Honestly, that's bullshit unless you mean that US IDMs are paying Chinese ODMs (which really would have to be Chinese IDMs acting as ODMs, right?) And then why would US IDMs be called IDMs?
Let's look at where stuff is designed and made: - Many many US companies are fabless manufacturers (design + sale.) No Chinese company comes close to Qualcomm or Broadcom revenue in that area. - Countries that make equipment to manufacture semiconductors? The Netherlands, USA, and Japan. No Chinese company in the top 15 by revenue. - In terms of pure foundries you'll find that Taiwan is the leader and China is barely represented (but the US is still ahead in pure foundry revenue compared to China.) - Companies that design and manufacture and sell (IDMs)? Giants like Intel and Samsung. USA/South Korea/Europe/Japan/Taiwan but again China is not in the top 20 by revenue.
So, in the semiconductor field China is still just the country that assembles stuff. Sure, China is investing heavily and trying to break into design and manufacture. Tsinghua Unigroup (China) was rumored to be interested in buying Micron (USA) but, let's be honest, regulators are never going to allow that.
I have not used bittorrent for a long time, but I remember that I could download without being a torrent server.
This is technologically possible with custom clients such as BitThief but using any client that follows the spec you pretty much have to upload to download. In the spec, peers choke peers that don't upload and prefer peers that upload more. In hindsight, I suppose it's probable that Rightscorp is using something like BitThief but having it masquerade as a common client and thus potentially not uploading any content. I haven't torrented in years so I don't really know if popular clients do anything to try to prevent BitThief-like protocol abuse.
Cox chose the "say nothing" option, which has resulted in a large civil award against them.
Cox didn't choose "say nothing", it dropped/blocked emails from someone abusing their abuse system after politely asking that company not to do so.
Then Cox did nothing about infringements Cox never knew about because the complaints were blocked. They were following up on complaints from other people who were following Cox's rules for submission. In terms of what they "do", their policy is actually fairly reasonable. They have escalating intervention per infraction: automated notification, soft service disconnects, harder disconnects with Cox employee interaction to try to negotiate with the customer to stop the abuse, and eventually termination of service if the customer persists.
Just none of that could happen for Rightscorp because they didn't follow Cox's rules for issue submission and then had a tantrum (read: spammed Cox and later sued Cox) when they realized Cox wasn't going to budge on it.
The same lawsuit probably wouldn't even work today against Cox because Cox changed their termination policy and theoretically qualify for Common Carrier status again (someone in management had an unofficial policy to let terminated subscribers re-subscribe and broke that.)
Yeah, I kind of got distracted reading the memorandum and digesting it as the news I've been reading about the topic was way different from the memorandum.
Anyway, I would say that copyright on the internet is different from copyright elsewhere because of how easy digital information is to copy.
VHS tapes were kind of a big deal but it was eventually allowed that you could record something on your TV and view it later (or even share it with your friend down the street and no one really cared.) At that point, the powers that be only cared about commercial copyright infringement. Then the internet allowed you to share content with the whole world for free and so we have the very broken DMCA.
Could be. They aren't distributing the material, just getting a copy. They have no way of knowing the legality of the distribution of non-BMG material
But see, it's bittorrent so they are distributing the material. And the "no way of knowing the legality" isn't a valid defense or then no one who uses bittorrent would be liable -- as I doubt anyone knows off the top of their head what is actually in the public domain or permissive.
Commercial copyright violations seem pretty cut and clear, like with your store example. But other methods of distribution like bittorrent make it a little more confusing. I agree it should probably be the original seeder of the torrent who is liable but that would kill the 3rd party copyright watchdog business model.
TLDR; Cox does cut customers loose but, for a time, Cox allowed disconnected users to sign up for service again. Judge rules before trial that this makes them not a common carrier. Cox explains during trial that they blocked/dropped all Rightscorp emails for abusing Cox's abuse process by a) soliciting $10-20 settlement payments with their complaints and b) sending extreme volumes of complaints when Cox told them they couldn't do that. BMG/Rightscorp argue that Cox is still liable for complaints that it never received. Judge agrees, asks Jury for verdict. Cox owes $25 million because it didn't let Rightscorp milk money from its subscribers with no due process. And possibly because Cox didn't join the Copyright Alert System (time frame fits but conjecture on my part.)
POTUS has said that "the Internet has become an essential part of everyday communication and everyday life" and asked the FCC to reclassify it as a "utility."
And then the FCC basically made ISPs Common Carriers but without some of the drawbacks (they selectively applied Title II.)
Your website(s) and your college are not ISPs nor Common Carries nor even utilities (well, arguably the college could be to students living in dorms.) I don't think university dorms count as landlord-tenant relationships (though IMO they should.)
The DMCA has been around for forever and been broken for forever.
