Yea, sure. Then they start wandering around other parts of your house and looking at other things (or even just looking at things on the way there)...if you happen to live in, say, Oregon, they walk through your kitchen and catch your wife wiping dishes dry and arrest her. (http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/24074/stupid_but_real_laws.html)
My point being: Nobody - not you, the cops, your lawyer, or your elected representatives knows every single law. And there are a lot of really stupid ones out there. So why should you cooperate with the police when they could just turn around and arrest you for something else?
Or you could always end up with a crooked cop who will either frame you for something or trash your house...
Or the 'cop' could be an impersonator who, once inside, will kill you and rape your wife and kids.
Yea, that's a great theory and all, but I have personally been in a situation where my mother's employer was following her, there were cars staked out across the street from our house all day, harrassing phone calls at all hours of the night, etc. We didn't get it as bad as some other people though - luckily my father is a lawyer, and they knew that. And why did all this happen? Because she was exercising her right to free speech, and her right to association. She was trying to unionize the hospital where she worked. And, in the end, she was successful and still works there, but had she made one mistake at work or even at home, she would have been unemployed within hours.
And this is a small hospital in a fairly small rural town, and for trying to unionize. Can you imagine what a large corporation would be willing to do to, say, a whistleblower? If you can't be anonymous, you can't be free. Just because your actions are legal doesn't mean there won't be consequences.
Well, to slightly correct you there, _one_ Freenet (0.7) is a darknet. And it sucks. The whole thing's still basically Alpha software, even though they made an 'official release' about two years ago. The devs screwed it up horribly. There is, however, another Freenet network. Freenet 0.5. It's an opennet, and as a long time user I can say that it works very well.
If you've got a few PCs laying around and BitTorrent, you can actually get some excellent and quite professional recordings for damn near free - pull as many soundcards as you can get, load them into one PC, and pirate Cakewalk (or pay a couple hundred bucks for it). It's amazing what you can do with that setup. I remember one solo that I just could not get right when my band was recording, and we actually spliced out a few notes that were bad and re-recorded them and layered it over.
Physical distribution isn't bad either if you're a small band and are looking to do it locally. You can get CDs printed and mailed to you for about $2 a disc online. Then you can sell those on your website, on Amazon, and probably on some other online stores. If you're looking for brick-and-mortar distribution...well that's the one thing that's missing, though you could easily do it locally - most record stores will allow you to set up a rack of discs and a cash box, though they won't ensure that everyone actually pays - and perhaps with some dedicated friends and fans (who you've met online) you could get most of the major cities covered that way.
And advertising...anyone can buy some google ads. And anyone can put together a 'street team' online. And 'word of mouth' flows much faster than it used to. Combine those and you've got some pretty good advertising.
Personally, I think it's easier even than you seem to imply.
That depends on what they're considering proof. I mean, I have great results with things like ecchinacia, which I believe are required to carry warnings that there is absolutely no proof that they do anything at all. Hell, even the best OTC sleep aids I've ever used (Valerian) are required to carry a warning that they have had no real FDA research. I mean, sure, we probably wouldn't lose anything more than just convenience drugs, but it would take quite a while for the research to go through and prove anything at all. And you have questions like, if it seems to work on 1% of the population, does that count? And would there even be enough money to make it worth getting these things certified? I mean at under $10 a bottle, I'm sure these things are profitable, but nowhere near the $20+ per pill mark that most prescription drugs hit...or the $1+ per pill of most OTC drugs. Most of the herbal and homeopathic stuff works out to be closer to $0.20 a pill. Even generic brand cold OTC cold pills tend to be several times that.
Well, it's not shared with a roommate, and it's only on the wired dorm connections, not the campus wifi. So if you really need some heavy downloads, you can use that. Or you can use their web proxy, as any traffic through that also doesn't count. And they have local mirrors of a lot of Linux distros and apps, so those don't count either. I thought I would have trouble staying under it, but I still torrent games and such and have no problems.
My university (Penn State) has free telephone to every room, and the copper goes straight to the phone company. They actually tell you at the orientation stuff that you can go ahead and get DSL to your dorm if you don't like their network setup. Some people do, though not many. Though their network policy isn't bad...just a 4GB weekly bandwidth limit.
Ok, sure, let's cover a disease that's killed one person so far, and isn't likely to last very long, rather than something like police brutality, which kills people on a regular basis. How about covering the fact that police are trying to kill people for _misdemeanors_. I mean, hell, friggin' _whooping cough_ kills more frequently than the swine flu has so far. When was the last time you heard about that in the news?
