You fail to account for the people who ONLY buy something because they pirated it. A lot of "pirates" will download a movie that they don't think they will like, watch it, see that they like it and then go see it in theaters or purchase the DVD.
I'm a little skeptical. How was this survey conducted? I don't exactly walk around with the proof of purchase of my CDs/DVDs in my pocket. Hell, I don't even keep the receipts after I see that the disc is free of defects (playing/watching it). How did these people prove that they had proof of purchase?
"To play devil's advocate, they didn't exactly lie here. This "GfK" just didn't publish a report that came to the opposite conclusions they were paid to reach. That's not quite "lying" and it's not quite the MPAA/RIAA."
From the article it doesn't appear that the company actually withheld the study. "Unfortunately, we will never get to read the official version of the study as the unnamed client who paid for it to be created has decided it should not see a release. The reason given for shelving it was that the contents proved “unpleasant.”"
They were contracted to perform a study, they performed a study, they reported their conclusions to the client free of bias, the end. The client decided not to release the study.
"The client" is being unethical by witholding evidence that is contrary to their own conclusions. Of course, making shit up is pretty much standard procedure for anything the RIAA/MPAA (likely clients) says, and the word "ethics" probably isn't even in their vocabulary.
You might be able to call GfK scummy or unethical if the study revealed something that impacted the "safety, health and welfare of the public", but that's not the case here.
A ban against this absolutely SHOULD NOT be in the constitution. It would be ridiculous to try and imagine every single thing that could possibly be invented in the future to infringe on our rights. The constitution lays down rights such as "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures". ANYTHING that violates these rights is unconstitutional. I think the 4th amendment does a fine job here.
Now, anything in "plain view" is obviously not protected by the 4th amendment. Seems to me that although your iris is in "plain view", specific details about it are not. Anything that requires a $3000 lens assembly attached to a sophisticated piece of electronic equipment cannot possibly be regarded as "in plain view" by any reasonable person. The problem is that lawyers and police officers are usually far from reasonable and generally have little, if any, common sense.
Where I live (and I suspect most places) there are laws that allow the cyclist to treat a red light as a stop sign for exactly this reason. The key phrase here is "STOP SIGN". As in, you still have to stop, look both ways, etc. before proceeding through.
Most cyclists argue "I can ride through without stopping because I can't trigger the sensor", which is ridiculous.
"Sure, but I think the difference is I am very aware of my surroundings"
I hear this argument all too often. "I'm a cyclist and I hate drivers for breaking the law, but it's OK for me to break the law because I'm a better cyclist than they are a driver". Your argument rests solely on your flawed belief that you're better than everyone else.
"The consequences for me NOT seeing a car are just too severe" You imply that the consequences for a driver failing to see another car are negligible. Do you seriously believe that drivers always walk away from car v. car collisions?
There's generally a special exception for farm and construction vehicles just about everywhere in the country. When in the street they're required to have an orange reflective triangle on the back of the vehicle.
Absolutely not. A biker has the capacity to cause an accident, which is a danger to EVERYONE involved. Yeah, the guy in the car is going to be a lot better off than the guy on the bike, but it doesn't mean the guy in the car is going to suffer no injuries whatsoever.
Also, a distracted cyclists forces a driver to make a choice: hit and kill the cyclist or hit and injure people in an adjacent car but spare the guy on the bike. It's obviously far better to rear-end a slow moving car in the next lane than slam into a cyclist at full speed. Overall the number and severity of the injuries are reduced, but not even close to eliminated.
Don't for a fucking second think that a cyclist playing around in the street isn't a danger to other people.
"Basically you will not be surprised to know that light travels at different speeds in glass or whatever depending on its frequency... that is pretty much how a prism makes a rainbow"
Nope, try again. Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prism_%28optics%29 Quote: The refractive index of many materials (such as glass) varies with the wavelength or color of the light used, a phenomenon known as dispersion. This causes light of different colors to be refracted differently and to leave the prism at different angles, creating an effect similar to a rainbow.
