The lawyers (or someone with half a brain) probably realized in the end that it was a mistake to let loose all the dogs of war.
I think that the key factor is that overly threatening openings are just par for the course in legal matters like this. It's like any kind of negotiation; you always ask for more than you want or need so that you can give something up as part of the bargaining. Sony probably didn't want to shut down the site completely, but threatening to do so was very effective in getting the owner's attention. You may not like it, but that's the way that things are done.
There's probably some truth to both sides of the issue. It's true that careless or incompetent administration can compromise the security and stability of even the best designed system. But it's also true that a well designed system requires less care and less competence to maintain as a reasonably secure and stable system.
Take dealing with services as an example. A well designed system has unnecessary services turned off (or even better, not installed) by default, so that any flaws in those services won't compromise the system. This means that a casual user, who won't be running them anyway, has one less thing to worry about and doesn't need to be as smart or careful to keep his system in good shape. Similarly, a system that allows users to spend most of their time in an unpriviledged mode is less likely to cause problems if/when those users eventually stumble onto trojans/viruses/worms. Adding in an extra, necessary step to make those malware programs really vicious makes it that much less likely that they'll cause problems.
Is good security something that you can buy off the shelf? Of course not. Security is a process, and administration is the key part of that process. But the quality of the product can make that process easier or harder.
Actually, this is incorrect. The series was not based on any manga. Escaflowne is a rare case of the TV version coming first and the manga being based on it rather than the other way around. It's actually an even rarer example of a series that managed to spawn not just one but two manga based on it, the shoujo and shounen manga that you mention.
He's at least not completely unique. I saw the movie at the American Film Institute festival, and enjoyed it enough to watch the series. The problem is not, I suspect, the movie per se but that the movie is a huge letdown after seeing the series. You just can't redo a whole 26 episode series as a 2 hour movie and hope to do it justice, so they had to change everything to make it work. It's pretty good if you don't go in expecting it to be more than peripherally related to the TV show.
She's also in DoCO together with the other women from Ranma 1/2. I just find it really odd to think of the same actress doing Dilando and Nabiki Tendo. I guess that's talent.
Even worse, that means no Minami Takayama as Dilando. I thought that Dilando was a huge scene stealer in the TV series, and I'm going to miss Minami's voice for him in the movie. I can't remember a better deranged villain voice.
There are reasons that you might want to consider spending the extra on a really hot processor. The main one I can think of is if there's something else very expensive as part of the setup. The biggest, most obvious one I can think of is software licenses. I've encountered software with licenses of as much as $8000 per processor, which obviously places a very large premium on having the fastest possible processor running it. I'm sure that there are other applications with even more outrageous prices, too. When you're forking out that much for your software, hardware costs start looking pretty tame.
And it's a good thing that the civil justice system works this way, too. Otherwise an entity that was at risk of a lawsuit could easily dodge it. In Microsoft's case, for instance, they could find some tiny company that had been trivially damaged by their anti-competitive behavior and pay them to sue MS. MS then fails to dispute the charges, gets fined a trivial amount, and uses the fact that they've already been sued as perfect protection against AOL/TW's giant suit.
This depends on the class. My introduction to programming class was designed around a fairly large, term-long project that each student was supposed to complete (a very simple vector graphics program). Some of the first few assignments did involve simple programming tasks, but there was simply no way that anything beyond that point could have been that similar from person to person.
I'd also expect this to work better on less experienced programmers than on more experienced ones. Part of what you learn as you develop is the better and worse ways of doing things, so that experienced programmers will tend to come up with essentially the same answers to any given (simple) question. You also learn programming idiom. But an inexperienced programmer hasn't developed those things yet. That means that two rookies are much less likely to develop very similar solutions than two experienced programmers, and even if they come up with a similar algorithm, they're less likely to express it as similarly. That should make a cheat-detecting program work better.
I'd also dispute the truth of the statement that anime spends less time on good animation. It may be true that it sometimes focuses on static images instead of animation, it's also true that the best anime has stunningly good animation. The detail in Mononoke is amazing- look at Ashitaka shooting his bow, sometime, and look at the fine detail of the mechanics- and so are all of the best anime feature films. Even the good TV stuff is very good. Some of the most disturbing sequences in Evangelion (especially the graphic fights against some of the later angels), for instance, get a lot of their power from the quality of the animation.
