...that someone in the states could create their own video, have a friend post it to YouTube, have the creator demand it be taken down, and then when Viacom get a copy of the taken down videos as they request in TFA they be sued for copyright infringement? Of course it may be that they only want videos taken down that belong to them, but I'm not so sure reading the article.
I'm sure it's one of those things that'll simply never work because there's no doubt some legal protection covering them if it's been handed over as part of a court order but just intrigued to know if anyone can answer for sure?
I disagree, just because an application has more reserved memory doesn't mean that Windows has guaranteed that memory for the application should things get tight. To give an example, say browser 1 has been allocated 50mb and browser 2 30mb, browser 1 appears to be more of a memory hog. If however 25mb of that has been set aside by Windows as an optimization by the memory manager whilst browser 2 has avoided this option using clever programming tricks there's no reason Windows wont reallocate the extra 25mb should things get tight. As such browser 1 isn't necessarily hogging that 50mb of memory, in fact it's only hogging 25mb whilst browser 2 really is hogging 30mb.
Reasons for doing this? Well, some of the criticism of Firefox 2 being a memory whore were down to Windows being over generous with the memory it allowed it. Some complaints were valid reports of memory leaks of course, but it wouldn't be unsurprising to hear that the Mozilla devs in charge of memory management of the browser got a little ticked off at people using an unfair memory metric in comparison of their browser last time and decided to fiddle it for the reporting a little this time. The question is if they did, how far did they take it? Does IE/Opera take it to the same level if they did?
I'm not saying any of this must have happened, but as the OP suggested, the experiment is worthless if it didn't take these factors into account and didn't properly measure true memory usage. It really is the difference between an interesting experiment and an outright useless experiment so I think it's a fair critique.
Better visual recognition and understanding of natural language would certainly aid us in producing better systems but I'm not convinced they'll allow us to simply create intelligent robots.
The search for an intelligent machine requires more than this, it's not just about sensing your environment of which vision is just one facet that is for example (i.e. blind people are still intelligent).
I've had a quick read of your website and whilst interesting I'm not sure that it's entirely correct, I think it oversimplifies the problem.
Recognising things visually is much more difficult than you might think, the system can be taught to recognise something but can it still do so if it changes colour? Can it recognise an object as being the same object it knew previously if it's broken? Can it for example recognise some smashed pieces of clay on the floor as the clay pot it was stood next to previously?
What about context? One man's football is another man's soccer ball. How do you go about applying context?
I understand that you suggest visual recognition is a starting point and other things can be built from here and I think visual recognition is an important area of research but I don't think it's really going to lead to strong AI in the way you approach the problem. Your proposed solution is too rigid for a fluid world, it's fairly similar to the case of symbolic vs. natural AI approaches whereby symbolic AI is great for solving some problems, it's limited in scope, it's not fluid or dynamic enough to solve some problems or lead eventually to strong AI. This is particularly the case when you compare to natural approaches like neural networks whereby pattern recognition can emerge through the processes that govern the system itself rather than be hard programmed or taught directly.
Aside from this critique however, I do feel it's a good project, I just don't agree that it's a path to strong AI as the text on your site completely side-steps some of the complex issues that have arisen through debate of the possibility of strong AI.
May I suggest though that perhaps a better way of doing things would not be to recognise objects simply by shape and dimensions but to also ensure recognition by texture, mass, colour and so forth? There is obviously more to recognition than just shape because as mentioned even a broken vase can be recognised by us as humans even though it's shape has changed completely. Any approach has to take all factors of an object into account and accept that no particular factor is necessarily fixed. Of course this again is even less straightforward because much classification that we as humans perform for things such as materials depend on past experience so this type of recognition has to be based on previous knowledge that is known to be correct (as far as our experience tells us!).
A system that performs set tasks isn't necessarily intelligent nor does it necessarily require intelligence. Or to put it another way, just because humans perform some tasks doesn't mean that task requires intelligence to perform.
Intelligence is defined by the likes of free thought, the ability to learn from mistakes, come up with ideas, adapt fluidly to changing situations and so on. If it's not capable of making mistakes it's not capable of learning how to deal with the unpredictable.
What you're after isn't really intelligence, just run of the mill systems capable of performing more complex tasks (or not in your case, systems can already solve the scenario you describe). The grey area here is weak AI, which is born of the fruits of AI research yet generally offers no more than ways of solving problems that classic approaches couldn't.
The original post looks like it's after projects that are aiming to advance our understanding of the possibility of strong AI which is simply not the best tool for the solution you describe any more than error prone humans are.
But seeing as it's impossible without massively intrusive physical surveillance of every person to actually connect a person to an IP address downloading pirated materials then they're not doing it the old fashioned way, nor are they necessarily finding and punishing people actually breaking the law.
What about someone hijacking another person's wi-fi, which lets face it on most consumer wireless routers has no security option that isn't breakable in about 5 minutes? What if warning letters/e-mails are similarly intercepted? Some innocent person is getting cut off whilst the perpetrator simply drives down the road to the next victim.
