you talk about the two as if they were seperate things.. but in fact if you can control gravity you effectively have time travel cinched. If you take einstein's equations and make the variable for effective mass negative, you wind up with the time variable becoming negative as well. They said something like that in physics class. Or maybe that was when you're travelling faster than the speed of light..? Um, never mind. It isn't important. Trust me, i'm right. And if you don't believe me, i can make some pictures in KPT Bryce for you that will prove my correctness beyond a doubt.
Anyway, it is well known that there is a definate link between gravity-based travel and time distortions. The government scientists at Area 51 have been doing extensive testing and refining of aircraft with a gravity-based engine based on technology recovered from crashed alien spacecraft. It has been well documented that exposure to such technology frequently results in "lost time"-- things in the general area of the gravity engine temporarily move at a faster rate through time than the world around them, causing them to wind up having short amounts of time "disappear". We know this information, by the way, because agent Fox Mulder of the FBI was able to infiltrate Area 51 after the reality warping in the general vicinity after a gravity-based spacecraft malfunctioned overhead his car on the highway outside area 51 and crashed caused, causing Mulder and a high-ranking Area 51 official to temporarily swap minds in an episode spanning two weeks. As a result we were able to get much information about this fascinating technology that is directed gravity propulsion.
> On another note, Hey Rob, what's with the Extrans option? It does the exact same thing as "plain text" now... it used to work..
While what you bring up is a point that probably deserves to be brought up, it's possible that putting it at the end of an anonymous coward post nested three levels deep in a very busy discussion is probably not the most effective word to get yourself heard. Especially not by any member of the slashdot staff.. they don't read _every_ post, and probably won't read yours. Just a bit of advice.
[personally i've never seen "extrans" work, although it would be really cool if it did.]
Besides the fact that making a place deep in a totally different website open up inside a frame on your website is incredibly obnoxious, and bad design, and irritates and wastes the screenspace of the people viewing, it isn't quite as easy to defend ethically or legally.
While i know nothing and you should not be listening to me, keep in mind the differences: a link is really nothing more than a statement saying "this is where this piece of information is" in a way that the computer can retrieve that bit of information. attempting to ban that without permission has some pretty serious First Amendment issues. if they ban the HTML <A HREF="http://ticketmaster.org/cgi-bin/#$#@@(*U&&!( ">You can buy what you're looking for here</A>, can they ban the words "You can buy the ticket from the ticketmaster website at the adress "http://ticketmaster.org/cgi-bin/#$#@@(*U&&!("? What about the words "You can buy the ticket from the ticketmaster outlet on 2343 Westheimer Street"? I see no difference between the three, they're just simple information on where to locate something.
Meanwhile framing is a bit more iffy. By framing you are presenting the content as being yours, which has some intellectual property theft/fraud implications which are a great deal less rediculous than whatever basis you'd try to stop linking on. Even if the framing is done in a non-misleading manner, most internet users are not intelligent enough to figure out that the ticketmaster window inside the tickets.com website is a different website. I suggest if you're going to deep-link to a competitor, you do it so the link opens in a new window. But, again, if you listen to me you're an idiot.
>It still does not stop them from litigation the case over and over.
Hasn't Ticketmaster already sued Microsoft because MSN was deep-linking to them? Does that ruling not apply here? Was there a ruling?
things will not really be what i would call acceptable, though, until it's as easy for someone who notices a bad patent to lodge a complaint, have the patent publicly reviewed, and have the patent struck down as it currently is for a corporation to file a bad patent, get it approved, and then use it to harass/sue/destroy people.
