Deleting is deleting, period...judge should get it
on
Deleting Files is a Crime?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I can't find it now, but a federal court judge once made the comment that people need the ability to delete files and have courts recognize them as "destroyed". Just because computer forensics has a much greater chance of success shouldn't mean that people can't deliberately disassociate themselves from material. This is core to the right against self incrimination.
Consider what might happen if I sent you a child porn image. You, offended, delete the image immediately and report me to the FBI. Now what if, unable to find me, the FBI came to your door, confiscated your laptop with a warrant (after all, you reported seeing the file, therefore you must have it) and used an undelete program to recover it. Are you now guilty of the crime of possession of child pornography? Yes, you are. At least, as far as the prosecutors are concerned.
It's never been tested legally to my knowledge, but the court MUST recognize that for someone to be charged over deleted evidence is akin to government agent pulling memories from your brain and using those memories to reconstitute matter in the same patter and then use it as evidence against you in a court of law.
This is Orwellian to the extreme, but it is quite possible that the raving "think of the children" lunatics out there will create just such a legal system. After all, they will argue, what stops kiddie porners from keeping their porn collections in the Recycle Bin? What about on a shadow drive with no FAT to link sectors to filenames? At what point does the work involved in recovery become high enough to consider something "gone"?
I'm glad to see this case, and I hope that the jurist in charge realizes that this is about a person's right to prevent their own thoughts and memories from being used against them in a court of law. After all, if the evidence went beyond the employee's person...there will be copies in e-mails, filed records, other computers. For someone to be able to go beyond the bounds of corporate communications into the person at the computer makes that employee's mind the company's property and not just his laptop.
The best part is when you can "loan" your ebooks to your friends by simply authorizing their computer, although perhaps you won't be able to simultaneously access it while it's "on loan". Then again, any single RIAA member seems to be more of a whiny prick than the whole of the publishing industry...so if are were okay with 5 simultaneous users for a song, I don't see why we should set a different precedent for books.
Another features we need are the ability to "burn" the book, or collections of books like short stories and so forth to create our own "mix". Don't laugh, if this capability were introduced, how long before someone created a printer than could pop out a neat little invoice-size paperback, bound and everything? Hell, they could do what Apple does with their photo albums and outsource the whole thing. You pick your favorite works, submit, and get an attractive leather-bound edition in the mail a couple days later.
And finally, those iTunes style celebrity "playlists". Who wouldn't want to know what our favorite celebrities are reading? Or...that our favorite celebrities actually ARE reading?
It's just impossible for people to read from a monitor without increasing their stress. You just can't stare at a florescent light or itty bitty neon lights or itty bitty LED lights for hours on end without your brain realizing there's got to be something better to look at.
Either they can figure out a way to light a screen with natural sunlight, or they can create true electronic ink. No reflection like cheap LCD. No backlighting like expensive LCD. No light emission like LED/plasma. We need the ambient light to bounce off a primarily white surface and refract naturally into our eyeballs.
It someone hands me a tablet approximately the size of a paperback, let's say maybe 5" x 4", makes it as thin and light as possible (1" and 5 lbs would probably be the maximum allowed) and gives me a way to load any kind of rich-text format onto it, I will buy one...I'll buy ten...I will throw piles of money at them, and spent the next few weeks of my life copying every single digital document I have onto whatever memory card the device uses.
I have been trying to replace the book in my life for about ten years. I tried Palm (to small, too dim)...I tried PocketPC (too small, too bright)...I tried laptops...(to huge, too bright) I tried Tablet PCs...(ugh, what a turd that design is).
My only hope is that new portable reader Sony has been working on that they are releasing in Japan. If Lik-Sung offers one, I'll probably buy it. Of course, I may have to wait for someone to crack whatever stupid eBook format it uses to allow me to load my own content.
Or maybe Apple will create a real iBook and do for literature what they did for music. Pleeeeeeeeeease?
File a FOIA request for a copy of the block list for the Armed Forces Internet. Simple. Then you can read the whole list and parse out any meaningful information. Honestly, I'm not even a journalist and it seems completely obvious to me. This is the whole reason the FOIA process exists: to give transparency to the operation of the federal government.
Now, perhaps there's a chance that the federal government will come back with some kind of excuse like "releasing the block list gives aid and comfort to the enemy" but that alone would be a story worth the price of admission. Wonkette is an idiot, so of course this simple idea wouldn't occur to her or her readership. I'm I hope that a real investigative journalist picks up the story so he or she can actually do some investigating and find out the truth. I think that it would be hilarious to compare the Chinese block list with the American block list. Wouldn't it be a hoot to find out that the Americans are blocking more?
Are all authors this stupid, or just the ones they hire to be their spokesman? If he's straining for some court precedent that would help their case, there is little point in just trying to grab every case just because in involves Google.
In the case of Perfect 10, Google was taking full size images and scaling them down to miniture size, which Perfect 10 argues was what they are doing by selling their images for use on mobile phones. First of all, Perfect 10's arguement is utter baloney. What is this secret technology that lets you resize images? It's available in EVERY SINGLE Windows computer that's been sold in the last twenty years via MSPaint. Not to mention, Google resizer is hardly what people would consider the right quality. Not to mention, the odds of finding a thumbnail the exact size of your mobile screen is about 1 in 1,000,000. Not to mention, the number of mobile phones that will let you add your own content from your computer is fast dwindling as the mobile carriers grow dollar signs where their eyes used to be and realize by cutting off file transfers (cough-Verizon-cough) they force people to pay for their overpriced content.
So anyway, Perfect 10's argument is total crap, and of course the technically illiterate judge didn't see that. Now this author's "Guild" -- "Guild"? As if modern money-whoring author (cough-James Frey-cough) has anything in common with the noble line of authors in centuries past who wrote for love or humanity or education -- anyway this "Guild" thinks that the ruling gives them a victory when it's a complete apples vs oranges situation. You can't search for "part" of an image. There's no way to run a Google image search of "all arms 18 inches long with four finger" and get back "summaries" of all the photos that match so you can then you know some names to research in your quest for that four-fingered midget for your next film. Maybe someday, and then there might be a comparison. But then, as now, I would expect any sane court, not blinded by copyright cartel false arguments, to realize that this doesn't impact the ability for the publisher to control his or her content...it only impacts the ability for the average public to FIND OUT about the content.
The odds that someone would run 1000 Google book queries to manually stitch together a single copyrighted book from each search snippet is about the same odds that someone finding a 100x200 thumbnail on Google will use it to redraw the original 1024x2048 image. It's an absurd argument and I'm dearly hoping this one goes the right way for Google. I think that if it does end up happening, and older book sales shoot through the roof because of all the people finding books on subject they never knew existed, there should be some law that lets Google sue them for the ill-gotten profits gained from Google's hard work.
Think about it. If the VCR was such a threat to the movie industry, who fought its very existance, then shouldn't the profits being made now belong to the VCR industry who wanted it and not the movie industry who didn't? If the copyright cartels were presented with the choice of fighting a technology and losing out on the future profits it might generate...there is no way they would take that gamble.
I don't know anything about Chinese proxies but the only reason I can think of to use a proxy would be to get around the firewall and avoid any kind of censoring systems. Are you sure you aren't doing just that? I don't know what happens when someone in China types Tiananmen into their browser since I'm not Chinese nor in China. I know know if typing in English as opposed to the localized language makes any difference. Not even English...aren't there a couple ways of phonetically typing out chinese words with roman characters?
Articles I've read say that searching for certain things in Google or Yahoo or any search engine yeilds blank or incomplete results. Google.cn simply says "this item was removed" rather than letting the firewall delete lines of text silently. I agree with Google's VP who testified before Congress when he said that it's much better to block people and inform them they are being blocked (human nature will not let you rest until you get around the block or find out why!) rather than having people blocked and not know it.
Well, they don't need to open a localized version here in the US...that's what Google.com is for. The localized version runs over there on Chinese soil in some Chinese datacenter and connects to the public internet inside of the Great Firewall of China. Right now, accessing Google has to go through the Firewall to be screened, which slows everything down. Since Chinese customers will be able to access Google content on a local server, search results will be comparable to the homegrown engines. Google gets more eyeballs in China, and the Chinese get more American bucks in their piggy bank.
I'm pretty sure that the only way you can offer any kind of service in China is if they can make sure you aren't somehow relaying content past the firewall. So there's some government involvedment. Hell, just running an Internet cafe over there requires huge amounts of government oversight. So, Google would have to negociate with the Chinese government before they could even think of opening up service over there.
