We may never know. It seems quite likely that undetected failures could occur. But more important than that, no sample is kept for later verification. It's one thing to have an imperfect device for field testing, but using those results in court is bad proceedure. A blood sample is far more reliable, plus multiple samples can be taken for independant analysis.
Dude, you're totally harshing the buzz here. You don't obfuscate your code to be "clever". You obfuscate your code because you can. Also, have you ever worked on an 8-bit embedded controller? Sometimes you don't have an extra byte for that temp variable. On the other hand, they've gotten so cheap and low power that those problems are a thing of the past.
I read through the affidavit and while there is a lot of BS and superstition in there, I expect the library of priated movies and music is what will ultimately hang this kid. Nearly everything else appears to be either improbable or not a crime. But that's the state of things these days. If you look hard enough into nearly anyone's life, you can probably find a few technical crimes to charge them with.
As long as people keep demanding services from government, government will have to find a way to pay for them. Have you ever been to a town-hall type meeting? They're filled with people looking for a handout. Everyone has something different they want the government to do for them. Fix this, fix that. It's always something specific that needs to be addressed and hard to say no to. And so taxes need to be raised to pay for all this crap and they try to raise them while pissing off the fewest number of people in the process.
Bill was probably a damn good programmer. His success, however, was purely a matter of luck and good timing. However, his programming put him in position to be there. In what may be the greatest business move of all time, he bought someone else's operating system very cheaply and licensed it to IBM. This was made possible because someone with a better product wouldn't sign a NDA.
Most successful people are successful by their own merit. To reach that next level takes a lot of luck and usually involves being the right person in the right place at the right time. Most people wouldn't have been able to put that business deal together and get IBM to agree to a license for it.
Umm, to correct your history, the PC market didn't open up until Compaq clean-room reverse engineered IBM's bios. Also, IBM was kind of cheap in how they built the PC and used a lot of commodity components making it particularly easy to clone aside from the BIOS. But let's not let reality cloud your analogy.
As it is, the cell phone industry seems to be largely gravitating to a micro-USB style connector. The last time we bought new phones at work, we gave our vendor an ultimatum: they all had to use the same charger so we wouldn't need to stock more than one kind. It took away a few options, but the bulk of the phones they were pushing used a micro-USB charger. (Or is it mini-USB? I can't remember which is which). Lazy manufacturers and angry customers seem to be bringing about convergence.
As for your claim that the cellphone industry would soar ahead if there was an ISO standard... The cellphone industry is still very much in a wild west environment right now. Lack of a standard charger hasn't really stopped anyone from buying a phone. There is plenty of incentive on the manufacturing front to create standards without intervention. Customers want things to just work and too many standards raises overhead. Given time, natural standards have, and will continue to, arise.
Actually, the applicable part of section 10 reads "No state shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation;...". There is no provision in that paragraph at all to even allow congress to ratify such an agreement. Now, you might argue that as written, it doesn't actually constitute an agreement. I'm not going to wade into that argument.
What I find curious, is what happens in the event that other states adopt some non-traditional means of voting: Borda Count, IRV, etc.
Whatever happens, you can be sure the lawsuits challenging it will fly for years to come.
My 3 year old monkey(who obviously can't read/write)
My little monkey has been reading and writing since she was 3. It's not that far fetched. Actually, it's damned conveniant. I can give her things and not have to explain it. She can read the onscreen instructions. But yes, to confirm your point my little monkey (now 5) is very fluent with the computer. I haven't set her up with email yet because I'm too lazy to find a good kind friendly mail program, but she's capable of running a computer. I'm going to set her up with Visual Studio soon and wait to see what she starts making.
I would doubt that. Nearly all TVs sold today have ATSC tuners built in. Once converters are out there for the legacy TVs out there, it becomes a dead market. That said, I'm picking up a converter for my TV that does have a built in ATSC tuner because the built in one sucks. The converter for my other TV is fantastic. I'd plug it, but I can't remember what brand I actually bought...
And every so often, one of these epic events actually happens. Take the example's of the Red and White Sox winning the world series, Susan Lucci's Emmy, and the release of Chineese Democracy. And while these events do sometimes happen, it's also worth pointing out that the Cubs still suck, DNF shows no signs of release, Google is still the king of search, and Windows owns the desktop. In summary, happy hollidays.
A better idea might be a breathalyzer/keyboard interlock. If it stops people from drunk posting to blogs, it might not be entirely a bad thing. Actually, I also know some people who should only be allowed to post under the influence. It could be a filter for twitter, only get updates depending on who is sober and who isn't.
No, this is a butchery of law, because it's not actually illegal to be a jackass until someone kills themself. Sure, someone lied on their MySpace application, which is really a trivial offense. This is a case of selective prosecution. If every EULA clickwrap scofflaw was prosecuted like this, every man, woman and child in the country would be in jail. I refuese to engage in witch hunts over unrelated discrete acts.
