Slashdot Mirror

You sound like the sort of user has grown beyond boasting specs to getting something accomplished.

We'd love to have you.

What are you, in a cult? Does he have to shave his head and kill his parents to join, or is it just the standard "give us all your money and worldly posessions"?

Wired has more details
Their story appeared today
It can be found here.

"If impregnating an Indian elephant with mammoth sperm produced young, that offspring would be impregnated with more mammoth sperm and the process repeated in the next generation, producing a creature that was 88 per cent mammoth. The process would take about 50 years."

This is not really cloning, this is similar to producing hybrid dogs by cross-breeding. And this does not really advance research, man has been doing this to crops, livestock and all for so long.
It just seems like researchers with nothing to do. The real step forward would be the Dolly method. That would be cloning.
Infact such a bit is underway in australia. Scientists are planning to clone a tasmaniana Tiger.
Now that would be the perfect push for cloning tech!

And digital prohibition is a good term for it.

Stallman wrote a wonderful piece of science fiction on the subject. If you want to think about where this is going, it's worth reading.

When you think about how it's possible for such a small industry (content is infinitessimal compared to, for instance, consumer electronics) to have such incredible influence, remember that politicians have a unique respect for those who control the media.

It's a remarkably cynical viewpoint, but the television in some ways restored an old social order called the monarchy. Content actually is King. More specifically, those who control the TV rule the world. I mean, think about it; that joke doesn't quite get the laugh it used to. Anyone who'se ever worked for a cause and felt the crushing, inevitable apathy of the world around them knows what I mean. Five minutes on Oprah could mobilize tens of millions of people to vote or to read or to free Tibet, but at the moment its highest calling is to sell beer and diet drugs.

And the days when the media owners were innocent and principled are ancient history. They know what they're doing. The federal government's ONDCP editing scripts of prime time TV shows? Disney making anti-file-sharing propaganda cartoons? Oh, they know exactly how it works.

They may be doomed anyway, but the content trust will fight brutally to the end. They'll take whatever we wont fight to the death over. They'll leave a wake of ruined lives and an ocean of lost opportunity in their wake. If we're lucky, our children and their children will get to clean up the mess we make today.

> HiThere/Charleshixn, why are you and many others so paranoid about DRM?
> If you don't like the terms of the content, you don't have to abide by it.

If that was true, there wouldn't be all this yelling and screaming. Having *SOME* machines running Palladium won't work. The only way to really guarantee Palladium's effectiveness is to ram it down everybody's throat. Ever heard of Fritz Hollings, Disney-crat from South Carolina and his SSSCA or CBTPDA (or whatever alphabet-soup-du-jour he's calling it today)? His bills would *MANDATE* that *EVERY DIGITAL DEVICE* have *DRM HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE*.

That's what people are "paranoid" about. Note that MS has already got Intel and AMD on board for the "Fritz" chip. Linux can be compiled on a variety of cpu's, so geeks might be able to avoid the DRM... *IF IT ISN'T MADE A LEGAL REQUIREMENT*.

> You as the user, get to make the choice. What could be more fair than that?

In that case, Palladium would die a quick death along the lines of DIVX and everything would be status quo. The MPAA/RIAA do *NOT* like the status quo, and they've got the best senators that money can buy on their side. I think that everybody realizes that people will not *WILLINGLY* allow their computers to be castrated. That's why MPAA/RIAA are buying the US Senate.

You're quite correct,

The clones were older powerpc based - however they we all going to transition to G3 sooner rather than later, some even went so far as to inclue a G3 daughter card inorder to get around Apples obnoxious legal department. here for more info .

Not only that, but MOT had it's own Mac clone that got squashed - though it was a small endevour compaired to the roumoured G3 ramp up.

more info.

according to the article, this move my apple cost MOT $95 million, who knows how much monet MOT wased on G3?

So let's just say that the name is just another data point that the ActiveBuddy crew is neither (1) original nor (2) diligent.

More of the voluminous public discussion of exactly the methods and systems ActiveBuddy claims to have invented:

Wired April 1996: Bots Are Hot!

Book published 1997: Bots: The Origin of New Species

At Activerse we were inspired by this and other prior work dating back to the first multi-user computer systems decades ago -- we didn't claim an "invention" where none existed.

Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to look like idiots when they claim to have invented it.

IRC.net documents advanced bots in 1994, let alone earlier, cruder bots which had been in use.

Bots are heavily in use in the corporate infrastructure, from auto-reply bots which answer emails based on formatting (think: subscribing to majordomo or even old NSI DNS requests), to complete bots which can answer "what color is the sand on Mars".

There's even a Wired article about IRC bots.

there should be stiff punishments for abusing the system like this, otherwise, what's to stop them? the only thing which gets hurt is their public image, and frankly that's not enough. I'm not talking prison terms, I'm talking stiff fines for such blatant misuse of the USPTO, to fund a future technical review board for the USPTO.

Here is an excellent article on the same subject, from wired mag.

Here is an excellent article on the same subject, from wired mag.

I knew I wasn't imagning this -

NASA is considering a plan to crash Galileo at the end of its mission into Jupiter to avoid the possibility of the satellite contaminating possible life on Europa. (July 4, 2000) Nasa Probes Crashing Explorer

... I shall mention etoy, since I remember them to be at least one of the first to manipulate search engine rankings in an amusing manner. Does anyone else remember the "hijackings" they did? You entered a conventional search term, e.g. "cooking chicken", and the n-th link of the results, if you clicked on it, took to to a big ol' page saying "YOU HAVE BEEN HIJACKED" yadda yadda. Entertaining, albeit politically incorrect, especially nowadays.

The neat thing was that they had their rankings down to a fine art - they could say "we want our page to be no. 2 on yahoo, no. 5 on altavista, and no. 1 on webcrawler" ... any hey presto, it was. Neat. The engine guys hated them, of course ... as did etoys.com - the altercation etoy.com had with *them* is probably where most people know them from.

There's an article on wired, but I haven't been able to come up with anything on their internet hijacks.

Oh well. I'm feeling old in Internet years right now.

Haven't you guys read:

Newer York, New York: After the Great Blaze of 2015, Manhattan went green - thanks to Bill Gates and bambootekture.
by Bruce Sterling?

Detailing a new ecologically sound/networked New York City...

Good read if you have the time.

Xix.

For the record, it's on page 5:

Getting caught is no small affair. Cheating at cards in Nevada can carry a sentence of up to 10 years. Card counting, on the other hand, will merely get you kicked out of the casino for good. But to Griffin and the surveillance establishment, the distinction between cheaters and counters is irrelevant. "Our job is to provide the casinos with information to explain why someone is winning," Griffin says. "It's up to the casinos as to what they want to do with the information."

Last year, Legend cleared 2.9 million units, claiming 30 percent market share - three times more than its nearest domestic rival and six times more than IBM, the closest international brand. A Legend spin-off, Digital China, is also the main Chinese distributor of HP printers, Cisco routers, Toshiba notebooks, and IBM minicomputers, as well as a leading player in handhelds, systems integration, and servers. With $3.5 billion in revenue, a 35 percent annual growth rate, and a $3 billion market cap, Legend is the fifth-largest publicly traded Chinese enterprise.

Okay, I'll scare the hell out of you.

St. Petersburg Times

ZDNet

So...

Yeah. I think that bad fathers will be bad fathers. If it wasn't EQ, it probably would have been *actual* heroin.

The kid who committed suicide is true too, according to Wired.

I think what is interesting is that the flat-fee model rewards playing a lot -- I guess these companies have balanced out server loads with making sure the game is popular. More people playing for long periods of time = better word of mouth, happier players, more $10-15/m in the future.

For the record, I only ever played Ultima Online and I think I got to be a Noble Master Warrior, all on a friend's account and PC. I played so much I made him fail freshman comp sci and drop out of school. So beware! Don't let me play Star Wars, say, at your work, or you'll be fired!

Here is a link to a Wired article from a few months back. It basically debunks a lot of the over-reaction to the dot-com bust. The New Economy Was a Myth, Right? perhaps a little too optimistic, but it makes a lot of very good points.

Here is a link to a Wired article from a few months back. It basically debunks a lot of the over-reaction to the dot-com bust. The New Economy Was a Myth, Right? perhaps a little too optimistic, but it makes a lot of very good points.