...that Google is using subterfuge? Doesn't anyone remember what happened when Google got hit with a DMCA by the Church of Scientology? Remember the outcry over Google removing certain search results? Do you also remember the ultimate solution? Google posted a copy of the actual DMCA request...which happened to contain the exact offending URLs...oh and just because of the way parser works, those URLs were hotlinks. Add to that the press involved and I think that the reality is at the end of the day, more people read that content than had ever thought to google it before.
Who here doesn't understand that this kind of behavior is way to both "be legal" and "don't be evil"? That a company that has a history of doing these kinds of end-runs around crummy laws is just as likely to do it in the future? Consider this:
Google.cn censors certain pages based on, most likely, a know list of offending sites and perhaps certain keywords. What happens on Google.cn if someone googles for freed0m? or fr33dom? or c1v1l rights or anything else? You can bet that until that variation pops up on the government radar, there will be a lot of traffic on those pages from Chinese users. It's not beyond the realm of possibility for Google's engine to even play some kind of silent "did you mean freedom?" game and show the best results regardless of misspelling.
One thing is for sure, I wouldn't put it past them. What incentive do Chinese search engines like Baidu have to do the right thing? First of all, to their culture, it's not even the right thing. It's quite possible that the management of Chinese search engines look upon it as their patriotic duty to censor, and zealously go beyond what is even required. Google is an American company...with a new Chinese arm. But the heart and the technology are still American and it is unlikely that Google could ever be as close to the government as other homegrown engines. Quite frankly, I'm shocked the Chinese government would even allow Google in to China. What do they have to gain? It's not like Google is bringing millions of manufacturing dollars. At best, a couple floors of technicians?
You can't stop information, and you can be pretty sure that Google knows that. That's why they are in the business of providing information. Sooner or later, the bar and the slippery slope will begin and either the Chinese government will realize they've been hoodwinked and kick Google out...or move to an entirely whitelist-based Internet...or people will master the tricks and the knowledge will spread as quickly as the latest viral video.
Since there are people who would deny that we in fact exist, the point isn't to address the loons. I'm just saying for the casual skeptic...the couch potato watching the stupid expose on FOX...some pictures of the landing sites would probably convince them.
Or you could invite skeptics to your observatory, you point the telescope at the moon, ask them to look. You move the telescope around in whatever direction they want to prove it isn't a canned demo. If they want to deny their own eyes you can safely write them off.
I don't personally think the moon landings were faked but, I still wonder why I've never seen a background wallpaper of the landing sites.
In the Mythbusters interview, among other places, it has been suggested that the best way to counter the myth that the moon landing was faked is to go back to the moon and bring back something from the previous astronauts.
I've always wondered why the hell we can't prove or disprove the moon landing myth by just pointing a friggin' telescope at it? I mean, if there is any such astronaut junk...couldn't the Hubble or even some small terrestrial telescope pick it out? There's no wind on the moon, so shouldn't the footprints and tire tracks still be visible? Did Neil Armstrong leave the flag planted or bring it back?
Why have I never seen pictures of these features? We can see planets a brazilian light years away but we can't pick out a landing zone a few hundred thousand miles away? The pictures on moon.google.com don't appear to have any better resolution than my digital camera can produce.
So maybe someone can answer this question for me. What prevents us from looking at the moon's surface with any sort of detail, and since the moon is our next big destination resort, why haven't we sent a probe to do the same kind of high-resolution imaging of the surface like we have for every other planet in our solar system? We might need to know where the best places are to build those hydrogen refineries or whatever.
I don't think so. While theoretically...if pull drive 1, the RAID should rebuild a copy of drive 1. When you pull drive 2, it should then rebuild a copy of drive 2. However, perhaps when you pull a drive, it doesn't get replaced with the previous contents but instead becomes the new parity drive. Well, yes, it's all striped but you know what I mean. Plus, if so much as a bit gets changed (Windows touches a file, a log gets updated, an automated snapshot is made...anything) then it would throw integrity out the window. I seriously doubt that any RAID, even this one, would even recognize a set of drives that had been pulled at independent times. I doubt you could even pull all four drive simultaneously from one RAID and put them in another and have them work. They are built to treat all incoming drives as virgins waiting to be sacrified to the gods of data. I've broken RAID sets on top of the line RAID cards, then instandly redetected the drive and yet, the controller will still rebuild the entire drive as if it was completely blank.
Yes, this is correct, you aren't just replacing one drive to get an extra magic 200GB of RAID storage...but what you are doing is letting it "hot swap" your capacity to a larger size. This is, as far as I can tell, a unique feature to Infrant's "X-RAID" system. With every other RAID system I've worked with, when I want to replace the drives I have to somehow backup the TB of data somewhere else (not to mention, redundant as well for safety), rebuild the array with the new drives and copy everything back. While it would be nice to be able to get extra RAID space for one incremental drive, I think you are right that it isn't easy. I think it would be possible, perhaps by using file parity instead of drive parity and storing the "PAR" files the other drives.
But anyway, when you want to move up, you do have to fork over the cash for four new drives. But then after replacing the last one...voila...magically you have the full capactity of the new drives and all your data is still intact. It seems like a trivial trick but...if so...why the hell isn't it a common feature of other RAID controllers?
Oh, I alsost forgot...just about the coolest feature is that the thing has a PCI slot and two USB ports. This means that you can add a wireless card or a firewire card if you want to use firewire storage devices or a wireless USB adapater or even USB storage devices and printers!
For USB printer connected to the back, the ReadyNAS works as a print server. If you add USB storage (almost everyone already has a USB drive kicking around somewhere) then that storage is available as a volume on the ReadyNAS. You obviously can't use it for part of the RAID but it is fantastic for loading up a drive of movies to take over to someone's house or bringing data from other homes/offices to backup on the RAID.
The ReadyNAS can also be configured to automatically copy data from any flash storage to a specified directory. So you have a camera with a CF or SD card, right? Get a USB card reader, and every time you plug your camera's flash card into it, it will copy the pictures over to your/Pictures volume so you can pull them up on your Media Center in the living room.
Since the underpinnings are all Linux, it's a sure bet that the PCI and USB ports will provide all sorts of cool amazing things as time progresses. I fully expect that you'll someday be able to add a second NIC and have the ReadyNAS function as a firewire...sorta like that big ugly yellow banana slug NAS that was reviewed on here a few months ago.
The ratings and reviews on their homepage http://www.infrant.com/ say it all. This thing blows a Terastation away in terms of ease of use, supported protocols, and goodies. Buy an empty ReadyNAS X6 from http://www.eaegis.com/ for $579 (no tax, free shipping). Fill it with two of whatever drive is dirt cheap this week (cough-newegg-cough). Here's the kicker...ReadyNAS will expand the drive array automatically each time you add a drive. So buy a couple 300GB's for $100 each and you'll have 300GB of mirrored storage. A few months from now, you run out of room, you just drop in another 300GB drive and now you've got 600GB of redundant storage. Add another drive and you'll have 900GB with redundancy. Still need more room? Replace those 300GB drives one at a time with higher capacity drives and watch it automatically resize the set to use the extra space. Without ever having to rebuld the array! Trying to backup a TB of data so you can move your NAS from 300GB drives to something higher really sucks the big one.
Of course it does CIFS(SMB). But it is one of the only NAS products to support Apple File Protocol, which is a must for networks with Mac/OS X users that insist on using filenames with colons, slashes and question marks and other things that make CIFS/SMB explode. It also supports NFS and rsync for the UNIX/Linux crowd and both FTP and HTTP for the web browser crowd (hi, grandma). It also streams in both flavors of home media server protocols (UPnP and the HMS) so you can buy a $100 Linksys media extender and watch anything you have stored on your RAID. It also has a SlimServer plugin for streaming music to those SlimServer devices that you can hook up to your stereo or a cheap pair of speakers.
It's also supports Gigabit with Jumbo Packets (write only currently) so you can copy 200GB of HD camera footage to the NAS in a couple hours instead of a couple days. The RevB case is cable-less with just thumbscrews between you and swapping a drive. It also holds the drives vertically because who is the idiot who thinks stacking heat factories horizontally on top of each other is a good idea. Also, I can't tell you how many RAID products only lets you specify an alert SMTP server name but no authentication information, which means e-mail alerts don't get delivered (boo Promise, boo 3Ware). ReadyNAS has its own MTA so the mail gets through without a problem, and it can also let you set login/password to authenticate to your ISP's SMTP server. It looks nice, clean, and it certainly not the noisiest thing I've had in my room, although I will be happy when future firmware lets you put the drives to sleep so the case fan can be completely turned off when you aren't using it.
I spend three weeks shopping for a NAS for my network, and I'm glad I looked past everyone telling me Terastation. I've had this ReadyNAS X6 for a few weeks now and I love it. I'm already shopping for a second so I can recycle the old drives from all my other rag-tag household systems into one nice neat package.
