So the copyright law basically says that you're protected automatically, but that the protection isn't worth anything until you actually register for protection? Nice. Good to know.
Actually, Marx merely postulated that revolution to overthrow oppression was inevitable, and that a classless society would also be inevitable. He never said that this was a way to "install world-wide Communism", merely that it was inevitable on a society-by-society basis.
The problem with all of the attempted restrictions is that the enterprising students who plan on doing whatever they want with the computer are going to get an installation disk, format the system, and do whatever they want with it, unrestricted. You could try setting up a punishment for those students, of course, but then you risk alienating the kids even further and driving them to despise and resent the laptops (kinda counter-productive). Better to eliminate the scary stalker-ish remote monitoring and lock-down policies and let the kids go nuts.
At the most, give them a token virus protection filter and a school email account with good server-side spam filtering and call it a day. For the sake of liability, you should send out information pamphlets that squarely place the responsibility of safe computing on the parents (where it belongs). Offer informational seminars if possible, at the very least to the local PTA.
For a bonus, you could install something like NeoOffice or OpenOffice on the systems so that they have exposure to a good productivity suite that won't cost the district anything extra, unless you've already got some sort of district-wide Microsoft license in place that actually makes it economical to put MS Office on there.
Because then they don't have to worry about having a school district full of virus-infested Windows machines that they have to tech support every other day. Granted that OSX will sooner or later attract its share of viruses, but in the meantime, it has none.
By the by, you might want to check your pricing. With the educational discount that Apple offers, you can't save $800 on a $950 laptop and get something that the students can actually make use of.
Actually, they ARE moving their Xboxes. This is an old and well-worn complaint. Not only is it stated in the summary, it's in the article, too.
I can't blame Microsoft for this one. If they could figure out how to fix it, great (after all, I can move my laptop while the disk is spinning, so you'd think it's do-able). However, I can't figure out what it is with all these people moving their game consoles around while it's running. I have a PS2 and PS3, and once I figured out where I wanted them, I left them there and there they've stayed. If it's something where a kid keeps it in the closet or something, again, figure it out: situate the console, then turn the damn thing on. Seriously, it's not that hard, and doing it the other way around just seems backwards to me. I can't think of a single audio/video appliance in my living room that I move around after turning it on.
The former is a matter of preventing industrial sharks from taking over and squeezing every last penny from consumers while offering sub-par service, the latter involves imposing someone else's subjective moral values on the general populace. Not the same thing at all.
If you're a serious Photoshop user, animator, video editor, or do any other work that is graphics-intensive, has a large undo stack, or relies on real-time effects (i.e. video playback in Final Cut Pro), then even modern systems with less than 8GB of RAM are still going to require disk swapping. Run two or more of these programs at a time and your requirements skyrocket. There are still many legitimate reasons for having virtual memory services available in an operating system.
Citation needed. Where do you get the number that there were 2000 Mac viruses in the wild in 2002? You need something to back up that claim. I've had Macs for 12 years and haven't worried about viruses since about the first year.
One example does not repeatedly make. While I agree that the image of the iPod touch is pretty damning, it's hardly representative of every single product displayed on the Apple Store web page. I was satisfied with the representations of every single computer on the page, actually.
In addition, the example you cite showing the actual size doesn't use a photograph to back up its claim of wrong-doing, either; the person just resized the original computer generated image in Photoshop. Lies upon lies, as it were.
Ironically, my first-generation iPod touch looks about as thin as the photo, versus the actual size claimed to be shown. I wonder if the new ones really are thicker?
Sterile is not the same as non-poisonous. Urine contains things your body didn't want in the first place (i.e. urea); putting them back in is counter-productive.
I'm not against the urine purification idea at all, just the idea of people preaching that it's okay to drink their own urine.
True; the grandfather post seems to be confusing sovereignty with "might makes right". By that logic, America would be the sole sovereign power by dint of having the largest military in the world. This is obviously not the case.
If you're driving so fast that looking at a speed limit sign actually creates a hazard, then you're probably already speeding, anyway. They actually do take those things into account when they lay out speed limits and post signs.
Yep. A Japanese researcher, Nakamura, finally figured out how to do it and the company he worked for made a fortune overnight. He finally had to sue them for royalties, since the company was making bank and gave him a measly $200 to show their appreciation).
He finally got a $190 million dollar settlement. The company actually made six times that in royalties, and the judge said that he was actually entitled to half, but Nakamura only asked for $190 million, so that's what he got.
If you read TFA, you'll see that they were in a commercial trial agreement, and that Sprint gave Cogent 30 day's notice of the disconnect past the expiration of the trial.