And law does not need to evlove. It needs to go the other direction and be reduced to the simplest set of abstractions possible. Good laws don't need to be updated for technology changes.
Right, and I don't think the sale of this should be blocked. On the other hand, I think these clowns should be prosecuted for knowingly and willingly aiding and abetting any number of felonies, and most of their customers should be prosecuted as well. This is a program primarily used for criminal purposes and those criminal acts should be prosecuted.
Classmates has also billed my credit card without authorization. They still owe me $30. If I ever meet one of the assholes that works there, I'm going to beat that money out of him with a baseball bat.
The out of print argument works fine in the realm of digital distribution where additional units can be produced for free. In the real world, economies of scale come in to play. It doesn't make sense to print a book if you can't sell at least, say, 10,000 copies at your desired price. Thus, a book may sit out of print until such a time as demand justifies printing more copies. The point being that it is the interest of authors and publishers to maximize their profits. Keep in mind that Disney's habit of bringing movies back only every seven years began when the only way to see a movie was at a theater. Continuous runs didn't work and the movies required storage and preservation in the interim.
In the current digital era, most of these concerns simply go out the window. Publishing has become far more efficient and digital formats eliminate a lot of distribution issues. As you suggest, the best answer is to keep copyrights to a reasonable length. Most works generate most of their profits in the first couple of years after their publication.
Many years ago, when I opened my first checking account, many places would not take checks with numbers under 500 or under 1000. Knowing this when I opend the account, I made sure my first book of checks started at number 1300.
By comparison, I kind of like year numbers for mature software. I find them easier to track than incremental version number increases. I was opposed to this when Microsoft started the practice back in '95 fearing that this would lead to model years for software along with planned obsolesence. And if Microsoft was capable of shipping an operating system on time, maybe it would have.
Revealing an encryption key is a confession that you know the key. Much like the police can brute force open a physical lock if you refuse to surrender the key, they can, if truly motivated, brute force an encryption key. Granted, that probably (usually), requires far more resources than they're willing to expend, but that's their problem, not yours. I suppose this will be a different story if the government ever develops a working mind probe.
BTW, nice karma-whoring troll.
On the plus side, it really highlights to others the long term consequences of selling DRM'd merchandise. DRM should only be used for subscription services. Also, now that WalMart has gone to selling unencumbered MP3s, I've finally started buying music on line.
Are you still first line tech support? I've worked with a lot of low level tech support folks and most of them were absolute idiots. If you haven't advanced in 2 years, it's kind of a red flag. At this point, most employers are going to be looking for something to show that you've got a strong upside. They either want someone who's involved in either programming duties of some sort or where they've got the keys to the kingdom. If you don't have admin level access it says that your current employer thinks very little of you.
Funny that. I just reinstalled Star-Craft on what is, by my best count, unique PC #7. And don't get me started on Civ2. Either way, when EA or Blizzard spends $50 million to develop a first class game, they're going to want to protect their investment. And I don't blame them either. So let's talk about what's reasonable. How about a physical token like a USB dongle? I'd be willing to take that. Serial and parallel port dongles were kind of a pain in the past and a lot of times they didn't play well together if they were stacked, but a USB hub effectively solves that problem.
CDs don't hold a lot of information anymore either. Poster has 100GB of data. That translates to about 140 CDs. That's a large library to manage. Of course, longevity tends to be inversely proportional to storage density.
Ultimately, if you want your data to last, make multiple copies in multiple formats (DVD and maybe a couple of hard drives) and plan on converting your data to something current or recopying it every 5 years. Buy quality materials. Good DVDs may not guarantee your data will last, but cheap ones are pretty much a sure bet that it won't. Give copies of the data to everyone that might be interested in having it (grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc). Someone is likely to maintain it. Good archiving is an ongoing task. You can't just do it once and be done.
I've always felt the proper respone to 'I have nothing to hide' is 'I don't want you to know what I'm hiding'. Frankly, there are countless legal activities I may or may not engage in that I don't want to be publicly known. Information once released can not be contained.
Really, anything that develops investigative thinking and design skills is a good thing. In that tradition, my little girl (she just turned 5) has her own workbench in the woodshop. It is, essentially, a replica of the workbench dad made for me. She's got all sorts of hand tools and an electric drill for whatever she wants to build. I've also got a broken 4-stroke engine to rebuild with her when she's a bit older.
And of course, she's had her own computer since she was 3. We're a Windows household so we've been playing around with C# a bit, but really, whatever works for you.
