Phishers a parallel with P2P? Give me a break.
on
The Long Arm of Microsoft
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Most of the cases were Microsoft simply providing evidence to local authorities, who themselves prosecute the scumbags. In the small number of cases where Microsoft is directly taking action (on behalf of little-guy victims everywhere), I'm actually surprised it isn't Citibank and other colossals pummeling these dirtbags into the ground.
Comparing this to the RIAA cases? Give me a break. That's like comparing a rapist with someone taking a second glance at someone they find attractive.
I know of a number of people who would pay what I consider to be a fair sum of money just to own something that had been _in space_.
Which is kind of weird given that every atom in your body, in the desk and air and plants around you, came from space, traveling enormous distances at colossal speeds, over the history of the universe, to form the tiniest portion of a chunk of feces or a keyboard key used to write a spam message, or whatever.
How many of them are going to have that nice warm fuzzy "I'm safe" feeling and therefore not bother with all the other good things like patching and spyware-awareness etc.
I highly doubt that the strawgroup you've imagined would pay the slightest heed to the idea of data-encryption if they don't care about the other problems.
If you can feel relatively confident that a lost or stolen laptop (or desktop for that matter -- they get stolen too) will not in any way reveal confidental data, then I would say it gives you a lot more trust in the media, hence the name.
And Intel will win, if not in the courts, then because it has probably 1000 times the money available to prosecute the case.
See the NTP/RIM case -- Transmeta can get a sympathetic judge to grant an injunction while they intentionally drag out the case, possibly forcing the prospect of Intel having to stop all processor sales until the case is settled. Intel will of course cave and just buy the "patents" to eliminate this business risk.
And that is why it's pretty much the opposite of your contention in some cases -- it isn't how much you have to use to fight, but how much you have to lose even if you might eventually win.
I know a lot of Slashdotters are antisocial, but "what will happen to t3h filesystem?!??" is not a reasonable question to ask when a wife and mother has disappeared and possibly been murdered.
It's an entirely reasonable question to ask, and the only reason this particular crime is getting attention here is the filesystem in question.
RIM tried using a similar defense, I believe, in their patent suit with NTP
RIM tried using jurisdiction in a lame, expected-to-fail attempt. They didn't seriously expect it to succeed.
How successful would a company like Microsoft be in saying they are a US company, so we do not answer to another court?
Well foreign courts don't generally dictate what Microsoft can do in the US. Imagine if a French judge declared that Microsoft had to remove Internet Explorer worldwide -- US congressman would be declaring war over this intrusion on their sovereignty. Instead courts generally stick to actions related to their own jurisdiction.
However, there is a lot of precedence that US courts feel it's their right to apply judgement worldwide. Several Canadian executives, for instance, can't travel through the US because their company does business in Cuba -- and the US doesn't like Cuba, therefore Canadian businesses don't have the right to do business in Cuba. Or so some American judges think.
Methinks you misunderstand the meaning of 'grain of salt'.
Somehow "a really tiny grain of salt" didn't sound right. I think the meaning is pretty clear and nonambiguous to anyone who doesn't literally parse a common saying. Basically I'm talking about readers who don't suffer from Severe Aspergers/Autism.
Well you still shouldn't -- while it might come to pass, I'd take this story with a massive grain of salt (mountain sized). The story comes from one unnamed individual, and is then circulated by some people that have a long history of rumors that didn't come to pass.
I know nothing or your work, but will say that in general cable installers are known to be home destroy hackjobs that will just drill holes at random, often completely disregard code, and often leave a terrible mess. My latest experience was one that basically ripped apart the air return in the basement, leaving it hanging open 1 foot.
In other words, the quickness of a cable installer probably doesn't carry over to a homeowner that wants to do a careful, legal, quality job.
While this may be the case for tech-related sites, I really doubt that the average user would bother complaining when Ask.com, for instance, is much slower than Google. They'll just get a worse user experience, and eventually they'll start using something else.
..before computer generated music becomes better than anything that could possibly be created by a person?
I guess it's all how you perceive it. I would always seen a person (or rather many people) behind that hardware/software combination, so ultimately it comes down to people just using different tools. A piano is a better instrument than punching yourself in the testes (presumedly), but there's still people using the piano (directly or indirectly) who are responsible for the music.
Really folks, how expensive is it to hardwire all the goodies that absolutely need the speed?? I'm probably missing the point.