I agree. I grew up with DST, and now live in Japan, which doesn't recognize it. The winters are exactly the same, and the additional light in the summer really doesn't make that much difference. (Although I do close the curtains on my east-facing bedroom window so that the 4:30AM sunrise in June doesn't wake me up).
I'm lucky to be using Softbank - all SMS messages and calls between customers are free. Since the majority of my friends are Softbank users, it works out very cheap for me. $10 a month for the plan.
The nice thing about Truecrypt encryption is that if they don't have your password and your password is reasonably decent (not your girlfriend's name), then they shouldn't be able to hack it. Truecrypt is considered military-grade protection when used correctly.
As LighterShadeOfBlack said, Truecrypt's "plausible deniability" feature is not to be discounted, either; a hidden, encrypted volume simply won't show up by any conventional method of data retrieval, and can only be accessed if you have the password.
If somebody asks if you have any other data hidden on the system, you can request that they scan it themselves to verify that there is nothing else besides the random data you would expect to find in unallocated disk space. Since Truecrypt will continue to function even after deleting the program file used to set up Truecrypt volumes, you can choose to delete the software in order to further conceal the fact that you might have hidden data. Authorities can't simply ask you to give them every single password you have in order to verify that you aren't keeping something from them.
Truecrypt also allows for hidden operating systems, which means that you can boot into a vanilla, dummy system for show, which should go a long way towards allaying suspicions about your trustworthiness. Without actually scanning the data structure of your hard drive, it's not worth their while to investigate further unless you give them a reason to be concerned.
The good news is, continued antics like this are going to make Jobs bullet-proof. It's the "boy who cried wolf" scenario: pull this prank enough times and nobody will ever believe that Jobs has died, even if he actually does.
I agree with keeping it entertaining. As a geek who also happens to have taught English to Japanese elementary school children for two years (talk about incomprehensible subject matter!), it's all about how much fun you make it for them. The good news is, fourth graders are the sweet spot for the balance of enthusiasm with smarts. Keep in mind mind that just because your job is IT doesn't mean that you have to be constrained to talk about it the entire time.
Seeing that you have 20 minutes, I'd say you've got eight minutes for a warm-up and the rest for a game. Definitely keep the focus on aerospace and computers, keep the IT talk to "I keep the computer systems running," and go from there. Keep in mind that fourth graders are NOT stupid, though, so make sure simple doesn't equal patronizing.
Above all, being easy-going and cheerful makes all the difference. Photos and hands-on props are always good, and if your company has any PR people, you might want to pick their brains on what's cool about where you work, too.
I can't believe they're being so stingy on the camera resolution. 3 Megapixels is the minimum on your average Japanese cell phone nowadays, so it's not like the technology is expensive (not to mention that the screens are smaller, so display resolution isn't exactly an excuse, either). Considering they're touting the ability to download content, you'd think they'd be more forward-thinking about the ability to upload as well using social websites like the Japanese Mixi, or the American Facebook.
Regarding the memory stick, yeah, it's strictly for transferring the games to the internal memory, nothing else.
Otherwise, let me be the millionth person to cry out, "1 Download != 1 Lost sale".
My favorite part of that press release:
Yes and no. While it does in fact represent opportunistic theft, I agree that it is not a 1-to-1 ratio. In other words, free downloading lowers the threshold at which point somebody decides they'd rather not pay to see a movie they suspect they wouldn't like.
However, there are people who genuinely want to see a movie but are opportunistic enough to take the free download instead. If you're downloading a copy of a movie without paying a rental fee, buying a theater ticket, or buying the DVD, you are indeed stealing. In the case of the theater or the rental store, if somebody got caught in sneaking in or removing a movie without paying, I don't think they'd be so ready to deny that he or she was doing something wrong.
However, I do think that some of the responsibility lies with the movie and music distributors for failing to adapt to the changing market. They are falling prey to their own greed, price-fixing practices, and lack of vision.
I, for example, choose to download American and British television that simply isn't available in the country where I live, and shows no signs of being licensed anytime soon. If I try to watch them through legitimate, on-line channels, I get denied with messages telling me that I'm not authorized to watch it in my country, which is either due to old-school licensing restrictions or a lack of local advertisers to make it worth their while. I fall in a distinct niche where my irritation at the shortcomings of the system overcomes my sense of guilt. It doesn't make me right; both the media creators and I are getting shafted by a distribution system that hasn't adapted completely to the ubiquitousness of a global internet.
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So the copyright law basically says that you're protected automatically, but that the protection isn't worth anything until you actually register for protection? Nice. Good to know.
Actually, Marx merely postulated that revolution to overthrow oppression was inevitable, and that a classless society would also be inevitable. He never said that this was a way to "install world-wide Communism", merely that it was inevitable on a society-by-society basis.