Slashdot Mirror
We may never know. It seems quite likely that undetected failures could occur. But more important than that, no sample is kept for later verification. It's one thing to have an imperfect device for field testing, but using those results in court is bad proceedure. A blood sample is far more reliable, plus multiple samples can be taken for independant analysis.
Yeah, and the second thing to cross my mind when I read the headline was "holy crap, Micro Focus is still around?"
Dude, you're totally harshing the buzz here. You don't obfuscate your code to be "clever". You obfuscate your code because you can. Also, have you ever worked on an 8-bit embedded controller? Sometimes you don't have an extra byte for that temp variable. On the other hand, they've gotten so cheap and low power that those problems are a thing of the past.
I read through the affidavit and while there is a lot of BS and superstition in there, I expect the library of priated movies and music is what will ultimately hang this kid. Nearly everything else appears to be either improbable or not a crime. But that's the state of things these days. If you look hard enough into nearly anyone's life, you can probably find a few technical crimes to charge them with.
As long as people keep demanding services from government, government will have to find a way to pay for them. Have you ever been to a town-hall type meeting? They're filled with people looking for a handout. Everyone has something different they want the government to do for them. Fix this, fix that. It's always something specific that needs to be addressed and hard to say no to. And so taxes need to be raised to pay for all this crap and they try to raise them while pissing off the fewest number of people in the process.
Bill was probably a damn good programmer. His success, however, was purely a matter of luck and good timing. However, his programming put him in position to be there. In what may be the greatest business move of all time, he bought someone else's operating system very cheaply and licensed it to IBM. This was made possible because someone with a better product wouldn't sign a NDA.
Most successful people are successful by their own merit. To reach that next level takes a lot of luck and usually involves being the right person in the right place at the right time. Most people wouldn't have been able to put that business deal together and get IBM to agree to a license for it.
Umm, to correct your history, the PC market didn't open up until Compaq clean-room reverse engineered IBM's bios. Also, IBM was kind of cheap in how they built the PC and used a lot of commodity components making it particularly easy to clone aside from the BIOS. But let's not let reality cloud your analogy.
As it is, the cell phone industry seems to be largely gravitating to a micro-USB style connector. The last time we bought new phones at work, we gave our vendor an ultimatum: they all had to use the same charger so we wouldn't need to stock more than one kind. It took away a few options, but the bulk of the phones they were pushing used a micro-USB charger. (Or is it mini-USB? I can't remember which is which). Lazy manufacturers and angry customers seem to be bringing about convergence.
As for your claim that the cellphone industry would soar ahead if there was an ISO standard... The cellphone industry is still very much in a wild west environment right now. Lack of a standard charger hasn't really stopped anyone from buying a phone. There is plenty of incentive on the manufacturing front to create standards without intervention. Customers want things to just work and too many standards raises overhead. Given time, natural standards have, and will continue to, arise.
It could be a lot worse. I got rick-rolled yesterday. Hadn't happened in so long that I clicked a link without looking at where it was going first.
Actually, the applicable part of section 10 reads "No state shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation;...". There is no provision in that paragraph at all to even allow congress to ratify such an agreement. Now, you might argue that as written, it doesn't actually constitute an agreement. I'm not going to wade into that argument.
What I find curious, is what happens in the event that other states adopt some non-traditional means of voting: Borda Count, IRV, etc.
Whatever happens, you can be sure the lawsuits challenging it will fly for years to come.
My 3 year old monkey(who obviously can't read/write)
My little monkey has been reading and writing since she was 3. It's not that far fetched. Actually, it's damned conveniant. I can give her things and not have to explain it. She can read the onscreen instructions. But yes, to confirm your point my little monkey (now 5) is very fluent with the computer. I haven't set her up with email yet because I'm too lazy to find a good kind friendly mail program, but she's capable of running a computer. I'm going to set her up with Visual Studio soon and wait to see what she starts making.
I would doubt that. Nearly all TVs sold today have ATSC tuners built in. Once converters are out there for the legacy TVs out there, it becomes a dead market. That said, I'm picking up a converter for my TV that does have a built in ATSC tuner because the built in one sucks. The converter for my other TV is fantastic. I'd plug it, but I can't remember what brand I actually bought...
And every so often, one of these epic events actually happens. Take the example's of the Red and White Sox winning the world series, Susan Lucci's Emmy, and the release of Chineese Democracy. And while these events do sometimes happen, it's also worth pointing out that the Cubs still suck, DNF shows no signs of release, Google is still the king of search, and Windows owns the desktop. In summary, happy hollidays.
A better idea might be a breathalyzer/keyboard interlock. If it stops people from drunk posting to blogs, it might not be entirely a bad thing. Actually, I also know some people who should only be allowed to post under the influence. It could be a filter for twitter, only get updates depending on who is sober and who isn't.
