Dan would eventually find out about the free kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggers--you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that.
Just about every PC game out now or in development is using SteamWorks [wikipedia.org]. Square Enix's products are some of those that do.
SteamWorks makes a game DVD into a Steam game so it's no different than buying it online with no DVD. Because of this, the buyer isn't allowed to trade, lend or resell the DVD under the TOS [steampowered.com]. If they are found doing this the account and the DVD key may be terminated. Unlike MMOs this is being applied to single-player games that don't use the internet at all. This may be unprecedented.
Several questions arise from this. We're only supposed to ask one so I guess just pick the one you like best!
1) Is there any legal precedent for or against this practice? ie Does the Right of First Sale apply? (As this is a physical medium rather than digital-only, as it has been confirmed to apply to digital data on a disc (UMG v. Augusto) regardless of the copyright holder trying to restrict the sale.) If not, even though it's a maxim that "software is licensed not sold" what is the relevant actual law that says this?
2) If the EULA that enforces this is in fact legally binding (which has not been established with any regularity as there have been decisions for and against) does this mean that these discs should not legally be allowed to be sold to minor persons who can't sign contracts? (This is to be contrasted with online purchases where the buyer is presenting evidence of being age of majority by their method of payment. Someone else also asked this before I was done typing mine.)
Already up for pre-order on Steam, and they will probably be using SteamWorks activation for the DVD (when asked about it, Todd Howard's only reply was "We like Steam") so whatever policies Steam applies will hold. If it uses SteamWorks it will require an internet connection to activate but can be played offline after this.
About eighty years ago there was another rogue party in Germany also caused by a book that went viral and got out of control. Most of the whole county ended up joining and it caused a lot of arrests and damage, even some deaths too. About time they did something about it.
When Netflix came to Canada or announced plans to do so, Rogers (cable) immediately LOWERED their measly caps from 60GB to 30GB-ish.
They also did something else. A year or so ago Rogers was using "shaping" (ie deep packet inspection) to cap BitTorrent upstream at ridiculously low rates (~1 KB/sec.) After much complaining this was scaled back to 9-10KB/sec. and finally removed. Where I live (southeast Toronto) it's come back at the latter magnitude within the last week or so.
In the W95 days, I had to reinstall Windows on my ex-father-in-law's PC several times. Once it was because he deleted a bunch of.DLL files. When I asked him why he would delete files in the Windows folder that had a gear icon, which would seem to indicate that they were part of the workings of the system, he replied, and I kid you not: "I thought Dee-Ell-Ell meant they were safe to Duh-Luh-Lete."
My own "pet theory" for this was that they would never be detected because although they do exist, they perturb the measurement device to the same degree that they do everything else, ie a gravity wave may perturb one arm of a LIGO detector, but it also correspondingly perturbs the waves of the laser beam passing through it. As a result it isn't detected. An analogy: It would be like measuring everything in a room with a ruler, then scaling the whole room including the ruler up or down. You wouldn't see a change with the same scaled ruler; you'd have to bring one in from outside.
I bounced this idea off a few physicists (including Bruce Allen who runs the Einstein@Home project on LIGO) but they don't seem to like it.:^) Maybe it will turn out to be correct, who knows. It certainly seems to be turning out to be more difficult to detect gravity waves than was initially predicted.
re: "I use earplugs to sleep (best sleep ever!) and so I bought myself an alarm clock for deaf people with a vibration device that is put under the mattrass cover. It also has several really loud sounds and flashes that you can switch on as well if you like."
Could it be this one? It's the one I use too, for the same reason as the poster above: my eeevil subconscious would wake up first with a standard alarm clock and either turn it off or hit the snooze button repeatedly, so I would groggily wonder what happened when I woke up late. I put the shaker unit under my pillow, and having my head vibrate in unison with the loud beeping is unnerving enough that I completely wake up. If I'm stressed for time, I can get up with only a few hours sleep. It is the best alarm clock ever.
It also rather invalidates needing to shake the entire bed. Just the sleeper's head is sufficient. And putting the shaker down one's PJ's provides a wake-up desired by yet another poster above.:^p
re: "What idiots -- Illegally contact people that you already know are especially hostile toward dealing with you. How many sales do they actually expect to make?"
Just as with spam, the telemarketer gangs don't make money off of sales. Rather, they make money off of selling their "service" to the "companies" whose "products" are being advertised. So even if there are no sales at all, they still profit.
Indeed, for those of us who suffered through the fads of the 1970's, there is a horrid piece of kitsch called "Santa Jaws", a parody of A Visit From Saint Nicholas, brought to you by the same source as the slightly more famous Mr. Jaws.
