Security officials investigating the problem said that the attackers gained entry to the system first by establishing dummy accounts. They realized that these attackers were Chinese when they discovered all the personal information fields were filled in with "CHING CHANG CHING CHONG CHONG" - and the accounts all had suspicious-sounding names like "Warner Oland", "Sidney Toler", "Roland Winters", "Kristin Kreuk", and "John Bennett" - obviously failed attempts to concoct unsuspicious names...
I don't understand the aversion to software patents. Seems like, since software is even easier to copy, it is more deserving of protection.
I should clarify - I do understand the aversion, it comes from the whole "I want other people's work to be free" ethic that permeates this and other communities. I don't get why it's a valid principle may be what I should have said.
I disagree with the principle that being first to lay claim to an idea is justification for receiving exclusive use of that idea, and in practice a lot of these software patents seem like nothing more than subtle permutations of simple ideas, arranged in a series of legal tripwires to shut out anyone without a well-funded legal department and act as leverage against anyone else who does have a well-funded legal department.
And then in this case - a patent on being able to see how a picture will look before you take the shot... This is a feature that would have been pretty revolutionary in the days of film cameras. I can see how it would have taken a fair bit of foresight to come up with this idea at some point in the past. And if it were implemented on You would have to think about where the technology was going to go in the future. But when you make a camera based on an electronic sensor, this feature is pretty obvious. Read the output of the sensor and send it to a screen - it's not a complicated idea when you get to the point where the feature is actually practical. I don't think it's fair to act as though nobody else could have figured out how to do this had Kodak not documented and patented the idea beforehand.
Of course, I haven't read the patent (I can't find reference to what patents are involved in this) so it could be that there's more to it than that. So I must allow for the possibility that I am wrong and this patent isn't trivial...
No, the preview takes other things into account besides just the framing of the picture - like the focus (which non-SLR viewfinders generally wouldn't), the lighting and exposure (flash notwithstanding), the color corrections (daylight/incandescent/fluorescent) and so on.
I don't know, with that receding hair-line of his I had a very hard time believing he was of high-school age. I'm not sure Brenda made the right decision by getting involved with him.
Yes, you *could* say it that way, in that same way you could also point out that we don't have clear proof that unicorns and leprechauns *DON'T* exist.
But you can't prove that they don't not exist, either!
How does this effect the Drake equation? Sure, it would alter an input, but that's hardly annihilation.
Well, it's a bit of a problem with Ludwig von Drake - when people start questioning his numbers, he gets frustrated easily, steam blows out his ears, and he has a tendency to either grab his papers carelessly and run around them, tear them up in anger, or start babbling like a madman and eat them...
Yeah. I know it's not perfect, and that all 2 m^2 of skin wouldn't actually be receiving full sunlight. I was just trying to emphasize that even with unrealistically optimal conditions, we wouldn't get nearly enough energy from the sun to live on photosynthesis alone.
we just need to evolve (or bioengineer) larger backs to catch more sun. Note that the creature doing photosynthesis has quite a large back
Hm, maybe we can acquire some genes from your mom...
If the joke wasn't that we stay up through all hours of the night
It was.
“that big, bright, yellowish thing on the eastern horizon when you go to bed” – funny. “Where I live the sun sets on the western horizon” – not so funny.
Oh, I know an Andre the Giant quote that would work great right here... No... no, not going to do it.
Let's just say that I think your idea of what's "funny" is a little bit strange, too permissive perhaps.
But if a lot of people bought the Wii despite this limitation, that supports the assertion that most people don't care about watching movies on the console...
That's a assumed correlation and correlation does not necessitate causation.
In other words, one cannot claim people who bought the Wii did so because they want to support a system that didn't play movies simply because the Wii doesn't play movies.
No, but it tells us those people did not go shopping for a console, say "Oh, this one doesn't play DVDs" and move on... If playing videos on their consoles mattered so much to them, they probably wouldn't have bought the Wii.
The highest output on the Wii is 480p. It looks great for Wii games but i would imagine most Netflix streaming customers want their stuff in HD.
Well, sure, that's what they want... But I think most of Netflix's streaming encodes are still 480p...
(I don't think 480p looks "great" for Wii games, personally... For video it would probably be alright 'cause you don't get all the aliasing problems you get with polygon graphics...)
I'm willing to bet that 100% of Wiis cannot output content at 1080p, or even 720p.
You missed the point.
He was saying that if the Wii is connected to a TV that can't display hi-def, then it doesn't matter if the Wii hardware is incapable of output in hi-def...
My knee-jerk reaction to the news of a Netflix player for Wii was that the display resolution would suck - but then I thought about it for half a second and remembered that Netflix streaming resolution probably isn't any better anyway...
