Can they demand you decrypt data or, worse, provide the key?
Step 1: Pack a Windows XP Home installation CD in the front pocket. Carry it at all times, even if you run Linux.
Step 2: When asked to login to the machine, say you don't know the password because you just bought the laptop from your friend's girlfriend's cousin's stepson and haven't yet had a chance to install one of these here Windows on it. (If confronted about this on the return trip, exclaim, "And what--show up in like some dumb American without my laptop?! Puh-lease!")
Step 3: Grin confidently while the security guard furrows his brows at you for a few seconds and then waves you on.
I'm from Europe, so I don't really get it... but please, help me. Why is it that the majority of Americans (and many Europeans to be fair) seem to think that only "Big Name" chain stores can provide these essential services to them?
I was never particularly a fan of CompUSA, but around here they were the only store that had a decent selection of parts for a fair (not great) price. I tend to buy anything of an electronic nature online because even with shipping, you usually get a much better deal than any physical store. But CompUSA was the only place in my mid-sized town that was pretty much guaranteed to have that thingamabob that I need tomorrow and wasn't likely to rip me off too bad over it, as long as a rebate wasn't involved.
I've been to every small computer shop in town and have the same exact problem at each one. I go and look for, say, a motherboard. They have 5 models. Only one works with the processor that I have but it's a crappy no-name brand with 3 expansion slots, USB 1.1, and some retarded proprietary winmodem daughterboard. And the price tag on it is three times as much as a nice mid-range motherboard on newegg. The employees are either high school kids trying to rack up some cash to support their Xbox addiction or cranky old codgers who will tell you with a straight face that the computing industry hit its technological peak with Windows 98SE.
Sure, once in awhile they have decent deals on some peripheral that they bought in bulk, but by and large their wares are dusty and cheap and their help incompetent. At least CompUSA got it half right.
Although I wish they'd follow Dell's lead and offer Linux as an OS option.
I had been looking at a ThinkPad T61 for months but finally splurged because they recently dropped by price by about $300. I've been using it for a couple weeks and man, this is a nice laptop. It reeks of thoughtful engineering and quality construction. It runs Linux perfectly, as long as you choose the right wifi and video cards. The best part? A midrange ThinkPad actually costs less than their competitors' flimsy equivalents. I don't mean for this to sound so much like an advertisement, but I just really love this machine.
I have some first-hand experience with this. I advised my mum to get a new Lenovo computer as her previous machine was beginning to show its age. She bought it at the store, brought it home, and it was immediately unusable out of the box. Most of her old programs didn't work, lots of her peripherals didn't have drivers, and it took minutes to boot while around 30 seconds just to wake up from suspend.
She called me asking for help and I asked her what OS came with it... Vista, of course. I tried to walk her though turning off all the fancy graphics options and services, but even with most of the OS disabled, it was still several times slower than the machine it was meant to replace. I took the weekend off to drive up to her place and install Windows XP on it and everything works perfectly now. Nice and quick, the drivers work fine, and so does all of her old software.
Now, this is admittedly a low-end desktop machine, but Lenovo had no business pre-installing Vista on the thing when Vista is clearly and practically unusable on it. Though I loathe nearly every aspect of Vista and the fact that it works with practically nothing even after being on the market for over year, I have to blame Lenovo more than Microsoft here, since it was ultimately their decision to put Vista on a machine that was clearly not designed for it.
With the radio-controlled clocks retailing for $20 and less, one would think that somebody out there has created a box about the size of a wifi router that just plugs into your network and serves NTP. Every few months I go googling for one and come up dry. Toyed with the idea of building one, but I don't have the requisite electronics knowledge and can't find any schematics. It may be possible to hack certain manufactured clocks, but I've found that the circuitry on those is a little too self-contained for proper hacking.
I can tell you haven't worked in retail or didn't utilize any clue when forming that comment or most probably both.
No store employee or security guard can detain someone for theft based on suspicion or belief alone. You can *only* attempt to detain a person if you have actual evidence of theft taking place. I.e, you pretty much have to have security camera footage of the person taking an item from the shelf and putting it in their coat and then failing to pay for it at the register.
The guy in TFA has every right to file a lawsuit not only against the police for unlawful arrest, but against the store for unlawful detainment.