Re:Mainstream/Subculture
on
NY Times on Anime
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It seems to me that there's much less risk of anime becoming boring than other things that go mainstream. After all, anime already is fairly mainstream- in Japan. That means that even if anime becomes modestly popular in the U.S., the Japanese market is still going to be the thing that drives the industry, which should help to keep it from getting sucked down.
If anything, I'm very happy that anime is becoming more popular. I find that the movies show up much better on the big screen than on video, so increasing popularity means that I get more chances to see the stuff as it was meant to be seen. Next Friday, for instance, I'll get the chance to pick between two anime that are being released that day: Metropolis (the movie that triggered the article) and Escaflowne: A Girl in Gaia. Last year I was able to see a bunch of anime on the big screen, and its increased popularity obviously had a lot to do with that. That sounds like something to celebrate, not to complain about.
Netscape. Um. Why should I use Netscape when I've got this or this instead?
And just where the hell do you think that Mozilla came from? That's right, it was developed largely with money from Netscape which means that AOL was footing the bill. That fact that AOL allows Mozilla to exist as a separate product, and lets people build cool products that use its source is just one more sign of how friendly AOL actually is.
The only problem with this argument is that.pdf isn't a proprietary format. It's true that most people who use it read and write.pdf using Adobe's products, but they are not by any means the only programs out there that use.pdf. On my Linux box, for instance, I read.pdf using xpdf and write it by printing to a.ps file and using ps2pdf. IIRC, OSX now uses display pdf, so it has pdf creation and interpreting abilities built in to the core of the OS. This is possible precisely because.pdf is not a proprietary format. It's well enough defined that other programmers can create software that reads and writes it perfectly.
Should the typical user be running a precompiled, distribution supplied kernel or a customized kernel that may offer performance advantages or may be wildly inappropriate and which creates immense tech support headaches?
But this misses the whole point. The point is that with a good autoconfigurator, there won't be an issue of a custom kernel that "may be wildly inappropriate". The autoconfigurator would detect the user's hardware (and possibly check to see which services/file systems they have running to know other kinds of support to compile in) and build a custom kernel that was actually appropriate and optimized for that user's specific hardware. If the system were well designed, there would be very little risk of ever winding up with a kernel that was wildly inappropriate. Any halfway decent design would also help to prevent a number of the most common newbie mistakes in kernel building, like forgetting to keep an appropriate, well tested kernel available in case the new one is a failure.
I think that you miss the point. The point is not to blast NVidia for releasing only binary drivers but rather to reward ATI for making open source drivers possible. The Radeon is at least competitive with the GeForce, and given a choice between two competitive products, the Ultimate Linux Box should pick the one that is most in keeping with the spirit of Linux, i.e. Free/Open Source Software.
Not really. California has taken a big swing to the left over the past decade or so. There's only one major statewide office held by a Republican (though that admittedly involved the other Republican in statewide office being run out for corruption), both houses of the Legislature have solid Democratic majorities, and the state voted for Gore in the last election by a large majority.
A big chunk of that is that California is heavily urbanized, and there is a tendency for cities to lean Democratic more than rural areas. Even urban areas like Orange County that used to be Republican strongholds are becoming more liberal. One district in OC even voted a Latina Democrat to Congress!
Frankly, I don't mind having my picture taken for the card, but a fingerprint or a retinal scan? Yer effing kidding right?
What state are you living in right now? My state (California) already requires an electronic thumb print as part of the process of getting a license. ISTR that the data is actually encoded onto the card so they can check that you're actually the valid holder of the card.
I'm not sure which is the scarier part of the article- the way it blythely assures you that this isn't really a significant step because the civil liberties damage is already done, or the fact that this is probably true. As they point out, all this involves is linking together data that's already kept and making it a bit easier to access. The problem is that making it easier to access will make it that much more tempting to access it for more and more trivial reasons. If it's really possible to check any driver's licence just by scanning it, how long will it be until you have to scan your license to buy alcohol or tobacco, rather than just showing it (or here in California not bothering to show it because nobody seems to care)?
