Check out Megatokyo's take on this. Back when Piro first finds out he's been playing as a female character against the "darkly cute" Miho. As Miho puts it, "Don't you think our mutual confusion is rather interesting? Especially considering the rather 'intimate' nature of our in-game relationship?"
People would show up at club meetings and sell pirated copies of commercial software? And people didn't see anything wrong with this?
Yes. It wasn't a criminal offense back then. Copyright was strictly a civil issue, like patent infringement is today. Criminal copyright penalties were introduced for film and sound recordings in 1982, and for everything else in 1992. Thirty years ago, it wasn't even clear that computer programs should be copyrightable at all. There was considerable discussion over this, and prominent authors argued against it.
Byte Magazine, in the early days, ran full page ads for a company called "Pirate's Harbor". "Locksmith", a tool for breaking copy protection, was a successsful commercial product.
Cell sites have used software-defined radios for many years. Cell sites today have far fewer discrite radios than they have active channels. Here's a typical software defined cell site radio system.
This isn't all that new. It's just becoming cheap enough that it's worth doing for single-channel units.
We know how to identify mail sent via Ironport's "Bonded Spammer" program, and put it in a junk folder. Now how do we identify "GoodMail", for similar treatment?
A non-final rejection is quite common. That's how the USPTO says "prove that this is patentable". The applicant then sends in more evidence.
I went through this with a patent on game physics engines. The USPTO rejected some claims as an insufficent advance over prior art. So I sent in published reviews of games that didn't use my technology. "This game really sucked". "Worst game I ever played". "Game physics terrible". "Objects randomly flying off into space after a collision".
The USPTO then accepted the claims without any further argument. That's how you prove non-obviousness - show previous failure. If others tried and failed, but yours works, then you must have invented something.
On my DSL line, I have a lease on the wire to the central office, and I should be completely entitled to determine what goes over it. Think of it as "quiet enjoyment", which you're entitled to when you lease something. The lessee "steps into the shoes" of the lessor. Thats real property law.
For the "last mile", the incumbent carrier is a regulated monopoly, and must not be allowed to exploit that monopoly unduly. We have some problems with the Bush Administration in that area, but that's probably temporary.
At the CO, I should be able to get that wire tied to a long haul carrier of my choice. Covad, for example. Beyond that point, the incumbent carrier has no involvement and no voice.
The Western Union Telegraph Company essentially went out of business in 1994. The entity that now uses the name "Western Union" is a money-transfer firm, Western Union Financial Services, that bought the rights to the name and some of tha assets. They kept on sending telegrams as a promotional item, but all they did was operate a call center that takes messages, prints them, and mails them.
AT&T took over Telex service in 1991, which was the last real Western Union volume business. The WU international switching center in Paramus NJ
lived on until at least 1996, but was phased out then.
The wall-sized TV that doesn't require a darkened room has been a fantasy since the 1950s. We finally do have flat-screen TV sets you can hang on the wall (though this still requires rather big bolts). And there is the Panasonic 103 inch flat panel. But we're not there yet.
(Larry Ellison actually did have a wall-sized sunlight-visible TV in his old house. It used a projector intended for much larger screens.)
Go to google.cn from the US and you're redirected back to the US Google.
This seems to be happening at the DNS level. "google.cn" resolves to "216.239.39.99", which is assigned to Google in Mountain View CA. A traceroute doesn't show a path to China at all.
Now, interestingly, if you look up "google.cn" in US Google, and get the cached page, you're really seeing the censored view of Google, in its English language edition.
To try this, go to the cached page above, and enter "falun gong". The top search results are "The Cult of Falun Gong", "Falun Gong Evil and Harmful", "Falun Gong Members Found in Slander Case.", "Heretical Cult -- The True Colors of Falun
Gong", and "Outlawing Falun Gong Cult". That's obviously the censored version. The search doesn't come up blank. There's no message about censorship. You get the Official Approved Propaganda Results.
It's very Orwelllian. And it's not what Google has been telling the US press.
Now try the same search with US Google. You'll get all the real Falun Gong sites, and the Wikipedia entry.
So that's Google's Ministry of Truth in action. Try it yourself.