"Santa Jaws" is so (deservedly) obscure that it doesn't appear on YouTube nor are its lyrics available anywhere except here and only from memory, and only due to being unavailable anywhere else.
Yet, it appears to have finally had a purpose after all.:^p
Exactly when the original story broke, I went from about two hundred spams a day to over a thousand, almost all of which were new topics, and it hasn't let up since. So the keys may have been passed on to several parties who are making more extensive use of the botnet than the HerbalKing group did.
I wonder how many it will take before Yahoo finally decides to start blacklisting spam hosts rather than sticking to the woefully inadequate filters.
Computerworld compared four disks, two popular solid state drives and two Seagate mechanical drives, for read/write performance, bootup speed, CPU utilization and other metrics.
But of course not the metrics that really matter, which SSD's vastly excel at and make them worth the price for many people: MTBF, power consumption, ruggedness and noise level.
No one has cracked ReCAPTCHA yet. (This CAPTCHA had a Slashdot article a few months ago.) As it uses text digitized from old books that the best OCR technology couldn't read, it's continually different and already demonstrated to be unintelligible to machines.
Plus, using ReCAPTCHA instead of other solutions also helps Carnegie-Mellon digitize old books for posterity.
From TFA: Microsoft, Google, and all other websites that currently use CAPTCHA, need to find a solution that puts them a step ahead of the spammers. This may well be it.
Slashdot Mirror
... to switch to Dvorak.
It would never be perfect, but it would be pretty damned effective for all but the most determined/informed geeks."
VPNs aren't that geeky anymore.
The Right To Read from 1997:
Dan would eventually find out about the free kernels, even entire free operating systems, that had existed around the turn of the century. But not only were they illegal, like debuggers--you could not install one if you had one, without knowing your computer's root password. And neither the FBI nor Microsoft Support would tell you that.
Not so sensationalist or paranoid now, is it?
(My apologies... posted anonymously.)
Just about every PC game out now or in development is using SteamWorks [wikipedia.org]. Square Enix's products are some of those that do.
SteamWorks makes a game DVD into a Steam game so it's no different than buying it online with no DVD. Because of this, the buyer isn't allowed to trade, lend or resell the DVD under the TOS [steampowered.com]. If they are found doing this the account and the DVD key may be terminated. Unlike MMOs this is being applied to single-player games that don't use the internet at all. This may be unprecedented.
Several questions arise from this. We're only supposed to ask one so I guess just pick the one you like best!
1) Is there any legal precedent for or against this practice? ie Does the Right of First Sale apply? (As this is a physical medium rather than digital-only, as it has been confirmed to apply to digital data on a disc (UMG v. Augusto) regardless of the copyright holder trying to restrict the sale.) If not, even though it's a maxim that "software is licensed not sold" what is the relevant actual law that says this?
2) If the EULA that enforces this is in fact legally binding (which has not been established with any regularity as there have been decisions for and against) does this mean that these discs should not legally be allowed to be sold to minor persons who can't sign contracts? (This is to be contrasted with online purchases where the buyer is presenting evidence of being age of majority by their method of payment. Someone else also asked this before I was done typing mine.)
Already up for pre-order on Steam, and they will probably be using SteamWorks activation for the DVD (when asked about it, Todd Howard's only reply was "We like Steam") so whatever policies Steam applies will hold.
If it uses SteamWorks it will require an internet connection to activate but can be played offline after this.
About eighty years ago there was another rogue party in Germany also caused by a book that went viral and got out of control. Most of the whole county ended up joining and it caused a lot of arrests and damage, even some deaths too. About time they did something about it.
"After a private ceremony, Mr. Ohga will be microwaved."
TFA: Initial tests show that the system in Bath emits approximately half as much energy as heat
Switched mode power supplies are on average about 94-95% efficient, so why half as much energy as heat? It should have been a mere 10% reduction.
Simple answer: without a fan, the heat is trapped in the case. Not much of an improvement.
I can approves it too, LoLCat. Your point?
Unsure if in an article or the comments, but it's arguably the most famous so surprised it wasn't mentioned.
$1000 Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable
When Netflix came to Canada or announced plans to do so, Rogers (cable) immediately LOWERED their measly caps from 60GB to 30GB-ish.
They also did something else. A year or so ago Rogers was using "shaping" (ie deep packet inspection) to cap BitTorrent upstream at ridiculously low rates (~1 KB/sec.) After much complaining this was scaled back to 9-10KB/sec. and finally removed. Where I live (southeast Toronto) it's come back at the latter magnitude within the last week or so.