Care to take a guess at the number of home or non-technical products and services Microsoft installs on their "business" operating systems? Far more vulnerabilities have been caused in the IT world because of them. UPnP (which as far as I can tell is completely unnecessary in a corporate environment where client are supposed to be getting services from the server not each other) has been the source of probably the most numerous and most severe problems. Then there is just the stupidity of having things like Movie Making software, DirectX, Internet games on a business PC. Yes yes, they can be removed, but why force people to go through the hassle of creating install scripts to reload machines when they ought to come configured for business mode to begin with? And, is anything ever really removed or are we just hiding icons because Microsoft has sol.exe on some System File Protection list?
If I had my choice, I'd run an enterprise completely on Windows XP Embedded. After stripping out everything but the core OS, I could finally be sure that I wasn't going to get my ass handed to me because Microsoft decided to integrate photo viewing into the user shell and let a JPG handling vulnerability force me to stay up late on a holiday weekend patching machines let some VP trying sneaking a peek and nude Britney Spears and infect the network.
1) Not only do they have to stop using XCP and MediaMax (which after this press fiasco they would do anyway) they cannot deploy ANY other DRM technology unless they can certify that it meets nine different restrictions (section 7). While it is possible for someone to make a "nice" DRM that obeys the rules, they certainly can't do this overnight and, given the stakes, they can't do it carelessly. So do they stop releasing music in the mean time? No...back to ordinary redbook audio. And since keeping people from accessing redbook audio is virtually impossible on a PC (without the kind of trickery forbidden by the restrictions) it's not something I expect to ever be solved.
2) If they accept the settlement, which they pretty much have to, then you'll be eating your hat. I hope it's tasty. Section 1 of the proposed settlement is to allow people to download unencrypted MP3 copies of the music from the affected albums...and the last sentance of that section says that Sony has to make every reasonable attempt to have it available via iTunes. Now that I read it again, I guess it's more likely these will be separate albums, since Sony could just as easily host the files from the affected albums and send people to iTunes for their three free compensation albums.
3) No, they haven't realeased a proper fix. They still require people to jump through registration hoops, and the uninstaller still performs a risky procedure and opens up ActiveX vulnerabilities. So they can't just give lipservice to this issue like they have been. And yes, giving away free music certainly is a good deal for Sony, but even if it costs them only pennies, the value to the consumer is the full, artificially inflated price they would have had to pay. Pick three new releases and that's $50-60. Better than most class action settlements. The part that will get Sony are the DRM rules, not the music giveaway.
4) Apparently you are unaware of Sony's current schizophenia. You may have heard of the Betamax decision? That was Sony hardware. You think the VCR would have been invented if Sony had owned a movie studio at the time? You may have heard of the Walkman. You think it would have played easily dubbed cassettes if Sony had owned a music company at the time? No, take a look at Sony's last hardware efforts since the arrival of the content side of the family. It's only in the very latest products that you can finally play MP3 files...and even they they are still converted to ATRAC in the background. There are countless memos and documents from executives in the portable group complaining that they pretty much gave up the chance to create the sequel to the Walkman because they weren't allowed to support MP3. Hardware people don't give a crap about content protection. They know that theft of content moves hardware. Nobody's buying CD and DVD burners to make archives of their Word files. Sony's hardware group would love to sell a product that can play anything and look cool and be small and sexy. But they can't until they kick the content idiots out of the boardroom and design the products consumers want, not what music executives want them to want.
After reading the linked document, there are a lot of interesting points. While none of these points are watershed moments in consumer rights, I think that they are really going to make Sony grit their teeth. Consider:
1) Sony now has to release "clean" CDs with NO content protection...which means that they are effectly out of the DRM business for at least two years. That's going to make their music execs hopping mad. 2) Not only do consumers get their DRM CD replaced at no charge with a non-DRM CD (something they could not have gotten before anyway), they also get either a) $7.50 b) a free CD from a list of at least 200 or c) three free albums from a downloadable service. That certainly better than the whopping $5 coupon I got back from the RIAA settlement. This is probably the least offensive section. 3) Sony has to make "all resonable commericial efforts" to allow the above downlodable albums from iTunes. Youch. That's pretty much an admission that Sony's own music service is crap and iTunes is the definitive standard for downloadable music. Boy, what fun Apple's PR group could have with that! This has really god to piss Sony off. Now they essentially HAVE to crawl to Apple and negotiate some deal to offer Sony customers the ability to download Sony music...for free...in UNENCRYPTED MP3 FORM...from Apple's music service.
The final part is that Sony has to restore people's computers back to the pre-rootkit way. Of course, we have to assume they can do this properly. If this part of the settlement gets screwed up, then all the free downloads in the world won't make up the cost of repairing or reloading a PC. So, potentially, this settlement might be letting Sony off. But really, what could we expect? While it's possible that there are some people out there who had their computer crash or die because of this software, let them opt out and get a settlement in small claims or some other method. The vast majority of the people would be happy just to have all traces of the software removed (safely) and some bonus music for their troubles.
So, I have to say...of all the settlement offers, I think this one by far is the best one I can remember. Especially from the standpoint of sending a message. You can damn well bet that Sony (who will I'm sure accept this because they publicity of this issue going to trial is their worst nightmare) is going to have some heads roll over this, and combined with pressure from upset Sony artists, might actually usher in a new crop of executives who are more willing to listen to the pro-consumer voices in their hardware divisions instead of heeding the horrible advice from their content divisions.
Seriously, I remember when the first previews came out, and every time I tried to talk to anyone who was lucky enough to see it, when I asked them about it, all I got was a ashen-faced forlorn look. Evenually, when you learn that they kill off several characters, you can't help but think...WTF was Whedon smoking?
Okay, I'm the last person to feel like we need to have cushy Star Trek rules where everyone lives that's a main character and only nameless red shirts die. I'm perfectly fine with major characters getting axed in a series...although you always hope it happens on the writer's terms and not because one of the actors dies (so sad, West Wing). But killing off a main character to fans is the like charging $20,000 on your credit card. That better be a damn spectactual investment that pays dividends in the long run that make up the cost. Otherwise, you've left a real goodwill vacuum.
Personally, I was I think most upset that Shepard Book was killed off. He was a great character, an walking apparent contradiction between his current peacemaker role and apparently some military past life (showing his ID card to the Alliance doctors to get someone medical treatment). The character Book gave a nice calm anchor to provide sage advice and comfort. Who would take his place? Is Jayne going to wax poetic when they face some great evil? So, killing of Book...which I would totally accept on its own...was a really ballsy move. The only way to make up for it would be to introduce a new "father figure" or similar replacement. But the movie didn't do that, or even hint at it.
Then they killed off Mr. Universe or whatever his name was, and a host of virtually every other bit character from the original series. This is the salt-the-earth style I'm talking about. Maybe none of those characters were worth a spit, but they were established coordinates on the Firefly roadmap. The movie only really introduced one new location, and it was devoid of human inhabitants. So it's like Firefly might as well be alone in the galaxy as far as relative relationships. If the movie had done well and a new series was greenlighted...it would have literally been like day one having to introduce a raft of new characters to replace all of the ones you wastefully killed off. Again, it could be done, but...only if the payoff is worth it.
And finally, killing off Wash. And doing in the most offhanded, insulting "ooga boogy" way possible. "Well I guess we're all OKAYAAAAAAAAAAHOMG (die)" That was just crap writing. And Zoe who was willing to storm the citiadel of some well armed private army to save him, just turned and walked away leaving his corpse to well known reaver necrophiliacs? One person who saw and early screened said..."I would have totally bought his death 100% if like at his gravesite Zoe had calmed cut off her ring finger with wedding ring and left it on his grave" I totally agree. It was like he was a total minor character in how his death was handled. And, maybe he wasn't a major character, but his marriage to Zoe had to at least elevate him higher than Simon, River, or even Jewel.
So, in my opinion, what killed Firefly is that as a mainstream movie, it didn't have the trite happy ending that the mainstream wants. And as a fan movie, it burned a season worth of fan goodwill for absolutely no reason at all. It had the plot of a mid-season extended episode, but it had the resolution of a series finale. And so, that's what it became. As a true Firefly fan...I honestly don't know if I would want whatever Firefly series would have had to follow that movie. If I were to close my eyes and dream at all now, it will be for a Firefly prequel about the war and the history Browncoats.
Firefly, in the end, was like Cowboy Bebop...an amazing ride, but written in such a way that when its over...its over.
Actually, the website mentioned in the article is part of a chain of hundreds of websites all run by the same dishonest camera shop in New York. I lost a bookmark that someone had compiled that listed almost all of their websites, but they all share the exact same layout and graphic elements (the "Hacker Safe" logo is a dead giveaway) and they all list their bait-and-switch with Froogle/Pricewatch/etc.
