> Agreed; I'd hate to end up in court over ANYTHING
What he said!
I was in a civil case, I was accused of something extremely vague. It took nearly $20,000 of attorneys fees just to nail her down to something I could actually start defending against. In the end, it was just a sham, to try to get money from me (since I was her ex-husbands friend), and since she had nothing and I was running out, settlement was the only option.
Sort of an official version of: "Give me $10k"
"No" "OK, I'll compromise for $5k"
"WTF?"
>Interestingly, there is much ado about a similar issue in the USA. Should the government protect telecommunication companies that helped the government spy on citizens, or should those companies be left holding the bag for litigation of privacy violations?
I'm not seeing the similarity. The government, as far as I know, didn't use its force to make the Telcos comply with their requests or threaten them with retaliation.
At least the Chinese government was open about what they were doing, and were following their own laws =-)
Oh, I actually do understand the context required, my point here is that the words are in it.
Just like the words are in the Koran.
If you take the "war language" of the Koran in the proper context, they are not actually war words. If you take the "war language" of the Bible in the proper context, they are not actually war words.
If you think one promotes war while the other doesn't, it just hi-lights which set of prejudices you approached your study with.
And the only reason I needed Google was to find me the actual verses... I was brought up in a private Baptist school, fully believing it when I sang "Onward Christian Soldiers", and didn't have a second thought about all the murder in the Bible. We weren't taught anything about context. They were evil, so it was OK.
period.
>>Last I checked, my Bible didn't say to wage jihad against the infidels. >Neither does the Quran.
I'm no biblical scholar, but a quick Google shows me (which is probably about as deep as many Christians read their Bibles)...
Deuteronomy 13:6-9 "If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying: Let us go and worship other gods (gods that neither you nor your fathers have known, gods of the peoples around you, whether near or far, from one end of the land to the other, or gods of other religions), do not yield to him or listen to him. Show him no pity. Do not spare him or shield him. You must certainly put him to death. Your hand must be the first in putting him to death, and then the hands of all the people."
Deuteronomy 17:3-5 "And he should go and worship other gods and bow down to them or to the sun or the moon or all the army of the heavens,.....and you must stone such one with stones and such one must die."
2 Chronicles 15:13 "All who would not seek the LORD, the God of Israel, were to be put to death, whether small or great, man or woman."
And for the "It's only the old Testament" folks:
"Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law (the Old Testament) or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke or a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law (the Old Testament) until everything is accomplished. (Matthew 5:17-18)"
Of course it can all be taken out of context, like anything else, and I don't personally care to put the effort in to find the appropriate context, but the Bible, on its face, seems to preach the "death to infidels" thing as well as the Koran, on the face of it.
Too many developers in our company are old-timers and connected to the EVPs. It took several years of fighting just to get enough support to not allow developers to disable antivirus software.
For us, since we can't guarantee our users store their confidential data in any particular location, we had to do full disk encryption and take the penalty.
I know we'd be interested in this, but we need something that can be rolled out to tens of thousands of machines automatically, encrypts in the background with minimal hassle to the user, won't lose data if power is lost during encryption, and will resume automatically after the system comes back on.
Our current Windows-only solution does that, so the Macs get left untouched... which works out OK for me, but is technically a problem =-)
Not a moot point. The GP said "One thing often overlooked by people is that [it] kills vendor lock"
The only way this can possible kill vendor lock is if vendors can't add their own locks to it. Since vendors can add locks to this, the original premise is wrong.
Kinda like the folks who say the site uses SSL, so it's safe to put in my personal information, forgetting that SSL says nothing about how the data is handled on the host, or where it moves beyond the host.
>if you can only accommodate users with 1.5Mb/512Kb connections, don't sell services rated at 7.5Mb/1.5Mb. Don't promise what you can't deliver and you won't have problems.
But then you have lots of wasted cost, which is passed down to me, that I don't want.
It's not like it's a mechanism unique to the cable companies. If 10% of land line phones are offline at the same time, the whole phone system in that area crumbles, they systems just can't handle it. What happens if everyone turns their water on full at once? Can all 300M folks in America hop on the interstates at once?
