Slashdot Mirror

Point taken; however ...

Yeah Apple is so open and this is the reason i can run OS X on my beige bo- OH WAIT I CANNOT !

Actually you can. There are a bunch of sites explaining how; that is much more useful than running XP on the new Intel Macs, which you can also do.

But that's not such an issue at least songs i downloaded with Itunes can be played on my noname mp3 play- OH NOES IT FAILS !

You have to convert them first; you can do that in Itunes.

Well at least Itunes runs on Linux, to- SHIT IT DOESN'T !

It works with wine apparently, or Crossover Office.

Google Knows All.

People should buy products (hardware, software, whatever) based on the CURRENT feature set. Not based on promised upgrades, that is a nice extra but not relevant.

In this case you're saying people should buy a player and assume they can only play movies that have already been released. THAT I'm going to have to totally disagree with. The players were not sold to early adopters as "able to play the 50 movies currently on the market." They were sold as being able to play Blu-Ray discs.

Your post seems to miss the point of the lawsuit: These players aren't choking on the special features, they can't play entire discs. Wired seems to think this is because the DRM was not finalized when these players were produced and now it can't be updated. (http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/02/samsung-sued-ov.html)

The MPAA and their lovers in bed the RIAA have been gong after people for downloading movies and music and everything in between in hopes that people will buy more CDs or specifically more songs (Wired says record companies make more money off songs than CDs>) even to the extent of saying it is illegal to rip CD you bought and put it on your computer and than again to place those same purchased songs on your iPod or MP3 player.

This is pathetic. Those hippocrits are still making tons of money due to the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the millions they have made so far, they should at least be respectful. Without LoTR I bet New Line wouldn't have enough money to spend bribing congressman so they should be happy with the few they can buy off and wait for another movie after paying their debts to penetrate deeper and deeper in our government.

Slowly and slowly we are electing the MPAA and RIAA into office and sooner or later the world will be come a dictatorship, not by a single person or politician, but by the entertainment industry telling us we can't even laugh without paying a tax for something funny.

But what do I know?

The article here left out a few salient details. Like the death threats. I'd say these retards are pretty much the epitome of forum trash.

All the while, the defendant gazed at his attorney to his left. Much of his pasty white skin was covered by the same dark dress coat he has donned since his trial began here three months ago. Jurors appeared un-animated.

There has been some movement to Macs and OSX, but the dual-boot is a key in some of this migration.

There is also a part of the market that likes the iPod and Mac hardware and doesn't even understand the concept of an OS.

From the two there is a small uprising of people from the Mac world using Vista more than OSX on Mac Hardware. It is not quite as rare as you think, especially with Leopard requiring as much or more hardware to run well than Vista. (1GB RAM, and even Newer GPU than Vista)

When have I used OSX? Wow, is that a loaded question. Well of course in your belief system for someone to have the opinions I do must not use OSX. Sadly, I probably use it more than 90% of the people on SlashDot, and know quite a bit about it terms of OS architecture, as this is something I teach.

OS X is what it is, a BSD interface to a nice MACH kernel with a psuedo Mac interface strapped on. In the end, Apple is spending more time working AROUND the dated architectual concepts that BSD is based on, and sadly there are newer OS theories and technologies out there, like NT. (Yes NT is fundamentally a newer OS architecture based on newer theories.)

The fact that there are people that prefer Vista over OSX on Mac hardware is not hard to understand when people can see on the same hardware they are faster and applications and gaming is faster under Vista. This is leaving people in Vista most of the time.

Here is a link for example that has drawn people to consider Vista over OSX on a Mac.
http://happybeggar.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=99&Itemid=2

Or go search and pick your own random article.

Heck even go to some of the bigger OS X people in the industry and look at what they said...
http://blog.wired.com/cultofmac/2007/01/running_vista_o.html

Feature for feature OS X offers nothing that Vista doesn't have or cannot do. However, technically due to the WDDM in Vista, it can do things OS X won't be able to do without a full re-write of the video subsystem, and this will be required to get better gaming performance out of OS X.

Actually, his son has been sent back to testify: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/11/reiser-son-test.html.M.

The officer also testified the defendant flatulated in his face when the authorities were snapping nude photos of him Sept. 28, 2006. The officer said Reiser told him: "'You're about to experience chaos' and, for lack of a better term, he farted in my face."

Jurors snickered and the defendant grinned.

"Did you make a report of that?" DuBois asked the officer.

"No. But it stays vividly in my head."