All light travels at the same speed in the speed in the same medium. (All light in air travels the same speed as different color light in the same air). Light slows down in various mediums, but all by the same amount.
Most of them want to retain the copyright so they can charge you obscene amounts of money to get the prints. They want you to have to pay them for every single copy of every picture that you want. Of course, they bury this in a 20 page contract filled with obtuse legal jargon so that it's hard to find. You only figure this out after your wedding, after all the pictures have been taken, and after your photographer has told you that you'll be paying $20 for every 5x7 copy of every picture you want. They won't give you the negatives and every picture comes stamped on the back with "do not duplicate, property of ".
Your argument about the photographer's artistic vision would be valid if you weren't paying the photographer for their time. In the case of a wedding you're paying the photographer to use their artistic vision, you're paying them for their time. YOU hired them, YOU paid them for their time, those photos are YOURS. There is absolutely no reason the photographer should retain the copyright on the photos. A wedding is different from a photographer taking their own time to go and photograph a public event. Think of it this way, the photographer wouldn't have the opportunity to photograph your private wedding if they weren't invited. It's not like you're trying to be evil by taking away the rights to their photos for something that's open to the public.
Obviously they should be allowed to put them in their portfolio and whatnot, but I believe that there's an exception in copyright law exactly for this purpose. If not, then the contract should address this. Regardless, the photographer does not need to have full control of the copyright just to put them in their portfolio.
I have a hard time believing that it took siemens this long to develop a fix. The fact that stuxnet was designed to compromise siemens PLCs and how it accomplished this has been known for several months now. There's no excuse not to push out a (working) patch within a few months of a huge 0-day being discovered. To have not fixed this by now, especially given the critical applications some PLCs are used in, suggests negligence.
Responsible disclosure says that you should give the responsible party a reasonable amount of time to fix the problem before disclosing it. Responsible disclosure is NOT keeping your mouth shut indefinitely so as to allow the responsible party to ignore the problem for as long as possible.
It's not that he was some lazy idiot who didn't bother to fill out a report. It's that he was in another country and COULDN'T fill out a report. My point is that the assertion that this guy is lazy or that he didn't really care about his laptop is nonsense.
Bullshit. Making part of something open source does not mean that the entire program is open source. "Prey" consists of a client application and a server application. Without one the other is worthless and if both parts are not open then neither is open.
I might as well publish a closed-source application and claim it as open-source because I used the printf() function, which is free and open. Part of my application is open therefore the entire thing is open.
Why don't you go read the article yourself. He was in ANOTHER COUNTRY for a few days when he figured out who the thief was. The police would only allow him to submit a report in person.
Why not just encrypt the important data (truecrypt container, for example) rather than encrypting the entire freaking disc? That way your data is safe and you stand a chance of recovering your laptop. I prefer not to write-off stolen $1200 machines if I can avoid it. Also, if you value your time at $100/hr (I don't know about you, but that's way more than I get paid) then you can spend up to 12 hours recovering your laptop (calling police, filling out reports, etc.) and still come out ahead economically.
It actually makes a lot of sense not to have a strong password on the laptop, here's why:
All of this tracking software is software based so if you use strong passwords and full drive encryption then the first thing the thieves will do is rip out the drive, thus disabling your tracking software, and you'll lose any chance of recovering it. On the other hand, if you put no password on it (or tape the password to the screen) then the thief isn't going to bother ripping out the hard drive and your tracking software will continue to function. Basically, you want to make sure that your laptop is usable by a thief so that the thief will use your laptop. If they don't then you have no chance of catching them. (Now obviously you don't want a thief getting into any sensitive data, so that should be encrypted (but not the entire disc)).
All of this is assuming that you're trying to protect your hardware. If you're only concerned with protecting your data then laptop theft is really a non-issue because all sensitive data should be backed up elsewhere anyway.
The article is attacking this from the wrong direction. The question "Are geeks better adults?" is misleading. They really mean "Are socially awkward people better adults?"
