And of course the other companies have only taken advantage of this unbundling in the places where they can see themselves getting the most customers and profit. In the rest of the country where British Telecom is the only supplier, the service is still slow and crap.
I got an email from my ISP saying that they will upgrade me from 2M to 8M, but they can't do it yet, because BT rations the number of upgrades that they can do each month.
In order to prevent a crime you must make the penalty equal or greater than the gain divided by the chance of getting caught
But for the justice system to be perceived as fair, you must make the penalty commensurate with the crime. Otherwise you end up with a situation like this, where people are punished very severely for crimes that are so trivial that the authorities do not usually bother to investigate them.
A similar phenomenon could be seen before the establishment of modern police forces, when criminals would be hanged or transported to Australia for trivial thefts. At the time, this was justified in the same way, but looking back on it now, we regard it as barbaric.
You're assuming that the purpose of the airport security checks is to prevent terrorists from taking bombs onto planes.
If that were the case, why were the current restrictions only put in place last week, when the existence of liquid-based bombs has been known for years, and the police claim to have been following the people they have now arrested for some weeks? Any why are the restrictions now being relaxed, if there is a danger from other unknown groups of people using the same methods?
I'm sure airport security deters a certain number of unintelligent crackpots, and it certainly shows the travelling public that "something is being done". But the ultimate answer to the problem is a political one, not technological.
Protection of a trademark isn't evil, but Google made a big mistake when they chose the "don't be evil" motto. Now every negative press article about them quotes the motto, in a context that makes it look hypocritical. Just look at TFA, which begins "... Google, known for its mantra "don't be evil", has fired off a series of legal letters...".
The Intel processor design has been a pile of manure ever since the first 8086. On the other hand, the IBM zSeries range of computers has been doing virtualization since the 1960s, and presumably the hardware has been designed to get it right. Can anyone give comparable performance figures for programs running in a virtual machine or the bare metal for a zSeries machine?
It's very noticable that the huge amount of press coverage and spin about this latest incident contains no hint that the police might have found any sort of bomb. Plenty of stories about "the terrorists were planning to use a bomb made of liquids", but absolutely nothing whatever along the lines of "the police have found some liquids".
I'm betting that it turns out that these people were talking big to each other, but never had a bomb. Actually, if you know your telephone is being tapped and there is paranoia about terrorism, this is not a bad way of making a "denial of service" attack on the system. You can get all the panic and disruption you like, and you don't need any explosives: the authorities do it all for you.
If I were running terrorist organization, I would wait a few months for it to all die down, then get my members to send a whole load of emails along the lines of "I've got the bomb ready: I'm going to hide it up my bum". Then sit back and watch hilarity ensure at Heathrow.
Did we finally get a message through that the majority of us aren't criminals?
No. If you read the PDF, all that has actually changed is the license agreement that binds the manufacturers of DVDs. They will now be allowed to make CSS-protected DVDs using special recordable disks. I suppose that previously they were only allowed to use pressed disks.
The immediate purpose of this will be to allow vending machines to create DVDs on the fly. As far as home recording goes, the press release just says "Individual consumers could legally record a variety of selected content", which doesn't mean anything: you can do that now, just so long as your "selected content" is not copyrighted! There's nothing here that will add any legal freedoms to the individual user.
The PDF linked from the article clearly states that this will need special blank disks.
Actually, CSS is hardware as well as software, because the key is stored in a spacial place on the disk, and existing disks do not allow that special place to be written. So it is impossible to make CSS-protected disks with current domestic DVD writers.
It's news because some people might have thought that this bank has better security than one which only asks for username and password.If you're choosing an online bank, it is important to know which ones are secure and which are not.
If it takes up to 9 attempts to crack the system, then on average you're going to get in after 4 or 5. So all the criminals have to do is to attack more than one account: some will get locked out but they will be lucky almost 50% of the time.
You would also need very little explosives to cause massive loss of life in an airport packed with passengers waiting to get through the security checks. So the current security precautions will have made it much easier for terrorists to kill a lot of people, if that's what they want to do.
Not necessarily: the UK government has been reducing our freedoms steadily for several years (removal of right to silence, reductions in rights to trial by jury, identity cards, tracking all car journeys etc etc). That's just the sort of thing that home secretaries say from time to time, to justify it all.
Actually, it was proved afterwards that he was not fleeing. He was behaving normally.
The police discovered that they had killed an innocent man within minutes, not months. So they put out a lot of misinformation to cover up their mistake.
