Domain: boingboing.net
Stories and comments across the archive that link to boingboing.net.
Comments · 2,019
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Re:Well, yeah
If Apple can remotely disable apps on iPhone, it seems Apple still wants to control their phone even after it is sold to the customers.
Steve jobs confirms this here. -
Add this to the satellite they launched recently
and they could actuarially revolutionize life in the developing world.
Take all the data from the satellite, crunch it through Precision Agriculture systems to generate recommendations for crop care (and even crop selection), and then distribute the results over the broadband network, along with things like video tutorials for farming techniques.
Boing Boing has a post on the basics of precision agriculture here: http://www.boingboing.net/2008/09/09/agroveillance-using.html
http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/hexayurt/supercomputer-applications-for-the-developing-world-375
Was an approach to doing this based on repurposing military imagery.
Really could change the world in a big way, food security for all.
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Re:The law has it all wrong.
Boy do I agree with you about how much easier it is with console games. I wanted to go buy Spore until I found out how restrictive its copy restriction is. WTF. I just want to play the game, not 'register' it. To answer your question, CD-ROM drives in PCs server different duties from consoles. It's a much bigger pain to swap out discs on a PC for a game when other things are going on. It's the nature of the beast.
No, it's because PC games companies don't give half-a-shit about the quality of their product. If a console with significantly wimpier hardware than my desktop computer can do it, then there's NO reason a PC can't also do it. And since most PC gamers have been beat-down over the years by low-quality products, they don't demand any better.
BTW you're not missing anything:
1) Spore is an EA game, and therefore practically guaranteed to suck
2) Spore is a highly-hyped high-concept game which is also a year late; I've been a gaming fan long enough to know that games like this are also guaranteed to suck. (See: Black and White or Fable, for example.)That isn't what I said. By the time 2 years have gone by, the game is typically no longer availble for sale. Many of the people will no longer be able to easily dig up their copy of it. Etc. There's really a number of reasons why somebody'd go download it later. Settle down.
It's still piracy, regardless of how much time has gone by! (Well, until the game is put in the public domain.) I'm unsettled because you are justifying the piracy of software by saying it's "ok" to take if the game is two years old. Wrong. It's legally wrong, and it's morally wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
This is the EXACT kind of weak-ass justifications that pirates tell themselves while they rob game developers of income. Which was the grandparent's entire point: if you're going to pirate games, don't waste our time and yours coming up with weak-ass justifications that wouldn't convince a kindergarten, and just admit you're pirating games because you're cheap.
Not buying it sends the message to game publishers that people don't want the game. It's no more informative than that. If the game is highly pirated but sales are low, they'll start asking questions like if the price was too high. If it's a given that copy protection won't work, they won't have much other choice than to find out why.
If people don't buy it, but tons of people pirate it, it sends the message that gamers are crooks who don't give a shit about paying for goods they consume. The fact that people pirated it means you're coming to the wrong conclusion; obviously people willing to break the law to get the game actually *do* want it. Duh.
If people didn't buy it, and people didn't pirate it, that would indicate that people don't want it. But that's basically the opposite scenario to the one we're talking about.
It's not a given that copy protection doesn't work; you have to be pretty uber-nerd to even attempt to break copy protection on a PC game. You have to actually mod hardware to break copy protection on most consoles, and throw away your ability to play online. (I dunno about the PS3, actually, I just have an Xbox.)
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/04/02itunes.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/09/yahoo-music-to-recor.html
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/hooray-for-no-drm/amazon-jumps-headfirst-into-drm+free-music-download-market-with-12000-record-labels-260898.php^^ Three major music distributers stopped using DRM. This is despite all of the MP3 files floating around on the internet. Success.
Music store... music store... music store... this is relevant to video games, how?
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Re:The law has it all wrong.
If they bought it, why would they download it from a filesharing site? You're making no damned sense.
Lots of reasons. (Deja vu, I was just telling somebody this yesterday.) Some cracks only work on a particular version of the binary file so it's beneficial to download the app along with it. People wanting to rid themselves of needing the CD can just download the cracked version, in full, and have that ready to reinstall. Some are people who have lost or damaged their CD and simply want to replace it. I've actually met people who download this stuff just to have it. Like it's a scavenger hunt or something. Maybe they barter with it? I don't know.
