Generally, when a movie that is still in theaters is released online, it's not very good quality, and is much worse than a rip of the DVD (which you won't find until the DVD itself is out). Pirates might not mind watching a Divx rip, but not as many are willing to settle for a VCD of a videocamera in a theater.
Here's an explanation of what happens which will probably be unclear due to my lack of physics lecturing experience:
Don't worry, it was pretty darned unclear. Specifically, this is where you lost me:
Imagine a conductor going in and out of your screen, in the middle.
OK, I can see him. He's got those denim overalls and the funny cap, but I don't know why he's going in and out of my monitor..
As you can see, if the time-constant of the eddy currents in the wire is a lot smaller than the frequency of the power in the wire, skin effect will be pretty small.
I don't normally count my self as stupid, but that made about as much sense to me as Geordi explaining how the deflector dish is going to create a reverse tackyon pulse to break the hold of the tractor beam while negating the subspace turbulance to disrupt the localized positron field surrounding the enemy ships.
I'm not trying to say that your explanation wasn't appreciated (Slashdot could use a few more researched explanations like that), just that it was way over my head, which isn't your fault.
Because more people will buy a unit because it's cheaper than will buy it because it has marginally better quality.
Myself, I'm just pissed that they didn't include X and Y buttons. You could have exact ports of a lot of old SNES favorites. Unfortunately, the few games they are porting need their interfaces redesigned, and some games just won't work without those buttons.
On the other hand, I'm really looking forward to F-Zero and Mario Kart. Almost enough to buy an import off of Ebay. Almost. (Finger itching.)
I've only got my rudementary high school French to support me, but I think either the show's writers screwed up translating to French, or someone screwed up translating from French. "Let's get cooking" would be, so far as I know, "allons cuisiner". Of course, it's clear he's trying to say "allez cuisine" in the show.
The only half-sane translation for "allez cuisine" I can think of would be something like "go cooking!", as if you were talking to cooking as a person, encouraging it to go on. That's heavy on the half-sane.
In the end, I guess that if that if the Japanese can mangle English, I suppose they can mangle French too.
Surely this must be the right way to license software which is paid for by taxpayers?
Effectively, you want the government to impose licensing restrictions to use something we, as a people, own. It is not licensed to us. Unlike every other piece of software -- even Linux and the BSD's -- we own it, in the true sense of the word. And, as owners, we have every right to do whatever we will with it, including incorporating it into a proprietary, closed source product sold for profit.
But that software must remain available to everybody who paid for it.
Why would placing it in the public domain somehow remove it from public use? That is the whole point of the public domain. The GPL will only dissuade people from using what is rightfully theirs and limit how they can use it.
They already use this with big rig trucks. It's not as detailed (all it will tattle on is the average speed and how often you stop), but the truckers hate it with a passion.
This attack was so effective because it involved hundreds of Windows hosts which were easily infected. Eggdrops (though there is a version for Windows) run on *nix servers, like you said, which are slightly harder to infect with a trojan. So eggdrop bots used for DDoS are much less common as it's harder to get the large numbers (and the bandwidth) to pull off a DDoS attack.
But, eggdrops are very frequently used on IRC for channel services (as mentioned earlier), and even in massive bot nets. However, these exist for redundancy rather than attack. On a netsplit-prone network that has no services (namely EFnet), bots are absolutely essential to maintain any public channel, and the more the better. And of course, eggdrops are preferably hosted on good connections, as they themselves are frequently targets of attacks.
The sad part about Gibson's tale is that he didn't do nearly as much as you did. Granted, he wasn't an IRC admin, and they were using a private server, but he made no attempt to remove these bots, or enable others to. Rather, he went into the hacker's channel and basically bragged about what he'd done, told them everything, and told us nothing about how to remedy it. Reading the chat log, it's clear that "^boss^" wasn't prodding Gibson for any information -- in fact he didn't know Gibson was there until Gibson started volunteering it.
Are you talking about the old iBooks? I've used them in the past, and the keyboard wasn't anything to write home about, IMO. Of course, I use a huge several pound IBM I-could-kill-you-with-this-thing keyboard that has real springs, with "hard" keys that make a loud noise when you press them. If you can guess, I'm not a big fan of "soft-touch" keyboards, so I suppose that's why the iBook didn't make a big impression on me.