I was searching for a Canon S400 and found one of these sites offering the camera for $100 less than anything even close. I knew it was too good to be true, so I called on the phone, illegally recording it but I wanted to have proof anyway. I asked specifically 1) was it refurbished (no) 2) was it the US model (yes) and 3) was it the retail version (yes). Okay, I figured I had all my bases covered, so I ordered it.
Warning bells went off when I got a call the next day from a sales rep asking if I wanted to upgrade the battery for only $15 more. Apparently, the battery that came with this model only lasts "30-40 photos" because Canon skimped on it. I was pretty damn sure a company like Canon wouldn't be so stupid, so after asking to call him back (so I could hit record on my answer machine) I asked if the battery that came with the camera was brand new and from Canon. Yes on both counts, so, I told him no thanks, just the camera and the "inferior" battery.
I received the camera and right off the bat I knew why it was $100 cheaper. It was the Japanese model. Basically, these a-holes had someone over in Korea or Taiwan fill up a shipping container with everything and sent it over here to the US. Grey-market. It's cheaper because of difference in currency, but despite being the "same" thing, it's not for two reasons: 1) Packaging...which isn't really important but 2) No US warrantee...which is VERY important. Also, US manufacturers can refuse to service foreign models (though they rarely do). Technically, your warantee is back overseas where the camera came from.
I called them and was told that was why it I was offered a chance to buy a warantee on the website. I pointed out that I paid for the US model, and did not receive it. I was told it was the US model it was just "imported direct from the manufacturer". I told them sorry, no dice, I want to return it. They said they would send me instructions. The instruction? 1) no returns without RMA number and 2) the only way to get an RMA number is to sign a form that you accept a 20% restocking fee. I took one look and called my credit card company.
Big plug here for Chase MasterCard. I have had to dispute six times in the four years I've had the card, and every time they worked FOR me against the merchant and made sure things turned out well. This time was no exception. The Chase rep sent me a simple form, where I checked the box "merchandise was not as advertised". For proof I send a picture of the website showing the model number (PowerShot S400) and the product box I received (IXY 400) Yes, they were the same physical camera, but not what I paid for!
I sent in the dispute and it was approved and I got my money back. Then the fun began! The merchant disputed my dispute, sending in a picture of a US box and saying that was what I received. Chase asked me to send them a different copy of the box, which I easily did. Then Chase informed me that I couldn't keep the product and I would need to return it to the company. I was pretty pissed about the concept of losing even $20 to ship it back to these crooks, but the helpful Chase person pointed out that MasterCard did not care how it went back to the company and suggested COD. (guinness)Brilliant!(/guinness) So, I packed up the camera and sent it COD without an RMA number. Surprise surprise, it was rejected and sent back to me. Yes, I had to pay the shipping both ways. But here's the fun part...I had attempted to return it and that's all Chase needed me to do. I sent in a copy of the shipping form and was issued the final resolution to my dispute: full ref
I hate to admit it, but I would probably be willing to accept some kind of DRM that was tied to my hardware in exchange for doing away with CD checks. The main reason is that I'm a laptop user and I quite frankly need the extra slot for a battery. Yes, I can just swap the CD drive in and out, but I generally don't carry it with me and then if I get the urge to play a game, I'm screwed. Well not really but I'm certainly not doing things the "white-hat" way.
I don't see why every media company...traditionally the most anti-computer bunch on the planet...can grudingly let go of their precious content when it's wrapped in DRM protections like Apple's FairPlay and Window's DRM...but computer game companies still dragging their feet. What if the game used FairPlay? You could install it on as many computers as you want and have two registered (I'd like five but I'm sure the bean counters would have a fit) If you wanted to play on a different computer, you would have to unregister one of your existing computers. That way I could install a game like Civ on my computer and my laptop, and those copies would only work on those devices. No crappy CD hassle, but no single authentication that can be passed around the office.
I know I'm advocating the spread of evil, but in this case, it's the lesser. It seems clear that after more than a decade, CD checks are not going way. Regardless of how painfully easy they are to bypass. I'm not even talking "techie" type easy. I'm talkind download CloneCD or install Daemon Tools type easy. I know nine-year-olds that know how to copy a game CD for their friends for crying out loud. That's not even counting the people who actually crack and release No-CD checks (which break needed game updates).
I applaud the Civ team giving an honest answer. They could have totally blown that question off. But I will bet a million imaginary dollars that there's not a single developer at the company that was swapping out CDs every time he compiled or tested the program. It's not about having patience. It's about someone telling that the emperor has no clothes so he can finally get a clue and go cover up his saggy pock-marked ass because we are tired of looking at it.
I agree. I mean, I assume they were trying both humane and inhumane traps so, bad luck for the rat but still...I think they should have just left the little guy alone to a happy retirement once they learned he jumped ship. They could have started over on the original island with a a new rat and new radio collar (waterproof this time right?).
As you point out, the buses have no storage. This is the same for San Fran and it seems like a terrible oversight in design. Even having just five minutes worth of power storage would give the driver enough time to make it to the next stop and then reconnect the poles. Instead, I can't count the times that buses jumped the lines turning a corner, fouling traffic in two directions for several minutes while the driver frantically tried to reconnect them. Stupid stupid design.
Cars don't have that problem. All electric cars are battery based (unlike bumper cars at amusement parks). So, it really wouldn't be a problem for an electric vehicle to not maintain a permanent connection. A car with a pole could make an attempt to connect to the power, and if the car needed to break away to pass another car, or pull into a driveway or go somewhere the lines aren't, no problem. Should the vehicle run out of charge "off the lines" then if it was a hybrid, gas would fill in.
The point is that while driving around in the city, a car would probably be able to tap in on all of the major routes, and stretch a poor battery capacity enough to make it work. Batteries would be most likely charged a lot faster than they are discharged, so it's possible that just brushing a line for a couple minutes or while stopped at a light would be enough to give the car another 20-30 minutes of driving, especially if the battery was low and "hungry" for charging.
The cost to dig up and then bury the cables would be prohibitive. It wouldn't take a crew very long to attach something to poles and run a wire, but the idea of trenching asphault, then burying the wire, then grading and paving...that would shut down roads for days.
Plus. let's say the coil breaks, how hard will it be to find that break? To dig up and fix?
Sadly, it has to be above ground, and because it's live voltage it has to be waaaaay above ground. It's ugly and messy and stupid, but that's really the best way to get it done.
Ironically, most building codes require cables to be buried now, so this plan would actually backfire in newer housing tracks and planned developments. Thanksfully your batteries should hold out as you drive from downtown to your tract home.
Most major metropolitan areas have light rail systems, trains that are powered from overhead electric lines. Many of them probably also have a similar system for buses (San Fran does).
So here's a question...why not rig a contraption like in Back to the Future to hook into the power and then have "zero emmission" vehicles today?
Adding overhead powerline infrastructure would cost very little, given that virtually every street in the US is lined with power poles. IT would be a simple matter to put out some rails and run an line for buses and electric cars.
The only thing that stopped this from happening before was the lack of electric cars. Buses are built in large quantities to order for cities, and unless a good percentage of consumers would be willing to do the same, there would be no way to make the infrastructure costs worthwhile.
BUT...now we have a large and growing segment of the population driving electric cars. Hybrid cars are electric, even if they have a gas engine to power their electric motors.
So, why not figure out a way to make some kind of retractable antenna like a bumper car that can feed off existing light rail or bus power, then the need for gas is essentially only for country driving where infrastructure would cost to much.
Of course, who pays for power? The cities should. intially. That will help speed adoption the same way tax breaks and other financial incentives work. I see a lot of places that offer free or low-cost charging ports to encourage people to drive electric cars. Down the road, when the amount of vehicles using the power starts to add up, introduce some kind of "power meter" and bill and a very reasonable rate.
Also, for all of those who complain that cars that are powered off the electric grid are producing just as much of an emmissions problem as gas powered cars...that may be true now, but think about the future: which will be easier to police and regulate: a handful of large power plants or a million vehicles. I would much rather have every car in America sucking off the power grid, even if that means more coal and yes oil being burned to fill demand. Because after the cars are gone, then all eyes will be on the power companies and there's a lot few of them and they are a lot easier to bully than millions of angry drivers.
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I can't find it now, but a federal court judge once made the comment that people need the ability to delete files and have courts recognize them as "destroyed". Just because computer forensics has a much greater chance of success shouldn't mean that people can't deliberately disassociate themselves from material. This is core to the right against self incrimination.