Game consoles require the CD to play, and those seem to be doing pretty well. (What's obnoxious is BOTH requiring the CD AND requiring a bunch of disk space for the install. One of the many reasons I've stopped buying PC games altogether.)
Boy do I agree with you about how much easier it is with console games. I wanted to go buy Spore until I found out how restrictive its copy restriction is. WTF. I just want to play the game, not 'register' it. To answer your question, CD-ROM drives in PCs server different duties from consoles. It's a much bigger pain to swap out discs on a PC for a game when other things are going on. It's the nature of the beast. Game consoles also have a different audience and differently natured hardware that seem to side-step the issue. I imagine part of it is simply that consoles that can store games is a recent thing. I'll tell you something I'm not sure that you're aware of. People have found a way to generate ISO images from PSPs and store them on Memory Sticks. My PSP has 8 or 9 games on it without any UMDs in it. All of them are legit, but two of them I did download instead of rip. It was just easier.
"It's ok if they take our product without paying for it, because our product has been released for 2 years." Christ, you're doing EXACTLY what the grandparent was talking about: justifying your piracy with a LAME excuse.
That isn't what I said. By the time 2 years have gone by, the game is typically no longer availble for sale. Many of the people will no longer be able to easily dig up their copy of it. Etc. There's really a number of reasons why somebody'd go download it later. Settle down.
What would you SUGGEST publishers do in response to stories like this?
... Seriously, do you know anything about how humans beings behave at all?Why do you think I'm annoyed with their stance on piracy? Why do you think I suggested making the DRM worthless instead of trying to convince ppl to throttle back the on-line downloads? I totally hear you, man. They let a train of though run away from them the legit customers were bitten.
The correct response, if there's a product you're not interested in buying (for ANY reason, including invasive DRM), the correct response is not to buy it. Pirating the product anyway just encourages more DRM in the future, it sends this message to the game's publishers: "gamers are criminals"
Not buying it sends the message to game publishers that people don't want the game. It's no more informative than that. If the game is highly pirated but sales are low, they'll start asking questions like if the price was too high. If it's a given that copy protection won't work, they won't have much other choice than to find out why.
Oh yeah? Link me. If it's been "disproven," you should have a myriad of sources and examples to back that up.
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2007/04/02itunes.html
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/10/09/yahoo-music-to-recor.html -
Ubiquitous Computing
This is one of three parts that will enable ubiquitous computing - the ubiquitous data gatherers & environmental sensors.
The second is a wireless routing protocol that really supports jumping from one AP to another (This will be worked out, probably as a derivative of cell phone networks, when people start roaming further than a single WiFi AP and demand seamless transitions) without disrupting existing sessions. More than just auto-connecting to a new AP, but having previous datastreams (streaming music, calls, chat) redirected to the new address and handing over authentication tokens as well.
The third is a system capable of generating or pattern-matching meaningful information from new sensors without being explicitly told how (since not even a geek such as I would want to program my implants to recognize every new blobject they encounter). We'll get there eventually. -
Re:AT&T's getting more clueful.
The iPhone, at least, has a "Disable Data Roaming" option... of course, they probably had that clue shoved down their throats by Apple.
:)This option was first demanded by a bunch of angry customers who had their email checking set every 15 minutes and got a huge roaming bill before Apple included it in the iphone software. For instance: http://boingboing.net/2007/07/31/att-iphone-intl-roam.html
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Spy sattelite can shoot pictures at unusual angles
I would assume that with some basic armchair assumptions about the FOV and zoom capabilities of the satellites' cameras
Well the problem is that more modern satellite have supposedly more complicated Cassegrain assemblies making them able to shoot pictures at weird angles.
So although amateurs satellite watcher could very well help establish a precise map of all "über-secret"(*) military satellites *are* - inferring which part of the world are indeed visible and looked at is going to be slightly more complicated.
