It is common for anyone who doesn't want their card frozen due to seemingly fraudulent use. You call the 800 number, do the usual authentication rigmarole (they check your source phone number, they ask you a number of security questions) and then amend your account details with the window you will be traveling and the destination. I have had a card deactivated even on a short road trip where I stopped too frequently at various gas stations and it auto-locked my card due to a pattern too far out of my normal routine.
Their algorithms are surprisingly sophisticated, to date I have had 1 false-positive (due to taking a trip I didn't notify the bank about) and 2 true-positives (due to two cards being stolen and used before I could call the bank) with banks using a properly implemented system (like Chase, Discover, BofA, etc). If you have a GEMB or other "bargain basement" card servicer, forget about it, they could care less.
The current (and foreseeable future) crop of biometric systems are very difficult to "attack" by using lifted fingerprints due to the way they read the fingerprint from your skin. Creating a real-skin (or functional equivalent) duplicate is probably somewhere near the order of difficulty of brute-forcing a password for commonly accepted (read: flawed) password mechanisms. So; worry about one worry about the other, I guess.
$70 is still very close to the general $100 point.
plus, many carriers are FORCING this $30/mo '4g' fee just, well, because THEY CAN.
That's what I told to my guidance counselor... Hey 70% (a C-) is very close to 100% (an A+) so why the hell did Harvard reject me? My essay WAS about the existentialism of prehistoric volcanoes though, maybe it went over their heads.
This isn't meant to troll, a 30 dollar difference is almost a third of the bill, not what most would call "very close". Also, the 4g fee isn't something I have experienced but I suspect that carriers have the sense to not charge it if you opt for a 3g phone; not that any carrier really has true 4G coverage to date...
It is a lot of money (about $360 per year for the $30 unlimited data plan with Verizon) and it's up to the individual to decide if the price is justifiable. Most people get addicted (for better and for worse) and would never go back to a dumbphone. Choose carefully.
They have taken a funny, harmless meme and created such a backstory that you just have to wonder if the people at the San Luis Obispo Sheriff's office aren't writers for Heroes.
"The Pedo Bear began as an online Japanese cartoon character, and is known for his "lecherous nature" towards prepubescent children."
From humble beginnings...
"One of the things that makes Pedobear popular is the controversy over his licentious love of little girls."
There are plenty of picture-perfect copies of digital media out there already, that's the bitterly ironic thing about DRM as it sits today; the people just trying to play by the rules are getting stuck buying more expensive, less compatible equipment while the pirates use software techniques to get whatever content they want, however they want it, with relative ease.
If HDCP didn't exist, there would still be legal battles over what kind of hardware was legal to sell (like bluray copiers, "open" DVRs, etc). If it were to go away tomorrow, the possible upside would be more software tools available to do things like media backups, software DVR of "protected" content, and more choices when it comes to what kind of TV/monitor you can use with a media source like a bluray player or cable box. Again, ironically, I wouldn't expect genuine piracy to be helped at all by this, and by and large people buying gear off the shelf at Best Buy will never know what happened.
Is there really just one master key? Or is this merely one of the keys a vendor would use to create compatible equipment, meaning the next "critical firmware update" to any HDCP hardware will include a blacklist entry for this key...
so it's my fault you don't look at any A/V components? or understand OSMOSIS? hot air rises.. when one component is on top of another you can obviously see what happens.
you are NOTHING
Wow. No. Convection, Entropy, Second law of Thermodynamics, Archimedes' principle... All these things would have been accurate. Osmosis? Not at all.
Of course the kernel in there is true; hot air indeed does rise. How does this affect the Boxee Box? Let's see, they designed it so that if it encountered other devices in a stack, it would indeed have to be the thing *on top* of everything else. If they were interested, as you insist, on keeping it cool; they would have designed it to have a large footprint and flat top that it would have to be placed at the *bottom* of the stack.
Feel free to throw out another badly planned, mostly wrong argument, and don't forget the petty insult at the end. This is fun.