Consider that Rightscorp is blindly downloading torrents in search of its client's copyrighted material. Ok, so they download every torrent that matches ABC.mp3 because one of their clients has a songs named that and then they download the full file to verify. Obviously they're not just using file hashes or that would be way too easy for pirates to circumvent.
What happens when Rightscorp downloads an ABC.mp3 file that is actually copyrighted by another entity? Rightscorp has just blindly committed a copyright violation! Of course, Rightscorp's competitors, who are doing the same thing, aren't going to file an infringement notice on Rightscorp because that would be mutually assured destruction.
And so you can see how this scheme is broken by design.
If I send 5,000,000 infringement notifications to Cox but only one is legitimate then is Cox required to go through all 5,000,000 to verify which are bogus and which are not? And how is Cox supposed to manage handling the requests of others if I do that?
What Cox does is it automatically parses emails to abuse@cox.net and puts them into a ticket system. Multiple complaints about the same subscriber (in a day) get put into the same ticket. They have a hard, but negotiable, limit of 200 complaints per day per source. This is not blind. They send an email back notifying the source that they have hit the limit that Cox can handle.
Cox has a "180 day" (6 month) abuse cycle where they: ignore the first ticket, notify the subscriber on the second to seventh complaints (sic), and soft-suspend the account on the eighth to ninth, requiring user action to unsuspend service.
Tenth to fourteenth complaints (sic) suspend service and require various levels of increasing manual communication with higher and higher levels of Cox management to continue service. At fourteen they do a full review of the account and decide if they permanently disconnect the user or not.
And thus Cox actually was cutting off service to users. It's just that they were also letting users sign up for service again (and when they resigned onto the service then they had a clean copyright infringement slate) for a brief period of time (until sometime 2012.)
Rightscorp's complaints include a link allowing people to pay $10 to $20 for an "automatic settlement" that gives the user a "legal release" (Can anyone say, FEAR SCAM? IRS phone scammers work the same way!) Cox has a policy of ignoring complaints with settlement offers because it considers them improper and falling outside of the spirit of the DMCA.
I mean, lightning strikes kill more americans than terrorists so lightning is obviously an immediate threat to our national security.
Obviously, if lightning is allowed to persist then america as we know it will no longer exist. I propose we effect this war by putting all of the politicians on tall metal poles and wishing them good luck.
Except I don't think this is actually an SQL injection and so you could have the most secure database driver with prepared statements and all of that jazz and it probably wouldn't matter.
Basically it sounds like the useragent string is stored in the database correctly (but unverified and/or unsanitized) and then other code is pulling it from the database and trusting that it is a safe string when it's not. It's actually a string of a serialized php object. But they trust their database so they unserialize it and Bad Things(TM). I could have that wrong, I haven't coded PHP in almost a decade.
While total N2O emissions are much lower than CO2 emissions, N2O is approximately 300 times more powerful than CO2 at trapping heat in the atmosphere (IPCC 2007). Since 1750, the global atmospheric concentration of N2O has risen by approximately 20 percent (IPCC 2007 and NOAA/ESRL 2015).
It's probably a good thing that it's hypocritical.
Certainly most people killed by cops are non-black and non-black communities weren't outraged about it until BLM started up. Getting non-black communities mad about the hypocrisy seems to help keep the anger in general at the cops over shootings alive.
First I'll start off by saying that it is pretty clear that cops are killing (justified or not) too many people. The U.K. goes years (sometimes) without cops even firing guns, let alone killing people, so we're obviously doing something wrong.
That said, I'm still not convinced that, nationally, police officers are shooting people based on race. I'm open to the possibility and my inner cynic even thinks it is likely. But not convinced. I'm also not even convinced that race exists but that's a different discussion.
The statistics are really poor to non-existent but what I have seen shows that: a) whites are the majority killed by police (because majority population) b) however, more blacks are probably killed per capita by police c) blacks commit more violent crime per capita than non-blacks
c-2) in fact, while the black population is a minority it actually appears that, until recently, blacks made up the majority of homicide offenders d) I'm willing to pull out of my ass that cops are more likely to use force when responding to violent crimes e) that could make up for the reason why we see more cop-on-black homicides per capita
Obviously, black american crime rates aren't higher because of skin color or self-identification but because black americans are more likely to be poor (and other social and geographic reasons.) That's not just some feel-good mentality either. It is shown by minority studies done by other countries (the one off the top of my head was done in the U.K.)
Thus the only real conclusion is that we need much much better statistics. The Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2013 should help some and the PRIDE Act will likely help more (if it ever passes) but obviously those will just be better tools to show the scope of the problem.
I imagine actually fixing the problem of officer-on-citizen homicide will take some combination of stricter gun control, maybe some economic/social policy reform, some rethinking about the war on drugs, changes in use of force rules and training, and changes in other police oversight and procedure (why don't police require something like the buddy system with periodic rotation to keep things honest? Costs more money to have enough officers to always have a partner?)
