).
I refuse to let any non-government agency swipe the mag-stripe on my driver's license If they won't serve me without doing so, I don't do business with them. I have walked out on such establishments in the past, the risk of identity theft is a lot greater than the occasional hassle of such precautions against it.
If I buy the Star Wars Trilogy DVD for my fiance for Christmas and it is three DVDs with a 30 minute unskippable intro you can bet your ass that I'm storing the originals and ripping out the crap and reburning to a DVDr.
For that particular kind of misfeature, it is a lot easier to just get a hackable DVD player that ignores the no-skip bit on the discs. See videohelp.com for a list of players with that ability.
A friend of mine tried it with a 1.0 preview build of firefox on his hpux workstation. It opened two windows instead of one -- one window was sized correctly and had the bank's designated content, the second window was the same size as a regular browser window and it had the phishing content in it. I think he said he reported their phishing failure to secunia, but I doubt they'd change their story, it would be a lot less sexy.
Anyone else have a build of firefox that wasn't really fooled?
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, the legality of installing Microsoft fonts if you haven't a Windows license is doubtful.
HPUX 11.0, and probably 11.11, come with the ubiquitous ms truetype fonts. They also come with a license that boils down to "distribute these however you want, as long as this license file is included." I believe the license that HP uses is one of the earliest that microsoft ever applied to those fonts, long before they realized that linux and XFree86 would ride along for free. If I were at work, I'd post the actual text of the license. But I'm not, so you'll just have to believe me. You should believe me, it is something I have double, triple and quadruple checked because everytime this discussion comes up about MS's license of those fonts I start to have doubts and go and re-read the HP license again.
I think, to be on the safe side, next time I remember to look, I'm going to tar the whole thing up and archive it in case an "upgrade" from HP silently replaces that license file.
Uh, can your BB gun permanently damage the eyes of pilots from the ground? Didn't think so.
Unless those pilots happen to be standing on the ground, not moving around, this laser can't hurt them either.
It takes sophisticated tracking equipment to keep a laser aimed at a distant moving target like a plane or a car - significantly beyond the capabilities of human eye-hand coordination.
Given the divergence of the beam over a couple of thousand feet, the "dot" will probably be about the size of a CD, thus significantly reducing the amount of energy per square inch. Combine that with the near impossibility of tracking a distant moving target by hand there is no way Joe Blow could keep this laser aimed at an airplane cockpit long enough to damage a pilot's eyes. That's assuming the pilot was too stupid to turn his head away either.
Now, if this laser's output was in the 10s or 100s of watts, then you'd have another story.
But, at a max of 0.2 watts, you are just being a hysterical pussy.
I can't wait for the NPIA (news paper industry association - there has to be one, right?)
That would be the NPAA, remember these groups are all associations, or more poetically they are the collective Ass. of America.
With libraries, you don't retain a permanent copy of the original work. There is a convenience factor as well.
How many people read a book more than once? Same thing with a DVD - you watch it once and then 99.9% of the time it sits on the shelf doing nothing. In other words, retaining a permanent copy is of trifling little value to the vast majority of consumers. The value is in the first watching or reading of it. Sure there are technical books, but you walk into any public library and you'll find that the books meant for "entertainment" outnumber the reference manuals by at least 100 to 1.
Thus, libraries do definitely "hurt" the market for books (and increasingly for DVDs) which is why you get things like Pat Schroeder attacking librarians.
And Rhona Mitra is definitely the woman!
She also used to be the real Lara Croft before they made the movies and Jolie got the big screen role.
Smokin.
Years ago when we developed a replacement CRM application for a large telco ISP, we did something unheard of - we integrated the customer service reps into the development process.
Smart companies do custom development by involving the end users in all steps of the process.
Stupid companies off-shore development to somewhere as far away from the end users as possible and think they are saving money by doing so. All they end up doing is shifting the cost from the development group to the end users, often multiplying those costs by an order of magnitude.
When people are stealing my stuff, I would do everything in my power to stop them whether I was a large company or a single individual.
The various Ass.'s of America are stealing MY STUFF. They are using the law to starve the public domain.
Given the corporatist nature of the American government, voting won't make a difference. The only way to have even a marginal effect on their actions is to do whatever I can to kill (bankrupt) them. Giving away their lifeblood for free is pretty much the only way that we, as non-corporate entities, have to stop them from continuing to steal our stuff.
Ok, i actually own a Sony WEGA 36", and its NOT 250lbs. Its still heavy, weighing in at 100lbs, but lets not over exaggerate here.
Sorry, I meant the Sony WEGA 34" model which, as you can see is spec'd at 194lbs unpacked. Packed it is in the 240-250 range. I know this, because a friend, against my counseling, bought one last month.
Don't Use Sharpies on CD-R
However, unlike CDs, DVDs have an extra layer of plastic on the back/top, so worries of ink eating away at the reflective layer in a CD-R do not apply to DVD*Rs. You also don't have to worry so much about scratching them and scraping away the reflective layer either.
