they ought to be punished in a fashion that utterly cripples their socio-economic development permanently.
I.e. you think the best way to solve the problem is to make these students "cripplingly poor and incredibly desperate" by heaping a whopping fine, and 20 years in prison onto them. Seems to me that would result in: "robbery... a very risky venture only generally perpetuated by those who are..." uh-oh... I know where that's going.
I call that counter productive.
These students, despite their flaws, are very likely to become productive tax paying citizens. I think we should be doing our best to ensure that happens, not doing our best to ruin their lives and force them into a life that ultimately costs us.
There is no value to society to locking these twits up forever. They need to learn their lesson, and hopefully move on to more productive pursuits. You seem to want revenge more than justice.
Imagine how his business would boom if privacy advocates and tin-foil-hatters accross the nation started transferring their business to him.
Lets see... which do I want?
a) A successful business and the freedom to enjoy it?
b) A booming business but locked away in prison?
Tough choice. Not.
I find it particularly amusing that its the exact same choice I would have if I were contemplating doing something illegal to generate business? You know like bribing a politician to rezone some land, or fishing in a protected area using banned gear, or violating the gag provisions of national security letter... hmmm... wait... why does that last one sound so familiar?
Just because some laws are stupid and unjust, its still generally better to avoid breaking them while you fight them.
After all... bribing politicians is wrong, right? But supporting their bid for re-election, and investing in their kids businesses... A-OK!! Maybe someone should just martyr themselves on that law too, because its plainly stupid, given that there are a 1000 ways to bribe without it looking like a bribe.
If they had to 1) Steal the keys from the principal to gain administrative access
2) Broke into the building holding the record books and tests
3) Changed the record or tests for profit
Except that:
For 1) they merely had to -see- the key and observe what it looked like. For 2) by 'breaking in' you mean, using the key right? That's an odd definition of "break in". For 3) they changed their grades. dishonest? absolutely, criminal? hardly.
So if you want to say the heinous part isn't the data they changed (because its not that heinous), but rather the steps they had to go to to change that data then sure, but lets look at what they REALLY ACTUALLY DID.
For what its worth, you've convinced me that yes its more than just altering their grades but...
In the 1980's - A kid "breaks" into the university admin offices by hiding under the stairs, and putting gum in the lock on the office door when visting the dean so it doesn't latch/lock when closed. Then after everyone leaves, he sneaks out, enters the office, and changes his test scores, which were in an locked cabinet (the key for which was sitting on the desk), all inside the supposedly locked office. Definately this is more serious than changing the name on his test -- I'll concede you that, but this is still a simple B&E coupled with academic dishonesty.
Its bad, but its not 20 years in jail and a whopping fine bad. Its basic B&E charges plus expulsion.
As for an "attack on the integrity of public data"? Get a sense of perpective. Seriously, he changed his own fucking grades, he didn't orchestrate a stock market crash. What's next, fudging your tax return to save $500 in taxes is a terrorist attempt to destablise the national economy? And doing it two years in a row is organized crime?
Bottom line, these students deserve a criminal record showing the B&E, probation, a small fine, and expulsion from school. The fact that they used a computer instead of a lockpick shouldn't change the nature or punishment of their crime. That would be in line for a B&E to accomplish what they accomplished.
Yes, I would agree with your points that such white collar crimes are more severe and lasting in effect than robbing someone at gunpoint of a scant few material possessions.
If by agree you mean 'take polar opposite positions', then yes.
Affecting a lot of people a very little bit is less serious than affecting one person a lot, even if the aggregate of little bits adds up to more.
Stealing a penny from a million american's over the internet would be a serious crime, and should be severely punished. But breaking into someone's home, binding them, beating them, and walking off with their pin number, to ultimately steal $3000.00 is, however, the worse crime by far.
The white collar guy deserves punishment, have all his ill-gotten gains taken away, and then imprisoned and/or fined on top of that as punishment. But he is far less a threat to society than the thug.
Yes, they harm me more personally because they damage my capacity to act intellectually with their lies than the armed robber does.
Yes, I can see how a little bit of bad data about someones grades in a database might affect you ever so slightly more. Unless of course you are or even know the one traumatized by the robbery and are now afraid to go outside alone, at which point whether or not your coworker really got an 'C+' instead of an 'A-' is near bottom of your priorities.
Yes, I agree that it was an orchestrated scam and most definitely not an act of passion.
You think a thug robbing you at gunpoint is a crime of passion? I don't think 'act of passion' means what you think it does.
You want to find something *faster* than a 8800GT, is used (yeah right, at that performance level?!), and isn't stolen, and is much cheaper than retail to boot. Not going to happen.
-shrugs-
The 8800GT is something of an anomaly in the normal price/performance ratio, and its brand new so used isn't really an option. So yeah, I agree in this specific circumstance, you probably can't beat that card for less money without it being stolen parts.
But in general, you can.
That said, the OP could have used an 8800GT, and achieved 'faster' by overclocking a used slower processor or something. Even more likely the OP was just talking out of his ass when he said *faster*, but the core wisdom that you can build impressive gaming rigs for less money using used parts is entirely accurate.
Sounds justifiable to me, simply on the basis of what they did. Surreptitiously altering records affects everyone, doing it knowingly for personal gain is an affront to everyone alive and everyone who will ever live. You can't trust someone who has demonstrated that they are of so corrupt and self serving a nature to walk among decent people.
And what if they had done it by erasing the braniacs name of his test sheet and writing your own in its place?
"Surreptitiously altering records"? check. "knowingly"? check. "for personal gain"? check.
$250,000 fine and 20 years in the can? An affront to everyone alive and everyone who will ever live?
Bearing in mind that beating somebody robbing you at gun point would net a far smaller sentence?
Hmmmm. No I don't see it.
A petty scam, and intellectual dishonesty. Maybe a small fine and suspension/expulsion from the school, and restoring the grades of course.
