The freedom to resell or give away your copy of the book The freedom to keep your copy of the book even after the supplier (or someone with the ability to put pressure on the supplier) decides you should no longer have it The freedom to keep your copy of the book after the vendor dies.
In most cases that I've had issues with I believe it's not so much bad people but bad software. Users converting to PDF using various software just because PDF is as close to a "universal" format as you can come... supposedly
Pdf is first and foremost a format for "as-printed" documents. It does a pretty damn good job of that, I can print from any app to a special printer driver and then later print that pdf on any printer and all the page numbers will be the same as they were originally. I can also view it on-screen or on an ebook reader as it would be printed.
What it's not good at is preserving the semantics of documents. Going through the print process of an application is likely to destroy most semantics that were there and while I belive theoretically pdf has some mechanisms for preserving semantics they aren't usually used. This isn't too much of a problem for printing or on-screen reading since screens tend to be big enough to view the width of an a4 page comfortably and most printers use paper of approximately a4 size*. Larger tablets are probablly fine too.
Where is falls down is mobile phones and smaller ebook readers. Content formatted for a4 pages is simply not suitable for reading on theese and the pdf usually doesn't have enough semantics for software to re-format it well.
* yeah I know you americans use letter rather than a4 but the two are close enough that one can choose "shrink to printable area" in acrobat and things will come out reasonablly printing a letter document on a4 or vice-versa.
Hopefully this boom in ebook readers means other formats will take over that role.
For documents with minimal formatting this may happen, but I just don't see most producers of heavilly formatted/illustrated documents putting in the extra effort to make them work well in a scalable format.
end users won't be able to buy a new PC without 8 after the new year.
If past actions of MS are anything to go by savvy end users will still be able to buy PCs with win7 installed (though likely with a win8 license sticker) for a while. People whose only knowlege of computer purchasing is worst buy not to much.
There are almost certainly people out there (users of cellular internet come to mind) who would find downloading a DVD image difficult but who would also find it difficult or impossible to get internet access during install. Keeping the first CD usable to get a reasonable install from which you can have at least a chance of sorting out your networking seems like a good idea in that context.
Also i've found that when optical drives start to fail the first thing they start having trouble reading is recordable DVDs.
With pretty much any modern drive (whether platter based or solid state) if you are paranoid about data security you have two options, either encrypt everything that may ever hit the drive or physically destroy the drive when you are done with it. Both platter based and soild state drives have remapping systems in place (though soild state drives to a lot more remapping) such that it is pretty much impossible to gaurantee an external overrwrite will hit anything. Both have built-in "secure erase" commands but noone except the manufacturers really knows how secure they are.
They certainly offered special XP home licenses for netbooks after regular XP home licenses became unavailable. I don't think it's publicly known how much (if anything) the OEMs paid for said licenses though.
It's only anonymous insomuch as you don't know the meat-space person who's signing their end of the key.
The trouble with online identities that aren't strongly tied to a meatspace identity is that you can always get a new one. Therefore you can fill some small transactions, wait for your reputation to build up and bigger transactions to start coming in and then dissappear with everyones money. Then repeat with a new identity.
If the BBC wants to continue to get access to major sporting events they need to follow the terms of their contracts with the operators of those events. Those contracts almost certainly require the BBC to take reasonable steps to limit their coverage to the UK
Afaict rights to show programs are usually sold on a geographic basis. Some leakage has always been tolerated since it's inevitable with a broadcast. You can get the BBC in most of western europe if you have a big enough dish, the beam from the sattelite is focussed on the UK but some power leaks out elsewhere. I'd think IP geolocation would work similarly, it will leak (since people will use proxies/vpns/etc and also the geolocation databases may not be 100% accurate) but it keeps the service mostly contained and hence satisfies the content owners.
Also afaict the BBC gets traffic to most UK ISPs for close to nothing through peering with them. If someone uses a UK proxy then most likely the traffic will travel from the BBC to the proxy over a peering link, then they proxy operator will have to pay for transit to get the data to the final recipiant (a small provider running proxies in the UK is highly unlikely to be able to send traffic to users in north america).
