because the AVERAGE user really doesn't want to mess around with downloading a 50GB backup, and then apply 200 diff files in sequence to reassemble their data after a crash??
He recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter.
Suggesting that students not make comments on stuff that the new york times and even fox news is reporting so as not to negatively reflect on a perception of their ability to deal with confidential information is simply asinine.
Take note CS professors: writing a Pac Man ghost algorithm would be an awesome exercise.
I wrote a PacMan in GWBasic when I was around 13 or so.
The Ghost algorithm was one of the more interesting problems. The chase rules were simple... at each intersection the ghost chose to move towards pac-man, with the one caveat that it wasn't allowed to simply reverse direction. There was also a smallish random chance that the ghost would go a different direction if available.
This made them mostly but not entirely predictable, and also helped break them up when multiple ghosts ended up in the same place behind pac-man. And was the only way they used the left-right 'teleporter'
It worked well enough and by fine tuning the random chance of going in a random direction I was able to get a pretty satisfactory game.
The algorithm was actually based more on my observations of lode-runner than of PacMan. (I desperately wanted to be able to write a lode-runner type game, but I was self-taught... and didnt' under stand data modelling. My pacman sprites navigated the maze by acutually looking a the pixel colors around them... white was a wall.
My next project was tetris a couple years later, in pascal, with the same sort of inspect the pixels to see if a row was complete, and to stop falling, see if rotations were allowed, etc.
I remember having the data model epipaphany when I was trying to write a variable width font word processing thing (again in basic), and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to support 'backspace'; looking backwards at the screen and comparing the pixels with the bitmaps for the different letters was simply a mess...hmmm... instead of simply drawing the letters as I type and moving the cursor forwards what if I put the letters I typed into a string as well... ooooooooooh.
That's not a valid line of rationale with regards to privacy issues. Why should that be used now?
Exactly why it should be used now.
Its not valid, and yet they tell us this over and over again with regards to our own privacy. Throwing it back in their face underscores just how invalid it is.
And did you see the post below, where applicants who wish to apply for work at the park must sign an agreement stating their belief in creationism?
Doubtful its even legal. I don't think even a church can discriminate like that against employees. (Large churches have paid employees...from sound technicians, to maintenance engineers... while they are often assumed to be Christian, and are often drawn from the congregation, and most people who would apply for these jobs would be Christian... i seriously doubt they could legally discriminate on it.
On a more fun note... I'd love it if an Islamic Creationist applied. (You didn't think only Christians had creationist twits did you?...)
"Why, yes, I do believe that the universe was created by Allah in 6 days as described in the Koran. I look forward to working in an environment that sets the truth straight to all the "old earthers".
The real question is whether they would give the same funding to a theme park promoting another religious denomination, not one that is secular.
Why not just look at other religious themed tourist attractions and find out if any of them get any sort of governement funding or tax breaks.
Does "The Holy Land Experience" get any tax breaks or tourism money? If so, then why is it a controversy for KY to do the same?
I know there's a Jewish museum in New York.. I imagine there are others... do any of those get any tourism related funding or breaks?
There are surely mormon themed museums, and historic sites. What about them?
I personally would have zero objection if they did.
I'm not going to even speculate whether a "muslim theme park" would get funding.
The controversy that would erupt over a muslim theme park has zilch to do with proper separation of church and state, and everything to do with political grandstanding, irrational fear of terrorism, and all the other buttons that "Islam" pushes among the ignorant and bigoted. The conversation would be completely derailed before it even got started.
Finding the amazon.uk.co page, the amazon.ca page, and the amazon.com page *for the same product* isn't useful.
If I'm in Canada, and the product isn't available from amazon in canada, than sure the US page is still relevant. (I can't order it from amazon.com, but the information about the product and reviews is useful...)
But since the reviews and information is the same, I don't need multiple results each from different amazon.com sites in my search results.
You think Amazon should consolidate all its localized stores into one huge site?
No. I think google should only show me one amazon result for a given product. If its in my country use that one. If its not, use one of the other same language countries.
Indeed, I'd like this to apply to my search results in general, across domains. If a bunch of sites are just copy-pasta of each other, I don't need all of them.
Penalize news aggregators that add no additional content, and just return the source.