So what if they run into problems... they either upgrade, try to finagle things, and do what they can to keep customers from defecting to competing systems. (I just wish we had a competing system in my area that wasn't satellite)
> they cry foul
Get the customers to call foul, and see how things go. If it stays as only the few customers that are crying foul, you just don't matter. You fit in the margins and are easily written off, get some support or start your own ISP.
Even more so, but I didn't see anything that specified anything about the data that the protocol moves around.
If I encrypt everything in a proprietary method (or with a proprietary key) and layer that into XMPP, you can still be locked in.
It's kind of like saying because it's stored in XML it's open... <document>
h5847uhlib43o8fvacgos8
5rw4978hefw9348fqw34fg
f438gqwoluiaf4687wgoasd </document>
There's my open document, so you can read it. (No, I didn't include a DTD, but just imaging it says "document contains a blob of document data".
Bandwidth used over time actually works out to Bytes of data, so bytes isn't an unreasonable way to cap.
I don't know what sort of bandwidth a cable carrier actually has, but lets assume for easy numbers it's an OC-12 (~622Mbps, ~77.75MBps) In 30 days, there are 2,592,000 seconds. In that 30 days, they can transmit about 200 TB. (77,750,000MBps * 2,592,000s)
I don't know how many customers they might have, so lets assume 20,000. If everyone was on using it evenly, they could each consume 10GB/mo. If everyone was using evenly all the time, they could consume about 31kbps of bandwidth.
Factor in some "we have X% heavy users, Y% 'normal' users, and Z% super-heavy-WTF users", and come up with a cap of 200GB, decided by the business folks. With the above cap, you could use nearly 2 hours a day at 8mbps for 30 days a month, and still be OK.
But at 8mbps*2 hours*30 days, you use up 216GB of the 200TB, and the carrier could only provide that for 925 people, meaning they have to build out capacity, since the have almost 11000 other customers. If they can ration the left over bandwidth, they can maintain customers while not having to invest more. At least until some sort of reasonable competition enters the area.
I'm not saying it's right for any given situation or contract/advertisement wording... just saying talking about caps in Bytes is not unreasonable in and of itself.
I operated several Windows 2003 servers running IIS on the public facing internet for one of your more hated internet companies (we were a very large target for just about everyone).
We only had one compromise... when one of the other admins left an account with a password that matched the account name and someone uploaded a bunch of infected MP3s to the FTP server. (As an admin he could override the policies).
Extra inbound traffic flagged something funny going on, we yanked and re-imaged/patched it, and 2 hours after the bozo move no more problem. (Not surprisingly he was laid off not too much later.)
Windows can be done securely, and without a lot of hassle... you just have to know what you're doing.
How can they block outbound viruses (which presumably they don't like) without scanning the text of the emails?
I bet they thought this looked like a piece of spam/phisher, given the lack of content other than an URL, and probably a very short subject as well, which is another flag. Spam Assassin setups also tend to me a little more aggressive on emails coming from dynamic address (like cabve modems).
My guess: spam controls.
And if we wasn't breaking the TOS that he agreed to, I'd suggest contacting support with it in order to update their filter rules.
1) Assuming you came up with X1 completely independently from a copyrighted image, you can distribute it all you want. If you saw a copyrighted image of a tree, and generated a number that represented that tree, and you didn't have permission to distribute the original image, you would likely not have permission to distribute your derivative work, since it consists almost entirely of the original.
2) Why not? I've seen a few X1s out there and they had fascinating results.
3) I don't see why not in general. But if f1 was built using X1, then I'd guess it would still fall under the derivative work stuff, so distributing that particular f1 would be an infringement, assuming you didn't have permission to do so. Otherwise, I could take a newspaper article and fax it to someone, and they could publish it, since the Faxing would be a particular f1.
4) If I define f to be a function that takes a hash of personal information and shoves it into a credit card app for me, and the hashed number represents your personal information... I would say no =-) Though depending on your credit rating and my ability to spend without getting caught, it could be fun. If I encode a numeric version of your voice as a number, and create a function f that alters that number so that you are now announcing to the world how you love to use sheep while having sexual relations with children, am I free to distribute that as well?
The fact that I recognize the 1s and 0s of your post to mean something worth responding to tells me that the 1s and 0s that PirateBay transmits might actually represent some kind of data as well.