She finds a recipe and creates a candy bar dispensing machine which she leaves at the supermarket and forgets about for two years.
If that were the case several questions come to mind:
1) Why did they wait two years before acting? You'd think they could have removed the candy machine the following day, rather than wait 2 years before pouncing on her, when the 'potential damages' have racked up to astronomical levels.
2) If it took 2 years before they even noticed it, then it probably wasn't doing anywhere near $200,000 in damages. I mean, some guy rips me off a quarter million, I notice it.
3) P2p users number in the millions. Say there are 5 million p2p users each sharing 24 songs. If each one of them got charged $200,000 for their heinous crime, that would be 200,000 x 5,000,000 = 1,000,000,000. That's ONE TRILLION dollars. That's on par with global military spending. Do you really think the damages to the recording industry are really on the same scale as that?
And that's a LOW estimate. There are more p2p users by far than 5 million, and lots of them are hosting 100s even 1000's of songs instead of 24. The 'damages' based on 200,000 for 24 songs per person -- could well be in the 100's of trillions.
Now, sure, there is a 'punitive' component to this, but something isn't right when the amount of damages being done to your industry are an order of magnitude more than the industry is even worth.
I'm trying to encapsulate the RIAA's biggest complaint, is that the copies being made available are perfect exact replicas.
4) An Mp3 is not a perfect replica of a CD track. It is a decent facimile, but it is decidely imperfect. And the quality of songs on the internet are far from the best you can do with mp3. To carry on your recipe analagy, all the ingredients were rounded to the nearest pound, and 1 of them got left out completely.
This woman's crime deserves maybe a $2000. A couple hundred in real damages (which is probably about right), and some more to let her know that what she did was wrong. $2000 would send that message. What message does $200,000 send?
Yes it is. Stealing is a more serious crime. Someone is actually physically deprived of property.
it'd be like finding the recipe for a candy bar, and then making exact copies of them, and giving them away for free. When, you phrase it like that, it's hard to say, well, it was a 55 cent candy bar, so they should pay that much.
No it'd be like finding a the recipe for a candy bar, putting a note up at the local grocery store with the recipe printed on it, and then going home and forgetting about it for 2 years. Then getting busted for infringement. How much should she be assessed for that? Anyone who'd ever been to that grocery store might have made a copy... $200,000 seems fair to you? For the extreme magnitude of her crime?
(In fact her criminal intent here is even less, in the above scenario she would have had to actually post the note deliberately and consciously making it available -- with Kazaa sharing is automatic and on by default.)
Bear in mind that breaking into a house while the owners are out, stealing all the valuables, and setting it on fire would actually net you a lower sentence this what this heinous criminal did!!
So kind of like when you steal a candy bar from a store and the only punishment is to pay back the 55 cents for the candy bar?
Your right, its more than $.55. But what is the actual punishment for that? Is it it $200,000? No. I didn't think so either. Not even if you stole 24 of them. Not even if you stole 240 of them. Seems to me $220,000 is right out of line.
The way I see it is she paid $2,000 for the activity and she paid $220,000 as a penalty for trying to run and hide under the cloak of the anti-RIAA movement to get herself out of a jam
I see. So if you stole 24 candybars, and then plead not guilty, and tried to get sympathy because you stole them from WalMart who is disliked by a big chunk of society, so you tried to ride that wave of discontent -- THEN you should have to pay $220,000??
Sorry, nope still I don't see it. You still only stole 24 candybars. Your penalty should be based on what you actually did, not the defence strategy. If you want to punish her for "trying to hide under the cloak of the anti-RIAA movement" charge her separately with that, and convict her for it. Otherwise get bent. (Good luck with that by the way, since its not even remotely illegal. And besides the RIAA itself is a cloak the labels hide under to hide from any negative PR blowback for what they do while wearing that cloak.)
Actually, most buses are rated in standard SI units, not base-2, this is because the "M" actually arrives by way of the clock speed rather than the storage size which is (often) bytes.
For example: consider AGP1x, which is rated at 266MB/s:
This is arrived at by multiplying: 66MHz clock x 4 byte data path (32 bits) = 266MB/s
(Note: actually 66 x 4 = 264, we get 266 due to round off error. The clock speed is more like to 66.6MHz than actually 66MHz. And 266MB/s is really just twice as fast as 133MB/s, which is the speed rating of regular PCI.)
The point however is that the M comes from the *M*Hz, and Hz are measured in base-10. 66.6MHz is 66,600,000 Hz
66,600,000 cycles per second x 4 bytes per cyle = 266,400,000 or rounded 266MB/s
That said, I agree with you. Storage measured in bytes is, by defacto standard, measured in base-2, where M=2^20, not 10^3.
You're downloading over your 100mbit internet connection (100 * 10^6 bits per second) at 8000kilobit per second,
So far so good.
that would be 1000 kilobyte per second.
Er. No.
1000 kilobytes per second would be 1,024,000 bytes, and you are only moving 1,000,000 bytes, or 976.5 kilobytes.
bits are *normally* treated in base 10 and kilo/mega/giga refer to 10^3, 10^6, 10^9. A kilobit is 1000 bits. bytes are *normally* treated in base 2 and kilo/mega/giga refer to 2^10, 2^20, 2^30 A kilobyte is 1024 bits.
Naturally that means you're writing 1000 kilobytes of data to you harddisk per second as well. And to all the anal people out there, we're overlooking cache issues, protocol overhead, retransmissions, and so on. We're looking at what speed we see in our downloading program.
Hate to break it to you but all the downloading programs I'm familiar with count bytes in base 2.
The fact is that storage is more or less the only area in computing where this error occurs.
The 'error' occurs whenever the unit is a byte. Few things other than data storage and occasionally data transmission speeds are measured in bytes. After all byte is a fundamentally a unit of storage. So it not surprising that most areas where it occurs are in storage.
