Well, I've welcomed the success of shows like Junkyard Wars, Battlebots, and the like, alongside the popularity of live televised police pursuits, and reality shows like Fear Factor and Maximum Exposure...
The success of all of these genres brings us ever so much closer to the day when we'll have realCar Wars style autoduels. I still play Car Wars regularly after 20 years, and it never grows old.
My only regret is that I can't mount even a paintball cannon to my Fnord Escort and take it out on the 210 freeway... much less a pair of 30mm Aden cannon.
Well, I wouldn't have found it if you hadn't pointed out the domain, but their product info is a dead giveaway:
Now, for the first time, McWhortle Enterprises is offering a product to the general public: the new Bio-Hazard Alert Detector. Running quietly on two double-A batteries, the Bio-Hazard Alert Detector emits an audible beep and flashes when in the presence of all known bio-hazards. The Bio-Hazard Alert Detector, measuring only 3 by 7 inches, is small enough to slip into a man's jacket pocket, a woman's purse or a child's backpack.
Utter bogosity. My employer has been working with ORNL for a decade on bringing portable chem and bio agent detectors to market, and even after a decade, they're barely small enough to fit in a trunk. And they require a lot of power... two 12V car batteries. Not to mention that no single sensor technology is suitable for detecting all agents...
Also, this should set off anyone's alarms:
It can detect even the finest-milled, weapons-grade biohazards from 50 feet, long before the risk of inhalation or cutaneous infection, by testing for the distinctive surface leptins. Proven effective to just.02 microns per cubic meter of air,
First of all, the implied sensitivity requires an in situ device, making detection from 50 feet impossible. But the real zit on this thing's nose is the laughable misuse of units... microns per unit volume? That reduces to nothing per unit area -- pure nonsense. I've seen better technobabble on episodes of ST:TNG.
But it may be fun to float the URL around the company here and see who spots the fnord first!
I agree. Start talking mebibytes and tebibytes and you'll sound like Mushmouth on the old Fat Albert cartoons.
Re:Cooltown, RIAA/MPAA style
on
Digital Lifestyle
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
"Would you like me to play you some light rock as you get dressed? Current prices are $4.99 per half hour."
This reflects my first thoughts upon reading this article -- how much will the subscription fees for all these services cost? Surely no one is going to sell you any commodity... no, everything will be licensed in a manner that wraps you up quite tidily so you have no rights whatsoever despite the fact that you pay more for the content than you do for the hardware it renders on.
Let's read the story again and estimate as we go how much this will cost the typical CoolTown inhabitant each and every month in the not-too-far-distant future:
$2.95 - Time server subscription
$15.00 - 'Lolita' voice personality license
$4.95 - Traffic conditions subscription
$56.14 - Typical cost of "Lite Rock" at $4.99/30min using 30 min/day on weekdays
$40.00 - Shuttle pass with Realtime Bus Locator and ETA service
$69.99 - Residential broadband internet access and 3 realtime video email accounts
$30.00 - FCC fee for residential wireless network spectrum allocation
$19.95 - Wireless telephone service
$3.95 - Personal consumer preference profile registration
$6.75 - Access fees for personal consumer preference profile (3/wk at $0.50 each)
$4.16 - Monthly cost of season subscription to NFL scores and highlights
And since "the first CoolTown centre was set up in California," let's put our hypothetical uberwired citizen there
$1.25 - CA internet operator's license fee, Class A ($15/yr)
$5.00 - CA Radiated Electromagnetic Energy Pollution Mitigation fee for ultrawideband residential wireless network
$15.00 - LA County Tarriff for subscription to interstate entertainment services
$75.00 - Mandatory Libel and Flame insurance
Total average monthly cost: $350.09
This is the reason that I don't have a cellphone, pager, wireless email terminal, personal video recorder, or other newfangled doodad. Hell, I don't even have cable. (Officially, that is.) All those little subscription fees add up, and before you know it, you're paying more for your "digital lifestyle" than you are for rent on your flat. And as service providers and content providers realize how digital rights management can wring more and more licensing fees out of the consumer, the situation is only going to get worse.