If you're going try to sidestep that, then you could just as easily argue that PirateBay are actually creating poetry based on observations of what is around them, and that they should be funded by a government program for advancement of the arts.
Heck, a physical CD is just a collection of protons, neutrons, and electrons... Music stores have a nearly unlimited supply of those as well, so it's not really stealing when you infringe on their particular arrangement of those atoms.
It's the same thing that got Napster... what is the primary and original purpose?
The primary purpose for PirateBay is for contributing to infringement of copyright. (to use the prosecutor's words) The primary purpose for Google is not.
They don't go after the Postal Service even though it's used sometimes for Drugs. The do go after drug dealers even though they sometimes transport legal items.
Right, but being made with boiling water, and being kept near boiling are two different things.
One might expect to get scalded when spilling hot coffee, but not skin-melted-off-plastic-surgery level. McDonalds was told to cool it down many times prior to that for years and they never did.
I was involved in a libel suit awhile back, and the court was not thrilled with the whole anonymous thing.
That court at least was of the opinion that if I was doing something anonymously then I clearly knew I was doing something wrong. (Completely missing the argument that what I did was legal, and I was trying to avoid being in court making the argument that it was legal because I knew one of the other parties was a litigious psychopath... in my opinion;-) )
If the thermite only hit part of the platters, and burned so fast that the rest of the platter didn't have a chance to hit the curie point, maybe some percentage of the sectors was readable?
Slashdot Mirror
> Agreed; I'd hate to end up in court over ANYTHING
What he said!
I was in a civil case, I was accused of something extremely vague. It took nearly $20,000 of attorneys fees just to nail her down to something I could actually start defending against. In the end, it was just a sham, to try to get money from me (since I was her ex-husbands friend), and since she had nothing and I was running out, settlement was the only option.
Sort of an official version of:
"Give me $10k"
"No"
"OK, I'll compromise for $5k"
"WTF?"
> Muslim country not under Muslim law
Which countries are you referring to?
I can only think of Turkey off hand.
Scanning signatures on http://www.thepetitionsite.com/2/removal-of-the-pics-of-muhammad-from-wikipedia, I saw very few from Turkey... similar to the number I saw come from Canada.
> same sort of bad behaviour
What behavior are your referring to? In this article, they're talking about one group requesting that images of Mohammed not be displayed.
Unless you're referring to the overall "Kill the infidel" behavior, in which case, I think Turkey stands as a convenient counterexample again.
>Interestingly, there is much ado about a similar issue in the USA. Should the government protect telecommunication companies that helped the government spy on citizens, or should those companies be left holding the bag for litigation of privacy violations?
I'm not seeing the similarity.
The government, as far as I know, didn't use its force to make the Telcos comply with their requests or threaten them with retaliation.
At least the Chinese government was open about what they were doing, and were following their own laws =-)
Oh, I actually do understand the context required, my point here is that the words are in it.
Just like the words are in the Koran.
If you take the "war language" of the Koran in the proper context, they are not actually war words.
If you take the "war language" of the Bible in the proper context, they are not actually war words.
If you think one promotes war while the other doesn't, it just hi-lights which set of prejudices you approached your study with.
And the only reason I needed Google was to find me the actual verses... I was brought up in a private Baptist school, fully believing it when I sang "Onward Christian Soldiers", and didn't have a second thought about all the murder in the Bible. We weren't taught anything about context. They were evil, so it was OK.
period.
>>Last I checked, my Bible didn't say to wage jihad against the infidels.
.....and you must stone such one with stones and such one must die."
>Neither does the Quran.
I'm no biblical scholar, but a quick Google shows me (which is probably about as deep as many Christians read their Bibles)...
Deuteronomy 13:6-9 "If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying: Let us go and worship other gods (gods that neither you nor your fathers have known, gods of the peoples around you, whether near or far, from one end of the land to the other, or gods of other religions), do not yield to him or listen to him. Show him no pity. Do not spare him or shield him. You must certainly put him to death. Your hand must be the first in putting him to death, and then the hands of all the people."