Imagine you're watching your favorite broadcast television show. You get a little hungry. When the commercials come on, you go into the kitchen and prepare a little snack. You know that you have about 3 minutes before the show starts up again and end up timing it just right so that you're sitting down again as the commercials end.
Now, using his logic: because you didn't watch the commercials that pay the employees and shareholders of the TV station, you're stealing from them. Stealing is a crime. You're now a criminal because you fixed yourself a burrito during the advertisements.
Might as well turn yourself in. Can't hide forever, you law-breaking cretin.
So what's the point of posting all that? Anybody can do a whois query. Are you posting the results here as a suggestion that somebody use this information in a retaliatory manner?
And would that really help his perception that Firefox users are criminals? Yes, he really thinks that. Blocking ads is "theft", thieves are criminals, therefore people who block ads are criminals. I can deconstruct this wacko's arguments all day long, we don't need his home address posted on a public forum if he's already been thoroughly discredited with good old-fasioned logic.
Mods, take the high road and put the parent down to -1, Flamebait where it ought to be.
Linus isn't saying that CVS and Subversion have fixable bugs or missing features. It's not about the code.
I think it's more about bashing some thing or another to gain attention.
I liked Linus, and I've held him in high regard for more than a decade for all that he's helped accomplished while still being mostly modest about it. But he seems to be slowly evolving into another Stallman lately. Everything has been, "I don't like x and therefore x is stupid and you're a mentally-retarded asshat if you don't agree with everything I say."
Just last week he started a flamewar on LKML about software suspend. Linus threw a shitfit when some bugs in suspend-to-disk were affecting suspend-to-RAM. After insulting a few other kernel developers without provocation, he basically ended the conversation by saying that the whole thing was going to be ripped out and redone only as suspend-to-RAM because he didn't use suspend-to-disk. Since he himself didn't use it, he postulated that it was a completely useless waste of time for anyone to implement it.
The Subversion team wants to solve Problem A, and Linus wants to solve Problem B.
So why couldn't he have simply said, "GIT solves the problem that I need it to solve, which is different from Subversion's"? Oh, right, because that wouldn't be interesting enough to make the front page of Slashdot. Too bad if the alternative alienates the half of the open source community that likes Subversion for what it does.
If these files start cropping up on The Pirate Bay, it just demonstrates what a crock of shit the "restriction of rights" argument always was. People just want music for free.
Um, hello? Hi. This is the year 2007 calling. I don't know if you're aware of this, but...
There are *always* going to be music pirates on the Internet, no matter what you do. You already know full well that music will be traded, swapped, and pirated right up until the music industry releases their entire body of content for free sans DRM and in master-quality audio. The RIAA does too, which is why they would probably use this argument to try to prove their point. But I would expect a Slashdotter to know better.
Granted the prices are too high, and you still can't get a high enough bitrate, but they've made a move more-or-less in the right direction.
All we ask is that the tracks be affordable, easy to purchase, and usable. That's it. Fly-by-night websites in Russia can do this, but the entire American music industry apparently can't. Baby steps don't cut it because they're not even trying. They want to be able to scream that piracy is killing them for as long as possible because that and large campaign contributions is how you get laws passed that put your fingers in everyone's pocketbooks.
A really, really, really smart client would detect that the info has been inserted into the file and then organize a mass protest at Apple and the RIAA headquarters...
Perhaps because Wifi is entirely the wrong kind of technology for widespread Internet access. 802.11a/b/g were designed for short-range stationary networking such as a house or small office building. Being in the unlicensed "ghetto" band of 2.4GHz, wifi radios have serious problems going through too much solid material, are pretty much stopped dead by mundane things like trees, have to compete with everything else in the 2.4GHz range (including omnipresent microwave ovens), and have crippling federal restrictions on transmitter power. A lot of people wanted to make municipal wifi work and I applaud them, but their solution to overcome Wifi's inherent problems was simply to dump hundreds of radios all over the place and pray that it would work. And they lost that bet.
If anything was going to make community wireless Internet access work, it's WiMAX, which fixes many of these problems. In particular, a community could be served by a *single* radio. And I hate to be a doom-sayer, but I predict that WiMAX is going to be dead in the water soon now that the cell phone companies are starting to offer reasonably-priced EVDO plans.