It was small, like any other laptop keyboard, with all the normal keys in odd, cramped places. And, like many other laptop keyboards, the keys didn't give you much response, only depressing about a millimeter to activate the plastic sensor-thingie. (Solenoid?) Frankly, it didn't strike me as any different than any other laptop keyboard (ie, bad), except it was white and had Mac-specific keys.
As for the rest of the iBook, I found that I hated the trackpad. For laptops, I rather prefer the rubber nipple.
I don't know where you're coming from. He said "if they wanna give me some cash", not "you must give me cash". "No patent" is not at all at variance with "feel free to give me money". Hey, I don't even have a patentable idea, but if anyone wants to give me money, I'll take it.
And I think you're being too cynical when you say there's no reason to give him any cash. Someone out there might just feel grateful and give him some reward. Probably not as much as if he had sold it, and perhaps none at all, but it's not the impossibility you claim.
Another point: the only chance of his idea being stolen would be for someone else to patent it as their own idea, something he has specifically asked us not to do.
--
Re:Last episode mirrored structure of STTNG
on
Voyager Eulogy
·
· Score: 2
Don't you remember? "You only have enough power for a one-way trip."
She could create a rift sizable enough for the Klingons (and therefore Voyager), but once it was closed, they're SOL. And what good would it do to bring Voyager into the future?
IIRC, Tasha was killed off because her contract was up and she didn't want to go on (at least at the price they were paying her), and Sinclair left because the viewers hated him. However, Sheridan proved to be a great character in his own way, while close enough to Sinclair to satisfy the gap, but different enough to be more than a Sinclair replacement. And then bringing Sinclair back as Valen was just great.
I've met a number of people like you over the years, who insist that their hunt and peck method of typing is obviously better than using the home row, just because they're so fast. The point is not that you can type faster than the average typist, it's that you'll be able to type even faster, more comfortably, and with fewer errors. Practice and training can make your WPM go sky high, while hunt and peck will always be limited.
Please, someone explain America On-Line: France, Austrailia, Germany, UK, and all of their other world ventures. I dunno, I think it'd be a little weird for me to sign up for Germany On-Line or something, so why doesn't it bother all of AOL's foreign customers?
Then again, everyone here in the US goes gaga for anything with a French name..
If you look at that photo, he does not appear in blue, but he does in the red and the green. If he was just wearing something that didn't show up in the blue filter, the resulting picture would reflect what was there. For example, a blue shirt would look black under the red and green filters, but white under the blue one. The resulting combination would show a lack of color for red and green and a lot of color for blue, resulting in a blue shirt that looked exactly like the original.
In any event, you can clearly see the background behind the man in the blue filter, so he just wasn't there. As to the color of his shirt, if you combine red and green but not blue, it looks remarkably similar to the shirts worn by the man second from the left and the man furthest right, so I'd wager it was red.
Seems fairly obvious to me that a "perfectly copied" DVD would contain the exact same watermark as the original. Why you could copy the original, but not the copy is beyond me, if the copy is indeed perfect.
Do you have a DVD pressing machine? Do Napster-using online pirates have them? The idea is that if the player detects the watermark on non-approved media -- anything that isn't a pressed DVD, like VCD's or DVD writables -- it won't play. The strange part is that this method doesn't affect the "real" pirates, the ones who do this as a business and can afford a pressing machine.
Yes, but remember that the Democratic official in Palm Beach County approved the design of the "butterfly ballot" that supposedly caused so much confusion.
Whether or not the confusion was obvious beforehand or if it could have been prevented is academic. However, it is evident by now that the ballot did confuse a large number of voters, affecting the outcome of the election. The point here is that we allowed several accidents, errors, and just plain dirty tricks to decide our election and the fact of the matter is that no one is quite sure just who won. Both sides need to face statistical facts: when an election is that close, it's a tie. Florida's votes should have been split or thrown out entirely.
The Unix version, at least, has a built-in web interface that you can typically get to at http://localhost:8081/. It's really pretty easy after that.
It's in the Windows version too, so this guy isn't adding very much. About the only thing he's added are "Freenet domains", which are convenient to be sure, but how do you access
MSK@SSK@enI8YFo3gj8UVh-Au0HpKMftf6QQAgE/homepage // ? And what about CHK's? If people want a human-readable key, they can still create a KSK key to redirect to their main site, if I'm not mistaken.