What about public access terminals? What about businesses?
The problems are NAT and the fact that anyone can sit down at any PC or connect to a free node on the network be it wireless or wired in the majority of places that don't have and can't afford the security measures to prevent such things.
The fact is without catching people red handed then they can't really catch the people who are actually guilty and there's the old fashioned police work you talk about - actually doing proper investigations to catch people, unfortunately however this aint what's happening and as such your suggestion that what they plan for is old fashioned police work is simply false. What they're in fact doing is as with all these plans, the copyright holder monitors torrent swarms and the likes, submits IPs to the relevant ISPs and the ISPs do their three strikes. There's no burden of proof that the copyright holders really did catch people in the process other than text and image based logs, both of which are easily faked and doctored and then there's no evidence whatsoever that the person who gets kicked off is the person that's guilty.
Connecting the virtual/real world isn't simple, but this is why legislation that takes such extreme measures also can't be rushed. They're trying to get these laws done and dusted in fairly short times but they're not following any kind of technical consultation process meaning these laws are different to many laws that are passed in that they're some of the first laws to do away with the burden of proof and are essentially deciding people are guilty based on evidence that would be entirely inadmissible as evidence for other crimes.
The problem isn't going after piracy itself, I think people understand, including many pirates themselves that what they're doing is wrong, but doing away with due process and simply being too lazy to find a proper way of handling the problem is even worse because many, many innocent people will be caught by this. Most likely more than for any other law ever set.
If this becomes law in the UK it's even worse as pensioners are having their food delivery services removed as a cost cutting measure and are being told to order online, internet access is becoming essential for homework and tax returns will shortly have to be filed online only. On one hand they're making the internet as essential as the telephone, running water and electricity whilst on the other they're suggesting it's something that doesn't matter and can be taken away at the say-so of some random person working for a record company without any real proof requirements.
I thought the project sounded quite interesting, but then I clicked to read more and saw this:
1. Excessive time spent by young people playing computer games on the internet.
2. Young people committing digital crimes on the internet.
3. A lack of professionals who work with networks and computer security.
Sorry, but it's failed already. Approaching the problem by suggesting teens favourite pasttime is somehow wrong and a problem is idiotic to say the least, it stinks of an arrogant older generation having a problem with "kids today". I'd argue point 2 is rather interesting too, could it possibly be hinting at the download of MP3s, movies and the like?
Before the internet kids used to just watch TV all the time, I'm sure many decades ago they used to go out, and judging from stories I've heard from older folks they did and they used to fire catapults and play cricket, regularly breaking people's windows and the likes in the process. Kids who aren't sat at home doing something nowadays are all too often out on the streets with no parental supervision, plenty of alcohol and a nice bit of vandalism.
Yet somehow kids spending a lot of time playing online games is somehow a problem? At least with something like WoW you're socialising in a way that causes no trouble to anyone else outside the context of the game.
If they want to convince kids to look towards a career in IT security then a better approach would be to integrate what kids enjoy, not fight it. Explain where exploits come from for games, how they're developed, how they can be protected against. Explain why having your account hacked or leaked by the game provider is a bad thing and a severe privacy breach don't approach the topic telling kids how bad they are and how the things they do are wrong in the eyes of the author.
You're not going to engage kids unless you work with them, work against them and they'll ignore you and you'll fail, spectacularly.
It is if they're the ones stopping you reaching the speed they advertised.
How would you feel if hard drive manufacturers didn't give you all the drive space they advertised or if your new sports car couldn't really run at the advertised max speed all the time? oh, wait...
Seriously though, living in the UK where we have ADSL max and I get advertised as being allowed up to 8mbps broadband but living in an area I can only get 2mbps is one thing. When the ISP then only lets me have 512kbps if I'm lucky half the time despite me getting shafted harder than most people the rest of the time it's a whole different matter, it's a kick in the nads. They really need to rethink their business plan if not only can they not supply what they're selling, but if they then can't even supply 1/4th and can in fact only supply 1/16th of what they're selling and even less than that with some ISPs.
This sort of scenario is one of the few where I think plea bargains are probably a good thing. The rest of the time they seem rather a stupid idea to me.
If the guy isn't willing to let hundreds of people have their data back then throw the book at him, if he's at very least decent enough to give it up then cut his sentence a fair bit.
Quite why an article could be titled "The truth about..." when it's well, not actually the truth but just mere speculation.
Speculation that is well known to be false and could've been showed up as such with a quick look at the XBox 360 specs which are available in many places that I'm sure Google would oblige to discover.
The issue has already been outed as being to do with cheap solder iirc that simply couldn't stay put under the heat of the system over extended periods of time.
Does the US not have an army/navy/air cadet force as an alternative to the scouts?