Making that threat was a big mistake. Now more security people will take a look at this "protection software", probably confirm the holes, and get it marked as hostile code. That will hit the mainstream press, and some major game vendors will be in the position Sony is now in.
Expect some product recalls.
This controversy is good. Games must be stopped from installing code which runs with kernel or administrator privileges. That's introducing too many security holes now, by preventing users from running as a nonprivileged user. Users can't lock down their machines and still run games. That's no longer acceptable.
The Archive is working, as I understand it, to move the Greatful Dead fan recordings off to somewhere else. Some of that content is streaming-only, and the fans keep playing the same streams over and over again. This is using up too much of the Archive's bandwidth.
Richard Dawkins, the well-known Oxford biologist, has been pushing for this lately. His two-hour series on Channel 4 in Britain, investigates religion the way 60 Minutes investigates scams. Part I, "The God Delusion", includes a visit to a US megachurch in which the interviewer asks the preacher some tough questions.
He also visits Lourdes, and asks questions about the reported miracle cure rate and the types of miracles recorded. It's consumer activism applied to religion.
(The audio of the show is available on the site above, and plays fine. The video is available on BitTorrent but seems to have some formatting problems.)
No, that's the "aw, how cute" reaction, which horses understand, and respond to. What I'm seeing is a general cluelessness about how to respond to a large moving object.
It's not an "IQ" issue. The original article makes a key point - kids are not getting conservation laws, like conservation of volume. I can see why.
Neither television nor video games enforce conservation of mass, energy, or volume. That basic observation about the physical world gets broken. Game worlds have much better graphics than they have physics. This may be messing up the worldview of kids, especially if they spend more time with games and TV than playing with physical objects.
I've noticed something else in the last year that worries me. I own a horse, and I recently had to move him to a barn that mostly teaches 6 to 14 year olds to ride. Often, the parents have non-riding kids in tow, and they hang around the barn.
Many (not all) of the non-riding kids have no clue how to deal with an environment that isn't entirely kid-safe. Some basic survival skills seem to be missing. They don't notice, let alone get out of the way of, horse traffic. They're unaware of what's happening behind them.
They have no sense that they need to have some caution when near these huge animals and their big, steel-shod hooves.
I've seen a horse, faced with an 8-year old child in his path, stop, reach down with his nose, and nudge the child out of the way, as a horse would do with a foal. The horses have more sense than some of the kids.
These are school-age kids from rather well-off families. They're not retarded or autistic. But they have no sense of what's hazardous.
Disney actually has a whole business unit devoted to turning out low-end sequels - DisneyToons.
DisneyToons is completely separate from the main Disney feature animation operation in beautiful downtown Burbank. Most of what DisneyToons really does is manage animation outsourcing.
David Stainton, who was running Disney Feature Animation, came up via DisneyToons. He's out, apparently.
Incidentally, if you want to track what's going on in the animation industry, read The Animation Guild newsletter, The Pegboard, published by Local 839, IATSE.
85% of the film and TV industry is unionized, and they're working on organizing the video game industry.
My message to FedEx, after receiving a phishing scam and talking to the billing part of FedEx.
FedEx case number: 1752XXXX
I've been referred to you by FedEx tech support, with
the case number above.
Attached is an obvious phishing scam using the FedEx name.
It has the usual hallmarks of a phishing scam:
1. A forged return
address "aroundtheworld@fedexemails.01o.com", while it
was actually sent from "snd6222.britecast.com".
(This, of course, is a criminal violation of the
CAN-SPAM act.)
2. Phony links to fake sites: the link supposedly
to "nba.fedex.com" actually goes to
"http://fedex.00b.net/ajtk/servlet/JJ?H=h3cq6&R=28 6452495".
So this is a clear phony.
The real concern is that the sender of this message has some
information about our FedEx account. The message contains
the line
"All shipments must be paid for with your FedEx
account number ending in 811."
That is in fact from our valid FedEx account number. So FedEx
appears to have a security breach; account numbers
have leaked to a scammer.
Full message source appears below.
Please let me know immediately if we need to cancel our
FedEx account because of this security breach.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
We received your inquiry. Thank you for contacting FedEx. We apologize for the inconvenience.
We would like to inform you that you may need to contact your local FedEx Account Executive so they can further advise you of what you need to do regarding the status of your account.