I've got it set up so that I have a Freenet node running permanently on the gateway for my home LAN, so any computer on the LAN can access Freenet by going to http://serverip:8081/ without having to install Freenet regardless of OS.
Imagine if we paid a company to maintain our roads, just like we do power lines, cable TV, airport runways, etc.
I'm can see it now: The roads would intermittantly go out of use, be filled with advertisements and vacuous popular culture, and we'd all have to wait two hours just to use them. Where do I sign up?
The rest of what you said, I agree with. I especially liked your opening comment that rights not explicitly spelled out are not neccesarrilly denied. There are some people (myself among them) that believe that the Constitution was not meant to spell out our rights, but to spell out the few cases in which the government has power over those rights.
Dude, amendments nine and ten say exactly that.
Had we held fast to this dogma, the Bill Of Rights would have been redundant: The government could not , for example, restrict free speech or gun rights because the constitution never granted them the power to do so.
Most of the original framers did not believe that the Bill of Rights was necessary, but in order to get the Constitution approved it was added to appease some who thought the federal government was too strong. And with the Constitution as originally written, the Bill of Rights did not apply to the States. Of course, nearly all the States had similar provisions in their State Constitutions, but fact was, any one State could ban guns and limit free speech without repealing either amendment. It's only after several Supreme Court cases and the 14th amendment that these protections apply to all people from every level of government.
Most technological companies are aware that the PC as a phenomenae will dissapear in some decades, being replaced by specialized, closed, devices.
Do not believe the hype. This idea is being fed to you by companies who bought the idea just so they could unload it on Wall Street. Face it: when people want a Universal Turing Machine (computers are luxury devices, this has nothing to do with need), they want the whole package. They don't want a crippled product that's "good enough". Why is Dell more profitable than eMachines? Why aren't WebTVs filling the homes of the computer illiterate?
That's not to say that specialized devices won't fill the market, but they need to have a more clearly defined function, one that isn't better served by a computer. And they're not going to replace anything, just add to it.
Slashdot Mirror
Generally, when a movie that is still in theaters is released online, it's not very good quality, and is much worse than a rip of the DVD (which you won't find until the DVD itself is out). Pirates might not mind watching a Divx rip, but not as many are willing to settle for a VCD of a videocamera in a theater.
--
Here's an explanation of what happens which will probably be unclear due to my lack of physics lecturing experience:
Don't worry, it was pretty darned unclear. Specifically, this is where you lost me:
Imagine a conductor going in and out of your screen, in the middle.
OK, I can see him. He's got those denim overalls and the funny cap, but I don't know why he's going in and out of my monitor..
As you can see, if the time-constant of the eddy currents in the wire is a lot smaller than the frequency of the power in the wire, skin effect will be pretty small.
I don't normally count my self as stupid, but that made about as much sense to me as Geordi explaining how the deflector dish is going to create a reverse tackyon pulse to break the hold of the tractor beam while negating the subspace turbulance to disrupt the localized positron field surrounding the enemy ships.
I'm not trying to say that your explanation wasn't appreciated (Slashdot could use a few more researched explanations like that), just that it was way over my head, which isn't your fault.
--
Because more people will buy a unit because it's cheaper than will buy it because it has marginally better quality.
Myself, I'm just pissed that they didn't include X and Y buttons. You could have exact ports of a lot of old SNES favorites. Unfortunately, the few games they are porting need their interfaces redesigned, and some games just won't work without those buttons.
On the other hand, I'm really looking forward to F-Zero and Mario Kart. Almost enough to buy an import off of Ebay. Almost. (Finger itching.)
--
I've only got my rudementary high school French to support me, but I think either the show's writers screwed up translating to French, or someone screwed up translating from French. "Let's get cooking" would be, so far as I know, "allons cuisiner". Of course, it's clear he's trying to say "allez cuisine" in the show.
The only half-sane translation for "allez cuisine" I can think of would be something like "go cooking!", as if you were talking to cooking as a person, encouraging it to go on. That's heavy on the half-sane.
In the end, I guess that if that if the Japanese can mangle English, I suppose they can mangle French too.
--
Surely this must be the right way to license software which is paid for by taxpayers?
Effectively, you want the government to impose licensing restrictions to use something we, as a people, own. It is not licensed to us. Unlike every other piece of software -- even Linux and the BSD's -- we own it, in the true sense of the word. And, as owners, we have every right to do whatever we will with it, including incorporating it into a proprietary, closed source product sold for profit.