Professor Robins of Harvard points out that "the Web has changed the scale of these things." Had there been a string of dead scientists back in 1992 rather than 2002, he says, it is possible that no one would have ever known. "Back then, you would not have had the technical ability to gather all these bits and pieces of information, while today you'd be able to pull it off. It's well known that if you take a lot of random noise, you can find chance patterns in it, and the Net makes it easier to collect random noise."

Unfortunately, DARPA is now in the process of designing the TIA (Total Information Awareness) system (here and here) :

It's a system which, it hopes, will ferret out terrorists' information signatures -- clues available before an attack, but usually not correctly interpreted until afterwards

... although database size will no longer be measured in the traditional sense, the amounts of data that will need to be stored and accessed will be unprecedented, measured in petabytes.

So, in other words, the TIA system is DESIGNED to attempt to find pattens in a few petbytes of random noise.

If you do not agree to the terms of this EULA, PC Manufacturer and Microsoft are unwilling to license the SOFTWARE PRODUCT to you. In such event, you may not use or copy the SOFTWARE PRODUCT, and you should promptly contact PC Manufacturer for instructions on return of the unused products(s) for a refund.

"My opinion, I don't care if someone knows where I drive everyday. Why should I? ... what does it matter if Big Brother knows that I had McDonalds last night ... "

How about they decide to start taxing you on every burger you eat. Not so hard to believe if people might be able to get away with this

" ... or I watched LOTR on DVD? ... "

They would love to know you watched that DVD. Although you might be a thief or perhaps they can charge you every time you view the DVD.

Of course you have nothing to fear because "Big Brother" would never give this info to the media conglomerates

" ... whats the problem?"

I'll let you answer that one on your own

Exactly. And that's the main reason the EU's creating their own GPS system too. The US has a habit of blocking GPS service to "enemy" fighters, and Europe doesn't want to have that stand in the way of their use of GPS.

Wired has an article from Feb 1999 about this.

• Bill Gates donates $100 million to AIDS research
  
• Bill Gates donates $25M for AIDS vaccine
  
• Bill Gates Donates $37 Million to Combat Hepatitis B in China
  
• Gates Donates Millions to Schools
  
• BILL GATES DONATES $2.2 BILLION TO POPULATION CONTROL
  

Check out this article and see if you still feel that way.

http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,54332,00 .html

Actually, I don't see anything about content protection in this.

Just because you don't see it, doesn't mean that it's not there..

One of the problems with this whole "digital tuner" thing is that "content protection" is built into the standard.. there is a flag (part of the broadcast) which (if set) will tell your VCR/PVR/whateVeR that it's not allowed to record this particular program... it was originally allowed by the FCC because the broadcasters claimed that they'd only use it for pay-per-view events and the like, but it slowly spread to include first-run movies, and (now) pretty much everything... so you can say goodbye to time-shifting anything broadcast by your local network.

And thanks to the DMCA, you'll be prevented from modding your VCR/PVR/whateVeR to ignore it.

More info can be found here.

To see an explanation of why Passport is not needed, see the fourth paragraph of the section "What is your name and address?" means "Can we invade your privacy?" in the article that I wrote about Windows XP problems: Windows XP shows the Direction Microsoft is Going.

For older articles about Passport, see:

Stealing MS Passport's Wallet (Passport has been cracked in the past.)

MS and Its Terms of Embarrassment (Maybe this license was Microsoft's true intention.)

To see an explanation of why Passport is not needed, see the fourth paragraph of the section "What is your name and address?" means "Can we invade your privacy?" in the article that I wrote about Windows XP problems: Windows XP shows the Direction Microsoft is Going.

For older articles about Passport, see:

Stealing MS Passport's Wallet (Passport has been cracked in the past.)

MS and Its Terms of Embarrassment (Maybe this license was Microsoft's true intention.)

Money Money Money. Read this article; the government expects to get 18 Billion dollars by 2010 out of spectrum auctions after digital TV is going.

Tutal,

I agree with you that it seems a little unlikely that the 250mb value is accurate. I think your argument is well-though-out, but I am not so sure about your comparison of programming a robot to perform physical motion and the data a human must retain to perform similar motions and how it would be a lot of data.