Currently it takes how much money to go into court and have a frivolous patent struck down? There are so many frivolous/dangerous patents out there that no ACLUish organisation could make a dent in them, and each one would be a long, long, drawn out legal struggle that would take forever and drain a huge amount of money. Meanwhile if a corporation has a patent that they should have no right to, and some other group or company annoys them, they can just do a few quick things with the lawyer they already have, and bam, semiinstant results. Unlike someone striking down a patent, who must go all the way to the end of the legal process to get the patent struck down, the corporation abusing their patent only has to go a little way, because these things are _always_ settled out of court. Assuming they even go to court in the first place; the mere threat of a lawsuit is probably enough to get what they want, esp. against companies small enough that having to hire a lawyer to even look into things and make a settlement would be a major problem. Threats cost nothing, and in most cases the patent owner is large enough it will barely hurt them to sue even if they lose and it will destroy the other side to get sued even if they win.
I'm not sure how coherent what i just said was, but just consider that even if the USPTO _IS_ more careful about preventing bad patents from being put into use, if a bad patent does slip through, for the owner to abuse that patent will still be far, far easier than someone preventing the owner from abusing it.
they're mattel. they don't need money to buy people off. Personally i suspect that, unbeknowst to Wired, Matthew Skala recieved $6,000 in Hot Wheels merchandise as well as one of these things and the full set of these, in exchange for his compliance.
they've already published a long, very good explanation of how exactly the software works. why would it matter whether they leave the software itself available?
they've done what they set out to do, which is expose flaws in the CyberPatrol system and disseminate information on the way [badly] it works. they've managed to shame the programmers behind cyberpatrol badly, even if the people they've shamed cyberpatrol in front of [slashdot] hated cyberpatrol anyway. The point it seemed to me wasn't the software; the point it seemed to me was that they reverse-engineered cyberpatrol. The software was just an extra, just something they posted to prove they were right about everything, and because they'd already written it..
why should they have to bother paying a lawyer, or bothering with _anything_ in court? sure the ACLU would pay for everything, but they'd still wind up being bothered. Why should we expect them to go through that? especially since they've already published the details of what cphack did in such deep detail that it seems that rewriting the program from scratch would be easy to anyone with even relatively elementary C skills.
Now if the article they wrote talking about cphack and reverse-engineering cyberpatrol were being taken down, well, then, that would be rather bothering. But that isn't happening; the settlement seems to concern only the cphack program itself.
and it seems to me that if they led to a long, drawn-out battle in court over cphack, then it would distract the public eye a lot from the real issues at the core of all this.. i think it's a lot more important to encourage people outside slashdot to read the cp-hacking article than encourage people inside slashdot to distribute the cphack program..
maybe i'm very confused, but what they're doing makes sense from where i'm standing.
you'll probably just get out about halfway to mars and then just go into a really elliptical orbit around the sun. don't think there's that much fuel in those things. firing to earth is a HELL of a lot easier; just aim a _little_, fire a _little_, and gravity just does the difficult work for you. and think about it, even if you DID get outside the solar system somehow, space is REALLY large and REALLY empty. the chances of coming across anything are almost nonexistently small. ----
On March 17, 2000, the motorola corporation set the boosters on its 66 Iridium satellites to fire into deep space, into which they flew at random, travelling further and further through the limitless empty void..
By random coincidence, iridium satellite #37 did, about 7.8 billion years later, reach something.
COMMANDER YYYYT: What's going on? why have we stopped?
ENGINEER ALTWK: We are having minor fluctuations in the quantum integrity stabiliser. I have slowed us to General Relativity speeds for about fifty seconds to give it a chance to cool down.
COMMANDER YYYYT: What's broken? Is this bad?
ENGINEER ALTWK: There's no problem. Probably just needs more stasis fluid. It can wait until port, we won't have to stop again.
COMMANDER YYYYT: Alright.
Suddenly there is a deafening thud, and the ship is jarred a bit. The shielding light blinks softly for several seconds.
NGLB: What the hell was that?
Altwyk reaches for the external sensors and sets them in pictoral projection mode. The screens focus on a wad of metal, battered, twisted, and dented from the effects of time, with two jagged, decaying panellike things sticking out, slowly spiralling away.
ENGINEER ALTWK: An asteroid.
NGLB: Damn, for an asteroid it looks pretty wierd.
