1) Eliminate competitors or workalikes with DMCA 2) Become only game server network 3) Profit!!!
It seems that the DMCA helps enable that "monopoly lock-in" business plan by allowing them to legally (albeit not practically) lock people out of the server protocols.
You eliminate competitors as well as people who find your weaknesses. Once you eliminate competitors, you get the MS-style monopoly-by-default.
Instead of having to be a dominant player by producing a better product, you get to just be a bully and be a dominant player by shutting everyone else out through legislation and legal maneuvering.
The word in the DVD recoder forums I frequent is that it will strip all forms analog copy protection, including CGMS/A, which is inserted in the vertical blanking interval and can still be detected after MPEG encoding.
Although I must say it seems odd that *any* video duplicator would add Macrovision by default or without charging extra. The original Macrovision mangled the signal used for automatic gain control and the newer colorstriping are arguably an introduced defect in the video signal.
And they probably WOULD charge extra; Macrovision is heavily licensed by Macrovision, Inc. and there's probably a charge for each unit of media encoded with a Macrovision system.
I think it shifts your mental focus away from your physical reality to the artificial reality where the conversation takes place.
For brief conversations which don't demand a lot of mental acuity, it's not that much more distraction than music or passengers or whatever. For complex conversations, it's deeply distracting -- you drive on autopilot.
And the same can happen in reverse. I refuse to engage most people calling from cell phones because you can end up with "autopilot" conversations, where they don't say anything or just say "yeah" a lot.
C'mon, shit breaks, wears out, gets stolen, or otherwise isn't suitable for the job at hand. It's not like all pro photogs are using the same equipment they bought when they first started.
Are you trying to tell me that before 1701 there wasn't a single father or mother in western society who paid attention to their children and loved them for their own sake instead of for some ascribed selfish desire?
That's just pedantic. I don't doubt that parents felt some kind of emotional tie to their children; it's biologically driven, up to a point. After that it's a culturally driven emotional facade.
Up until fairly recently in western cultures, more kids meant more mouths to feed, and the pressure was intense to begin with to feed one's self; there wasn't a charity or food shelf or anything of that sort. Kids were welcomed for their labor output or their salability for their labor output. If they couldn't meet those needs, they were a drag on the family, not a lovable asset.
It's not cynical -- life was hard and cruel. I'm not advocating that's the way one should live or should want to live, but it was the *reality* of family life for centuries. I'm personally glad (and like everyone else, a benificiary) for the changing attitudes about children and family.
But liking and wanting a warm, soft and fuzzy family ideal doesn't mean that it isn't new or the way that it had always been.
Is an invention of the 18th century. Until that time the rich simply forked their children over to governnesses, teachers, etc and forgot about them until their kids challenged them for their holdings.
Everyone else either worked as many offspring as they could sire in the fields, sold them off as indentured servants, or, if they didn't need or want more, comitted post-natal abortion.
The idea that one actually had some involvement with their kids is historically kind of new. The idea of "childhood" itself is even newer; it used to only last until you were old enough to do meaningful work. The fact that it now lasts until the mid-20s or the end of college is a very new phenomenon and probably as unhealthy as selling them off as servants when they turned 10.
I'd imagine we'll see all kinds of obstacles, although fewer than the cell companies will be throwing up for cell portability. There was a newspaper article that said "expect lots of fees and potential equipment incompatibilities."
I want to know why the estate taxes weren't modified years ago to peg them to inflation or some other non-legislatively updatable financial model. I could easily live with $10 or even $20M as the point where estate taxes kick in, and leave amounts lower untaxed.
These days, $10M is enough to ensure one or two generations of family "has it made" in terms of education, housing and medical care, but it hardly guarantees even a life of leisure for those that direcly inherit it.
It seems to me the estate tax got a bad rap because it was wasn't properly indexed, and a few people who were clearly not members of the privileged class got nailed pretty hard. I know someone who fits this description, although even though she had to sell the family owned bank (in a small town), she and her two brothers still have several million each after taxes.
Had the estate tax been indexed to include only egregious wealth and not incidental wealth, it might still be around.
$100k per year for a job doesn't seem outrageous, especially if you consider the equipment expenses they have, as well as the fact that they're picking up the tab for all the usual self-employment taxes.
Considering what self-absorbed harpies most brides are, the money alone should be worth it for just dealing with the customer base.
And besides, try to get $skilled_worker to come to $location at $fixed_time and do $job, correctly the first and only time it can be done, for less than $3000. Mostly it cannot be done.