So IP geolocation makes perfect sense from both a licensing point of view and a financial point of view
I'd prefer to have a login that is provided when I pay for my license fee. The BBC could then stream concurrently to [for example] 4 clients using the same login details.
The BBC may be able to do this for some content but for a lot of content they won't be able to because their rights to it will be geographically limited.
It requires ENERGY to raise TEMPERATURES. 1 calorie (unit of energy) is required to raise 1 gram of water 1 degree Celsius.
However to keep that water at 1 degree celcius above it's surroundings will require continuous energy input since any item hotter than it's surroundings will constantly lose heat to it's surroundings.
This means in the long term there are TWO ways to increase the temperature of an object. You can increase the rate at which heat is supplied to the object or you can make it harder for the object to lose heat to it's surroundings. The greenhouse affect does the latter.
Even if you do have the ability to artificially raise or lower the humidity that doesn't mean it makes sense to keep it at the same level all year round.
Most electronics is specified for quite a wide range of relative humidity. Usually 5% to 95% or so.
In winter you want low relative humidity to reduce the risk of condensation on stuff brought in from outside (yeah you try to seal stuff and let it warm up before unwrapping but mistakes and emergencies happen). It's also cheap to achieve low relative humidity due to the low outside air temperature (for a given absoloute humidity relative humidity goes down as temperature goes up).
In summer humidity doesn't matter so much since stuff brought in from outside will be warm. It's also likely to be more expensive to achieve low relative humidity since it involves active dehumidification (which is achieved by cooling the air to the point where the water condenses out)
(2)(c) while the person filing the infringement notice was in the wrong so was the uploader (e.g. neither of them holds the copyright), the item remains offline (2)(d) the uploader belives they are in the right but they are too afraid of lawsuits to assert that right, the item remains offline
Milk is in pints if you buy it from the milkman or buy own-brand milk from a store run by a big supermarket chain (even if the store in question isn't actually a big supermarket). If you buy it from a conviniance store that isn't associated with a big supermarket it generally comes in litres. Branded milk (like the cravendale filtered stuff) also tends to come in litres.
The game retailers (it's not just gamestation) are not going to buy a used game unless they think they can resell it at a profit.
So while some gamers may have had a little more money for new games as a result of selling a bagful of old games (something a gamer can clearly only do occasionally, otherwise they would run out of games to sell) other gamers must be spending money that could have been spent on new games on used games and afaict most of the money those gamers are spending on used games goes to the retailers, not to the people who trade in the bags of used games.
On the other hand used game sales are probablly the only reason specialist game retailers in town centers have remained viable for so long (though they seem to be struggling now at least here in the UK) and i'm not convinced losing them would be a good thing for the gaming industry.
You will never calculate an exact figure for "how long will an attacker take to crack my password" because you will never know the attackers strategy. The attacker will presumably start with passwords they think are more likely and move to ones they think are less likely but you don't know what things they will or won't consider likely.
So there are two ways to try and defend a password. You can try and come up with a clever scheme and hope it's not on the attackers list of things to try. The trouble is in reality many people end up with one a of a few common schemes. So the scheme you thought was really clever may be somewhere pretty early in the list of things for the attacker to try.
Or you can assume the attacker has your scheme on his list of things to try and make sure you include enough entropy in the password so that even if the attacker does know your scheme they still can't guess your password.
You are getting your dividions of BT mixed up, BT openreach maintain the connections to your house (and I think they also run the FTTC equipment in the cabinets but i'm not positive on that), BT wholesale run ADSL and phone equipment at the telephone exchage and sell service on it to service providers (including BT retail).
So you can escape from BT wholesale by using a LLU provider but you will still be relying on BT openreach to fix any faults with the cabling to your house.
I've bought non-rebranded (don't recall if they have hauwei's brand printed on them or if they are just plain white with no brand marking) hauwei mobile broadband sticks in the UK (I wanted them unlocked so I could freely switch carriers and I also wanted an external antenna which meant I needed specific models, many of the newer ones lack the external antenna connector) in the UK. It was from a computer gear supplier though not retail.