Consider what might happen if I sent you a child porn image. You, offended, delete the image immediately and report me to the FBI. Now what if, unable to find me, the FBI came to your door, confiscated your laptop with a warrant (after all, you reported seeing the file, therefore you must have it) and used an undelete program to recover it. Are you now guilty of the crime of possession of child pornography? Yes, you are. At least, as far as the prosecutors are concerned.
It's never been tested legally to my knowledge, but the court MUST recognize that for someone to be charged over deleted evidence is akin to government agent pulling memories from your brain and using those memories to reconstitute matter in the same patter and then use it as evidence against you in a court of law.
This is Orwellian to the extreme, but it is quite possible that the raving "think of the children" lunatics out there will create just such a legal system. After all, they will argue, what stops kiddie porners from keeping their porn collections in the Recycle Bin? What about on a shadow drive with no FAT to link sectors to filenames? At what point does the work involved in recovery become high enough to consider something "gone"?
I'm glad to see this case, and I hope that the jurist in charge realizes that this is about a person's right to prevent their own thoughts and memories from being used against them in a court of law. After all, if the evidence went beyond the employee's person...there will be copies in e-mails, filed records, other computers. For someone to be able to go beyond the bounds of corporate communications into the person at the computer makes that employee's mind the company's property and not just his laptop.
-JoeShmoe
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The best part is when you can "loan" your ebooks to your friends by simply authorizing their computer, although perhaps you won't be able to simultaneously access it while it's "on loan". Then again, any single RIAA member seems to be more of a whiny prick than the whole of the publishing industry...so if are were okay with 5 simultaneous users for a song, I don't see why we should set a different precedent for books.
Another features we need are the ability to "burn" the book, or collections of books like short stories and so forth to create our own "mix". Don't laugh, if this capability were introduced, how long before someone created a printer than could pop out a neat little invoice-size paperback, bound and everything? Hell, they could do what Apple does with their photo albums and outsource the whole thing. You pick your favorite works, submit, and get an attractive leather-bound edition in the mail a couple days later.
And finally, those iTunes style celebrity "playlists". Who wouldn't want to know what our favorite celebrities are reading? Or...that our favorite celebrities actually ARE reading?
-JoeShmoe
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It's just impossible for people to read from a monitor without increasing their stress. You just can't stare at a florescent light or itty bitty neon lights or itty bitty LED lights for hours on end without your brain realizing there's got to be something better to look at.
Either they can figure out a way to light a screen with natural sunlight, or they can create true electronic ink. No reflection like cheap LCD. No backlighting like expensive LCD. No light emission like LED/plasma. We need the ambient light to bounce off a primarily white surface and refract naturally into our eyeballs.
It someone hands me a tablet approximately the size of a paperback, let's say maybe 5" x 4", makes it as thin and light as possible (1" and 5 lbs would probably be the maximum allowed) and gives me a way to load any kind of rich-text format onto it, I will buy one...I'll buy ten...I will throw piles of money at them, and spent the next few weeks of my life copying every single digital document I have onto whatever memory card the device uses.
I have been trying to replace the book in my life for about ten years. I tried Palm (to small, too dim)...I tried PocketPC (too small, too bright)...I tried laptops...(to huge, too bright) I tried Tablet PCs...(ugh, what a turd that design is).
My only hope is that new portable reader Sony has been working on that they are releasing in Japan. If Lik-Sung offers one, I'll probably buy it. Of course, I may have to wait for someone to crack whatever stupid eBook format it uses to allow me to load my own content.
Or maybe Apple will create a real iBook and do for literature what they did for music. Pleeeeeeeeeease?
-JoeShmoe
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File a FOIA request for a copy of the block list for the Armed Forces Internet. Simple. Then you can read the whole list and parse out any meaningful information. Honestly, I'm not even a journalist and it seems completely obvious to me. This is the whole reason the FOIA process exists: to give transparency to the operation of the federal government.
Now, perhaps there's a chance that the federal government will come back with some kind of excuse like "releasing the block list gives aid and comfort to the enemy" but that alone would be a story worth the price of admission. Wonkette is an idiot, so of course this simple idea wouldn't occur to her or her readership. I'm I hope that a real investigative journalist picks up the story so he or she can actually do some investigating and find out the truth. I think that it would be hilarious to compare the Chinese block list with the American block list. Wouldn't it be a hoot to find out that the Americans are blocking more?
-JoeShmoe
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Are all authors this stupid, or just the ones they hire to be their spokesman? If he's straining for some court precedent that would help their case, there is little point in just trying to grab every case just because in involves Google.
In the case of Perfect 10, Google was taking full size images and scaling them down to miniture size, which Perfect 10 argues was what they are doing by selling their images for use on mobile phones. First of all, Perfect 10's arguement is utter baloney. What is this secret technology that lets you resize images? It's available in EVERY SINGLE Windows computer that's been sold in the last twenty years via MSPaint. Not to mention, Google resizer is hardly what people would consider the right quality. Not to mention, the odds of finding a thumbnail the exact size of your mobile screen is about 1 in 1,000,000. Not to mention, the number of mobile phones that will let you add your own content from your computer is fast dwindling as the mobile carriers grow dollar signs where their eyes used to be and realize by cutting off file transfers (cough-Verizon-cough) they force people to pay for their overpriced content.
So anyway, Perfect 10's argument is total crap, and of course the technically illiterate judge didn't see that. Now this author's "Guild" -- "Guild"? As if modern money-whoring author (cough-James Frey-cough) has anything in common with the noble line of authors in centuries past who wrote for love or humanity or education -- anyway this "Guild" thinks that the ruling gives them a victory when it's a complete apples vs oranges situation. You can't search for "part" of an image. There's no way to run a Google image search of "all arms 18 inches long with four finger" and get back "summaries" of all the photos that match so you can then you know some names to research in your quest for that four-fingered midget for your next film. Maybe someday, and then there might be a comparison. But then, as now, I would expect any sane court, not blinded by copyright cartel false arguments, to realize that this doesn't impact the ability for the publisher to control his or her content...it only impacts the ability for the average public to FIND OUT about the content.
The odds that someone would run 1000 Google book queries to manually stitch together a single copyrighted book from each search snippet is about the same odds that someone finding a 100x200 thumbnail on Google will use it to redraw the original 1024x2048 image. It's an absurd argument and I'm dearly hoping this one goes the right way for Google. I think that if it does end up happening, and older book sales shoot through the roof because of all the people finding books on subject they never knew existed, there should be some law that lets Google sue them for the ill-gotten profits gained from Google's hard work.
Think about it. If the VCR was such a threat to the movie industry, who fought its very existance, then shouldn't the profits being made now belong to the VCR industry who wanted it and not the movie industry who didn't? If the copyright cartels were presented with the choice of fighting a technology and losing out on the future profits it might generate...there is no way they would take that gamble.
-JoeShmoe
I don't know anything about Chinese proxies but the only reason I can think of to use a proxy would be to get around the firewall and avoid any kind of censoring systems. Are you sure you aren't doing just that? I don't know what happens when someone in China types Tiananmen into their browser since I'm not Chinese nor in China. I know know if typing in English as opposed to the localized language makes any difference. Not even English...aren't there a couple ways of phonetically typing out chinese words with roman characters?
Articles I've read say that searching for certain things in Google or Yahoo or any search engine yeilds blank or incomplete results. Google.cn simply says "this item was removed" rather than letting the firewall delete lines of text silently. I agree with Google's VP who testified before Congress when he said that it's much better to block people and inform them they are being blocked (human nature will not let you rest until you get around the block or find out why!) rather than having people blocked and not know it.
-JoeShmoe
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Well, they don't need to open a localized version here in the US...that's what Google.com is for. The localized version runs over there on Chinese soil in some Chinese datacenter and connects to the public internet inside of the Great Firewall of China. Right now, accessing Google has to go through the Firewall to be screened, which slows everything down. Since Chinese customers will be able to access Google content on a local server, search results will be comparable to the homegrown engines. Google gets more eyeballs in China, and the Chinese get more American bucks in their piggy bank.
I'm pretty sure that the only way you can offer any kind of service in China is if they can make sure you aren't somehow relaying content past the firewall. So there's some government involvedment. Hell, just running an Internet cafe over there requires huge amounts of government oversight. So, Google would have to negociate with the Chinese government before they could even think of opening up service over there.
-JoeShmoe
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...that Google is using subterfuge? Doesn't anyone remember what happened when Google got hit with a DMCA by the Church of Scientology? Remember the outcry over Google removing certain search results? Do you also remember the ultimate solution? Google posted a copy of the actual DMCA request...which happened to contain the exact offending URLs...oh and just because of the way parser works, those URLs were hotlinks. Add to that the press involved and I think that the reality is at the end of the day, more people read that content than had ever thought to google it before.