COMMANDER YYYYT: I've seen wierder.
ENGINEER ALTWK [into intercom] Resuming travel speeds. Disassociation to commence shortly, please sit down.
And thus ended Humanity's final contact with the universe.
you're using linux/ppc. or linux/alpha. or linux/dreamcast or linux running on some processor i made in my basement using technology i recovered from a crashed alien spacecraft. or linux on any other non-intel processor.
can't exactly convert one type of machine code to another, now can you? so if you wind up on a non-intel platform and are handed an intel.rpm, even if you have rpm installed you can't do much of anything with it.
you could just say that software companies shouldn't be expected to go to the bother of supporting/coding for alternative platforms. i say that's a horrible way to look at it. whether the platform is widely used is a non-issue; even if the platform has no users, that shouldn't matter. one of linux's greatest strengths (OK, one of GNU's greatest strengths) is its cross-platform functionality.. once you have the kernel and gcc and hardware drivers ported, any linux program will go over perfectly fine. So linux erases hardware boundaries; makes the hardsware aspects irrelivant. Which is how things should be. If you ship for one platform only, and make hardware relevant in the least, you are breaking something fundamental about what makes linux powerful.
There _are_ ways around it; they _could_ just compile for all conceivable platforms, and then refuse to test the compiled rpms or verify they work. Would be better than nothing, anyway.. and of course they could just do something where the source is available to any user, but not open; that is, give the user no rights to distribute, reuse, or do anything else with the code beyond tweak and compile it.. but of course then we'd have all kinds of flames against them, because for some reason people are angered by restrictively liscensed source code more than unavailable source code. and they would probably refuse to do it anyway. i think there is something of a problem here.
> Yes, and I've only seen one ISP (UUNet) which actually uses that as their primary address. Many of the other big ISP's hold on to the.net TLD, but it's nothing more than a redirect to the.com address, which is by your definition another "ridiculous misuse of the namespace."
earthlink.net/psi.net, if you want the local big national bethemoth. swbell.net (and pacbell.net, etc...) basically your major telcoms and thus major DSL providers. pdq.net and concentric.net. i know nothing about these but they're the only ISPs i ever see ads for around here. wt.net.
except for the cable access, RoadRunner, netcom and AOL, these are about the only ISPs in the area i can think of off the top of my head. and the.net domain is the one that they all use for reverse DNS resolves of people on their networks.
pangeasoft has their priorities WAY, WAY out of line. what they REALLY ought to be porting is "gerbils".. NOT nanosaur.:)
of course let's keep in mind this is why Quickdraw 3d was originally created; so that people could _do_ things like porting a 3d app crossplatform ("crossplatform" at the time meaning "windows and mac os", of course) without massive rewrites (although i never saw anyone do this except for the makers of the game "Havoc"). Of course, then OpenGL came along and made QD3D irrelivant, but we didn't _know_ that was going to happen when QD3D first came out.. at the time, sitting there staring for hours at pangeasoft's gerbils demo, and to a lesser extent their (still very cool) 3DTicTacToe and Wormhole 3D demos.. oh man. it just seemed like the coolest thing in the world. Esp. right after we were recovering from Quicktime VR.. we may never find a use for quicktime VR, but damn, it was nifty.:)
Oh well. Maybe someone could get hold of the gerbils source or something-- i dunno. i can't even find a place to download the binaries anymore, nor can i find a 3dtictactoe or wormhole 3d, or for that matter any of those small yet at the time mind-blowingly cool (3DCalc!!!) original Quickdraw 3D apps.. they used to all be linked from apple's website but now that's all gone. What happened to all this stuff?
