Posts by MacGyver

Re: Oh they would so love to do it ...

This is how you keep them at bay, by letting them know in no uncertain terms that we will not tolerate "Always On" nanny consoles.

I suspect those Meme pictures will be thrown around whenever someone even hints at "always on" anything.

Re: Just goes to show, if you have enough money..

If that is the case, then this is truly the exception, as they do spend their money on making the world a better place. The Gates are definitely not the norm. Most of the time the buyer is someone like Donald Trump, not someone who really has spent billions helping to fight AIDS and malaria. I stand by my statement as general rule in regards to people with too much money buying crap with what would be 5-20 years worth of salary, but concede in this particular case.

Re: Micky Mouse Act

..and renewable every 20 years until the end of time.

Sounds like forever to me, after all they wanted it to be forever.

"Sonny Bono wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution. ... As you know, there is also [then-MPAA president] Jack Valenti's proposal for term to last forever less one day. "

In 2023 when Mickey Mouse is set to drop into public domain (again), you honestly think it will, if so have I got a bridge to sell you.

Re: It's impossible to send data this way ...

Why couldn't you just record a minutes worth of "information" being transmitted, then compare the timestamps after the fact? What you said is like saying a telephone can't work because by the time you run over to the other end the sound is already gone.

Anyway, if data is being transmitted 6 times faster than the speed of light or more, maybe the problem is that the information they are trying to measure at the distant end is coming from only one possible future, and by stopping the experiment "before" that future event has caught up with current events, therefore screwing up the results. I guess what I'm asking is has anyone working with entangled quantum particles ever encoded something like PI in the spin of of one of their entangled particles and "kept" encoding it for an extended period of time, while measuring the spin of the opposite end to see if that same data ever starts coming in. I know they say that viewing the spin of the opposite end changes the result, but what if that is only for tests shorter than the event lag?

Re: Don't do the crime if you can't do the time

Really Yorgo? The issue is that the age of the people involved is often so young that their frontal-cortex hasn't even developed yet, so they basically CAN'T really make proper decisions based upon long-term consequences. Yet you think that it is fair to ruin their future or basically give them a life sentence for what is most of the time a victimless crime?

If you were any kind of a caring human being and not a sociopath you would have at least amended your comment with a suggestion for making the whole thing make more sense, instead of regurgitating uneducated crap quilted into pillows by Quakers .

I say, find them the equivalent of fixing Y2K date entries in code, or manually converting one database to another, or something, anything other than locking away a person that was most of the time literally too smart for their own good and too young to weigh the consequences. Give them a chance to pay back society in a way that their talents could offer the most benefit for everyone involved. Chances are if you stick a 20 something in jail for hacking, they are going to come out with new violence related skill-sets, a chip on their shoulder, and no job prospects higher than fry-cook, and that is just asking trouble.

Re: I don't understand.

I honestly at first wasn't really concerned with putting Linux on, I really was just wanting to dual-boot XP Pro 64 and Windows 8, but that is blocked from installing under UEFI as well. I was just using Grub2 as a easy way to pick bootloaders. I'm going to pine of that Windows XP File Explorer for years to come, I can feel it.

Re: Fair enough

He started out with the wrong mindset, he came around when it counted, now he acts like we all should. He now tries to make the world a better place, there is nothing wrong with that.

Re: Data delete?

I know, they make it sound like they lost something, other than the <10 minutes that it takes to boot from their PE or recovery CD/DVD and run the OS specific boot recovery command.

They should be thankful that it happened the way it did, they should take it for the wake-up call that it was. It also might be a good idea in the future to run one antivirus software on half of your infrastructure, and a competing antivirus of the the other half, that way, when this happens again, you won't be completely shutdown and sitting in the dark wondering what was going on.

Re: Self-inflicted wound

When I was in South Korea in 2005 you couldn't re-install XP and get it updated fast enough to prevent the new install from being infected. You had to use an external firewall or install the patches offline. If I remember it right, it took 30 seconds of being on the internet unprotected to get infected.

I'm not sure how making a new part to replace an old broken part is outside of fairuse. I mean that is almost the exact reason that CDs and DVDs are allowed copies, in the event of the original becoming damaged.

I think the the question you are proposing is whether or not you are buying the right to possess an object made from their IP. If that is the case, then the answer should be yes, at least one at any given time, and a copy from their IP to replace a defective/broken one should be well within fairuse.

Re: DRM Encourages Piracy

People need to fight with their dollars against this "tethered" model of software. What if I want to play it on the 10 hour flight to the states, or at my grandmothers house, or during a move before I have "the internet" connected? Requiring the internet is fine, just give my a free box that will provide this "internet" for free everywhere I go if I must be connected to it at all times to make use of the software you sold me, otherwise, no thank you.