A lot of the hemp alternatives and studies are done and presented by what you would consider advocates. That being said, double check what is presented and still take it with a grain of salt. I remember a friend who was convinced by these people that ropes can be made cheaper and stronger by hemp fibers and repeated a claim that during one of the world wars, the government decided to pay off their friends at 3m by using the artificial ropes and even made it into law to profit. But the reality was that natural ropes needed to be replaces every 6 months for use on ships because they rot and aren't as strong as they should be where the synthetic ropes could last 3 years or more if taken care of in the same way as hemp ropes. But they couldn't seem to think of why that would be important in a war or to keep operating costs down.

There is a lot of research into using switch grass and other natural vegetations that don't or won't need deforestation, require plowing, tilling, fertilizer and or pest repellent applications, and many of the other steps associated with corn production. This study when reported by my local news station actually contests portions of it because of how much weight was put on the corn growing process and the low yields of energy from it. It does seem to not include the gasification processes that have been recently discovered that can refine almost any organic material into ethanol for about $1 or less a gallon while also increasing the productive energy output. Staying with corn, this new process can produce 7.7 times the energy require to produce the ethanol where normal distillation only produces 1.3 times the amount. This is important because the study showing how it is bad is considering a .3 multiple gain in energy compared to a 6.7 multiple.

If Hemp does have a lot of extra energy that isn't something attributed to the distillation process differences, That technique I linked to would show it. I guess the issue then might be if the gains would be worth the hassles or would it end up over regulated with a good portion of it's costs going to regulations.

Either way, it doesn't matter much. It seems that a lot of environmentalist just don't want us driving cars or having what "they" consider excess. We could probably turn ethanol production into something ten times safer then oil and with 20 times the efficiency and they would still be complaining. It's like that old joke about the california car dealer who decided not to stock SUVs and 4 wheel drive cars and anything not considered green because Sierra club members were prominent in his area. He then watched them go to his competitors because they needed the SUVs and all wheel drive and gas guzzlers to get close to nature.

In 2003 AT&T built "secret rooms" hidden deep in the bowels of its central offices in various cities, housing computer gear for a government spy operation which taps into the company's popular WorldNet service and the entire internet. These installations enable the government to look at every individual message on the internet and analyze exactly what people are doing. Documents showing the hardwire installation in San Francisco suggest that there are similar locations being installed in numerous other cities.

This only point of this article seems to be don't buy an iPhone. Even the headline is designed to taunt people that already bought one.

What evidence does the article provide?

- AT&T said a new iPhone was coming in 2008. Of course this leaves 10 more months assuming that AT&T even knows what Apple is working on which previous reports have said they don't. http://www.wired.com/gadgets/wireless/magazine/16-02/ff_iphone

- Apple recently hired a television crew for... something. According to a Mac rumors site.

- Broadcom has started sampling a new lower power 3G chip. Which is implied to be a panacea, completely ignoring that redesigning the iPhone is more complicated than popping in a new chip -- there are antennas to redesign and software that has to be rewritten just to start -- and the chip isn't even shipping yet.

- "Apple can't wait much longer." The author uses this argument several times, backing it up with AT&T's plans to roll out 3G to more cities by the end of 2008.

Hasn't it occurred to anyone that it's going to take 6 months for the FCC to test a new iPhone and no one has turned up anything to show the FCC has even started this yet?

I don't know if you saw this story, but since it's a scientific (well, mathematical) dataset, you'd probably qualify for free hosting from Google soon. At 1.6TB, you're around half of their size limit.

I'm surprised this Wired story doesn't mention the awesome, in-depth article Neil Stephenson wrote in 1996 that chronicled the birth and construction of the FLAG cable: Mother Earth Mother Board - The hacker tourist ventures forth across the wide and wondrous meatspace of three continents, chronicling the laying of the longest wire on Earth.

The Secret Service is in your color laserprinter. The Federal Reserve and a group of international bankers are in your commercial image manipulation programtelecom equipement. And there's plenty of other examples like backdoor passwords in consumer grade router/switches, Cisco IOS, What you jokingly dismiss is entirely plausible and probable.

Why should Wired waste it's time doing that? The FBI made the same request last year and then blew Wired off after they got the questions. That's the reason why Wired was forced to submit a FOIA request. The link to the exchange is right there in THE FUCKING SUMMARY, you idiot. In fact, I'll post the link here in this post so it'll real easy for you to find.

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/07/thank-you-for-y.html

Let's all see what files Cary Sherman has on his PC/Laptop/hard drives?