We hope this information is helpful. Again, thank you for contacting FedEx.
Note that they've referred me back to the part of FedEx that referred me to them. So that's FedEx, clueless.
Several good mainstream voice applications are on the way out. Wildfire is gone. TellMe is laying off people and no longer promoting their public services. These are good systems; you could get quite a bit done on the phone with them, and they had good speaker independent voice recognition. Yet they're gone, or going.
Try TellMe. Call 1-800-555-TELL. It's a voice portal. Buy movie tickets.
Get driving directions. News, weather, stock quotes, and sports. All without looking at the phone. So what's the problem?
There's far more to Disney than the studio and the theme parks. Disney owns the ABC television network, ESPN, and a few minor networks like Lifetime. They own not only the Disney film brands (Disney, Touchstone, Hollywood, and Caravan), but Miramax. They own several record labels, several book publishers, about thirty hotels, and Infoseek.
Running all that stuff is a full time job, and the current management doesn't do that good a job of it.
The real question is whether Jobs will become CEO of Disney/Pixar. If he does, he'll probably have to give up Apple, and move to LA. Running Disney is a full time job.
Slashdot Mirror
Check out Megatokyo's take on this. Back when Piro first finds out he's been playing as a female character against the "darkly cute" Miho. As Miho puts it, "Don't you think our mutual confusion is rather interesting? Especially considering the rather 'intimate' nature of our in-game relationship?"
Yes. It wasn't a criminal offense back then. Copyright was strictly a civil issue, like patent infringement is today. Criminal copyright penalties were introduced for film and sound recordings in 1982, and for everything else in 1992. Thirty years ago, it wasn't even clear that computer programs should be copyrightable at all. There was considerable discussion over this, and prominent authors argued against it.
Byte Magazine, in the early days, ran full page ads for a company called "Pirate's Harbor". "Locksmith", a tool for breaking copy protection, was a successsful commercial product.
Cubic zirconia in a MMORPG. Now that's cute.
This isn't all that new. It's just becoming cheap enough that it's worth doing for single-channel units.
We know how to identify mail sent via Ironport's "Bonded Spammer" program, and put it in a junk folder. Now how do we identify "GoodMail", for similar treatment?
I went through this with a patent on game physics engines. The USPTO rejected some claims as an insufficent advance over prior art. So I sent in published reviews of games that didn't use my technology. "This game really sucked". "Worst game I ever played". "Game physics terrible". "Objects randomly flying off into space after a collision".
The USPTO then accepted the claims without any further argument. That's how you prove non-obviousness - show previous failure. If others tried and failed, but yours works, then you must have invented something.
For the "last mile", the incumbent carrier is a regulated monopoly, and must not be allowed to exploit that monopoly unduly. We have some problems with the Bush Administration in that area, but that's probably temporary.
At the CO, I should be able to get that wire tied to a long haul carrier of my choice. Covad, for example. Beyond that point, the incumbent carrier has no involvement and no voice.
AT&T took over Telex service in 1991, which was the last real Western Union volume business. The WU international switching center in Paramus NJ lived on until at least 1996, but was phased out then.
No big. We'll just buy what we need from China.
(Larry Ellison actually did have a wall-sized sunlight-visible TV in his old house. It used a projector intended for much larger screens.)
They don't have that right. The Rock and Roll Museum in Cleveland fought a photographer over that, and lost.
Yet here is a picture of FAA headquarters. From the FAA.
This seems to be happening at the DNS level. "google.cn" resolves to "216.239.39.99", which is assigned to Google in Mountain View CA. A traceroute doesn't show a path to China at all.
Now, interestingly, if you look up "google.cn" in US Google, and get the cached page, you're really seeing the censored view of Google, in its English language edition.
To try this, go to the cached page above, and enter "falun gong". The top search results are "The Cult of Falun Gong", "Falun Gong Evil and Harmful", "Falun Gong Members Found in Slander Case.", "Heretical Cult -- The True Colors of Falun Gong", and "Outlawing Falun Gong Cult". That's obviously the censored version. The search doesn't come up blank. There's no message about censorship. You get the Official Approved Propaganda Results. It's very Orwelllian. And it's not what Google has been telling the US press.
Now try the same search with US Google. You'll get all the real Falun Gong sites, and the Wikipedia entry.