I suspect that we store the information necessary to do physical motions in a very lightweight format. I'm imagining something like how postscript works to describe curves, lines, and shading to a laser printer. If you send a picture of a page of printed text to a printer pixel-by-pixel, that's going to be several megs of data. If you send the printer the instructions of how the page is drawn in postscript, it is likely to be a couple hundred kb. Once a printer has the description of what a letter 'A' looks like in a given font, it can easily draw that letter 'A' in whatever size is desired without having to completely re-explain the drawing of a letter 'A'.

As we develop, perhaps we don't learn to do each thing as a seperate movement, but we learn basic movements and then can plug different parameters into the formulas for those movements in order to achieve things like dancing or throwing a ball across a field.

I am not sure, but I think what I'm saying touches on the the theory of Stephen Wolfram that he's got in that big book he's published.

goodnight.

I'm surprized at how seldom he is mentioned, but one of the most prolific and notorious spammers, Mr. Sanford Wallace, AKA Spamford Wallace, was responsible for the vast majority of spam that cluttered inboxes about 5 years ago (ah, a lifetime in Internet time). This notorious individual was targetted by hackers, and he even floated a trial balloon that he'd start his own spam friendly backbone after getting chased from provider to provider.

Anyways, the legal system worked as Cyberpromotions was shut down by lawsuits. Sort of like crime, the reality was that it was only a few individuals who were responsible for the overwhelming majority of spam, and that was true in this case too: After Spamford was shut down, the amount of spam hitting inboxes literally slowed to a crawl.

This one had me in awe: Newer York, New York After the Great Blaze of 2015, Manhattan went green - thanks to Bill Gates and bambootekture.

By Michael McDonough (as told to Bruce Sterling).

This is a tag-team battle-royale of the imagination!!

Why spend $200 on a box to make a copy of a DVD, when my sub-$100 DVD player will do it for free? Plus, it has no region coding either. Go Apex!

It seems that the article is focused on what benefits these converging technologies give us.

But what about the dangers they pose?
Didn't the discovery of nuclear fission lead to the invention and use of the nuclear bomb?

Here's a great article which gives thoughts to these , by Bill Joy (chief scientist of Sun microsystems)
www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy_pr.html

reminds me of the old

blowthedotcomoutyourass.com web site

some old links to it

Wired story

some old pictures

They actually registered ijusthadarectalexamonline.com (dead link) got to love the picture

Not much uptake on my anti-spam plan, so here's another:

Combine Vipul's Razor with lawsuits against spammers

When you get spam, you forward it to a special email address, which aggregates it and keeps your address. When there are enough copies to justify a case, the lawyers track down the spammer and file a class action, using whichever spam laws apply. They disperse the damages back via PayPal, keeping a percentage themselves.

republished from my weblog

I don't care about other people's daily life. I don't care what happened to somebody on the street. I don't care about what one person finds funny about this waiter at his/her favorite restaurant.
Moderate -1 Asperger's.

Some of us old farts on slashdot may remember when Wired Magazine actually ran insightful articles. Here was one that I thought was particularly good. It's called The Great HDTV Swindle. I very highly recommend reading it if you're interested in the whole process by which the HDTV standard in this country was established, in all its ugly detail.

Basically, here's the gist: Broadcast companies could care less about broadcasting HDTV. For all their talk about drastically improving the quality of television, their eyes are on the really big asset they're sitting on: their spectrum.

First, a little history. (Sorry for the slight tangent, but bear with me :-) Unbeknownst to most people, network TV stations are the only companies in the country that get free transmission spectrum. This was done in 1932 (or sometime around then) when there were few other uses for the bandwidth and the government wanted to encourage broadcasting because they felt it would be in the public good to have universal access to this new communications medium. Since then, of course, that spectrum has become incredibly valuable, but the broadcasters continue to get it for free.