The problem is already solved. DMVs also issue "state ID" which is valid for all purposes that a drivers license is used for.

A national ID doesn't solve any particular problem people have on a day to day basis.

I can tell you what a national ID will make worse: identity theft. Oh but wait you say - a national ID is highly verified and impossible to duplicate or forge. Never say never - a national ID will have forgeries. Except since everyone "knows" that a ID is not forgeable, those who will be the unfortunate victim of identity thefts won't be able to get off the hook.

A similar situation has happened recently. Newer model cars with immobilizers are "unstealable" - until they are not. There is a good Wired article about this:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.08/carkey.html

a choice quote:

"Since you reportedly can account for all the vehicle keys, the forensic information suggests that the loss did not occur as reported," the company wrote to Wassef, denying his claim. The barely hidden subtext: Wassef was lying."

Now imagine instead of cars we're talking about your identity. If your ID is not forgeable, then anything done with your ID tagged to it is clearly done by you. Now imagine these RFID IDs are in fact trivial to clone with the right equipment... now what?

In the end, what problem are we solving? I keep on hearing in the US the Real ID solves the issue of multiple drivers licenses from multiple states. But if that hole was plugged would it prevent terrorism? Probably not I'm thinking. Then what problem would it really help with? Tracking down and punishing people for trivial crimes will end up being the #1 application of these things.

From Bruce Sterling's blog at Wired.com...

"...Others maintain the damage signifies retribution for the impending opening of the Iranian Oil Bourse, which will allow trading in currencies other than the U.S. dollar, potentially diminishing the value of the dollar. (((As if the dollar wasn't busy diminishing itself, with or without submarines.)))

Clearly, the political impact, should the damage be attributed to military or financially motivated activity, poses severe implications, but apart from that, the mere impact on broadband connectivity within the region, and communications capabilities with Europe and North America have already been hampered, causing significant disruption to workflows at many businesses.

"This has been an eye-opener for the telecom industry worldwide," said According to Colonel R.S. Parihar, Secretary of the Internet Service Providers Association of India. "Today, the cause of the problem might have been an anchor, but what if it is sabotage tomorrow? These are owned by private operators, and there are no governments or armies protecting these cables."

http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2008/02/the-undersea-ca.html

Since they won't let Cheney satisfy his invasion fetish, Cheney has to do something with all that free time on his hands.

"So who has the link to the post with this in 1998?

1) Buy millions of domain names that have typos in them
2) ...
3) Profit "

You thought you were kidding wern't you? But it wasn't in the form you thought. It was this:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/mcdonalds_pr.html

The month this article hit the newsstands Internic registration turnaround went from three days to eleven weeks because of the volume. It took a year to normalize but never got down to 3 days again.

The NSF was subsidizing the Internic for US post secondary educational institutions and after this, gave up. They asked the FNCIC to decide what to do, they told the NSF to direct NSI to begin charging for domain names.

But, by this time pissed off companies worldwide who began rattling sabres at IANA because "somebody has stolen their domain; IANA not having any legal personality Postel was scared shitless and began to look for institutionalization. He did but lost all authority - when he tried to get the root servers to point to him and not NSI's A root but the feds were so in the loop he was literally threatened with guys in black suits in black cars.

He had now been made redundent, died shortly after leaving is with the multimillion dollar per year atrocity known as ICANN.

No other single article in the history of the internet changed the landscape as much as this one did. It probably would have happened eventually anyway, but for you chaos theory fans, this is one hell of an example.

Some of them ARE 'painted black', either for useful heat reasons, or some amount of concealment.

The difference between a "still not as black as a night sky" and "reflecting the sun like nobody's business" is big enough that you have to move up a class in telescope.

Which means that it is harder for folks with a 6" telescope or binoculars to spot the things.

... Which in turn is important, because those big installation telescopes don't grow on trees. The fact that there is a distributed network of inefficient sensors (amateurs with small scopes) working on the problem means that that difference DOES make a difference in how long it is before your satellite is spotted (again).

Additional reading: Wired

This is "Flamebait"? Next time, try a little research before you reach for that button, mods. Here, let me start you off:

http://oversight.house.gov/investigations.asp?Issue=Politics+and+Science
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2007/02/72672
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/17/60minutes/main1415985.shtml
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/08/politics/08climate.html

Anyway, an article far less screwed up then TFA (let alone the submission) is here.