I'm honestly skeptical that the states have it in them to fix it.
Any time you (or an ancestor or a representative you maybe voted for) vote for a tax you are saying that. And it's true.
There are things as an individual citizen that you can't spend your money to do. There are things that government can do that charitable organizations and corporations can't do. Thus, for some things, the government can spend the money better than you can.
That doesn't mean you should want to give the government all of your money but saying that "everything the government does is negative and a waste of money" is disingenuous.
Or they could require an ID and tie the ticket to a person's name at purchase time. Then maybe do a more relaxed automated refund system for people who can't make it (and add that seat back to the pool.)
It definitely seems like a legal (non-)solution to a technical problem. Ticketmaster could also just use a better CAPTCHA... Sure, there are people in poor countries who could be (are?) paid to solve CAPTCHAs but that's not what a law that outlaws bots covers, is it?
I think they tended to inject bad stuff into people too. What happens when there is nasty bacteria on your skin and the pulse of the gas pushes that into your blood stream?
If the psyllid that spreads the pathogen has spread to the U.S. then it's an invasive species and couldn't we just release some genetically engineered males or females that produce sterile offspring and mostly decimate the population?
I know there are promising pilot programs that do that for mosquitoes.
Honestly, the hate against GMO as a concept is weird given that all of modern agriculture is basically genetic engineering through trial and error of a very inefficient method of creating mutations. Nothing we eat is "natural" in the sense that it's the form of the plant that would be most successful in the wild without outside interference.
I think people are right to want regulation and oversight for food safety but that's something that should always be true of all food -- GMO or otherwise.
If you read the article you'll see that they note D-Link puts backdoors into their stuff too.
The example was router firmware that let you bypass http authentication by specifying a certain user agent. This was "legitimately" used by binaries/scripts on the device to change settings for things like dynamic DNS because it was apparently easier to query the http server to change settings than to rewrite it...
Also included was a proof of concept shell code execution (via buffer overflow of the http server iirc.)
Sadly for cable modems we can't exactly do nice things like run our own OpenWRT-derived firmware. Granted people can do nefarious things like bypass ISP bandwidth limitations with custom firmware but I honestly have to wonder if that's not just an excuse for laziness on the part of ISPs.
If half of what you're saying is true then why isn't there a UN security council resolution with multi-nation military forces on the ground right now? That sounds as bad as the holocaust in everything but number of victims.
My only issue with that is that I don't necessarily really know that ISIS is about irrational bloodthirsty marketing campaigns.
In Western media we never actually get to hear the other side of the story and I certainly don't speak Arabic or Farsi and so even if I had access to the other side I wouldn't be able to understand their message.
I could certainly see that from a certain perspective it might look like Western nations are warmongering resource hungry invaders who indiscriminately bomb civilians. So when we get bombed it's terrorism but when we bomb them and kill innocents it's not? I don't think we're quite as 'white' as we claim to be.
Read The Intercept's drone program report and you'll see that when we bomb someone on very iffy intelligence (because 3rd world countries) we automatically classify any incidentally killed people as enemy combatants until such a time after the fact as they can be verified as innocent civilians and then they're reclassified. I might be off a little on specific terminology but not on the gist of it. We're assassinating bad guys in other countries because there is no law system to coordinate with but we're also murdering innocent people at the same time. We're not exactly paragons of moral excellence there.
Note that I'm not trying to apologize for ISIS. I think the mostly likely answer is that they are religiously fanatical people who are attempting to take advantage of a power vacuum created by the Syrian civil war, the weakening of governments by the Arab Spring in the North African region, and the effects of removing a dictator from power in Iraq. But I don't really know. In my experience, our mainstream entertainment-based media is better at twisting the truth to get viewers than actually informing people in an unbiased fashion.
If you read the article or look at wikipedia you'll see that Intel is easily #1 (by revenue.) Consider that they design and manufacture most processors in laptops and desktops and that those chips are a lot more expensive than generic ICs.
Then it's Samsung, Qualcomm (who doesn't actually fab their own stuff), and Micron. I don't think they're including foundries but even if you included those TSMC would probably only be #3 (or a very close #4.)
No other foundry even comes close to top 10 semiconductor company revenue.
China's current top foundry is probably SMIC and they don't even have a semiconductor company in the top 20 revenue list. You'll see lots of USA, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan (more so in foundries), and a few European companies instead.
You need more than just a crew for a generational ship. You'd either need some seriously amazing self-sufficiency or parts reliability because given current propulsion tech it would take so very long to reach the nearest star. As in tens of thousands of years long on the optimistic side. Probably more like hundreds of thousands. That's not a generational ship mission, that's a self-sufficient closed-system interstellar civilization ship mission.
Now, of course if the EM drive works out and achieves anything close to the theoretical efficiency that it can achieve then we could probably reach the next closest star in a couple hundred years. A few hundred year generational ship would still be really impressive but I think it might actually be feasible.