But civilian applications (knowing which of the official satellite is looking where) could be more easily done (since I haven't heard any of them to be designed to shoot picture at weird angles - and even then their characteristics could be obtained), thus helping privacy paranoid to hide their cat and exhibitionists to inflict their nude sunbaths to innocent Google Maps users.
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(*) - übergeheim for german geeks...
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Re:ehh..
"So expect that in a few years you will insert a CF card or USB stick into your media station and watch the latest movie."
Already happening...
It's very likely a disruptive technology will affect the storage industry in the next 5-8 yrs. And we'll be hitting another tech boom as well (since the current web2.0 is finally dying down...)
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The question posed in the summary is very valid
This is pointless.
Yep, that's an adequate summary of this whole thread.
So far, looks like the parent post by circletimessquare got modded down as "Offtopic," which I think one could make a valid argument for (whether or not I think the moderation is "fair" being a different issue).
Seriously, why take this guy's bait? He's karma-whoring, IMHO.
For what it's worth, I think you had a valid point in that it's not a good idea for any Western power to get involved in these matters. We can certainly express an opinion, but when it comes to "calls to action" like circletimessquare seems to be advocating, do we really even know enough about these kinds of situations to inject ourselves into them and try to change them? What if we choose wrong and wind up creating more problems for ourselves (or the people we are ostensibly trying to help) in the long run?
I also want to take exception to circletimessquare's apparent assertion that asking "What if this happens here?" is somehow being selfish. (If that's not the point he was making, then I apologize, but that's what I gleaned from his comment.) I think that's a perfectly valid question being posed in the summary. Whether the current anti-government protestors are in fact anti-democratic (as many analysts believe) is not the point. The fact is that the democratic regime in Thailand which is currently in power undermines its own credibility when it tries to suppress dissent and shut down opposition web sites. This is a scary precedent, and I would hate to see something like that happen here.
In point of fact, according to Lawrence Lessig, we may already be heading in the direction that the Thai government is -- did you see the recent article on BoingBoing about the coming iPatriot Act? This legislation is sitting on a shelf or in someone's desk at the Justice Department, waiting for the right excuse to be dusted off and implemented. The video is embedded in the linked page -- Lessig's comments on the iPatriot Act are about 6 minutes in. Note that he also discusses how the Patriot Act was already pretty much completed long before 9/11 happened.
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Re:We learned a lot from 9/11.
You haven't lost even a drop of your liberty.
Tell that to those on one of the Do Not Fly lists. Recently CNN did a report on three people who have trouble taking a flight. One is a commercial pilot for an airline, another is a 5 year old boy, the third is a lawyer. But they all share the same name, James Robinson, which is on one of those lists. And the pilot is a retired Air National Guard brigadier general.
That most definitely is a loss of liberty.
Falcon
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Re:Not illegal
Oh man! As an Oregon State taxpayer, I'm totally suing California for stealing our idea!
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Re:Audible will never accept this
Same with Random House, who found that none of their DRM-free audiobooks were pirated.
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Re:Analog FTW!
Yes, yes it would. You see photographers actually care about their prints lasting (or at least they have since Wilhelm started doing permanence testing on color materials and discovered they all sucked at the time). A pigment inkjet print on acid-free paper or a good B&W silver halide print will probably outlast most digital media you can easily come up with. And the print is it's own reader.
I'll go a step further.
Any halfway-decent print, even if it's moderately neglected, should outlast the photographer, if not his grandchildren as well.
(And, no, this isn't just in the case of the guy who develops his prints with a radioactive emulsion, or the one who used AIDS-tainted blood as his Red #25 filter)
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Re:Doesn't matter to me
LOOK AT THIS BUNCH OF IDIOTS WRITING HARSH JOKES AT THE REPUBLICANS.
Still it needs just one joke on the N_GGER Hussein II and you get immediately modded as "FLAMEBAIT"&"TROLL"
Well I do remember that it was mr Hussein IIthat asked for political matters to be realeased under CC and still it looks they are using a proprietary format. So maybe he's not much of a NAGGER but really he manages quite effectively in annoying me: he doesen't uphold even a stupid promise.
Sig: In Politically Correct America you can't talk about anything without consulting a lawyer.
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Re:In FEMA's defense
Just curious, would you advocate privately run police forces?
