I have a single malt set of anyone's choice(1) set aside for anyone who can help me get past the "no process killed" response without going beyone a single-line command after Alt+F2.
(1) Redeemable only within 25 miles of Chicago proper; if you want to collect, yes I'm serious. I'm *almost* as evangelical about FOSS as I am about a good single-malt.:-)
Thanks for the tip; that's what I thought too, but n3wb that I am, I get either "operation not permitted" as the user who launched firefox, or "no process killed" as root.
And as a result of this conversation, I just realized that *nix only needs a Mark Russinovich in order to go mainstream. Seriously, if I felt like I could offer my non-technical associates the same level of help in *nix that I can in *doze, I'd switch them in a minute. (And I'm an MS developer by day, so there go my chances of an MVP I guess...) On the MS platform, Russinovich has done my job for me; there are precious few problems I can't deduce the cause of in 5 minutes or less using one of his (free as in beer) tools. Give me a similar single source of simplicity-for-the-technically-adept-but-time-challenged in Fedora or Ubuntu, and my Auntie Emma's WinME installation is toast.:-)
Alt+F4 can have some lag time in my experience; of course I usually have 36 tabs or so open at any given time.
On the other hand, [Windows+R] -> "pskill firefox" -> Enter takes surprisingly little time to type, and the effects are instant. Now I just gotta find the *nix equivalent from Alt+F2 without needing to look up the PID...
...and comparatively slow and less precise in relevance. I also remember AltaVista as the best thing going before I'd heard of Google (and NorthernLight at about the same time, if anyone remembers that). Searching for specific code snippets and developer resources was tedious, and it got *much* easier for me when Google came along.
Really, does anyone remember how the speed difference felt at the time? Google was the first major search engine I saw printing the search execution time on the results page, and its responsiveness felt like my first time using broadband after years of dial-up.
I understand the distinction you're trying to draw between "ad-supported" and "free," but when something is free-of-charge in the same sense as FM radio and broadcast TV are, I don't expect average people to see a conflict.
Maybe we need a new term for things that are free-like-Craigslist?
Agreed, wealth doesn't perfectly correlate with intelligence any more than poverty does with stupidity.
Statistically though, I'd wager that the likelihood of exhibiting money-losing behaviors tends to drop as wealth increases, and that the likelihood of having a decent understanding of complex financial issues grows along the same trendline. If I had to pick someone at random to help me understand and cope with a new tax law, and all I knew about them was their income, I wouldn't be sifting through the bottom percentiles for my mentor.
On the other hand, if I had to predict their income knowing only their level of financial understanding OR the demographic circumstances of their birth (i.e., luck), I would prefer the former.
Your "net" under what calculation? Excluding your 401K contributions? Before or after your donations to the Social Security scheme? Including the amount your employer spends on your health insurance? Excluding expense reimbursements, but including work-related expenditures?
Flat-taxes are one part of the solution, but not as big a part as people imagine. First you need a consistent way of calculating "net" that is fair, that applies to all income brackets equally, and that encourages wealth formation.
Reforms like this will never get passed, though. This is because (among other things) they make it harder for the government to obfuscate your real tax burden, they make it harder for them to obfuscate wealth-transfers, and special interest groups have little trouble convincing great numbers of people that they'll take it in the kiester under a flat tax. (That's easy to do; just measure "fairness" as if the current graduated system were a baseline for fairness. Don't account for the loopholes of the current system in your comparison though. That way you can tell the lower-income guy that his tax will go from 15% to 17% while the rich guy's will go from 35% to 17%, and he'll get righteously pissed. Don't mention the leveling of deduction loopholes, or secondary economic effects on standard of living; he's too much of a simpleton to understand the rest of the details anyway.)
It's like the doomed attempt of 7 years ago to give citizens a modicum of control over their own Social Security accounts: People actually marched on Washington demanding that this plan be defeated to keep their SSI "safe". So in order to prevent a possible decline of a small percentage of one's retirement income that they would have ownership of, what did they demand? That's right, to keep it in a program where there would be a definite decline in their retirement income, and where they would have ownership of none of it.