Bytes are the standard unit in storage: RAM, ROM, PROM, EEPROM, Flash, CD, DVD, DAT, DLT, and even, historically, hard drives, back when they were still measured in megabytes. It wasn't until GB plus drives showed up that drive manufacturers started representing things in base 10.
I guess you have never talked to a PC gamer with a decent gaming rig,
Er. I am one. I have one. And no, I don't talk to myself much.
200W is nothing and in many cases they keep their rig running 24x7.
A PC at idle uses a fraction of 200W, even a gamer's rig. Even those 'ridiculous' dual 8800GTX's in SLI with Raptor RAIDs and Audigy Platinums on OC'd core2duo don't use much power just sitting there, modern cpus step down their speed, most people have at least the monitor turn off, etc.
That said, yeah, a gamers PC running folding at home, especially an older Pentium D, or someone running the GPU edition can run 200W+. But that's not the point, this article was about the PS3.
Its much harder to say how much the average PC costs to run F@H, a pentium iii system probably sustains 50 to 60W. A core 2 duo probably sustains under 100W. Most PC's use far less than a PS3.
Besides, most extreme gamers don't run F@H on their rig, they don't want the over head or the memory footprint, and they tend to be more acutely aware of things like cpu utilisation, heat, fan speed, power cost, and while they might think its 'cool' they can process more work units per hour with their rig than someone else, they also generally don't want their overclocked cpu and gpu running at 100% utilisation 24x7 for years on end.
The PS3 on the other hand, is an appliance, like a VCR, and most people wouldn't think twice about leaving it on for a year or two.
Not every IT person is gutsy enough to stand up and say "no fucking way".
Not every IT person should. IT is a service industry. They need to make sure they are providing the service that is actually desired.
Downloading torrents is a pig on bandwidth, but unless bandwidth is cramped. So what?
Downloading from external email accounts may carry greater virus risks, but they are going to pick up the messages when they get the laptop home anyway, so the machine comes in infected tomorrow instead of this afternoon. Or they'll pick it up through some webmail account somewhere that you haven't blocked. Or they'll hook up their laptop to their cellphone/pda.
Some IT departments should say "no fucking way". But in a lot of them IT is supposed to simply be providing a secure reliable functional network. That doesn't necessarily mean locking it it down so hard that its reliability reaches 5 9s, and its so secure even the users can't get in half the time, while functionality is at the bare minimum specified in an SLA, while IT pats itself on the back for a job well done.
Meanwhile half the staff have resorted to personal laptops/pdas and cellular data plans because they can't get email from important customers through the company mail server, and they can't access web content they need through the company network without jumping through stupid hoops each and every time... and IT just stands around saying "no fucking way".
For every PHB manager drawing up pointless re-org charts and misusing buzzwords, and marketing moron promsing perpetual motion machines and obsessing over what color they should be, there is an IT-admin somewhere very effectively ensuring his network is as hostile, unfriendly, and as unusable as possible to the people trying to use it.
Like I said, Some IT departments should say "no fucking way". Some environments and situations DO demand that. But many of them say that a hell of a lot more often than is remotely justifiable.
Although, if you are running electric heating at your residence, 200W of heat from a PS3 costs the same as 200W of heat from the baseboard heater. One is a bit more useful, though.
True. But almost nobody runs a baseboard heater year round 24 hours a day.
I suppose if you hooked up a thermostat on the other side of the room to the PS3 so it ran your PS3 folding@home when it was too cool, and only until the room reached the temperature you wanted you'd have a comparable solution.;)
It's not "their". Results are published in peer-review journals (see here). Benefits go to all mankind.
That's great, but its still our money. And its in the hundreds per year(*) its a fair bit of our money too. If you want to donate hundreds per year that's certainly your perogative, its a good cause. But I have finite resources and if I'm going to spend hundreds on a charity, there are other charities I'd rather donate to...and they give tax receipts too.
(*) Folding at Home runs between $100 and $500 per year.
The PS3 runs a sustained 200W running folding @ home. That's 140kWh per month assuming you leave it on 24x7. Assuming a $0.12 kWh rate, you'll be paying ~$200 per year in electricity for folding at home. And 12 cents isn't "high"; its much higher in some places (Alaska, California, New York, most of Europe...), and lower in others like most of Canada, Tenessee, Iowa, etc...)
Check your local rates. And be sure to consider to consider usage type, and steppings. Most utilities charge resential more than industrial, and most have steps where the first X kwH is one price, while the next Y kwH is another higher price. Adding a 140kWH per month to your bill can easily bump you up a step. Even your fridge uses a FRACTION of what the ps3 running folding@home will.
You made so many points worth responding to, but let me just say this.
An OS is big and complicated. The more services, interfaces, options, libraries, etc that it provides the harder it becomes to ensure its defect free.
And you are suggesting making them even bigger (allowing applications to move from one to the next, allowing multiple windowing systems to run at once, allowing multiple applications to bind to the same port number on different ip addresses even if one of them is ill-behaved and assumes it can bind to all of them, with management tools that can resolve/allocate hardware to applications, etc, etc, etc.
Yet simultaneously you are insisting that they have no defects to ensure sandboxes can't be escaped, etc.
Its a beautiful dream.
But virtualization solves the problem more elegantly:
1) They are small. So defects are easier to contain. 2) They don't require operating systems and applications to live up to your standards of 'goodness'. 3) They are backwards compatible with everything we already have. 4) They work today, your 'dream' would take years to realize. 5) They are future proof - even if we came up with a standard, how would we cope with competing standards, proprietary extensions to the standards, updates to the standard...
I still amuse myself from time to time thinking, "Heck, if we virtualize OS software, why don't we go one step further and virtualize virtualization software! A whole new untapped market!"
Actually the above is likely to happen.
Seriously, though, if applications and OSs were structured differently, there would be no reason for "virtualization".
Not really. It would look different but we'd still need it.