Is there some sort of who-needs-it-harumph! template that all you hardware naysayers use? I hope so, because it pains me to think that people actually bother typing these "Who needs it!" replies to every hardware progression.
You don't need it? Great, then move along. Though I'm sure in a couple of years when it is the new universal standard, you'll happily appreciate the innovation.
Compared to all the money MS spends on other stuff you'd think they'd bother to at least spend 20 million on making a few good RPGs at a total loss just to sell the console.
With all due respect, while releases of RPGs demonstrate that many players of the genre are fanatics (e.g. long midnight lines, etc), the vast majority of console gamers play sports games, racing games, and fighting games. The 360 will do just fine if zero RPG gamers buy it.
And I care about movie interactivity why? It's a friggin movie for crying out loud.
Despite the score on your post (currently -1), it's a very valid point -- most extras on DVDs are never viewed (at most I've gone into the deleted scenes for some laughs). Making those interactive will hardly improve them (in fact the interactivity is usually the pain, as you wait for stupid transition scenes to play out between selections), and I marvel that studios still spend the money to produce them.
Where I think interactivity would improve the genre are for things like DVD games, basically turning the DVD player into a 3do.
How does that undermine what I just said? It quite clearly indicates that RC1 was in no way in hell a real RC -- it was a beta. The code diff between RC1 and what actually goes gold with be massive.
Just as an FYI for others, after launching the Java applet Akamai download manager, it sat at 0 bytes for probably 5 minutes, and then started downloading at 350KB/second or so. So have you patience if you try to download this — I'd almost cancelled the seemingly failed download when it finally started up.
Wasn't there a time when "RC" literally meant release canadidate as in if this works we're burning this exact image on the retail CDs? Nowadays release candidates are really betas, and betas -- which are supposed to be feature complete, almost 100% apps that are only being tested for technical faults, are really alphas, with endless new feature additions and changes.
Well, I worked in the telecom industry for 20 years, and I can tell you that Nortel, for one, engineers its PBX's for exactly the same reliability as its CO switches, and there's no legislation forcing them to do that
Customers would reject their equipment otherwise.
BTW, exactly what piece of legislation subjects Bell Canada to limits on downtime? I've never heard of it.
You worked in the telecom industry and you're seriously asking this?
Virtually everything that Bell Canada does is tightly regulated and mandated by the CRTC (given that the phone network is, or was, a critical piece of infrastructure, and Bell [and Telus out West, and MTS in the middle] was given basically a government granted monopoly. The CRTC requires constant auditing and reporting upon a large range of metrics, including downtime, the time to get a dial-tone, quality-of-voice indicators, rural surface indicators, repair speed, and so on. Here's a tiny subsamping that's basically nothing more than a shout-out to the real rules and regulations of the Canadian phone system.
And some cable VoIP phone providers, by the way, fall under the same umbrella, and require the same high level of reliability.
Another major problem that in my opinion should discourage alarm monitoring over broadband is the unscheduled downtime experienced. When was the last time you picked up the phone and found out there was no dialtone there?
Doesn't half the article discuss the fact that VoIP has surprizingly high reliability? Why are you injecting this like it's an "also"?
Obviously it depends on cable provider, and a lot of the slander of cable is the result of a couple of nefarious companies (and the respect for phone companies is misplaced -- your phone is reliable because they're mandated by legislation to achieve a very low downtime rate).
I'm under the umbrella of Cogeco in Ontario, and in five years my cable television has been out for minutes, and my high-speed internet over cable has been out for one day (years back). That was, of course, before they beefed up their system to handle VoIP, and they promise much better reliability now (and my experience since getting their service has been 100%). VoIP goes through different routing from their internet access (it gets QoS guarantees), and comes via a redundant, battery-backed, high reliability VoIP geared cable modem. There's no reason to believe that it will be less reliable than a shoddy set of twisted pairs running willy-nilly through a neighbourhood.
I think the sweep wing that you were looking at on that link are the F-111, Navy is across the street.
Nope, those ones centered (at least when I look at that link) are the F-14s. It has a distinct, aesthetically pleasing shape, and of course two vertical stabilizers, versus the rather gangly, and single vertical stabilizer F-111. You can find F-111s in a different part of the same yard.