I've never heard of solar cells being net positive in terms of energy -- the materials and manufacturing processes always involve far more energy than the cells can produce in their lifetimes.
Has this really changed? Or are they only counting the energy required to assemble the materials, and not counting the cost of creating the materials (ie, the mining/refining/processing of the chemicals that go into the materials)?
There was a patch or something for Quake 1 that let you run it with a voodoo card, and its why I bought a voodoo card to begin with,
I still have the Q1 CD, but it occured to me -- can I even run it and get good graphics without a voodoo card, or am I stuck with software rendering? IIRC the Q1 patch was voodoo specific.
I'm also wonder if Q1 wasn't a DOS game as well, which might make it impossible to run on XP, unless a subsequent Windows version was released.
I owned a Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2 card. Didn't the Voodoo2 series have the ability to be cabled *directly* to another Voodoo2 card for greater performance? I forget what they called this piggybacking, but maybe he's confusiong the passthrough video cabling with this ability.
Whenever I hear a new phone ring and its got that bad sample sound of some music I always wonder why they didn't use that ability to sample actual analog bells? Phones, door bells, buzzers, and so on. It'd be better than a phone version of some gay Justin Timberlake song.
Disclaimer: I have a 3-4 year old star tac that just makes a "normal" electronic racket when it rings, so maybe the new ones do have real bell sounds available.
I bought a Teac CD player that only takes the small CDs, but will play ISOs with MP3s. I'd swear it was under $100, and the advantage is I can take a fairly substantial music collection in a few CDs.
On the downside, it's kind of cheesy feature-wise, has so little buffering I can't put it on a belt pouch and walk fast, and gets less than 2 hours of play time on a set of 1800mAh NiMH rechargables.
I'd love an iPod, but they're just too expensive for the amount of use I'd actually get out of it. If they had one for under $200 I'd probably buy one, but $300 for a portable is just a little beyond my ability to justify it considering I don't use mine other than walking for exercise or on an airplane.
I'm trying to figure out how to use cookies from others computers on mine to acccess sites they use that have a "save my password" feature.
Right now the copied cookie is ignored by the web site.
Moon base make more sense than an orbiting one?
on
The Case for the Moon
·
· Score: 1
Other than the fuel costs in getting to the moon, wouldn't the moon be a better place to have a base than in earth orbit?
Is the small amount of lunar gravity less of an obstacle to, say, Mars or elsewhere than Earth? Could we assemble a larger space ship on the moon than we could in LEO, or easier? (Some gravity being easier than the free-fall of orbit?)
...told the FTC that they had to wait 30 days before any enforcement actions, as the Party had just sent out a fundraising letter and they wanted to see if they'd get a check, first.
While some/.'ers may complain this is unfairly partisan, it *does* strike me that the Republican party's main goal in life is enabling anybody who calls themself a corporation to do anything they want and call it a (patentable) business model.
Re:Not arming ourselves for the real fight
on
Radiofrequency Weapons
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
In each case we did or could have kicked ass if we were willing to committ to the actions necessary. The victories of those irregular units were about political spin and a lack of the will to committ to actions that could lead to victory.
It might have been in the case of Viet Nam if Westmoreland had been given the authority after Khe San to chase the NVA further North and into Cambodia. But in Viet Nam we had no qualms about wiping out whole villages based on intelligence of support for the VC. We lack even that level of determination now.
We could have Iraq under control in a matter of days if we were willing to do what is necessary to make it so. This would be politically disastrous but is strategically possible in a purely military sense.
And that's kind of the point -- we *could*, if we were so motivated, run the middle east -- but we'd have to do it the way the SS ran Eastern Europe '39-44 or, for a more palatable analogy, the way Sherman defeated the South. Scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners, mass executions, 10 of yours for 1 of mine, and so on.
However, we no longer live in the ethical paradigm that enables us to conquer foreign peoples and use whatever means necessary to subdue them. That, and the current thinking is "hearts and minds", which I think is highly ineffective, but there's little better paradigm.
In terms of weapons systems to meet our current politico-military paradigm, I'd like to see for one, a lot more design and building of things like APCs capable of withstanding roadside bombs and RPGs. That we have Star Trek intel systems but we put our ground forces in unarmored buggies is exactly the kind of poor threat analysis that leads to wasteful spending on EMP weapons. Wrong weapon for the wrong problem.
It's all speculation of course. But I do not think it is unwise to look at capabilities for dealing with enemies that don't 'exist' yet. We can't merely focus on our current situation. A technologically advanced enemy is not outside the realm of possibility. In fact I would argue that at some point it is a certainty.
