no matter what happens with SMDI it will be cracked. I think that the fact that even part of it was cracked with a massive boycott going on speaks to the encryption schemes weakness. Even if the whole thing had been broken, i dont think SMDI would have released the fact. They have too much money riding on it now to start over with something new, which is what they would have to do if everything was cracked. what will be important in the following months is that if SMDI is actually released into the wild or not. If it isnt, i suspect the whole thing has been cracked, if it is, then it will be cracked soon enough. Either way mp3's are the future of music, not smdi.
As a U of MD student, i want to clear something up: MS is not forcing the university to do anything. They are giving the university the option to have students pay $20 for access to all MS products. The university in turn is having every student who registers for class vote on whether or not they want to pay the $20. So far everyone ive spoken to has voted no for several reasons: 1: they dont have a computer that runs windows 2: their computer already has office and windows on it 3: they can pirate anything they want off the schools network for free. This will never go through, unless the univeristy has already decided for us, and if they have all hell will break loose.
You make a very good point, however reread the first line of the "catch the breeze" article and you'll not that its his parents, not he, who want the record expunged. Even the headline is "Parents of Mira Costa student want record cleared" Obviously his parents dont understand his statement anymore than the school does.
Reminds me of the "independent thought alarm" from the Simpsons.
Skinner: Two independant thought alarms in one day? Willy, remove the colored chalk from the classrooms.
Willy: ahhh warrrned ye, that chalk was forged by lucifer himeslf!
Whatever circuit these things use, I would wager that if you get them close nough to a high power RF source on the same wavelength, youll burn them out. Most of the anti theft devices used by stores like best buy work on the same principle. You send the right signal, it sends one back and the alarm goes off. They deactivate them by passing them by a high power RF sourse which fries the circuit. Since the frequencies of these things will probably be well known, you should be able to burn them out pretty easy. Or you could build a scanner device that will burn out everything within a certain range.
The thing about laws is, they only work so long as they are (1) enforced and (2) people follow them. Prime example is the case of MP3's 99.9% of the Mp3's people have are blatantly against the law. Does this mean that people get in trouble for having them and listening to them? For the large part no, simply because too many people choose to ignore the law because the feel it to be wrong or irrelavant. A better case would be segregation. All of a sudden blacks in the south said "we dont like this law, and therefore we will not follow it" The whites in the south attempted to enforce the law as it was written, but ultimately failed because people would not allow it to be enforced. My pooint is that, it seems alot of people think that this law is bunk. Therefore, dont follow it. Host deCSS, write the next "deCSS", store works you feel need to be stored so that future people may enjoy or need them, regardess of wether or not they are copyrighted and DCMA protected. Dont like the law? dont follow it.
dude, I would say that LSD is WORSE than crack and heroin, simply for its longterm effects. Granted, youre not going to become addicted to LSD like you are to crack, but 20 years down the road when youre sitting in a buisness luncheon and you start having a bad trip, youll regret the LSD more than you might regret experimenting with crack or heroin.
Just imagine how much farther you could go with a tank of liquid nitrogen in your trunk expanding. I
don't know the figures for N2, but for our old friend H20, it expands by a factor of 1700 times going from liquid to gas. That's nearly 6x what
you'd get compressing a gas to 300 atmospheres. true, but liquid nitrogen needs to be kept cold, or it wont stay liquid for long. Cooling nitrogen enough to liquify it requires alot of energy, probably more than 6x the amount of energy stored by air at 300 bars. you could probably up the pressure to 1800 bars, and all it would require is a weightier car, not expensve cooling apparatus. Using carbon composites for the tank might even negate the weight problem. although whether this would offset the cost increases would need to be seen.
Granted, you arent going to be thawing any human popsicles anytime soon, especially since we dont have cures for most of the diseases they died from, however this is a big advance towards suspended animation, which at present is needed for deep space travel ( assuming humans traveled in deep space. hello? congress?) so it does have a benefit other than reviving people.
two spacecraft hurtled at 250 miles
above Kazakhstan at a rate of 50 miles a second.
Ummmm NO! Escape velocity for earth is 11.2 km/s, or 6.8 mi/s. In fact if the shuttle were travelling this fast it would be the fastest man made object ever, the previous record holder being voyager 2 at 21 mi/s. What you probably meant to say was that they were travelling at 5 mi/s which is orbital velocity at that altitude. Off by an order of magnitude, oops!
Just because theyre banning arcades in Malaysia doesnt mean we should let our gaurd down on the complaints by people that there is too much blood and violence in video games. We could say, oh well let them restrict the violence, at least were not as bad as malaysia. If we did that, pretty soon we would be as bad as malaysia. Attacks on freedom at any level, no mater how insignificant they seem in comparison to other countries, need to be opposed.
I work at the university of maryland Space systems lab. At the SSL we have a gian neutral bouancy tank where we can simulate on orbit testing. The SSL has been working on a robot called ranger since 1990. It has been modified slightly to work in an underwater environment. If you have $20 Million you can get your own
My first exposure to programming was programming in logo on an Apple ][e i still have all my programs, now if i can only find a 5 1/4" floppy drive so that i can read them, its all good. Logo kinda rem inds me of html mixed with basic but i digress.