I hate to be cynical, but in a country where arguments like that can kill an initiative to reform a doomed Ponzi scheme, what hope is there for truth in taxation?
Otherwise, there's no real disincentive against bringing a suit which is without merit, or against needlessly prolonging a case.
Why would legislators -- who are lawyers -- want such a disincentive, when it would dampen their industry's revenues? I don't know all the details of the UK's loser-pays system, but as I understand the US's approach to this, you pretty much have to fight to even recoup your actual legal costs here after a win. I can't recall ever hearing about a punitive award being handed out specifically to punish the act of bringing a meritless suit, or unnecessarily prolonging a case. (Of course I don't get out much, so my not hearing about it by no means means it's unheard of...)
If there is a proven legal strategy for getting such an award, I'd love to hear about it.
"It's not gonna be hard to circumvent windows based monitoring software when you have full admin rights."
One word...
ipfw add deny log all from me to %MONITORSERVER%
I'm not even sure you need Admin access to run it from the command line. He just needs a thumb drive disguised as a peanut butter sandwich or something for all his portable apps...
Anyway, good point; wouldn't the enforcement folks be better off making him use a router that they pwn instead of a Windows installation that they've tried to compromise?
Right, but the entire song is a sarcastic commentary on the shallowness, superficiality and hollowness of the "star" lifestyle. From the song's point of view, the ubiquity of drugs is offered as an element of criticism, not praise. In that context, the censorship just seems silly.
I suspect a custom censoring job in this case. I live in Chicagoland, and some stations leave "drugs" in while others don't. I agree that private censorship is the stations' prerogative; I'm just surprised... this is the first time I've heard it used on such a commonplace word. It's not the same as government censorship, you're right, but my fear is that this is a sign of our culture developing an expectation of being shielded from anything they find even mildly unsettling.
I have no idea what the band's position is on this; I suspect their label gives them little choice about agreeing to whatever they have to to ensure widespread airplay.
Good point. As has Pink Floyd's "don't give me that do-goody-good bullshit" and Steve Miller's "funky shit goin' down in the city."
All these years I *thought* ZZ Top was singing "I want her... *shit* I gotta have her." I was Sofa King disappointed to read the more mundane "*said* I gotta have her..."
IMO, it's expected for "fuck" to be excised from airplay one way or another, but speaking of Nickelback, WTF is with the word "drug" in "drug dealer" being censored from *some* radio stations' versions of their "Rockstar" song?
I've honestly never heard something like that before, and it gives me chills. The reference isn't even glorifying drugs, but even if it were, the censors are still off their leashes.
Metered bandwidth is not the same as metered minutes. The broadband companies been selling *peak* "up-to" bandwidth rates all along anyway.
They don't have to stop doing that, just offer Peak + Sustained plans for users with greater needs.
The Peak-Only folks will still get their 6Mb/s burst speeds (on cable, probably less for DSL), but daily/weekly/hourly/monthly loads would would be throttled to, e.g., 512k. Those who wanted to could buy their peak rates up to 8 or 10Mb (as you can now), but would also have a new option to buy their sustained rates up in tiers, to 1.5Mb, 3Mb, or whatever the network can handle without degrading others' service.
I have the top tier service now, and I rarely see real combined torrent download rates over 300-400k coming through my pipe.
buyindie.net is a great concept, and I don't think it's doomed at all. It's closer to a MetroMix than a Google Local, but it serves a more specialized purpose than either. There's great opportunity for using the local aspect to promote the Indie music scene as well, linking artists' merchandise (both local and web outlets) with their appearances, venues, and reviews of same.
I'd like to see it be a little more suburbanite-friendly (e.g. put a zip code box front and center), but that notwithstanding, the concept & execution are pretty impressive.
(Now if you're really worried about its survival, just make it easy for people to get laid through it.)
I don't get how making ACLs granular down to the user *and* process levels == DRM || Trusted Computing.
I'm as tinfoilhatty about those things as anyone, but nothing about the GP's suggested security enhancements require them to be locked away from the machine administrator. They're also exactly the kinds of things SE Linux is incorporating right now.