Who here doesn't understand that this kind of behavior is way to both "be legal" and "don't be evil"? That a company that has a history of doing these kinds of end-runs around crummy laws is just as likely to do it in the future? Consider this:
Google.cn censors certain pages based on, most likely, a know list of offending sites and perhaps certain keywords. What happens on Google.cn if someone googles for freed0m? or fr33dom? or c1v1l rights or anything else? You can bet that until that variation pops up on the government radar, there will be a lot of traffic on those pages from Chinese users. It's not beyond the realm of possibility for Google's engine to even play some kind of silent "did you mean freedom?" game and show the best results regardless of misspelling.
One thing is for sure, I wouldn't put it past them. What incentive do Chinese search engines like Baidu have to do the right thing? First of all, to their culture, it's not even the right thing. It's quite possible that the management of Chinese search engines look upon it as their patriotic duty to censor, and zealously go beyond what is even required. Google is an American company...with a new Chinese arm. But the heart and the technology are still American and it is unlikely that Google could ever be as close to the government as other homegrown engines. Quite frankly, I'm shocked the Chinese government would even allow Google in to China. What do they have to gain? It's not like Google is bringing millions of manufacturing dollars. At best, a couple floors of technicians?
You can't stop information, and you can be pretty sure that Google knows that. That's why they are in the business of providing information. Sooner or later, the bar and the slippery slope will begin and either the Chinese government will realize they've been hoodwinked and kick Google out...or move to an entirely whitelist-based Internet...or people will master the tricks and the knowledge will spread as quickly as the latest viral video.
-JoeShmoe
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but now this surveillance company can use this in all their advertising and PR...I hope this "Golden Casino" mentality stops right
I question how effective this advertising and PR really is if you can't remember the name is GoldenPalace.Com!
Just in case you've forgotten the golf tournament streaker or the Virgin Mary grilled cheese, you can see them here
-JoeShmoe
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Since there are people who would deny that we in fact exist, the point isn't to address the loons. I'm just saying for the casual skeptic...the couch potato watching the stupid expose on FOX...some pictures of the landing sites would probably convince them.
Or you could invite skeptics to your observatory, you point the telescope at the moon, ask them to look. You move the telescope around in whatever direction they want to prove it isn't a canned demo. If they want to deny their own eyes you can safely write them off.
I don't personally think the moon landings were faked but, I still wonder why I've never seen a background wallpaper of the landing sites.
-JoeShmoe
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In the Mythbusters interview, among other places, it has been suggested that the best way to counter the myth that the moon landing was faked is to go back to the moon and bring back something from the previous astronauts.
I've always wondered why the hell we can't prove or disprove the moon landing myth by just pointing a friggin' telescope at it? I mean, if there is any such astronaut junk...couldn't the Hubble or even some small terrestrial telescope pick it out? There's no wind on the moon, so shouldn't the footprints and tire tracks still be visible? Did Neil Armstrong leave the flag planted or bring it back?
Why have I never seen pictures of these features? We can see planets a brazilian light years away but we can't pick out a landing zone a few hundred thousand miles away? The pictures on moon.google.com don't appear to have any better resolution than my digital camera can produce.
So maybe someone can answer this question for me. What prevents us from looking at the moon's surface with any sort of detail, and since the moon is our next big destination resort, why haven't we sent a probe to do the same kind of high-resolution imaging of the surface like we have for every other planet in our solar system? We might need to know where the best places are to build those hydrogen refineries or whatever.
-JoeShmoe
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I don't think so. While theoretically...if pull drive 1, the RAID should rebuild a copy of drive 1. When you pull drive 2, it should then rebuild a copy of drive 2. However, perhaps when you pull a drive, it doesn't get replaced with the previous contents but instead becomes the new parity drive. Well, yes, it's all striped but you know what I mean. Plus, if so much as a bit gets changed (Windows touches a file, a log gets updated, an automated snapshot is made...anything) then it would throw integrity out the window. I seriously doubt that any RAID, even this one, would even recognize a set of drives that had been pulled at independent times. I doubt you could even pull all four drive simultaneously from one RAID and put them in another and have them work. They are built to treat all incoming drives as virgins waiting to be sacrified to the gods of data. I've broken RAID sets on top of the line RAID cards, then instandly redetected the drive and yet, the controller will still rebuild the entire drive as if it was completely blank.
-JoeShmoe
Yes, this is correct, you aren't just replacing one drive to get an extra magic 200GB of RAID storage...but what you are doing is letting it "hot swap" your capacity to a larger size. This is, as far as I can tell, a unique feature to Infrant's "X-RAID" system. With every other RAID system I've worked with, when I want to replace the drives I have to somehow backup the TB of data somewhere else (not to mention, redundant as well for safety), rebuild the array with the new drives and copy everything back. While it would be nice to be able to get extra RAID space for one incremental drive, I think you are right that it isn't easy. I think it would be possible, perhaps by using file parity instead of drive parity and storing the "PAR" files the other drives.
But anyway, when you want to move up, you do have to fork over the cash for four new drives. But then after replacing the last one...voila...magically you have the full capactity of the new drives and all your data is still intact. It seems like a trivial trick but...if so...why the hell isn't it a common feature of other RAID controllers?
-JoeShmoe
Oh, I alsost forgot...just about the coolest feature is that the thing has a PCI slot and two USB ports. This means that you can add a wireless card or a firewire card if you want to use firewire storage devices or a wireless USB adapater or even USB storage devices and printers!
/Pictures volume so you can pull them up on your Media Center in the living room.
For USB printer connected to the back, the ReadyNAS works as a print server. If you add USB storage (almost everyone already has a USB drive kicking around somewhere) then that storage is available as a volume on the ReadyNAS. You obviously can't use it for part of the RAID but it is fantastic for loading up a drive of movies to take over to someone's house or bringing data from other homes/offices to backup on the RAID.
The ReadyNAS can also be configured to automatically copy data from any flash storage to a specified directory. So you have a camera with a CF or SD card, right? Get a USB card reader, and every time you plug your camera's flash card into it, it will copy the pictures over to your
Since the underpinnings are all Linux, it's a sure bet that the PCI and USB ports will provide all sorts of cool amazing things as time progresses. I fully expect that you'll someday be able to add a second NIC and have the ReadyNAS function as a firewire...sorta like that big ugly yellow banana slug NAS that was reviewed on here a few months ago.
-JoeShmoe
The ratings and reviews on their homepage http://www.infrant.com/ say it all. This thing blows a Terastation away in terms of ease of use, supported protocols, and goodies. Buy an empty ReadyNAS X6 from http://www.eaegis.com/ for $579 (no tax, free shipping). Fill it with two of whatever drive is dirt cheap this week (cough-newegg-cough). Here's the kicker...ReadyNAS will expand the drive array automatically each time you add a drive. So buy a couple 300GB's for $100 each and you'll have 300GB of mirrored storage. A few months from now, you run out of room, you just drop in another 300GB drive and now you've got 600GB of redundant storage. Add another drive and you'll have 900GB with redundancy. Still need more room? Replace those 300GB drives one at a time with higher capacity drives and watch it automatically resize the set to use the extra space. Without ever having to rebuld the array! Trying to backup a TB of data so you can move your NAS from 300GB drives to something higher really sucks the big one.
Of course it does CIFS(SMB). But it is one of the only NAS products to support Apple File Protocol, which is a must for networks with Mac/OS X users that insist on using filenames with colons, slashes and question marks and other things that make CIFS/SMB explode. It also supports NFS and rsync for the UNIX/Linux crowd and both FTP and HTTP for the web browser crowd (hi, grandma). It also streams in both flavors of home media server protocols (UPnP and the HMS) so you can buy a $100 Linksys media extender and watch anything you have stored on your RAID. It also has a SlimServer plugin for streaming music to those SlimServer devices that you can hook up to your stereo or a cheap pair of speakers.
It's also supports Gigabit with Jumbo Packets (write only currently) so you can copy 200GB of HD camera footage to the NAS in a couple hours instead of a couple days. The RevB case is cable-less with just thumbscrews between you and swapping a drive. It also holds the drives vertically because who is the idiot who thinks stacking heat factories horizontally on top of each other is a good idea. Also, I can't tell you how many RAID products only lets you specify an alert SMTP server name but no authentication information, which means e-mail alerts don't get delivered (boo Promise, boo 3Ware). ReadyNAS has its own MTA so the mail gets through without a problem, and it can also let you set login/password to authenticate to your ISP's SMTP server. It looks nice, clean, and it certainly not the noisiest thing I've had in my room, although I will be happy when future firmware lets you put the drives to sleep so the case fan can be completely turned off when you aren't using it.