I highly doubt that the insinuation you make (that people don't want to watch movies on their consoles) was the driving force behind the purchase of the Wii.
But if a lot of people bought the Wii despite this limitation, that supports the assertion that most people don't care about watching movies on the console...
Personally I haven't wanted to use a game console as a DVD player since my PS2 showed me what a bad DVD player implementation looked like...
But... on the internet, everybody is a dog. Besides, their streaming service is so shitty on the PC that many subscribers of the service still pirate online just because it's easier than trying to convince Silverlight to work.
And that's the real reason for the disc requirement - piracy. If you take a closer look at the disc you'll notice that it has a jagged edge, but an average person wouldn't normally notice the difference when handling the disc. Now imagine someone reporting you for pirating movies and your little disc spinning at 25,000 rpm then being shot out at 200 mph.. DRM now stands for Decapitation & Radical Maiming.
Yeah, but at least we don't *look* like douchebags with a little penis sticking out of out mouths. Puff away, smoky.
This comment reminds me of that anti-smoking commercial where the message was, basically, "smoking is dumb, because smacking the end of a pack of cigarettes looks vaguely similar to this chimpanzee doing the same thing"...
"It looks dumb" is not at all high on the list of reasons why I don't appreciate people smoking in public.
Slashdot Mirror
Security officials investigating the problem said that the attackers gained entry to the system first by establishing dummy accounts. They realized that these attackers were Chinese when they discovered all the personal information fields were filled in with "CHING CHANG CHING CHONG CHONG" - and the accounts all had suspicious-sounding names like "Warner Oland", "Sidney Toler", "Roland Winters", "Kristin Kreuk", and "John Bennett" - obviously failed attempts to concoct unsuspicious names...
World War WAN? That might be confusing
Heaven help us when we reach World War Five. America's finest pro wrestlers will be helpless before the might of China's panda commandos...
Remember soldier, when you're captured by the enemy you owe them only three pieces of information!
A/S/L, nothing more!
I don't understand the aversion to software patents. Seems like, since software is even easier to copy, it is more deserving of protection.
I should clarify - I do understand the aversion, it comes from the whole "I want other people's work to be free" ethic that permeates this and other communities. I don't get why it's a valid principle may be what I should have said.
I disagree with the principle that being first to lay claim to an idea is justification for receiving exclusive use of that idea, and in practice a lot of these software patents seem like nothing more than subtle permutations of simple ideas, arranged in a series of legal tripwires to shut out anyone without a well-funded legal department and act as leverage against anyone else who does have a well-funded legal department.
And then in this case - a patent on being able to see how a picture will look before you take the shot... This is a feature that would have been pretty revolutionary in the days of film cameras. I can see how it would have taken a fair bit of foresight to come up with this idea at some point in the past. And if it were implemented on You would have to think about where the technology was going to go in the future. But when you make a camera based on an electronic sensor, this feature is pretty obvious. Read the output of the sensor and send it to a screen - it's not a complicated idea when you get to the point where the feature is actually practical. I don't think it's fair to act as though nobody else could have figured out how to do this had Kodak not documented and patented the idea beforehand.
Of course, I haven't read the patent (I can't find reference to what patents are involved in this) so it could be that there's more to it than that. So I must allow for the possibility that I am wrong and this patent isn't trivial...
Which is the bloody definition of preview.
Huh?
No, the preview takes other things into account besides just the framing of the picture - like the focus (which non-SLR viewfinders generally wouldn't), the lighting and exposure (flash notwithstanding), the color corrections (daylight/incandescent/fluorescent) and so on.
I don't know, with that receding hair-line of his I had a very hard time believing he was of high-school age. I'm not sure Brenda made the right decision by getting involved with him.
You have Popper backwards.
Man, what's John Popper got to do with this?
We also have horses too, and numerous stories of magical ones with horns. That's way more evidence than we have of any alien life.
Huh?
We have people, and numerous stories of people from other worlds. So I'd say the amount of evidence is about equal. XD
Yes, you *could* say it that way, in that same way you could also point out that we don't have clear proof that unicorns and leprechauns *DON'T* exist.
But you can't prove that they don't not exist, either!
. From not only a scientific point of view with the near complete annihilation of Drake's equation ...
Err, this would help us pin down one of the variables in the drake equation, not destroy it!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation#The_equation
Specifically these variables:
ne = the average number of planets that can potentially support life per star that has planets
fe = the fraction of the above that actually go on to develop life at some point
What about Bs?
How does this effect the Drake equation? Sure, it would alter an input, but that's hardly annihilation.