Playing with proper military kit like L98A1s, LSWs and getting to sit in challengers (I was tank regiment) and getting flights in Lynx helicopters, NBC suits as well as learning important skills like camouflage and concealment, first aid, map and compass like the scouts was certainly more fun than the scouts could ever have been! Whilst the military has always discriminated against homosexuals it was never an issue in cadets, they had no problem with a couple of gay kids that were in it and religion was certainly never anything that mattered.
I've heard tales of air cadets getting to have flying lessons and go up in hercules also, I'm not sure what toys the naval cadets got to play with, presumably they let them on some of the ships for tours but I couldn't say for sure.
The only downside was that you had to do drill and learn to march properly or face getting shouted at by a still serving or ex-army major which when you're an adult is one thing but when you're a kid is pretty damn scary!
Following your logic women aren't normal because the statistically normal sex in the world is men with 1.014 men to women in the world. Taking your bigot logic further, you like sex with the sex that isn't normal which obviously means you're not normal.
In fact, you're not normal because you're not the statistically normal race either unless you're asian. Are you asian or are you not of normal race either?
Perhaps you should be banned from every travelling to south america or anywhere in the middle east through to asia or africa simply because it would be for your own good and people there might look at you funny and tease you for your look.
A statistical majority is just that, a majority, that doesn't necessarily make it more normal unless you truly believe that women are less normal than men, that hispanics, blacks and whites are less normal than asians.
Get a grip, there's a simple solution to the problem you pose - discipline people discriminating against other people whatever it's for, whether it's race or sexual preference or anything else. If you think you can't teach kids that making fun of someone because they're homosexual is wrong then similarly you must believe that you can't teach kids that being of different race is wrong. You can teach kids these things, there just has to be the will to do it and all that requires is the same strictness in understanding that racism, agism and making fun of people's disabilities is wrong to extend to the idea that making fun of people's sexual preference is wrong.
What makes the whole thing worse is institutions like the scouts and scout camp lead to people discovering their homosexual sides more than anything simply due to contact with so many other males so ironically, the very institution that's trying to bannish homosexuality from it's ranks is also one that will feature most prominently in allowing people to discover their true sexual preferences.
Homosexuality was banned in the military during the two world wars yet the close comradeship and dependancy on each other by males in these wars led to increases in homosexual encounters because men were given the opportunity to spend time with many other men and were put in situations where they had to be close. If you think these men should've been kicked out the military then go fuck yourself because these are some of the people that gave their lives to give us the freedoms from the very facism that you're supporting with your comments today.
Oh and before you ask, no I'm not gay, I have a long term girlfriend and am straight. Luckily however I don't suffer from the amazing level of bigotry you've displayed here and can quite happily realise that sexual preference isn't a choice anymore than race is which is certainly more than can be said for things like religion and bigotry.
O2 is okay if you can get any reception with them, but if you can't get any reception, say, at home or at work for example then you're not likely to be a customer.
The reason Vodafone and Orange are so big and so popular despite not doing well in the customer satisfaction surveys is because there is very few dead spots, whereas O2 you'll regularly have to travel to get any kind of reception and people's homes are often dead spots with O2 where they're not with the bigger providers like Vodafone and Orange.
I've no disagreement that the big providers like Vodafone and Orange are arseholes when it comes to customer service, but importantly they just work and that's simply not the case with other providers.
Funnily enough, Tesco mobile actually uses O2's network, so for it to use their network and then outdo them is rather interesting.
Also, if you check somewhere like here where reviews are user submitted and where there is a decent sample of reviews for Vodafone, Orange and O2 you'll see that Orange is clearly worst of the three at 3.3/10, O2 second at 4.2/10 and Vodafone just beating them by a slight amount at 4.3/10.
I guess it really comes down to whose reviews you read as well, but going from personal experience and that of friends and colleagues I certainly wouldn't touch O2 ever, I get no reception in either my house or at work with them. Orange I get reception fine at work, and only 2 bars at home, but still reception and Vodafone I get a full 6 bars at work and at home.
O2 are crap, most people in the UK realise this, it's one of the main reasons the iPhone has failed to take off in the UK.
At least before they could make some money on the handsets selling them to unlockers, now in their greed to get people on the contracts as well they're going to lose sales.
Unless Apple can get Vodafone/Orange on board with the same processes in place this is only going to make the iPhone even less common in the UK.
That said, presumably this is why the new 3G iPhone will only be £100, because unlike before, they're following the same route as other phone suppliers by using the contract itself to cover the rest of the handset costs. I'm not convinced they'd be making a loss selling it for £100 though still, I'm pretty sure they can manufacture, box and get them in stores for a lot less than that so the previous situation would still surely have been better for sales.
...and it's not like they're all suffering from poverty as many of the high-population asian markets are.
You're right, Europe is a sensible market to focus on. Over 2, almost 3 times the population of relatively wealthy (in whole world terms) people is quite a difference!
It's probably worth noting also that with 800,000,000 people in Europe, 332,000,000 in North America and only 120,000,000 in Japan and without the issue of poverty in Europe that plagues even larger markets like China and India, Europe is probably the best place to focus on. It really does have brightest future in terms of sales potential in the near-term. China/India will be good choices eventually, but not for another couple of decades.