I have never seen an A/V component take in air from the top/bottom and spit it out the directly opposite side (the bottom/top, respectively). It could certainly happen, but the fact of the matter is that anyone designing something to be sat on a shelf would certainly see the flaw with it sitting on it's own vent, even if they weren't envisioning a whole stack of such devices. No, most ventilation happens 'out the back'; with air feeding in from the front or sides. This is typical thanks to the desire to keep the fan pointed away from the user to improve the ambient noise metric.
I stand by my insistence that any company making a TV accessory not ready to take into account someone turning it on and putting it inside one of the many popular TV cabinets that have no active cooling is downright negligent and they should be ready to warranty their products when they fail.
The simplicity and low cost involved in using a thermal cutoff circuit is *amazing*. Anyone designing a several-hundred-dollar piece of electronic equipment is absolutely a failure at life if they overlook that. Hell, there probably IS one inside the Boxee Box (considering it has an Intel chip at it's core) and you are just here arguing so you can score cred with your troll buddies.
So you make a device that's stackable, and you know that a good number of customers prefer to put their equipment in a cabinet, and yet you blame the customers when they do so, the device creates enough heat to cook it, and it fails?
Problem 1: not enough fans or vents / device designed for too low of a temperature envelope Problem 2: No hardware fail-safe / device can go into thermal run-away and not shut down before permanent damage is done
I say that lack of very easy fixes for these two problems are *definitely* the manufacturer's fault.
Why oh why would they make it so fiendishly hard to place one of these things? Is it really aesthetically pleasing to have to dedicate the whole cabinet under your TV (if you even have one) to this awkward device?
I for one want to see more devices that stay 100% out-of-the-fucking-way. Let me hide it in a low profile cabinet. Let me mount it BEHIND my TV if I want. I bought the TV to look at the TV... I bought your device, TO KEEP LOOKING AT THE TV. Sigh.
Those looking at this from a long term perspective wish he would smash them already! Seriously, nothing sends a message of "you better learn how to use your f****** computer" like waking up one day, turning it on, and finding it completely wiped of everything. I had that experience when I was about 13, and have been extremely vigilant against malware (and malware-free) ever since. As it is, all those computers are spewing spam and infections out and the operator will probably never know.
Wake me up when they have ported GOM player... The media player that not only recognizes just about every format, but can actually play them back efficiently without hours of installing extra codecs and tweaking archaic settings. VLC is nice simply because it's open source. Take away that requirement, and you can find much better, equally free-to-license media players out there.
"...which while not a 4G network offers what T-Mobile is calling 4G-like speeds up to 21 Mbps."
From the ITU, on 4G mobile speed per the working group: "A nominal data rate of 100 Mbit/s"
Yes, HSPA+ is 4G-like indeed. It is nice that they are being a bit more honest and not just calling it "blazing fast 4G" or some similar hyperbole. However, I do long for the day when we can do away with terms like "up to" when referring to mobile data rates. It's pointless to say how fast it "could" go IF tower proximity is x and interference is y and in-band traffic is z...
They might as well just advertise with "We hope it's faster than the other guys!" and wait for the PC Mag test to get published.
Is it their fault all the good fun is to be had pointing out how hypocritical and untalented the Right Wing is? If you want to watch jokes (try to be) made at the expense of the Establishment/Left, just watch Saturday Night Live (you may or may not laugh)...
Also, in case you needed more of a reason, the proposed date is 10/10/10... Are you thinking what I'm thinking? 101010 in binary=42 in decimal. The answer is right in front of us!
This part never fails to amuse me. An arbitrary image that happens to say "it's safe because I said so, and look; I even know what day it is today!" makes me feel GREAT about the web site. It needs to say "go find the lock icon in your browser. does it look locked? good. on your way."
Slashdot Mirror
Doesn't the fact that you called it "Dances with Thundercats" imply that it has a story, and that the story is similar to Dances with Wolves?
I thought it sucked too, but just sayin...
Uhhhh, the movie, or the dance? </Troy McClure>
It is common for anyone who doesn't want their card frozen due to seemingly fraudulent use. You call the 800 number, do the usual authentication rigmarole (they check your source phone number, they ask you a number of security questions) and then amend your account details with the window you will be traveling and the destination. I have had a card deactivated even on a short road trip where I stopped too frequently at various gas stations and it auto-locked my card due to a pattern too far out of my normal routine.