Consider if the hardware abstraction provided by virtualization had been there all along, and was standardised, so you could install a HAL, and then an OS, and then your applications. In theory, the HAL could support multiple OSes, so the HAL would have to provide more than basic 'memory management', and decisions would have to be made on how to provide each OS a 'video' card, while still allowing hardware acceleration, etc.
Such a HAL would look a lot like VMWare ESX, except that instead of providing virtual hardware to the OS on top, it would provide a standardized HAL API.
Of course, over time, we'd improve the HAL, and different OSes would require different HALs, and we'd need to have a HAL that could host the different HALs...
(After all, isn't the OS supposed to be the "virtualization" between applications and hardware in the first place?)
That's just one small facet of operating systems. Other facets are thread and memory management, common libraries and services including everything from providing an api for user interface (the windowing system, and window widgets like buttons) to providing encryption services, and network stacks like TCP/IP.
If you are willing to spend that kind of money either money is not an object...
I wouldn't call a 2k PC unusually expensive. Hell, its same price range as the imacs.
you won't mind the time and effort to build a custom gaming rig, which will always be cheaper.
It isn't specifically about price although getting decent value for your money is an important factor. Its about getting the right hardware. Apple won't sell users the platform they want. They don't want anything particularly special - they want a core2duo in a tower configuration. If apple offered something like that at price consistent with their other platforms, it would be suitable.
The imac is suitable hardware specs at a suitable price, but the form factor is wrong; its not a tower; its a notebook designed for the desktop. The MacPro is the wrong platform, but the right form factor - Dual Xeon's and ECC RAM is overpriced overkill.
The MacPro is expensive, yes - but you were talkign ABILITY and not EXPENSE.
You should read versatile less pedantically. The expense of the product makes it an unsuitable platform, even though its technically feasible.
In my experience people either build a cheap system whose needs are met by something like a mini or iMac already, or they are building Uber Expensive Gaming Rig in which case you are talking MacPro money anyway!
Then you don't have much experience. Most gaming rigs clock in the 2k range. Yes, "uber expensive" stuff goes well beyond that, but you can get a fast Core2Duo, 8800GTX, 2GB RAM, with a raptor hard drives, and a 500GB secondary drive, XP Pro or Vista Ultimate, and a premium powersupply for ~2k without really trying. And that's roughly the sweet spot for gamers and value conscious overclockers today. (sure there's variation, OCing Core2Quads Q6600 to 3GHz and beyond is popular too, and the 8800GTS is a cheaper video solution, some people opt for 4GB of RAM, but its mostly in that ballpark of 2k.
500 for CPU/Mobo (E6850 and a reputable mobo from Asus or MSI or your brand of choice)
200 for RAM 2GB (2x1GB)
50 for DVDRW
150 for P/S brand name stuff, good quality
100 for case
600 for vid card say an 8800GTS or upper end ATI 2900XT
500 for Hard drives a pair of 250GB raptors
100 misc aftermarket cooling fan, floppy drive maybe, get a sexier case, whatever... ----- 2200
As you can see the above system is by no means cheap. Premium parts all round, not 'take my money cuz I'm stupid' (except for maybe the video card, but hey, it IS a gaming rig. You could still build a very serviceable gaming rig for considerably less by dropping into a cheap case/ps, using value ram, dropping to 7200rpm hard drives, and going with an 8800GTS.
Now lets try and build my 'respectable' gaming rig on a Mac platform. imac and mini are right out because the video card upgrade simply is not an option period. That leaves the Power Mac.
So we start with a $2500 machine; remember, my rig was 2200. So were at 300 premium and we haven't even started! Right off the bat the cpu is a problem. 2x 2.66GHz core2duo "xeon". nice on paper, but utterly useless... a single 3GHz core2duo E6850 would benchmark faster in games. But you can't get that. To get close to that on a PowerMac you have to get a pair of 3Ghz 2core Xeons for another $800. ouch.
The apple store doesn't offer fast drives, so we keep the 250GB one, and have to add the raptors or 500GB drives at home. Paying $129 to upgrade to a 500GB is a rip... you can get a whole drive for that much. And Apple charges $329 for the second drive. Robbery. Budget $500 for a pair of raptors for when it gets home.
Next up video: nothing but shit 7300GTs from Apple. So take that and toss it, budget 600 for a 8800GTX when it gets home.
Next up RAM. 1GB on 2x512. WTF who spends that much on a machine and gets 1GB? I want 2GB minimum and Apple screws you there... instead of 2x1GB its 4x512MB. WTF?! There's just no winning with these clowns. And its ECC RAM... so good luck on the OC front. But going with their 2GB option adds another $300 to the price. At least its got 8 slots so we can add more down the road without a total loss on these.
Total cost of a the rig on a PowerMac:
2500 base
800 cpu to 3GHz
500 hard drives added at home
600 vid card added at home
300 memory to 2GB ---- 4700 total
$4700 for a system that STILL won't benchmark as fast as a $2200 PC in any game. Sure its got an extra xeon sitting on the board that I didn't need, but its not doing me any good and I'd just as soon sell it. But what's the point its $320 new, and would go for maybe $200 used, if I could find a buyer who actually needed one. $4500 doesn't really do me any favors. I suppose I could have gotten the pair of 2.66's and tried selling both of them to fund a single 3.2 Xe
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they ought to be punished in a fashion that utterly cripples their socio-economic development permanently.
I.e. you think the best way to solve the problem is to make these students "cripplingly poor and incredibly desperate" by heaping a whopping fine, and 20 years in prison onto them. Seems to me that would result in: "robbery... a very risky venture only generally perpetuated by those who are..." uh-oh... I know where that's going.
I call that counter productive.
These students, despite their flaws, are very likely to become productive tax paying citizens. I think we should be doing our best to ensure that happens, not doing our best to ruin their lives and force them into a life that ultimately costs us.
