Oh, and by the way, TrueCrypt is open source, which means (1) there's no point in jailing the author, because the code is already out there, and (2) any back doors are likely to be noticed.
They know about encryption MORE than you do, they know about Truecrypt. If its author is not in jail, there must be a good reason. Of course, and that reason is that it isn't illegal to write encryption software. The authors of PGP and Freenet aren't in jail either.
That's what packages like TrueCrypt with hidden volume support are good for. The Man tortures you, you give up a key, and he finds some fake secret files, while your real secret files are still safely hidden.
Can I upgrade previously purchased music to iTunes Plus?
Yes. Any available upgrades will be shown on the Upgrade My Library page (Music received for free is not eligible for upgrade.). You can upgrade all music at once by using the Buy button. This replaces all music you've bought previously on iTunes with available iTunes Plus versions of the same music. You cannot choose which songs, music videos or albums to upgrade individually. Song upgrades are available for $0.30, video upgrades for $0.60, and albums for 30% of the album price. iTunes Plus music will continually be added to iTunes, so check back often to find new music available for upgrading.
If you buy an album in DRM-encrusted form, and it later becomes available in DRM-free form, it sucks to be you... because albums cost the same with or without DRM for new customers, but you have to pay to upgrade.
For example, "Demon Days" by Gorillaz costs $12.99 whether you get the DRM version or the iTunes Plus version. But if you buy the DRM version, the policy above states that you have to pay another 30% of the album price (about $4) to upgrade to the iTunes Plus version.
So if you feel tempted to buy an album on iTunes, thinking you might upgrade it later, don't. Wait for the DRM-free version to become available, unless you want to get charged twice.
copyright/patent reform: This one is the one that he would disagree with most slashdotters on. While I am sure he would agree tate the current patent office is broken, I am pretty sure he will conceptually side with patent holders on this one. What an anti-libertarian position.
I mean, I know libertarians love property rights, and some people mistakenly use the term "intellectual property" to apply to copyright and patents, but information and ideas aren't property in any traditional sense. It doesn't take a genius to realize that.
If you can just declare that something is a new kind of "property" in order to get libertarians to support it, you undermine the entire libertarian philosophy.
Thanks. I don't use IRC much anymore either, sadly, which is why ViRC development has stopped. I have been porting parts to C#, so a rewritten ViRC 3 may be in the future, but there are still issues with ViRC 2 that deserve some attention.
The project is already up on sourceforge for anyone who's interested.
The original article is about technical training for support staff. If someone calls on the phone with a problem, and the technician says, "Give me a few hours, I have to go RTFM for a solution" it will not go over well. If he had RTFM himself, then he'd already know the solution!
Give me a living situation where I can have a 2,000 sq ft apartment for $250K I hope you mean a 2000 sq ft condo... if you're paying $250k a month to rent an apartment, you'd better get a lot more than 2000 sq ft!
Yes, there's a lot of Delphi code out there that still needs to be maintained (or ported). In fact, I hear there's a fast, powerful, free IRC client written in Delphi that's looking for someone to take over development...
There's even Delphi for PHP now. WTF? It uses a completely different language and library, and applies to a completely different field of software, but for some reason it's still called Delphi and the library is still called VCL.
One, most of the time they make it impossible to return anything any more unless it's broken. Finding out that it doesn't do what you need it to do (and reasonably expected it to based on advertising) or that it was sold to you under a bait-and-switch doesn't get you a return, it gets you laughed at. That hasn't been my experience at CompUSA, Best Buy, Circuit City, Costco, or Wal-Mart. Where are you shopping that has such draconian return policies?
If you want to be more like allofmp3, you can have another friend set up his own rights clearance organization. It doesn't matter if he's recognized by BMI/ASCAP, etc. -- ROMS certainly isn't, so that's not the point. Actually, that is the point. ROMS doesn't need to be recognized by BMI/ASCAP because it's in Russia, and so is AllOfMP3.
If you tried to set up your own American AllOfMP3, then you'd have to follow US law... which is why people recommend AllOfMP3 over some US equivalent.