The problem is that there's a finite amount of resources available, and virtually every indication since Gary Hart ran for president is that a massive land battle based on 500,000 T-72s rushing the Fulda Gap ain't gonna happen.
What we HAVE seen on an interrupted basis since Viet Nam is highly motivated irregulars armed with small arms whipping the shit out of high-tech armies -- Viet Nam, Lebanon, Afghanistan, the list goes on and on.
With this in mind, why spend more than the most basic R&D resources on something that doesn't fit any fight we're remotely likely to get into in the next 20 years?
North Korea relies on older comm equipment? Ok, that's relatively easy to blow up, jam, or compromise. Then they have to revert to the backup system. Maybe cell phones. And this *is* effective against that.
Not even that high-tech. Think hand-cranked field telephones with buried cable.
The most recent articles I've read said that China currently lacks the logistical capability to invade *Taiwan*, let alone mount any kind of high tech combat offensive against anyone.
Given the population size and the size of China's current army (5M infantry?), nobody has any desire to invade China, even if there was someting there somebody wanted.
Anyway, if you want to take the long-as-in-50-years view, OK, maybe we might face a Chinese invasion in the US mainland in 2054, which we'd more than likely repel with nuclear weapons or, space-based lasers or something.
Not arming ourselves for the real fight
on
Radiofrequency Weapons
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The real fight the US faces is NOT relatively high-tech foes like the Soviet Union, but low-tech guys armed with home-made bombs scavanged from artillery rounds and AK-47s.
What good is this kind of technology against these foes? It's almost impossible to think we even face an enemy capable of fielding a large force for a stand-up battle, let alone one easily immobilized by EM. Even the North Koreans, on anyone's short list for potential combat, likely rely heavily on WWII-era or older combat communications unaffected by EMP.
NAT's limitation is that it overcomplicates internetworking with other networks, as you run into overlapping address space, since everyone uses the same RFC1918 address space, usually wastefully.
You can do NAT-NAT solutions, but they can be a real bear to debug as well as being nonfunctional in a number of software or application environments.
Slashdot Mirror
GameSpy business plan:
1) Eliminate competitors or workalikes with DMCA
2) Become only game server network
3) Profit!!!
It seems that the DMCA helps enable that "monopoly lock-in" business plan by allowing them to legally (albeit not practically) lock people out of the server protocols.
You eliminate competitors as well as people who find your weaknesses. Once you eliminate competitors, you get the MS-style monopoly-by-default.
Instead of having to be a dominant player by producing a better product, you get to just be a bully and be a dominant player by shutting everyone else out through legislation and legal maneuvering.
And we wonder why we're in decline.
The word in the DVD recoder forums I frequent is that it will strip all forms analog copy protection, including CGMS/A, which is inserted in the vertical blanking interval and can still be detected after MPEG encoding.
Although I must say it seems odd that *any* video duplicator would add Macrovision by default or without charging extra. The original Macrovision mangled the signal used for automatic gain control and the newer colorstriping are arguably an introduced defect in the video signal.
And they probably WOULD charge extra; Macrovision is heavily licensed by Macrovision, Inc. and there's probably a charge for each unit of media encoded with a Macrovision system.
I think it shifts your mental focus away from your physical reality to the artificial reality where the conversation takes place.
For brief conversations which don't demand a lot of mental acuity, it's not that much more distraction than music or passengers or whatever. For complex conversations, it's deeply distracting -- you drive on autopilot.
And the same can happen in reverse. I refuse to engage most people calling from cell phones because you can end up with "autopilot" conversations, where they don't say anything or just say "yeah" a lot.
Haha, mine too, including while AT Disneyworld.
C'mon, shit breaks, wears out, gets stolen, or otherwise isn't suitable for the job at hand. It's not like all pro photogs are using the same equipment they bought when they first started.
Are you trying to tell me that before 1701 there wasn't a single father or mother in western society who paid attention to their children and loved them for their own sake instead of for some ascribed selfish desire?
That's just pedantic. I don't doubt that parents felt some kind of emotional tie to their children; it's biologically driven, up to a point. After that it's a culturally driven emotional facade.
Up until fairly recently in western cultures, more kids meant more mouths to feed, and the pressure was intense to begin with to feed one's self; there wasn't a charity or food shelf or anything of that sort. Kids were welcomed for their labor output or their salability for their labor output. If they couldn't meet those needs, they were a drag on the family, not a lovable asset.