Yea, it's better than talking about Obama's dog. No, that doesn't mean it's not still stupid.
Here's the interesting thing: I have a professor that uses such tools (specifically TurnItIn.com), and I submitted a paper not too long ago and was told it was 6% plagiarized. No big deal. My prof said 20-30% would be allowable, as like you said, it's hard to write anything without seemingly plagiarizing. But the problem is this: I didn't cheat, I never saw anyone else's papers, and nobody ever saw mine. Yet a week later, after everyone else had sumbitted, suddenly I was at 23% plagiarized. Now, my professor didn't make any mention of it, but this raises a question about such services - they provide no way to see what the percentage was when submitted, only what it is now. And depending on how specific the prompt was that is being submitted, your percentage plagiarized can increase dramatically from other students submitting their own responses.
Oh, and of course the reason nobody should act on such tools alone - I have yet to see one that can will determine if a source has been cited or not. That doesn't mean there aren't ones that do that out there - I would be surprised if there weren't - but with TurnItIn as my example again, if I made heavy use of attributed quotes in my paper, I may start off with 20%+ plagiarized. And after everyone else submits I may even break 50%. Even without plagiarizing a single sentence. Anyone who is stupid enough to rely entirely on the score some program gives has no place in education.
Pay a little more? I usually check newegg, tigerdirect, and pricegrabber (even though pricegrabber searches newegg and tigerdirect...they usually have more specs and such), and tigerdirect _never_ has the best price. Newegg has been getting better recently...it used to be I bought damn near everything off of random Yahoo business sites and such, but now I'm finding Newegg often has the best deal. But maybe that's just because I've been moving to higher quality (and not so outdated) hardware...
I think you missed a bit or I was unclear. The problem in that specific case with iTunes was not that the program itself was slow, but that as soon as I start it up it starts doing crap that I neither want nor need (like 'determining gapless playback information') that takes hours to complete, eats up all my system resources, yet is damn near impossible to cancel. That particular problem was more with apple than microsoft. But still, the point is that Linux apps seem to be fundamentally designed differently. I've never had such an experience on Linux.
Eh. As I said, I've dug through the process, services, and boot lists and removed anything not necessary, but I only boot into Vista for a half hour or so every couple months, so it's not really worth spending any time on. Though I don't see how it would even _get_ a virus with that kind of usage...but I suppose it has been known to happen.
I have an iPod Touch. It is jailbroken, but I still haven't been able to get any other software to work with it. And it wasn't my choice, it was a gift. I am considering switching entirely to 'pwnplayer' rather than the default music player app though, as with that I can simply have it play from the file system.
Ah. That would work I suppose. I don't usually mount when I logon though, as there are three of them and I don't need all of them usually. Hell, I don't need _any_ of them usually. So I prefer to just mount when needed. But yea, I probably could use a bat file for it...I dunno. Just seems easier in Linux:)
Mounting my shared disk space from the university. Which I need to do frequently, as I don't have a printer, so I have to transfer all my papers over to the network space and then go to a lab to print. So in Windows, I have to type in the massive string that is whatever the hell the drive is I'm trying to mount (I don't even know it), then put in my username and password, and select a drive to mount it to, etc, etc. On Linux I just run a shell script and enter my password.
Though I suppose I could have both of them do automount, but I don't like automounting network disks like this...because if I'm not on the university's network, the system starts spewing error messages about not being able to find it. And as I leave the campus network at least once a week, and have multiple network disks that I mount, that would also be rather annoying.
I know exactly what you mean. I had to boot into Vista the other day to update my iPod, and it was a mess. I mean, it's pretty much a brand new install, and I've done as much as possible to reduce running services and apps, but still...it can barely handle a single browser on this computer. And it's so damn unresponsive. Combine that with the horror than is iTunes (It just starts doing all kinds of crap that I don't want it to do, and it slows my computer to such a crawl that it takes ten minutes get my mouse to the cancel button) and what should have taken five minutes ended up taking over an hour.