I wanted my Apple (now outdated) and so I invested my $3500k 4-5yrs ago, and it was/is awesome. Now with some of the new stuff they are coming out with I'm PLANNING on getting another... not just talking about it...
Funny you should mention that cost and lifetime... I spent about the same amount at about the same time, and my 200 Mhz 604e runs OS 9.1, IE, Office 98, and most games just fine. Only the newest hi-res 3D games show any delays or frame rate problems. Granted, I've upgraded it repeatedly (HD, RAM, Video), but at minimal cost and with few headaches.
I'm quite happy that this old horse still gets the job done. But the record belongs to my old Mac Plus, which I ran from 1986 to 1994. And I, too, am planning to buy a G4... as soon as I pay off a few debts. And I expect it to be useful for at least 4 years, if not more.
Let's see a wintel box exhibit that kind of staying power.
record the sound in the room, and send the recordings now and then
Make sure and start recording as your suicide script runs, so you can entertain yourself and your other BOFH friends again and again by listening to the thief's exclamations of surprise, disbelief, and outrage, as file start disappearing...
The script could also monitor files in the pr0n collection and to record while any are opened. You can then post these recordings on the internet: "Thief wanks to stolen pr0n on my stolen Mac!" I'd suggest that you use a webcam, too, if available, but the chances are better that you'd wish you hadn't recorded video.
Jimmy Buffet. Crystal Method. Peter Gabriel. Jimi Hendrix. Al Jarreau. Moody Blues... and that's just from a quick scan of the first few pages. Those are, unfortunately, all artists whose CDs I already own, and would buy more from.
Not now. As another Mac owner, with a better audio setup on my computer than anywhere else in the house, I will be more motivated to seek out pirated copies of new music from these artists than ever before.
Just goes to show you how fscking clueless UMG is.
LOL, but honestly, I shall be tuning-in to the last episode, if only to see which loose ends they decide to tie off, and how they manage it...
The one loose end I'm really hoping they resolve is the prediction from "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose" in which the title character, who can see how everyone he meets is going to die, predicts that Scully doesn't die.
Saved Apple from what? I'm tired of revisionist computer historians telling me that Apple was all but doomed at some point or another in recent history, when it simply isn't true.
Sure, at the end of Amelio's reign, Apple had problems. Severe quality assurance problems... for Apple, but still no worse than your average wintel boxmaker. (At the time, our IT dept. was returning more than 15% of new IBM workstations for warranty service, and so decided to switch us all to Gateway.)
Apple had glut of models, yes, probably compounding QA difficulties and eroding profit margins. But so do modern US automakers. Are they doomed?
Apple had a marginal market share, yes. But what's new? Gee, you have 3% of domestic sales instead of 5%. You're doomed!
Clonemakers were taking the most profitable part of Apple's market, yes. (Hell, I bought a high-end clone, too... best Mac price/performace ratio in history. Well, until iMac maybe.) This was perhaps the most threatening problem. But it was because the clonemakers got greedy and didn't honor their licensing agreement. So Apple just didn't renew it. Problem solved.
They had many serious issues to face, and they knew it. Hell, that's why they brought back Jobs. But if he had refused, who knows what would have happened. They had a lot going for them, though: Lots and lots of cash in the bank, enough to fend off any sort of hostile takover attempt. A huge installed base supporting a horde of loyal, even fanatic, users. Mac zealotry was even more intense back then than it is today. They weren't automatically doomed.
Unless you count living in the margins ekeing out a profit on a couple percent share of the market as doomed.
What Jobs did was bring Apple back to the vanguard of personal technology, revitalized their marketing and R&D, gave them a leader to stand behind, and a caricature to present to the public and press. But he didn't "save them from the brink" of anything but mediocrity.
I knew what you meant at first, but then I read your comment more closely and said, "Huh?"