The DEA is already employing private security for their raids.
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Re:Slashdot crazies who know nothing about the law
This is 5th amendment. And the use of the 5th amendment is not incriminating. Any sane individual would take the 5th under all circumstances.
After all, even if he didn't have kiddie porn, he could get nailed if he had pirated music or software, or fired if the computer had company secrets. There are a million reasons to take the 5th, even by innocent people, and people who would convict *solely* on a brief glimpse of a computer screen by a cop and a defendant taking the 5th should educate themselves about the purpose of the 5th amendment (see my previous link).
If you watch the video I linked, it gives a million reasons why volunteering information is stupid, even if you are innocent. Providing information leads to false convictions on flimsy evidence. And it's not because the cops are dirty (usually), it's because they're human, they make mistakes, and their job description doesn't include looking for ways to exonerate a suspect.
Finally, from TFA, it says the officer saw "thousands of images of adult pornography and animation depicting adult and child pornography." You note there isn't an overlap there. They saw adult pornography (legal) and animated child (and adult) pornography (legal however distasteful you may find it). So they don't even have probably cause, nothing they saw was unambiguously illegal.
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Not only that ...
.. but if that was the stupidest thing he's ever seen he doesn't get out of Mom's basement much.
I mean, fercryinoutloud, there's NASCAR Brand Bacon:
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/03/30/moment-of-adversyner.html
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Re:Why?
sorry, it might have been boingboing, not
/.: -
Re:Innovation, eh?
Yeah, touch screen is so passé.
In the 80s, even Buicks had 'em.
http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/06/23/buick-reatta-had-a-t.html/
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Re:At the risk of being modded troll...
Yeah, that's why Steve Jobs said he doesn't like DRM and wants to get rid of it.
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Re:The real news: No mention of iPhone in the arti
For the average consumer they don't need to mention the iPhone. I was at a bar last week and there was a TV on. Several times there was a commercial for a phone that wasn't the iPhone (but had a touch screen motion sensing, etc.) and twice I heard people make comments on the iPhone when they saw the ad. The iPhone has such huge mindshare that even an ad selling something similar to an iPhone is selling the iPhone.
If anyone is going to really compete with the iPhone in the next several years they're going to have to reuse the old Honneywell slogan: The other touchscreen phone.
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Re:Muslims believe that the earth is flat!
Well, not all of them believe the earth is flat; there's the physicist who debated this flat-earth "astonomer" on Iraqi TV, but yes, it's a good reminder that there are quite a few muslim flat-earthers.
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Re:Health care, what health care?
But if you do, post pictures.
The smurf who ran for office in Montana (as a libertarian, naturally) looked awesome.
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Re:Anyone up for a pool?
Since traffic counters and blinkenlights are terrorist tools in Boston, I'm surprised this guy got as far down the street as he did before Homeland Security detained him for our safety.
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Re:uhhh
Now if only they could "kindle" some interest in the darned things
That's mostly because Amazon have awful hardware designers -- Apple or Microsoft or anyone else would have done a decent job but whoever designed the 1970s-style ugliness that is Kindle needs to be fired, and then the Amazon manager who approved it needs to be fired, and so on up the chain. Thankfully
e-ink will be on magazine covers before the year end and so hopefully we'll get decent devices soon.
and make the media format open we might have something to be excited about.
With DRM/TPMs being legally protected now there's a big push in the copyright industry to move to protected digital forms. When content is surrounded by DRM/TPMs then they can remove fair use or anything that law makers provide.
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Creative Commies (cc)
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Luckily they don't have Verizon in Austria
or it could be much worse.
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Re:The abuse of Copyright has gone far enough
Funny thing is, Mickey wasn't about to become public domain. He was and always will be a Disney trademark. Shorts like Steamboat Willie were going to go into the public domain (which was a VERY blatant rip off of Steamboat Bill, using a character that was a rip off of a toy Micky Mouse that Disney just marketed better and then sued the originator of the toy. I have yet to see a single thing that Disney created even mostly from scratch. They're scum, and I'm going to do my best to not support them, even though I've got a kid on the way.
