In practice there is no $X cost per item, but a $I initial cost to produce the original plus a $X cost per copy made of it. When you know the number of copies in advance, you can include the initial costs in each copy and make the scheme above work.
However, in the case of music piracy, the pirate can skip the entire initial cost by getting a copy and copy from that, meaning that the pirate's cost per copy is much lower than $X.
What Copyright tries to prevent is that the pirate will do this and make and sell copies of something he did not produce, at much lower cost per copy. However, what the music industry has done is take this as an excuse to put no limit on the initial costs $I, and thus worsen the problem. They have too much overhead on initial production, and thus a too high cost per copy, to be able to sell at the price the customer likes.
Laws of economy dictate that they should cut their costs, especially this initial cost. When that means less salary to the board members, a less flashy building for the office, cheaper production of (and thus cheaper looking) videoclips, so be it. But this way they could get back in business and making profits.
But, it is of course easier to blame someone else, and that is what they have chosen to do.
What is worrying is not that there are defects in Windows, but it that it takes so much time and so many incidents to get Microsoft to admit that this is a problem, and to get them to spend a sensible percentage of their billions of dollars of income on solving these issues.
Things have improved a lot the past year, but it is the years of "nobody cares about bugs, customers never mention bugs, they want new features so that is what we will work on" attitude that has resulted in the big mess that we now have.
Try clicking on the "I don't want this" button for a while. Especially those that link to a URL with the word "cotegory" (sic). (unfortunately they always link to a form where you once again have to enter your e-mail address, sometimes with a dropdown list of domainnames of which you have to select the last one, which apparently means "other", to enable the entry of a full user@domain address)
I know it is contrary to widespread advice, but with Korean mail it really helps! Apparently they have effective anti-spam laws that forbid sending of mail to users who have opted out.
They have little reason to, as every one of those was reported to the sending provider (usually Hotmail or MSN) and the provider of the dropboxes (usually Yahoo or Walla). I wrote a script to do that, so it is little effort.
I always wonder why MSN/Hotmail, being the largest 419 scam distributor, does not do some spamscanning on outgoing mail. Those 419s are very easy to catch, at least for my SpamAssassin filter.
Those are mostly residential cable/adsl systems. I find that I can cut most of them by excluding patterns like these for the reverse-resolved address:
*.res.rr.com *.??.comcast.net
I enable a filter with a long list of these whenever a new spam/virus storm breaks out. Could probably leave it enabled all the time as we (as a Dutch company) never get any valid mail from addresses like that, but you never know...