After that experience I have truly realized why I love Linux. I love it because, even on my $500 Dell Vostro, I can run a browser with 15 tabs open, and leave it running for weeks at a time (an old, leaky firefox even!)...while running KDevelop and Pidgin and Amarok and Konsole and Epiphany (yes, I run two browsers sometimes) and kate and whatever else I need. And nothing slows down. I love it because I can squeeze almost 6 hours of life out of a battery than can barely hit 3 on Vista. I love it because I can do 'sh passmount.sh' and punch in a password rather than typing in some huge string, typing in a username and password, selecting a drive and hitting next 6 times...but if I want GUI tools, they're right there too. I love it because all of my apps run. All of them. From Fantasy General and Zone Raiders (old DOS games) to World of Warcraft and Command and Conquer: Tiberium Wars. Basically, I love it because it does what I want. Everything I want. But _only_ what I want.
I imagine they define it the same way they do now. This definition has already been made, quite a while ago. - hit CTRL-ALT-DEL on XP or Vista and you have two separate tabs, one for applications and one for processes. As far as I can tell, an application is basically a window. Therefore, things in the taskbar or background processes aren't applications. Only things that you are actively interacting with are.
I always laugh when people use 'a valid credit card' as a form of age ID. I had a 'valid credit card' at 16. I mean sure, technically it's a debit card, but it works as a credit card, and I've used it on such sites without any problems.
Yea, not only was the Chernobyl disaster caused by an experiment, it was an experiment that the engineers _knew_ would destabilize the reactor. But they did it anyway.
Though it was also fundamentally a poor reactor design. I forget the exact names of the types, but in US and most other reactors, when the temperature increases, the reaction slows down. In the Chernobyl reactor, when the temperature increased, the reaction progressed faster. Bad idea.
As for Three Mile Island...that was really nothing. Based on the formulas we use to calculate such things, one person in every two billion in the area might die from cancer caused by the incident. It released about as much radiation as a chest X-Ray. And far less than a mammogram. So either mammograms are extremely unsafe procedures (as they deliver 15 times more radiation to a person than TMI), or TMI was nothing. Even those inside the plant got only 2/3 the dose of a single mammogram.
Slashdot Mirror
Yea, sure. Then they start wandering around other parts of your house and looking at other things (or even just looking at things on the way there)...if you happen to live in, say, Oregon, they walk through your kitchen and catch your wife wiping dishes dry and arrest her. (http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/24074/stupid_but_real_laws.html)
My point being: Nobody - not you, the cops, your lawyer, or your elected representatives knows every single law. And there are a lot of really stupid ones out there. So why should you cooperate with the police when they could just turn around and arrest you for something else?
Or you could always end up with a crooked cop who will either frame you for something or trash your house...
Or the 'cop' could be an impersonator who, once inside, will kill you and rape your wife and kids.
Yea, that's a great theory and all, but I have personally been in a situation where my mother's employer was following her, there were cars staked out across the street from our house all day, harrassing phone calls at all hours of the night, etc. We didn't get it as bad as some other people though - luckily my father is a lawyer, and they knew that. And why did all this happen? Because she was exercising her right to free speech, and her right to association. She was trying to unionize the hospital where she worked. And, in the end, she was successful and still works there, but had she made one mistake at work or even at home, she would have been unemployed within hours.
And this is a small hospital in a fairly small rural town, and for trying to unionize. Can you imagine what a large corporation would be willing to do to, say, a whistleblower? If you can't be anonymous, you can't be free. Just because your actions are legal doesn't mean there won't be consequences.
Well, to slightly correct you there, _one_ Freenet (0.7) is a darknet. And it sucks. The whole thing's still basically Alpha software, even though they made an 'official release' about two years ago. The devs screwed it up horribly.
There is, however, another Freenet network. Freenet 0.5. It's an opennet, and as a long time user I can say that it works very well.
If you've got a few PCs laying around and BitTorrent, you can actually get some excellent and quite professional recordings for damn near free - pull as many soundcards as you can get, load them into one PC, and pirate Cakewalk (or pay a couple hundred bucks for it). It's amazing what you can do with that setup. I remember one solo that I just could not get right when my band was recording, and we actually spliced out a few notes that were bad and re-recorded them and layered it over.
Physical distribution isn't bad either if you're a small band and are looking to do it locally. You can get CDs printed and mailed to you for about $2 a disc online. Then you can sell those on your website, on Amazon, and probably on some other online stores. If you're looking for brick-and-mortar distribution...well that's the one thing that's missing, though you could easily do it locally - most record stores will allow you to set up a rack of discs and a cash box, though they won't ensure that everyone actually pays - and perhaps with some dedicated friends and fans (who you've met online) you could get most of the major cities covered that way.