I'll be honest, despite them being such a massive firm, and having heard about them many hundreds of times on Slashdot, I've never actually seen a peice of Huawei kit here in the UK.
Afaict most mobile broadband sticks sold in the UK are made by them.
Equally radio spectrum is a limited resource and building more base stations or replacing the existing ones with newer tech is expensive. Also once the cell density gets above a certain point you will almost certainly get into diminishing returns because the path losses are simply not high enough to properly isolate the cells from each other. Do you really want your mobile service to be terrible because a few heavy users are running bittorrent continuously.
Some kind of balance needs to be struck between preventing gouging by the cartel of mobile carriers and keeping bulk data on fixed lines where it belongs.
You are somewhat right, if the grid does collapse then distributed generation will disconnect itself to protect both itself and those working on fixing the grid.
However if you get to that point you have already lost. The goal should be to stop the grid from collapsing in the first place and distributed generation can in principle help this.
The problem with wind is it's unpredicatable, you can have a day that is hot but still. Solar is probablly a better bet for dealing with peak load in hot countries because it will have it's maximum output on the same days when people are using maximum aircon.
Someone brought up the possibility of mate in debian but debian doesn't like code duplication (it's not exactly forbidden but it's strongly discouraged). It could still happen of course but if and when it does it will be controversial.
For debian i386 and amd64 users the mate guys offer packages but users of other debian architectures are less lucky.
But how much does backhaul connectivity from somewhere you can buy internet transit to the mountains of pakistan cost? and how much does internet transit (or onward direct connections if you preffer) cost when you get there?
Slashdot Mirror
The freedom to resell or give away your copy of the book
The freedom to keep your copy of the book even after the supplier (or someone with the ability to put pressure on the supplier) decides you should no longer have it
The freedom to keep your copy of the book after the vendor dies.
In most cases that I've had issues with I believe it's not so much bad people but bad software. Users converting to PDF using various software just because PDF is as close to a "universal" format as you can come... supposedly
Pdf is first and foremost a format for "as-printed" documents. It does a pretty damn good job of that, I can print from any app to a special printer driver and then later print that pdf on any printer and all the page numbers will be the same as they were originally. I can also view it on-screen or on an ebook reader as it would be printed.
What it's not good at is preserving the semantics of documents. Going through the print process of an application is likely to destroy most semantics that were there and while I belive theoretically pdf has some mechanisms for preserving semantics they aren't usually used. This isn't too much of a problem for printing or on-screen reading since screens tend to be big enough to view the width of an a4 page comfortably and most printers use paper of approximately a4 size*. Larger tablets are probablly fine too.
Where is falls down is mobile phones and smaller ebook readers. Content formatted for a4 pages is simply not suitable for reading on theese and the pdf usually doesn't have enough semantics for software to re-format it well.
* yeah I know you americans use letter rather than a4 but the two are close enough that one can choose "shrink to printable area" in acrobat and things will come out reasonablly printing a letter document on a4 or vice-versa.
Hopefully this boom in ebook readers means other formats will take over that role.
For documents with minimal formatting this may happen, but I just don't see most producers of heavilly formatted/illustrated documents putting in the extra effort to make them work well in a scalable format.
end users won't be able to buy a new PC without 8 after the new year.
If past actions of MS are anything to go by savvy end users will still be able to buy PCs with win7 installed (though likely with a win8 license sticker) for a while. People whose only knowlege of computer purchasing is worst buy not to much.
There are almost certainly people out there (users of cellular internet come to mind) who would find downloading a DVD image difficult but who would also find it difficult or impossible to get internet access during install. Keeping the first CD usable to get a reasonable install from which you can have at least a chance of sorting out your networking seems like a good idea in that context.
Also i've found that when optical drives start to fail the first thing they start having trouble reading is recordable DVDs.
But who do you get the hash from?