10 Subject: Re:
4 Subject: IMPORTANT MESSAGE
3 Subject: BE INFORMED ( UNCLAIMED - PRIZE)
2 Subject: UK LOTTERY WINNING NOTIFICATION Batch: 074/05/ZY369
2 Subject: AWAIT YOUR URGENT REPLY
1 Subject: àúä äåìê ìâìåú àú îä ùàó àçã ìà øåöä ùúãò...
1 Subject: contact your claims agent
1 Subject: Your Urgent Attention Is Required
1 Subject: WINNING NOTIFICATION LETTER.
1 Subject: Urgent Funds for Investment.
1 Subject: TRUSTING YOU IN ACTUALIZING THIS
1 Subject: THANKS
1 Subject: REQUEST ASSISTANCE/PARTNERSHIP .
1 Subject: REPLY TODAY PLEASE!!!
1 Subject: RE: URGENT RESPONSE NEEDED
1 Subject: Please kindly get back to me.
1 Subject: PRIVATE AND URGENT
1 Subject: PRAY FOR ME
1 Subject: PLEASE TREAT URGENTLY-------
1 Subject: PLEASE ASSIST
1 Subject: ONLINE DRAWS
1 Subject: NOTICE
1 Subject: NEED YOUR REPLY
1 Subject: Mrs. Nora Walters(Benefactor).
1 Subject: Mrs Mary Koffi/ Michael son.
1 Subject: Martinez
1 Subject: MY INTRODUCTION
1 Subject: LAST WINNING NOTIFICATION$$$
1 Subject: INVESTMENT
1 Subject: Hope to hear from you soonest.
1 Subject: Good day
1 Subject: From: DR. JOSEPH
1 Subject: FROM DR IBRAHIM DABLA
1 Subject: FRANCIS SULE
1 Subject: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION
1 Subject: FINAL WINNING NOTIFICATION!!!
1 Subject: Expecting your response.
1 Subject: Dear Friend.
1 Subject: Contract Payment From Central Bank Of Nigeria
1 Subject: Congratulations! You won...
1 Subject: COULD YOU BE ENTRUSTED WITH US$50,000,000 (?)
1 Subject: CONTACT YOUR CLAIM AGENT
1 Subject: CONGRATULATIONS- YOU JUST HIT THE JACKPOT.
1 Subject: CALL FOR LOTTERY CLAIM!!!!!!!!!!!
1 Subject: ATTENTON////Pascoe???
Apparently I get a different kind of spam than AOL.
It always amazes me how Microsoft can have a resource problem, or at least a claimed one. Doesn't this company earn enough money to hire separate teams to work on new products and maintenance of old stuff?
This bug is not in the browser, but in a document handler on Windows. So it does not matter which browser you use. When you open a.DOC file with a Word Macro virus it also will not matter if you get it via IE, Mozilla, FTP or a diskette, the virus affects Word. In this case the GDI is the affected component.
Your posting shows very clearly why it is a good idea not to rely on the US, in this case for a positioning system. No need to elaborate about the "treaties and justice are fine as long as it is on our terms" part.
W.r.t. drugs, the problems caused by addiction to alcohol and tobacco are far more widespread and severe than those caused by drugs. The production and sale of alcohol and tobacco is viewed as a healthy commercial activity, but the production and sale of drugs is seen as a crime. As a result, large amounts of money going around in the drugs scene is kept outside of normal financial traffic, and this causes many problems (even terrorism is financed using this money). Furthermore, those addicted to drugs have to pay the elevated prices, and are becoming criminal to get the money they need.
Legalizing drugs would probably kill some people because they get addicted, but it would also reduce financial and street crime enormously. There are many legal activities that kill some people. Even people who did not make that choice themselves.
You may think that the international court trials are show trials and do not use reasonable laws, but I do think that keeping a lot of people in a camp in Cuba without trial and without telling them what they are accused of is very unreasonable. The way the US is currently "fighting a war agains terrorism" is clearly showing that its freedom and justice values are very flimsy. Send a couple of planes in US buildings and it breaks down all the values that it claims it stands for.
Also, the laws the US uses to extradite people (e.g. drugs laws) are not very reasonable or realistic. Note that the whole problem of drugs and drug criminality is primaly caused by drugs being illegal. The US tried it with alcohol as well, and it was a complete failure.
As US soldiers are fighting wars that do not obey international war treaties, it is very reasonable to send them (and their principals) to an international court for it.
You may be interested to know that the US has implemented laws to allow an invasion in the Netherlands, home of the international court of justice, in case an American has to appear in front of that court. They don't approve this court and want to free their citizens in case they are brought to it.
At the same time, the US is sending requests to Dutch courts to have Dutch citizens appear in American courts for claimed offenses.
Of course, that is ridiculous. But it is the factual situation. Others are seeing this as well and do not trust the Americans as much as they did 50 years ago.
There used to be a (British) series called "the secret life of machines" on Discovery here that showed "how it works". It was kind of like the Mythbusters, in that it always ended in destructing the topic of investigation using explosions and fireworks.
On my account at work, most of the spam originates from Microsoft's Hotmail and MSN mail servers.
Every day, several 419 scam artist send me messages about the millions of dollars they want to transfer to my bank account. The SpamAssassin filter catches them all. I semi-automatically forward them to the abuse department of the originating server, and of the dropbox mentioned in the body of the mail (usually at Yahoo Mail).
The Yahoo mail account is usually deleted the next day. The MSN abuse service takes 2 weeks to handle the complaint, and spends most of the return message excusing themselves that it took so long and that they are so busy.