I spend three weeks shopping for a NAS for my network, and I'm glad I looked past everyone telling me Terastation. I've had this ReadyNAS X6 for a few weeks now and I love it. I'm already shopping for a second so I can recycle the old drives from all my other rag-tag household systems into one nice neat package.
-JoeShmoe
Care to take a guess at the number of home or non-technical products and services Microsoft installs on their "business" operating systems? Far more vulnerabilities have been caused in the IT world because of them. UPnP (which as far as I can tell is completely unnecessary in a corporate environment where client are supposed to be getting services from the server not each other) has been the source of probably the most numerous and most severe problems. Then there is just the stupidity of having things like Movie Making software, DirectX, Internet games on a business PC. Yes yes, they can be removed, but why force people to go through the hassle of creating install scripts to reload machines when they ought to come configured for business mode to begin with? And, is anything ever really removed or are we just hiding icons because Microsoft has sol.exe on some System File Protection list?
If I had my choice, I'd run an enterprise completely on Windows XP Embedded. After stripping out everything but the core OS, I could finally be sure that I wasn't going to get my ass handed to me because Microsoft decided to integrate photo viewing into the user shell and let a JPG handling vulnerability force me to stay up late on a holiday weekend patching machines let some VP trying sneaking a peek and nude Britney Spears and infect the network.
-JoeShmoe
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1) Not only do they have to stop using XCP and MediaMax (which after this press fiasco they would do anyway) they cannot deploy ANY other DRM technology unless they can certify that it meets nine different restrictions (section 7). While it is possible for someone to make a "nice" DRM that obeys the rules, they certainly can't do this overnight and, given the stakes, they can't do it carelessly. So do they stop releasing music in the mean time? No...back to ordinary redbook audio. And since keeping people from accessing redbook audio is virtually impossible on a PC (without the kind of trickery forbidden by the restrictions) it's not something I expect to ever be solved.
2) If they accept the settlement, which they pretty much have to, then you'll be eating your hat. I hope it's tasty. Section 1 of the proposed settlement is to allow people to download unencrypted MP3 copies of the music from the affected albums...and the last sentance of that section says that Sony has to make every reasonable attempt to have it available via iTunes. Now that I read it again, I guess it's more likely these will be separate albums, since Sony could just as easily host the files from the affected albums and send people to iTunes for their three free compensation albums.
3) No, they haven't realeased a proper fix. They still require people to jump through registration hoops, and the uninstaller still performs a risky procedure and opens up ActiveX vulnerabilities. So they can't just give lipservice to this issue like they have been. And yes, giving away free music certainly is a good deal for Sony, but even if it costs them only pennies, the value to the consumer is the full, artificially inflated price they would have had to pay. Pick three new releases and that's $50-60. Better than most class action settlements. The part that will get Sony are the DRM rules, not the music giveaway.
4) Apparently you are unaware of Sony's current schizophenia. You may have heard of the Betamax decision? That was Sony hardware. You think the VCR would have been invented if Sony had owned a movie studio at the time? You may have heard of the Walkman. You think it would have played easily dubbed cassettes if Sony had owned a music company at the time? No, take a look at Sony's last hardware efforts since the arrival of the content side of the family. It's only in the very latest products that you can finally play MP3 files...and even they they are still converted to ATRAC in the background. There are countless memos and documents from executives in the portable group complaining that they pretty much gave up the chance to create the sequel to the Walkman because they weren't allowed to support MP3. Hardware people don't give a crap about content protection. They know that theft of content moves hardware. Nobody's buying CD and DVD burners to make archives of their Word files. Sony's hardware group would love to sell a product that can play anything and look cool and be small and sexy. But they can't until they kick the content idiots out of the boardroom and design the products consumers want, not what music executives want them to want.
-JoeShmoe
After reading the linked document, there are a lot of interesting points. While none of these points are watershed moments in consumer rights, I think that they are really going to make Sony grit their teeth. Consider:
1) Sony now has to release "clean" CDs with NO content protection...which means that they are effectly out of the DRM business for at least two years. That's going to make their music execs hopping mad.
2) Not only do consumers get their DRM CD replaced at no charge with a non-DRM CD (something they could not have gotten before anyway), they also get either a) $7.50 b) a free CD from a list of at least 200 or c) three free albums from a downloadable service. That certainly better than the whopping $5 coupon I got back from the RIAA settlement. This is probably the least offensive section.
3) Sony has to make "all resonable commericial efforts" to allow the above downlodable albums from iTunes. Youch. That's pretty much an admission that Sony's own music service is crap and iTunes is the definitive standard for downloadable music. Boy, what fun Apple's PR group could have with that! This has really god to piss Sony off. Now they essentially HAVE to crawl to Apple and negotiate some deal to offer Sony customers the ability to download Sony music...for free...in UNENCRYPTED MP3 FORM...from Apple's music service.
The final part is that Sony has to restore people's computers back to the pre-rootkit way. Of course, we have to assume they can do this properly. If this part of the settlement gets screwed up, then all the free downloads in the world won't make up the cost of repairing or reloading a PC. So, potentially, this settlement might be letting Sony off. But really, what could we expect? While it's possible that there are some people out there who had their computer crash or die because of this software, let them opt out and get a settlement in small claims or some other method. The vast majority of the people would be happy just to have all traces of the software removed (safely) and some bonus music for their troubles.
So, I have to say...of all the settlement offers, I think this one by far is the best one I can remember. Especially from the standpoint of sending a message. You can damn well bet that Sony (who will I'm sure accept this because they publicity of this issue going to trial is their worst nightmare) is going to have some heads roll over this, and combined with pressure from upset Sony artists, might actually usher in a new crop of executives who are more willing to listen to the pro-consumer voices in their hardware divisions instead of heeding the horrible advice from their content divisions.
-JoeShmoe
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Seriously, I remember when the first previews came out, and every time I tried to talk to anyone who was lucky enough to see it, when I asked them about it, all I got was a ashen-faced forlorn look. Evenually, when you learn that they kill off several characters, you can't help but think...WTF was Whedon smoking?
Okay, I'm the last person to feel like we need to have cushy Star Trek rules where everyone lives that's a main character and only nameless red shirts die. I'm perfectly fine with major characters getting axed in a series...although you always hope it happens on the writer's terms and not because one of the actors dies (so sad, West Wing). But killing off a main character to fans is the like charging $20,000 on your credit card. That better be a damn spectactual investment that pays dividends in the long run that make up the cost. Otherwise, you've left a real goodwill vacuum.
Personally, I was I think most upset that Shepard Book was killed off. He was a great character, an walking apparent contradiction between his current peacemaker role and apparently some military past life (showing his ID card to the Alliance doctors to get someone medical treatment). The character Book gave a nice calm anchor to provide sage advice and comfort. Who would take his place? Is Jayne going to wax poetic when they face some great evil? So, killing of Book...which I would totally accept on its own...was a really ballsy move. The only way to make up for it would be to introduce a new "father figure" or similar replacement. But the movie didn't do that, or even hint at it.
Then they killed off Mr. Universe or whatever his name was, and a host of virtually every other bit character from the original series. This is the salt-the-earth style I'm talking about. Maybe none of those characters were worth a spit, but they were established coordinates on the Firefly roadmap. The movie only really introduced one new location, and it was devoid of human inhabitants. So it's like Firefly might as well be alone in the galaxy as far as relative relationships. If the movie had done well and a new series was greenlighted...it would have literally been like day one having to introduce a raft of new characters to replace all of the ones you wastefully killed off. Again, it could be done, but...only if the payoff is worth it.
And finally, killing off Wash. And doing in the most offhanded, insulting "ooga boogy" way possible. "Well I guess we're all OKAYAAAAAAAAAAHOMG (die)" That was just crap writing. And Zoe who was willing to storm the citiadel of some well armed private army to save him, just turned and walked away leaving his corpse to well known reaver necrophiliacs? One person who saw and early screened said..."I would have totally bought his death 100% if like at his gravesite Zoe had calmed cut off her ring finger with wedding ring and left it on his grave" I totally agree. It was like he was a total minor character in how his death was handled. And, maybe he wasn't a major character, but his marriage to Zoe had to at least elevate him higher than Simon, River, or even Jewel.
So, in my opinion, what killed Firefly is that as a mainstream movie, it didn't have the trite happy ending that the mainstream wants. And as a fan movie, it burned a season worth of fan goodwill for absolutely no reason at all. It had the plot of a mid-season extended episode, but it had the resolution of a series finale. And so, that's what it became. As a true Firefly fan...I honestly don't know if I would want whatever Firefly series would have had to follow that movie. If I were to close my eyes and dream at all now, it will be for a Firefly prequel about the war and the history Browncoats.
Firefly, in the end, was like Cowboy Bebop...an amazing ride, but written in such a way that when its over...its over.
