I hardly saw any media coverage on this (not even mentioned in those closing "isn't this interesting" segments on local news).
Local News isn't a good indicator of anything. Unless you live in Nevada, this isn't local news for you. For anything not local, it has to be extremely significant for local news to cover it.
The fact that most people only watch local news has long been a major source of problems. For example, all the major news outlets listed and debunked the justifications for invading Iraq, on their National/World news programs, long before the first bombs were dropped...
I know that ABC's World News program had a segment a few minutes long on the results of the Grand Challenge. The CBS News website has some interesting RAW video of the race (rtsp://real.tvc.cbsig.net/cbsnews/2005/10/10/vide o931213.rm) which obviously didn't air, but perhaps in a day or so when the news about the earthquake in Pakistan, NYC Subway hoax, and Bird Flu fearmongering die down, you will likely see a story about it.
They build them into things or at the very least have the cables non-detachable.
Not really. On coax TV cables they add a little plastic collar, so you need a special tool to unscrew it from the TV. However, any flat piece of metal (screwdriver) and a little patience easily gets you around their wonderful protections.
The same goes for everything else. They aren't very secure, they're just good enough to slow people down enough so it won't be worth stealing.
There are many modern PCs that cannot boot from a USB memory stick. And even if you could, we all know how picky Windows XP is about its hardware.
You've obviously never heard of BartsPE/WinPE, even though/. has posted multiple stories about it.
It's a lot of hassle to set-up, but so is the Linux equivalent if you want to add your own software rather than just using what (eg.) Knoppix happens to have installed.
Supersonic long range air travel SHOULD be the way we are heading, but everyone's so freaking scared of them now because of the concorde crash,
No, supersonic air travel was unpopular even when the Concorde was in it's prime. It really showed how difficult, impractical, and economically unfeasable it all really was.
The thing flew for over 30 years with only one crash that wasn't really its fault (re: debris on the runway flattened a tire which ruptured a fuel tank). Hell, in that time, how many passenger jets have gone down? dozens. And people still fly on those.
You have a serious perspective problem. Although the Concorde was flying for "over 30 years" it carried a very small number of passengers on a very small number of flights over that time. It was such a small number of successful flights, that one single crash pushed the death-rate far past any other airplane currently in-use. It is dead-last for safety now, and by a huge margin. Look at the statistics for yourself: http://www.airdisaster.com/statistics/
It's not just that it's unsafe, it's also that the very rich who can easily afford to fly on the Concorde with it's very high pricetag, expect their money to buy them almost a guarantee of safety. Practically nobody would have ever bought a ticket for the Concorde, if they had known it would have been safer, as well as cheaper, more comfortable, more convenient, and not all that much slower anyhow.
I would just like to congratulate Slashdot. You've successfully managed to turn no story at all, into two seperate stories...
Since I started here, slashdot started accepting ads, there have been DDoS attacks, numerous other outages, break-ins, an increasing number of trolls, crapflooders, page-widening spam, M2, and the whole moderation system has repeatedly fallen flat on it's face... But it was all worth it to see a story posted about Google every single day, even when there's isn't any actual story.
*sniff* I promised myself I wouldn't cry... *sniff*
I see nothing at all racist about what I said. I didn't say that Asians were incapable of producing good products, or anything similarly racists. I'm merely commenting on my own observations, that every product I've seen that is comming out of China these days is very low quality.
Now look at who makes high-end electronics.
Okay, then let's say that some-time, in years to come, the Chinese could start making high-quality products. Good for them. That does not change the fact that, right now, their products are rather low quality.
but the 'quality' is up to the level that majority of the world uses it.
The majority of the world uses it not because it's quality, but because it's much cheaper, and people have been lulled/tricked into not considering quality anymore.
Check out which piece of electronic in your home is not made in China.
The answer will always be: "Every piece that lasts more than 2 years"
Are you kidding? My god. I wouldn't touch Chinese-made tools with a 30 foot pole... I know numerous people that were seriously injured when a made-in-china drill bit/router bit/saw blade/etc. turned into high-speed flying shrapnel under normal use. I'll pay practically any price to get steel products that were not made in China.