What the hell is WRONG with you people?? SLASHDOT ISN'T JOURNALISM!! OK, so it is sometimes when they post original articles, but this ISN'T one of those times. This is a link, a summary, and a discussion forum. PERIOD. it isn't MEANT to be journalism. it isn't supposed to be "reporting" shit. it isn't a "story". it isn't intended to be accurate or anything. it is intended to give you a LINK, and a vague description as to the link's content. that's IT. the entire point here is, they show you where to read information on the subject and ask you to respond. they are not "reporting facts" in any way, shape or form. they are telling you where to get facts. I'm amazed i have to EXPLAIN this.
the article/headline was phrased in such a way that anyone with half a brain cell could figure out what it meant. esp. the part about "As you might expect, the coursework is (an interdisciplinary approach to) designing and coding games, not playing them." apparently half a braincell is not too common a thing to have, judging from the huge number of people bitching "this is a misleading headline blah blah blah". Hey, guess what: Actually reading the article IS NOT THAT IMPRESSIVE. Lots of people do it. You haven't really "discovered" anything by finding out, hey, if you read the first couple sentances of the article linked, the headline which is obviously a flippant joke turns out to be somewhat misleading when taken out of context!
so given that none of this was intended to be or attempting to be journalism, why are you people so unable to handle it not being journalism..?
go away and stop cluttering my screen!! if they posted a blatantly misleading summary of something important that's bound to start a flamewar that would be one thing; but no. This is slight irritating goofiness in an article that doesn't matter much.. why do you feel compelled to act offended by it?? I dunno. excuse me if i am overreacting, but more than six semiidentical comments bitching about how the/. summary (which nobody in their right mind would pay attention to) was inadequate, is just slightly more than i can handle. Especially when some of these posts are at score:3.
What we want stopped? Microsoft throwing a bunch of crud into open protocols, cluttering up the procotol JUST so they can put their names on it, say "look! microsoft did something in creating this standard!" Microsoft does not do extend these things to get a technical benefit from the extention; they do it to show people who's boss, to point out that MIT, the linux community, et all, is NOT in control here; this is MICROSOFT'S world, not theirs, and if they think that a community decision is going to be allowed to dictate what happens, then they have another thing coming. And, of course, in the process of extending, they propeitarize, which directly hurts the community currently using the protocol because it means that for a longish while, the original supporters of the protocol will be unable to adapt their software to be operable with microsoft's supporters; and even after the original supporters support microsoft's extention, the way they do this will more than likely be reverse-engineered and highly dodgy (*cough *cough *SAMBA* cough*).
We don't really want microsoft to stop extending; more importantly what we want is microsoft to design their extentions to the standards in such a way as to ENCOURAGE INEROPABILITY. If you are going to be extending a standard, this is not evil in itself; if you are going to add something to the standard in order to get some kind of feature or benefit that you would not get without the extention, this is almost certainly a good thing. But if whatever is on the other side of the protocol from you does not comply with your extention, the result should be that neither side benefits from the presense of the extention. The result should NOT be interopability. All recent extendable standards i can think of-- HTML being the first to come to mind-- attempt to stress methods by which failure by both ends to support the same extention results in the extention not being used, NOT in the standard becoming nonfunctinonal between the two sides.
a better way to phrase the original question, i think, woudl be: How do we get the media, the public, and everything to the point where microsoft can no longer get away with doing this? Microsoft does not neccicarily need to be stopped in this respect; but what needs to happen is people need to be _aware_ that microsoft is doing this; that microsoft is purposefully breaking functionality in a product _they paid for_ in a situation where that functionality that could have easily be retained. People need to begin asking themselves the question of why microsoft is doing this. People need to be aware of the extent to which microsoft wants everything propeitary to them. If people in general were aware of what was going on, and more importantly UNDERSTOOD it, they would almost certainly disapprove; but instead we wind up with the people (who probably never go to anything requiring more authentication than My Yahoo) just going, "Kerberos? Huh?". You think "propeitary" is even in most people's vocabulary?
I apologize if my writing here is somewhat unwieldy. I've had a bad day.:P
they make Firewire<->SCSI crossovers already. they make USB<->ADB crossovers already.