Where do you draw the line? Technically speaking, anything legal _is_ a legitimate business. If you don't want it done, just pass a law to outlaw it. That's exactly what the GP was disputing, I think. He's saying that these businesses might be legal, but that doesn't make them "legitimate".
But you're right: where do you draw the line? "Legitimate" just means a business that you approve of. Are payday loan shops legitimate businesses? How about telemarketers, pawn shops, or casinos? Head shops? Porn shops? They're all legal, but whether the GP would call them "legitimate" is up to him.. and it's a pointless argument anyway.
Frankly, if Google is going to start banning ads from shady-but-legal businesses, I think they're opening up a can of worms. I know I've seen plenty of shady ads on there that had nothing to do with academic essays. Why shouldn't those be banned too?
If anything, theoretically NYC should be the worst market, since you have the same limited amount of spectrum and a dense population. Not really. A dense population means (1) there's more likely to be someone around with the dedication and the cash to start up a radio station, and (2) whatever you play, there are more people within range who will listen to it. It might not be economical to start a niche station that'll only gather 1000 listeners, but if you can bump that up to 50,000 just by doing it in a place where the population is 50 times as dense, that's a different story.
The other responses are right. You live in a metro area with millions of people - of course there are a few good stations.
Most of the country is not NYC. I live in a city of 200,000 and there's exactly one decent radio station, a low-power one that can be hard to pick up. Besides that, there's NPR and some AM religious stations, a jazz/classical station from the university, and the rest of the dial is Clear Channel/Citadel repeating the same committee-defined genre playlists that you'll find everywhere else in the nation.
What this WILL mean is that you'll end up with the bland "selection" of national radio that other Western countries have. I was always surprised at how diverse the US music industry was but I didn't realise your radio stations got a free ride. We already have a bland "selection" of mostly-national radio. The stations are nominally "local", but by some miraculous coincidence, they all play the same music and the DJs all sound the same. I pay $12.95 a month so I don't have to listen to our "diverse" FM radio.
Apart from the dramatic increase in the number and severity of crimes committed by young people, the dramatic decrease in the level of classroom discipline and respect for authority figures such as parents and teachers, and the general "me, me, me" attitude increasingly exhibited by Generation Text? That's the same old list of complaints every generation has had about its successor, back to the ancient Greeks - a cliche more tired than "get off my lawn" and "turn down that racket" put together.
So, tell us: what other major changes have their been in the way children have been raised over the past decade or two compared to the time before, which could credibly account for the dramatic change in behaviour exhibited by school-age children today? Perhaps the culture as a whole has gotten more violent, or maybe the "dramatic change" is caused by ADHD drugs or by living in a society that treats kids as criminals, or maybe the change is just plain overstated.
Most parents who use physical means to discipline their children are not habitual child-beaters and do not use excessive force. According to whom? I say any force is excessive unless it's done to prevent immediate further harm (e.g. breaking up a fight or keeping fingers out of the light socket).
Who's talking about "beatings"? Unless that word has very different connotations where you are from what it means to me, there is a big difference between giving a kid a beating and giving them some brief physical punishment such as a light smack. It's only a matter of degree. Once you start using threats of violence to influence behavior, you've already crossed the line; the only difference between "beating" and "smack" is how long it keeps hurting.
I'm afraid every single argument put forward by the "it's all child abuse" PC crowd pretty much falls flat by the simple reasoning that their softly-softly approach doesn't work. Sorry, but there really isn't any evidence for that. Kids who haven't been beaten can still learn respect for others.
This is abundantly clear from the changes in school discipline in places like the UK as teachers and then parents systematically had their rights to physically discipline badly behaved children eroded. No more than it's clear that the dwindling number of high seas pirates has caused global warming. Correlation is not causation.
But in reality, I'd rather have a world where kids got a clip round the ear occasionally and had a little respect for the rules and their elders than today's PC world, where they're all little angels, laying a finger on them is called child abuse, and I hear nine-year-olds who've just scratched right down the side of my neighbour's new car doing hundreds of pounds of damage telling him point-blank that it's his problem because "I can't commit a crime, I'm only 9!". If his parents can't think of a way to discipline him that doesn't involve physical violence, they have no business raising kids. I know in "today's PC world", people hate being told that they're incompetent parents, but sometimes it's true.