So any protection will have to stand on it's own and breaking it is perfectly legal. Hey works for me.
It does not, however, work for me, or anyone else that has thought this through.
DRM has, thus-far, been terribly weak. That does not necessarily hold true forever. When practically unbreakable DRM is here, it's going to be codified in law as perfectly legal, despite fair-use and all other rights consumers are supposed-to have.
This would be only a small-step-up from what we have now. I'll hold out for something that is actually GOOD.
*) Spell-check. It's amazing that Google Maps is completely crippled if you don't spell every single term exactly right. It won't suggest alternative spellings, it won't go to the destination with the closest spelling, etc. Since Google search handles things like this so well, you'd think they could do the same for Maps. Hell, Mapquest/YahooMaps do a much better job than the might GOOGLE of handling mispelled words.
*) Find locations by popular name, rather than requiring exact addresses. I still find it insane that typing-in something like "Death Valley" it will find obscure businesses, but NEVER find the actual place.
*) Differentiate between street, city, state, zip, etc., by parsing the string. eg. Road name will be before st/rd/ln. Street address will be first, and zip will be last. etc. As it is, you have to put correct and proper punctuation between every string, or it can't figure out what you want. This might be okay if they had seperate fields for inserting each item, but they only have one line, and YOU have to GUESS how to punctuate everything so it will be recognized. For those interested, commas between each field always seem to work, but it took me a long time to figure that much out.
Google Maps has got a nice navigation interface, and it seems it's the only one with aerial photos anymore, but of all the google projects, it's the worst, at least interface-wise.
Then congress will start taxing things like burnable CD, digital media players, to make up for the lost revenue due to piracy.
I hate the RIAA and our corporation friendly government as much as anybody, but you have got to have one hell of a tin-foil hat to believe this will possibly happen.
First of all, a company can't buy political influence if they don't have money to buy influence with. The government isn't going to pass a federal music tax, or any similar nonsense. If there's tax-money to be made, politicians want it going into pork, not music companies.
High-tech companies make far more money than all the entertainment companies put together. They put a quick stop to the RIAA/MPAA last time they wanted to push their agenda like that.
Technology is why we have unrestricted audio recording devices, despite laws that prohibit such things. Technology will get around any tax they can come up with. If CDs are taxed, audio on DVD-Rs will become popular. If all disks are taxed, things like iPods or CompactFlash players will get more popular. Technology is very flexible... Enough so that any laws can be worked-around without too much difficulty.
In addition, the American public at large is slow, but they do catch-up. Any such massive tax initiative would be met with serious public backlash (in addition to the high-tech companies' opposition) which is not something any politician would be willing to go against.
Re:Mass Spoofing (think fake japenese airfields WW
on
RIAA Sues a Child
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm sure that with all the coders and other people out there somthing like this could be done easily. Make a text document with the filename.mp3 of a new release and tracked theft title. Fill it with a message that states "If you checked this file you would see that it isnt real. Sue me, and expect a countersuit to cover harrassment, and my legal fees" Fill the rest with enough random hash to make up the appropriate filesize.
Nah, that's just no good... Here's a better idea.
A friend or family member of a independant musician illegally shares the copyrighted music, misleadingly named to look like a much more popular RIAA artist.
The RIAA eventually downloads these songs and files a lawsuit. The person who shared them gets out of the lawsuit because it's not material RIAA owns the copyright on. Then, the independant musician who actually owns the copyright can use the RIAA trial as incontrovertible proof that agents of the RIAA illegally downloaded his music, and sue them for truck-loads of cash...
Incidentally, how is Avian Flu being reported in america?
Regularly... and with loads and loads of fear-mongering. Everyone's tired of hearing how the world could be destroyed at any moment by a giant projectile from space. It's successor, the "super volcano" scare compaign didn't really pan-out, so bird flu is the big thing.
Here in Aus we don't hear much, even though I (and the WHO) are convinced it's the next big pandemic.
To that sentiment, allow me to just say:
SARS!!! SARS!!! Oh God, won't someone please think of the children!!! SARS!!!
if in the future artisits don't become millionaires, do you really think people will stop making music?