Think about it this way: go the opposite direction from the GP's suggestion and run with little to no ACL granularity. There... welcome to Windows 95, where processes can easily have more privileges than the invoking user.
DRM is about fencing the user out of things on his own computer. The ACL tweaking suggested above is about letting the user fence things off more precisely than before. The two ideas have some overlap, but the one doesn't entail a slippery slope to the other.
How do you staff the Bureau of Behavior Modification? The consequences for getting a bad apple in there scare the shit out of me. It's all well and good when wise and benevolent hypothetical people just like you or me are running it. But what happens when they're handpicked by Dick Cheney or Hillary Clinton or [insert favorite Machiavellian villain here]?
I'm not saying the prison system doesn't need an overhaul, nor that we shouldn't have a comprehensive sanity check on punishments relative to offenses and in relation to each other. I also get that sentencing is intrinsically intended -- at least in part -- to produce changes in the offender's future behavior.
When people say "behavior modification" though, they're not usually talking about aggregate studies of sentencing methods versus recidivism rates. They're usually talking about starting down a path that quite probably leads to Clockwork Orange crap down the road. Any power that you grant the government will eventually end up in the hands of people who don't share your political orientation or your ideas about what should and shouldn't constitute crimes. I don't know about you, but I would rather live with high crime rates than have a body of "reconditioning experts" become a fixture of our government.
I'm not an economist, but doesn't increasing demand for a used CD / DVD have some effect on the sales of new units? I honestly don't know, but it seems like it would to me.
Items like cars have model years, so if I were to, say, buy a 2003 Lexus, it wouldn't necessarily have any direct effect on 2007 model year sales. My extra demand might help the brand's reputation for resale value, but that's not a direct factor as far as I can tell.
On the other hand, CDs and DVDs can have more pressings issued at any time. A no-talent ass-clown's release named "Time, Love and Tenderness" is available used from $0.01 on Amazon, so demand must have dropped sharply since the album's release. If you wanted a classic like "Back in Black" though, the best used deal on Amazon is $2.59, with other editions of the same album going for $4.99, $6.77, and $7.49 used. If I were in charge of what to re-press and how many copies to issue, that latter state of affairs would make me think "Back in Black" was a good candidate for a big reissue.
Then again... if the demand for pre-owned copies was rising mainly because of a movement to boycott new ones, my sales projections could be wrong and the new pressing might just sit on store shelves. Like I said, I'm no economist. I thought about saying all this in my previous post, but it seemed easier to just say "dilute your contribution [by buying used]," and let that cover all the secondary economic effects of the act.
Pick any two: Enjoy mainstream movies, obey the law, deprive the MPAA of funds.
About the best compromise is to dilute your contribution to the bad guys' revenue streams: only buy movies used when purchasing, and whenever possible, check them out from your local library or borrow from friends instead. Those you do own, loan liberally among friends.
Admonish your peer group not to buy you new DVDs or CDs as gifts. Tell them you are happy to receive used ones though.
Bring up silly questions like "why do 10 of us have to own this same DVD? Do you think more than one of our group has ever watched it on the same night?"
You could also brutally murder anyone who disagrees, but IANAL so I can't speak to the legality of that.
This is due to Windows Media Center being about the only PVR software to obey CGMS-A signals, which come through your cable box via the analog S-Video output.
Best ways I've found to avoid these problems: 1) Turn OFF Windows Update, and/or use a disk imaging system to make sure you can roll back any unwelcome changes like this; 2) Use different software for recording cable content (MediaPortal, or the scheduling app that comes with most tuner cards, etc.) 3) Don't pay for HBO; get those shows through alternative providers that have higher-quality, DRM-free, digital copies
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses (x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected (x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists (x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email (x) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats (x) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes (x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft (x) Technically illiterate politicians (x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves (x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering (x) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation (x) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud (x) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free (x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. (x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Slashdot Mirror
I have a single malt set of anyone's choice(1) set aside for anyone who can help me get past the "no process killed" response without going beyone a single-line command after Alt+F2.