I wonder why it would be so difficult to install a SpamAssassin-like filter (of course a Microsoft re-invention of the thing, claiming to be a novelty development) on the outgoing servers of Hotmail and MSN. They seem to have inbound filtering (not sure, I don't have an account there but sometimes my spam complaints are bounced by the abuse account because they have been determined to be spam. DUH.) Why not have outbound spam filtering as well??? Because it does not earn them selling points for their service, presumably? But it would save their (outsourced) abuse department a lot of work!
It makes no sense to buy a Mac (at Apple's h/w price level) and then run Windows on it. Especially when that is going to be in the form of "boot Windows". When you want to run Windows, get a Dell.
Maybe they hadn't heard of the User Shell Folders registry keys, which have been in Windows for over a decade, either!
There are some pretty dumb developers out there... the developer of the telebanking app of our bank insists on placing temporary files in %windir% instead of %temp%. Maybe he once had the experience that %windir% always exists and so is the best place to write temporary files... (similarly, some apps write tempfiles in the root directory, or in %windir%\Temp)
We have been running Windows 2000 workstations with ordinary "user" privileges and toughened filesystem security settings at work for several years now. What you describe is becoming less and less common, but it happens. Interestingly enough, one of the worst applications at work is an electronic banking program. Apparently banks don't care about security. We got the same response from their helpdesk.
But otherwise, it really is possible to do it. Requires some extra effort, but so does security on Unix/Linux systems. We even run an extra service called "TrustNoExe" that allows you to restrict the location of executable programs to e.g. C:\Program Files and C:\Windows, where users cannot write. This even more prevents downloading and "accidentally" running unapproved programs.
But to get the point: try to install it into a few randomly chosen new laptops so that everything works out of the box
This kind of comment always reminds me of the Dell Laptop we once ordered (with Windows XP) intending to use it with Windows 2000. It would not run Windows 2000 no matter what. The video driver refused to work. However, SuSE Linux worked just fine! And Windows 2000 worked under VMware running under Linux.
So, randomly chosen new laptops may fail under Windows just as well.
Much worse than all this, is that the government (of the Netherlands and two other countries in the world) believes that terrorism is something that you should (and can) fight a war against. Of course, any reasonable person can see that terrorism is an act by people who feel overpowered and powerless against an unmanagable external force, and that fighting a war against it will be counterproductive at best, but certainly it will be fruitless.
The terrorists must be chuckling in their caves. The entire "free world" is voluntarily dropping all its privileges and acquired rights, just to facilitate a "war against terrorism". This of course is a much bigger victory (for the terrorists) than blowing up some building or train, and scaring some people. Here, they are successfully attacking the very system and ideology of the countries they are trying to fight!
And the destruction is not even performed by the terrorists, but by the very government those "free world" countries' citizens elected by the "democratic" system they so highly acclaim!
It is unfortunate that presidents and politicians apparently lack the IQ to see this, and keep making stupid moves like they have done the past 4 years.
The recording industry has a well established tradition of lobbying for the continuation of their business model. Normally, when an industry runs into trouble with its established product or marketing method, the government says "tough luck", and the businesses in that industry successively go bankrupt. But the recording industry is an exception: they somehow have the power of getting special laws and taxes passed to protect their business.
I don't think it is too far-fetched to assume that this case will be no different. They will probably succeed in convincing the governments that they need this information to survive.
Re:Calculate the exact URLs
on
Sober Code Cracked
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The URLs are not domain names registered in DNS, but page names on "free homepage" services. So they would have to get in contact with the providers of those services instead (arcor.de, pages.at)
I found that even worse than registering a domain, is registering official port numbers or organisational unique ID's with IANA.
These guys still live in the previous century, and publish lists of assigned numbers complete with e-mail address. Copies of these lists also live on many systems (e.g./etc/services) I am buried under viruses and spam on the addresses once given to IANA and still valid (I had to make some invalid as well).
Indicative of the virus problem is the fact that I receive many viruses "from" an address that is near my address in such lists.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you are confusing Copyright with Patents.
In practice there is no $X cost per item, but a $I initial cost to produce the original plus a $X cost per copy made of it.