I'm not familiar with the exact wording of the DMCA, but the "protection" method that the labels have started using is an addition of noise, not encryption or access control, or anything else that renders the signal unreadable. They add not so much noise that a discman or home audio CD player can't read it, but enough so that CD-ROMs (which don't include the same noise suppression algorithms) are stymied.
It's amazing how frequently computer and internet terms can be misapplied without objection. Especially when it comes to legal issues... in cyberlaw, it seems that you can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear -- you just slap a "Silk Purse" label on it, and voila!
Anyway, my point is, if someone produces a CD-ROM that uses the same suppression algorithms as an Audio CD player, I suspect the RIAA will have little ground to stand on if they try to sue under the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision. First, those algorithms have been around for 20 years, 18 years longer than the DMCA. And second, you're not circumventing anything, you're just filtering out noise that the publisher intends to be filtered out anyhow.
[To paraphrase] The company firewall thinks I'm trying to circumvent its content restrictions.
Heh, my company contracts CSC to provide internet and intranet services, and their web filter spat the following at me when I tried to translate the tecchannel.de page:
"The request was denied, as specified in the SmartFilter Content Filter configuration. The content category reported is sex."
I'd say that's pretty savvy of CSC, 'cuz the article is indeed about how consumers are getting sodomized by the RIAA!
So I just need to stop driving to become a nonperson!
Either that, or get caught in possession of marijuana. Have we all forgotten that the last incarnation of the Federal executive branch, in their ultimate compassion, wisdom, and regard for our liberties, held state highway funds hostage to coerce state legistatures into passing laws that revoked one's drivers license upon conviction of marijuana possession. Even if you were nowhere near a car at the time!
I don't know if all the states gave in, but I'm sure most of them did. California sure did. I haven't smoked habitually since college, more than a decade ago. But this still ticks me off: both the underhanded way the feds foisted it on us, and in the way it takes a perfectly functioning citizen who likes an occasional toke and risks making them unemployed, homeless, or worse. It's the pinnacle of achievement by the narrow-minded, intolerant, party-line towing, drug-war-profiteering rectal sphincters that declare drugs (or anything else they don't like or understand) as "evil." This kind of "solution" renders self-fulfilling the anti-drug crusaders' (erroneous) characterization of pot smokers as nonfunctional.
And now the Driver's License will be the national ID card. So if you get caught taking a toke, you become a non person, unable to function in places without decent mass transit like LA, Seattle or Dallas, or any rural setting? Fscking brilliant social policy, if you're a fascist.
Gah - I know it's tangential to the subject at hand, but I had to relieve the pressure in my spleen.
Either that, or we need to stop thinking of Web polls as reliable.
Or we need to stop calling them "polls." Sheesh, every software and microelectronics geek out there was taught that to poll is to actively solicit input (e.g., poll an I/O port, poll a semaphore). These "web polls" aren't polls... hell, I don't even know what to call them, but they aren't polls.
Blind ballot boxes?
Multiple choice opinion pigeonholers?
Electronic circle jerks?
But if they were polls, you would have been randomly selected from some general database and sent an email or an IRC message soliciting your opinion.
And gee- coincidentally, that's how real polls (Gallup, etc.) ensure accurate results!
I found it highly amusing that yet another Microsoft "feature" recklessly ignoring users' privacy and security has turned around and bit them in the ass.
Then of course DSL just sucks, but it sucks everywhere.
Wrong. Here in Pasadena I have PacBell DSL and Earthlink as my ISP. I pay earthlink $49.95 a month for 768k down/384k up, but consistently get over 1.5M down, anytime of the day or night.
Getting it installed was a monstrous exercise in frustration, but once I passed that hurdle it was worth it.
I will agree with the other comments that remark on how little broadband content is really out there. Streaming radio is about the only broadband content I regularly consume. Where is the video? Where are the games?,P.
It's clear that broadband's "killer app" has yet to emerge.