:-)
(1) Redeemable only within 25 miles of Chicago proper; if you want to collect, yes I'm serious. I'm *almost* as evangelical about FOSS as I am about a good single-malt.
Thanks for the tip; that's what I thought too, but n3wb that I am, I get either "operation not permitted" as the user who launched firefox, or "no process killed" as root.
:-)
And as a result of this conversation, I just realized that *nix only needs a Mark Russinovich in order to go mainstream. Seriously, if I felt like I could offer my non-technical associates the same level of help in *nix that I can in *doze, I'd switch them in a minute. (And I'm an MS developer by day, so there go my chances of an MVP I guess...) On the MS platform, Russinovich has done my job for me; there are precious few problems I can't deduce the cause of in 5 minutes or less using one of his (free as in beer) tools. Give me a similar single source of simplicity-for-the-technically-adept-but-time-challenged in Fedora or Ubuntu, and my Auntie Emma's WinME installation is toast.
Alt+F4 can have some lag time in my experience; of course I usually have 36 tabs or so open at any given time.
On the other hand, [Windows+R] -> "pskill firefox" -> Enter takes surprisingly little time to type, and the effects are instant. Now I just gotta find the *nix equivalent from Alt+F2 without needing to look up the PID...
...and comparatively slow and less precise in relevance. I also remember AltaVista as the best thing going before I'd heard of Google (and NorthernLight at about the same time, if anyone remembers that). Searching for specific code snippets and developer resources was tedious, and it got *much* easier for me when Google came along.
Really, does anyone remember how the speed difference felt at the time? Google was the first major search engine I saw printing the search execution time on the results page, and its responsiveness felt like my first time using broadband after years of dial-up.
Informative. Thanks.
I understand the distinction you're trying to draw between "ad-supported" and "free," but when something is free-of-charge in the same sense as FM radio and broadcast TV are, I don't expect average people to see a conflict.
Maybe we need a new term for things that are free-like-Craigslist?
Agreed, wealth doesn't perfectly correlate with intelligence any more than poverty does with stupidity.
Statistically though, I'd wager that the likelihood of exhibiting money-losing behaviors tends to drop as wealth increases, and that the likelihood of having a decent understanding of complex financial issues grows along the same trendline. If I had to pick someone at random to help me understand and cope with a new tax law, and all I knew about them was their income, I wouldn't be sifting through the bottom percentiles for my mentor.
On the other hand, if I had to predict their income knowing only their level of financial understanding OR the demographic circumstances of their birth (i.e., luck), I would prefer the former.
Your "net" under what calculation? Excluding your 401K contributions? Before or after your donations to the Social Security scheme? Including the amount your employer spends on your health insurance? Excluding expense reimbursements, but including work-related expenditures?
Flat-taxes are one part of the solution, but not as big a part as people imagine. First you need a consistent way of calculating "net" that is fair, that applies to all income brackets equally, and that encourages wealth formation.
Reforms like this will never get passed, though. This is because (among other things) they make it harder for the government to obfuscate your real tax burden, they make it harder for them to obfuscate wealth-transfers, and special interest groups have little trouble convincing great numbers of people that they'll take it in the kiester under a flat tax. (That's easy to do; just measure "fairness" as if the current graduated system were a baseline for fairness. Don't account for the loopholes of the current system in your comparison though. That way you can tell the lower-income guy that his tax will go from 15% to 17% while the rich guy's will go from 35% to 17%, and he'll get righteously pissed. Don't mention the leveling of deduction loopholes, or secondary economic effects on standard of living; he's too much of a simpleton to understand the rest of the details anyway.)
It's like the doomed attempt of 7 years ago to give citizens a modicum of control over their own Social Security accounts: People actually marched on Washington demanding that this plan be defeated to keep their SSI "safe". So in order to prevent a possible decline of a small percentage of one's retirement income that they would have ownership of, what did they demand? That's right, to keep it in a program where there would be a definite decline in their retirement income, and where they would have ownership of none of it.