USB<->Firewire crossovers should be relatively easy for any decent peripheral manufacturer who finds a reason to develop them. Fact is though that practically all computers using firewire are macs (which already _have_ USB), and hooking up something firewire to a USB port would just be silly when you consider how little bandwidth USB has and how much bandwidth most firewire devices need. So there wouldn't be much of a target market for a USB<->Firewire crossover; so if such a connector does not already exist, i'd imagine that would be the reason why..
when the consititution of the United States was first being written, most of the people behind it worried that "political parties" would rise into power and ruin the democratic system, the way that they had in Britain. Political parties rose into power anyway within a fairly short amount of time, and more or less ruined the democratic system in america.
Please, please-- let's not let this happen to ICANN. Never mind whether or not normal "at large membership" voters have much say-- choosing who you vote for on the basis of whether they have a specific orginisation's endorsement, as opposed to the individual candidates themselves, is a recipe for disaster in many ways. Not that the different candidates shouldn't be _discussed_ on slashdot.. just that if we get to the point where people just go in the booth and vote a "straight democratic ticket" or "straight republican ticket" or "straight slashdot ticket", you can expect all kinds of bad effects.
What are you talking about? Amazon can't have the patent on air-- it's taken. Microsoft got the patent. About five years ago, about the time they bought the Roman Catholic Church.
How were you not aware of this? Apparently you were not a USENET reader, or you definately would have heard about it.
Re:"Gender Exploration?" That's like, totally gay!
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Men Playing as Women
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hitting on who you think is a sex-starved woman only to discover "she" is actually a man laughing at you.. is bad. hitting on who you think is a sex-starved woman only to discover "she" is actually an inanimate object.. is maybe even worse.
#biteenfem on EFNET more than likely has a lower concentration of actual bisexual teen females than any other place in the entire world.
Re:Time Zone preferences-- legal battle awaits?
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MacOS X DP3
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· Score: 1
> I think they pulled the Map in OS8.
They didn't. They just moved it. The map is still in the "apple extras" folder of every mac os 8 and 9 installation. Many apps (ok, not many, but a couple) still use the information from the Map control panel to figure out exact geographical location.
this is really cool.. i don't think anything like this has ever been done before, really. so the important question is, what are the prices? they're going to have to price low enough that they make it worth it to buy from them instead of the VCD piraters.. esp. since if you buy from a bootlegger, you get a nice physical copy of it on a CD and it doesn't take up hard drive space or whatever. but they should be able to do that, since they will have almost no operating expenses.. just pay for bandwidth, and give the people who made the movie their money and, um, that's it. Hell, if you wind up with some system where you can pay a small fee to get the movie and appears that most of the money is going to the actual people who made the movie and not to some big theater-owning corporation.. you may get a good bit of money back from some of the rampant over-the-internet VCD pirating. Although you won't get to that point until you're doing something except hong kong films.. And it will only happen with movies that are good.:)
How's the chineese government feel about this? Exactly how much strict control are they exerting over Hong Kong now that they control it? any?
anyway if the prices are good enough to make it worth it.. oh God, i hope they don't stop with hong kong. i hope they move on to anime.
FOOL!! do NOT take the muppets lightly!! we will destroy you!!:D this is VERY important to some of us; the Muppets take on religion-like importance for some of us. It's even as important to some of us as, say, linux. Perhaps ordinarily you could get away with slightly uninformed posts, but not this time!! THIS TIME YOU'VE GONE TOO FAR!! 4N1M4L \V1LL 0\VN J00 817C|-|!! PH33R!!! AAAUUUUUEGH
What do you mean "relaxed"?? Why were you expecting this to be relaxed? Weren't you paying attention a couple months ago during the "who's your favorite muppet" poll? that's the most heated, impassioned discussion i've seen on slashdot yet. : D There are _strong_ feelings around here on this subject; you best watch yo' step, homeboy
y'know, they _did_ try to ressurect the muppet "show" in a way about four, five years ago.. i can't remember the name, but i watched a couple episodes (the show was tragically put on at the same time as either the x-files or sliders, i forget which. Either way it was a very difficult choice as to which to watch, and i only chose the new muppets a couple times..) it had some really clever bits in it.. the first episode basically came down to the muppets in some kind of meeting, looking over the ABC fall scedule, and then suddenly realizing the time slot that begins in three minutes didn't have anything in it. and then basically trying to throw together a letterman-style talk show in four minutes. It really did feel a lot like the old-school muppet show, but wasn't as wasn't nearly as consistent. It was kind of hit-or-miss, and about half of the material was kind of dull, but when it hit it was really funny. The stock Mrs. Piggy/Kermit characters weren't technically part of the show being produced itself, but they kept wandering in and out backstage and interfering with things, seeming like a bunch of old people who think they know everything. which was kind of funny to watch. I can't really remember it well enough to pass judgement on it though, really..