Yes. Well, good music anyhow.
It's economics. The less chance you have of being successful, the greater the pay-off has to be. And if the money isn't there, the musicians will go get a real job, and not really spend any time becomming good musicians.
There are many movies that I would be very willing to watch in the theatre if I only had the ability to do so with some guarantee of peace and quiet from those around me.
Well good for you, but I can assure you that you are in the minority. Certainly, noisy children are an annoyance, as are cell phones/pagers, but only occasionally someone who is talking.
Having an actual audience, reacting to the movie, is one of the good reasons to go to the theatre. The ridiculous prices, endless commercials (which you PAID a lot to go see), terrible movies, and other crap you have to put up with are the real drawbacks.
If it's on autopilot why can't it reduce altitude so the people can regain consciousness?
One word: Mountains
The more "automatic safety features" they put on airplanes, the more often they decide the pilot is wrong (about things like which way is up) and cause fatal crashes.
Hell, why can't it just declare an emergency and automatically land at the nearest airport after receiving an OK signal from the airport that it's safe to land.
Don't you remember the outcome of the DARPA Grand Challenge? Even with a prize of a million dollars, no company could get a CAR to drive very far on it's own. Good luck designing a computer system that can safely land a extremely heavy aircraft at several hundred MPH.
We have all this technology but it's implemented by idiots.
Feel free to start-up a company, since you're obviously the genius that's going to lead us all out of the technological dark ages.
It's amazing to me though that the US has some of the best protection laws when it comes to this sort of thing.
Why should that amaze you at all? This USED-TO be a good country, remember??? If you're dealing with laws that were made more than ~50 years ago or so, they're actually quite good. It's just recent laws that are bought and sold by corporations.
I've got a good laptop at the moment, so I'm not in the market. However, at that price, I'd certainly assume there must be problems with it... Dying battery, hot pixels, busted fan, etc.
This unit would also have a LOT of benefits a modern laptop wouldn't. Extremely low power, a screen that can be read in direct sunlight, extremely low power, a hand-crank to power it, and did I mention being extremely low power?
Agreed, I'd love to have one of these new laptops, provided they have some basic ports on them (at least 1 USB and 1 RS232).
You just can't find laptops anywhere with great specs like these! Screen you can see outside? NOBODY makes laptops like that! Incredibly low power consumption? Again, nobody makes laptops like that! Putting-in a hand-cranked generator only makes it that much more useful in the middle of nowhere. Campers and backpackers could use laptops too. Why don't we see anything like this in the 1st world, at any price?
Sell these things for $200 in the USA, promising to donate one to a 3rd-world child for every one purchased. Money issues instantly SOLVED.
You're not likely to get an old Laptop in good working order for even $250 on eBay, or anywhere else for that matter.
Besides that, old equipment is not necessarily good equipment. Buying something new can save you loads of money on power requirements, battery life, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Local News isn't a good indicator of anything. Unless you live in Nevada, this isn't local news for you. For anything not local, it has to be extremely significant for local news to cover it.
The fact that most people only watch local news has long been a major source of problems. For example, all the major news outlets listed and debunked the justifications for invading Iraq, on their National/World news programs, long before the first bombs were dropped...
I know that ABC's World News program had a segment a few minutes long on the results of the Grand Challenge. The CBS News website has some interesting RAW video of the race (rtsp://real.tvc.cbsig.net/cbsnews/2005/10/10/vid
Not really. On coax TV cables they add a little plastic collar, so you need a special tool to unscrew it from the TV. However, any flat piece of metal (screwdriver) and a little patience easily gets you around their wonderful protections.
The same goes for everything else. They aren't very secure, they're just good enough to slow people down enough so it won't be worth stealing.
You've obviously never heard of BartsPE/WinPE, even though
It's a lot of hassle to set-up, but so is the Linux equivalent if you want to add your own software rather than just using what (eg.) Knoppix happens to have installed.
No, supersonic air travel was unpopular even when the Concorde was in it's prime. It really showed how difficult, impractical, and economically unfeasable it all really was.