But that software must remain available to everybody who paid for it.
Why would placing it in the public domain somehow remove it from public use? That is the whole point of the public domain. The GPL will only dissuade people from using what is rightfully theirs and limit how they can use it.
--
Heinlein's Predictions for the Year 2000
--
They already use this with big rig trucks. It's not as detailed (all it will tattle on is the average speed and how often you stop), but the truckers hate it with a passion.
--
This attack was so effective because it involved hundreds of Windows hosts which were easily infected. Eggdrops (though there is a version for Windows) run on *nix servers, like you said, which are slightly harder to infect with a trojan. So eggdrop bots used for DDoS are much less common as it's harder to get the large numbers (and the bandwidth) to pull off a DDoS attack.
But, eggdrops are very frequently used on IRC for channel services (as mentioned earlier), and even in massive bot nets. However, these exist for redundancy rather than attack. On a netsplit-prone network that has no services (namely EFnet), bots are absolutely essential to maintain any public channel, and the more the better. And of course, eggdrops are preferably hosted on good connections, as they themselves are frequently targets of attacks.
--
The sad part about Gibson's tale is that he didn't do nearly as much as you did. Granted, he wasn't an IRC admin, and they were using a private server, but he made no attempt to remove these bots, or enable others to. Rather, he went into the hacker's channel and basically bragged about what he'd done, told them everything, and told us nothing about how to remedy it. Reading the chat log, it's clear that "^boss^" wasn't prodding Gibson for any information -- in fact he didn't know Gibson was there until Gibson started volunteering it.
--
Are you talking about the old iBooks? I've used them in the past, and the keyboard wasn't anything to write home about, IMO. Of course, I use a huge several pound IBM I-could-kill-you-with-this-thing keyboard that has real springs, with "hard" keys that make a loud noise when you press them. If you can guess, I'm not a big fan of "soft-touch" keyboards, so I suppose that's why the iBook didn't make a big impression on me.
It was small, like any other laptop keyboard, with all the normal keys in odd, cramped places. And, like many other laptop keyboards, the keys didn't give you much response, only depressing about a millimeter to activate the plastic sensor-thingie. (Solenoid?) Frankly, it didn't strike me as any different than any other laptop keyboard (ie, bad), except it was white and had Mac-specific keys.
As for the rest of the iBook, I found that I hated the trackpad. For laptops, I rather prefer the rubber nipple.
--
I don't know where you're coming from. He said "if they wanna give me some cash", not "you must give me cash". "No patent" is not at all at variance with "feel free to give me money". Hey, I don't even have a patentable idea, but if anyone wants to give me money, I'll take it.
And I think you're being too cynical when you say there's no reason to give him any cash. Someone out there might just feel grateful and give him some reward. Probably not as much as if he had sold it, and perhaps none at all, but it's not the impossibility you claim.
Another point: the only chance of his idea being stolen would be for someone else to patent it as their own idea, something he has specifically asked us not to do.
--
Don't you remember? "You only have enough power for a one-way trip."
She could create a rift sizable enough for the Klingons (and therefore Voyager), but once it was closed, they're SOL. And what good would it do to bring Voyager into the future?
Anyway, it was a stupid way to end the series.
--
IIRC, Tasha was killed off because her contract was up and she didn't want to go on (at least at the price they were paying her), and Sinclair left because the viewers hated him. However, Sheridan proved to be a great character in his own way, while close enough to Sinclair to satisfy the gap, but different enough to be more than a Sinclair replacement. And then bringing Sinclair back as Valen was just great.
--
I've met a number of people like you over the years, who insist that their hunt and peck method of typing is obviously better than using the home row, just because they're so fast. The point is not that you can type faster than the average typist, it's that you'll be able to type even faster, more comfortably, and with fewer errors. Practice and training can make your WPM go sky high, while hunt and peck will always be limited.
--
Please, someone explain America On-Line: France, Austrailia, Germany, UK, and all of their other world ventures. I dunno, I think it'd be a little weird for me to sign up for Germany On-Line or something, so why doesn't it bother all of AOL's foreign customers?
Then again, everyone here in the US goes gaga for anything with a French name..