In comparison, my parents have Time Warner "Roadrunner" cable in rural NC, and pay the same price. They seldom get more than 56k down during the afternoon and evening. If they want the promised bandwith, they have to get up early or stay up late.
Slashdot Mirror
The success of all of these genres brings us ever so much closer to the day when we'll have real Car Wars style autoduels. I still play Car Wars regularly after 20 years, and it never grows old.
My only regret is that I can't mount even a paintball cannon to my Fnord Escort and take it out on the 210 freeway... much less a pair of 30mm Aden cannon.
Hamilton Sundstrand, a United Technologies company.
- Now, for the first time, McWhortle Enterprises is offering a product to the general public: the new Bio-Hazard Alert Detector. Running quietly on two double-A batteries, the Bio-Hazard Alert Detector emits an audible beep and flashes when in the presence of all known bio-hazards. The Bio-Hazard Alert Detector, measuring only 3 by 7 inches, is small enough to slip into a man's jacket pocket, a woman's purse or a child's backpack.
Utter bogosity. My employer has been working with ORNL for a decade on bringing portable chem and bio agent detectors to market, and even after a decade, they're barely small enough to fit in a trunk. And they require a lot of power... two 12V car batteries. Not to mention that no single sensor technology is suitable for detecting all agents...Also, this should set off anyone's alarms:
- It can detect even the finest-milled, weapons-grade biohazards from 50 feet, long before the risk of inhalation or cutaneous infection, by testing for the distinctive surface leptins. Proven effective to just
.02 microns per cubic meter of air,
First of all, the implied sensitivity requires an in situ device, making detection from 50 feet impossible. But the real zit on this thing's nose is the laughable misuse of units... microns per unit volume? That reduces to nothing per unit area -- pure nonsense. I've seen better technobabble on episodes of ST:TNG.But it may be fun to float the URL around the company here and see who spots the fnord first!
I agree. Start talking mebibytes and tebibytes and you'll sound like Mushmouth on the old Fat Albert cartoons.
This reflects my first thoughts upon reading this article -- how much will the subscription fees for all these services cost? Surely no one is going to sell you any commodity... no, everything will be licensed in a manner that wraps you up quite tidily so you have no rights whatsoever despite the fact that you pay more for the content than you do for the hardware it renders on.
Let's read the story again and estimate as we go how much this will cost the typical CoolTown inhabitant each and every month in the not-too-far-distant future:
- $2.95 - Time server subscription
- $15.00 - 'Lolita' voice personality license
- $4.95 - Traffic conditions subscription
- $56.14 - Typical cost of "Lite Rock" at $4.99/30min using 30 min/day on weekdays
- $40.00 - Shuttle pass with Realtime Bus Locator and ETA service
- $69.99 - Residential broadband internet access and 3 realtime video email accounts
- $30.00 - FCC fee for residential wireless network spectrum allocation
- $19.95 - Wireless telephone service
- $3.95 - Personal consumer preference profile registration
- $6.75 - Access fees for personal consumer preference profile (3/wk at $0.50 each)
- $4.16 - Monthly cost of season subscription to NFL scores and highlights
- $1.25 - CA internet operator's license fee, Class A ($15/yr)
- $5.00 - CA Radiated Electromagnetic Energy Pollution Mitigation fee for ultrawideband residential wireless network
- $15.00 - LA County Tarriff for subscription to interstate entertainment services
- $75.00 - Mandatory Libel and Flame insurance
This is the reason that I don't have a cellphone, pager, wireless email terminal, personal video recorder, or other newfangled doodad. Hell, I don't even have cable. (Officially, that is.) All those little subscription fees add up, and before you know it, you're paying more for your "digital lifestyle" than you are for rent on your flat. And as service providers and content providers realize how digital rights management can wring more and more licensing fees out of the consumer, the situation is only going to get worse.And since "the first CoolTown centre was set up in California," let's put our hypothetical uberwired citizen there
Total average monthly cost: $350.09
Damn, after that I want a cigarette.