There is no value to society to locking these twits up forever. They need to learn their lesson, and hopefully move on to more productive pursuits. You seem to want revenge more than justice.
Imagine how his business would boom if privacy advocates and tin-foil-hatters accross the nation started transferring their business to him.
Lets see... which do I want?
a) A successful business and the freedom to enjoy it?
b) A booming business but locked away in prison?
Tough choice. Not.
I find it particularly amusing that its the exact same choice I would have if I were contemplating doing something illegal to generate business? You know like bribing a politician to rezone some land, or fishing in a protected area using banned gear, or violating the gag provisions of national security letter... hmmm... wait... why does that last one sound so familiar?
Just because some laws are stupid and unjust, its still generally better to avoid breaking them while you fight them.
After all... bribing politicians is wrong, right? But supporting their bid for re-election, and investing in their kids businesses... A-OK!! Maybe someone should just martyr themselves on that law too, because its plainly stupid, given that there are a 1000 ways to bribe without it looking like a bribe.
If they had to
1) Steal the keys from the principal to gain administrative access
2) Broke into the building holding the record books and tests
3) Changed the record or tests for profit
Except that:
For 1) they merely had to -see- the key and observe what it looked like.
For 2) by 'breaking in' you mean, using the key right? That's an odd definition of "break in".
For 3) they changed their grades. dishonest? absolutely, criminal? hardly.
So if you want to say the heinous part isn't the data they changed (because its not that heinous), but rather the steps they had to go to to change that data then sure, but lets look at what they REALLY ACTUALLY DID.
For what its worth, you've convinced me that yes its more than just altering their grades but...
In the 1980's - A kid "breaks" into the university admin offices by hiding under the stairs, and putting gum in the lock on the office door when visting the dean so it doesn't latch/lock when closed. Then after everyone leaves, he sneaks out, enters the office, and changes his test scores, which were in an locked cabinet (the key for which was sitting on the desk), all inside the supposedly locked office. Definately this is more serious than changing the name on his test -- I'll concede you that, but this is still a simple B&E coupled with academic dishonesty.
Its bad, but its not 20 years in jail and a whopping fine bad. Its basic B&E charges plus expulsion.
As for an "attack on the integrity of public data"? Get a sense of perpective. Seriously, he changed his own fucking grades, he didn't orchestrate a stock market crash. What's next, fudging your tax return to save $500 in taxes is a terrorist attempt to destablise the national economy? And doing it two years in a row is organized crime?
Bottom line, these students deserve a criminal record showing the B&E, probation, a small fine, and expulsion from school. The fact that they used a computer instead of a lockpick shouldn't change the nature or punishment of their crime. That would be in line for a B&E to accomplish what they accomplished.
Yes, I would agree with your points that such white collar crimes are more severe and lasting in effect than robbing someone at gunpoint of a scant few material possessions.
If by agree you mean 'take polar opposite positions', then yes.
Affecting a lot of people a very little bit is less serious than affecting one person a lot, even if the aggregate of little bits adds up to more.
Stealing a penny from a million american's over the internet would be a serious crime, and should be severely punished. But breaking into someone's home, binding them, beating them, and walking off with their pin number, to ultimately steal $3000.00 is, however, the worse crime by far.
The white collar guy deserves punishment, have all his ill-gotten gains taken away, and then imprisoned and/or fined on top of that as punishment. But he is far less a threat to society than the thug.
Yes, they harm me more personally because they damage my capacity to act intellectually with their lies than the armed robber does.
Yes, I can see how a little bit of bad data about someones grades in a database might affect you ever so slightly more. Unless of course you are or even know the one traumatized by the robbery and are now afraid to go outside alone, at which point whether or not your coworker really got an 'C+' instead of an 'A-' is near bottom of your priorities.
Yes, I agree that it was an orchestrated scam and most definitely not an act of passion.
You think a thug robbing you at gunpoint is a crime of passion? I don't think 'act of passion' means what you think it does.
You want to find something *faster* than a 8800GT, is used (yeah right, at that performance level?!), and isn't stolen, and is much cheaper than retail to boot. Not going to happen.
-shrugs-
The 8800GT is something of an anomaly in the normal price/performance ratio, and its brand new so used isn't really an option. So yeah, I agree in this specific circumstance, you probably can't beat that card for less money without it being stolen parts.
But in general, you can.
That said, the OP could have used an 8800GT, and achieved 'faster' by overclocking a used slower processor or something. Even more likely the OP was just talking out of his ass when he said *faster*, but the core wisdom that you can build impressive gaming rigs for less money using used parts is entirely accurate.
Sounds justifiable to me, simply on the basis of what they did. Surreptitiously altering records affects everyone, doing it knowingly for personal gain is an affront to everyone alive and everyone who will ever live. You can't trust someone who has demonstrated that they are of so corrupt and self serving a nature to walk among decent people.
And what if they had done it by erasing the braniacs name of his test sheet and writing your own in its place?
"Surreptitiously altering records"? check.
"knowingly"? check.
"for personal gain"? check.
$250,000 fine and 20 years in the can?
An affront to everyone alive and everyone who will ever live?
Bearing in mind that beating somebody robbing you at gun point would net a far smaller sentence?
Hmmmm. No I don't see it.
A petty scam, and intellectual dishonesty. Maybe a small fine and suspension/expulsion from the school, and restoring the grades of course.
If you're talking about >40% off store prices, your goods are almost certainly stolen, since that is below even wholesale cost.
Unless the goods are used. When I sell parts to fund an upgrade I usually dump them for around half retail.
She finds a recipe and creates a candy bar dispensing machine which she leaves at the supermarket and forgets about for two years.
If that were the case several questions come to mind:
1) Why did they wait two years before acting? You'd think they could have removed the candy machine the following day, rather than wait 2 years before pouncing on her, when the 'potential damages' have racked up to astronomical levels.