The last I heard, they were rolling out the chipped passports in phases. I got mine renewed (from the Peterborough office) a few weeks back, after the rollout started, and I was lucky enough to get one of the old ones. So it's still worth trying.
The police in the UK are trying to build a DNA sample database of the entire population.
So far, they have only got permission to take samples if they arrest someone; this may explain their willingness to arrest everyone they can, for the most trivial reasons. The law then allows the sample to be retained indefinitely, even if the person is released with no charge (hence, the parents cannot sue).
The UK is rapidly becoming one of the countries with the most draconian social controls in the Western world.
And perhaps not planting trees near power lines would give civilization a better chance of another 100 years.
Re:Not even funny anymore
on
The Hybrid Scooter
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
walking from local mall to the local Holiday Inn/mini-Walmart takes 45 mins
So build your buildings closer together.
Here in Europe, living in the centre of the city, within walking distance of everything, is becoming more and more popular. As transport becomes more expensive, the suburbs will wither and die.
Given what happened to this BMW owner, I would suggest that no one with any sense should use biometric security to protect anything that is valuable to thieves.
I don't think so: that says "copy and distribute", not just "copy". The GPL has the implicit assumption that I am receiving the program in source code form, so section 1 allows me to copy that source code, and section 3 allows me to compile it and distribute the result, so long as I also offer to distribute the source code with it.
Of course the GPL was written some years ago, before the problems associated with copying MP3s and the like became so well-known. This Microsoft license is a new one, so I would expect it to take all that stuff into account, and it seems to differ from the "shared source" licenses that I've seen before: the "academic purposes" clause has been added.
The "impure" distros like Suse - the ones you pay money for - have always packaged Sun's java. I can only suppose that they paid money to Sun to make the problem go away.
The acid test is whether Debian are bundling it, since that is the distro that is the most obsessive about keeping true to the faith and to the letter of the license agreements. I haven't looked to see what they are doing.
...their findings will still be restricted to the 16 groups involved
Sounds like he's trying to make the HIV research community into one big monolithic business. More like Microsoft than Open Source?
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And of course the other companies have only taken advantage of this unbundling in the places where they can see themselves getting the most customers and profit. In the rest of the country where British Telecom is the only supplier, the service is still slow and crap.
I got an email from my ISP saying that they will upgrade me from 2M to 8M, but they can't do it yet, because BT rations the number of upgrades that they can do each month.
In order to prevent a crime you must make the penalty equal or greater than the gain divided by the chance of getting caught
But for the justice system to be perceived as fair, you must make the penalty commensurate with the crime. Otherwise you end up with a situation like this, where people are punished very severely for crimes that are so trivial that the authorities do not usually bother to investigate them.
A similar phenomenon could be seen before the establishment of modern police forces, when criminals would be hanged or transported to Australia for trivial thefts. At the time, this was justified in the same way, but looking back on it now, we regard it as barbaric.
Now they have a monopoly, so can charge monopoly prices. I'm sure that's a win for someone, but I'm not sure how it's a win for everyone.
Alternatively, forcibly convert everyone to Islam. Then we will all be on the same side.
My solution is better than yours, because your solution kills a lot of innocent people, whereas mine shows a respect for life.
You're assuming that the purpose of the airport security checks is to prevent terrorists from taking bombs onto planes.
If that were the case, why were the current restrictions only put in place last week, when the existence of liquid-based bombs has been known for years, and the police claim to have been following the people they have now arrested for some weeks? Any why are the restrictions now being relaxed, if there is a danger from other unknown groups of people using the same methods?
I'm sure airport security deters a certain number of unintelligent crackpots, and it certainly shows the travelling public that "something is being done". But the ultimate answer to the problem is a political one, not technological.
Protection of a trademark isn't evil, but Google made a big mistake when they chose the "don't be evil" motto. Now every negative press article about them quotes the motto, in a context that makes it look hypocritical. Just look at TFA, which begins "... Google, known for its mantra "don't be evil", has fired off a series of legal letters ...".
The Intel processor design has been a pile of manure ever since the first 8086. On the other hand, the IBM zSeries range of computers has been doing virtualization since the 1960s, and presumably the hardware has been designed to get it right. Can anyone give comparable performance figures for programs running in a virtual machine or the bare metal for a zSeries machine?
It's very noticable that the huge amount of press coverage and spin about this latest incident contains no hint that the police might have found any sort of bomb. Plenty of stories about "the terrorists were planning to use a bomb made of liquids", but absolutely nothing whatever along the lines of "the police have found some liquids".