You have a serious perspective problem. Although the Concorde was flying for "over 30 years" it carried a very small number of passengers on a very small number of flights over that time. It was such a small number of successful flights, that one single crash pushed the death-rate far past any other airplane currently in-use. It is dead-last for safety now, and by a huge margin. Look at the statistics for yourself: http://www.airdisaster.com/statistics/
It's not just that it's unsafe, it's also that the very rich who can easily afford to fly on the Concorde with it's very high pricetag, expect their money to buy them almost a guarantee of safety. Practically nobody would have ever bought a ticket for the Concorde, if they had known it would have been safer, as well as cheaper, more comfortable, more convenient, and not all that much slower anyhow.
I don't get it. The 30% of photo printers that don't print pictures... What exactly do they do?
"Mohave"? It's spelled "Mojave"?
See "Mojave Desert", "Mojave River", "Mojave, CA", etc.
I would just like to congratulate Slashdot. You've successfully managed to turn no story at all, into two seperate stories...
Since I started here, slashdot started accepting ads, there have been DDoS attacks, numerous other outages, break-ins, an increasing number of trolls, crapflooders, page-widening spam, M2, and the whole moderation system has repeatedly fallen flat on it's face... But it was all worth it to see a story posted about Google every single day, even when there's isn't any actual story.
*sniff* I promised myself I wouldn't cry... *sniff*
I see nothing at all racist about what I said. I didn't say that Asians were incapable of producing good products, or anything similarly racists. I'm merely commenting on my own observations, that every product I've seen that is comming out of China these days is very low quality.
Okay, then let's say that some-time, in years to come, the Chinese could start making high-quality products. Good for them. That does not change the fact that, right now, their products are rather low quality.
The majority of the world uses it not because it's quality, but because it's much cheaper, and people have been lulled/tricked into not considering quality anymore.
The answer will always be: "Every piece that lasts more than 2 years"
Are you kidding? My god. I wouldn't touch Chinese-made tools with a 30 foot pole... I know numerous people that were seriously injured when a made-in-china drill bit/router bit/saw blade/etc. turned into high-speed flying shrapnel under normal use. I'll pay practically any price to get steel products that were not made in China.
It does not, however, work for me, or anyone else that has thought this through.
DRM has, thus-far, been terribly weak. That does not necessarily hold true forever. When practically unbreakable DRM is here, it's going to be codified in law as perfectly legal, despite fair-use and all other rights consumers are supposed-to have.
This would be only a small-step-up from what we have now. I'll hold out for something that is actually GOOD.
*) Spell-check. It's amazing that Google Maps is completely crippled if you don't spell every single term exactly right. It won't suggest alternative spellings, it won't go to the destination with the closest spelling, etc. Since Google search handles things like this so well, you'd think they could do the same for Maps. Hell, Mapquest/YahooMaps do a much better job than the might GOOGLE of handling mispelled words.
*) Find locations by popular name, rather than requiring exact addresses. I still find it insane that typing-in something like "Death Valley" it will find obscure businesses, but NEVER find the actual place.
*) Differentiate between street, city, state, zip, etc., by parsing the string. eg. Road name will be before st/rd/ln. Street address will be first, and zip will be last. etc. As it is, you have to put correct and proper punctuation between every string, or it can't figure out what you want. This might be okay if they had seperate fields for inserting each item, but they only have one line, and YOU have to GUESS how to punctuate everything so it will be recognized. For those interested, commas between each field always seem to work, but it took me a long time to figure that much out.
Google Maps has got a nice navigation interface, and it seems it's the only one with aerial photos anymore, but of all the google projects, it's the worst, at least interface-wise.
I hate the RIAA and our corporation friendly government as much as anybody, but you have got to have one hell of a tin-foil hat to believe this will possibly happen.
First of all, a company can't buy political influence if they don't have money to buy influence with. The government isn't going to pass a federal music tax, or any similar nonsense. If there's tax-money to be made, politicians want it going into pork, not music companies.
High-tech companies make far more money than all the entertainment companies put together. They put a quick stop to the RIAA/MPAA last time they wanted to push their agenda like that.