No, this is a butchery of law, because it's not actually illegal to be a jackass until someone kills themself. Sure, someone lied on their MySpace application, which is really a trivial offense. This is a case of selective prosecution. If every EULA clickwrap scofflaw was prosecuted like this, every man, woman and child in the country would be in jail. I refuese to engage in witch hunts over unrelated discrete acts. And law does not need to evlove. It needs to go the other direction and be reduced to the simplest set of abstractions possible. Good laws don't need to be updated for technology changes.
Right, and I don't think the sale of this should be blocked. On the other hand, I think these clowns should be prosecuted for knowingly and willingly aiding and abetting any number of felonies, and most of their customers should be prosecuted as well. This is a program primarily used for criminal purposes and those criminal acts should be prosecuted.
Classmates has also billed my credit card without authorization. They still owe me $30. If I ever meet one of the assholes that works there, I'm going to beat that money out of him with a baseball bat.
The out of print argument works fine in the realm of digital distribution where additional units can be produced for free. In the real world, economies of scale come in to play. It doesn't make sense to print a book if you can't sell at least, say, 10,000 copies at your desired price. Thus, a book may sit out of print until such a time as demand justifies printing more copies. The point being that it is the interest of authors and publishers to maximize their profits. Keep in mind that Disney's habit of bringing movies back only every seven years began when the only way to see a movie was at a theater. Continuous runs didn't work and the movies required storage and preservation in the interim.
In the current digital era, most of these concerns simply go out the window. Publishing has become far more efficient and digital formats eliminate a lot of distribution issues. As you suggest, the best answer is to keep copyrights to a reasonable length. Most works generate most of their profits in the first couple of years after their publication.
Many years ago, when I opened my first checking account, many places would not take checks with numbers under 500 or under 1000. Knowing this when I opend the account, I made sure my first book of checks started at number 1300.
By comparison, I kind of like year numbers for mature software. I find them easier to track than incremental version number increases. I was opposed to this when Microsoft started the practice back in '95 fearing that this would lead to model years for software along with planned obsolesence. And if Microsoft was capable of shipping an operating system on time, maybe it would have.
Revealing an encryption key is a confession that you know the key. Much like the police can brute force open a physical lock if you refuse to surrender the key, they can, if truly motivated, brute force an encryption key. Granted, that probably (usually), requires far more resources than they're willing to expend, but that's their problem, not yours. I suppose this will be a different story if the government ever develops a working mind probe. BTW, nice karma-whoring troll.
On the plus side, it really highlights to others the long term consequences of selling DRM'd merchandise. DRM should only be used for subscription services. Also, now that WalMart has gone to selling unencumbered MP3s, I've finally started buying music on line.
Are you still first line tech support? I've worked with a lot of low level tech support folks and most of them were absolute idiots. If you haven't advanced in 2 years, it's kind of a red flag. At this point, most employers are going to be looking for something to show that you've got a strong upside. They either want someone who's involved in either programming duties of some sort or where they've got the keys to the kingdom. If you don't have admin level access it says that your current employer thinks very little of you.
Funny that. I just reinstalled Star-Craft on what is, by my best count, unique PC #7. And don't get me started on Civ2. Either way, when EA or Blizzard spends $50 million to develop a first class game, they're going to want to protect their investment. And I don't blame them either. So let's talk about what's reasonable. How about a physical token like a USB dongle? I'd be willing to take that. Serial and parallel port dongles were kind of a pain in the past and a lot of times they didn't play well together if they were stacked, but a USB hub effectively solves that problem.
CDs don't hold a lot of information anymore either. Poster has 100GB of data. That translates to about 140 CDs. That's a large library to manage. Of course, longevity tends to be inversely proportional to storage density. Ultimately, if you want your data to last, make multiple copies in multiple formats (DVD and maybe a couple of hard drives) and plan on converting your data to something current or recopying it every 5 years. Buy quality materials. Good DVDs may not guarantee your data will last, but cheap ones are pretty much a sure bet that it won't. Give copies of the data to everyone that might be interested in having it (grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc). Someone is likely to maintain it. Good archiving is an ongoing task. You can't just do it once and be done.
I've always felt the proper respone to 'I have nothing to hide' is 'I don't want you to know what I'm hiding'. Frankly, there are countless legal activities I may or may not engage in that I don't want to be publicly known. Information once released can not be contained.
Really, anything that develops investigative thinking and design skills is a good thing. In that tradition, my little girl (she just turned 5) has her own workbench in the woodshop. It is, essentially, a replica of the workbench dad made for me. She's got all sorts of hand tools and an electric drill for whatever she wants to build. I've also got a broken 4-stroke engine to rebuild with her when she's a bit older. And of course, she's had her own computer since she was 3. We're a Windows household so we've been playing around with C# a bit, but really, whatever works for you.