I disagree, he should have done it, I'm glad he did, and I only wish I'd have thought of it first. Though nobody seems to have thought to ask him why he sent the fake take-down notice, I suspect he did it to help underscore how truly ridiculous our society's behavior has been become regarding copyrights. You have this handful of enormous corporations who want to own and tightly control all of the world's content. They throw money at lawmakers who then pass really stupid laws that substantially reduce our freedoms in a lot of ways and then send threatening letters and file lawsuits against ordinary people who didn't think they were doing anything particularly wrong.
This kid single-handedly demonstrated to the world how ridiculously easy it is for absolutely anyone to get content removed from public content-sharing services, especially when they don't actually own the content in question.
But what do we get from the media? "Oh, it was just some dumb kid trying to scam YouTube."
Er, it rather depends on the codec you use. Of course you can do FAX over VoIP. Hell, the public telephone network has been almost entirely digital for over a decade now. The only real difference between PSTN and VoIP is that VoIP data travels over the Internet rather than a network explicitly built for voice communications. Since both are similar, much of the technology is also similar, including compression algorithms.
Most people have only two realistic options: cable or DSL, each from its respective monopoly.
I think that even among the geek element, this is more of a myth than a reality in many locations around the country. Sometimes you have to look hard to find them, but there are usually decent-quality DSL providers owned by independent companies. They might have to lease the last-mile lines from the local monopoly, but their service is otherwise quite separate and you'll usually find that their prices and performance are better while their restrictions are fewer.
Slashdot Mirror
Can they demand you decrypt data or, worse, provide the key?
Step 1: Pack a Windows XP Home installation CD in the front pocket. Carry it at all times, even if you run Linux.
Step 2: When asked to login to the machine, say you don't know the password because you just bought the laptop from your friend's girlfriend's cousin's stepson and haven't yet had a chance to install one of these here Windows on it. (If confronted about this on the return trip, exclaim, "And what--show up in like some dumb American without my laptop?! Puh-lease!")
Step 3: Grin confidently while the security guard furrows his brows at you for a few seconds and then waves you on.
I'm from Europe, so I don't really get it... but please, help me. Why is it that the majority of Americans (and many Europeans to be fair) seem to think that only "Big Name" chain stores can provide these essential services to them?
I was never particularly a fan of CompUSA, but around here they were the only store that had a decent selection of parts for a fair (not great) price. I tend to buy anything of an electronic nature online because even with shipping, you usually get a much better deal than any physical store. But CompUSA was the only place in my mid-sized town that was pretty much guaranteed to have that thingamabob that I need tomorrow and wasn't likely to rip me off too bad over it, as long as a rebate wasn't involved.
I've been to every small computer shop in town and have the same exact problem at each one. I go and look for, say, a motherboard. They have 5 models. Only one works with the processor that I have but it's a crappy no-name brand with 3 expansion slots, USB 1.1, and some retarded proprietary winmodem daughterboard. And the price tag on it is three times as much as a nice mid-range motherboard on newegg. The employees are either high school kids trying to rack up some cash to support their Xbox addiction or cranky old codgers who will tell you with a straight face that the computing industry hit its technological peak with Windows 98SE.
Sure, once in awhile they have decent deals on some peripheral that they bought in bulk, but by and large their wares are dusty and cheap and their help incompetent. At least CompUSA got it half right.
Although I wish they'd follow Dell's lead and offer Linux as an OS option.
I had been looking at a ThinkPad T61 for months but finally splurged because they recently dropped by price by about $300. I've been using it for a couple weeks and man, this is a nice laptop. It reeks of thoughtful engineering and quality construction. It runs Linux perfectly, as long as you choose the right wifi and video cards. The best part? A midrange ThinkPad actually costs less than their competitors' flimsy equivalents. I don't mean for this to sound so much like an advertisement, but I just really love this machine.
I have some first-hand experience with this. I advised my mum to get a new Lenovo computer as her previous machine was beginning to show its age. She bought it at the store, brought it home, and it was immediately unusable out of the box. Most of her old programs didn't work, lots of her peripherals didn't have drivers, and it took minutes to boot while around 30 seconds just to wake up from suspend.