The hashes come from the torrent file.
With pretty much any modern drive (whether platter based or solid state) if you are paranoid about data security you have two options, either encrypt everything that may ever hit the drive or physically destroy the drive when you are done with it. Both platter based and soild state drives have remapping systems in place (though soild state drives to a lot more remapping) such that it is pretty much impossible to gaurantee an external overrwrite will hit anything. Both have built-in "secure erase" commands but noone except the manufacturers really knows how secure they are.
They certainly offered special XP home licenses for netbooks after regular XP home licenses became unavailable. I don't think it's publicly known how much (if anything) the OEMs paid for said licenses though.
It's only anonymous insomuch as you don't know the meat-space person who's signing their end of the key.
The trouble with online identities that aren't strongly tied to a meatspace identity is that you can always get a new one. Therefore you can fill some small transactions, wait for your reputation to build up and bigger transactions to start coming in and then dissappear with everyones money. Then repeat with a new identity.
It's much harder to get a new meatspace identity.
16GB DDR3 is available as a single stick [crucial.com] for desktops at a reasonable price.
READ THE FUCKING SPECS
"Quad Ranked Registered"
This is NOT desktop memory, it will only work in high end server boards that support quad-ranked registered memory.
Besides just because a given size and technology of module is available doesn't mean your board will support it.
If the BBC wants to continue to get access to major sporting events they need to follow the terms of their contracts with the operators of those events. Those contracts almost certainly require the BBC to take reasonable steps to limit their coverage to the UK
send traffic to users in north america
That should have said "send traffic over peering links to users in north america"
Afaict rights to show programs are usually sold on a geographic basis. Some leakage has always been tolerated since it's inevitable with a broadcast. You can get the BBC in most of western europe if you have a big enough dish, the beam from the sattelite is focussed on the UK but some power leaks out elsewhere. I'd think IP geolocation would work similarly, it will leak (since people will use proxies/vpns/etc and also the geolocation databases may not be 100% accurate) but it keeps the service mostly contained and hence satisfies the content owners.
Also afaict the BBC gets traffic to most UK ISPs for close to nothing through peering with them. If someone uses a UK proxy then most likely the traffic will travel from the BBC to the proxy over a peering link, then they proxy operator will have to pay for transit to get the data to the final recipiant (a small provider running proxies in the UK is highly unlikely to be able to send traffic to users in north america).
So IP geolocation makes perfect sense from both a licensing point of view and a financial point of view
I'd prefer to have a login that is provided when I pay for my license fee. The BBC could then stream concurrently to [for example] 4 clients using the same login details.
The BBC may be able to do this for some content but for a lot of content they won't be able to because their rights to it will be geographically limited.
It requires ENERGY to raise TEMPERATURES. 1 calorie (unit of energy) is required to raise 1 gram of water 1 degree Celsius.
However to keep that water at 1 degree celcius above it's surroundings will require continuous energy input since any item hotter than it's surroundings will constantly lose heat to it's surroundings.
This means in the long term there are TWO ways to increase the temperature of an object. You can increase the rate at which heat is supplied to the object or you can make it harder for the object to lose heat to it's surroundings. The greenhouse affect does the latter.
Even if you do have the ability to artificially raise or lower the humidity that doesn't mean it makes sense to keep it at the same level all year round.
Most electronics is specified for quite a wide range of relative humidity. Usually 5% to 95% or so.
In winter you want low relative humidity to reduce the risk of condensation on stuff brought in from outside (yeah you try to seal stuff and let it warm up before unwrapping but mistakes and emergencies happen). It's also cheap to achieve low relative humidity due to the low outside air temperature (for a given absoloute humidity relative humidity goes down as temperature goes up).
In summer humidity doesn't matter so much since stuff brought in from outside will be warm. It's also likely to be more expensive to achieve low relative humidity since it involves active dehumidification (which is achieved by cooling the air to the point where the water condenses out)
(2)(c) while the person filing the infringement notice was in the wrong so was the uploader (e.g. neither of them holds the copyright), the item remains offline
(2)(d) the uploader belives they are in the right but they are too afraid of lawsuits to assert that right, the item remains offline
Milk is in pints.