The first, "Slobbo," will drool, laze all over the couch,[snip]
Lets not forget Slobo, who will take over a small country in the balkans, terrorize its neighbors and eventually get kicked out when the humans realize that hes really just an evil robot with mice inside trying to take over the world.
Im listening to the beginning of this debate, and the moderator says "ok jack, why dont you introduce yourself" He then proceeds to go on an at least 10 minute screed about not stealing with quotes by lbj, occams razor, etc. He then kisses harvards ass. Rants about napster,more screed about not stealing. choice quote "just because its on the internet, its not free" realizes finally that its an introduction, not a speech, and decides to go on for a few more minutes about MPAA. "we [US motion pictures] are hospitably recieved by every country on the planet" Im sure Iran would beg to differ. Finally he says, internet good, but only if we can make money off of it, not if it competes with us. Thats him introducing himself. sheesh.
This whole thing is about capitalism vs communisim. If somone can produce something for less than you, then you either change or go out of buisness. Thats capitalism. When the government regulates a market to artificially inflate the price of a product, thats comunisim ( ok loose definitions on both of them, dont flame me) The point is, the MPAA has competition now, just like netscape had competition when microsoft started giving IE away for free. Only this time its the public that is going to either ultimately change the MPAA or drive them out of buisness. Somehow i doubt that the MPAA will go out of buisness, but they have to change, and nobody likes to change when theyre making money.
What happens when you spill your drink on your shirt? Or worse, what happens if you drop it on your pants? And you thought it was embarasing before if you had a big wet spot on your pants, now its embarassing and painful. ZAP!
Windows was bloated even then. 5 floppy disks? That might be over a megabyte. For a time when they sold 5 meg hard drives, thats an insanely huge amount of software just to run your computer. If i recall correctly, the original Mac ran off 1 800k floppy (3.5") with room to spare for programs. Hmm, i wonder if you could run the software that came with win 1.0 on Windows 2000, its supposed to be backwards compatible.
Would compiling a colonel involve taking a seargent and a leuitenant and kinda squishing them together? Please clear that up, i must be as dumb as you say those africans are.
Nope, current record is 26.8 % and thats from late 1999 article on it here but its gallium arsenide, and is probably hella expensive. Silicon is about 12-13 % efficient, so i was being generous. article excerpt:
"In 1997 our newest solar cell converted 21.6 percent of the sun's rays into
power. In 1999 our solar cells will convert 26.8 percent, and by 2002 we hope to
further improve the design to convert 30 to 40 percent of the sun's rays into
spacecraft power. When you compare this to the 12.3 percent conversion
efficiency of a silicon solar cell, you can see we've made tremendous
improvements in order to help our customers maximize their on-orbit
performance and increase revenue."
Slashdot Mirror
Skinner: Two independant thought alarms in one day? Willy, remove the colored chalk from the classrooms.
Willy: ahhh warrrned ye, that chalk was forged by lucifer himeslf!
My pooint is that, it seems alot of people think that this law is bunk. Therefore, dont follow it. Host deCSS, write the next "deCSS", store works you feel need to be stored so that future people may enjoy or need them, regardess of wether or not they are copyrighted and DCMA protected. Dont like the law? dont follow it.
Ummmm NO! Escape velocity for earth is 11.2 km/s, or 6.8 mi/s. In fact if the shuttle were travelling this fast it would be the fastest man made object ever, the previous record holder being voyager 2 at 21 mi/s. What you probably meant to say was that they were travelling at 5 mi/s which is orbital velocity at that altitude. Off by an order of magnitude, oops!
Lets not forget Slobo, who will take over a small country in the balkans, terrorize its neighbors and eventually get kicked out when the humans realize that hes really just an evil robot with mice inside trying to take over the world.
This whole thing is about capitalism vs communisim. If somone can produce something for less than you, then you either change or go out of buisness. Thats capitalism. When the government regulates a market to artificially inflate the price of a product, thats comunisim ( ok loose definitions on both of them, dont flame me) The point is, the MPAA has competition now, just like netscape had competition when microsoft started giving IE away for free. Only this time its the public that is going to either ultimately change the MPAA or drive them out of buisness. Somehow i doubt that the MPAA will go out of buisness, but they have to change, and nobody likes to change when theyre making money.
Thats his point exactly, religion in any form causes war
Youre just jealous because I bought Apple stock at $13 a share and now its at $52
"In 1997 our newest solar cell converted 21.6 percent of the sun's rays into power. In 1999 our solar cells will convert 26.8 percent, and by 2002 we hope to further improve the design to convert 30 to 40 percent of the sun's rays into spacecraft power. When you compare this to the 12.3 percent conversion efficiency of a silicon solar cell, you can see we've made tremendous improvements in order to help our customers maximize their on-orbit performance and increase revenue."