I'm ok with an aggregator or review site that HAS a lot of REAL comments, AND there is actual healthy discussion on the page. But the same news article or product page on 147 aggregator domains all with "Be the First to Comment" or "Be the first to review" has no value.
I'll complain about them. Finding useful review of something on google is a pain... search for a game...
IGN... your "ULTIMATE SOURCE FOR news and media"... half the time its a place holder page; I just roll my eyes every time I see that in the search results.
or you get Nextag or Dealtime or any of a dozen other price / review aggregators with a place holder page populated with generated content that was scraped from somewhere else, and then barfed on.
And its the same content on all of them, because they're all scraping off each other.
And then I see amazon.com page, along with the amazon.ca page, and the amazon.co.uk page... one of them is useful... the other copies... not so much.
Googling for reviews is a nearly worthless endeavor anyway. 90% of the time I just find worthless pages at price aggregators and then countless more worthless reviews that are little more than cut-n-paste of product spec sheets.
We already have such a setting. Tools->Options->Privacy->Uncheck "Accept cookies." Some web sites work with it unchecked. Some don't. Make your choice whether you want their content.
Its pretty trivial to track you even if you have cookies unchecked.
But in the real world such a header would just become another bit to go into your 'unique fingerprint' for the advertisers.
In the real world, the big fish such as Google/Microsoft/Facebook etc would generally honor it, because they will get investigated, caught, and fined heavily if they don't.
The law is effective at restricting law abiding citizens and organizations. And that's precisely what we need here.
Its a mitigating factor. Not a get out of jail free card. Most crimes and sentencing are heavily influenced by the knowledge and intent of the defendant.
because she can't understand that everyone else using Limewire is making stuff available that she'd otherwise have to pay for, and she's looking at screens, right in front of her eyes that show how many people are connected to the things she's uploading, but her argument is that even though she's smart enough to install and operate the software, she's too dumb to wonder how all the magic free stuff happens?
When I want pictures of cars or animals or celebrities or... I just enter them into a search bar and they get dumped right on my screen. How many average people have considered the legality of this?
I can go to websites and play flash games for free.
I can search for programs and download many of them for free, including the copy of Kazaa she used.
Why exactly would anyone just assume music is some extra special case?
For a lot of people p2p software is just google for music. That's about all the thought they put into it.
I've never met a single kid older than 10 who hasn't - for years - understood that you can buy your entertainment for pennies, through legit services
a) She was charged years ago, and the "crime" was committed even earlier. Those copyright savvy 10 year old kids were in diapers and discovering things like object permanence. People were running Windows ME.
b) It shouldn't be up to her to prove she didn't know. It should be up to you to prove she did. Innocent until proven guilty.
Fair enough. Then her parents are the ones who are responsible for her behavior, and thus the consequences.
What exactly were the consequences of her actions again? Exactly what harm did she cause? What awful thing did she do that we need to punish them with fines in the 10s of thousands? Your earlier speeding ticket example was apt... but the fine for that is a few hundred bucks.
That's right about where her fine should be too, all things considered.
No, some teenager somewhere directly violates copyright by distrubuting protected works. And she can't have an 'innocent infringement' defense because: she's not innocent of distributing copyrighted works.
a) I have yet to see any proof she knew the client shared the music back to the network.
b) I have, as in all RIAA/MPAA cases a profound disagreement with the sentence/fine imposed. To the point that I would rather declare her completely innocent than subject her to that penalty. Even if she's guilty she's not THAT guilty. 27,000+ for a couple CDs worth of songs, uploaded an unknown number of times (possibly less than a full copy each)... to people who were predominantly unlikely to buy it in the first place. Even if she's guilty, she was underage, and didn't cause significant damage. $750 is probably about right. $27000+ is absurd.
A leak is only good think if it serves a legitimate public interest, not merely curiousity. If your intention is merely to cause embarassment for embarassments sake then youre not a whistleblower.
Perhaps, but withholding/suppressing true information simply because it may cause embarrassment is a very slippery slope to censorship of the free press and freedom of speech.
A lot of dirty laundry isn't corruption, it's just frank truthfulness that is embarrassing for one party, and it is good decency to keep such things private.