Their algorithms are surprisingly sophisticated, to date I have had 1 false-positive (due to taking a trip I didn't notify the bank about) and 2 true-positives (due to two cards being stolen and used before I could call the bank) with banks using a properly implemented system (like Chase, Discover, BofA, etc). If you have a GEMB or other "bargain basement" card servicer, forget about it, they could care less.
<Insert mythbusters episode reference here>
The current (and foreseeable future) crop of biometric systems are very difficult to "attack" by using lifted fingerprints due to the way they read the fingerprint from your skin. Creating a real-skin (or functional equivalent) duplicate is probably somewhere near the order of difficulty of brute-forcing a password for commonly accepted (read: flawed) password mechanisms. So; worry about one worry about the other, I guess.
Do your own peer review... toss a coin and decide if it passes muster.
$70 is still very close to the general $100 point.
plus, many carriers are FORCING this $30/mo '4g' fee just, well, because THEY CAN.
That's what I told to my guidance counselor... Hey 70% (a C-) is very close to 100% (an A+) so why the hell did Harvard reject me? My essay WAS about the existentialism of prehistoric volcanoes though, maybe it went over their heads.
This isn't meant to troll, a 30 dollar difference is almost a third of the bill, not what most would call "very close". Also, the 4g fee isn't something I have experienced but I suspect that carriers have the sense to not charge it if you opt for a 3g phone; not that any carrier really has true 4G coverage to date...
It is a lot of money (about $360 per year for the $30 unlimited data plan with Verizon) and it's up to the individual to decide if the price is justifiable. Most people get addicted (for better and for worse) and would never go back to a dumbphone. Choose carefully.
They have taken a funny, harmless meme and created such a backstory that you just have to wonder if the people at the San Luis Obispo Sheriff's office aren't writers for Heroes.
"The Pedo Bear began as an online Japanese cartoon character, and is known for his "lecherous nature" towards prepubescent children."
From humble beginnings...
"One of the things that makes Pedobear popular is the controversy over his licentious love of little girls."
Who doesn't like a good controversy?
There are plenty of picture-perfect copies of digital media out there already, that's the bitterly ironic thing about DRM as it sits today; the people just trying to play by the rules are getting stuck buying more expensive, less compatible equipment while the pirates use software techniques to get whatever content they want, however they want it, with relative ease.
If HDCP didn't exist, there would still be legal battles over what kind of hardware was legal to sell (like bluray copiers, "open" DVRs, etc). If it were to go away tomorrow, the possible upside would be more software tools available to do things like media backups, software DVR of "protected" content, and more choices when it comes to what kind of TV/monitor you can use with a media source like a bluray player or cable box. Again, ironically, I wouldn't expect genuine piracy to be helped at all by this, and by and large people buying gear off the shelf at Best Buy will never know what happened.
Is there really just one master key? Or is this merely one of the keys a vendor would use to create compatible equipment, meaning the next "critical firmware update" to any HDCP hardware will include a blacklist entry for this key...
so it's my fault you don't look at any A/V components? or understand OSMOSIS? hot air rises.. when one component is on top of another you can obviously see what happens.
you are NOTHING
Wow. No. Convection, Entropy, Second law of Thermodynamics, Archimedes' principle... All these things would have been accurate. Osmosis? Not at all.
Of course the kernel in there is true; hot air indeed does rise. How does this affect the Boxee Box? Let's see, they designed it so that if it encountered other devices in a stack, it would indeed have to be the thing *on top* of everything else. If they were interested, as you insist, on keeping it cool; they would have designed it to have a large footprint and flat top that it would have to be placed at the *bottom* of the stack.
Feel free to throw out another badly planned, mostly wrong argument, and don't forget the petty insult at the end. This is fun.
I have never seen an A/V component take in air from the top/bottom and spit it out the directly opposite side (the bottom/top, respectively). It could certainly happen, but the fact of the matter is that anyone designing something to be sat on a shelf would certainly see the flaw with it sitting on it's own vent, even if they weren't envisioning a whole stack of such devices. No, most ventilation happens 'out the back'; with air feeding in from the front or sides. This is typical thanks to the desire to keep the fan pointed away from the user to improve the ambient noise metric.