While I agree with the rest of your point (I remember having an 8Mhz Atari 520ST, expanded to 4MB. The spare memory seemed colossal, and I usually ended up with a 3MB RAMDisc with nothing to use it for. We had full GUI operating systems, fairly intensive games, development environments....this little gumstick thing would be considered a supercomputer then), regarding this-
Also keep in mind that a 200 MHz ARM CPU is somewhat more powerful than a 200 MHz Pentium CPU. So in effect, these systems may turn out to be quite a bit better than the desktops we had in the late 1990s.
The ARM is a RISC processor, and gets less done per cycle than the CISC Pentium. I'd be surprized if it could outpace a Pentium at half the clockrate.
One of the biggest problems with those old jets is the massive number of ground service hours required for every hour of air time. The F-14 was one of the worst. Not to mention that maintaining a certain level of air superiority might require X of an older type of jet, versus 1/4X of a newer type of jet.
Often you can save money buy spending money.
And those old F-14s aren't immediately ground up into Bender sandwiches -- They usually go to a graveyard to sit around in a state of somewhat possibly potentially close to readiness, just in case a really big war breaks out.
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Most of the cases were Microsoft simply providing evidence to local authorities, who themselves prosecute the scumbags. In the small number of cases where Microsoft is directly taking action (on behalf of little-guy victims everywhere), I'm actually surprised it isn't Citibank and other colossals pummeling these dirtbags into the ground.
Comparing this to the RIAA cases? Give me a break. That's like comparing a rapist with someone taking a second glance at someone they find attractive.
Which is kind of weird given that every atom in your body, in the desk and air and plants around you, came from space, traveling enormous distances at colossal speeds, over the history of the universe, to form the tiniest portion of a chunk of feces or a keyboard key used to write a spam message, or whatever.
I highly doubt that the strawgroup you've imagined would pay the slightest heed to the idea of data-encryption if they don't care about the other problems.
If you can feel relatively confident that a lost or stolen laptop (or desktop for that matter -- they get stolen too) will not in any way reveal confidental data, then I would say it gives you a lot more trust in the media, hence the name.
See the NTP/RIM case -- Transmeta can get a sympathetic judge to grant an injunction while they intentionally drag out the case, possibly forcing the prospect of Intel having to stop all processor sales until the case is settled. Intel will of course cave and just buy the "patents" to eliminate this business risk.
And that is why it's pretty much the opposite of your contention in some cases -- it isn't how much you have to use to fight, but how much you have to lose even if you might eventually win.
It's an entirely reasonable question to ask, and the only reason this particular crime is getting attention here is the filesystem in question.
RIM tried using jurisdiction in a lame, expected-to-fail attempt. They didn't seriously expect it to succeed.
Well foreign courts don't generally dictate what Microsoft can do in the US. Imagine if a French judge declared that Microsoft had to remove Internet Explorer worldwide -- US congressman would be declaring war over this intrusion on their sovereignty. Instead courts generally stick to actions related to their own jurisdiction.
However, there is a lot of precedence that US courts feel it's their right to apply judgement worldwide. Several Canadian executives, for instance, can't travel through the US because their company does business in Cuba -- and the US doesn't like Cuba, therefore Canadian businesses don't have the right to do business in Cuba. Or so some American judges think.
Turns out I was entirely wrong.
Somehow "a really tiny grain of salt" didn't sound right. I think the meaning is pretty clear and nonambiguous to anyone who doesn't literally parse a common saying. Basically I'm talking about readers who don't suffer from Severe Aspergers/Autism.
Well you still shouldn't -- while it might come to pass, I'd take this story with a massive grain of salt (mountain sized). The story comes from one unnamed individual, and is then circulated by some people that have a long history of rumors that didn't come to pass.
I know nothing or your work, but will say that in general cable installers are known to be home destroy hackjobs that will just drill holes at random, often completely disregard code, and often leave a terrible mess. My latest experience was one that basically ripped apart the air return in the basement, leaving it hanging open 1 foot.
In other words, the quickness of a cable installer probably doesn't carry over to a homeowner that wants to do a careful, legal, quality job.
While this may be the case for tech-related sites, I really doubt that the average user would bother complaining when Ask.com, for instance, is much slower than Google. They'll just get a worse user experience, and eventually they'll start using something else.
I guess it's all how you perceive it. I would always seen a person (or rather many people) behind that hardware/software combination, so ultimately it comes down to people just using different tools. A piano is a better instrument than punching yourself in the testes (presumedly), but there's still people using the piano (directly or indirectly) who are responsible for the music.