Funny you should mention that cost and lifetime... I spent about the same amount at about the same time, and my 200 Mhz 604e runs OS 9.1, IE, Office 98, and most games just fine. Only the newest hi-res 3D games show any delays or frame rate problems. Granted, I've upgraded it repeatedly (HD, RAM, Video), but at minimal cost and with few headaches.
I'm quite happy that this old horse still gets the job done. But the record belongs to my old Mac Plus, which I ran from 1986 to 1994. And I, too, am planning to buy a G4... as soon as I pay off a few debts. And I expect it to be useful for at least 4 years, if not more.
Let's see a wintel box exhibit that kind of staying power.
Make sure and start recording as your suicide script runs, so you can entertain yourself and your other BOFH friends again and again by listening to the thief's exclamations of surprise, disbelief, and outrage, as file start disappearing...
The script could also monitor files in the pr0n collection and to record while any are opened. You can then post these recordings on the internet: "Thief wanks to stolen pr0n on my stolen Mac!" I'd suggest that you use a webcam, too, if available, but the chances are better that you'd wish you hadn't recorded video.
But I can do the opposite just as easily:
Jimmy Buffet. Crystal Method. Peter Gabriel. Jimi Hendrix. Al Jarreau. Moody Blues... and that's just from a quick scan of the first few pages. Those are, unfortunately, all artists whose CDs I already own, and would buy more from.
Not now. As another Mac owner, with a better audio setup on my computer than anywhere else in the house, I will be more motivated to seek out pirated copies of new music from these artists than ever before.
Just goes to show you how fscking clueless UMG is.
The one loose end I'm really hoping they resolve is the prediction from "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose" in which the title character, who can see how everyone he meets is going to die, predicts that Scully doesn't die.
Funny you should mention Millenium, the best show Chris Carter ever produced, and the one that got most egregiously snubbed by FOX.
Power-armor football!
And heck, with one of those suits, even I could guard Shaq.
It's just you. His right hand is clearly grasping a handgrip at the end of the... erm... umm... exo-ulna?
Saved Apple from what? I'm tired of revisionist computer historians telling me that Apple was all but doomed at some point or another in recent history, when it simply isn't true.
Sure, at the end of Amelio's reign, Apple had problems. Severe quality assurance problems... for Apple, but still no worse than your average wintel boxmaker. (At the time, our IT dept. was returning more than 15% of new IBM workstations for warranty service, and so decided to switch us all to Gateway.)
Apple had glut of models, yes, probably compounding QA difficulties and eroding profit margins. But so do modern US automakers. Are they doomed?
Apple had a marginal market share, yes. But what's new? Gee, you have 3% of domestic sales instead of 5%. You're doomed!
Clonemakers were taking the most profitable part of Apple's market, yes. (Hell, I bought a high-end clone, too... best Mac price/performace ratio in history. Well, until iMac maybe.) This was perhaps the most threatening problem. But it was because the clonemakers got greedy and didn't honor their licensing agreement. So Apple just didn't renew it. Problem solved.
They had many serious issues to face, and they knew it. Hell, that's why they brought back Jobs. But if he had refused, who knows what would have happened. They had a lot going for them, though: Lots and lots of cash in the bank, enough to fend off any sort of hostile takover attempt. A huge installed base supporting a horde of loyal, even fanatic, users. Mac zealotry was even more intense back then than it is today. They weren't automatically doomed.
Unless you count living in the margins ekeing out a profit on a couple percent share of the market as doomed.
What Jobs did was bring Apple back to the vanguard of personal technology, revitalized their marketing and R&D, gave them a leader to stand behind, and a caricature to present to the public and press. But he didn't "save them from the brink" of anything but mediocrity.
Now you're talkin' about a value system I can stand behind!
I knew what you meant at first, but then I read your comment more closely and said, "Huh?"