Milk is in pints if you buy it from the milkman or buy own-brand milk from a store run by a big supermarket chain (even if the store in question isn't actually a big supermarket). If you buy it from a conviniance store that isn't associated with a big supermarket it generally comes in litres. Branded milk (like the cravendale filtered stuff) also tends to come in litres.
The game retailers (it's not just gamestation) are not going to buy a used game unless they think they can resell it at a profit.
So while some gamers may have had a little more money for new games as a result of selling a bagful of old games (something a gamer can clearly only do occasionally, otherwise they would run out of games to sell) other gamers must be spending money that could have been spent on new games on used games and afaict most of the money those gamers are spending on used games goes to the retailers, not to the people who trade in the bags of used games.
On the other hand used game sales are probablly the only reason specialist game retailers in town centers have remained viable for so long (though they seem to be struggling now at least here in the UK) and i'm not convinced losing them would be a good thing for the gaming industry.
You will never calculate an exact figure for "how long will an attacker take to crack my password" because you will never know the attackers strategy. The attacker will presumably start with passwords they think are more likely and move to ones they think are less likely but you don't know what things they will or won't consider likely.
So there are two ways to try and defend a password. You can try and come up with a clever scheme and hope it's not on the attackers list of things to try. The trouble is in reality many people end up with one a of a few common schemes. So the scheme you thought was really clever may be somewhere pretty early in the list of things for the attacker to try.
Or you can assume the attacker has your scheme on his list of things to try and make sure you include enough entropy in the password so that even if the attacker does know your scheme they still can't guess your password.
You are getting your dividions of BT mixed up, BT openreach maintain the connections to your house (and I think they also run the FTTC equipment in the cabinets but i'm not positive on that), BT wholesale run ADSL and phone equipment at the telephone exchage and sell service on it to service providers (including BT retail).
So you can escape from BT wholesale by using a LLU provider but you will still be relying on BT openreach to fix any faults with the cabling to your house.
I've bought non-rebranded (don't recall if they have hauwei's brand printed on them or if they are just plain white with no brand marking) hauwei mobile broadband sticks in the UK (I wanted them unlocked so I could freely switch carriers and I also wanted an external antenna which meant I needed specific models, many of the newer ones lack the external antenna connector) in the UK. It was from a computer gear supplier though not retail.
I'll be honest, despite them being such a massive firm, and having heard about them many hundreds of times on Slashdot, I've never actually seen a peice of Huawei kit here in the UK.
Afaict most mobile broadband sticks sold in the UK are made by them.
Equally radio spectrum is a limited resource and building more base stations or replacing the existing ones with newer tech is expensive. Also once the cell density gets above a certain point you will almost certainly get into diminishing returns because the path losses are simply not high enough to properly isolate the cells from each other. Do you really want your mobile service to be terrible because a few heavy users are running bittorrent continuously.
Some kind of balance needs to be struck between preventing gouging by the cartel of mobile carriers and keeping bulk data on fixed lines where it belongs.
You are somewhat right, if the grid does collapse then distributed generation will disconnect itself to protect both itself and those working on fixing the grid.
However if you get to that point you have already lost. The goal should be to stop the grid from collapsing in the first place and distributed generation can in principle help this.
The problem with wind is it's unpredicatable, you can have a day that is hot but still. Solar is probablly a better bet for dealing with peak load in hot countries because it will have it's maximum output on the same days when people are using maximum aircon.
Someone brought up the possibility of mate in debian but debian doesn't like code duplication (it's not exactly forbidden but it's strongly discouraged). It could still happen of course but if and when it does it will be controversial.
For debian i386 and amd64 users the mate guys offer packages but users of other debian architectures are less lucky.
But how much does backhaul connectivity from somewhere you can buy internet transit to the mountains of pakistan cost? and how much does internet transit (or onward direct connections if you preffer) cost when you get there?