--
If you look at that photo, he does not appear in blue, but he does in the red and the green. If he was just wearing something that didn't show up in the blue filter, the resulting picture would reflect what was there. For example, a blue shirt would look black under the red and green filters, but white under the blue one. The resulting combination would show a lack of color for red and green and a lot of color for blue, resulting in a blue shirt that looked exactly like the original.
In any event, you can clearly see the background behind the man in the blue filter, so he just wasn't there. As to the color of his shirt, if you combine red and green but not blue, it looks remarkably similar to the shirts worn by the man second from the left and the man furthest right, so I'd wager it was red.
--
Seems fairly obvious to me that a "perfectly copied" DVD would contain the exact same watermark as the original. Why you could copy the original, but not the copy is beyond me, if the copy is indeed perfect.
Do you have a DVD pressing machine? Do Napster-using online pirates have them? The idea is that if the player detects the watermark on non-approved media -- anything that isn't a pressed DVD, like VCD's or DVD writables -- it won't play. The strange part is that this method doesn't affect the "real" pirates, the ones who do this as a business and can afford a pressing machine.
--
... mudsexing in Worlds using the girl avatar ...
.. you said "mudsexing" .. huhuhuhhuhuh. [/beavis]
[beavis] huhuhuh
--
Yes, but remember that the Democratic official in Palm Beach County approved the design of the "butterfly ballot" that supposedly caused so much confusion.
Whether or not the confusion was obvious beforehand or if it could have been prevented is academic. However, it is evident by now that the ballot did confuse a large number of voters, affecting the outcome of the election. The point here is that we allowed several accidents, errors, and just plain dirty tricks to decide our election and the fact of the matter is that no one is quite sure just who won. Both sides need to face statistical facts: when an election is that close, it's a tie. Florida's votes should have been split or thrown out entirely.
--
The Unix version, at least, has a built-in web interface that you can typically get to at http://localhost:8081/. It's really pretty easy after that.
e // ? And what about CHK's? If people want a human-readable key, they can still create a KSK key to redirect to their main site, if I'm not mistaken.
It's in the Windows version too, so this guy isn't adding very much. About the only thing he's added are "Freenet domains", which are convenient to be sure, but how do you access
MSK@SSK@enI8YFo3gj8UVh-Au0HpKMftf6QQAgE/homepag
I've got it set up so that I have a Freenet node running permanently on the gateway for my home LAN, so any computer on the LAN can access Freenet by going to http://serverip:8081/ without having to install Freenet regardless of OS.
--
Imagine if we paid a company to maintain our roads, just like we do power lines, cable TV, airport runways, etc.
I'm can see it now: The roads would intermittantly go out of use, be filled with advertisements and vacuous popular culture, and we'd all have to wait two hours just to use them. Where do I sign up?
--
The rest of what you said, I agree with. I especially liked your opening comment that rights not explicitly spelled out are not neccesarrilly denied. There are some people (myself among them) that believe that the Constitution was not meant to spell out our rights, but to spell out the few cases in which the government has power over those rights.
Dude, amendments nine and ten say exactly that.
Had we held fast to this dogma, the Bill Of Rights would have been redundant: The government could not , for example, restrict free speech or gun rights because the constitution never granted them the power to do so.
Most of the original framers did not believe that the Bill of Rights was necessary, but in order to get the Constitution approved it was added to appease some who thought the federal government was too strong. And with the Constitution as originally written, the Bill of Rights did not apply to the States. Of course, nearly all the States had similar provisions in their State Constitutions, but fact was, any one State could ban guns and limit free speech without repealing either amendment. It's only after several Supreme Court cases and the 14th amendment that these protections apply to all people from every level of government.
--
"Enter" is where it's at.
--
Do I want to turn Japanese, no.
Are you sure?
The song, incidently, has nothing to do with Anime.
--
Most technological companies are aware that the PC as a phenomenae will dissapear in some decades, being replaced by specialized, closed, devices.
Do not believe the hype. This idea is being fed to you by companies who bought the idea just so they could unload it on Wall Street. Face it: when people want a Universal Turing Machine (computers are luxury devices, this has nothing to do with need), they want the whole package. They don't want a crippled product that's "good enough". Why is Dell more profitable than eMachines? Why aren't WebTVs filling the homes of the computer illiterate?
That's not to say that specialized devices won't fill the market, but they need to have a more clearly defined function, one that isn't better served by a computer. And they're not going to replace anything, just add to it.
--