I hate to be cynical, but in a country where arguments like that can kill an initiative to reform a doomed Ponzi scheme, what hope is there for truth in taxation?
Why would legislators -- who are lawyers -- want such a disincentive, when it would dampen their industry's revenues? I don't know all the details of the UK's loser-pays system, but as I understand the US's approach to this, you pretty much have to fight to even recoup your actual legal costs here after a win. I can't recall ever hearing about a punitive award being handed out specifically to punish the act of bringing a meritless suit, or unnecessarily prolonging a case. (Of course I don't get out much, so my not hearing about it by no means means it's unheard of...)
If there is a proven legal strategy for getting such an award, I'd love to hear about it.
MOD PARENT UP
/. certainly wouldn't hurt.
I for one would like to know if/when someone sets up a legal defense fund for this; high-profile exposure here on
One word...
I'm not even sure you need Admin access to run it from the command line. He just needs a thumb drive disguised as a peanut butter sandwich or something for all his portable apps...
Anyway, good point; wouldn't the enforcement folks be better off making him use a router that they pwn instead of a Windows installation that they've tried to compromise?
I think "Chaotic Neutral Empire" might be more fitting at this point.
Right, but the entire song is a sarcastic commentary on the shallowness, superficiality and hollowness of the "star" lifestyle. From the song's point of view, the ubiquity of drugs is offered as an element of criticism, not praise. In that context, the censorship just seems silly.
I suspect a custom censoring job in this case. I live in Chicagoland, and some stations leave "drugs" in while others don't. I agree that private censorship is the stations' prerogative; I'm just surprised... this is the first time I've heard it used on such a commonplace word. It's not the same as government censorship, you're right, but my fear is that this is a sign of our culture developing an expectation of being shielded from anything they find even mildly unsettling.
I have no idea what the band's position is on this; I suspect their label gives them little choice about agreeing to whatever they have to to ensure widespread airplay.
Good point. As has Pink Floyd's "don't give me that do-goody-good bullshit" and Steve Miller's "funky shit goin' down in the city."
All these years I *thought* ZZ Top was singing "I want her... *shit* I gotta have her." I was Sofa King disappointed to read the more mundane "*said* I gotta have her..."
IMO, it's expected for "fuck" to be excised from airplay one way or another, but speaking of Nickelback, WTF is with the word "drug" in "drug dealer" being censored from *some* radio stations' versions of their "Rockstar" song?
I've honestly never heard something like that before, and it gives me chills. The reference isn't even glorifying drugs, but even if it were, the censors are still off their leashes.
Metered bandwidth is not the same as metered minutes. The broadband companies been selling *peak* "up-to" bandwidth rates all along anyway.
They don't have to stop doing that, just offer Peak + Sustained plans for users with greater needs.
The Peak-Only folks will still get their 6Mb/s burst speeds (on cable, probably less for DSL), but daily/weekly/hourly/monthly loads would would be throttled to, e.g., 512k. Those who wanted to could buy their peak rates up to 8 or 10Mb (as you can now), but would also have a new option to buy their sustained rates up in tiers, to 1.5Mb, 3Mb, or whatever the network can handle without degrading others' service.
I have the top tier service now, and I rarely see real combined torrent download rates over 300-400k coming through my pipe.
buyindie.net is a great concept, and I don't think it's doomed at all. It's closer to a MetroMix than a Google Local, but it serves a more specialized purpose than either. There's great opportunity for using the local aspect to promote the Indie music scene as well, linking artists' merchandise (both local and web outlets) with their appearances, venues, and reviews of same.
I'd like to see it be a little more suburbanite-friendly (e.g. put a zip code box front and center), but that notwithstanding, the concept & execution are pretty impressive.
(Now if you're really worried about its survival, just make it easy for people to get laid through it.)
I don't get how making ACLs granular down to the user *and* process levels == DRM || Trusted Computing.
I'm as tinfoilhatty about those things as anyone, but nothing about the GP's suggested security enhancements require them to be locked away from the machine administrator. They're also exactly the kinds of things SE Linux is incorporating right now.
