The "comedy" part is provided by the idiot commentators. That, and the US is a nation that collectively finds it funny to watch someone get hit with a baseball bat in the testicles, so it's not hard to extrapolate to watching robots push each other over exposed circular saw blades.
"[Linking] is analogous to driving someone to a home so that they may burglarize the home." -- Jack Valenti
A far better analogy would be that linking is like telling someone on the street what someone's home address is and raising your finger to point in its direction. The idea that this is meaningfully different from the pure speech act of telling someone what the address is is ludicrous.
I'm already blocking all content from akamai, because I don't want to see their ads. Sure, I'd have to reconsider that if I ever wanted to use them as a such a proxy, but since I don't, I'm not affected by their "security holes".
As I see it, the greatest problem caused by this discovery is that it might hinder the adoption of adblocking software. But I don't think the risk is high.
What's to stop a dishonest website from giving itself a blander rating than it deserves? (We already see lots of sites stacking their pages with dictionary-esque meta tags in order to get more hits on stupid web crawlers.) For that matter, what's to ensure that one's own tastes and perspectives on how a site should be rated will conform with the site's author?
Sure, there would be incentive for porn peddlers to give themselves the raunchiest rating possible in order to draw more consumers. But at the same time, the ones with the most resources could easily have two parallel sets of pages, one with a raunchy rating and the other with a benign one, in order not to miss the ones who'd get snagged by censorware. With cgi-generated html wrapped around stock images, this could even be a preference-box on the user's home page within that site.
If mandatory self-ratings are to work as you intend, then there has to be some followup by the government to punish those whose ratings do not conform with community standards. But that's the same as having government-imposed censorship in the first place.
(And the idea that some people can construct an entire www for themselves containing only sites that agree with them and filtering out all other sites so there's not hte slightest chance that a dissenting opinion might slip in and provoke a new idea is abhorrent in my view.
But a mouse or a stylus pen could have a disposable latex/plastic sheath as you find with dental instruments. Keyboards with their many individual moving parts and greater reliance on tactile feedback pose a much bigger problem.
What was so difficult to accept about Robocop?
on
The Computer of 2010
·
· Score: 1
Or at least Robocop 2. The badguy interfaces with liquid crack. That's an interface humans have understood since before they were humans.
Try holding out your finger for five minutes straight, much less a whole day of computer use. Tired yet? Touch screens won't come of age until we get ubiquitous thin flat-screened tablet-portables, so you can curl up with them on a couch and touch them as you would turn the pages of a novel. It'd be ideal for some applications, but it's hardly ideal for others.
BTW, there is a purpose for using cursors on keyboards, besides not having to move one's hands much while typing. There's no aiming for the scroll box, and once there you can't lose window focus by jiggling the keyboard, as you could with even a trackball, much less a mouse.
And picking up whats on your co-workers fingers: are you a hypochondriac or what?
Actually, computer keyboards have for a while been the largest vector of cross-patient contamination at hospitals. People disinfect the toilets and occasionally remember to scrub the doorknobs, but people rarely think to try to swab down a keyboard, in part because doing so would be difficult with today's keyboards and their many pits and crevices. A doctor who examines his patients while wearing latex gloves often forgets to remove those same gloves before looking up some record or info on his computer, and those who don't wear gloves often forget to wash their hands first, though they religiously scrub after the whole examination.
Does the GPL (GNU Public Licence, system under which open source is licensed) need to be modified for the bulk of vendors to jump to open source business models? Nope, it's the [GNU] General Public Liscense -- a small point but still of more value than the lesser/library LGPL distinction.
Last I checked, goodnoise was complying with their garbage patent claims...
sega vs. accolade: intermediate copying
on
Emulation Legality
·
· Score: 1
One of the arguments that Accolade lost was that intermediate copying of a copyrighted work should not infringe upon the original copyright holder's rights if the final product is significantly different from the original. Notwithstanding liscense issues, if a bunch of programmers get together and disassemble a software program for the purpose of crafting an emulator (using several unauthorized copies of the original to do so), this would infringe IP. This to me would seem like fair use. What say the rest of you?
Emunews is carrying the announcement and mirroring the emulator. Download it here. 'New N64 Emu Plays Commercial ROMs! A major new emulator has debuted. The world's first Nintendo 64 emulator that actually plays commercial games! Epsilon and RealityMan are the authors behind this masterpiece. Called UltraHLE, this one's for Windows 95. It requires at least PII 300 and a 3dfx graphics card "UltraHLE gives PC owners the first chance ever to run commercially available Nintendo 64 games (rom images). The current aim of UltraHLE is not to run as many games as possible, it is to run some of the best titles as well as possible (e.g. Super Mario 64, Zelda: Ocarina of Time etc)."'
The playstation's copyprotection consists of having the playstation cds burned with incorrect checksums on the theory that normal burners will put in the correct checksums when burning the data. The ubiquitous modchips get around this restriction, but VGS officially honors this copy protection.
People who wish to violate copyright will continue to do so. Besides, will this watermark survive a conversion to and fro and back again across formats?
Slashdot Mirror
The "comedy" part is provided by the idiot commentators. That, and the US is a nation that collectively finds it funny to watch someone get hit with a baseball bat in the testicles, so it's not hard to extrapolate to watching robots push each other over exposed circular saw blades.
Or would that count as RF jamming?