Geeks are better adults, but not because they're shunned from the high school social circles. They're better adults because they're smart, they think about things before they do them, and they don't often go off half-cocked over inflammatory bullshit. Someone who pays attention in high school science class is going to be a better adult than some idiot jock who spends his time making fun of other people rather than learning. Geeks make better adults because they realize that being able to balance your checkbook is more important than getting a ball to the other side of a field when the majority of the country doesn't realize this.
It just so happens that being smart and paying attention in class are "uncool" and these actions make you unpopular.
"I wonder why some 20 years old would think he had the merest grasp of what would or would not be "useful" to him.'"
Probably because when you're 20 years old you know what you want to do in life. You start college at 18, by your logic every college student should major in every available discipline because there's just no way these naive people could have the slightest idea of what they might ever want to do in life.
If this student wanted to be a business major then there's relay no reason for him to be versed in arbitrary novels. Now, there's not really any merit to his claim that plagiarizing a paper actually requires worthwhile skills, but reading "great" novels may very well be equally useless. I know that English teachers (I assume you are one based on your post) have a hard time understanding that various "great works" of writing might not actually have any relevance to every single person on the face of this planet; but at you really aren't in any kind of position to dictate what knowledge a 20 year old student needs in later life outside of his chosen discipline.
"If you don't like it, why? I like my life, where people who commit crimes are actually tracked down by the state and held."
Your argument is a fallacy because it justifies literally anything and everything that helps track down criminals, up to and including surgically implanting GPS tracking devices in every person.
Example: "If you don't like [gps trackers], why? I like my life, where people who commit crimes are actually tracked down by the state and held."
No, this isn't a slippery slope: your argument fails to differentiate between license plate cameras and more invasive tactics.
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You fail to account for the people who ONLY buy something because they pirated it. A lot of "pirates" will download a movie that they don't think they will like, watch it, see that they like it and then go see it in theaters or purchase the DVD.
I'm a little skeptical. How was this survey conducted? I don't exactly walk around with the proof of purchase of my CDs/DVDs in my pocket. Hell, I don't even keep the receipts after I see that the disc is free of defects (playing/watching it). How did these people prove that they had proof of purchase?
"To play devil's advocate, they didn't exactly lie here. This "GfK" just didn't publish a report that came to the opposite conclusions they were paid to reach. That's not quite "lying" and it's not quite the MPAA/RIAA."
From the article it doesn't appear that the company actually withheld the study.
"Unfortunately, we will never get to read the official version of the study as the unnamed client who paid for it to be created has decided it should not see a release. The reason given for shelving it was that the contents proved “unpleasant.”"
They were contracted to perform a study, they performed a study, they reported their conclusions to the client free of bias, the end. The client decided not to release the study.
"The client" is being unethical by witholding evidence that is contrary to their own conclusions. Of course, making shit up is pretty much standard procedure for anything the RIAA/MPAA (likely clients) says, and the word "ethics" probably isn't even in their vocabulary.
You might be able to call GfK scummy or unethical if the study revealed something that impacted the "safety, health and welfare of the public", but that's not the case here.
A ban against this absolutely SHOULD NOT be in the constitution. It would be ridiculous to try and imagine every single thing that could possibly be invented in the future to infringe on our rights. The constitution lays down rights such as "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures". ANYTHING that violates these rights is unconstitutional. I think the 4th amendment does a fine job here.
Now, anything in "plain view" is obviously not protected by the 4th amendment. Seems to me that although your iris is in "plain view", specific details about it are not. Anything that requires a $3000 lens assembly attached to a sophisticated piece of electronic equipment cannot possibly be regarded as "in plain view" by any reasonable person. The problem is that lawyers and police officers are usually far from reasonable and generally have little, if any, common sense.
It's just "PIN", not "PIN number".
Where I live (and I suspect most places) there are laws that allow the cyclist to treat a red light as a stop sign for exactly this reason. The key phrase here is "STOP SIGN". As in, you still have to stop, look both ways, etc. before proceeding through.
Most cyclists argue "I can ride through without stopping because I can't trigger the sensor", which is ridiculous.