Another important point is that unlike places like North Korea people aren't in the military so they can get the bear minimum requirements to survive - i.e. food, they're in it as a job.
Sure they may not have any choice other than to join the army for a living but lets face it their ties to the army aren't particularly a live or die choice.
The chances are if something has upset the population of America so much about the government that the friends and family of those in the military and equally those in the military themselves would be affected. Do people in the states really believe that the armed forces there for some reason feel closer to the governemnt than to their own friends and family? Certainly here in the UK I don't believe that's the case, I couldn't imagine if the government ever did something so bad that the average joe wanted to cause an uprising the military wouldn't do the job of overthrowing anyway because as the end of the day, not only are they themselves citizens but their parents, their brothers, their sisters, their aunts, their uncles and so on are also.
Turkey is a pretty good example in that their military hasn't and wont ever hesitate to overthrow the ruling government should they allow too much religious intervention into government policy due to it going against their secular constitution. If the Turkish military is going to side with the citzens you can be sure the British, American and just about every other western military would also side with it's citizens.
In the UK primary school teachers certainly work little over 6hrs a day and really do only work for something like 36 weeks of the year. They also get paid extremely well for such an easy job with so much free time.
On the other hand, secondary school teachers often have to put in 10hrs+ a day due to marking homework, will often have to put time in during their holidays and really don't need get paid enough for the amount of crap they have to deal with from kids that age.
The person you're responding to was wrong to generalise about teachers, but similarly so were you. Teaching jobs vary so much depending on what level you're teaching at and of course what country you're teaching in. Without taking those factors into account it's meaningless to discuss teachers workloads, wages and so forth.
Certainly in the UK I have little sympathy for primary school teachers complaining they need more pay but have a lot of sympathy for high school teachers. Realistically I think there needs to be a rebalancing here, secondary school teachers need more pay at the expense of primary school teachers wages. The current situation is just stupid, the pay difference between levels is minimal yet the difference in difficulty of job is massive.
I can't comment on post-16 teaching in the UK, I really don't know how much work and how well paid they are for that work at that level other than from my experience as a student which isn't really enough to go on to make a fair judgement.
It's something to do with putting your hands over your ears, closing your eyes and repeating "the internet is not the future" to yourself whilst simultaneously suing your customers isn't it?
Under the data protection act you have the right to request a copy of any data stored on you so it's covered by that.
It could get expensive though as they're allowed to charge a processing fee which by the way I think absolutely stinks. Why should you have to pay to see if they've fucked up your data? The burden should be entirely on the data holders and if they get lots of malicious requests designed to cost them money in man hours then maybe they should reconsider the need to store data on you in the first place. At very worst the costs should be capped at something trivial like £0.50.
If your boss is an ass that gives you a bad reference out of sheer malice or even as in some cases, because they depend on you and don't want you to leave then you should have every right to sue the living daylights out of him/her. They're effectively playing with your life and your future which is unacceptable.
References just don't work a lot of the time, it's already been pointed out here that a crap worker may get a good reference to get rid of them and a good worker may get a bad reference to try and prevent them leaving.
I've had a bad boss like this before, I just didn't give him as my reference in the end, I gave a friend at work who was on a higher payscale than me and hence good enough to fit the bill of someone senior. It still makes the reference process pointless though because someone who is a friend is always going to give a good reference even if I had actually done a shit job!
At the end of the day people will fiddle the system to suit them from both sides of the reference process, whatever comes out certainly is never going to be an unbiased description of the candidates work ethic or skill set.
Christ, as if existing standard hard drives aren't unreliable enough already.
It's not unrealistic to see 1 out of every 10 to 20 (well, 1 in every 3 if you use Maxtors:p) modern IDE/SATA drives fail within 3 years as is, they already have a pretty high failure rate.
I thought one of the major advantages of SSDs was their reliability or is that simply not the case? are they really so unreliable currently?
One of my biggest dislikes of hard drives in general is reliability, I want to be sure my hard drive wont just not work one day leaving me without my files and backing up is one of those necessary evils as is. I build RAID in to all my machines nowadays with redundancy but I still feel like I'm getting screwed having to buy multiple disks and only get a portion of the total storage.
Would it be nice to be able to save files one day on a standard consumer system and be guaranteed they'll always be there the next without ever needing to back them up and without having to buy at least twice as many drives for redundancy.
I don't really see how they're so vulnerable when they've quite clearly survived the last god knows how many thousands of years without the rest of us okay.
The problem is by giving them the choice you've already changed things for them and aren't really giving them a balanced choice. The very fact you've contacted them and taught them how to understand you due to language differences means you've already changed them a step towards your way of life.
Slashdot Mirror
...that someone in the states could create their own video, have a friend post it to YouTube, have the creator demand it be taken down, and then when Viacom get a copy of the taken down videos as they request in TFA they be sued for copyright infringement? Of course it may be that they only want videos taken down that belong to them, but I'm not so sure reading the article.