2) If it took 2 years before they even noticed it, then it probably wasn't doing anywhere near $200,000 in damages. I mean, some guy rips me off a quarter million, I notice it.
3) P2p users number in the millions. Say there are 5 million p2p users each sharing 24 songs. If each one of them got charged $200,000 for their heinous crime, that would be 200,000 x 5,000,000 = 1,000,000,000. That's ONE TRILLION dollars. That's on par with global military spending. Do you really think the damages to the recording industry are really on the same scale as that?
And that's a LOW estimate. There are more p2p users by far than 5 million, and lots of them are hosting 100s even 1000's of songs instead of 24. The 'damages' based on 200,000 for 24 songs per person -- could well be in the 100's of trillions.
Now, sure, there is a 'punitive' component to this, but something isn't right when the amount of damages being done to your industry are an order of magnitude more than the industry is even worth.
I'm trying to encapsulate the RIAA's biggest complaint, is that the copies being made available are perfect exact replicas.
4) An Mp3 is not a perfect replica of a CD track. It is a decent facimile, but it is decidely imperfect. And the quality of songs on the internet are far from the best you can do with mp3. To carry on your recipe analagy, all the ingredients were rounded to the nearest pound, and 1 of them got left out completely.
This woman's crime deserves maybe a $2000. A couple hundred in real damages (which is probably about right), and some more to let her know that what she did was wrong. $2000 would send that message. What message does $200,000 send?
Stealing is a very different crime.
Yes it is. Stealing is a more serious crime. Someone is actually physically deprived of property.
it'd be like finding the recipe for a candy bar, and then making exact copies of them, and giving them away for free. When, you phrase it like that, it's hard to say, well, it was a 55 cent candy bar, so they should pay that much.
No it'd be like finding a the recipe for a candy bar, putting a note up at the local grocery store with the recipe printed on it, and then going home and forgetting about it for 2 years. Then getting busted for infringement. How much should she be assessed for that? Anyone who'd ever been to that grocery store might have made a copy... $200,000 seems fair to you? For the extreme magnitude of her crime?
(In fact her criminal intent here is even less, in the above scenario she would have had to actually post the note deliberately and consciously making it available -- with Kazaa sharing is automatic and on by default.)
Bear in mind that breaking into a house while the owners are out, stealing all the valuables, and setting it on fire would actually net you a lower sentence this what this heinous criminal did!!
So kind of like when you steal a candy bar from a store and the only punishment is to pay back the 55 cents for the candy bar?
Your right, its more than $.55. But what is the actual punishment for that? Is it it $200,000? No. I didn't think so either. Not even if you stole 24 of them. Not even if you stole 240 of them. Seems to me $220,000 is right out of line.
The way I see it is she paid $2,000 for the activity and she paid $220,000 as a penalty for trying to run and hide under the cloak of the anti-RIAA movement to get herself out of a jam
I see. So if you stole 24 candybars, and then plead not guilty, and tried to get sympathy because you stole them from WalMart who is disliked by a big chunk of society, so you tried to ride that wave of discontent -- THEN you should have to pay $220,000??
Sorry, nope still I don't see it. You still only stole 24 candybars. Your penalty should be based on what you actually did, not the defence strategy. If you want to punish her for "trying to hide under the cloak of the anti-RIAA movement" charge her separately with that, and convict her for it. Otherwise get bent. (Good luck with that by the way, since its not even remotely illegal. And besides the RIAA itself is a cloak the labels hide under to hide from any negative PR blowback for what they do while wearing that cloak.)
Actually, most buses are rated in standard SI units, not base-2, this is because the "M" actually arrives by way of the clock speed rather than the storage size which is (often) bytes.
For example: consider AGP1x, which is rated at 266MB/s:
This is arrived at by multiplying: 66MHz clock x 4 byte data path (32 bits) = 266MB/s
(Note: actually 66 x 4 = 264, we get 266 due to round off error. The clock speed is more like to 66.6MHz than actually 66MHz. And 266MB/s is really just twice as fast as 133MB/s, which is the speed rating of regular PCI.)
The point however is that the M comes from the *M*Hz, and Hz are measured in base-10. 66.6MHz is 66,600,000 Hz
66,600,000 cycles per second x 4 bytes per cyle = 266,400,000 or rounded 266MB/s
That said, I agree with you. Storage measured in bytes is, by defacto standard, measured in base-2, where M=2^20, not 10^3.
You're downloading over your 100mbit internet connection (100 * 10^6 bits per second) at 8000kilobit per second,
So far so good.
that would be 1000 kilobyte per second.
Er. No.
1000 kilobytes per second would be 1,024,000 bytes, and you are only moving 1,000,000 bytes, or 976.5 kilobytes.
bits are *normally* treated in base 10 and kilo/mega/giga refer to 10^3, 10^6, 10^9. A kilobit is 1000 bits.
bytes are *normally* treated in base 2 and kilo/mega/giga refer to 2^10, 2^20, 2^30 A kilobyte is 1024 bits.
Naturally that means you're writing 1000 kilobytes of data to you harddisk per second as well. And to all the anal people out there, we're overlooking cache issues, protocol overhead, retransmissions, and so on. We're looking at what speed we see in our downloading program.
Hate to break it to you but all the downloading programs I'm familiar with count bytes in base 2.
The fact is that storage is more or less the only area in computing where this error occurs.
The 'error' occurs whenever the unit is a byte. Few things other than data storage and occasionally data transmission speeds are measured in bytes. After all byte is a fundamentally a unit of storage. So it not surprising that most areas where it occurs are in storage.
Bytes are the standard unit in storage: RAM, ROM, PROM, EEPROM, Flash, CD, DVD, DAT, DLT, and even, historically, hard drives, back when they were still measured in megabytes. It wasn't until GB plus drives showed up that drive manufacturers started representing things in base 10.
Ahhh, what an awful dream. Ones and zeroes everywhere... and I thought I saw a two.