Well, it's a bit of a problem with Ludwig von Drake - when people start questioning his numbers, he gets frustrated easily, steam blows out his ears, and he has a tendency to either grab his papers carelessly and run around them, tear them up in anger, or start babbling like a madman and eat them...
Perhaps the GP planned to unzip his skin down the back, peel it forward, and present his entire "surface area" to the sun?
** shudder **
That approach works great - just don't use it when sunbathing at the beach! It's a pain in the ass trying to get all that sand out.
Yeah. I know it's not perfect, and that all 2 m^2 of skin wouldn't actually be receiving full sunlight. I was just trying to emphasize that even with unrealistically optimal conditions, we wouldn't get nearly enough energy from the sun to live on photosynthesis alone.
we just need to evolve (or bioengineer) larger backs to catch more sun. Note that the creature doing photosynthesis has quite a large back
Hm, maybe we can acquire some genes from your mom...
It's not really a joke when it's not funny.
That counts as a "whoosh", then. You didn't get the humor.
It's not a "whoosh" if the joke just wasn't funny...
If the joke wasn't that we stay up through all hours of the night
It was.
“that big, bright, yellowish thing on the eastern horizon when you go to bed” – funny.
“Where I live the sun sets on the western horizon” – not so funny.
Oh, I know an Andre the Giant quote that would work great right here... No... no, not going to do it.
Let's just say that I think your idea of what's "funny" is a little bit strange, too permissive perhaps.
I mean, what else would you do with Swedish Eye-Tracking technology? Track Swedish Eyes, obviously...
They are using Outlook/Exchange like a BBS that sends in digest mode only.
Actually the comparison is pretty much spot-on. When they're in transmission range, they download the day's messages as a QWK file...
I think all the old and Next-Gen Trek movies had at least one really serious flaw.
Yeah, not enough Tribbles.
Tribbles didn't save "The Search for Spock"...
But if a lot of people bought the Wii despite this limitation, that supports the assertion that most people don't care about watching movies on the console...
That's a assumed correlation and correlation does not necessitate causation.
In other words, one cannot claim people who bought the Wii did so because they want to support a system that didn't play movies simply because the Wii doesn't play movies.
No, but it tells us those people did not go shopping for a console, say "Oh, this one doesn't play DVDs" and move on... If playing videos on their consoles mattered so much to them, they probably wouldn't have bought the Wii.
The highest output on the Wii is 480p. It looks great for Wii games but i would imagine most Netflix streaming customers want their stuff in HD.
Well, sure, that's what they want... But I think most of Netflix's streaming encodes are still 480p...
(I don't think 480p looks "great" for Wii games, personally... For video it would probably be alright 'cause you don't get all the aliasing problems you get with polygon graphics...)
And that matters because?
I'm willing to bet that 100% of Wiis cannot output content at 1080p, or even 720p.
You missed the point.
He was saying that if the Wii is connected to a TV that can't display hi-def, then it doesn't matter if the Wii hardware is incapable of output in hi-def...
My knee-jerk reaction to the news of a Netflix player for Wii was that the display resolution would suck - but then I thought about it for half a second and remembered that Netflix streaming resolution probably isn't any better anyway...
I highly doubt that the insinuation you make (that people don't want to watch movies on their consoles) was the driving force behind the purchase of the Wii.
But if a lot of people bought the Wii despite this limitation, that supports the assertion that most people don't care about watching movies on the console...
Personally I haven't wanted to use a game console as a DVD player since my PS2 showed me what a bad DVD player implementation looked like...
But... on the internet, everybody is a dog. Besides, their streaming service is so shitty on the PC that many subscribers of the service still pirate online just because it's easier than trying to convince Silverlight to work.
And that's the real reason for the disc requirement - piracy. If you take a closer look at the disc you'll notice that it has a jagged edge, but an average person wouldn't normally notice the difference when handling the disc. Now imagine someone reporting you for pirating movies and your little disc spinning at 25,000 rpm then being shot out at 200 mph.. DRM now stands for Decapitation & Radical Maiming.
Or... Digital Rights Murder...
1) Insert popcorn
2) Push popcorn button
3) wait
4) When popcorn is ready instead of a chime you'll get:
DROID!!! DROID!!! DROID!!! DROID!!! DROID!!! DROID!!! DROID!!! DROID!!!
Only if you can program the replacement chime :)
But then you'd have to pay royalties to Lucasfilm...
busybody-douchebags
Yeah, but at least we don't *look* like douchebags with a little penis sticking out of out mouths. Puff away, smoky.
This comment reminds me of that anti-smoking commercial where the message was, basically, "smoking is dumb, because smacking the end of a pack of cigarettes looks vaguely similar to this chimpanzee doing the same thing"...
"It looks dumb" is not at all high on the list of reasons why I don't appreciate people smoking in public.