Perhaps. But between free speech and free press we generally protect people who just publish the truth, whether its decent or not.
Correct. There is no good solution. Privacy regulation may help somewhat to curb abuse by large corporations, but that's about the best we can realistically hope for.
If you are in the habit of accepting and keeping every cookie ever offered to you, you were being "tracked" before Facebook got involved.
For my part I *really* don't care if the website I'm visiting is tracking my movements on its own site.
I -only- get irate when that tracking starts to follow me around after I leave.
I don't use facebook, and that near ubiquitous facbook icon on pages used to merely annoy me for being a waste of space and an eyesore. But I wasn't specifcially aware that it was actively tracking me if I ignored it. Perhaps if I had thought about it, I'd have realized that it was likely wired back to facebook and tracking me, but until now I hadn't.
So I do find this interesting. Not that I needed another reason to despise facebook.
And yes, other widespread tracking systems also do bother me; I've regularly criticized google's reach between its advertising and analytics numerous times here on slashdot.
If I regularly shoot bullets in random directions in my city, I can probably get away with trivial damages most of the time too. Would you think a fair penalty is simply to have me pay for the windows I shoot out?
I think that would be a fair assessment of the damages.
That said, I also think you should be fined heavily, or even imprisoned for the clearly reckless and dangerous behavior, but that is a separate issue from the damages.
Slashdot Mirror
because the AVERAGE user really doesn't want to mess around with downloading a 50GB backup, and then apply 200 diff files in sequence to reassemble their data after a crash??
He recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter.
Suggesting that students not make comments on stuff that the new york times and even fox news is reporting so as not to negatively reflect on a perception of their ability to deal with confidential information is simply asinine.
Take note CS professors: writing a Pac Man ghost algorithm would be an awesome exercise.
I wrote a PacMan in GWBasic when I was around 13 or so.
The Ghost algorithm was one of the more interesting problems. The chase rules were simple... at each intersection the ghost chose to move towards pac-man, with the one caveat that it wasn't allowed to simply reverse direction. There was also a smallish random chance that the ghost would go a different direction if available.
This made them mostly but not entirely predictable, and also helped break them up when multiple ghosts ended up in the same place behind pac-man. And was the only way they used the left-right 'teleporter'
It worked well enough and by fine tuning the random chance of going in a random direction I was able to get a pretty satisfactory game.
The algorithm was actually based more on my observations of lode-runner than of PacMan. (I desperately wanted to be able to write a lode-runner type game, but I was self-taught... and didnt' under stand data modelling. My pacman sprites navigated the maze by acutually looking a the pixel colors around them... white was a wall.
My next project was tetris a couple years later, in pascal, with the same sort of inspect the pixels to see if a row was complete, and to stop falling, see if rotations were allowed, etc.
I remember having the data model epipaphany when I was trying to write a variable width font word processing thing (again in basic), and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to support 'backspace'; looking backwards at the screen and comparing the pixels with the bitmaps for the different letters was simply a mess...hmmm... instead of simply drawing the letters as I type and moving the cursor forwards what if I put the letters I typed into a string as well... ooooooooooh.
A real personal Eureka moment there.
That's not a valid line of rationale with regards to privacy issues. Why should that be used now?
Exactly why it should be used now.
Its not valid, and yet they tell us this over and over again with regards to our own privacy. Throwing it back in their face underscores just how invalid it is.
And did you see the post below, where applicants who wish to apply for work at the park must sign an agreement stating their belief in creationism?
Doubtful its even legal. I don't think even a church can discriminate like that against employees. (Large churches have paid employees...from sound technicians, to maintenance engineers... while they are often assumed to be Christian, and are often drawn from the congregation, and most people who would apply for these jobs would be Christian... i seriously doubt they could legally discriminate on it.
On a more fun note... I'd love it if an Islamic Creationist applied. (You didn't think only Christians had creationist twits did you?...)
"Why, yes, I do believe that the universe was created by Allah in 6 days as described in the Koran. I look forward to working in an environment that sets the truth straight to all the "old earthers".
The real question is whether they would give the same funding to a theme park promoting another religious denomination, not one that is secular.
Why not just look at other religious themed tourist attractions and find out if any of them get any sort of governement funding or tax breaks.