I'm not familiar with the exact wording of the DMCA, but the "protection" method that the labels have started using is an addition of noise, not encryption or access control, or anything else that renders the signal unreadable. They add not so much noise that a discman or home audio CD player can't read it, but enough so that CD-ROMs (which don't include the same noise suppression algorithms) are stymied.
It's amazing how frequently computer and internet terms can be misapplied without objection. Especially when it comes to legal issues... in cyberlaw, it seems that you can make a silk purse out of a sow's ear -- you just slap a "Silk Purse" label on it, and voila!
Anyway, my point is, if someone produces a CD-ROM that uses the same suppression algorithms as an Audio CD player, I suspect the RIAA will have little ground to stand on if they try to sue under the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision. First, those algorithms have been around for 20 years, 18 years longer than the DMCA. And second, you're not circumventing anything, you're just filtering out noise that the publisher intends to be filtered out anyhow.
Heh, my company contracts CSC to provide internet and intranet services, and their web filter spat the following at me when I tried to translate the tecchannel.de page:
"The request was denied, as specified in the SmartFilter Content Filter configuration. The content category reported is sex."
I'd say that's pretty savvy of CSC, 'cuz the article is indeed about how consumers are getting sodomized by the RIAA!
Either that, or get caught in possession of marijuana. Have we all forgotten that the last incarnation of the Federal executive branch, in their ultimate compassion, wisdom, and regard for our liberties, held state highway funds hostage to coerce state legistatures into passing laws that revoked one's drivers license upon conviction of marijuana possession. Even if you were nowhere near a car at the time!
I don't know if all the states gave in, but I'm sure most of them did. California sure did. I haven't smoked habitually since college, more than a decade ago. But this still ticks me off: both the underhanded way the feds foisted it on us, and in the way it takes a perfectly functioning citizen who likes an occasional toke and risks making them unemployed, homeless, or worse. It's the pinnacle of achievement by the narrow-minded, intolerant, party-line towing, drug-war-profiteering rectal sphincters that declare drugs (or anything else they don't like or understand) as "evil." This kind of "solution" renders self-fulfilling the anti-drug crusaders' (erroneous) characterization of pot smokers as nonfunctional.
And now the Driver's License will be the national ID card. So if you get caught taking a toke, you become a non person, unable to function in places without decent mass transit like LA, Seattle or Dallas, or any rural setting? Fscking brilliant social policy, if you're a fascist.
Gah - I know it's tangential to the subject at hand, but I had to relieve the pressure in my spleen.
Gee, perhaps it's already been asked?
And don't forget the slot that spits out calculation results printed on paper tape!
Tape Librarians Will Mount Anything
Or we need to stop calling them "polls." Sheesh, every software and microelectronics geek out there was taught that to poll is to actively solicit input (e.g., poll an I/O port, poll a semaphore). These "web polls" aren't polls... hell, I don't even know what to call them, but they aren't polls.
Blind ballot boxes?
Multiple choice opinion pigeonholers?
Electronic circle jerks?
But if they were polls, you would have been randomly selected from some general database and sent an email or an IRC message soliciting your opinion.
And gee- coincidentally, that's how real polls (Gallup, etc.) ensure accurate results!
Har! 'Bout time!
Wrong. Here in Pasadena I have PacBell DSL and Earthlink as my ISP. I pay earthlink $49.95 a month for 768k down/384k up, but consistently get over 1.5M down, anytime of the day or night.
Getting it installed was a monstrous exercise in frustration, but once I passed that hurdle it was worth it.
I will agree with the other comments that remark on how little broadband content is really out there. Streaming radio is about the only broadband content I regularly consume. Where is the video? Where are the games?,P. It's clear that broadband's "killer app" has yet to emerge.
In comparison, my parents have Time Warner "Roadrunner" cable in rural NC, and pay the same price. They seldom get more than 56k down during the afternoon and evening. If they want the promised bandwith, they have to get up early or stay up late.
Start your sig with a line break tag (BR) to add an additional line between your post and your sig.
Easy, huh?