The show really wasn't very developed enough though. They were just going out and experimenting, trying to see if they could hit anything that worked. You could tell they were trying really hard, but they didn't always pull the show off the way it should have been. And ABC didn't give them a chance to experiment until they got it right; they pulled the show after about a half a season, and it never got developed to the point where it fufilled its potential. I dunno. There was some kind of rumor floating around that a second season was made but only shown in Hawaii or something wierd like that, but i never found out what was going on with that..
It would be nice if they could somehow recapture the spirit that made everything Jim Henson did so wonderful-- the kind of creative, almost-edgy, almost-dangerous feel to everything he did that what he was doing had never been done before. Whatever else you may have to say about the Muppet Show or early Sesame Street or any of his movies, the fact is you were never quite sure what was about to happen.
As opposed to, say, Muppets in Space, where you could tell _exactly_ what was going to happen, and nothing was unpredictable. That was just sad. Muppet Treasure Island/Christmas Carol was more or less ok, as if the people working on it were violently trying to honor Jim's memory with something wierd, but Muppets In Space felt more like they were burying Jim.. the whole movie just seemed hollow, empty, on autopilot. LIke the soul and the mind of the Muppets were dead but the body was still moving. The hamster was gone but the wheel was still spinning.
i want to see them go back to unpredictability.. i'd like to see something truly different from the muppet franchise again. I'd like to see something as mold-breaking as Labyrinth or Dark Crystal was come out of JH Productions again.. i doubt i ever will.
Really they ought to hire the people who did Sifl and Olly.. -_- That was probably the coolest, most funny thing i've ever seen on a television. And they definately have Jim's wierdness down.. -_-
"cindy crawford's taking off her robe..!!!" <---if you can identify where this came from, give yourself a cookie.
-mcc-baka Five to one, baby, one in five.. no one here gets out alive, now
::beats sig_11 over the head mercilessly::.. for God's sake, think before you post!!
Jim Henson died in 1990 of pnemonia, right about the time Jim Henson Productions became 0wned by disney. And yes, the "new" muppets (i.e. pretty much everything since) has not had quite the same quality. his son has taken over the voice pretty well, the people around him have tried to carry on his style, but still there's a certain life to the muppets that died with Jim Henson. There was a level of depth to the "old" muppets that the people in charge now have trouble capturing. Which is why everything sense has had an extreme hit-or-miss quality, and why all the muppets stuff in the last ten years has stayed rather static-- they can try to emulate Jim's old style, but they can't change style the way Jim could. This is why you've seen _nothing_ from the muppet group in the last ten years coming close to the breathtaking innovation/novelty/creativity/what's-the-word-i'm- looking-for of, say, Labyrinth.
i think about "ponies for sale" and the first image that comes to mind is some long-haired bearded guy on acid, in a pool of his own vomit, pupils dilated, screaming "look at all the pretty horses!!!!".. anyone else have this reaction?
seriously, i think we need to put some of the important UI designers (rasterman, miguel, etc) on large amounts of lsd and other psychadelic drugs in order to increase their creativity. this should be looked upon as something that _has_ to be done in order to compete in terms of UI with the marijuana-soaked haze in cupertino that produced everything that makes the mac os (and mac os x) good to use.