Sounds too good to be true so it almost certainly is but you never know.
It really is bizarre that our society is completely fine with criminalizing minor activities and then taking away someone's rights and freedoms while paying to house and feed them.
But any government program that tries to help house or feed or improve the life of a non-criminal is considered a waste of money and some sort of "Nanny State" attack on society and will lead to a totalitarian communist government and the complete erosion of our rights and freedoms.
Or how people can be against gun licenses when most Americans require a car to work and survive and have no issue with passing a driving test, renewing their license, and dealing with car titles/inspections/license plates. Guns are weapons and we regulate transportation more than them.
I really wonder how a psychiatrist would diagnose the two major political parties. They seem quite insane to me.
While drugs are bad there is also evidence that shitty environmental situations, not just addiction, drive people to drugs in the first place.
Your "honest person observation" smells an awful lot like what prejudice people say when they want to persecute minorities. "Any honest person will tell you that, in their experience, [group] are [lazy/dumb/useless/not REAL people so it's ok that we treat them like shit]"
Giving drug abusers an even shittier environment to live in by demonizing them isn't going to lead to better outcomes for society. Watch this but with a grain of salt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The point is not that the public should embrace the use of drugs but that the war on drugs is a complete failure and actually doing harm. It only makes sense that you should try something else when what you're doing isn't working.
For example, we could legalize marijuana and decriminalize other drugs and use the income from taxes on marijuana to fund education to prevent abuse and social programs to help abusers get back on their feet and be proud of themselves and break their addiction (and, possibly more importantly, their need for their addiction.) Ideally we'd try lots of different methods of helping people and use studies to see which methods are actually effective and worth continued funding.
So, we wouldn't be wasting taxes on law enforcement and prison sentences for abusers, we'd hopefully undercut the black market and cut down on drug related crime, it would potential be self-funding (the best kind of taxation), and people might actually get help instead of being treated like scum.
I don't have any ideas for what to do about drug dealers who can no longer make a profit selling drugs, though. It'd suck to collapse that economy and drive them to a worse crime.
And honestly, we already tax alcohol and tobacco and I have to wonder where all of that money is going. It seems to me if 100% of that were going to education and social programs for drug abusers (including alcohol and tobacco) then we'd probably be in a lot better place.
I used to have a debt collector call my cell phone and leave messages between 3am and 6am. I've never even owned a credit card or taken out a loan or had any form of debt. I've had that cell phone number for over a decade so it shouldn't be a wrong number in their purchased database.
Eventually they get someone (old people and scared people?) who will pay them (even if it's the wrong person) and so it's all worthwhile.
I know someone who used to work for a debt collection agency and it sounded like the most scumbag of operations. There are rules that they're supposed to follow to make sure they call the correct people and they're only supposed to call within certain hours but in practice it seems they don't follow the rules unless they fuck up and spam call a senator's kid.
Even assuming that there were a completely flat pay scale there would still be monetary incentive to go to school for those jobs. There can only be so many janitors and there will always be more people who qualify for the janitor jobs than for intellectual jobs.
In that case going to school gives you more potential jobs you can apply to and thus a higher chance of getting a job.
Now, in this case, if you read the actual article, you'll see that he immediately bumped the minimum wage to $50k from $35k and then set that to increase to $70k by 2017 ($10k per year.) Anyone who already made between $50k and $70k got a $5k raise. I imagine anyone who makes over $70k kept getting whatever they were getting already (though he dropped his own income to $70k.)
The whole point is to increase productivity across the board by taking away unhappiness due to finances. The reason he picked those numbers was because a study on happiness found unhappiness increased significantly under $75k but happiness didn't increase above $75k. He also had a friend who worked long hours and made under $50k but who was stressing out about rent, student debt, and basic life necessity increases while he was making millions and the disparity upset him.
The reason for $70,000 and not $70 billion is because the Princeton study he based the decision on said that making more than $75,000 didn't make people happier on a daily basis but that making less than $75,000 increase how unhappy people were. Thus by decreasing his own salary and increasing the minimum wage at his company (but not completely eliminating the pay scale) he figured he could increase overall productivity while also being ethically responsible. It seems to have paid off.
Obviously that would differ depending on the cost of living in a region. I assume that number he quoted is specifically calculated for Seattle.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, that's bullshit unless you mean that US IDMs are paying Chinese ODMs (which really would have to be Chinese IDMs acting as ODMs, right?)
And then why would US IDMs be called IDMs?
Let's look at where stuff is designed and made:
- Many many US companies are fabless manufacturers (design + sale.) No Chinese company comes close to Qualcomm or Broadcom revenue in that area.
- Countries that make equipment to manufacture semiconductors? The Netherlands, USA, and Japan. No Chinese company in the top 15 by revenue.