I still think that CRTs offer the best picture out there, at least for the price.
They also offer the most efficient hernia creation out there too, at any price.
36" Sony WEGA =~ 250lbs @ US$2100
vs
100" Optoma 939 front projector & screen =~ 20lbs @ US$1700
For less than $200 total you can get an epson r200 and a continuos ink system that includes about 20 refills worth of ink for all cartridges (20*6, not 20/6). Replacement ink for the continuous ink system is dirt cheap.
If you aren't going to be printing enough discs to need to contemplate a continuous ink system, then you can stick with the regular cartridges which get you about 200-300 discs for about $40 of ink.
Either way, you don't have to "spend loads on overpriced ink."
As a counter example - read the yellow pages in any major city in America. Look up "escort services" -- typically you will find multiple pages of listings. It has been this way for at least twenty years (that's when, I as a horny teen, ordered my first call girl on a trip to the big city) and probably a whole lot longer than that.
As escorts are just another name for prostitutes, that would make the yellow pages of every major metropolitan area guilty of conspiracy for solicitation. Yet, these ads continue to run and the yellow pages publishers seem to be completely unmolested by the legal system for their part in it all.
Now, you can't quite download a hooker via bittorrent, but I think the analogy between the call girls in the yellow pages and suprnova is a lot closer than the analogy between the bartender's hitman and suprnova.
While this move may be the top of the iceberg, it is hardly the end of the Itanic. Instead, this looks a whole lot like more of Fiornia's insane plan to divest HP of all technical talent and turn it into one huge organization of sales and contracts people.
According to the article, HP will continue to use itanium chips and will spend at least $3B over the next 3 years on development of systems using it.
If you look at the specfp numbers, Itanium is neck and neck with IBM's Power5 and everything else is significantly slower, like 30-40% slower. So it isn't as if Itanium is a total flop.
However, it's not all beer and skittles.
And a good thing too, because beer and skittles is one rainbow of flavor I can do without.
Why is it so fashionable to hate the USA?
Why is it so hip to hate freedom, and to resent success?
Hate is love.
Slavery is freedom.
Failure is success.
We have always been at war with Oceania.
You wear the hood of the winked very well my friend.
We had the Patriot Missile system covering a small area where we knew where missiles were coming from. Even then, it was a massive failure.
Patriot was not designed for that kind of mission, it was drafted into duty with lots of fanfare for PR purposes, which is why there is a lot of bogus PR about how succesful it was. Frontline did a bit on it quite a few years ago.
Despite what all the official propoganda says, this system is primarily an offensive weapon.
As others have pointed out - no two-bit dictator with a nuke is going to launch it at the US (or any of our allies that might be geographically closer) because they know it is a sure ticket to "liberation."
But, what the US military, and anyone who bothers to think about it for 30 seconds, does know is that if the US premptively liberates a country from its two-bit dictator, then any nuke that guy has at his disposal will be launched just as soon as he can hit that red button.
Ballistic missile defense is designed to neutralize that retaliatory threat and thus make it "safe" for the US to liberate a country like Iran or North Korea. That's the reason all the talk about how "it will never work" because of decoys and whatnot doesn't make an impact on development - they don't (plan to) need to deal with a well-funded and well-planned attack, only the last-minute, "if I'm going down, I'm going to take as many of them with me" kind of attack.
Speaking as a US citizen and a WORLD citizen, I tend to think that the less free the US feels to throw its weight around, the better off the planet is in the long run.
Regarding profit - even in the USA, it wasn't until just a few years ago that sharing without the exchange of money was OK. Google on "David LaMacchia" a student at MIT who ran a HUGE warez ftp site. He did not charge any money for access, but (I think) he did have U/D ratios. He was arrested and indicted for wire fraud, but all charges were thrown out because we was not doing it for monetary compensation.
A year or two later, congress passed a law (I *think* it was part of the DMCA) that broadened the definition of compensation to include just about anything, even false promises. So, maybe an Ass. of America slipped something into Finland's laws, or maybe you've still got the same kind of definitions we recently had.
Knowing the way lawyers work, this loophole is already plugged, but just in case... what if:
What if the site needing money for bandwidth/whatever just had a link to another site that sold regular stuff for insanely high prices? Behind the scenes the profit from the insanely high prices would pay the bandwidth costs on the original site.
Kind of the way public radio and other non-profits do charity drives in the USA, if you are familiar with that paradigm.
My brother-in-law has three teenage daughters. The only thing that he has to hold over their head is being online.
I don't think so. There are a lot simpler carrots and sticks available, in order of decreasing importance to the average teenage girl:
1) Telephone privs - no cell phone for you
2) Grounding - no hanging out at the mall for you
3) Allowance - no buying the latest MTV-hyped fad product for you
4) Television privs - no watching MTV-hyped commercials-as-content for you
5) Driving privs - no freedom to move about for you
6) Food - no bulemia practice for you
Watch for the latest copyright legislation to contain a special provision allowing the arbitrary execution of any software developer who creates a new file sharing protocol. It will be made retroactive and the Ass.'s of America will then execute the author of Bittorrent as an example. The create of Gnutella and WASTE will be next.