Let's look at what the NMPA actually wants: instead of 9.1 cents per song, they want 12.5 cents per song - almost 40% more. Note that they don't want a share (percentage) of the price, they want a lump sum no matter what the song is sold for. Hell, that would even be fine for the RIAA's plans for online music sales - 12.5 cents off of a $2 song is a smaller loss for them than 9.1 cents off of 99 cents. But it also means that any savings between digital distribution vs. physical distribution will not be used to lower the price of the song, but shall go into the coffers of the NMPA.

Interesting article from David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame) regarding the future of music. His take includes the statement that artist royalties usually end up between $1.40 - $1.60 per album. So, if you want to contribute, pirate away, and send the artist $2 - you'll be paying them more than the RIAA.

Of course you're screwing over the songwriters, but who gives a crap about writers? They aren't important at all. Got it? Great. Now that we have the music thing settled, can somebody tell me why all the TV shows are reruns lately...?

Depends... Did this man serve on the board of Walmart, did this man vote for funding the war in Iraq (and never apologize for it?) Did this man shred thousands of documents related to a potential scandal? ( http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D06E6D7163DF93AA35750C0A962958260 )

How does this man compare on civil liberties actions? The other candidate - http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/01/clinton-slams-o.html - looks pretty good. She's never said she opposes widespread wiretapping, unlike the SAFE act (which Obama was vocal for.) http://w2.eff.org/patriot/safe_act_analysis.php for details.

I cannot support Clinton from a policy perspective when we have someone more in line with ideals concerning civil liberties.

Well, here's a clue: being an Engineer means that when you screw up, people die.

He obviously left out Ron Paul to get a rise out of the large libertarian contingent of /.ers. And it worked! IOW, YHBT, HAND.

I am a registered Republican, and I will be most likely be voting for Ron Paul next week, but let's face facts. He's not going to win, and votes for him are valuable only as an indicator of dissent. He has good views on war, small government, and the Constitution, but he's also a creationist wacko, plus either a lying racist or so atrociously lazy and irresponsible about reading papers before signing them that it's hard to trust him.

Unless a vast number of voters in Super Tuesday states have been systematically lying to pollsters, it's going to McCain vs Clinton. So, will Ann Coulter do what she promised, and campaign for Hillary?

See also: Who's Nuttier: Apple Fanatics or Ron Paul Enthusiasts?

> just find some artist that you like, who is willing to give their work away for free.
> There's plenty of homeless people with guitars and horns that you can listen to.

Wow, that's one hell of a strawman... haven't you conveniently forgotten the growing, ever growing, numbers of independent professional and semi-professional musicians fueled by new options for making money from their music who many of us, like me, are willing to pay?

The record labels haven't forgotten, they're running scared and wreaking havoc with our society...

<sarcasm>Quite a few of those homeless musicians are probably still signed on record company contracts and aren't able to legally sell us their music as independents, poor guys!</sarcasm>

No, cables are not abandoned and therefore you can't go grab them.

The legal setup to ensure this is quite complicated and interesting. The course of the cable is carefully published in maps so it's everyone's responsibility not to disturb that narrow channel. If you cut the cable inside the channel it's your fault, if you cut the cable outside the chanel it's the cable owner's fault.

The practical setup to ensure this is also quite complicated and interesting. The cables have to be laid in a very narrow channel on the sea bed. So a ship has to carefully drop a cable two miles down to the sea floor---non trivial, so lots of high tech involved.

Wired has an old article by Neil Stephenson in Dec 1996 on FLAG:
    http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html
which is worth a read.

Just like if the CIA wanted to run a covert op they would just do it covertly, right?

In Italy, CIA Agents Are Undone by Their Cell Phones
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/15-07/st_cia

I believe that many/all undersea cables are mapped.

Ships/captains plying international waters must have up-to-date info. If they damage a cable that is on the maps, they are responsible.

See the great WIRED article from Neal Stephanson on the laying of FLAG:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

OK, it's an article from 1996, but it's one of the best WIRED articles (and looong) ever (back before they were owned by Conde Nast)

L. Scrub

And he knows his complexity theory.

Two of the three cables cut were FLAG cables, which Neil Stephenson wrote about in an epic article for Wired called Mother Earth, Mother Board.

Interesting thing about FLAG--it's an entirely private consortium that was created just to build a cable that went from England to Japan. 95% of all undersea cable goes to or from the U.S.; when a study group identified that major gap--Europe to Asia--they launched the project themselves.

Add AT&T to your roster of dark conspirators...

Probably not for the Mitniks nor the Scientologists of the world either.