Does "The Holy Land Experience" get any tax breaks or tourism money? If so, then why is it a controversy for KY to do the same?
I know there's a Jewish museum in New York.. I imagine there are others... do any of those get any tourism related funding or breaks?
There are surely mormon themed museums, and historic sites. What about them?
I personally would have zero objection if they did.
I'm not going to even speculate whether a "muslim theme park" would get funding.
The controversy that would erupt over a muslim theme park has zilch to do with proper separation of church and state, and everything to do with political grandstanding, irrational fear of terrorism, and all the other buttons that "Islam" pushes among the ignorant and bigoted. The conversation would be completely derailed before it even got started.
Which site did you find useful? Why only one?
Finding the amazon.uk.co page, the amazon.ca page, and the amazon.com page *for the same product* isn't useful.
If I'm in Canada, and the product isn't available from amazon in canada, than sure the US page is still relevant. (I can't order it from amazon.com, but the information about the product and reviews is useful...)
But since the reviews and information is the same, I don't need multiple results each from different amazon.com sites in my search results.
You think Amazon should consolidate all its localized stores into one huge site?
No. I think google should only show me one amazon result for a given product. If its in my country use that one. If its not, use one of the other same language countries.
Indeed, I'd like this to apply to my search results in general, across domains. If a bunch of sites are just copy-pasta of each other, I don't need all of them.
Penalize news aggregators that add no additional content, and just return the source.
I'm ok with an aggregator or review site that HAS a lot of REAL comments, AND there is actual healthy discussion on the page. But the same news article or product page on 147 aggregator domains all with "Be the First to Comment" or "Be the first to review" has no value.
It sucks, but this will kill just about any nasty thing you want off your computer.
Except a modern virus.
Because unless you get the whole thing in one go, the bit that the remains just regenerates all the pieces you removed.
You need to run XP in XP mode?
I can't tell if this thread is just clever sarcastic interplay... I hope it is. Otherwise ... god help you both. :)
For those following along; yes; Microsoft Security Essentials is completely supported on XP.
Aha! But I have an unlimited texting plan! I'll just tunnel streaming video through SMS!
I'll complain about them. Finding useful review of something on google is a pain... search for a game...
IGN ... your "ULTIMATE SOURCE FOR news and media"... half the time its a place holder page; I just roll my eyes every time I see that in the search results.
or you get Nextag or Dealtime or any of a dozen other price / review aggregators with a place holder page populated with generated content that was scraped from somewhere else, and then barfed on.
And its the same content on all of them, because they're all scraping off each other.
And then I see amazon.com page, along with the amazon.ca page, and the amazon.co.uk page... one of them is useful... the other copies... not so much.
Googling for reviews is a nearly worthless endeavor anyway. 90% of the time I just find worthless pages at price aggregators and then countless more worthless reviews that are little more than cut-n-paste of product spec sheets.
We already have such a setting. Tools->Options->Privacy->Uncheck "Accept cookies." Some web sites work with it unchecked. Some don't. Make your choice whether you want their content.
Its pretty trivial to track you even if you have cookies unchecked.
But in the real world such a header would just become another bit to go into your 'unique fingerprint' for the advertisers.
In the real world, the big fish such as Google/Microsoft/Facebook etc would generally honor it, because they will get investigated, caught, and fined heavily if they don't.
The law is effective at restricting law abiding citizens and organizations. And that's precisely what we need here.
Well, shoot. That's a fantastic excuse, isn't it?
Its a mitigating factor. Not a get out of jail free card. Most crimes and sentencing are heavily influenced by the knowledge and intent of the defendant.
because she can't understand that everyone else using Limewire is making stuff available that she'd otherwise have to pay for, and she's looking at screens, right in front of her eyes that show how many people are connected to the things she's uploading, but her argument is that even though she's smart enough to install and operate the software, she's too dumb to wonder how all the magic free stuff happens?
When I want pictures of cars or animals or celebrities or ... I just enter them into a search bar and they get dumped right on my screen. How many average people have considered the legality of this?
I can go to websites and play flash games for free.
I can search for programs and download many of them for free, including the copy of Kazaa she used.
Why exactly would anyone just assume music is some extra special case?