And you can lose that "they're all little angels" strawman. No one's saying that. But if beatings were an acceptable and effective punishment for misbehavior, we wouldn't need all these jails; we'd just hit criminals with a 2x4 until their mean streak were reduced to a pool on the floor, and then they'd never commit a crime again because they'd be too afraid of more beatings, right? Shame that doesn't actually work in the real world.
Indeed - and striking with an object is definitely over the line. That's physical abuse, period, no matter how much people try to apologize for it by telling nostalgic stories about how much their grandpa or headmaster used to physically abuse them.
Rather, it provides a way for people to prove what policies they are enforcing on their own machines. That's a sneaky way to say "it provides a way for other people to require you to enforce a certain policy on your own machine".
Sure, you might argue it's not really a requirement, because you can always just "opt out". But that's like saying the Mark of the Beast is optional because you can always just "opt out" of buying and selling. I don't want to facilitate an economy where getting data is dependent on enforcing certain restrictions on your own hardware, even if it is, technically, optional (at least in the beginning). I want that kind of business model to wither and die.
"Trusted Computing" would be fine with just one change: add a manual override switch, so the owner of the hardware can tell it to "prove" that it's running a software configuration it isn't actually running. Like user agent spoofing, but better.
It aims to replace legal restrictions (that you have no choice about) with technological ones (that you can always choose not to use). No, it aims to add new technological restrictions. The legal restrictions will still be there, and of course they'll still be enforced. But with TC, they'll be enforced by your computer instead of (or in addition to) the lawyers.
"Having a childhood" is a romantic phrase adults use to whitewash the years of their lives when they were unable to influence the world around them, had their lives scheduled by other people, and weren't allowed to make any more important decisions than what kind of cereal to eat for breakfast.
It's not something that kids actually want, or need, or benefit from if you force it on them.
Sure, you don't have to work for a living when you're that age, but it still sucks overall. I applaud these kids for reaching out beyond what society says kids are supposed to concern themselves with.
Things like child pr0n are *always* exploitative. In suppressing content like this it's not people's free speech that's being suppressed (they're still free to express the perverted view that it's OK to exploit 10 year olds for sex) it's the actual exploitative act which is suppressed. No, it isn't. That's like saying you could suppress terrorism by banning the 9/11 crash videos!
The actual exploitative act has already been committed long before the video recording of it is posted or downloaded by anyone. Censorship can't turn back the clock and prevent the original act; it can only prevent speech.
The Harmony remotes have a little more capability that isn't exposed through the web-based configuration. I'd recommend calling Harmony tech support and telling them what you're trying to do - they might be able to set up the macros for you on their end.
Seriously, are you that lazy that you can't provide an ID when you use a credit card? You've already gone into your wallet to get the card, why not pull out your license while you're at it? This is America. I show my ID when I board a plane, when I get pulled over for speeding, and when I buy alcohol. If they want me to show my ID every time I use my credit card, they're going to have to give me a beer or a seatbelt every time too.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and by the way, TrueCrypt is open source, which means (1) there's no point in jailing the author, because the code is already out there, and (2) any back doors are likely to be noticed.
That's what packages like TrueCrypt with hidden volume support are good for. The Man tortures you, you give up a key, and he finds some fake secret files, while your real secret files are still safely hidden.
Modding your Xbox doesn't keep you from using Xbox Live, if you have a switchable mod chip or use a softmod.
If you buy an album in DRM-encrusted form, and it later becomes available in DRM-free form, it sucks to be you... because albums cost the same with or without DRM for new customers, but you have to pay to upgrade.
For example, "Demon Days" by Gorillaz costs $12.99 whether you get the DRM version or the iTunes Plus version. But if you buy the DRM version, the policy above states that you have to pay another 30% of the album price (about $4) to upgrade to the iTunes Plus version.
So if you feel tempted to buy an album on iTunes, thinking you might upgrade it later, don't. Wait for the DRM-free version to become available, unless you want to get charged twice.