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Re:standards
I got the impression that Ogg Theora was removed as the default codec because certain parties were arguing for the inclusion of DRM in the HTML 5 standard. Was that an incorrect assumption?
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#video0
My point was exactly that pushing for a standard which does not exist would be similar to the non-standard tags pushed through in the period when NS4.7 & IE4 where the main browsers.
From the above link:
"we need a codec that is known to not require per-unit or per-distributor licensing"
No problem.
"compatible with the open source development model, that is of sufficient quality as to be usable,"
Quality is disputable, of course. But what other open sourced alternative is there at the moment?
"and that is not an additional submarine patent risk for large companies."
This is not a problem, as far as I understand matters. Ogg Theora allows everyone to use the patented methods used, right? No other format I know of does. It would be lovely if there were "open" alternatives.
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Re:You wonder?
And don't think that this was some accidental one-off thing. The London police are running a campaign to equate taking photos with terrorism.
The large numbers of London CCTV cameras are justified with the mantra "You have no right to privacy in a public place". Apparently this argument doesn't apply for citizens who wish to take photos themselves...
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Re:not surprising
Since you still refuse to publish a URL of your supposed YEARS of fighting the voting machine.
We'll start you off nice and slow this morning.
Your homework consists simply reading several articles. Then removing your foot from your mouth.
Hunt for the (backdoor)kill switch in microchips.
US reveals plans to hit back at cyber threats (note the part about CHIPS)
Investigating Machine Identification Code Technology in Color Laser Printers (if you can do this you can do anything)
The Hunt for the Kill Switch (This is the best of the articles in my opinion)
So your idea of "computerized tabulation" will work only if the public John Doe/ Jane Doe/ You/ Me/ Slashdot Readers/ "We The People" and anyone else is allowed to destructively reverse engineer every electronic voting machine component under an electron microscope looking for backdoor logic (Which is NOT allowed), and any network, hub, switch, vault, radio transmitter, Radio receiver, or memory device that might have been used in conjunction with the election (Again the public is NOT allowed to, not to mention it would be physically impossible and too costly at the expense of bringing down the entire communications infrastructure.), and monitor the whole spectrum 24/7 at all geographic locations during an election. (ain't going to happen) And monitor the power supply for rogue signals, or frequency or voltage anomalies.
So really what your saying is it's okay for someone to walk in on election day, reach into their pocket, activate their hidden transmitter, and flip the vote, by a plethora of methods.
And that's just the HARDWARE.
Shall we wait until you digest all that before we talk about the SOFTWARE and WHAT'S ALREADY BEEN FOUND?
hint #1
Top To Bottom Reviewhint #2
Federal Vote-Counting Accuracy Mandate Is Ignored
Violations abound, but no federal action is takenAnd again I remind you that 100% hand counts of ballots that have 100% chain of custody (even that is broken) with 100% public oversight (currently the public is denied access and ballots have been illegally destroyed) have never been compared to the 100% machine tabulation.
Furthermore your continued publicizing of the myth that "hand counted paper ballots are unrealistic due to population." Is just that. A MYTH!
If your ideas are so open source, show them right here right now. Quit saying you don't know where to take these ideas, I'm telling you right now.
Publish it! Publish it right here, right now.
Get a free frigging yahoo/geocities account, and publish it. Make a god damned blog and publish it. Rar the shit up and upload it to Rapidshare. Create an account at sourceforge and PUBLISH IT!
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Re:Fences, Gates and Guards....
No.
I can point you specifically to 130 IAC 4-1-5 in the Indiana Code. The New York Port Authority has something similar that reaches farther. Maryland does. Ohio. I'd list other states but it has been a while since I traveled around the US for photography.
Here is picture of the signs you'll find around New York, courtesy of the Port Authority. I know from first hand experience that it is enforced.
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Re:same old story
Something like boingboing using "underwear-perverts" instead of "super-hero" when Marvel told them they had to stop 'cause super-hero was a trademark?
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Re:Legal locally but illegal on the federal level
Would you be able to make an arguable case in court on the premise that the state in which you reside said it is ok to violate the federal law?