I'm sure it's one of those things that'll simply never work because there's no doubt some legal protection covering them if it's been handed over as part of a court order but just intrigued to know if anyone can answer for sure?
I disagree, just because an application has more reserved memory doesn't mean that Windows has guaranteed that memory for the application should things get tight. To give an example, say browser 1 has been allocated 50mb and browser 2 30mb, browser 1 appears to be more of a memory hog. If however 25mb of that has been set aside by Windows as an optimization by the memory manager whilst browser 2 has avoided this option using clever programming tricks there's no reason Windows wont reallocate the extra 25mb should things get tight. As such browser 1 isn't necessarily hogging that 50mb of memory, in fact it's only hogging 25mb whilst browser 2 really is hogging 30mb.
Reasons for doing this? Well, some of the criticism of Firefox 2 being a memory whore were down to Windows being over generous with the memory it allowed it. Some complaints were valid reports of memory leaks of course, but it wouldn't be unsurprising to hear that the Mozilla devs in charge of memory management of the browser got a little ticked off at people using an unfair memory metric in comparison of their browser last time and decided to fiddle it for the reporting a little this time. The question is if they did, how far did they take it? Does IE/Opera take it to the same level if they did?
I'm not saying any of this must have happened, but as the OP suggested, the experiment is worthless if it didn't take these factors into account and didn't properly measure true memory usage. It really is the difference between an interesting experiment and an outright useless experiment so I think it's a fair critique.
Better visual recognition and understanding of natural language would certainly aid us in producing better systems but I'm not convinced they'll allow us to simply create intelligent robots.
The search for an intelligent machine requires more than this, it's not just about sensing your environment of which vision is just one facet that is for example (i.e. blind people are still intelligent).
I've had a quick read of your website and whilst interesting I'm not sure that it's entirely correct, I think it oversimplifies the problem.
Recognising things visually is much more difficult than you might think, the system can be taught to recognise something but can it still do so if it changes colour? Can it recognise an object as being the same object it knew previously if it's broken? Can it for example recognise some smashed pieces of clay on the floor as the clay pot it was stood next to previously?
What about context? One man's football is another man's soccer ball. How do you go about applying context?
I understand that you suggest visual recognition is a starting point and other things can be built from here and I think visual recognition is an important area of research but I don't think it's really going to lead to strong AI in the way you approach the problem. Your proposed solution is too rigid for a fluid world, it's fairly similar to the case of symbolic vs. natural AI approaches whereby symbolic AI is great for solving some problems, it's limited in scope, it's not fluid or dynamic enough to solve some problems or lead eventually to strong AI. This is particularly the case when you compare to natural approaches like neural networks whereby pattern recognition can emerge through the processes that govern the system itself rather than be hard programmed or taught directly.
Aside from this critique however, I do feel it's a good project, I just don't agree that it's a path to strong AI as the text on your site completely side-steps some of the complex issues that have arisen through debate of the possibility of strong AI.
May I suggest though that perhaps a better way of doing things would not be to recognise objects simply by shape and dimensions but to also ensure recognition by texture, mass, colour and so forth? There is obviously more to recognition than just shape because as mentioned even a broken vase can be recognised by us as humans even though it's shape has changed completely. Any approach has to take all factors of an object into account and accept that no particular factor is necessarily fixed. Of course this again is even less straightforward because much classification that we as humans perform for things such as materials depend on past experience so this type of recognition has to be based on previous knowledge that is known to be correct (as far as our experience tells us!).
A system that performs set tasks isn't necessarily intelligent nor does it necessarily require intelligence. Or to put it another way, just because humans perform some tasks doesn't mean that task requires intelligence to perform.
Intelligence is defined by the likes of free thought, the ability to learn from mistakes, come up with ideas, adapt fluidly to changing situations and so on. If it's not capable of making mistakes it's not capable of learning how to deal with the unpredictable.
What you're after isn't really intelligence, just run of the mill systems capable of performing more complex tasks (or not in your case, systems can already solve the scenario you describe). The grey area here is weak AI, which is born of the fruits of AI research yet generally offers no more than ways of solving problems that classic approaches couldn't.
The original post looks like it's after projects that are aiming to advance our understanding of the possibility of strong AI which is simply not the best tool for the solution you describe any more than error prone humans are.
But seeing as it's impossible without massively intrusive physical surveillance of every person to actually connect a person to an IP address downloading pirated materials then they're not doing it the old fashioned way, nor are they necessarily finding and punishing people actually breaking the law.
What about someone hijacking another person's wi-fi, which lets face it on most consumer wireless routers has no security option that isn't breakable in about 5 minutes? What if warning letters/e-mails are similarly intercepted? Some innocent person is getting cut off whilst the perpetrator simply drives down the road to the next victim.
What about public access terminals? What about businesses?
The problems are NAT and the fact that anyone can sit down at any PC or connect to a free node on the network be it wireless or wired in the majority of places that don't have and can't afford the security measures to prevent such things.