Deuteronomy 17:3-5 "And he should go and worship other gods and bow down to them or to the sun or the moon or all the army of the heavens,
2 Chronicles 15:13 "All who would not seek the LORD, the God of Israel, were to be put to death, whether small or great, man or woman."
And for the "It's only the old Testament" folks:
"Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law (the Old Testament) or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke or a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law (the Old Testament) until everything is accomplished. (Matthew 5:17-18)"
Of course it can all be taken out of context, like anything else, and I don't personally care to put the effort in to find the appropriate context, but the Bible, on its face, seems to preach the "death to infidels" thing as well as the Koran, on the face of it.
> What I'm describing is a workable compromise...
Not in our company.
It took years of fighting just to get developers to not be allowed to disable their antivirus software.
And these are mostly Windows machines, so removing admin access is a little trickier than on a Linux machine.
If the IT manager is allowed to do his job...
Too many developers in our company are old-timers and connected to the EVPs.
It took several years of fighting just to get enough support to not allow developers to disable antivirus software.
Depending on your directive...
For us, since we can't guarantee our users store their confidential data in any particular location, we had to do full disk encryption and take the penalty.
I know we'd be interested in this, but we need something that can be rolled out to tens of thousands of machines automatically, encrypts in the background with minimal hassle to the user, won't lose data if power is lost during encryption, and will resume automatically after the system comes back on.
Our current Windows-only solution does that, so the Macs get left untouched... which works out OK for me, but is technically a problem =-)
So, why don't you vote?
Not a moot point. The GP said "One thing often overlooked by people is that [it] kills vendor lock"
The only way this can possible kill vendor lock is if vendors can't add their own locks to it.
Since vendors can add locks to this, the original premise is wrong.
Kinda like the folks who say the site uses SSL, so it's safe to put in my personal information, forgetting that SSL says nothing about how the data is handled on the host, or where it moves beyond the host.
>if you can only accommodate users with 1.5Mb/512Kb connections, don't sell services rated at 7.5Mb/1.5Mb. Don't promise what you can't deliver and you won't have problems.
But then you have lots of wasted cost, which is passed down to me, that I don't want.
It's not like it's a mechanism unique to the cable companies.
If 10% of land line phones are offline at the same time, the whole phone system in that area crumbles, they systems just can't handle it.
What happens if everyone turns their water on full at once?
Can all 300M folks in America hop on the interstates at once?
So what if they run into problems... they either upgrade, try to finagle things, and do what they can to keep customers from defecting to competing systems. (I just wish we had a competing system in my area that wasn't satellite)
> they cry foul
Get the customers to call foul, and see how things go.
If it stays as only the few customers that are crying foul, you just don't matter. You fit in the margins and are easily written off, get some support or start your own ISP.
Even more so, but I didn't see anything that specified anything about the data that the protocol moves around.
If I encrypt everything in a proprietary method (or with a proprietary key) and layer that into XMPP, you can still be locked in.
It's kind of like saying because it's stored in XML it's open...
<document>
h5847uhlib43o8fvacgos8
5rw4978hefw9348fqw34fg
f438gqwoluiaf4687wgoasd
</document>
There's my open document, so you can read it. (No, I didn't include a DTD, but just imaging it says "document contains a blob of document data".
Bandwidth used over time actually works out to Bytes of data, so bytes isn't an unreasonable way to cap.
I don't know what sort of bandwidth a cable carrier actually has, but lets assume for easy numbers it's an OC-12 (~622Mbps, ~77.75MBps)
In 30 days, there are 2,592,000 seconds.
In that 30 days, they can transmit about 200 TB. (77,750,000MBps * 2,592,000s)
I don't know how many customers they might have, so lets assume 20,000.
If everyone was on using it evenly, they could each consume 10GB/mo.
If everyone was using evenly all the time, they could consume about 31kbps of bandwidth.
Factor in some "we have X% heavy users, Y% 'normal' users, and Z% super-heavy-WTF users", and come up with a cap of 200GB, decided by the business folks.
With the above cap, you could use nearly 2 hours a day at 8mbps for 30 days a month, and still be OK.
But at 8mbps*2 hours*30 days, you use up 216GB of the 200TB, and the carrier could only provide that for 925 people, meaning they have to build out capacity, since the have almost 11000 other customers.