When you know the number of copies in advance, you can include the initial costs in each copy and make the scheme above work.
However, in the case of music piracy, the pirate can skip the entire initial cost by getting a copy and copy from that, meaning that the pirate's cost per copy is much lower than $X.
What Copyright tries to prevent is that the pirate will do this and make and sell copies of something he did not produce, at much lower cost per copy.
However, what the music industry has done is take this as an excuse to put no limit on the initial costs $I, and thus worsen the problem.
They have too much overhead on initial production, and thus a too high cost per copy, to be able to sell at the price the customer likes.
Laws of economy dictate that they should cut their costs, especially this initial cost. When that means less salary to the board members, a less flashy building for the office, cheaper production of (and thus cheaper looking) videoclips, so be it.
But this way they could get back in business and making profits.
But, it is of course easier to blame someone else, and that is what they have chosen to do.
What is worrying is not that there are defects in Windows, but it that it takes so much time and so many incidents to get Microsoft to admit that this is a problem, and to get them to spend a sensible percentage of their billions of dollars of income on solving these issues.
Things have improved a lot the past year, but it is the years of "nobody cares about bugs, customers never mention bugs, they want new features so that is what we will work on" attitude that has resulted in the big mess that we now have.
Try clicking on the "I don't want this" button for a while. Especially those that link to a URL with the word "cotegory" (sic).
(unfortunately they always link to a form where you once again have to enter your e-mail address, sometimes with a dropdown list of domainnames of which you have to select the last one, which apparently means "other", to enable the entry of a full user@domain address)
I know it is contrary to widespread advice, but with Korean mail it really helps! Apparently they have effective anti-spam laws that forbid sending of mail to users who have opted out.
They have little reason to, as every one of those was reported to the sending provider (usually Hotmail or MSN) and the provider of the dropboxes (usually Yahoo or Walla). I wrote a script to do that, so it is little effort.
I always wonder why MSN/Hotmail, being the largest 419 scam distributor, does not do some spamscanning on outgoing mail. Those 419s are very easy to catch, at least for my SpamAssassin filter.
Those are mostly residential cable/adsl systems.
I find that I can cut most of them by excluding patterns like these for the reverse-resolved address:
*.res.rr.com
*.??.comcast.net
I enable a filter with a long list of these whenever a new spam/virus storm breaks out. Could probably leave it enabled all the time as we (as a Dutch company) never get any valid mail from addresses like that, but you never know...
A listing of this week's subjects:
10 Subject: Re:
4 Subject: IMPORTANT MESSAGE
3 Subject: BE INFORMED ( UNCLAIMED - PRIZE)
2 Subject: UK LOTTERY WINNING NOTIFICATION Batch: 074/05/ZY369
2 Subject: AWAIT YOUR URGENT REPLY
1 Subject: àúä äåìê ìâìåú àú îä ùàó àçã ìà øåöä ùúãò...
1 Subject: contact your claims agent
1 Subject: Your Urgent Attention Is Required
1 Subject: WINNING NOTIFICATION LETTER.
1 Subject: Urgent Funds for Investment.
1 Subject: TRUSTING YOU IN ACTUALIZING THIS
1 Subject: THANKS
1 Subject: REQUEST ASSISTANCE/PARTNERSHIP .
1 Subject: REPLY TODAY PLEASE!!!
1 Subject: RE: URGENT RESPONSE NEEDED
1 Subject: Please kindly get back to me.
1 Subject: PRIVATE AND URGENT
1 Subject: PRAY FOR ME
1 Subject: PLEASE TREAT URGENTLY-------
1 Subject: PLEASE ASSIST
1 Subject: ONLINE DRAWS
1 Subject: NOTICE
1 Subject: NEED YOUR REPLY
1 Subject: Mrs. Nora Walters(Benefactor).
1 Subject: Mrs Mary Koffi/ Michael son.
1 Subject: Martinez
1 Subject: MY INTRODUCTION
1 Subject: LAST WINNING NOTIFICATION$$$
1 Subject: INVESTMENT
1 Subject: Hope to hear from you soonest.
1 Subject: Good day
1 Subject: From: DR. JOSEPH
1 Subject: FROM DR IBRAHIM DABLA
1 Subject: FRANCIS SULE
1 Subject: FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION
1 Subject: FINAL WINNING NOTIFICATION!!!
1 Subject: Expecting your response.
1 Subject: Dear Friend.
1 Subject: Contract Payment From Central Bank Of Nigeria
1 Subject: Congratulations! You won...
1 Subject: COULD YOU BE ENTRUSTED WITH US$50,000,000 (?)
1 Subject: CONTACT YOUR CLAIM AGENT
1 Subject: CONGRATULATIONS- YOU JUST HIT THE JACKPOT.
1 Subject: CALL FOR LOTTERY CLAIM!!!!!!!!!!!
1 Subject: ATTENTON////Pascoe???
Apparently I get a different kind of spam than AOL.
It always amazes me how Microsoft can have a resource problem, or at least a claimed one.
Doesn't this company earn enough money to hire separate teams to work on new products and maintenance of old stuff?
This bug is not in the browser, but in a document handler on Windows. So it does not matter which browser you use. .DOC file with a Word Macro virus it also will not matter if you get it via IE, Mozilla, FTP or a diskette, the virus affects Word.
When you open a
In this case the GDI is the affected component.
Your posting shows very clearly why it is a good idea not to rely on the US, in this case for a positioning system.
No need to elaborate about the "treaties and justice are fine as long as it is on our terms" part.
W.r.t. drugs, the problems caused by addiction to alcohol and tobacco are far more widespread and severe than those caused by drugs. The production and sale of alcohol and tobacco is viewed as a healthy commercial activity, but the production and sale of drugs is seen as a crime.
As a result, large amounts of money going around in the drugs scene is kept outside of normal financial traffic, and this causes many problems (even terrorism is financed using this money).
Furthermore, those addicted to drugs have to pay the elevated prices, and are becoming criminal to get the money they need.
Legalizing drugs would probably kill some people because they get addicted, but it would also reduce financial and street crime enormously.
There are many legal activities that kill some people. Even people who did not make that choice themselves.
You may think that the international court trials are show trials and do not use reasonable laws, but I do think that keeping a lot of people in a camp in Cuba without trial and without telling them what they are accused of is very unreasonable. The way the US is currently "fighting a war agains terrorism" is clearly showing that its freedom and justice values are very flimsy. Send a couple of planes in US buildings and it breaks down all the values that it claims it stands for.
Also, the laws the US uses to extradite people (e.g. drugs laws) are not very reasonable or realistic. Note that the whole problem of drugs and drug criminality is primaly caused by drugs being illegal. The US tried it with alcohol as well, and it was a complete failure.
As US soldiers are fighting wars that do not obey international war treaties, it is very reasonable to send them (and their principals) to an international court for it.
You may be interested to know that the US has implemented laws to allow an invasion in the Netherlands, home of the international court of justice, in case an American has to appear in front of that court. They don't approve this court and want to free their citizens in case they are brought to it.
At the same time, the US is sending requests to Dutch courts to have Dutch citizens appear in American courts for claimed offenses.
Of course, that is ridiculous. But it is the factual situation.
Others are seeing this as well and do not trust the Americans as much as they did 50 years ago.
There used to be a (British) series called "the secret life of machines" on Discovery here that showed "how it works".
It was kind of like the Mythbusters, in that it always ended in destructing the topic of investigation using explosions and fireworks.
Why 300 kbps for 1 vehicle? Must be more like 300 bps...
Sorry, attached to wrong article...
On my account at work, most of the spam originates from Microsoft's Hotmail and MSN mail servers.
Every day, several 419 scam artist send me messages about the millions of dollars they want to transfer to my bank account.
The SpamAssassin filter catches them all. I semi-automatically forward them to the abuse department of the originating server, and of the dropbox mentioned in the body of the mail (usually at Yahoo Mail).
The Yahoo mail account is usually deleted the next day. The MSN abuse service takes 2 weeks to handle the complaint, and spends most of the return message excusing themselves that it took so long and that they are so busy.