- In terms of pure foundries you'll find that Taiwan is the leader and China is barely represented (but the US is still ahead in pure foundry revenue compared to China.)
- Companies that design and manufacture and sell (IDMs)? Giants like Intel and Samsung. USA/South Korea/Europe/Japan/Taiwan but again China is not in the top 20 by revenue.
So, in the semiconductor field China is still just the country that assembles stuff. Sure, China is investing heavily and trying to break into design and manufacture.
Tsinghua Unigroup (China) was rumored to be interested in buying Micron (USA) but, let's be honest, regulators are never going to allow that.
I have not used bittorrent for a long time, but I remember that I could download without being a torrent server.
This is technologically possible with custom clients such as BitThief but using any client that follows the spec you pretty much have to upload to download.
In the spec, peers choke peers that don't upload and prefer peers that upload more.
In hindsight, I suppose it's probable that Rightscorp is using something like BitThief but having it masquerade as a common client and thus potentially not uploading any content.
I haven't torrented in years so I don't really know if popular clients do anything to try to prevent BitThief-like protocol abuse.
Cox chose the "say nothing" option, which has resulted in a large civil award against them.
Cox didn't choose "say nothing", it dropped/blocked emails from someone abusing their abuse system after politely asking that company not to do so.
Then Cox did nothing about infringements Cox never knew about because the complaints were blocked.
They were following up on complaints from other people who were following Cox's rules for submission.
In terms of what they "do", their policy is actually fairly reasonable.
They have escalating intervention per infraction: automated notification, soft service disconnects, harder disconnects with Cox employee interaction to try to negotiate with the customer to stop the abuse, and eventually termination of service if the customer persists.
Just none of that could happen for Rightscorp because they didn't follow Cox's rules for issue submission and then had a tantrum (read: spammed Cox and later sued Cox) when they realized Cox wasn't going to budge on it.
The same lawsuit probably wouldn't even work today against Cox because Cox changed their termination policy and theoretically qualify for Common Carrier status again (someone in management had an unofficial policy to let terminated subscribers re-subscribe and broke that.)
Yeah, I kind of got distracted reading the memorandum and digesting it as the news I've been reading about the topic was way different from the memorandum.
Anyway, I would say that copyright on the internet is different from copyright elsewhere because of how easy digital information is to copy.
VHS tapes were kind of a big deal but it was eventually allowed that you could record something on your TV and view it later (or even share it with your friend down the street and no one really cared.) At that point, the powers that be only cared about commercial copyright infringement.
Then the internet allowed you to share content with the whole world for free and so we have the very broken DMCA.
Could be. They aren't distributing the material, just getting a copy. They have no way of knowing the legality of the distribution of non-BMG material
But see, it's bittorrent so they are distributing the material. And the "no way of knowing the legality" isn't a valid defense or then no one who uses bittorrent would be liable -- as I doubt anyone knows off the top of their head what is actually in the public domain or permissive.
Commercial copyright violations seem pretty cut and clear, like with your store example. But other methods of distribution like bittorrent make it a little more confusing. I agree it should probably be the original seeder of the torrent who is liable but that would kill the 3rd party copyright watchdog business model.
TLDR;
Cox does cut customers loose but, for a time, Cox allowed disconnected users to sign up for service again. Judge rules before trial that this makes them not a common carrier.
Cox explains during trial that they blocked/dropped all Rightscorp emails for abusing Cox's abuse process by a) soliciting $10-20 settlement payments with their complaints and b) sending extreme volumes of complaints when Cox told them they couldn't do that.
BMG/Rightscorp argue that Cox is still liable for complaints that it never received. Judge agrees, asks Jury for verdict.
Cox owes $25 million because it didn't let Rightscorp milk money from its subscribers with no due process. And possibly because Cox didn't join the Copyright Alert System (time frame fits but conjecture on my part.)
POTUS has said that "the Internet has become an essential part of everyday communication and everyday life" and asked the FCC to reclassify it as a "utility."
And then the FCC basically made ISPs Common Carriers but without some of the drawbacks (they selectively applied Title II.)
Your website(s) and your college are not ISPs nor Common Carries nor even utilities (well, arguably the college could be to students living in dorms.) I don't think university dorms count as landlord-tenant relationships (though IMO they should.)
The DMCA has been around for forever and been broken for forever.
Consider that Rightscorp is blindly downloading torrents in search of its client's copyrighted material.
Ok, so they download every torrent that matches ABC.mp3 because one of their clients has a songs named that and then they download the full file to verify. Obviously they're not just using file hashes or that would be way too easy for pirates to circumvent.
What happens when Rightscorp downloads an ABC.mp3 file that is actually copyrighted by another entity? Rightscorp has just blindly committed a copyright violation!
Of course, Rightscorp's competitors, who are doing the same thing, aren't going to file an infringement notice on Rightscorp because that would be mutually assured destruction.