In a word, no. A number of people licensed to grow or sell medical marijuana by their local cities have been sent to federal prison, and I believe they couldn't mention their local-government blessing in federal court.
There's a good article in today's LA Times. A guy who ran a dispensary is up on Federal charges, and at the top of the article is a photo of him cutting the ribbon with the whole city council standing with him. Boing Boing has some related coverage about the high school student with advanced cancer who Lynch was supplying with pot to help with pain and appetite loss. The feds are using that to push for a bigger sentence. Lynch probably won't even be able to use the term "medical marijuana" in court.
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Re:competition
Yeah, I guess the old days were better - when there was no consortium, when file and data formats were not at all intercompatible and mostly untranslatable, and when everyone just used Microsoft's file and data formats because "everyone else uses it."
There were no file formats before Microsoft cam along with Office? Then what was ASCII,
.txt, .rdf, and Word Perfect's format.Meanwhile open standards work fine such as for electricity, electricity produced by wind farms in Scandinavia is compatible with the electricity produced via wind farms in Spain or the electricity produced in France's nuclear reactors.
:lol: Um....
:snicker: really? You want to talk about the intercompatibility of electricity? :lol:Yes, several governments are talking about "Wind-fuelled 'supergrid' offers clean power to Europe" using High Voltage DC to transmit energy from Iceland the northern Africa. You recall those blackouts in the Northeast a few years ago, you know the one that effected the US and Canada? The lines were interconnected, if they hadn't been power would only have been lost in local places not all over.
Seriously, even electricity has had its share of battles and compatibility problems:
I know about the electrical battle between Edison and Tesla, Edison used DC whereas Tesla advocated AC. I even posted a link on
/. a little while ago about how Edison tried to electrocute an elephant to show how dangerous AC power was. While AC power is delivered to most places in the US there were places in New York that used DC until last year, 2007. The US uses high voltage DC transmissions today. HVDC is used because there is less of a loss of power when transmitting it long distance than there is transmitting the same amount of power over AC lines the same distance.Falcon
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Here's one on Boing Boing
Bully caught on Boing Boing is immediately dressed down by editors.
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Re:time to join a darknet or use anonymous p2p
Well, in a way: yes! It is not about the artists, it is about the bloody 'music industry'. The sooner it dies, the better.
Record companies have had their uses, but now they are only leeches; the sooner they disappear, the better. A slew of real creativity, not Brittney-crea, will probably follow, since artists will once again be selected on musicality and not on what the record companies tell ($$$) the radio stations what to play. That payola money will be gone like with the disappearance of the record companies.
And yes, we will probably see a difference in the way artists get paid. A lot of ppl will not pay, others a little and die hard fans will shell out big-bucks to get something like a special signed edition, which will make the artists (and not the bloody record company executives) money to live on.
There have always been musicians, there will always be musicians as long as there is creativity in human kind. Stop paying money for music (download illegally) and the whole current infrastructure will collapse, NOT the creativity. Musicians (Radiohead, NIN) will find a way to get paid.
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Re:Liberate the Spectrum.
What's replacing radio?
Not sure. But something certainly is:
Radio's Popularity Declining Unevenly
CBS Acquires Last.fm Seeking To Overcome Declining Radio Business
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Obvious Answer: World Record Wi-Fi Antenna
Some lads with a couple of your dishes cracked 125 miles during the 2005 Defcon Wi-fi distance shoot out. With your one dish on one end, and even the weakest built-in wifi antenna on the other, you can still create a solid network connection to the next County. If the other antenna is a run of the mill 15 or 24 dB directional wifi, you can really crank.
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Re:Reminder: this does not preserve your privacy
In that same article apparently given what you provided has absolutely nothing to do with data sharing, it's an article about when Google started implementing government required blocks on search terms on their China based domain.
On the other hand since my post refering to Viacom was about their track record as a company as a whole, we have the fact that Viacom is a member of the MPAA, the movie industry's version of the RIAA, and just a year ago were caught submitting false DMCA takedown notices, multiple times.
Want to try again? -
Re:Interesting...
Do either of you have first-hand experience with someone who spoke out against the government and then "heard the fed knocking"?
If neither of them reply, does that mean the answer is yes?