The problem is that to compress any 1 MB file (by which we mean any file, even one filled up with random bits) to 1/100 of its original size you'll need a lot more than 256 algorithms. In fact, you'll need zillions of them, enough that the size of the header describing which algorithm you're using will take up all of the compression savings. That's the point of the argument.
Look at it this way; there are 2E8000000 possible files 1 million bytes in length and only 2E80000 possible files 1/100 that long. That means that you'll need 2E7920000 different compression algorithms to make your system work, and you'll need a header almost 1MB long to tell them apart. Your savings suddenly disappear.
Well, there didn't use to be spam on USENET. Those of us who have been there for a while can remember the great evil of Canter and Siegel's greencard spam. May they rot in Hell.
Re:it's like the lottery!
on
New iMac Announced
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I think that it's the Monte Hall paradox.
For those who don't know, Monte Hall was the host of a gameshow in which the prize was hidden behind one of three doors. They picked one door, another was opened to reveal nothing, and then they were given the option of staying with their pick or switching to the remaining unopened door. It turns out that in a fair contest you should choose to switch; the chance of the first chosen door being right is 1/3 and the remaining door is 2/3 (hence the paradox).
How are they going to communicate with the robot observatory?
That's a pretty good question, but there are several pretty reasonable approaches. One would be to use relay satelites. Put a few satelites in lunar orbit and you can use them to relay the data back to Earth. I suppose that you could also put a relay station on the near side and transmit the data to it using a landline.
I debated mentioning Megumi by name, but decided against it. She's certainly very famous; she also has a fair number of music CDs, both by herself and with the other women of Ranma 1/2 (where she played Ranma-chan). FWIW, you can see her credits at the on-line seiyuu database. I think that the best indication of her reputation is that there's a character named in her honor in Nadesico, and fans are expected to get the joke (even that the character trained as a nurse before becoming a seiyuu, just like the original).
Maybe you should start watching better movies. They are out there, you know, and some of them even come from Hollywood. Just because they're not the movies that Hollywood spends all of its time hyping doesn't mean that's not where they're coming from. It's possible that they don't get into the theaters where you live- not every city is lucky enough to have an art-movie theater- but I don't have a lot of trouble finding them.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that the key factor is that overly threatening openings are just par for the course in legal matters like this. It's like any kind of negotiation; you always ask for more than you want or need so that you can give something up as part of the bargaining. Sony probably didn't want to shut down the site completely, but threatening to do so was very effective in getting the owner's attention. You may not like it, but that's the way that things are done.
There's probably some truth to both sides of the issue. It's true that careless or incompetent administration can compromise the security and stability of even the best designed system. But it's also true that a well designed system requires less care and less competence to maintain as a reasonably secure and stable system.
Take dealing with services as an example. A well designed system has unnecessary services turned off (or even better, not installed) by default, so that any flaws in those services won't compromise the system. This means that a casual user, who won't be running them anyway, has one less thing to worry about and doesn't need to be as smart or careful to keep his system in good shape. Similarly, a system that allows users to spend most of their time in an unpriviledged mode is less likely to cause problems if/when those users eventually stumble onto trojans/viruses/worms. Adding in an extra, necessary step to make those malware programs really vicious makes it that much less likely that they'll cause problems.
Is good security something that you can buy off the shelf? Of course not. Security is a process, and administration is the key part of that process. But the quality of the product can make that process easier or harder.
Actually, this is incorrect. The series was not based on any manga. Escaflowne is a rare case of the TV version coming first and the manga being based on it rather than the other way around. It's actually an even rarer example of a series that managed to spawn not just one but two manga based on it, the shoujo and shounen manga that you mention.
He's at least not completely unique. I saw the movie at the American Film Institute festival, and enjoyed it enough to watch the series. The problem is not, I suspect, the movie per se but that the movie is a huge letdown after seeing the series. You just can't redo a whole 26 episode series as a 2 hour movie and hope to do it justice, so they had to change everything to make it work. It's pretty good if you don't go in expecting it to be more than peripherally related to the TV show.