It's not cynical -- life was hard and cruel. I'm not advocating that's the way one should live or should want to live, but it was the *reality* of family life for centuries. I'm personally glad (and like everyone else, a benificiary) for the changing attitudes about children and family.
But liking and wanting a warm, soft and fuzzy family ideal doesn't mean that it isn't new or the way that it had always been.
Is an invention of the 18th century. Until that time the rich simply forked their children over to governnesses, teachers, etc and forgot about them until their kids challenged them for their holdings.
Everyone else either worked as many offspring as they could sire in the fields, sold them off as indentured servants, or, if they didn't need or want more, comitted post-natal abortion.
The idea that one actually had some involvement with their kids is historically kind of new. The idea of "childhood" itself is even newer; it used to only last until you were old enough to do meaningful work. The fact that it now lasts until the mid-20s or the end of college is a very new phenomenon and probably as unhealthy as selling them off as servants when they turned 10.
And hardware RAID isn't that expensive, especially IDE raid. Under $400 to eliminate all the worrying and guesswork is money well spent.
Plus I'm not aware of any software RAID solutions you can install the OS itself into, it's always just the data drives.
I'd imagine we'll see all kinds of obstacles, although fewer than the cell companies will be throwing up for cell portability. There was a newspaper article that said "expect lots of fees and potential equipment incompatibilities."
I want to know why the estate taxes weren't modified years ago to peg them to inflation or some other non-legislatively updatable financial model. I could easily live with $10 or even $20M as the point where estate taxes kick in, and leave amounts lower untaxed.
These days, $10M is enough to ensure one or two generations of family "has it made" in terms of education, housing and medical care, but it hardly guarantees even a life of leisure for those that direcly inherit it.
It seems to me the estate tax got a bad rap because it was wasn't properly indexed, and a few people who were clearly not members of the privileged class got nailed pretty hard. I know someone who fits this description, although even though she had to sell the family owned bank (in a small town), she and her two brothers still have several million each after taxes.
Had the estate tax been indexed to include only egregious wealth and not incidental wealth, it might still be around.
Instead we've decided to become Brazil.
$100k per year for a job doesn't seem outrageous, especially if you consider the equipment expenses they have, as well as the fact that they're picking up the tab for all the usual self-employment taxes.
Considering what self-absorbed harpies most brides are, the money alone should be worth it for just dealing with the customer base.
And besides, try to get $skilled_worker to come to $location at $fixed_time and do $job, correctly the first and only time it can be done, for less than $3000. Mostly it cannot be done.
I've never heard of solar cells being net positive in terms of energy -- the materials and manufacturing processes always involve far more energy than the cells can produce in their lifetimes.
Has this really changed? Or are they only counting the energy required to assemble the materials, and not counting the cost of creating the materials (ie, the mining/refining/processing of the chemicals that go into the materials)?
There was a patch or something for Quake 1 that let you run it with a voodoo card, and its why I bought a voodoo card to begin with,
I still have the Q1 CD, but it occured to me -- can I even run it and get good graphics without a voodoo card, or am I stuck with software rendering? IIRC the Q1 patch was voodoo specific.
I'm also wonder if Q1 wasn't a DOS game as well, which might make it impossible to run on XP, unless a subsequent Windows version was released.
I owned a Voodoo 1 and Voodoo 2 card. Didn't the Voodoo2 series have the ability to be cabled *directly* to another Voodoo2 card for greater performance? I forget what they called this piggybacking, but maybe he's confusiong the passthrough video cabling with this ability.
Whenever I hear a new phone ring and its got that bad sample sound of some music I always wonder why they didn't use that ability to sample actual analog bells? Phones, door bells, buzzers, and so on. It'd be better than a phone version of some gay Justin Timberlake song.
Disclaimer: I have a 3-4 year old star tac that just makes a "normal" electronic racket when it rings, so maybe the new ones do have real bell sounds available.
I bought a Teac CD player that only takes the small CDs, but will play ISOs with MP3s. I'd swear it was under $100, and the advantage is I can take a fairly substantial music collection in a few CDs.
On the downside, it's kind of cheesy feature-wise, has so little buffering I can't put it on a belt pouch and walk fast, and gets less than 2 hours of play time on a set of 1800mAh NiMH rechargables.
I'd love an iPod, but they're just too expensive for the amount of use I'd actually get out of it. If they had one for under $200 I'd probably buy one, but $300 for a portable is just a little beyond my ability to justify it considering I don't use mine other than walking for exercise or on an airplane.