But in reality, this just doesn't happen here.
Yet kids still get investigated by the Secret Service for singing Bob Dylan songs or drawing pictures of Bush's head on a spike or of him as a demon with rockets and a caption of "end the war on Errorism" (amusingly enough google warned me that the second page could be harmful to my computer). There's also the infamous case about the guy who was arrested for joking about God talking from a burning bush.
It's quite obvious that the federal government does take this stuff seriously, and it's entirely possible there's a file somewhere tagged "slashdot+rebel" that lists everyone who suggests such things on the site.
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Ironically
if you go right back to when domestic electricity supply was the breakthrough, you will find the architect of that breakthrough (Edison) had enormous legal and public relations problems with the entrenched gaslight industry who were hell bent on stopping his electric light company.
Edison did the same himself. His electric company transmitted DC power and when Tesla came out with AC power Edison tried to make it look dangerous. Edison even electrocuted an elephant to prove his point.
Falcon
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Re:Interesting...
Yes, I think the real *crime* here is that Comcast is charging customers the same, but is not treating them the same.
Which leads to the next question: Is there a class action suit pending? Because this reminds me of the NetFlix lawsuit. It was found that Netflix (which charged a flat monthly rate for movie rentals) was purposely slowing the deliver of movies to customers who had a fast turnaround. Chavez, who filed the lawsuit claimed you really couldn't rent unlimited movies as NetFlix advertisment claims and that they purposely throttled customers back to 12 movies a month so light users got preference. NetFlix's TOS even stated this, but they lost the lawsuit anyway and the Chavez who filed got $2,000, his lawyers got $2.5 million. Customers got a 1 month free upgrade. (woo hoo)
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Re:Terror on Times Square!
Boingboing on the video displays in Times Square:
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how will this be (mis)used?
We have a pretty good idea what's going to happen with this law. There are so many immediate uses that those wiretapping will be too busy to actually getting around to trying to wiretap any real threats.
Lets take a look at how surveillance cameras are used in London
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/06/28/local-councils-in-th.htmlIn the US, expect frivolous uses of the law such as the above. It will be used to find where to dig dirt (sex lives,funny/out of context quotes) on any politicians.
Expect those abusing it to have a good sense of 'just how far they can get away with it', and typically keep within those bounds so as to not be noticed.
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Re:Westerfeld & Doctorow
Don't forget Peeps, which is my favorite Westerfeld.
Seriously, a lot of the best SF/F is being marketed in the YA section these days. I'd refer everyone to this thread at BoingBoing, which has a good overview of recent YA.
And everyone here at Slashdot who hasn't recommended Little Brother yet should be ashamed.
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Re:Let me get this straight
Who said it's legal? Ok, it wasn't downloaded but bought, but I guess the only difference would have been him getting two accusations instead of just one.
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RSS Feeds - an incomplete list
Comix:
Ctrl-Alt-Del http://www.cad-comic.com/
Diesel Sweeties http://dieselsweeties.com/
Questionable Content http://www.questionablecontent.net/
Penny Arcade http://www.penny-arcade.com/
xkcd http://xkcd.com/Blogs:
Warren Ellis http://www.warrenellis.com/
Thighs Wide Shut http://thighswideshut.org/
Kids with Guns http://patrickben.livejournal.com/Geeky Blogs/Mags:
Boing Boing http://www.boingboing.net/
Cool Hunting
365 Tomorrows
Grinding.be http://grinding.be/
io9 http://io9.com/
Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/
Slashdot
Wired http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
AppleInsider http://www.appleinsider.com/
Macenstein http://macenstein.com/default
The Unofficial Apple Weblog http://www.tuaw.com/
Macworld http://www.macworld.com/Dirty Stuff:
Fleshbot http://fleshbot.com/tag/straight
FlickrBabes http://flickrbabes.com/
UseMyComputer http://usemycomputer.com/
Homocidal Insomniac http://homicidalinsomniac.blogspot.com/News:
Salon http://www.salon.com/ -
Re:That sound you hear....
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Re:Racing games?
Not just racing games, but any game with models based off real objects. I'm glad to see an end brought to stupidity like this.