You might want to watch the story of Brazil's petroleum independence and almost total conversion to ethanol:
http://current.com/items/89112645/the_world_s_sugar_daddy.htm
The problem with all of the attempted restrictions is that the enterprising students who plan on doing whatever they want with the computer are going to get an installation disk, format the system, and do whatever they want with it, unrestricted. You could try setting up a punishment for those students, of course, but then you risk alienating the kids even further and driving them to despise and resent the laptops (kinda counter-productive). Better to eliminate the scary stalker-ish remote monitoring and lock-down policies and let the kids go nuts.
At the most, give them a token virus protection filter and a school email account with good server-side spam filtering and call it a day. For the sake of liability, you should send out information pamphlets that squarely place the responsibility of safe computing on the parents (where it belongs). Offer informational seminars if possible, at the very least to the local PTA.
For a bonus, you could install something like NeoOffice or OpenOffice on the systems so that they have exposure to a good productivity suite that won't cost the district anything extra, unless you've already got some sort of district-wide Microsoft license in place that actually makes it economical to put MS Office on there.
Because then they don't have to worry about having a school district full of virus-infested Windows machines that they have to tech support every other day. Granted that OSX will sooner or later attract its share of viruses, but in the meantime, it has none.
By the by, you might want to check your pricing. With the educational discount that Apple offers, you can't save $800 on a $950 laptop and get something that the students can actually make use of.
Actually, they ARE moving their Xboxes. This is an old and well-worn complaint. Not only is it stated in the summary, it's in the article, too.
I can't blame Microsoft for this one. If they could figure out how to fix it, great (after all, I can move my laptop while the disk is spinning, so you'd think it's do-able). However, I can't figure out what it is with all these people moving their game consoles around while it's running. I have a PS2 and PS3, and once I figured out where I wanted them, I left them there and there they've stayed. If it's something where a kid keeps it in the closet or something, again, figure it out: situate the console, then turn the damn thing on. Seriously, it's not that hard, and doing it the other way around just seems backwards to me. I can't think of a single audio/video appliance in my living room that I move around after turning it on.
Regulation of commerce != censorship of media.
The former is a matter of preventing industrial sharks from taking over and squeezing every last penny from consumers while offering sub-par service, the latter involves imposing someone else's subjective moral values on the general populace. Not the same thing at all.
If you're a serious Photoshop user, animator, video editor, or do any other work that is graphics-intensive, has a large undo stack, or relies on real-time effects (i.e. video playback in Final Cut Pro), then even modern systems with less than 8GB of RAM are still going to require disk swapping. Run two or more of these programs at a time and your requirements skyrocket. There are still many legitimate reasons for having virtual memory services available in an operating system.
Citation needed. Where do you get the number that there were 2000 Mac viruses in the wild in 2002? You need something to back up that claim. I've had Macs for 12 years and haven't worried about viruses since about the first year.
One example does not repeatedly make. While I agree that the image of the iPod touch is pretty damning, it's hardly representative of every single product displayed on the Apple Store web page. I was satisfied with the representations of every single computer on the page, actually.
In addition, the example you cite showing the actual size doesn't use a photograph to back up its claim of wrong-doing, either; the person just resized the original computer generated image in Photoshop. Lies upon lies, as it were.
Ironically, my first-generation iPod touch looks about as thin as the photo, versus the actual size claimed to be shown. I wonder if the new ones really are thicker?
Sterile is not the same as non-poisonous. Urine contains things your body didn't want in the first place (i.e. urea); putting them back in is counter-productive.
I'm not against the urine purification idea at all, just the idea of people preaching that it's okay to drink their own urine.
True; the grandfather post seems to be confusing sovereignty with "might makes right". By that logic, America would be the sole sovereign power by dint of having the largest military in the world. This is obviously not the case.
If you're driving so fast that looking at a speed limit sign actually creates a hazard, then you're probably already speeding, anyway. They actually do take those things into account when they lay out speed limits and post signs.
If you finish watching the movie, he actually goes on to say exactly that, and shows how to properly wire it with a resistor.
Yep. A Japanese researcher, Nakamura, finally figured out how to do it and the company he worked for made a fortune overnight. He finally had to sue them for royalties, since the company was making bank and gave him a measly $200 to show their appreciation).
He finally got a $190 million dollar settlement. The company actually made six times that in royalties, and the judge said that he was actually entitled to half, but Nakamura only asked for $190 million, so that's what he got.
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20040131a1.html
If you read TFA, you'll see that they were in a commercial trial agreement, and that Sprint gave Cogent 30 day's notice of the disconnect past the expiration of the trial.