And so you can see how this scheme is broken by design.
If I send 5,000,000 infringement notifications to Cox but only one is legitimate then is Cox required to go through all 5,000,000 to verify which are bogus and which are not? And how is Cox supposed to manage handling the requests of others if I do that?
What Cox does is it automatically parses emails to abuse@cox.net and puts them into a ticket system. Multiple complaints about the same subscriber (in a day) get put into the same ticket.
They have a hard, but negotiable, limit of 200 complaints per day per source. This is not blind. They send an email back notifying the source that they have hit the limit that Cox can handle.
Cox has a "180 day" (6 month) abuse cycle where they: ignore the first ticket, notify the subscriber on the second to seventh complaints (sic), and soft-suspend the account on the eighth to ninth, requiring user action to unsuspend service.
Tenth to fourteenth complaints (sic) suspend service and require various levels of increasing manual communication with higher and higher levels of Cox management to continue service. At fourteen they do a full review of the account and decide if they permanently disconnect the user or not.
And thus Cox actually was cutting off service to users. It's just that they were also letting users sign up for service again (and when they resigned onto the service then they had a clean copyright infringement slate) for a brief period of time (until sometime 2012.)
Rightscorp's complaints include a link allowing people to pay $10 to $20 for an "automatic settlement" that gives the user a "legal release" (Can anyone say, FEAR SCAM? IRS phone scammers work the same way!)
Cox has a policy of ignoring complaints with settlement offers because it considers them improper and falling outside of the spirit of the DMCA.
Cox replies to such complaints askin
I think we should declare war on lightning.
I mean, lightning strikes kill more americans than terrorists so lightning is obviously an immediate threat to our national security.
Obviously, if lightning is allowed to persist then america as we know it will no longer exist.
I propose we effect this war by putting all of the politicians on tall metal poles and wishing them good luck.
Except I don't think this is actually an SQL injection and so you could have the most secure database driver with prepared statements and all of that jazz and it probably wouldn't matter.
It looks like (the details I've read are pretty slim) it's actually a php object injection. Apparently, this has happened to Joomla before.
Basically it sounds like the useragent string is stored in the database correctly (but unverified and/or unsanitized) and then other code is pulling it from the database and trusting that it is a safe string when it's not. It's actually a string of a serialized php object. But they trust their database so they unserialize it and Bad Things(TM).
I could have that wrong, I haven't coded PHP in almost a decade.
There are nitrogen oxides that arguably contribute to global warming (and some that arguably have a cooling effect.)
As a source, I guess the EPA is no one: http://www3.epa.gov/climatecha...
While total N2O emissions are much lower than CO2 emissions, N2O is approximately 300 times more powerful than CO2 at trapping heat in the
atmosphere (IPCC 2007). Since 1750, the global atmospheric concentration of N2O has risen by approximately 20 percent (IPCC 2007 and NOAA/ESRL 2015).
http://www3.epa.gov/climatecha...
Granted, if we want to be pedantic about what "nitrogen" means then that's not nitrogen gas (N2).
If your monthly limit is 100MB then you might as well not even use a graphical browser and stick with lynx or links2.
The average web page (before cache) is over 1MB.
It's probably a good thing that it's hypocritical.
Certainly most people killed by cops are non-black and non-black communities weren't outraged about it until BLM started up.
Getting non-black communities mad about the hypocrisy seems to help keep the anger in general at the cops over shootings alive.
First I'll start off by saying that it is pretty clear that cops are killing (justified or not) too many people.
The U.K. goes years (sometimes) without cops even firing guns, let alone killing people, so we're obviously doing something wrong.
That said, I'm still not convinced that, nationally, police officers are shooting people based on race.
I'm open to the possibility and my inner cynic even thinks it is likely. But not convinced.
I'm also not even convinced that race exists but that's a different discussion.
The statistics are really poor to non-existent but what I have seen shows that:
a) whites are the majority killed by police (because majority population)
b) however, more blacks are probably killed per capita by police
c) blacks commit more violent crime per capita than non-blacks
c-2) in fact, while the black population is a minority it actually appears that, until recently, blacks made up the majority of homicide offenders
d) I'm willing to pull out of my ass that cops are more likely to use force when responding to violent crimes
e) that could make up for the reason why we see more cop-on-black homicides per capita
Obviously, black american crime rates aren't higher because of skin color or self-identification but because black americans are more likely to be poor (and other social and geographic reasons.)
That's not just some feel-good mentality either. It is shown by minority studies done by other countries (the one off the top of my head was done in the U.K.)
Thus the only real conclusion is that we need much much better statistics. The Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2013 should help some and the PRIDE Act will likely help more (if it ever passes) but obviously those will just be better tools to show the scope of the problem.
