Slashdot Mirror

Oh, someone came up with a solution to *that* problem...

Not to mention, how are you going to power this, and make sure it stays powered?

Why, Douglas-Martin power screens of course (e.g. Let There Be Light

The RIAA should not be allowed to read The Proud Robot. The story references a solution to unauthorized copying using infrsound that sends would-be pirates running away in terror while soiling their pants.

"A Logic Called Joe"

first published in 1945.

Indeed. Damon Knight did a killer review of A.E. van Vogt's "World of Null-A" by pointing out how ridiculous it was to have a 25th century hand-held electronic lie-detector that spoke (and understoood) colloquial English. No way. Suspension of disbelief is one thing, but you can go too far.

On the other hand there's this major and amazing exception to the general rule: A logic named Joe by Murray Leinster. There's a "best of Leinster" anthology out by (I think) the NESFA containing the story. Read it!

More info on how ordinary mortals can train themselves to perform at this level, in particular how does he memorize words like gey without knowing what they mean? (Does he have a just have a kind of photographic memory but not care what words mean? Is this not bad?) Anyway I am going to have to look on freshmeat..

.. 20 seconds later .. so maybe we are talking about Anaquiz which seems to help you memorize the dictionary (is this why he doesn't know words' meanings but knows which are legal?) The anaquiz screenshot is quite intriguing. I think the story link to the unix program must be anaquiz.

I see also the Judge scrabble adjucation system, and Scrabaid which seems to be a scrabble coach.. any other links to tools for improving memory (I remember a mnemonic trainer story a year ago) would be interesting.

For example in a story of Robert Heinlein's called Have Spacesuit Will Travel in which an engineer teen hacker successfully refurbishes a spacesuit and later makes good use of the distances of the planets from the Sun which he had luckily memorized with a cool limerick. Any other modern limericks or ways to memorize constellations and other astronomical phenomena would be quite useful if anyone knows of them.

Of course Jack Valenti wants this. This is the same guy who once said "The VCR is to the Movie Industry what the Boston Strangler is to the woman alone". He's not exactly a visionary.

The question the semi-intelligent people who listen to Jack have to solve now is this: how can we force consumers to buy something they don't want?

The proven formula for this is legislation. Government mandated airbags have killed more children than school shootings - and more importantly, they've created a precedent for how a corporation can incorporate non-features into consumer products.

Do you think consumers really wanted to buy DVD players with region coding and Macrovision? Was that a feature? The total ownership of the DVD standard presents a second way to force unwanted hardware down the customer's throats: patent a standard, license keys, and use the DMCA to enforce the keyring.

The infamous SSSCA is their attempt at bring approach #1, and they may also (in parallel) try approach #2. If there's any word I can use to describe the actions of the Movie Industry right now, it's "desperate". They know that the precedents set right now will last for hundreds of years, and they are fighting for what they believe is their very survival.

The question is, will consumers keep buying Dell and ignore the EFF? And if so, what's the most effective way to raise awareness...