I'm trying to figure out how to use cookies from others computers on mine to acccess sites they use that have a "save my password" feature.
Right now the copied cookie is ignored by the web site.
Other than the fuel costs in getting to the moon, wouldn't the moon be a better place to have a base than in earth orbit?
Is the small amount of lunar gravity less of an obstacle to, say, Mars or elsewhere than Earth? Could we assemble a larger space ship on the moon than we could in LEO, or easier? (Some gravity being easier than the free-fall of orbit?)
...told the FTC that they had to wait 30 days before any enforcement actions, as the Party had just sent out a fundraising letter and they wanted to see if they'd get a check, first.
/.'ers may complain this is unfairly partisan, it *does* strike me that the Republican party's main goal in life is enabling anybody who calls themself a corporation to do anything they want and call it a (patentable) business model.
While some
In each case we did or could have kicked ass if we were willing to committ to the actions necessary. The victories of those irregular units were about political spin and a lack of the will to committ to actions that could lead to victory.
It might have been in the case of Viet Nam if Westmoreland had been given the authority after Khe San to chase the NVA further North and into Cambodia. But in Viet Nam we had no qualms about wiping out whole villages based on intelligence of support for the VC. We lack even that level of determination now.
We could have Iraq under control in a matter of days if we were willing to do what is necessary to make it so. This would be politically disastrous but is strategically possible in a purely military sense.
And that's kind of the point -- we *could*, if we were so motivated, run the middle east -- but we'd have to do it the way the SS ran Eastern Europe '39-44 or, for a more palatable analogy, the way Sherman defeated the South. Scorched-earth, take-no-prisoners, mass executions, 10 of yours for 1 of mine, and so on.
However, we no longer live in the ethical paradigm that enables us to conquer foreign peoples and use whatever means necessary to subdue them. That, and the current thinking is "hearts and minds", which I think is highly ineffective, but there's little better paradigm.
In terms of weapons systems to meet our current politico-military paradigm, I'd like to see for one, a lot more design and building of things like APCs capable of withstanding roadside bombs and RPGs. That we have Star Trek intel systems but we put our ground forces in unarmored buggies is exactly the kind of poor threat analysis that leads to wasteful spending on EMP weapons. Wrong weapon for the wrong problem.
It's all speculation of course. But I do not think it is unwise to look at capabilities for dealing with enemies that don't 'exist' yet. We can't merely focus on our current situation. A technologically advanced enemy is not outside the realm of possibility. In fact I would argue that at some point it is a certainty.
The problem is that there's a finite amount of resources available, and virtually every indication since Gary Hart ran for president is that a massive land battle based on 500,000 T-72s rushing the Fulda Gap ain't gonna happen.
What we HAVE seen on an interrupted basis since Viet Nam is highly motivated irregulars armed with small arms whipping the shit out of high-tech armies -- Viet Nam, Lebanon, Afghanistan, the list goes on and on.
With this in mind, why spend more than the most basic R&D resources on something that doesn't fit any fight we're remotely likely to get into in the next 20 years?
North Korea relies on older comm equipment? Ok, that's relatively easy to blow up, jam, or compromise. Then they have to revert to the backup system. Maybe cell phones. And this *is* effective against that.
Not even that high-tech. Think hand-cranked field telephones with buried cable.
There's long views, and there's long views.
The most recent articles I've read said that China currently lacks the logistical capability to invade *Taiwan*, let alone mount any kind of high tech combat offensive against anyone.
Given the population size and the size of China's current army (5M infantry?), nobody has any desire to invade China, even if there was someting there somebody wanted.
Anyway, if you want to take the long-as-in-50-years view, OK, maybe we might face a Chinese invasion in the US mainland in 2054, which we'd more than likely repel with nuclear weapons or, space-based lasers or something.
The real fight the US faces is NOT relatively high-tech foes like the Soviet Union, but low-tech guys armed with home-made bombs scavanged from artillery rounds and AK-47s.
What good is this kind of technology against these foes? It's almost impossible to think we even face an enemy capable of fielding a large force for a stand-up battle, let alone one easily immobilized by EM. Even the North Koreans, on anyone's short list for potential combat, likely rely heavily on WWII-era or older combat communications unaffected by EMP.
NAT's limitation is that it overcomplicates internetworking with other networks, as you run into overlapping address space, since everyone uses the same RFC1918 address space, usually wastefully.
You can do NAT-NAT solutions, but they can be a real bear to debug as well as being nonfunctional in a number of software or application environments.