I imagine actually fixing the problem of officer-on-citizen homicide will take some combination of stricter gun control, maybe some economic/social policy reform, some rethinking about the war on drugs, changes in use of force rules and training, and changes in other police oversight and procedure (why don't police require something like the buddy system with periodic rotation to keep things honest? Costs more money to have enough officers to always have a partner?)
I'm honestly skeptical that the states have it in them to fix it.
Any time you (or an ancestor or a representative you maybe voted for) vote for a tax you are saying that. And it's true.
There are things as an individual citizen that you can't spend your money to do.
There are things that government can do that charitable organizations and corporations can't do.
Thus, for some things, the government can spend the money better than you can.
That doesn't mean you should want to give the government all of your money but saying that "everything the government does is negative and a waste of money" is disingenuous.
What? Being nice to others is not only emotionally positive but it also makes logical sense.
The golden rule logically allows for a world where you're less likely to run into someone who is bigger and badder and decides to eat you for lunch.
Or they could require an ID and tie the ticket to a person's name at purchase time.
Then maybe do a more relaxed automated refund system for people who can't make it (and add that seat back to the pool.)
It definitely seems like a legal (non-)solution to a technical problem. Ticketmaster could also just use a better CAPTCHA...
Sure, there are people in poor countries who could be (are?) paid to solve CAPTCHAs but that's not what a law that outlaws bots covers, is it?
I think they tended to inject bad stuff into people too.
What happens when there is nasty bacteria on your skin and the pulse of the gas pushes that into your blood stream?
If the psyllid that spreads the pathogen has spread to the U.S. then it's an invasive species and couldn't we just release some genetically engineered males or females that produce sterile offspring and mostly decimate the population?
I know there are promising pilot programs that do that for mosquitoes.
Honestly, the hate against GMO as a concept is weird given that all of modern agriculture is basically genetic engineering through trial and error of a very inefficient method of creating mutations.
Nothing we eat is "natural" in the sense that it's the form of the plant that would be most successful in the wild without outside interference.
I think people are right to want regulation and oversight for food safety but that's something that should always be true of all food -- GMO or otherwise.
If you read the article you'll see that they note D-Link puts backdoors into their stuff too.
The example was router firmware that let you bypass http authentication by specifying a certain user agent.
This was "legitimately" used by binaries/scripts on the device to change settings for things like dynamic DNS because it was apparently easier to query the http server to change settings than to rewrite it...
Also included was a proof of concept shell code execution (via buffer overflow of the http server iirc.)
Sadly for cable modems we can't exactly do nice things like run our own OpenWRT-derived firmware.
Granted people can do nefarious things like bypass ISP bandwidth limitations with custom firmware but I honestly have to wonder if that's not just an excuse for laziness on the part of ISPs.
If half of what you're saying is true then why isn't there a UN security council resolution with multi-nation military forces on the ground right now?
That sounds as bad as the holocaust in everything but number of victims.
My only issue with that is that I don't necessarily really know that ISIS is about irrational bloodthirsty marketing campaigns.
In Western media we never actually get to hear the other side of the story and I certainly don't speak Arabic or Farsi and so even if I had access to the other side I wouldn't be able to understand their message.
I could certainly see that from a certain perspective it might look like Western nations are warmongering resource hungry invaders who indiscriminately bomb civilians. So when we get bombed it's terrorism but when we bomb them and kill innocents it's not? I don't think we're quite as 'white' as we claim to be.
Read The Intercept's drone program report and you'll see that when we bomb someone on very iffy intelligence (because 3rd world countries) we automatically classify any incidentally killed people as enemy combatants until such a time after the fact as they can be verified as innocent civilians and then they're reclassified.
I might be off a little on specific terminology but not on the gist of it.
We're assassinating bad guys in other countries because there is no law system to coordinate with but we're also murdering innocent people at the same time.
We're not exactly paragons of moral excellence there.
Note that I'm not trying to apologize for ISIS. I think the mostly likely answer is that they are religiously fanatical people who are attempting to take advantage of a power vacuum created by the Syrian civil war, the weakening of governments by the Arab Spring in the North African region, and the effects of removing a dictator from power in Iraq.
But I don't really know. In my experience, our mainstream entertainment-based media is better at twisting the truth to get viewers than actually informing people in an unbiased fashion.
If you read the article or look at wikipedia you'll see that Intel is easily #1 (by revenue.)
Consider that they design and manufacture most processors in laptops and desktops and that those chips are a lot more expensive than generic ICs.
Then it's Samsung, Qualcomm (who doesn't actually fab their own stuff), and Micron. I don't think they're including foundries but even if you included those TSMC would probably only be #3 (or a very close #4.)
No other foundry even comes close to top 10 semiconductor company revenue.
China's current top foundry is probably SMIC and they don't even have a semiconductor company in the top 20 revenue list. You'll see lots of USA, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan (more so in foundries), and a few European companies instead.