- JoeShmoe
Actually, the website mentioned in the article is part of a chain of hundreds of websites all run by the same dishonest camera shop in New York. I lost a bookmark that someone had compiled that listed almost all of their websites, but they all share the exact same layout and graphic elements (the "Hacker Safe" logo is a dead giveaway) and they all list their bait-and-switch with Froogle/Pricewatch/etc.
I was searching for a Canon S400 and found one of these sites offering the camera for $100 less than anything even close. I knew it was too good to be true, so I called on the phone, illegally recording it but I wanted to have proof anyway. I asked specifically 1) was it refurbished (no) 2) was it the US model (yes) and 3) was it the retail version (yes). Okay, I figured I had all my bases covered, so I ordered it.
Warning bells went off when I got a call the next day from a sales rep asking if I wanted to upgrade the battery for only $15 more. Apparently, the battery that came with this model only lasts "30-40 photos" because Canon skimped on it. I was pretty damn sure a company like Canon wouldn't be so stupid, so after asking to call him back (so I could hit record on my answer machine) I asked if the battery that came with the camera was brand new and from Canon. Yes on both counts, so, I told him no thanks, just the camera and the "inferior" battery.
I received the camera and right off the bat I knew why it was $100 cheaper. It was the Japanese model. Basically, these a-holes had someone over in Korea or Taiwan fill up a shipping container with everything and sent it over here to the US. Grey-market. It's cheaper because of difference in currency, but despite being the "same" thing, it's not for two reasons: 1) Packaging...which isn't really important but 2) No US warrantee...which is VERY important. Also, US manufacturers can refuse to service foreign models (though they rarely do). Technically, your warantee is back overseas where the camera came from.
I called them and was told that was why it I was offered a chance to buy a warantee on the website. I pointed out that I paid for the US model, and did not receive it. I was told it was the US model it was just "imported direct from the manufacturer". I told them sorry, no dice, I want to return it. They said they would send me instructions. The instruction? 1) no returns without RMA number and 2) the only way to get an RMA number is to sign a form that you accept a 20% restocking fee. I took one look and called my credit card company.
Big plug here for Chase MasterCard. I have had to dispute six times in the four years I've had the card, and every time they worked FOR me against the merchant and made sure things turned out well. This time was no exception. The Chase rep sent me a simple form, where I checked the box "merchandise was not as advertised". For proof I send a picture of the website showing the model number (PowerShot S400) and the product box I received (IXY 400) Yes, they were the same physical camera, but not what I paid for!
I sent in the dispute and it was approved and I got my money back. Then the fun began! The merchant disputed my dispute, sending in a picture of a US box and saying that was what I received. Chase asked me to send them a different copy of the box, which I easily did. Then Chase informed me that I couldn't keep the product and I would need to return it to the company. I was pretty pissed about the concept of losing even $20 to ship it back to these crooks, but the helpful Chase person pointed out that MasterCard did not care how it went back to the company and suggested COD. (guinness)Brilliant!(/guinness) So, I packed up the camera and sent it COD without an RMA number. Surprise surprise, it was rejected and sent back to me. Yes, I had to pay the shipping both ways. But here's the fun part...I had attempted to return it and that's all Chase needed me to do. I sent in a copy of the shipping form and was issued the final resolution to my dispute: full ref
I hate to admit it, but I would probably be willing to accept some kind of DRM that was tied to my hardware in exchange for doing away with CD checks. The main reason is that I'm a laptop user and I quite frankly need the extra slot for a battery. Yes, I can just swap the CD drive in and out, but I generally don't carry it with me and then if I get the urge to play a game, I'm screwed. Well not really but I'm certainly not doing things the "white-hat" way.
I don't see why every media company...traditionally the most anti-computer bunch on the planet...can grudingly let go of their precious content when it's wrapped in DRM protections like Apple's FairPlay and Window's DRM...but computer game companies still dragging their feet. What if the game used FairPlay? You could install it on as many computers as you want and have two registered (I'd like five but I'm sure the bean counters would have a fit) If you wanted to play on a different computer, you would have to unregister one of your existing computers. That way I could install a game like Civ on my computer and my laptop, and those copies would only work on those devices. No crappy CD hassle, but no single authentication that can be passed around the office.
I know I'm advocating the spread of evil, but in this case, it's the lesser. It seems clear that after more than a decade, CD checks are not going way. Regardless of how painfully easy they are to bypass. I'm not even talking "techie" type easy. I'm talkind download CloneCD or install Daemon Tools type easy. I know nine-year-olds that know how to copy a game CD for their friends for crying out loud. That's not even counting the people who actually crack and release No-CD checks (which break needed game updates).
I applaud the Civ team giving an honest answer. They could have totally blown that question off. But I will bet a million imaginary dollars that there's not a single developer at the company that was swapping out CDs every time he compiled or tested the program. It's not about having patience. It's about someone telling that the emperor has no clothes so he can finally get a clue and go cover up his saggy pock-marked ass because we are tired of looking at it.
-JoeShmoe
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I agree. I mean, I assume they were trying both humane and inhumane traps so, bad luck for the rat but still...I think they should have just left the little guy alone to a happy retirement once they learned he jumped ship. They could have started over on the original island with a a new rat and new radio collar (waterproof this time right?).
- JoeShmoe
As you point out, the buses have no storage. This is the same for San Fran and it seems like a terrible oversight in design. Even having just five minutes worth of power storage would give the driver enough time to make it to the next stop and then reconnect the poles. Instead, I can't count the times that buses jumped the lines turning a corner, fouling traffic in two directions for several minutes while the driver frantically tried to reconnect them. Stupid stupid design.
Cars don't have that problem. All electric cars are battery based (unlike bumper cars at amusement parks). So, it really wouldn't be a problem for an electric vehicle to not maintain a permanent connection. A car with a pole could make an attempt to connect to the power, and if the car needed to break away to pass another car, or pull into a driveway or go somewhere the lines aren't, no problem. Should the vehicle run out of charge "off the lines" then if it was a hybrid, gas would fill in.
The point is that while driving around in the city, a car would probably be able to tap in on all of the major routes, and stretch a poor battery capacity enough to make it work. Batteries would be most likely charged a lot faster than they are discharged, so it's possible that just brushing a line for a couple minutes or while stopped at a light would be enough to give the car another 20-30 minutes of driving, especially if the battery was low and "hungry" for charging.
-JoeShmoe
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The cost to dig up and then bury the cables would be prohibitive. It wouldn't take a crew very long to attach something to poles and run a wire, but the idea of trenching asphault, then burying the wire, then grading and paving...that would shut down roads for days.
Plus. let's say the coil breaks, how hard will it be to find that break? To dig up and fix?
Sadly, it has to be above ground, and because it's live voltage it has to be waaaaay above ground. It's ugly and messy and stupid, but that's really the best way to get it done.
Ironically, most building codes require cables to be buried now, so this plan would actually backfire in newer housing tracks and planned developments. Thanksfully your batteries should hold out as you drive from downtown to your tract home.
-JoeShmoe
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Most major metropolitan areas have light rail systems, trains that are powered from overhead electric lines. Many of them probably also have a similar system for buses (San Fran does).
So here's a question...why not rig a contraption like in Back to the Future to hook into the power and then have "zero emmission" vehicles today?
Adding overhead powerline infrastructure would cost very little, given that virtually every street in the US is lined with power poles. IT would be a simple matter to put out some rails and run an line for buses and electric cars.
The only thing that stopped this from happening before was the lack of electric cars. Buses are built in large quantities to order for cities, and unless a good percentage of consumers would be willing to do the same, there would be no way to make the infrastructure costs worthwhile.
BUT...now we have a large and growing segment of the population driving electric cars. Hybrid cars are electric, even if they have a gas engine to power their electric motors.
So, why not figure out a way to make some kind of retractable antenna like a bumper car that can feed off existing light rail or bus power, then the need for gas is essentially only for country driving where infrastructure would cost to much.
Of course, who pays for power? The cities should. intially. That will help speed adoption the same way tax breaks and other financial incentives work. I see a lot of places that offer free or low-cost charging ports to encourage people to drive electric cars. Down the road, when the amount of vehicles using the power starts to add up, introduce some kind of "power meter" and bill and a very reasonable rate.
Also, for all of those who complain that cars that are powered off the electric grid are producing just as much of an emmissions problem as gas powered cars...that may be true now, but think about the future: which will be easier to police and regulate: a handful of large power plants or a million vehicles. I would much rather have every car in America sucking off the power grid, even if that means more coal and yes oil being burned to fill demand. Because after the cars are gone, then all eyes will be on the power companies and there's a lot few of them and they are a lot easier to bully than millions of angry drivers.
-JoeShmoe
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