So that's Google's Ministry of Truth in action. Try it yourself.
This controversy is good. Games must be stopped from installing code which runs with kernel or administrator privileges. That's introducing too many security holes now, by preventing users from running as a nonprivileged user. Users can't lock down their machines and still run games. That's no longer acceptable.
The Archive is working, as I understand it, to move the Greatful Dead fan recordings off to somewhere else. Some of that content is streaming-only, and the fans keep playing the same streams over and over again. This is using up too much of the Archive's bandwidth.
Richard Dawkins, the well-known Oxford biologist, has been pushing for this lately. His two-hour series on Channel 4 in Britain, investigates religion the way 60 Minutes investigates scams. Part I, "The God Delusion", includes a visit to a US megachurch in which the interviewer asks the preacher some tough questions. He also visits Lourdes, and asks questions about the reported miracle cure rate and the types of miracles recorded. It's consumer activism applied to religion.
(The audio of the show is available on the site above, and plays fine. The video is available on BitTorrent but seems to have some formatting problems.)
No, that's the "aw, how cute" reaction, which horses understand, and respond to. What I'm seeing is a general cluelessness about how to respond to a large moving object.
I've noticed something else in the last year that worries me. I own a horse, and I recently had to move him to a barn that mostly teaches 6 to 14 year olds to ride. Often, the parents have non-riding kids in tow, and they hang around the barn. Many (not all) of the non-riding kids have no clue how to deal with an environment that isn't entirely kid-safe. Some basic survival skills seem to be missing. They don't notice, let alone get out of the way of, horse traffic. They're unaware of what's happening behind them. They have no sense that they need to have some caution when near these huge animals and their big, steel-shod hooves.
I've seen a horse, faced with an 8-year old child in his path, stop, reach down with his nose, and nudge the child out of the way, as a horse would do with a foal. The horses have more sense than some of the kids.
These are school-age kids from rather well-off families. They're not retarded or autistic. But they have no sense of what's hazardous.
I keep seeing image links to that site in spam. I thought they were a hosting service for spammers.
David Stainton, who was running Disney Feature Animation, came up via DisneyToons. He's out, apparently.
Incidentally, if you want to track what's going on in the animation industry, read The Animation Guild newsletter, The Pegboard, published by Local 839, IATSE. 85% of the film and TV industry is unionized, and they're working on organizing the video game industry.
I've been referred to you by FedEx tech support, with the case number above.
Attached is an obvious phishing scam using the FedEx name. It has the usual hallmarks of a phishing scam:
1. A forged return address "aroundtheworld@fedexemails.01o.com", while it was actually sent from "snd6222.britecast.com". (This, of course, is a criminal violation of the CAN-SPAM act.)
2. Phony links to fake sites: the link supposedly to "nba.fedex.com" actually goes to "http://fedex.00b.net/ajtk/servlet/JJ?H=h3cq6&R=28 6452495".
So this is a clear phony.
The real concern is that the sender of this message has some information about our FedEx account. The message contains the line
"All shipments must be paid for with your FedEx account number ending in 811."
That is in fact from our valid FedEx account number. So FedEx appears to have a security breach; account numbers have leaked to a scammer.
Full message source appears below.
Please let me know immediately if we need to cancel our FedEx account because of this security breach. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
FedEx reply:
Dear John:
We received your inquiry. Thank you for contacting FedEx. We apologize for the inconvenience.
We would like to inform you that you may need to contact your local FedEx Account Executive so they can further advise you of what you need to do regarding the status of your account.
We hope this information is helpful. Again, thank you for contacting FedEx.
Note that they've referred me back to the part of FedEx that referred me to them. So that's FedEx, clueless.
Try TellMe. Call 1-800-555-TELL. It's a voice portal. Buy movie tickets. Get driving directions. News, weather, stock quotes, and sports. All without looking at the phone. So what's the problem?
Running all that stuff is a full time job, and the current management doesn't do that good a job of it.
The real question is whether Jobs will become CEO of Disney/Pixar. If he does, he'll probably have to give up Apple, and move to LA. Running Disney is a full time job.
Somehow, I suspect that getting a rebate online will be made as difficult as possible. And then you'll get it as a store credit.