You need more than just a crew for a generational ship. You'd either need some seriously amazing self-sufficiency or parts reliability because given current propulsion tech it would take so very long to reach the nearest star. As in tens of thousands of years long on the optimistic side. Probably more like hundreds of thousands.
That's not a generational ship mission, that's a self-sufficient closed-system interstellar civilization ship mission.
Now, of course if the EM drive works out and achieves anything close to the theoretical efficiency that it can achieve then we could probably reach the next closest star in a couple hundred years. A few hundred year generational ship would still be really impressive but I think it might actually be feasible.
Sounds too good to be true so it almost certainly is but you never know.
Common law (kinda sorta minus Louisiana. Maybe.)
A pretty map
It really is bizarre that our society is completely fine with criminalizing minor activities and then taking away someone's rights and freedoms while paying to house and feed them.
But any government program that tries to help house or feed or improve the life of a non-criminal is considered a waste of money and some sort of "Nanny State" attack on society and will lead to a totalitarian communist government and the complete erosion of our rights and freedoms.
Or how people can be against gun licenses when most Americans require a car to work and survive and have no issue with passing a driving test, renewing their license, and dealing with car titles/inspections/license plates. Guns are weapons and we regulate transportation more than them.
I really wonder how a psychiatrist would diagnose the two major political parties. They seem quite insane to me.
While drugs are bad there is also evidence that shitty environmental situations, not just addiction, drive people to drugs in the first place.
Your "honest person observation" smells an awful lot like what prejudice people say when they want to persecute minorities.
"Any honest person will tell you that, in their experience, [group] are [lazy/dumb/useless/not REAL people so it's ok that we treat them like shit]"
Giving drug abusers an even shittier environment to live in by demonizing them isn't going to lead to better outcomes for society.
Watch this but with a grain of salt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The point is not that the public should embrace the use of drugs but that the war on drugs is a complete failure and actually doing harm.
It only makes sense that you should try something else when what you're doing isn't working.
For example, we could legalize marijuana and decriminalize other drugs and use the income from taxes on marijuana to fund education to prevent abuse and social programs to help abusers get back on their feet and be proud of themselves and break their addiction (and, possibly more importantly, their need for their addiction.)
Ideally we'd try lots of different methods of helping people and use studies to see which methods are actually effective and worth continued funding.
So, we wouldn't be wasting taxes on law enforcement and prison sentences for abusers, we'd hopefully undercut the black market and cut down on drug related crime, it would potential be self-funding (the best kind of taxation), and people might actually get help instead of being treated like scum.
I don't have any ideas for what to do about drug dealers who can no longer make a profit selling drugs, though. It'd suck to collapse that economy and drive them to a worse crime.
And honestly, we already tax alcohol and tobacco and I have to wonder where all of that money is going. It seems to me if 100% of that were going to education and social programs for drug abusers (including alcohol and tobacco) then we'd probably be in a lot better place.
I used to have a debt collector call my cell phone and leave messages between 3am and 6am.
I've never even owned a credit card or taken out a loan or had any form of debt. I've had that cell phone number for over a decade so it shouldn't be a wrong number in their purchased database.
Eventually they get someone (old people and scared people?) who will pay them (even if it's the wrong person) and so it's all worthwhile.
I know someone who used to work for a debt collection agency and it sounded like the most scumbag of operations. There are rules that they're supposed to follow to make sure they call the correct people and they're only supposed to call within certain hours but in practice it seems they don't follow the rules unless they fuck up and spam call a senator's kid.
Even assuming that there were a completely flat pay scale there would still be monetary incentive to go to school for those jobs.
There can only be so many janitors and there will always be more people who qualify for the janitor jobs than for intellectual jobs.
In that case going to school gives you more potential jobs you can apply to and thus a higher chance of getting a job.
Now, in this case, if you read the actual article, you'll see that he immediately bumped the minimum wage to $50k from $35k and then set that to increase to $70k by 2017 ($10k per year.) Anyone who already made between $50k and $70k got a $5k raise.
I imagine anyone who makes over $70k kept getting whatever they were getting already (though he dropped his own income to $70k.)
The whole point is to increase productivity across the board by taking away unhappiness due to finances. The reason he picked those numbers was because a study on happiness found unhappiness increased significantly under $75k but happiness didn't increase above $75k.
He also had a friend who worked long hours and made under $50k but who was stressing out about rent, student debt, and basic life necessity increases while he was making millions and the disparity upset him.
The reason for $70,000 and not $70 billion is because the Princeton study he based the decision on said that making more than $75,000 didn't make people happier on a daily basis but that making less than $75,000 increase how unhappy people were.
Thus by decreasing his own salary and increasing the minimum wage at his company (but not completely eliminating the pay scale) he figured he could increase overall productivity while also being ethically responsible. It seems to have paid off.
Obviously that would differ depending on the cost of living in a region. I assume that number he quoted is specifically calculated for Seattle.