"[Linking] is analogous to driving someone to a home so that they may burglarize the home." -- Jack Valenti
A far better analogy would be that linking is like telling someone on the street what someone's home address is and raising your finger to point in its direction. The idea that this is meaningfully different from the pure speech act of telling someone what the address is is ludicrous.
With their ongoing legal woes, Microsoft should've named it the nolo chip.
I'm already blocking all content from akamai, because I don't want to see their ads. Sure, I'd have to reconsider that if I ever wanted to use them as a such a proxy, but since I don't, I'm not affected by their "security holes".
As I see it, the greatest problem caused by this discovery is that it might hinder the adoption of adblocking software. But I don't think the risk is high.
What's to stop a dishonest website from giving itself a blander rating than it deserves? (We already see lots of sites stacking their pages with dictionary-esque meta tags in order to get more hits on stupid web crawlers.) For that matter, what's to ensure that one's own tastes and perspectives on how a site should be rated will conform with the site's author?
Sure, there would be incentive for porn peddlers to give themselves the raunchiest rating possible in order to draw more consumers. But at the same time, the ones with the most resources could easily have two parallel sets of pages, one with a raunchy rating and the other with a benign one, in order not to miss the ones who'd get snagged by censorware. With cgi-generated html wrapped around stock images, this could even be a preference-box on the user's home page within that site.
If mandatory self-ratings are to work as you intend, then there has to be some followup by the government to punish those whose ratings do not conform with community standards. But that's the same as having government-imposed censorship in the first place.
(And the idea that some people can construct an entire www for themselves containing only sites that agree with them and filtering out all other sites so there's not hte slightest chance that a dissenting opinion might slip in and provoke a new idea is abhorrent in my view.
But a mouse or a stylus pen could have a disposable latex/plastic sheath as you find with dental instruments. Keyboards with their many individual moving parts and greater reliance on tactile feedback pose a much bigger problem.
Or at least Robocop 2. The badguy interfaces with liquid crack. That's an interface humans have understood since before they were humans.
This comment by the_other_one on another article sure thinks the idea has merit, albeit in jest.
Try holding out your finger for five minutes straight, much less a whole day of computer use. Tired yet? Touch screens won't come of age until we get ubiquitous thin flat-screened tablet-portables, so you can curl up with them on a couch and touch them as you would turn the pages of a novel. It'd be ideal for some applications, but it's hardly ideal for others.
BTW, there is a purpose for using cursors on keyboards, besides not having to move one's hands much while typing. There's no aiming for the scroll box, and once there you can't lose window focus by jiggling the keyboard, as you could with even a trackball, much less a mouse.
And picking up whats on your co-workers fingers: are you a hypochondriac or what?
Actually, computer keyboards have for a while been the largest vector of cross-patient contamination at hospitals. People disinfect the toilets and occasionally remember to scrub the doorknobs, but people rarely think to try to swab down a keyboard, in part because doing so would be difficult with today's keyboards and their many pits and crevices. A doctor who examines his patients while wearing latex gloves often forgets to remove those same gloves before looking up some record or info on his computer, and those who don't wear gloves often forget to wash their hands first, though they religiously scrub after the whole examination.
It's like his own personal Holocaust. And to think people died trying to escape what he has voluntarily performed upon himself.
And catalogs everywhere cry out in anguish at the loss of privacy and anonymity that slashdot has perpetrated by posting this article.
And if you use wire it into your Isuzu Amigo as an mp3-player, will the resulting graphic boyfriend-girlfriend action cause censors' heads to explode?
GNU/Unix sure is an operating system.
The clients connect to each other instead of to a central server. It's less brittle that way.
Does the GPL (GNU Public Licence, system under which open source is licensed) need to be modified for the bulk of vendors to jump to open source business models?
Nope, it's the [GNU] General Public Liscense -- a small point but still of more value than the lesser/library LGPL distinction.
Last I checked, goodnoise was complying with their garbage patent claims...
One of the arguments that Accolade lost was that intermediate copying of a copyrighted work should not infringe upon the original copyright holder's rights if the final product is significantly different from the original. Notwithstanding liscense issues, if a bunch of programmers get together and disassemble a software program for the purpose of crafting an emulator (using several unauthorized copies of the original to do so), this would infringe IP. This to me would seem like fair use. What say the rest of you?
ummm, never mind
Emunews is carrying the announcement and mirroring the emulator. Download it here.
'New N64 Emu Plays Commercial ROMs! A major new emulator has debuted. The world's first Nintendo 64 emulator that actually plays commercial games! Epsilon and RealityMan are the authors behind this masterpiece. Called UltraHLE, this one's for Windows 95. It requires at least PII 300 and a 3dfx graphics card
"UltraHLE gives PC owners the first chance ever to run commercially available Nintendo 64 games (rom
images). The current aim of UltraHLE is not to run as many games as possible, it is to run some of the best titles as well as possible (e.g. Super Mario 64, Zelda: Ocarina of Time etc)."'
The animation was spectacular, but unfortunately it wasn't funny. Downhill from the opening sequence: "20th Century Sux".
The playstation's copyprotection consists of having the playstation cds burned with incorrect checksums on the theory that normal burners will put in the correct checksums when burning the data. The ubiquitous modchips get around this restriction, but VGS officially honors this copy protection.
The "part of the gnu project" link is broken. Anyone know the correct link?
People who wish to violate copyright will continue to do so. Besides, will this watermark survive a conversion to and fro and back again across formats?