The fact is without catching people red handed then they can't really catch the people who are actually guilty and there's the old fashioned police work you talk about - actually doing proper investigations to catch people, unfortunately however this aint what's happening and as such your suggestion that what they plan for is old fashioned police work is simply false. What they're in fact doing is as with all these plans, the copyright holder monitors torrent swarms and the likes, submits IPs to the relevant ISPs and the ISPs do their three strikes. There's no burden of proof that the copyright holders really did catch people in the process other than text and image based logs, both of which are easily faked and doctored and then there's no evidence whatsoever that the person who gets kicked off is the person that's guilty.
Connecting the virtual/real world isn't simple, but this is why legislation that takes such extreme measures also can't be rushed. They're trying to get these laws done and dusted in fairly short times but they're not following any kind of technical consultation process meaning these laws are different to many laws that are passed in that they're some of the first laws to do away with the burden of proof and are essentially deciding people are guilty based on evidence that would be entirely inadmissible as evidence for other crimes.
The problem isn't going after piracy itself, I think people understand, including many pirates themselves that what they're doing is wrong, but doing away with due process and simply being too lazy to find a proper way of handling the problem is even worse because many, many innocent people will be caught by this. Most likely more than for any other law ever set.
If this becomes law in the UK it's even worse as pensioners are having their food delivery services removed as a cost cutting measure and are being told to order online, internet access is becoming essential for homework and tax returns will shortly have to be filed online only. On one hand they're making the internet as essential as the telephone, running water and electricity whilst on the other they're suggesting it's something that doesn't matter and can be taken away at the say-so of some random person working for a record company without any real proof requirements.
What level of idiocy is required for people to think they can somehow get away with this type of thing without anyone noticing or caring.
I simply can't comprehend the thoughts that must've gone through the developer's minds when they decided this was okay.
I thought the project sounded quite interesting, but then I clicked to read more and saw this:
1. Excessive time spent by young people playing computer games on the internet.
2. Young people committing digital crimes on the internet.
3. A lack of professionals who work with networks and computer security.
Sorry, but it's failed already. Approaching the problem by suggesting teens favourite pasttime is somehow wrong and a problem is idiotic to say the least, it stinks of an arrogant older generation having a problem with "kids today". I'd argue point 2 is rather interesting too, could it possibly be hinting at the download of MP3s, movies and the like?
Before the internet kids used to just watch TV all the time, I'm sure many decades ago they used to go out, and judging from stories I've heard from older folks they did and they used to fire catapults and play cricket, regularly breaking people's windows and the likes in the process. Kids who aren't sat at home doing something nowadays are all too often out on the streets with no parental supervision, plenty of alcohol and a nice bit of vandalism.
Yet somehow kids spending a lot of time playing online games is somehow a problem? At least with something like WoW you're socialising in a way that causes no trouble to anyone else outside the context of the game.
If they want to convince kids to look towards a career in IT security then a better approach would be to integrate what kids enjoy, not fight it. Explain where exploits come from for games, how they're developed, how they can be protected against. Explain why having your account hacked or leaked by the game provider is a bad thing and a severe privacy breach don't approach the topic telling kids how bad they are and how the things they do are wrong in the eyes of the author.
You're not going to engage kids unless you work with them, work against them and they'll ignore you and you'll fail, spectacularly.
It is if they're the ones stopping you reaching the speed they advertised.
How would you feel if hard drive manufacturers didn't give you all the drive space they advertised or if your new sports car couldn't really run at the advertised max speed all the time? oh, wait...
Seriously though, living in the UK where we have ADSL max and I get advertised as being allowed up to 8mbps broadband but living in an area I can only get 2mbps is one thing. When the ISP then only lets me have 512kbps if I'm lucky half the time despite me getting shafted harder than most people the rest of the time it's a whole different matter, it's a kick in the nads. They really need to rethink their business plan if not only can they not supply what they're selling, but if they then can't even supply 1/4th and can in fact only supply 1/16th of what they're selling and even less than that with some ISPs.
This sort of scenario is one of the few where I think plea bargains are probably a good thing. The rest of the time they seem rather a stupid idea to me.
If the guy isn't willing to let hundreds of people have their data back then throw the book at him, if he's at very least decent enough to give it up then cut his sentence a fair bit.
Quite why an article could be titled "The truth about..." when it's well, not actually the truth but just mere speculation.
Speculation that is well known to be false and could've been showed up as such with a quick look at the XBox 360 specs which are available in many places that I'm sure Google would oblige to discover.
The issue has already been outed as being to do with cheap solder iirc that simply couldn't stay put under the heat of the system over extended periods of time.
Does the US not have an army/navy/air cadet force as an alternative to the scouts?