I agree. I grew up with DST, and now live in Japan, which doesn't recognize it. The winters are exactly the same, and the additional light in the summer really doesn't make that much difference. (Although I do close the curtains on my east-facing bedroom window so that the 4:30AM sunrise in June doesn't wake me up).
I'm lucky to be using Softbank - all SMS messages and calls between customers are free. Since the majority of my friends are Softbank users, it works out very cheap for me. $10 a month for the plan.
The nice thing about Truecrypt encryption is that if they don't have your password and your password is reasonably decent (not your girlfriend's name), then they shouldn't be able to hack it. Truecrypt is considered military-grade protection when used correctly.
As LighterShadeOfBlack said, Truecrypt's "plausible deniability" feature is not to be discounted, either; a hidden, encrypted volume simply won't show up by any conventional method of data retrieval, and can only be accessed if you have the password.
If somebody asks if you have any other data hidden on the system, you can request that they scan it themselves to verify that there is nothing else besides the random data you would expect to find in unallocated disk space. Since Truecrypt will continue to function even after deleting the program file used to set up Truecrypt volumes, you can choose to delete the software in order to further conceal the fact that you might have hidden data. Authorities can't simply ask you to give them every single password you have in order to verify that you aren't keeping something from them.
Truecrypt also allows for hidden operating systems, which means that you can boot into a vanilla, dummy system for show, which should go a long way towards allaying suspicions about your trustworthiness. Without actually scanning the data structure of your hard drive, it's not worth their while to investigate further unless you give them a reason to be concerned.
I use the electricity-friendly version called the photograph. ;)
I agree that citizen piracy won't stop, but the artist's still stand to gain from stopping the institutionalized kind.
The good news is, continued antics like this are going to make Jobs bullet-proof. It's the "boy who cried wolf" scenario: pull this prank enough times and nobody will ever believe that Jobs has died, even if he actually does.
I agree with keeping it entertaining. As a geek who also happens to have taught English to Japanese elementary school children for two years (talk about incomprehensible subject matter!), it's all about how much fun you make it for them. The good news is, fourth graders are the sweet spot for the balance of enthusiasm with smarts. Keep in mind mind that just because your job is IT doesn't mean that you have to be constrained to talk about it the entire time.
Seeing that you have 20 minutes, I'd say you've got eight minutes for a warm-up and the rest for a game. Definitely keep the focus on aerospace and computers, keep the IT talk to "I keep the computer systems running," and go from there. Keep in mind that fourth graders are NOT stupid, though, so make sure simple doesn't equal patronizing.
Above all, being easy-going and cheerful makes all the difference. Photos and hands-on props are always good, and if your company has any PR people, you might want to pick their brains on what's cool about where you work, too.
I can't believe they're being so stingy on the camera resolution. 3 Megapixels is the minimum on your average Japanese cell phone nowadays, so it's not like the technology is expensive (not to mention that the screens are smaller, so display resolution isn't exactly an excuse, either). Considering they're touting the ability to download content, you'd think they'd be more forward-thinking about the ability to upload as well using social websites like the Japanese Mixi, or the American Facebook.
Regarding the memory stick, yeah, it's strictly for transferring the games to the internal memory, nothing else.
Otherwise, let me be the millionth person to cry out, "1 Download != 1 Lost sale".
My favorite part of that press release:
Yes and no. While it does in fact represent opportunistic theft, I agree that it is not a 1-to-1 ratio. In other words, free downloading lowers the threshold at which point somebody decides they'd rather not pay to see a movie they suspect they wouldn't like.
However, there are people who genuinely want to see a movie but are opportunistic enough to take the free download instead. If you're downloading a copy of a movie without paying a rental fee, buying a theater ticket, or buying the DVD, you are indeed stealing. In the case of the theater or the rental store, if somebody got caught in sneaking in or removing a movie without paying, I don't think they'd be so ready to deny that he or she was doing something wrong.
However, I do think that some of the responsibility lies with the movie and music distributors for failing to adapt to the changing market. They are falling prey to their own greed, price-fixing practices, and lack of vision.
I, for example, choose to download American and British television that simply isn't available in the country where I live, and shows no signs of being licensed anytime soon. If I try to watch them through legitimate, on-line channels, I get denied with messages telling me that I'm not authorized to watch it in my country, which is either due to old-school licensing restrictions or a lack of local advertisers to make it worth their while. I fall in a distinct niche where my irritation at the shortcomings of the system overcomes my sense of guilt. It doesn't make me right; both the media creators and I are getting shafted by a distribution system that hasn't adapted completely to the ubiquitousness of a global internet.