If they can ration the left over bandwidth, they can maintain customers while not having to invest more.
At least until some sort of reasonable competition enters the area.
I'm not saying it's right for any given situation or contract/advertisement wording... just saying talking about caps in Bytes is not unreasonable in and of itself.
I operated several Windows 2003 servers running IIS on the public facing internet for one of your more hated internet companies (we were a very large target for just about everyone).
We only had one compromise... when one of the other admins left an account with a password that matched the account name and someone uploaded a bunch of infected MP3s to the FTP server. (As an admin he could override the policies).
Extra inbound traffic flagged something funny going on, we yanked and re-imaged/patched it, and 2 hours after the bozo move no more problem. (Not surprisingly he was laid off not too much later.)
Windows can be done securely, and without a lot of hassle... you just have to know what you're doing.
Keeping up on the WTF angle...
How can they block outbound viruses (which presumably they don't like) without scanning the text of the emails?
I bet they thought this looked like a piece of spam/phisher, given the lack of content other than an URL, and probably a very short subject as well, which is another flag. Spam Assassin setups also tend to me a little more aggressive on emails coming from dynamic address (like cabve modems).
My guess: spam controls.
And if we wasn't breaking the TOS that he agreed to, I'd suggest contacting support with it in order to update their filter rules.
Here's my shot
1) Assuming you came up with X1 completely independently from a copyrighted image, you can distribute it all you want.
If you saw a copyrighted image of a tree, and generated a number that represented that tree, and you didn't have permission to distribute the original image, you would likely not have permission to distribute your derivative work, since it consists almost entirely of the original.
2) Why not? I've seen a few X1s out there and they had fascinating results.
3) I don't see why not in general. But if f1 was built using X1, then I'd guess it would still fall under the derivative work stuff, so distributing that particular f1 would be an infringement, assuming you didn't have permission to do so. Otherwise, I could take a newspaper article and fax it to someone, and they could publish it, since the Faxing would be a particular f1.
4) If I define f to be a function that takes a hash of personal information and shoves it into a credit card app for me, and the hashed number represents your personal information... I would say no =-) Though depending on your credit rating and my ability to spend without getting caught, it could be fun.
If I encode a numeric version of your voice as a number, and create a function f that alters that number so that you are now announcing to the world how you love to use sheep while having sexual relations with children, am I free to distribute that as well?
The fact that I recognize the 1s and 0s of your post to mean something worth responding to tells me that the 1s and 0s that PirateBay transmits might actually represent some kind of data as well.
If you're going try to sidestep that, then you could just as easily argue that PirateBay are actually creating poetry based on observations of what is around them, and that they should be funded by a government program for advancement of the arts.
Heck, a physical CD is just a collection of protons, neutrons, and electrons... Music stores have a nearly unlimited supply of those as well, so it's not really stealing when you infringe on their particular arrangement of those atoms.
It's the same thing that got Napster... what is the primary and original purpose?
The primary purpose for PirateBay is for contributing to infringement of copyright. (to use the prosecutor's words)
The primary purpose for Google is not.
They don't go after the Postal Service even though it's used sometimes for Drugs.
The do go after drug dealers even though they sometimes transport legal items.
Same same
Just want to understand the lingo...
Is it possible to be locked down and not be a piece of crap?
Right, but being made with boiling water, and being kept near boiling are two different things.
One might expect to get scalded when spilling hot coffee, but not skin-melted-off-plastic-surgery level.
McDonalds was told to cool it down many times prior to that for years and they never did.
I was involved in a libel suit awhile back, and the court was not thrilled with the whole anonymous thing.
;-) )
That court at least was of the opinion that if I was doing something anonymously then I clearly knew I was doing something wrong.
(Completely missing the argument that what I did was legal, and I was trying to avoid being in court making the argument that it was legal because I knew one of the other parties was a litigious psychopath... in my opinion
If the thermite only hit part of the platters, and burned so fast that the rest of the platter didn't have a chance to hit the curie point, maybe some percentage of the sectors was readable?
I would love to experiment with that one... =-)
No, no, you have it wrong.
20% of the statistics are quoted 80% of the time.
> kind of the exact I love this place