Which ironically actually made him more legitimate than the rest of them.
Its absolutely pathetic when a satirist making a parody of the election process process has more credibility than the average 'legitimate' candidate.
I guess you have never talked to a PC gamer with a decent gaming rig,
Er. I am one. I have one. And no, I don't talk to myself much.
200W is nothing and in many cases they keep their rig running 24x7.
A PC at idle uses a fraction of 200W, even a gamer's rig. Even those 'ridiculous' dual 8800GTX's in SLI with Raptor RAIDs and Audigy Platinums on OC'd core2duo don't use much power just sitting there, modern cpus step down their speed, most people have at least the monitor turn off, etc.
That said, yeah, a gamers PC running folding at home, especially an older Pentium D, or someone running the GPU edition can run 200W+. But that's not the point, this article was about the PS3.
Its much harder to say how much the average PC costs to run F@H, a pentium iii system probably sustains 50 to 60W. A core 2 duo probably sustains under 100W. Most PC's use far less than a PS3.
Besides, most extreme gamers don't run F@H on their rig, they don't want the over head or the memory footprint, and they tend to be more acutely aware of things like cpu utilisation, heat, fan speed, power cost, and while they might think its 'cool' they can process more work units per hour with their rig than someone else, they also generally don't want their overclocked cpu and gpu running at 100% utilisation 24x7 for years on end.
The PS3 on the other hand, is an appliance, like a VCR, and most people wouldn't think twice about leaving it on for a year or two.
Not every IT person is gutsy enough to stand up and say "no fucking way".
Not every IT person should. IT is a service industry. They need to make sure they are providing the service that is actually desired.
Downloading torrents is a pig on bandwidth, but unless bandwidth is cramped. So what?
Downloading from external email accounts may carry greater virus risks, but they are going to pick up the messages when they get the laptop home anyway, so the machine comes in infected tomorrow instead of this afternoon. Or they'll pick it up through some webmail account somewhere that you haven't blocked. Or they'll hook up their laptop to their cellphone/pda.
Some IT departments should say "no fucking way". But in a lot of them IT is supposed to simply be providing a secure reliable functional network. That doesn't necessarily mean locking it it down so hard that its reliability reaches 5 9s, and its so secure even the users can't get in half the time, while functionality is at the bare minimum specified in an SLA, while IT pats itself on the back for a job well done.
Meanwhile half the staff have resorted to personal laptops/pdas and cellular data plans because they can't get email from important customers through the company mail server, and they can't access web content they need through the company network without jumping through stupid hoops each and every time... and IT just stands around saying "no fucking way".
For every PHB manager drawing up pointless re-org charts and misusing buzzwords, and marketing moron promsing perpetual motion machines and obsessing over what color they should be, there is an IT-admin somewhere very effectively ensuring his network is as hostile, unfriendly, and as unusable as possible to the people trying to use it.
Like I said, Some IT departments should say "no fucking way". Some environments and situations DO demand that. But many of them say that a hell of a lot more often than is remotely justifiable.
Although, if you are running electric heating at your residence, 200W of heat from a PS3 costs the same as 200W of heat from the baseboard heater. One is a bit more useful, though.
;)
True. But almost nobody runs a baseboard heater year round 24 hours a day.
I suppose if you hooked up a thermostat on the other side of the room to the PS3 so it ran your PS3 folding@home when it was too cool, and only until the room reached the temperature you wanted you'd have a comparable solution.
You also would need to factor in the cost of that heat. If you're regular heat comes from a gas furnace the cost of electricity vs gas is relevant.
On the flipside, in summer, that's just extra heat your airconditioning needs to remove.
It's not "their". Results are published in peer-review journals (see here). Benefits go to all mankind.
That's great, but its still our money. And its in the hundreds per year(*) its a fair bit of our money too. If you want to donate hundreds per year that's certainly your perogative, its a good cause. But I have finite resources and if I'm going to spend hundreds on a charity, there are other charities I'd rather donate to...and they give tax receipts too.
(*) Folding at Home runs between $100 and $500 per year.
The PS3 runs a sustained 200W running folding @ home. That's 140kWh per month assuming you leave it on 24x7. Assuming a $0.12 kWh rate, you'll be paying ~$200 per year in electricity for folding at home. And 12 cents isn't "high"; its much higher in some places (Alaska, California, New York, most of Europe...), and lower in others like most of Canada, Tenessee, Iowa, etc...)
Check your local rates. And be sure to consider to consider usage type, and steppings. Most utilities charge resential more than industrial, and most have steps where the first X kwH is one price, while the next Y kwH is another higher price. Adding a 140kWH per month to your bill can easily bump you up a step. Even your fridge uses a FRACTION of what the ps3 running folding@home will.
You made so many points worth responding to, but let me just say this.
An OS is big and complicated. The more services, interfaces, options, libraries, etc that it provides the harder it becomes to ensure its defect free.
And you are suggesting making them even bigger (allowing applications to move from one to the next, allowing multiple windowing systems to run at once, allowing multiple applications to bind to the same port number on different ip addresses even if one of them is ill-behaved and assumes it can bind to all of them, with management tools that can resolve/allocate hardware to applications, etc, etc, etc.
Yet simultaneously you are insisting that they have no defects to ensure sandboxes can't be escaped, etc.
Its a beautiful dream.
But virtualization solves the problem more elegantly:
1) They are small. So defects are easier to contain.
2) They don't require operating systems and applications to live up to your standards of 'goodness'.
3) They are backwards compatible with everything we already have.
4) They work today, your 'dream' would take years to realize.
5) They are future proof - even if we came up with a standard, how would we cope with competing standards, proprietary extensions to the standards, updates to the standard...
I still amuse myself from time to time thinking, "Heck, if we virtualize OS software, why don't we go one step further and virtualize virtualization software! A whole new untapped market!"
Actually the above is likely to happen.