She called me asking for help and I asked her what OS came with it... Vista, of course. I tried to walk her though turning off all the fancy graphics options and services, but even with most of the OS disabled, it was still several times slower than the machine it was meant to replace. I took the weekend off to drive up to her place and install Windows XP on it and everything works perfectly now. Nice and quick, the drivers work fine, and so does all of her old software.
Now, this is admittedly a low-end desktop machine, but Lenovo had no business pre-installing Vista on the thing when Vista is clearly and practically unusable on it. Though I loathe nearly every aspect of Vista and the fact that it works with practically nothing even after being on the market for over year, I have to blame Lenovo more than Microsoft here, since it was ultimately their decision to put Vista on a machine that was clearly not designed for it.
So, all this will accomplish is teaching the trolls how to speak like the British?
Beware, the parent post offers to clear up this whole confusing situation, but his links contain no reference to Wookies or Endor at all.
I have to say, we don't see the word "trombone" used as a verb nearly often enough.
I, for one, welcome our new Russian.... wait, what year is it?
With the radio-controlled clocks retailing for $20 and less, one would think that somebody out there has created a box about the size of a wifi router that just plugs into your network and serves NTP. Every few months I go googling for one and come up dry. Toyed with the idea of building one, but I don't have the requisite electronics knowledge and can't find any schematics. It may be possible to hack certain manufactured clocks, but I've found that the circuitry on those is a little too self-contained for proper hacking.
I can tell you haven't worked in retail or didn't utilize any clue when forming that comment or most probably both.
No store employee or security guard can detain someone for theft based on suspicion or belief alone. You can *only* attempt to detain a person if you have actual evidence of theft taking place. I.e, you pretty much have to have security camera footage of the person taking an item from the shelf and putting it in their coat and then failing to pay for it at the register.
The guy in TFA has every right to file a lawsuit not only against the police for unlawful arrest, but against the store for unlawful detainment.
(Disclaimer: This may vary by region, of course.)
Imagine you're watching your favorite broadcast television show. You get a little hungry. When the commercials come on, you go into the kitchen and prepare a little snack. You know that you have about 3 minutes before the show starts up again and end up timing it just right so that you're sitting down again as the commercials end.
Now, using his logic: because you didn't watch the commercials that pay the employees and shareholders of the TV station, you're stealing from them. Stealing is a crime. You're now a criminal because you fixed yourself a burrito during the advertisements.
Might as well turn yourself in. Can't hide forever, you law-breaking cretin.
You have the right to put your content on the web for all to see.
I have the right to look at only those parts which I care about.
So what's the point of posting all that? Anybody can do a whois query. Are you posting the results here as a suggestion that somebody use this information in a retaliatory manner?
And would that really help his perception that Firefox users are criminals? Yes, he really thinks that. Blocking ads is "theft", thieves are criminals, therefore people who block ads are criminals. I can deconstruct this wacko's arguments all day long, we don't need his home address posted on a public forum if he's already been thoroughly discredited with good old-fasioned logic.
Mods, take the high road and put the parent down to -1, Flamebait where it ought to be.
And yes, unfortunately Reuters calls the criminals 'hackers,' further besmirching the once-revered title."
You mean after they've been doing this for 20 years, there's still somebody left who cares about it?
Linus isn't saying that CVS and Subversion have fixable bugs or missing features. It's not about the code.
I think it's more about bashing some thing or another to gain attention.
I liked Linus, and I've held him in high regard for more than a decade for all that he's helped accomplished while still being mostly modest about it. But he seems to be slowly evolving into another Stallman lately. Everything has been, "I don't like x and therefore x is stupid and you're a mentally-retarded asshat if you don't agree with everything I say."
Just last week he started a flamewar on LKML about software suspend. Linus threw a shitfit when some bugs in suspend-to-disk were affecting suspend-to-RAM. After insulting a few other kernel developers without provocation, he basically ended the conversation by saying that the whole thing was going to be ripped out and redone only as suspend-to-RAM because he didn't use suspend-to-disk. Since he himself didn't use it, he postulated that it was a completely useless waste of time for anyone to implement it.
The Subversion team wants to solve Problem A, and Linus wants to solve Problem B.