Playing with proper military kit like L98A1s, LSWs and getting to sit in challengers (I was tank regiment) and getting flights in Lynx helicopters, NBC suits as well as learning important skills like camouflage and concealment, first aid, map and compass like the scouts was certainly more fun than the scouts could ever have been! Whilst the military has always discriminated against homosexuals it was never an issue in cadets, they had no problem with a couple of gay kids that were in it and religion was certainly never anything that mattered.
I've heard tales of air cadets getting to have flying lessons and go up in hercules also, I'm not sure what toys the naval cadets got to play with, presumably they let them on some of the ships for tours but I couldn't say for sure.
The only downside was that you had to do drill and learn to march properly or face getting shouted at by a still serving or ex-army major which when you're an adult is one thing but when you're a kid is pretty damn scary!
Following your logic women aren't normal because the statistically normal sex in the world is men with 1.014 men to women in the world. Taking your bigot logic further, you like sex with the sex that isn't normal which obviously means you're not normal.
In fact, you're not normal because you're not the statistically normal race either unless you're asian. Are you asian or are you not of normal race either?
Perhaps you should be banned from every travelling to south america or anywhere in the middle east through to asia or africa simply because it would be for your own good and people there might look at you funny and tease you for your look.
A statistical majority is just that, a majority, that doesn't necessarily make it more normal unless you truly believe that women are less normal than men, that hispanics, blacks and whites are less normal than asians.
Get a grip, there's a simple solution to the problem you pose - discipline people discriminating against other people whatever it's for, whether it's race or sexual preference or anything else. If you think you can't teach kids that making fun of someone because they're homosexual is wrong then similarly you must believe that you can't teach kids that being of different race is wrong. You can teach kids these things, there just has to be the will to do it and all that requires is the same strictness in understanding that racism, agism and making fun of people's disabilities is wrong to extend to the idea that making fun of people's sexual preference is wrong.
What makes the whole thing worse is institutions like the scouts and scout camp lead to people discovering their homosexual sides more than anything simply due to contact with so many other males so ironically, the very institution that's trying to bannish homosexuality from it's ranks is also one that will feature most prominently in allowing people to discover their true sexual preferences.
Homosexuality was banned in the military during the two world wars yet the close comradeship and dependancy on each other by males in these wars led to increases in homosexual encounters because men were given the opportunity to spend time with many other men and were put in situations where they had to be close. If you think these men should've been kicked out the military then go fuck yourself because these are some of the people that gave their lives to give us the freedoms from the very facism that you're supporting with your comments today.
Oh and before you ask, no I'm not gay, I have a long term girlfriend and am straight. Luckily however I don't suffer from the amazing level of bigotry you've displayed here and can quite happily realise that sexual preference isn't a choice anymore than race is which is certainly more than can be said for things like religion and bigotry.
O2 is okay if you can get any reception with them, but if you can't get any reception, say, at home or at work for example then you're not likely to be a customer.
The reason Vodafone and Orange are so big and so popular despite not doing well in the customer satisfaction surveys is because there is very few dead spots, whereas O2 you'll regularly have to travel to get any kind of reception and people's homes are often dead spots with O2 where they're not with the bigger providers like Vodafone and Orange.
I've no disagreement that the big providers like Vodafone and Orange are arseholes when it comes to customer service, but importantly they just work and that's simply not the case with other providers.
Funnily enough, Tesco mobile actually uses O2's network, so for it to use their network and then outdo them is rather interesting.
Also, if you check somewhere like here where reviews are user submitted and where there is a decent sample of reviews for Vodafone, Orange and O2 you'll see that Orange is clearly worst of the three at 3.3/10, O2 second at 4.2/10 and Vodafone just beating them by a slight amount at 4.3/10.
I guess it really comes down to whose reviews you read as well, but going from personal experience and that of friends and colleagues I certainly wouldn't touch O2 ever, I get no reception in either my house or at work with them. Orange I get reception fine at work, and only 2 bars at home, but still reception and Vodafone I get a full 6 bars at work and at home.
O2 are crap, most people in the UK realise this, it's one of the main reasons the iPhone has failed to take off in the UK.
At least before they could make some money on the handsets selling them to unlockers, now in their greed to get people on the contracts as well they're going to lose sales.
Unless Apple can get Vodafone/Orange on board with the same processes in place this is only going to make the iPhone even less common in the UK.
That said, presumably this is why the new 3G iPhone will only be £100, because unlike before, they're following the same route as other phone suppliers by using the contract itself to cover the rest of the handset costs. I'm not convinced they'd be making a loss selling it for £100 though still, I'm pretty sure they can manufacture, box and get them in stores for a lot less than that so the previous situation would still surely have been better for sales.
...and it's not like they're all suffering from poverty as many of the high-population asian markets are.
You're right, Europe is a sensible market to focus on. Over 2, almost 3 times the population of relatively wealthy (in whole world terms) people is quite a difference!
It's probably worth noting also that with 800,000,000 people in Europe, 332,000,000 in North America and only 120,000,000 in Japan and without the issue of poverty in Europe that plagues even larger markets like China and India, Europe is probably the best place to focus on. It really does have brightest future in terms of sales potential in the near-term. China/India will be good choices eventually, but not for another couple of decades.