And advertising...anyone can buy some google ads. And anyone can put together a 'street team' online. And 'word of mouth' flows much faster than it used to. Combine those and you've got some pretty good advertising.
Personally, I think it's easier even than you seem to imply.
That depends on what they're considering proof. I mean, I have great results with things like ecchinacia, which I believe are required to carry warnings that there is absolutely no proof that they do anything at all. Hell, even the best OTC sleep aids I've ever used (Valerian) are required to carry a warning that they have had no real FDA research. I mean, sure, we probably wouldn't lose anything more than just convenience drugs, but it would take quite a while for the research to go through and prove anything at all. And you have questions like, if it seems to work on 1% of the population, does that count? And would there even be enough money to make it worth getting these things certified? I mean at under $10 a bottle, I'm sure these things are profitable, but nowhere near the $20+ per pill mark that most prescription drugs hit...or the $1+ per pill of most OTC drugs. Most of the herbal and homeopathic stuff works out to be closer to $0.20 a pill. Even generic brand cold OTC cold pills tend to be several times that.
Well, it's not shared with a roommate, and it's only on the wired dorm connections, not the campus wifi. So if you really need some heavy downloads, you can use that. Or you can use their web proxy, as any traffic through that also doesn't count. And they have local mirrors of a lot of Linux distros and apps, so those don't count either. I thought I would have trouble staying under it, but I still torrent games and such and have no problems.
Yea, in response to number 2:
My university (Penn State) has free telephone to every room, and the copper goes straight to the phone company. They actually tell you at the orientation stuff that you can go ahead and get DSL to your dorm if you don't like their network setup. Some people do, though not many. Though their network policy isn't bad...just a 4GB weekly bandwidth limit.
I think we should seriously design an underground internet, just in case we need it.
You mean like freenet? Or maybe I2P? Although under this law I can see such programs being found illegal...
Ok, sure, let's cover a disease that's killed one person so far, and isn't likely to last very long, rather than something like police brutality, which kills people on a regular basis. How about covering the fact that police are trying to kill people for _misdemeanors_. I mean, hell, friggin' _whooping cough_ kills more frequently than the swine flu has so far. When was the last time you heard about that in the news?
Yea, it's better than talking about Obama's dog. No, that doesn't mean it's not still stupid.
Here's the interesting thing: I have a professor that uses such tools (specifically TurnItIn.com), and I submitted a paper not too long ago and was told it was 6% plagiarized. No big deal. My prof said 20-30% would be allowable, as like you said, it's hard to write anything without seemingly plagiarizing. But the problem is this: I didn't cheat, I never saw anyone else's papers, and nobody ever saw mine. Yet a week later, after everyone else had sumbitted, suddenly I was at 23% plagiarized. Now, my professor didn't make any mention of it, but this raises a question about such services - they provide no way to see what the percentage was when submitted, only what it is now. And depending on how specific the prompt was that is being submitted, your percentage plagiarized can increase dramatically from other students submitting their own responses.
Oh, and of course the reason nobody should act on such tools alone - I have yet to see one that can will determine if a source has been cited or not. That doesn't mean there aren't ones that do that out there - I would be surprised if there weren't - but with TurnItIn as my example again, if I made heavy use of attributed quotes in my paper, I may start off with 20%+ plagiarized. And after everyone else submits I may even break 50%. Even without plagiarizing a single sentence. Anyone who is stupid enough to rely entirely on the score some program gives has no place in education.
Pay a little more? I usually check newegg, tigerdirect, and pricegrabber (even though pricegrabber searches newegg and tigerdirect...they usually have more specs and such), and tigerdirect _never_ has the best price. Newegg has been getting better recently...it used to be I bought damn near everything off of random Yahoo business sites and such, but now I'm finding Newegg often has the best deal. But maybe that's just because I've been moving to higher quality (and not so outdated) hardware...
I think you missed a bit or I was unclear. The problem in that specific case with iTunes was not that the program itself was slow, but that as soon as I start it up it starts doing crap that I neither want nor need (like 'determining gapless playback information') that takes hours to complete, eats up all my system resources, yet is damn near impossible to cancel. That particular problem was more with apple than microsoft. But still, the point is that Linux apps seem to be fundamentally designed differently. I've never had such an experience on Linux.
Eh. As I said, I've dug through the process, services, and boot lists and removed anything not necessary, but I only boot into Vista for a half hour or so every couple months, so it's not really worth spending any time on. Though I don't see how it would even _get_ a virus with that kind of usage...but I suppose it has been known to happen.