Great Firewall of China.
Great Fatwahl of Pakistan?
In the W95 days, I had to reinstall Windows on my ex-father-in-law's PC several times. .DLL files.
Once it was because he deleted a bunch of
When I asked him why he would delete files in the Windows folder that had a gear icon, which would seem to indicate that they were part of the workings of the system, he replied, and I kid you not:
"I thought Dee-Ell-Ell meant they were safe to Duh-Luh-Lete."
This gives "Radia" a whole new meaning.
My own "pet theory" for this was that they would never be detected because although they do exist, they perturb the measurement device to the same degree that they do everything else, ie a gravity wave may perturb one arm of a LIGO detector, but it also correspondingly perturbs the waves of the laser beam passing through it. As a result it isn't detected.
An analogy: It would be like measuring everything in a room with a ruler, then scaling the whole room including the ruler up or down. You wouldn't see a change with the same scaled ruler; you'd have to bring one in from outside.
I bounced this idea off a few physicists (including Bruce Allen who runs the Einstein@Home project on LIGO) but they don't seem to like it. :^) Maybe it will turn out to be correct, who knows. It certainly seems to be turning out to be more difficult to detect gravity waves than was initially predicted.
re: "I use earplugs to sleep (best sleep ever!) and so I bought myself an alarm clock for deaf people with a vibration device that is put under the mattrass cover. It also has several really loud sounds and flashes that you can switch on as well if you like."
Could it be this one? It's the one I use too, for the same reason as the poster above: my eeevil subconscious would wake up first with a standard alarm clock and either turn it off or hit the snooze button repeatedly, so I would groggily wonder what happened when I woke up late. I put the shaker unit under my pillow, and having my head vibrate in unison with the loud beeping is unnerving enough that I completely wake up. If I'm stressed for time, I can get up with only a few hours sleep. It is the best alarm clock ever.
It also rather invalidates needing to shake the entire bed. Just the sleeper's head is sufficient. And putting the shaker down one's PJ's provides a wake-up desired by yet another poster above. :^p
re: "What idiots -- Illegally contact people that you already know are especially hostile toward dealing with you. How many sales do they actually expect to make?"
Just as with spam, the telemarketer gangs don't make money off of sales. Rather, they make money off of selling their "service" to the "companies" whose "products" are being advertised. So even if there are no sales at all, they still profit.
Indeed, for those of us who suffered through the fads of the 1970's, there is a horrid piece of kitsch called "Santa Jaws", a parody of A Visit From Saint Nicholas, brought to you by the same source as the slightly more famous Mr. Jaws.
"Santa Jaws" is so (deservedly) obscure that it doesn't appear on YouTube nor are its lyrics available anywhere except here and only from memory, and only due to being unavailable anywhere else.
Yet, it appears to have finally had a purpose after all. :^p
re: "Mod me up because I have a vagina and I advertise it through my username!"
Hmmm... "Anonymous Coward". Yes, kind of an obscure reference but, indeed, you are correct there. :^p
Here. (The title is not in English but the clip is; the oft-linked English-titled clip got yanked.)
Exactly when the original story broke, I went from about two hundred spams a day to over a thousand, almost all of which were new topics, and it hasn't let up since. So the keys may have been passed on to several parties who are making more extensive use of the botnet than the HerbalKing group did.
I wonder how many it will take before Yahoo finally decides to start blacklisting spam hosts rather than sticking to the woefully inadequate filters.
SP3...apparently broke a Microsoft application, Microsoft Dynamics Retail Management System...
Service Pack withdrawn because it breaks the Microsoft DRM System. Cue tinfoil hats.
Computerworld compared four disks, two popular solid state drives and two Seagate mechanical drives, for read/write performance, bootup speed, CPU utilization and other metrics.
But of course not the metrics that really matter, which SSD's vastly excel at and make them worth the price for many people: MTBF, power consumption, ruggedness and noise level.
...but it's interesting that this "documentary" opens tomorrow.
No one has cracked ReCAPTCHA yet. (This CAPTCHA had a Slashdot article a few months ago.) As it uses text digitized from old books that the best OCR technology couldn't read, it's continually different and already demonstrated to be unintelligible to machines.
Plus, using ReCAPTCHA instead of other solutions also helps Carnegie-Mellon digitize old books for posterity.
From TFA: Microsoft, Google, and all other websites that currently use CAPTCHA, need to find a solution that puts them a step ahead of the spammers. This may well be it.