Seriously, though, if applications and OSs were structured differently, there would be no reason for "virtualization".
Not really. It would look different but we'd still need it.
Consider if the hardware abstraction provided by virtualization had been there all along, and was standardised, so you could install a HAL, and then an OS, and then your applications. In theory, the HAL could support multiple OSes, so the HAL would have to provide more than basic 'memory management', and decisions would have to be made on how to provide each OS a 'video' card, while still allowing hardware acceleration, etc.
Such a HAL would look a lot like VMWare ESX, except that instead of providing virtual hardware to the OS on top, it would provide a standardized HAL API.
Of course, over time, we'd improve the HAL, and different OSes would require different HALs, and we'd need to have a HAL that could host the different HALs...
(After all, isn't the OS supposed to be the "virtualization" between applications and hardware in the first place?)
That's just one small facet of operating systems. Other facets are thread and memory management, common libraries and services including everything from providing an api for user interface (the windowing system, and window widgets like buttons) to providing encryption services, and network stacks like TCP/IP.
It's not clear to me what problem is being solved by having virtual OSX.
Same problems as virtualization has always solved.
The ability to deploy different versions of the same services on the same ports without deploying a new box.
The ability to run different versions of OSX on the same box.
Server consolidation.
Testing/debugging environments.
etc, etc.
Hey, Wing Commander was pretty good. [ srsly ]
I really liked the sonar pings. And also when they pushed the wreckage off the landing strip and instead of floating away, it fell "down".
If you are willing to spend that kind of money ...
either money is not an object
I wouldn't call a 2k PC unusually expensive. Hell, its same price range as the imacs.
you won't mind the time and effort to build a custom gaming rig, which will always be cheaper.
It isn't specifically about price although getting decent value for your money is an important factor. Its about getting the right hardware. Apple won't sell users the platform they want. They don't want anything particularly special - they want a core2duo in a tower configuration. If apple offered something like that at price consistent with their other platforms, it would be suitable.
The imac is suitable hardware specs at a suitable price, but the form factor is wrong; its not a tower; its a notebook designed for the desktop. The MacPro is the wrong platform, but the right form factor - Dual Xeon's and ECC RAM is overpriced overkill.
The MacPro is expensive, yes - but you were talkign ABILITY and not EXPENSE.
You should read versatile less pedantically. The expense of the product makes it an unsuitable platform, even though its technically feasible.
In my experience people either build a cheap system whose needs are met by something like a mini or iMac already, or they are building Uber Expensive Gaming Rig in which case you are talking MacPro money anyway!
Then you don't have much experience. Most gaming rigs clock in the 2k range. Yes, "uber expensive" stuff goes well beyond that, but you can get a fast Core2Duo, 8800GTX, 2GB RAM, with a raptor hard drives, and a 500GB secondary drive, XP Pro or Vista Ultimate, and a premium powersupply for ~2k without really trying. And that's roughly the sweet spot for gamers and value conscious overclockers today. (sure there's variation, OCing Core2Quads Q6600 to 3GHz and beyond is popular too, and the 8800GTS is a cheaper video solution, some people opt for 4GB of RAM, but its mostly in that ballpark of 2k.
500 for CPU/Mobo (E6850 and a reputable mobo from Asus or MSI or your brand of choice)
200 for RAM 2GB (2x1GB)
50 for DVDRW
150 for P/S brand name stuff, good quality
100 for case
600 for vid card say an 8800GTS or upper end ATI 2900XT
500 for Hard drives a pair of 250GB raptors
100 misc aftermarket cooling fan, floppy drive maybe, get a sexier case, whatever...
-----
2200
As you can see the above system is by no means cheap. Premium parts all round, not 'take my money cuz I'm stupid' (except for maybe the video card, but hey, it IS a gaming rig. You could still build a very serviceable gaming rig for considerably less by dropping into a cheap case/ps, using value ram, dropping to 7200rpm hard drives, and going with an 8800GTS.
Now lets try and build my 'respectable' gaming rig on a Mac platform. imac and mini are right out because the video card upgrade simply is not an option period. That leaves the Power Mac.
So we start with a $2500 machine; remember, my rig was 2200. So were at 300 premium and we haven't even started! Right off the bat the cpu is a problem. 2x 2.66GHz core2duo "xeon". nice on paper, but utterly useless... a single 3GHz core2duo E6850 would benchmark faster in games. But you can't get that. To get close to that on a PowerMac you have to get a pair of 3Ghz 2core Xeons for another $800. ouch.
The apple store doesn't offer fast drives, so we keep the 250GB one, and have to add the raptors or 500GB drives at home. Paying $129 to upgrade to a 500GB is a rip... you can get a whole drive for that much. And Apple charges $329 for the second drive. Robbery. Budget $500 for a pair of raptors for when it gets home.
Next up video: nothing but shit 7300GTs from Apple. So take that and toss it, budget 600 for a 8800GTX when it gets home.
Next up RAM. 1GB on 2x512. WTF who spends that much on a machine and gets 1GB? I want 2GB minimum and Apple screws you there... instead of 2x1GB its 4x512MB. WTF?! There's just no winning with these clowns. And its ECC RAM... so good luck on the OC front. But going with their 2GB option adds another $300 to the price. At least its got 8 slots so we can add more down the road without a total loss on these.
Total cost of a the rig on a PowerMac:
2500 base
800 cpu to 3GHz
500 hard drives added at home
600 vid card added at home
300 memory to 2GB
----
4700 total
$4700 for a system that STILL won't benchmark as fast as a $2200 PC in any game. Sure its got an extra xeon sitting on the board that I didn't need, but its not doing me any good and I'd just as soon sell it. But what's the point its $320 new, and would go for maybe $200 used, if I could find a buyer who actually needed one. $4500 doesn't really do me any favors. I suppose I could have gotten the pair of 2.66's and tried selling both of them to fund a single 3.2 Xe