Sometimes I forget how naive and trusting the average bloke is in America. Thanks for reminding me. Let me return the favor by opening your eyes just a little bit to how the world really works.
Also, establishments that might ask yuo for your ID are doing so for both your protection as well as there own.
I know that's the company line, what they tell you tell the customers, but you should exercise some critical thinking before just blindly repeating it. Verification of ID for credit card purchases is NEVER for the customer's protection -- they are already protected by federal law which makes them liable for no more than $50 of charges on a stolen card and 99% of the issuing banks waive even that $50. Essentially ZERO risk. The store on the other hand generally has to "eat" the cost of a fraudulent transaction and thus it is in their best interest to reduce risk as much as possible. Thus there is no benefit to the customer to having to provide ID, but there is increased risk of identity theft and who knows what else. In other words, the company line is a flat out, bald-faced lie -- Safeway is trying to shift the risk of fraud onto their customers, they should at least be honest about it.
I work for Safeway (grocery store) and it is company policy that all credit card transactions we check for valid ID.
Then Safeway better get ready to lose their merchant account. Such policy is in clear violation of both Visa and Mastercard merchant policies. If Visa and MC get enough complaints, they will eventually cancel the contract. Rather than dig up an online merchant contract - read this soundbite summary. The reasoning behind these contractual clauses is that MC and Visa want their cards to be as easy to use as cash. Cash rarely needs an ID, thus credit cards must also rarely require an ID else they aren't as easy to use. Think of the policy what you will, but that is contract Safeway signed, if they don't like the burden of risk, they are free not to accept credit cards.
Either way it is not done to gather information about our shops for business statistics but rather to make sure whoever is claiming to be you, is in fact you. Also, when many establishments collect information about you through various methods (grocery stores all you club cards now, at least Safeway, Krugers, and Albertson's).
More rote recitation of the company line without the application of critical thinking.
1) Unless you are close to the CIO at Safeway, you have no idea what happens to the data once it is put into the system. No matter what they are doing with it, they would never admit to anything unless caught red handed. Thus such reassurances are meaningless (at least in America, the UK and Europe they have extremely strict data protection laws that would prevent Safeway from lying about it over there).
2) There are data-mining companies that vendors, grocery stores in particular, can get a subscription to where they feed all the information they gather (DL info, CC#, shopping lists, etc) to the data-mining company which then cross-corelates as much of that information as possible among all the subscribing merchants. So, you may avoid using those "club cards" at the grocery store, but if you pay with a credit card they can associate your purchases with your CC# and if you have an account at another subscriber like say, Blockbuster Video, where they require a credit card and personal details then viola! "they" now can connect your personal details to your purchases. They find out that you just rented Shrek 2, so they send you a coupon (only good at the groecery store) for Shrek Cereal. Or maybe the local pharamcy reports that you just filled a subsrcription for a herpes medicine, so the next week you get a coupon for condoms in the mail. At what point does "marketing" cross the line and become invasion of privacy? Or maybe Corporate stalking would be a more
He said saving the cost/headaches of fines for serving to minors more than covers the cost (approx US$2K).
Not to mention the high-quality database he's been able to acquire of information about his patrons. Not just name, sex, height, date of birth, eye-color, home address and DL# -- all highly desirable to someone making forged driver's licenses --- but also the patterns of their comings and goings at his place of business, both individually and group demographics (as in Tuesday night seems to be popular with the yuppies as well as something more devious like Fred and Bob always show up at about the same time together, maybe they are having an affair).
I refuse to let any non-government agency swipe the mag-stripe on my driver's license If they won't serve me without doing so, I don't do business with them. I have walked out on such establishments in the past, the risk of identity theft is a lot greater than the occasional hassle of such precautions against it.
If I buy the Star Wars Trilogy DVD for my fiance for Christmas and it is three DVDs with a 30 minute unskippable intro you can bet your ass that I'm storing the originals and ripping out the crap and reburning to a DVDr.
For that particular kind of misfeature, it is a lot easier to just get a hackable DVD player that ignores the no-skip bit on the discs. See videohelp.com for a list of players with that ability.
Of course there are other reasons, like post-processing and re-encoding for better image quality that no simple player hack will enable, but relatively few people care about that versus skipping forced commercials.
A friend of mine tried it with a 1.0 preview build of firefox on his hpux workstation. It opened two windows instead of one -- one window was sized correctly and had the bank's designated content, the second window was the same size as a regular browser window and it had the phishing content in it. I think he said he reported their phishing failure to secunia, but I doubt they'd change their story, it would be a lot less sexy.
Anyone else have a build of firefox that wasn't really fooled?