Another important point is that unlike places like North Korea people aren't in the military so they can get the bear minimum requirements to survive - i.e. food, they're in it as a job.
Sure they may not have any choice other than to join the army for a living but lets face it their ties to the army aren't particularly a live or die choice.
The chances are if something has upset the population of America so much about the government that the friends and family of those in the military and equally those in the military themselves would be affected. Do people in the states really believe that the armed forces there for some reason feel closer to the governemnt than to their own friends and family? Certainly here in the UK I don't believe that's the case, I couldn't imagine if the government ever did something so bad that the average joe wanted to cause an uprising the military wouldn't do the job of overthrowing anyway because as the end of the day, not only are they themselves citizens but their parents, their brothers, their sisters, their aunts, their uncles and so on are also.
Turkey is a pretty good example in that their military hasn't and wont ever hesitate to overthrow the ruling government should they allow too much religious intervention into government policy due to it going against their secular constitution. If the Turkish military is going to side with the citzens you can be sure the British, American and just about every other western military would also side with it's citizens.
Depends on what you're teaching and where.
In the UK primary school teachers certainly work little over 6hrs a day and really do only work for something like 36 weeks of the year. They also get paid extremely well for such an easy job with so much free time.
On the other hand, secondary school teachers often have to put in 10hrs+ a day due to marking homework, will often have to put time in during their holidays and really don't need get paid enough for the amount of crap they have to deal with from kids that age.
The person you're responding to was wrong to generalise about teachers, but similarly so were you. Teaching jobs vary so much depending on what level you're teaching at and of course what country you're teaching in. Without taking those factors into account it's meaningless to discuss teachers workloads, wages and so forth.
Certainly in the UK I have little sympathy for primary school teachers complaining they need more pay but have a lot of sympathy for high school teachers. Realistically I think there needs to be a rebalancing here, secondary school teachers need more pay at the expense of primary school teachers wages. The current situation is just stupid, the pay difference between levels is minimal yet the difference in difficulty of job is massive.
I can't comment on post-16 teaching in the UK, I really don't know how much work and how well paid they are for that work at that level other than from my experience as a student which isn't really enough to go on to make a fair judgement.
Or until about 2010 - 2015 if Scotland and Wales get their way anytime soon ;)
It's something to do with putting your hands over your ears, closing your eyes and repeating "the internet is not the future" to yourself whilst simultaneously suing your customers isn't it?
Under the data protection act you have the right to request a copy of any data stored on you so it's covered by that.
It could get expensive though as they're allowed to charge a processing fee which by the way I think absolutely stinks. Why should you have to pay to see if they've fucked up your data? The burden should be entirely on the data holders and if they get lots of malicious requests designed to cost them money in man hours then maybe they should reconsider the need to store data on you in the first place. At very worst the costs should be capped at something trivial like £0.50.
It depends on someone or some company, like me for example saying:
...Er wait, forget I said that!
"You're welcome to DoS attack my connection all you want"
If your boss is an ass that gives you a bad reference out of sheer malice or even as in some cases, because they depend on you and don't want you to leave then you should have every right to sue the living daylights out of him/her. They're effectively playing with your life and your future which is unacceptable.
References just don't work a lot of the time, it's already been pointed out here that a crap worker may get a good reference to get rid of them and a good worker may get a bad reference to try and prevent them leaving.
I've had a bad boss like this before, I just didn't give him as my reference in the end, I gave a friend at work who was on a higher payscale than me and hence good enough to fit the bill of someone senior. It still makes the reference process pointless though because someone who is a friend is always going to give a good reference even if I had actually done a shit job!
At the end of the day people will fiddle the system to suit them from both sides of the reference process, whatever comes out certainly is never going to be an unbiased description of the candidates work ethic or skill set.
Christ, as if existing standard hard drives aren't unreliable enough already.
:p) modern IDE/SATA drives fail within 3 years as is, they already have a pretty high failure rate.
It's not unrealistic to see 1 out of every 10 to 20 (well, 1 in every 3 if you use Maxtors
I thought one of the major advantages of SSDs was their reliability or is that simply not the case? are they really so unreliable currently?
One of my biggest dislikes of hard drives in general is reliability, I want to be sure my hard drive wont just not work one day leaving me without my files and backing up is one of those necessary evils as is. I build RAID in to all my machines nowadays with redundancy but I still feel like I'm getting screwed having to buy multiple disks and only get a portion of the total storage.
Would it be nice to be able to save files one day on a standard consumer system and be guaranteed they'll always be there the next without ever needing to back them up and without having to buy at least twice as many drives for redundancy.
I don't really see how they're so vulnerable when they've quite clearly survived the last god knows how many thousands of years without the rest of us okay.
The problem is by giving them the choice you've already changed things for them and aren't really giving them a balanced choice. The very fact you've contacted them and taught them how to understand you due to language differences means you've already changed them a step towards your way of life.