But what about the people who are falsely accused of being Scientologists? That guy has had his name, address, phone and SSN splashed all over the web, through no fault of his own. Seems like he could use some reputation management to clean up all of that info. Or, if it can't be cleaned-up, then to bury it in positive Google-karma.

Neal Stephenson wrote a great piece about undersea cables, and FLAG in particular, called "Mother Earth Motherboard" http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html Flag lands at Alexandria and runs across Egypt because the Suez canal is too shallow and is dredged too often for a cable to be safe. He talks about anchor snags too. One creepy thing about the article- he wrote it in 97, note the reference to the World Trade Center collapsing.

I think I'd prefer to get wet or use an umbrella than breathe the horrible smog [guardian.co.uk] that blankets Beijing. In fact, the rain is often the only thing that reduces the smog and air pollution for a shirt while.

And there's always the Hail Mary play: cloud seeding. Should air quality threaten to steal the show, the Beijing Meteorological Bureau promises to have its fleet of cloud-seeding aircraft warmed up on the runways, ready to bomb the sky with silver iodide and set off air-scrubbing showers over competition areas.

I doubt things have changed all that much:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html

Paying for it probably won't be a problem(If you spend a lot of money, you spend a smaller, yet still significant some making sure that the contract is 'good', which largely means very specific), but the time it takes for somebody to get out there and actually do it, who knows.

If you create music ...

Ooops, you just disqualified 99% of slashdot participants — thus underscoring my point.

you should never let ownership of your songs fall into the hands of these vultures, lest they use it to sue children.

Now let me demolish your point... Some real musicians, such as Metallica and U2 think, "the vultures" aren't aggressive enough.

As for your "sue children" — please, stop the demagoguery. If the same cheeky child was throwing a rock through your window every morning, you'd be suing him and his parents within a week — there are plenty of misdeeds, for which young age is no excuse.

All that said, you are welcome to give your own music away on whatever terms you wish. Just don't prevent others from enforcing their rights to control their creations...

see his brilliant article in Wired on undersea communication cables.

Bezos has stated in the past that he is patenting software methods as a defensive measure. "We're not saying we have bad patents," Amazon.com spokesman Bill Curry said. "We feel very good about our patents... [Bezos] makes the point very emphatically in the letter that we cannot unilaterally disarm in a world where there are big ugly players who aren't disarming."

It's like road rage. When people are cutting you off and breaking all the rules, you have to tailgate and cut them off as a defensive measure (sometimes, at least). Nice guys finish last. The entire system is broken and the Patent Office really needs more legislative direction because it has strayed from its original mission.

I think software and business methods should not be patentable in the same way that physical inventions are. Also, I question the concept of selling patents. We end up with these litigious patent holding companies that have no technical abilities of their own, only a lot of lawyers.

A few years ago I looked into making and marketing a telephony device that would be an incremental but useful improvement over existing equipment, and discovered that so many methods related to telephony and voicemail are patented that practically speaking there was no way to make a device without infringing. "A method for playing back a telephoned message by pressing a button"--give me a freaking break. No wonder the U.S. has slipped behind in technical innovation, when much of the incentive for incremental product improvement has been removed by the threat of instant litigation. Thank goodness the Asians still believe in incremental improvement.

I'm OK with Amazon patenting stupid obvious things, as long as they don't enforce those patents, which I believe they have done very little of, and as long as Jeff Bezos continues to crusade for patent reform. Just my 2c!

A very good story ran on Wired a short while back, "Hacking our five senses", and what he described is part of the story:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.04/esp.html

Also check out
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/cyborg_mann_041012.html
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2002/03/50976

And the story on Slashdot itself
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/03/155204

A very good story ran on Wired a short while back, "Hacking our five senses", and what he described is part of the story:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.04/esp.html

Also check out
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/cyborg_mann_041012.html
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2002/03/50976

And the story on Slashdot itself
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/03/155204

That's not true. Yes, patents should not be issued for things that occur naturally. But how about genes? It's ludicrous to think that someone could patent a DNA sequence, and force others to pay licensing fees when screening for that gene. Here's an op-ed by Michael Crichton that discusses patents on genes. Here's another article from Wired. That's just to give you an idea, though I'm sure there are many more informative articles.

Pharmaceutical companies? They care nothing except for their profit. Who said they were worried about staying in business? One company has never made a profit or marketed a drug of its own. And it's been in existence since 1981. Another company has lost $1.3 billion, yet is still up and running.