I wonder why it would be so difficult to install a SpamAssassin-like filter (of course a Microsoft re-invention of the thing, claiming to be a novelty development) on the outgoing servers of Hotmail and MSN.
They seem to have inbound filtering (not sure, I don't have an account there but sometimes my spam complaints are bounced by the abuse account because they have been determined to be spam. DUH.)
Why not have outbound spam filtering as well??? Because it does not earn them selling points for their service, presumably? But it would save their (outsourced) abuse department a lot of work!
Many "modern monitors" do not even have a CRT...
It makes no sense to buy a Mac (at Apple's h/w price level) and then run Windows on it. Especially when that is going to be in the form of "boot Windows".
When you want to run Windows, get a Dell.
Maybe they hadn't heard of the User Shell Folders registry keys, which have been in Windows for over a decade, either!
There are some pretty dumb developers out there... the developer of the telebanking app of our bank insists on placing temporary files in %windir% instead of %temp%. Maybe he once had the experience that %windir% always exists and so is the best place to write temporary files...
(similarly, some apps write tempfiles in the root directory, or in %windir%\Temp)
We have been running Windows 2000 workstations with ordinary "user" privileges and toughened filesystem security settings at work for several years now.
What you describe is becoming less and less common, but it happens. Interestingly enough, one of the worst applications at work is an electronic banking program.
Apparently banks don't care about security. We got the same response from their helpdesk.
But otherwise, it really is possible to do it. Requires some extra effort, but so does security on Unix/Linux systems.
We even run an extra service called "TrustNoExe" that allows you to restrict the location of executable programs to e.g. C:\Program Files and C:\Windows, where users cannot write. This even more prevents downloading and "accidentally" running unapproved programs.
But to get the point: try to install it into a few randomly chosen new laptops so that everything works out of the box
This kind of comment always reminds me of the Dell Laptop we once ordered (with Windows XP) intending to use it with Windows 2000.
It would not run Windows 2000 no matter what. The video driver refused to work.
However, SuSE Linux worked just fine! And Windows 2000 worked under VMware running under Linux.
So, randomly chosen new laptops may fail under Windows just as well.
Much worse than all this, is that the government (of the Netherlands and two other countries in the world) believes that terrorism is something that you should (and can) fight a war against.
Of course, any reasonable person can see that terrorism is an act by people who feel overpowered and powerless against an unmanagable external force, and that fighting a war against it will be counterproductive at best, but certainly it will be fruitless.
The terrorists must be chuckling in their caves. The entire "free world" is voluntarily dropping all its privileges and acquired rights, just to facilitate a "war against terrorism". This of course is a much bigger victory (for the terrorists) than blowing up some building or train, and scaring some people.
Here, they are successfully attacking the very system and ideology of the countries they are trying to fight!
And the destruction is not even performed by the terrorists, but by the very government those "free world" countries' citizens elected by the "democratic" system they so highly acclaim!
It is unfortunate that presidents and politicians apparently lack the IQ to see this, and keep making stupid moves like they have done the past 4 years.
The recording industry has a well established tradition of lobbying for the continuation of their business model.
Normally, when an industry runs into trouble with its established product or marketing method, the government says "tough luck", and the businesses in that industry successively go bankrupt.
But the recording industry is an exception: they somehow have the power of getting special laws and taxes passed to protect their business.
I don't think it is too far-fetched to assume that this case will be no different. They will probably succeed in convincing the governments that they need this information to survive.
The URLs are not domain names registered in DNS, but page names on "free homepage" services.
So they would have to get in contact with the providers of those services instead (arcor.de, pages.at)
I found that even worse than registering a domain, is registering official port numbers or organisational unique ID's with IANA.
/etc/services)
These guys still live in the previous century, and publish lists of assigned numbers complete with e-mail address.
Copies of these lists also live on many systems (e.g.
I am buried under viruses and spam on the addresses once given to IANA and still valid (I had to make some invalid as well).
Indicative of the virus problem is the fact that I receive many viruses "from" an address that is near my address in such lists.
TLD should be opened to registration in a manner similar to how .eu is now opened.