So why couldn't he have simply said, "GIT solves the problem that I need it to solve, which is different from Subversion's"? Oh, right, because that wouldn't be interesting enough to make the front page of Slashdot. Too bad if the alternative alienates the half of the open source community that likes Subversion for what it does.
If these files start cropping up on The Pirate Bay, it just demonstrates what a crock of shit the "restriction of rights" argument always was. People just want music for free.
Um, hello? Hi. This is the year 2007 calling. I don't know if you're aware of this, but...
There are *always* going to be music pirates on the Internet, no matter what you do. You already know full well that music will be traded, swapped, and pirated right up until the music industry releases their entire body of content for free sans DRM and in master-quality audio. The RIAA does too, which is why they would probably use this argument to try to prove their point. But I would expect a Slashdotter to know better.
Granted the prices are too high, and you still can't get a high enough bitrate, but they've made a move more-or-less in the right direction.
All we ask is that the tracks be affordable, easy to purchase, and usable. That's it. Fly-by-night websites in Russia can do this, but the entire American music industry apparently can't. Baby steps don't cut it because they're not even trying. They want to be able to scream that piracy is killing them for as long as possible because that and large campaign contributions is how you get laws passed that put your fingers in everyone's pocketbooks.
A really, really, really smart client would detect that the info has been inserted into the file and then organize a mass protest at Apple and the RIAA headquarters...
Perhaps because Wifi is entirely the wrong kind of technology for widespread Internet access. 802.11a/b/g were designed for short-range stationary networking such as a house or small office building. Being in the unlicensed "ghetto" band of 2.4GHz, wifi radios have serious problems going through too much solid material, are pretty much stopped dead by mundane things like trees, have to compete with everything else in the 2.4GHz range (including omnipresent microwave ovens), and have crippling federal restrictions on transmitter power. A lot of people wanted to make municipal wifi work and I applaud them, but their solution to overcome Wifi's inherent problems was simply to dump hundreds of radios all over the place and pray that it would work. And they lost that bet.
If anything was going to make community wireless Internet access work, it's WiMAX, which fixes many of these problems. In particular, a community could be served by a *single* radio. And I hate to be a doom-sayer, but I predict that WiMAX is going to be dead in the water soon now that the cell phone companies are starting to offer reasonably-priced EVDO plans.
Nice-looking project, but did you notice your demo galleries are full of comment spam?
We're writing our own.
Dear Google,
Do No Evil. (Please?)
Signed,
Every Web User
It was silly and he shouldn't have done it,
I disagree, he should have done it, I'm glad he did, and I only wish I'd have thought of it first. Though nobody seems to have thought to ask him why he sent the fake take-down notice, I suspect he did it to help underscore how truly ridiculous our society's behavior has been become regarding copyrights. You have this handful of enormous corporations who want to own and tightly control all of the world's content. They throw money at lawmakers who then pass really stupid laws that substantially reduce our freedoms in a lot of ways and then send threatening letters and file lawsuits against ordinary people who didn't think they were doing anything particularly wrong.
This kid single-handedly demonstrated to the world how ridiculously easy it is for absolutely anyone to get content removed from public content-sharing services, especially when they don't actually own the content in question.
But what do we get from the media? "Oh, it was just some dumb kid trying to scam YouTube."
Makes me sick.
Dear Zonk, your posts to Slashdot are uninformative, full of errors, and not relevant to anyone's interests. Please go away.
Also, anyone who agrees with me, please tag this article "zonkism".
Er, it rather depends on the codec you use. Of course you can do FAX over VoIP. Hell, the public telephone network has been almost entirely digital for over a decade now. The only real difference between PSTN and VoIP is that VoIP data travels over the Internet rather than a network explicitly built for voice communications. Since both are similar, much of the technology is also similar, including compression algorithms.
Most people have only two realistic options: cable or DSL, each from its respective monopoly.
I think that even among the geek element, this is more of a myth than a reality in many locations around the country. Sometimes you have to look hard to find them, but there are usually decent-quality DSL providers owned by independent companies. They might have to lease the last-mile lines from the local monopoly, but their service is otherwise quite separate and you'll usually find that their prices and performance are better while their restrictions are fewer.