Technology is why we have unrestricted audio recording devices, despite laws that prohibit such things. Technology will get around any tax they can come up with. If CDs are taxed, audio on DVD-Rs will become popular. If all disks are taxed, things like iPods or CompactFlash players will get more popular. Technology is very flexible... Enough so that any laws can be worked-around without too much difficulty.
In addition, the American public at large is slow, but they do catch-up. Any such massive tax initiative would be met with serious public backlash (in addition to the high-tech companies' opposition) which is not something any politician would be willing to go against.
Nah, that's just no good... Here's a better idea.
A friend or family member of a independant musician illegally shares the copyrighted music, misleadingly named to look like a much more popular RIAA artist.
The RIAA eventually downloads these songs and files a lawsuit. The person who shared them gets out of the lawsuit because it's not material RIAA owns the copyright on. Then, the independant musician who actually owns the copyright can use the RIAA trial as incontrovertible proof that agents of the RIAA illegally downloaded his music, and sue them for truck-loads of cash...
Isn't it obvious? This virus will turn those 5% into flesh-eating zombies, who will then proceed to kill the other 95%.
Regularly... and with loads and loads of fear-mongering. Everyone's tired of hearing how the world could be destroyed at any moment by a giant projectile from space. It's successor, the "super volcano" scare compaign didn't really pan-out, so bird flu is the big thing.
To that sentiment, allow me to just say:
SARS!!! SARS!!! Oh God, won't someone please think of the children!!! SARS!!!
*ahem*... Sorry about that.
Yes. Well, good music anyhow.
It's economics. The less chance you have of being successful, the greater the pay-off has to be. And if the money isn't there, the musicians will go get a real job, and not really spend any time becomming good musicians.
Well good for you, but I can assure you that you are in the minority. Certainly, noisy children are an annoyance, as are cell phones/pagers, but only occasionally someone who is talking.
Having an actual audience, reacting to the movie, is one of the good reasons to go to the theatre. The ridiculous prices, endless commercials (which you PAID a lot to go see), terrible movies, and other crap you have to put up with are the real drawbacks.
No, actually I think whistleblower laws are MUCH OLDER. Think: Civil War-era.
It was ammended about 20 years ago to add upon it, but the body of the law is much, much older.
You're obviously one of the "IANAL-but I play on on Slashdot"-types.
Gee, that joke was HILARIOUS the first 500,000 times I heard it...
One word: Mountains
The more "automatic safety features" they put on airplanes, the more often they decide the pilot is wrong (about things like which way is up) and cause fatal crashes.
Don't you remember the outcome of the DARPA Grand Challenge? Even with a prize of a million dollars, no company could get a CAR to drive very far on it's own. Good luck designing a computer system that can safely land a extremely heavy aircraft at several hundred MPH.
Feel free to start-up a company, since you're obviously the genius that's going to lead us all out of the technological dark ages.
Why should that amaze you at all? This USED-TO be a good country, remember??? If you're dealing with laws that were made more than ~50 years ago or so, they're actually quite good. It's just recent laws that are bought and sold by corporations.
I've got a good laptop at the moment, so I'm not in the market. However, at that price, I'd certainly assume there must be problems with it... Dying battery, hot pixels, busted fan, etc.
This unit would also have a LOT of benefits a modern laptop wouldn't. Extremely low power, a screen that can be read in direct sunlight, extremely low power, a hand-crank to power it, and did I mention being extremely low power?
Agreed, I'd love to have one of these new laptops, provided they have some basic ports on them (at least 1 USB and 1 RS232).
You just can't find laptops anywhere with great specs like these! Screen you can see outside? NOBODY makes laptops like that! Incredibly low power consumption? Again, nobody makes laptops like that! Putting-in a hand-cranked generator only makes it that much more useful in the middle of nowhere. Campers and backpackers could use laptops too. Why don't we see anything like this in the 1st world, at any price?
Sell these things for $200 in the USA, promising to donate one to a 3rd-world child for every one purchased. Money issues instantly SOLVED.
You're not likely to get an old Laptop in good working order for even $250 on eBay, or anywhere else for that matter.
Besides that, old equipment is not necessarily good equipment. Buying something new can save you loads of money on power requirements, battery life, etc.