For a lot of people p2p software is just google for music. That's about all the thought they put into it.
I've never met a single kid older than 10 who hasn't - for years - understood that you can buy your entertainment for pennies, through legit services
a) She was charged years ago, and the "crime" was committed even earlier. Those copyright savvy 10 year old kids were in diapers and discovering things like object permanence. People were running Windows ME.
b) It shouldn't be up to her to prove she didn't know. It should be up to you to prove she did. Innocent until proven guilty.
Fair enough. Then her parents are the ones who are responsible for her behavior, and thus the consequences.
What exactly were the consequences of her actions again? Exactly what harm did she cause? What awful thing did she do that we need to punish them with fines in the 10s of thousands? Your earlier speeding ticket example was apt... but the fine for that is a few hundred bucks.
That's right about where her fine should be too, all things considered.
You need proof that she understood copyright law
No. I need proof she understood she was uploading songs.
(not that ignorance of the law matters
Suppose she knew uploading music was illegal. She still might not have known her download software was uploading. That should be a mitigating factor.
The fact that she was underage is also a mitigating factor. Children are not expected to be adults.
but you're happy to make assertions about the predominant behavior of the people receiving the files she was publishing?
What of it? The burden of proof of wrongdoing is on the plaintiff. Innocence until proven guilty.
No, some teenager somewhere directly violates copyright by distrubuting protected works. And she can't have an 'innocent infringement' defense because: she's not innocent of distributing copyrighted works.
a) I have yet to see any proof she knew the client shared the music back to the network.
b) I have, as in all RIAA/MPAA cases a profound disagreement with the sentence/fine imposed. To the point that I would rather declare her completely innocent than subject her to that penalty. Even if she's guilty she's not THAT guilty. 27,000+ for a couple CDs worth of songs, uploaded an unknown number of times (possibly less than a full copy each)... to people who were predominantly unlikely to buy it in the first place. Even if she's guilty, she was underage, and didn't cause significant damage. $750 is probably about right. $27000+ is absurd.
A leak is only good think if it serves a legitimate public interest, not merely curiousity. If your intention is merely to cause
embarassment for embarassments sake then youre not a whistleblower.
Perhaps, but withholding/suppressing true information simply because it may cause embarrassment is a very slippery slope to censorship of the free press and freedom of speech.
A lot of dirty laundry isn't corruption, it's just frank truthfulness that is embarrassing for one party, and it is good decency to keep such things private.
Perhaps. But between free speech and free press we generally protect people who just publish the truth, whether its decent or not.
Kowalski, Fritz, Chin, O'Donnell, Luigi, and all three of the Liebermann Triplets will be missed.
The police said I was powerless, I had given up my right when I had clicked through the Terms of Service to join Facebook.
The like hands are chasing me too. But I have not joined facebook, and I have not clicked through their terms of service.
Correct. There is no good solution. Privacy regulation may help somewhat to curb abuse by large corporations, but that's about the best we can realistically hope for.
If you are in the habit of accepting and keeping every cookie ever offered to you, you were being "tracked" before Facebook got involved.
For my part I *really* don't care if the website I'm visiting is tracking my movements on its own site.
I -only- get irate when that tracking starts to follow me around after I leave.
I don't use facebook, and that near ubiquitous facbook icon on pages used to merely annoy me for being a waste of space and an eyesore. But I wasn't specifcially aware that it was actively tracking me if I ignored it. Perhaps if I had thought about it, I'd have realized that it was likely wired back to facebook and tracking me, but until now I hadn't.
So I do find this interesting. Not that I needed another reason to despise facebook.
And yes, other widespread tracking systems also do bother me; I've regularly criticized google's reach between its advertising and analytics numerous times here on slashdot.
If I regularly shoot bullets in random directions in my city, I can probably get away with trivial damages most of the time too. Would you think a fair penalty is simply to have me pay for the windows I shoot out?
I think that would be a fair assessment of the damages.
That said, I also think you should be fined heavily, or even imprisoned for the clearly reckless and dangerous behavior, but that is a separate issue from the damages.
Doh. And *I* didn't mean to hit anonymously to post -that-. I was just trying to turn off the karma+ since its not really on topic.
And it looks like you have to go into options to set that now... :(