I mean, I know libertarians love property rights, and some people mistakenly use the term "intellectual property" to apply to copyright and patents, but information and ideas aren't property in any traditional sense. It doesn't take a genius to realize that.
If you can just declare that something is a new kind of "property" in order to get libertarians to support it, you undermine the entire libertarian philosophy.
Thanks. I don't use IRC much anymore either, sadly, which is why ViRC development has stopped. I have been porting parts to C#, so a rewritten ViRC 3 may be in the future, but there are still issues with ViRC 2 that deserve some attention.
The project is already up on sourceforge for anyone who's interested.
Yes, there's a lot of Delphi code out there that still needs to be maintained (or ported). In fact, I hear there's a fast, powerful, free IRC client written in Delphi that's looking for someone to take over development...
There's even Delphi for PHP now. WTF? It uses a completely different language and library, and applies to a completely different field of software, but for some reason it's still called Delphi and the library is still called VCL.
If you tried to set up your own American AllOfMP3, then you'd have to follow US law... which is why people recommend AllOfMP3 over some US equivalent.
But you're right: where do you draw the line? "Legitimate" just means a business that you approve of. Are payday loan shops legitimate businesses? How about telemarketers, pawn shops, or casinos? Head shops? Porn shops? They're all legal, but whether the GP would call them "legitimate" is up to him.. and it's a pointless argument anyway.
Frankly, if Google is going to start banning ads from shady-but-legal businesses, I think they're opening up a can of worms. I know I've seen plenty of shady ads on there that had nothing to do with academic essays. Why shouldn't those be banned too?
The other responses are right. You live in a metro area with millions of people - of course there are a few good stations.
Most of the country is not NYC. I live in a city of 200,000 and there's exactly one decent radio station, a low-power one that can be hard to pick up. Besides that, there's NPR and some AM religious stations, a jazz/classical station from the university, and the rest of the dial is Clear Channel/Citadel repeating the same committee-defined genre playlists that you'll find everywhere else in the nation.
And you can lose that "they're all little angels" strawman. No one's saying that. But if beatings were an acceptable and effective punishment for misbehavior, we wouldn't need all these jails; we'd just hit criminals with a 2x4 until their mean streak were reduced to a pool on the floor, and then they'd never commit a crime again because they'd be too afraid of more beatings, right? Shame that doesn't actually work in the real world.
Indeed - and striking with an object is definitely over the line. That's physical abuse, period, no matter how much people try to apologize for it by telling nostalgic stories about how much their grandpa or headmaster used to physically abuse them.
Sure, you might argue it's not really a requirement, because you can always just "opt out". But that's like saying the Mark of the Beast is optional because you can always just "opt out" of buying and selling. I don't want to facilitate an economy where getting data is dependent on enforcing certain restrictions on your own hardware, even if it is, technically, optional (at least in the beginning). I want that kind of business model to wither and die.
"Trusted Computing" would be fine with just one change: add a manual override switch, so the owner of the hardware can tell it to "prove" that it's running a software configuration it isn't actually running. Like user agent spoofing, but better. It aims to replace legal restrictions (that you have no choice about) with technological ones (that you can always choose not to use). No, it aims to add new technological restrictions. The legal restrictions will still be there, and of course they'll still be enforced. But with TC, they'll be enforced by your computer instead of (or in addition to) the lawyers.
"Having a childhood" is a romantic phrase adults use to whitewash the years of their lives when they were unable to influence the world around them, had their lives scheduled by other people, and weren't allowed to make any more important decisions than what kind of cereal to eat for breakfast.
It's not something that kids actually want, or need, or benefit from if you force it on them.
Sure, you don't have to work for a living when you're that age, but it still sucks overall. I applaud these kids for reaching out beyond what society says kids are supposed to concern themselves with.
The actual exploitative act has already been committed long before the video recording of it is posted or downloaded by anyone. Censorship can't turn back the clock and prevent the original act; it can only prevent speech.
The Harmony remotes have a little more capability that isn't exposed through the web-based configuration. I'd recommend calling Harmony tech support and telling them what you're trying to do - they might be able to set up the macros for you on their end.
What makes you think Apple is trying to build a killer international product? They don't support the European 3G system either!