Re: I'm not seeing what the problem is?

Not really the same thing, a camera takes pictures of people at locations at a certain time, GPS coordinates are for buildings and landmarks, and is not time sensitive, and is only accurate to a few meters anyway. Also note that any "tourist" could take a decrypted GPS receiver put it in their bag, and walk all over China, and provide "inch accurate" maps. How would they stop someone taking accurate GPS readings from known geographic locations around the bases and using those along side of the aerial photographs to create inch accurate maps. They can't. So why all the drama other than stupidity, or anti-competitive practices?

It sounds like some 70 year old bureaucrats are still stuck in the 1960's and logistics engineers are paying the price for their ignorance and fear.

Ditto about the control, but not only that, you're taking away jobs from your community and sending them to who knows where. Add to that network congestion issues, political issues in the countries your servers are hosted in, the security of your data, the fact that if you lose connection to your "cloud" and depending on how many "cloud" services you are using (Office365), you could be looking at a COMPLETE work stoppage from ALL your employees, the list goes on. At least with local in-house storage YOU control the money spent, but once you hand your data over, you are at the mercy of their price increases, and if you don't like, what are you going to do move it all back to your in-house... oh wait, never-mind.

Re: The thing is, he is right

Easy fix for devs (assuming you're not on some seldom used mirror), just add a # of times downloaded, and give the option to sort by popular. Leverage the crowd.

You could fix the problem of each mirror having it's own stats, by asking mirrors to upload their stats to a central repository or have the repository pull those stats daily (they may already do this, I have no idea).

That's the greatness of OpenSource, you don't have to wait until program manager finally fixes a problem, you can pull down the source and do it yourself if you're so inclined.

Re: hang on a minute ..

Firing any patent lawyer that is unable to explain why they granted a patent during a trial against/for said patent would go a long way. I bet we would see an increase in the scrutinizing over issued patents then.

Or at least require that 2 out of 3 non co-located patent clerks agree on the patent-ability of an idea before one is issued. I agree that it would increase the time to patent, so rectify that by hiring more clerks and raising the price of a patent by the correct factor to compensate for the increase in budget costs due to the increase in clerks. It's a win win, more jobs created and greater scrutiny towards the patents filed prior to them being issued.

Also, if stocks can now be traded on nanosecond scales, then patents should be shortened as well. We can't all live in a world that is speeding up yet still allow companies to continuously lobby to increase the length of time they "own" an idea. The same for copyrights, evolve or die, how many generations should get to make a living off a drawing of a mouse.

Re: AC 16:44

I was referring to the GUI "enhancements" because secure mode is more a function of the BIOS not the OS, but anyway, you still can't consistently turn that off either, go try it of a few on displays at various stores, it will be hit or miss, some will boot back up, some will not (Sony will not). I thought you were referring to the OS (for reasons stated above), and pertaining to the Metro/Modern mode, and yes you can click the "Desktop" tile, but if you think that makes it all go away, then that explains a lot and I'm done debating as we have no common ground to start from, have a nice day.

Re: I don't give a shit anymore...

I think it should be called "IP Sodomy", it has a nicer ring to it. (I mean they are looking for scary words are they not?)

"NBC was sodomized today by hackers." . see how it rolls off the tongue.

Re: 1980s?

I don't why people can't see this. It also seems like the quickest way to get around it would be to simply fracture your larger company into different new "divisions" thereby increasing the need for more credits. Or simply create a bunch of fake manufacturing companies that have all the equipment to run, but don't, then sell off their allotted markers to larger companies, go out of business after those are gone, sell the "business" to themselves under a new name, get new credits, repeat as needed. Hell I can see it now, "charities" will be set up that will say they do some sort of positive offset such as planting trees, big companies will "donate" tax-deductible money to them to "offset" their own markers, then the next day that charity can dig that tree up, and then sell the planting of it again the next day. (will there be laws as to how long a "planted tree" has to be in the ground? There will have to be.)

In the end it is all just a complete joke if EVERY country on the planet doesn't buy into it, the only recourse to a non-member country would be a full trade embargo. If it is world-wide, what organization is going to police and monitor every business in the world to check for compliance. Let just put this stupid idea away already and come up with something better.

Why don't we assemble panels of experts in the various fields, and come up with solutions or better regulations based upon what is possible from current technology, create guidelines for lowering harmful emissions over time based on what is possible each year, fine any company that doesn't follow the regulations. Let them stick their cap-and-trade up their ass.