She's also in DoCO together with the other women from Ranma 1/2. I just find it really odd to think of the same actress doing Dilando and Nabiki Tendo. I guess that's talent.
Even worse, that means no Minami Takayama as Dilando. I thought that Dilando was a huge scene stealer in the TV series, and I'm going to miss Minami's voice for him in the movie. I can't remember a better deranged villain voice.
There are reasons that you might want to consider spending the extra on a really hot processor. The main one I can think of is if there's something else very expensive as part of the setup. The biggest, most obvious one I can think of is software licenses. I've encountered software with licenses of as much as $8000 per processor, which obviously places a very large premium on having the fastest possible processor running it. I'm sure that there are other applications with even more outrageous prices, too. When you're forking out that much for your software, hardware costs start looking pretty tame.
And it's a good thing that the civil justice system works this way, too. Otherwise an entity that was at risk of a lawsuit could easily dodge it. In Microsoft's case, for instance, they could find some tiny company that had been trivially damaged by their anti-competitive behavior and pay them to sue MS. MS then fails to dispute the charges, gets fined a trivial amount, and uses the fact that they've already been sued as perfect protection against AOL/TW's giant suit.
This depends on the class. My introduction to programming class was designed around a fairly large, term-long project that each student was supposed to complete (a very simple vector graphics program). Some of the first few assignments did involve simple programming tasks, but there was simply no way that anything beyond that point could have been that similar from person to person.
I'd also expect this to work better on less experienced programmers than on more experienced ones. Part of what you learn as you develop is the better and worse ways of doing things, so that experienced programmers will tend to come up with essentially the same answers to any given (simple) question. You also learn programming idiom. But an inexperienced programmer hasn't developed those things yet. That means that two rookies are much less likely to develop very similar solutions than two experienced programmers, and even if they come up with a similar algorithm, they're less likely to express it as similarly. That should make a cheat-detecting program work better.
I'd also dispute the truth of the statement that anime spends less time on good animation. It may be true that it sometimes focuses on static images instead of animation, it's also true that the best anime has stunningly good animation. The detail in Mononoke is amazing- look at Ashitaka shooting his bow, sometime, and look at the fine detail of the mechanics- and so are all of the best anime feature films. Even the good TV stuff is very good. Some of the most disturbing sequences in Evangelion (especially the graphic fights against some of the later angels), for instance, get a lot of their power from the quality of the animation.
It seems to me that there's much less risk of anime becoming boring than other things that go mainstream. After all, anime already is fairly mainstream- in Japan. That means that even if anime becomes modestly popular in the U.S., the Japanese market is still going to be the thing that drives the industry, which should help to keep it from getting sucked down.
If anything, I'm very happy that anime is becoming more popular. I find that the movies show up much better on the big screen than on video, so increasing popularity means that I get more chances to see the stuff as it was meant to be seen. Next Friday, for instance, I'll get the chance to pick between two anime that are being released that day: Metropolis (the movie that triggered the article) and Escaflowne: A Girl in Gaia. Last year I was able to see a bunch of anime on the big screen, and its increased popularity obviously had a lot to do with that. That sounds like something to celebrate, not to complain about.
And just where the hell do you think that Mozilla came from? That's right, it was developed largely with money from Netscape which means that AOL was footing the bill. That fact that AOL allows Mozilla to exist as a separate product, and lets people build cool products that use its source is just one more sign of how friendly AOL actually is.
The only problem with this argument is that .pdf isn't a proprietary format. It's true that most people who use it read and write .pdf using Adobe's products, but they are not by any means the only programs out there that use .pdf. On my Linux box, for instance, I read .pdf using xpdf and write it by printing to a .ps file and using ps2pdf. IIRC, OSX now uses display pdf, so it has pdf creation and interpreting abilities built in to the core of the OS. This is possible precisely because .pdf is not a proprietary format. It's well enough defined that other programmers can create software that reads and writes it perfectly.