Think about it this way: go the opposite direction from the GP's suggestion and run with little to no ACL granularity. There... welcome to Windows 95, where processes can easily have more privileges than the invoking user.
DRM is about fencing the user out of things on his own computer. The ACL tweaking suggested above is about letting the user fence things off more precisely than before. The two ideas have some overlap, but the one doesn't entail a slippery slope to the other.
How do you staff the Bureau of Behavior Modification? The consequences for getting a bad apple in there scare the shit out of me. It's all well and good when wise and benevolent hypothetical people just like you or me are running it. But what happens when they're handpicked by Dick Cheney or Hillary Clinton or [insert favorite Machiavellian villain here]?
I'm not saying the prison system doesn't need an overhaul, nor that we shouldn't have a comprehensive sanity check on punishments relative to offenses and in relation to each other. I also get that sentencing is intrinsically intended -- at least in part -- to produce changes in the offender's future behavior.
When people say "behavior modification" though, they're not usually talking about aggregate studies of sentencing methods versus recidivism rates. They're usually talking about starting down a path that quite probably leads to Clockwork Orange crap down the road. Any power that you grant the government will eventually end up in the hands of people who don't share your political orientation or your ideas about what should and shouldn't constitute crimes. I don't know about you, but I would rather live with high crime rates than have a body of "reconditioning experts" become a fixture of our government.
Jabootu loves you.
http://jabootu.net./
I'm not an economist, but doesn't increasing demand for a used CD / DVD have some effect on the sales of new units? I honestly don't know, but it seems like it would to me.
Items like cars have model years, so if I were to, say, buy a 2003 Lexus, it wouldn't necessarily have any direct effect on 2007 model year sales. My extra demand might help the brand's reputation for resale value, but that's not a direct factor as far as I can tell.
On the other hand, CDs and DVDs can have more pressings issued at any time. A no-talent ass-clown's release named "Time, Love and Tenderness" is available used from $0.01 on Amazon, so demand must have dropped sharply since the album's release. If you wanted a classic like "Back in Black" though, the best used deal on Amazon is $2.59, with other editions of the same album going for $4.99, $6.77, and $7.49 used. If I were in charge of what to re-press and how many copies to issue, that latter state of affairs would make me think "Back in Black" was a good candidate for a big reissue.
Then again... if the demand for pre-owned copies was rising mainly because of a movement to boycott new ones, my sales projections could be wrong and the new pressing might just sit on store shelves. Like I said, I'm no economist. I thought about saying all this in my previous post, but it seemed easier to just say "dilute your contribution [by buying used]," and let that cover all the secondary economic effects of the act.
Disclaimer: I'm probably over-thinking this.
Pick any two: Enjoy mainstream movies, obey the law, deprive the MPAA of funds.
About the best compromise is to dilute your contribution to the bad guys' revenue streams: only buy movies used when purchasing, and whenever possible, check them out from your local library or borrow from friends instead. Those you do own, loan liberally among friends.
Admonish your peer group not to buy you new DVDs or CDs as gifts. Tell them you are happy to receive used ones though.
Bring up silly questions like "why do 10 of us have to own this same DVD? Do you think more than one of our group has ever watched it on the same night?"
You could also brutally murder anyone who disagrees, but IANAL so I can't speak to the legality of that.
This is due to Windows Media Center being about the only PVR software to obey CGMS-A signals, which come through your cable box via the analog S-Video output.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CGMS-A
Best ways I've found to avoid these problems:
1) Turn OFF Windows Update, and/or use a disk imaging system to make sure you can roll back any unwelcome changes like this;
2) Use different software for recording cable content (MediaPortal, or the scheduling app that comes with most tuner cards, etc.)
3) Don't pay for HBO; get those shows through alternative providers that have higher-quality, DRM-free, digital copies
Your post advocates a
(x) technical (x) legislative ( ) market-based (x) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(x) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
(x) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(x) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
This requires an internet-using & participating patsy, of course, plus a partner to "witness" target's online postings...