Enter HDTV. Using modern compression standards, broadcasters can fit the entire datastream of an HDTV picture into the same 6MHz T.V. channel currently used for NTSC. But broadcast companies started looking at it the other way around. Using modern compression standards, they could fit 6 NTSC channels into one spectrum slice. Or... they could fit 1 NTSC channel into 1/6 the slice, and use the other 5/6 slice for other services e.g. data transmission, cell phones, etc. After all, they're getting a full 6Mhz for free; if they can continue their current broadcasts (thereby continuing their current revenue) and add other profitable services without having to pay for the spectrum, why not?

Look at it this way: they could either use the 6Mhz to a) transmit 1 HDTV channel b) transmit 6 NTSC channels c) transmit 1 NTSC channel and a bunch of other services. It's clear that options b & c would be far more profitable than option a. This is why there is no one HDTV standard, but a whole spectrum of standards. Note how NTSC defines one picture standard, but HDTV defines 18 (all of which must be supported by a TV in order for it to be sold as an "HDTV")! One of those happens to include compressed, digitized NTSC...

Grease the palms of our honorable legislators enough, and it's not hard to get a sweet deal. And the networks are sitting on an incredibly sweet deal. First of all, they can decide which picture standard to use (ranging in quality from crappy NTSC to fullblown HDTV) assured that consumers have paid for the expensive decoder chips to watch whichever standard they choose to broadcast. Secondly, they can decide which mix of channels/services/etc. is the most profitable for them with no regulation whatsoever that forces them to use their spectrum for actually broadcasting HDTV. And they can do it all on free spectrum that otherwise would have cost them $70 billion (according to estimates of how much that spectrum would have fetched the government if it was auctioned)!

Are you feeling sick? Do you want to lead a consumer revolt by not buying HDTV sets? Don't worry; they have that covered too. In 10-15 years, by law, all NTSC broadcasts will be halted and everyone will be forced to switch over to HDTV. Unless you want to quit watching TV of any kind, you *must* purchase an HDTV set. Note how if you have a B&W T.V. from the 40's, you can still watch T.V. today, but 10 years from now, your NTSC set will be useless; why do you think they couldn't come up with a way to maintain backward compatibility when they were defining the HDTV standard? Or at least allow the market to determine the rate of HDTV acceptance as it saw fit? Perhaps because broadcasters knew that once people began to see that they essentially bought expensive new sets in order to watch the same crappy TV just so that the network companies could make more money off their spectrum, no one would buy HDTV sets and networks may have to continue broadcasting NTSC and miss out on all their extra profits...

So to segue back on-topic, broadcasters could care less about the quality of TV transmission and the details about penetration rates, signal quality, etc. etc. Because no matter how bad the transmission quality is, in 10 years, everyone will be forced to adopt the new standard anyway. And why should they care if half the people in their station area can't receive their TV signal and are thus not watching their advertising? They'll be making far more from all those extra services they'll be selling on their newfound $70 billion bandwidth horde...

Not trying to be a troll, but why did this make slashdot? Blogs aren't anything new. Novels aren't anything new. Using a blog to tell a story is about 5 minutes older than the first blog. Why is this more intereting than This [spam-scams] or This [Cyber athletes] or even This [Pure shock value].

No, the page can visit YOU via the HTML email feature of Outlook Express, Outlook, and even Eudora in some cases. Until very recently, scripting and ActiveX were enabled by default for incoming emails on most mail clients. The majority of exploits that utilize Outlook to launch an attack against IE were fixed over a year ago

Wired ran an article about the new flywheels a while ago.

Wired ran an article about the new flywheels a while ago.

And for the cut-n-paste impared: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,54062,00 .html

First the Metal Storm, now this!

Soon Australians will be able to fly up to anyone, anywhere in the world, within minutes, and then cut them to ribbons.

I wish I was Australian.

Unless the laws are made in the USA, in which case they apply to every human being on planet Earth. Maybe within the solar system, even...
(not so far-fetched...)

This is more like the game-rental system EB had on their website for a while, where you could download current games, play them for a set period of time, and then their system forced the uninstall/disabling of the game.

They claim they want to find out how much real life hacking use wireless networks are getting... but then they tell people where these are (roughly, DC is not really a huge city). It seems to me that this will just lead to more people looking for them just for fun, and not for any real use.

Anyway, the real wireless hotspot in DC is going to be American University since they're going all wireless this year. Nothing says wide open like a campus network! ;-)