Of course the downside is we'll probably wind up with enlightemnent 0.18's source code just being the words "NUMBER FOUR. NUMBER FOUR. NUMBER FOUR." over and over.. so maybe we should only let them have it during the design phase or something. i dunno.
yes, there will always be cracks around the banner ads.
but the thing is they [qualcomm] aren't exactly _losing_ anything by releasing a banner ad version. look at it this way; anyone who would be willing to download a crack for the full w/ads version so they didn't have to look at the banner ads would be just as willing to just warez the normal, pay full version with no banner ads by default. in fact this kind of person has probably _already_ warezed the normal full version, and is unaffected by the announcement of the banner-ad version.
anyway i'm sure it's easier to write an s/n generator for the full version than a cracked.dll that makes the banner ad window not display.Which isn't to say people won't make the cracked.dll version anyway; a lot of the time defeating copy protection is done sheerly for the challenge and fun of it, not to actually use the program in question. Basically the more complex the copy protection is to break, the more interesting to break it is and thus the more likely it is to get broken by somebody. I know this one old guy who's been an expert at cracking software protection since he started doing it on the apple//.. these days he actually goes and buys all his software legally, but once he's bought it he goes and finds or figures out a way around the copy protection, just because that's more fun than actually putting the real S/N in the dialog box.
Slashdot Mirror
you talk about the two as if they were seperate things.. but in fact if you can control gravity you effectively have time travel cinched. If you take einstein's equations and make the variable for effective mass negative, you wind up with the time variable becoming negative as well. They said something like that in physics class. Or maybe that was when you're travelling faster than the speed of light..? Um, never mind. It isn't important. Trust me, i'm right. And if you don't believe me, i can make some pictures in KPT Bryce for you that will prove my correctness beyond a doubt.
Anyway, it is well known that there is a definate link between gravity-based travel and time distortions. The government scientists at Area 51 have been doing extensive testing and refining of aircraft with a gravity-based engine based on technology recovered from crashed alien spacecraft. It has been well documented that exposure to such technology frequently results in "lost time"-- things in the general area of the gravity engine temporarily move at a faster rate through time than the world around them, causing them to wind up having short amounts of time "disappear". We know this information, by the way, because agent Fox Mulder of the FBI was able to infiltrate Area 51 after the reality warping in the general vicinity after a gravity-based spacecraft malfunctioned overhead his car on the highway outside area 51 and crashed caused, causing Mulder and a high-ranking Area 51 official to temporarily swap minds in an episode spanning two weeks. As a result we were able to get much information about this fascinating technology that is directed gravity propulsion.
-mcc-baka
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS THEFT
> On another note, Hey Rob, what's with the Extrans option? It does the exact same thing as "plain text" now... it used to work..
While what you bring up is a point that probably deserves to be brought up, it's possible that putting it at the end of an anonymous coward post nested three levels deep in a very busy discussion is probably not the most effective word to get yourself heard. Especially not by any member of the slashdot staff.. they don't read _every_ post, and probably won't read yours.
Just a bit of advice.
[personally i've never seen "extrans" work, although it would be really cool if it did.]
Besides the fact that making a place deep in a totally different website open up inside a frame on your website is incredibly obnoxious, and bad design, and irritates and wastes the screenspace of the people viewing, it isn't quite as easy to defend ethically or legally.
( ">You can buy what you're looking for here</A>, can they ban the words "You can buy the ticket from the ticketmaster website at the adress "http://ticketmaster.org/cgi-bin/#$#@@(*U&&!("? What about the words "You can buy the ticket from the ticketmaster outlet on 2343 Westheimer Street"? I see no difference between the three, they're just simple information on where to locate something.
While i know nothing and you should not be listening to me, keep in mind the differences: a link is really nothing more than a statement saying "this is where this piece of information is" in a way that the computer can retrieve that bit of information. attempting to ban that without permission has some pretty serious First Amendment issues. if they ban the HTML <A HREF="http://ticketmaster.org/cgi-bin/#$#@@(*U&&!