"Sure, but I think the difference is I am very aware of my surroundings"
I hear this argument all too often. "I'm a cyclist and I hate drivers for breaking the law, but it's OK for me to break the law because I'm a better cyclist than they are a driver". Your argument rests solely on your flawed belief that you're better than everyone else.
"The consequences for me NOT seeing a car are just too severe"
You imply that the consequences for a driver failing to see another car are negligible. Do you seriously believe that drivers always walk away from car v. car collisions?
There's generally a special exception for farm and construction vehicles just about everywhere in the country. When in the street they're required to have an orange reflective triangle on the back of the vehicle.
Absolutely not. A biker has the capacity to cause an accident, which is a danger to EVERYONE involved. Yeah, the guy in the car is going to be a lot better off than the guy on the bike, but it doesn't mean the guy in the car is going to suffer no injuries whatsoever.
Also, a distracted cyclists forces a driver to make a choice: hit and kill the cyclist or hit and injure people in an adjacent car but spare the guy on the bike. It's obviously far better to rear-end a slow moving car in the next lane than slam into a cyclist at full speed. Overall the number and severity of the injuries are reduced, but not even close to eliminated.
Don't for a fucking second think that a cyclist playing around in the street isn't a danger to other people.
Mark Zuckerberg, a person owning a company that's a direct competitor to Google+, has bad things to say about Google+? NO WAY! THIS IS HEADLINE NEWS!
Of course he's going to claim that he has privacy concerns, what a better way to slander your competitors without getting in trouble.
"Basically you will not be surprised to know that light travels at different speeds in glass or whatever depending on its frequency... that is pretty much how a prism makes a rainbow"
Nope, try again. Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prism_%28optics%29
Quote:
The refractive index of many materials (such as glass) varies with the wavelength or color of the light used, a phenomenon known as dispersion. This causes light of different colors to be refracted differently and to leave the prism at different angles, creating an effect similar to a rainbow.
All light travels at the same speed in the speed in the same medium. (All light in air travels the same speed as different color light in the same air). Light slows down in various mediums, but all by the same amount.
""Tribal" artwork is owned by the tribes who used them for millennia"
Even with the ridiculous extensions in copyright law constantly being passed anything owned "for millennia" is in the public domain by now.
Most of them want to retain the copyright so they can charge you obscene amounts of money to get the prints. They want you to have to pay them for every single copy of every picture that you want. Of course, they bury this in a 20 page contract filled with obtuse legal jargon so that it's hard to find. You only figure this out after your wedding, after all the pictures have been taken, and after your photographer has told you that you'll be paying $20 for every 5x7 copy of every picture you want. They won't give you the negatives and every picture comes stamped on the back with "do not duplicate, property of ".
Your argument about the photographer's artistic vision would be valid if you weren't paying the photographer for their time. In the case of a wedding you're paying the photographer to use their artistic vision, you're paying them for their time. YOU hired them, YOU paid them for their time, those photos are YOURS. There is absolutely no reason the photographer should retain the copyright on the photos. A wedding is different from a photographer taking their own time to go and photograph a public event.
Think of it this way, the photographer wouldn't have the opportunity to photograph your private wedding if they weren't invited. It's not like you're trying to be evil by taking away the rights to their photos for something that's open to the public.
Obviously they should be allowed to put them in their portfolio and whatnot, but I believe that there's an exception in copyright law exactly for this purpose. If not, then the contract should address this. Regardless, the photographer does not need to have full control of the copyright just to put them in their portfolio.
At a decent company yeah, that's probably how it would go.
At Dell the response would probably be "Have you tried rebooting the computer?"
I have a hard time believing that it took siemens this long to develop a fix. The fact that stuxnet was designed to compromise siemens PLCs and how it accomplished this has been known for several months now. There's no excuse not to push out a (working) patch within a few months of a huge 0-day being discovered. To have not fixed this by now, especially given the critical applications some PLCs are used in, suggests negligence.
Responsible disclosure says that you should give the responsible party a reasonable amount of time to fix the problem before disclosing it. Responsible disclosure is NOT keeping your mouth shut indefinitely so as to allow the responsible party to ignore the problem for as long as possible.