It's a Dell Vostro 1000. Came with Vista pre-installed. I've got a 2GHz AMD Turion 64 X2, 2GB RAM, and a Radeon Xpress 1150.
I have an iPod Touch. It is jailbroken, but I still haven't been able to get any other software to work with it. And it wasn't my choice, it was a gift. I am considering switching entirely to 'pwnplayer' rather than the default music player app though, as with that I can simply have it play from the file system.
Ah. That would work I suppose. I don't usually mount when I logon though, as there are three of them and I don't need all of them usually. Hell, I don't need _any_ of them usually. So I prefer to just mount when needed. But yea, I probably could use a bat file for it...I dunno. Just seems easier in Linux :)
Mounting my shared disk space from the university. Which I need to do frequently, as I don't have a printer, so I have to transfer all my papers over to the network space and then go to a lab to print. So in Windows, I have to type in the massive string that is whatever the hell the drive is I'm trying to mount (I don't even know it), then put in my username and password, and select a drive to mount it to, etc, etc. On Linux I just run a shell script and enter my password.
Though I suppose I could have both of them do automount, but I don't like automounting network disks like this...because if I'm not on the university's network, the system starts spewing error messages about not being able to find it. And as I leave the campus network at least once a week, and have multiple network disks that I mount, that would also be rather annoying.
I know exactly what you mean. I had to boot into Vista the other day to update my iPod, and it was a mess. I mean, it's pretty much a brand new install, and I've done as much as possible to reduce running services and apps, but still...it can barely handle a single browser on this computer. And it's so damn unresponsive. Combine that with the horror than is iTunes (It just starts doing all kinds of crap that I don't want it to do, and it slows my computer to such a crawl that it takes ten minutes get my mouse to the cancel button) and what should have taken five minutes ended up taking over an hour.
After that experience I have truly realized why I love Linux. I love it because, even on my $500 Dell Vostro, I can run a browser with 15 tabs open, and leave it running for weeks at a time (an old, leaky firefox even!)...while running KDevelop and Pidgin and Amarok and Konsole and Epiphany (yes, I run two browsers sometimes) and kate and whatever else I need. And nothing slows down. I love it because I can squeeze almost 6 hours of life out of a battery than can barely hit 3 on Vista. I love it because I can do 'sh passmount.sh' and punch in a password rather than typing in some huge string, typing in a username and password, selecting a drive and hitting next 6 times...but if I want GUI tools, they're right there too. I love it because all of my apps run. All of them. From Fantasy General and Zone Raiders (old DOS games) to World of Warcraft and Command and Conquer: Tiberium Wars. Basically, I love it because it does what I want. Everything I want. But _only_ what I want.
you get 10mbit/s??? Lucky!
...and you got modded _interesting_?
What, did somebody not know this fact already? Not make the connection?
Funny, sure, but _interesting_?
Man, these mods today...they don't make 'em like they used to...
As many posts made prior to you have pointed out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_radio
'Pirate Radio' has been used to describe illegal radio transmissions since at least the 60s.
I imagine they define it the same way they do now. This definition has already been made, quite a while ago. - hit CTRL-ALT-DEL on XP or Vista and you have two separate tabs, one for applications and one for processes. As far as I can tell, an application is basically a window. Therefore, things in the taskbar or background processes aren't applications. Only things that you are actively interacting with are.
I always laugh when people use 'a valid credit card' as a form of age ID. I had a 'valid credit card' at 16. I mean sure, technically it's a debit card, but it works as a credit card, and I've used it on such sites without any problems.
Yea, not only was the Chernobyl disaster caused by an experiment, it was an experiment that the engineers _knew_ would destabilize the reactor. But they did it anyway.
Though it was also fundamentally a poor reactor design. I forget the exact names of the types, but in US and most other reactors, when the temperature increases, the reaction slows down. In the Chernobyl reactor, when the temperature increased, the reaction progressed faster. Bad idea.
As for Three Mile Island...that was really nothing. Based on the formulas we use to calculate such things, one person in every two billion in the area might die from cancer caused by the incident. It released about as much radiation as a chest X-Ray. And far less than a mammogram. So either mammograms are extremely unsafe procedures (as they deliver 15 times more radiation to a person than TMI), or TMI was nothing. Even those inside the plant got only 2/3 the dose of a single mammogram.
yea, I've gotten several dos games to run under wine. of course, your other option is dosbox...have you tried that?