I stand by my insistence that any company making a TV accessory not ready to take into account someone turning it on and putting it inside one of the many popular TV cabinets that have no active cooling is downright negligent and they should be ready to warranty their products when they fail.
The simplicity and low cost involved in using a thermal cutoff circuit is *amazing*. Anyone designing a several-hundred-dollar piece of electronic equipment is absolutely a failure at life if they overlook that. Hell, there probably IS one inside the Boxee Box (considering it has an Intel chip at it's core) and you are just here arguing so you can score cred with your troll buddies.
So you make a device that's stackable, and you know that a good number of customers prefer to put their equipment in a cabinet, and yet you blame the customers when they do so, the device creates enough heat to cook it, and it fails?
Problem 1: not enough fans or vents / device designed for too low of a temperature envelope
Problem 2: No hardware fail-safe / device can go into thermal run-away and not shut down before permanent damage is done
I say that lack of very easy fixes for these two problems are *definitely* the manufacturer's fault.
Why oh why would they make it so fiendishly hard to place one of these things? Is it really aesthetically pleasing to have to dedicate the whole cabinet under your TV (if you even have one) to this awkward device?
I for one want to see more devices that stay 100% out-of-the-fucking-way. Let me hide it in a low profile cabinet. Let me mount it BEHIND my TV if I want. I bought the TV to look at the TV... I bought your device, TO KEEP LOOKING AT THE TV. Sigh.
Those looking at this from a long term perspective wish he would smash them already! Seriously, nothing sends a message of "you better learn how to use your f****** computer" like waking up one day, turning it on, and finding it completely wiped of everything. I had that experience when I was about 13, and have been extremely vigilant against malware (and malware-free) ever since. As it is, all those computers are spewing spam and infections out and the operator will probably never know.
Wake me up when they have ported GOM player... The media player that not only recognizes just about every format, but can actually play them back efficiently without hours of installing extra codecs and tweaking archaic settings. VLC is nice simply because it's open source. Take away that requirement, and you can find much better, equally free-to-license media players out there.
"...which while not a 4G network offers what T-Mobile is calling 4G-like speeds up to 21 Mbps."
From the ITU, on 4G mobile speed per the working group: "A nominal data rate of 100 Mbit/s"
Yes, HSPA+ is 4G-like indeed. It is nice that they are being a bit more honest and not just calling it "blazing fast 4G" or some similar hyperbole. However, I do long for the day when we can do away with terms like "up to" when referring to mobile data rates. It's pointless to say how fast it "could" go IF tower proximity is x and interference is y and in-band traffic is z...
They might as well just advertise with "We hope it's faster than the other guys!" and wait for the PC Mag test to get published.
Don't you mean Decepticons?
<groundskeeper willie>Shhh! Ye wanna get sued?</groundskeeper willie>
Amazingly enough, Alton has published many Good Eats books...
LOL is it red!!! RT @British okay blood is coming out
Cue the overly-partisan healthcare debate in 3... 2...
you're on!
Tragedian. The internets agree... Although demagogue or fearmonger or "Certifiable" come to mind too...
Stop being an elitist, insulting curmudgeon, learn how to sign in to Slashdot, and your check will arrive in 4-6 weeks. See? Was that so hard?
Is it their fault all the good fun is to be had pointing out how hypocritical and untalented the Right Wing is? If you want to watch jokes (try to be) made at the expense of the Establishment/Left, just watch Saturday Night Live (you may or may not laugh)...
Also, in case you needed more of a reason, the proposed date is 10/10/10... Are you thinking what I'm thinking? 101010 in binary=42 in decimal. The answer is right in front of us!
If he will resort to weeping publicly over his concern for our great Republic, I will show up and offer him a kleenex. It's only decent.
This part never fails to amuse me. An arbitrary image that happens to say "it's safe because I said so, and look; I even know what day it is today!" makes me feel GREAT about the web site. It needs to say "go find the lock icon in your browser. does it look locked? good. on your way."