But this misses the whole point. The point is that with a good autoconfigurator, there won't be an issue of a custom kernel that "may be wildly inappropriate". The autoconfigurator would detect the user's hardware (and possibly check to see which services/file systems they have running to know other kinds of support to compile in) and build a custom kernel that was actually appropriate and optimized for that user's specific hardware. If the system were well designed, there would be very little risk of ever winding up with a kernel that was wildly inappropriate. Any halfway decent design would also help to prevent a number of the most common newbie mistakes in kernel building, like forgetting to keep an appropriate, well tested kernel available in case the new one is a failure.
I think that you miss the point. The point is not to blast NVidia for releasing only binary drivers but rather to reward ATI for making open source drivers possible. The Radeon is at least competitive with the GeForce, and given a choice between two competitive products, the Ultimate Linux Box should pick the one that is most in keeping with the spirit of Linux, i.e. Free/Open Source Software.
Not really. California has taken a big swing to the left over the past decade or so. There's only one major statewide office held by a Republican (though that admittedly involved the other Republican in statewide office being run out for corruption), both houses of the Legislature have solid Democratic majorities, and the state voted for Gore in the last election by a large majority.
A big chunk of that is that California is heavily urbanized, and there is a tendency for cities to lean Democratic more than rural areas. Even urban areas like Orange County that used to be Republican strongholds are becoming more liberal. One district in OC even voted a Latina Democrat to Congress!
What state are you living in right now? My state (California) already requires an electronic thumb print as part of the process of getting a license. ISTR that the data is actually encoded onto the card so they can check that you're actually the valid holder of the card.
I'm not sure which is the scarier part of the article- the way it blythely assures you that this isn't really a significant step because the civil liberties damage is already done, or the fact that this is probably true. As they point out, all this involves is linking together data that's already kept and making it a bit easier to access. The problem is that making it easier to access will make it that much more tempting to access it for more and more trivial reasons. If it's really possible to check any driver's licence just by scanning it, how long will it be until you have to scan your license to buy alcohol or tobacco, rather than just showing it (or here in California not bothering to show it because nobody seems to care)?
The problem is that to compress any 1 MB file (by which we mean any file, even one filled up with random bits) to 1/100 of its original size you'll need a lot more than 256 algorithms. In fact, you'll need zillions of them, enough that the size of the header describing which algorithm you're using will take up all of the compression savings. That's the point of the argument.
Look at it this way; there are 2E8000000 possible files 1 million bytes in length and only 2E80000 possible files 1/100 that long. That means that you'll need 2E7920000 different compression algorithms to make your system work, and you'll need a header almost 1MB long to tell them apart. Your savings suddenly disappear.
Well, there didn't use to be spam on USENET. Those of us who have been there for a while can remember the great evil of Canter and Siegel's greencard spam. May they rot in Hell.
I think that it's the Monte Hall paradox.
For those who don't know, Monte Hall was the host of a gameshow in which the prize was hidden behind one of three doors. They picked one door, another was opened to reveal nothing, and then they were given the option of staying with their pick or switching to the remaining unopened door. It turns out that in a fair contest you should choose to switch; the chance of the first chosen door being right is 1/3 and the remaining door is 2/3 (hence the paradox).
That's a pretty good question, but there are several pretty reasonable approaches. One would be to use relay satelites. Put a few satelites in lunar orbit and you can use them to relay the data back to Earth. I suppose that you could also put a relay station on the near side and transmit the data to it using a landline.
Well, it has been done with pigeons, so I don't see why it shouldn't be possible to do it with rats.
I debated mentioning Megumi by name, but decided against it. She's certainly very famous; she also has a fair number of music CDs, both by herself and with the other women of Ranma 1/2 (where she played Ranma-chan). FWIW, you can see her credits at the on-line seiyuu database. I think that the best indication of her reputation is that there's a character named in her honor in Nadesico, and fans are expected to get the joke (even that the character trained as a nurse before becoming a seiyuu, just like the original).
Maybe you should start watching better movies. They are out there, you know, and some of them even come from Hollywood. Just because they're not the movies that Hollywood spends all of its time hyping doesn't mean that's not where they're coming from. It's possible that they don't get into the theaters where you live- not every city is lucky enough to have an art-movie theater- but I don't have a lot of trouble finding them.