I'm betting that it turns out that these people were talking big to each other, but never had a bomb. Actually, if you know your telephone is being tapped and there is paranoia about terrorism, this is not a bad way of making a "denial of service" attack on the system. You can get all the panic and disruption you like, and you don't need any explosives: the authorities do it all for you.
If I were running terrorist organization, I would wait a few months for it to all die down, then get my members to send a whole load of emails along the lines of "I've got the bomb ready: I'm going to hide it up my bum". Then sit back and watch hilarity ensure at Heathrow.
Did we finally get a message through that the majority of us aren't criminals?
No. If you read the PDF, all that has actually changed is the license agreement that binds the manufacturers of DVDs. They will now be allowed to make CSS-protected DVDs using special recordable disks. I suppose that previously they were only allowed to use pressed disks.
The immediate purpose of this will be to allow vending machines to create DVDs on the fly. As far as home recording goes, the press release just says "Individual consumers could legally record a variety of selected content", which doesn't mean anything: you can do that now, just so long as your "selected content" is not copyrighted! There's nothing here that will add any legal freedoms to the individual user.
The PDF linked from the article clearly states that this will need special blank disks.
Actually, CSS is hardware as well as software, because the key is stored in a spacial place on the disk, and existing disks do not allow that special place to be written. So it is impossible to make CSS-protected disks with current domestic DVD writers.
So if I log in every day, it's over a week before the criminals steal all my money. Great.
It's news because some people might have thought that this bank has better security than one which only asks for username and password.If you're choosing an online bank, it is important to know which ones are secure and which are not.
If it takes up to 9 attempts to crack the system, then on average you're going to get in after 4 or 5. So all the criminals have to do is to attack more than one account: some will get locked out but they will be lucky almost 50% of the time.
That's what you get when you get rid of the Taliban. They had nearly succeeded in wiping out opium production.
You would also need very little explosives to cause massive loss of life in an airport packed with passengers waiting to get through the security checks. So the current security precautions will have made it much easier for terrorists to kill a lot of people, if that's what they want to do.
Not necessarily: the UK government has been reducing our freedoms steadily for several years (removal of right to silence, reductions in rights to trial by jury, identity cards, tracking all car journeys etc etc). That's just the sort of thing that home secretaries say from time to time, to justify it all.
Actually, it was proved afterwards that he was not fleeing. He was behaving normally.
The police discovered that they had killed an innocent man within minutes, not months. So they put out a lot of misinformation to cover up their mistake.
The last I heard, they were rolling out the chipped passports in phases. I got mine renewed (from the Peterborough office) a few weeks back, after the rollout started, and I was lucky enough to get one of the old ones. So it's still worth trying.
The police in the UK are trying to build a DNA sample database of the entire population.
So far, they have only got permission to take samples if they arrest someone; this may explain their willingness to arrest everyone they can, for the most trivial reasons. The law then allows the sample to be retained indefinitely, even if the person is released with no charge (hence, the parents cannot sue).
The UK is rapidly becoming one of the countries with the most draconian social controls in the Western world.
And perhaps not planting trees near power lines would give civilization a better chance of another 100 years.
walking from local mall to the local Holiday Inn/mini-Walmart takes 45 mins
So build your buildings closer together.
Here in Europe, living in the centre of the city, within walking distance of everything, is becoming more and more popular. As transport becomes more expensive, the suburbs will wither and die.
Given what happened to this BMW owner, I would suggest that no one with any sense should use biometric security to protect anything that is valuable to thieves.
I don't think so: that says "copy and distribute", not just "copy". The GPL has the implicit assumption that I am receiving the program in source code form, so section 1 allows me to copy that source code, and section 3 allows me to compile it and distribute the result, so long as I also offer to distribute the source code with it.
Of course the GPL was written some years ago, before the problems associated with copying MP3s and the like became so well-known. This Microsoft license is a new one, so I would expect it to take all that stuff into account, and it seems to differ from the "shared source" licenses that I've seen before: the "academic purposes" clause has been added.
The "impure" distros like Suse - the ones you pay money for - have always packaged Sun's java. I can only suppose that they paid money to Sun to make the problem go away.
The acid test is whether Debian are bundling it, since that is the distro that is the most obsessive about keeping true to the faith and to the letter of the license agreements. I haven't looked to see what they are doing.
...their findings will still be restricted to the 16 groups involved
Sounds like he's trying to make the HIV research community into one big monolithic business. More like Microsoft than Open Source?