Is there some sort of who-needs-it-harumph! template that all you hardware naysayers use? I hope so, because it pains me to think that people actually bother typing these "Who needs it!" replies to every hardware progression.
You don't need it? Great, then move along. Though I'm sure in a couple of years when it is the new universal standard, you'll happily appreciate the innovation.
With all due respect, while releases of RPGs demonstrate that many players of the genre are fanatics (e.g. long midnight lines, etc), the vast majority of console gamers play sports games, racing games, and fighting games. The 360 will do just fine if zero RPG gamers buy it.
Good point. And while they're at it, I have an old futon that the cat pissed on that I've been looking to dump, so maybe they can take that too.
Despite the score on your post (currently -1), it's a very valid point -- most extras on DVDs are never viewed (at most I've gone into the deleted scenes for some laughs). Making those interactive will hardly improve them (in fact the interactivity is usually the pain, as you wait for stupid transition scenes to play out between selections), and I marvel that studios still spend the money to produce them.
Where I think interactivity would improve the genre are for things like DVD games, basically turning the DVD player into a 3do.
How does that undermine what I just said? It quite clearly indicates that RC1 was in no way in hell a real RC -- it was a beta. The code diff between RC1 and what actually goes gold with be massive.
Just as an FYI for others, after launching the Java applet Akamai download manager, it sat at 0 bytes for probably 5 minutes, and then started downloading at 350KB/second or so. So have you patience if you try to download this — I'd almost cancelled the seemingly failed download when it finally started up.
Wasn't there a time when "RC" literally meant release canadidate as in if this works we're burning this exact image on the retail CDs? Nowadays release candidates are really betas, and betas -- which are supposed to be feature complete, almost 100% apps that are only being tested for technical faults, are really alphas, with endless new feature additions and changes.
Customers would reject their equipment otherwise.
You worked in the telecom industry and you're seriously asking this?
Virtually everything that Bell Canada does is tightly regulated and mandated by the CRTC (given that the phone network is, or was, a critical piece of infrastructure, and Bell [and Telus out West, and MTS in the middle] was given basically a government granted monopoly. The CRTC requires constant auditing and reporting upon a large range of metrics, including downtime, the time to get a dial-tone, quality-of-voice indicators, rural surface indicators, repair speed, and so on. Here's a tiny subsamping that's basically nothing more than a shout-out to the real rules and regulations of the Canadian phone system.
And some cable VoIP phone providers, by the way, fall under the same umbrella, and require the same high level of reliability.
Doesn't half the article discuss the fact that VoIP has surprizingly high reliability? Why are you injecting this like it's an "also"?
Obviously it depends on cable provider, and a lot of the slander of cable is the result of a couple of nefarious companies (and the respect for phone companies is misplaced -- your phone is reliable because they're mandated by legislation to achieve a very low downtime rate).
I'm under the umbrella of Cogeco in Ontario, and in five years my cable television has been out for minutes, and my high-speed internet over cable has been out for one day (years back). That was, of course, before they beefed up their system to handle VoIP, and they promise much better reliability now (and my experience since getting their service has been 100%). VoIP goes through different routing from their internet access (it gets QoS guarantees), and comes via a redundant, battery-backed, high reliability VoIP geared cable modem. There's no reason to believe that it will be less reliable than a shoddy set of twisted pairs running willy-nilly through a neighbourhood.
I think the sweep wing that you were looking at on that link are the F-111, Navy is across the street.
Nope, those ones centered (at least when I look at that link) are the F-14s. It has a distinct, aesthetically pleasing shape, and of course two vertical stabilizers, versus the rather gangly, and single vertical stabilizer F-111. You can find F-111s in a different part of the same yard.
The ARM is a RISC processor, and gets less done per cycle than the CISC Pentium. I'd be surprized if it could outpace a Pentium at half the clockrate.
One of the biggest problems with those old jets is the massive number of ground service hours required for every hour of air time. The F-14 was one of the worst. Not to mention that maintaining a certain level of air superiority might require X of an older type of jet, versus 1/4X of a newer type of jet.
Often you can save money buy spending money.
And those old F-14s aren't immediately ground up into Bender sandwiches -- They usually go to a graveyard to sit around in a state of somewhat possibly potentially close to readiness, just in case a really big war breaks out.