It's not that he was some lazy idiot who didn't bother to fill out a report. It's that he was in another country and COULDN'T fill out a report. My point is that the assertion that this guy is lazy or that he didn't really care about his laptop is nonsense.
You shouldn't have to lock anything. People shouldn't take what isn't theirs.
Obviously he's not speaking in terms of reality, but rather what should ideally be the case.
Bullshit. Making part of something open source does not mean that the entire program is open source. "Prey" consists of a client application and a server application. Without one the other is worthless and if both parts are not open then neither is open.
I might as well publish a closed-source application and claim it as open-source because I used the printf() function, which is free and open. Part of my application is open therefore the entire thing is open.
Why don't you go read the article yourself. He was in ANOTHER COUNTRY for a few days when he figured out who the thief was. The police would only allow him to submit a report in person.
Why not just encrypt the important data (truecrypt container, for example) rather than encrypting the entire freaking disc? That way your data is safe and you stand a chance of recovering your laptop. I prefer not to write-off stolen $1200 machines if I can avoid it. Also, if you value your time at $100/hr (I don't know about you, but that's way more than I get paid) then you can spend up to 12 hours recovering your laptop (calling police, filling out reports, etc.) and still come out ahead economically.
It actually makes a lot of sense not to have a strong password on the laptop, here's why:
All of this tracking software is software based so if you use strong passwords and full drive encryption then the first thing the thieves will do is rip out the drive, thus disabling your tracking software, and you'll lose any chance of recovering it. On the other hand, if you put no password on it (or tape the password to the screen) then the thief isn't going to bother ripping out the hard drive and your tracking software will continue to function. Basically, you want to make sure that your laptop is usable by a thief so that the thief will use your laptop. If they don't then you have no chance of catching them. (Now obviously you don't want a thief getting into any sensitive data, so that should be encrypted (but not the entire disc)).
All of this is assuming that you're trying to protect your hardware. If you're only concerned with protecting your data then laptop theft is really a non-issue because all sensitive data should be backed up elsewhere anyway.
The article is attacking this from the wrong direction. The question "Are geeks better adults?" is misleading. They really mean "Are socially awkward people better adults?"
Geeks are better adults, but not because they're shunned from the high school social circles. They're better adults because they're smart, they think about things before they do them, and they don't often go off half-cocked over inflammatory bullshit. Someone who pays attention in high school science class is going to be a better adult than some idiot jock who spends his time making fun of other people rather than learning. Geeks make better adults because they realize that being able to balance your checkbook is more important than getting a ball to the other side of a field when the majority of the country doesn't realize this.
It just so happens that being smart and paying attention in class are "uncool" and these actions make you unpopular.
"I wonder why some 20 years old would think he had the merest grasp of what would or would not be "useful" to him.'"
Probably because when you're 20 years old you know what you want to do in life. You start college at 18, by your logic every college student should major in every available discipline because there's just no way these naive people could have the slightest idea of what they might ever want to do in life.
If this student wanted to be a business major then there's relay no reason for him to be versed in arbitrary novels. Now, there's not really any merit to his claim that plagiarizing a paper actually requires worthwhile skills, but reading "great" novels may very well be equally useless. I know that English teachers (I assume you are one based on your post) have a hard time understanding that various "great works" of writing might not actually have any relevance to every single person on the face of this planet; but at you really aren't in any kind of position to dictate what knowledge a 20 year old student needs in later life outside of his chosen discipline.
"If you don't like it, why? I like my life, where people who commit crimes are actually tracked down by the state and held."
Your argument is a fallacy because it justifies literally anything and everything that helps track down criminals, up to and including surgically implanting GPS tracking devices in every person.
Example:
"If you don't like [gps trackers], why? I like my life, where people who commit crimes are actually tracked down by the state and held."
No, this isn't a slippery slope: your argument fails to differentiate between license plate cameras and more invasive tactics.
Considering that exposing yourself is a crime, your argument is moot.