Meanwhile framing is a bit more iffy. By framing you are presenting the content as being yours, which has some intellectual property theft/fraud implications which are a great deal less rediculous than whatever basis you'd try to stop linking on. Even if the framing is done in a non-misleading manner, most internet users are not intelligent enough to figure out that the ticketmaster window inside the tickets.com website is a different website.
I suggest if you're going to deep-link to a competitor, you do it so the link opens in a new window. But, again, if you listen to me you're an idiot.
>It still does not stop them from litigation the case over and over.
Hasn't Ticketmaster already sued Microsoft because MSN was deep-linking to them? Does that ruling not apply here? Was there a ruling?
-mcc-baka
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY IS THEFT
things will not really be what i would call acceptable, though, until it's as easy for someone who notices a bad patent to lodge a complaint, have the patent publicly reviewed, and have the patent struck down
as it currently is for a corporation to file a bad patent, get it approved, and then use it to harass/sue/destroy people.
Currently it takes how much money to go into court and have a frivolous patent struck down? There are so many frivolous/dangerous patents out there that no ACLUish organisation could make a dent in them, and each one would be a long, long, drawn out legal struggle that would take forever and drain a huge amount of money. Meanwhile if a corporation has a patent that they should have no right to, and some other group or company annoys them, they can just do a few quick things with the lawyer they already have, and bam, semiinstant results. Unlike someone striking down a patent, who must go all the way to the end of the legal process to get the patent struck down, the corporation abusing their patent only has to go a little way, because these things are _always_ settled out of court. Assuming they even go to court in the first place; the mere threat of a lawsuit is probably enough to get what they want, esp. against companies small enough that having to hire a lawyer to even look into things and make a settlement would be a major problem. Threats cost nothing, and in most cases the patent owner is large enough it will barely hurt them to sue even if they lose and it will destroy the other side to get sued even if they win.
I'm not sure how coherent what i just said was, but just consider that even if the USPTO _IS_ more careful about preventing bad patents from being put into use, if a bad patent does slip through, for the owner to abuse that patent will still be far, far easier than someone preventing the owner from abusing it.
they're mattel. they don't need money to buy people off.
Personally i suspect that, unbeknowst to Wired, Matthew Skala recieved $6,000 in Hot Wheels merchandise as well as one of these things and the full set of these, in exchange for his compliance.
they've already published a long, very good explanation of how exactly the software works. why would it matter whether they leave the software itself available?
they've done what they set out to do, which is expose flaws in the CyberPatrol system and disseminate information on the way [badly] it works. they've managed to shame the programmers behind cyberpatrol badly, even if the people they've shamed cyberpatrol in front of [slashdot] hated cyberpatrol anyway. The point it seemed to me wasn't the software; the point it seemed to me was that they reverse-engineered cyberpatrol. The software was just an extra, just something they posted to prove they were right about everything, and because they'd already written it..
why should they have to bother paying a lawyer, or bothering with _anything_ in court? sure the ACLU would pay for everything, but they'd still wind up being bothered. Why should we expect them to go through that? especially since they've already published the details of what cphack did in such deep detail that it seems that rewriting the program from scratch would be easy to anyone with even relatively elementary C skills.
Now if the article they wrote talking about cphack and reverse-engineering cyberpatrol were being taken down, well, then, that would be rather bothering. But that isn't happening; the settlement seems to concern only the cphack program itself.
and it seems to me that if they led to a long, drawn-out battle in court over cphack, then it would distract the public eye a lot from the real issues at the core of all this.. i think it's a lot more important to encourage people outside slashdot to read the cp-hacking article than encourage people inside slashdot to distribute the cphack program..
maybe i'm very confused, but what they're doing makes sense from where i'm standing.
you'll probably just get out about halfway to mars and then just go into a really elliptical orbit around the sun. don't think there's that much fuel in those things. firing to earth is a HELL of a lot easier; just aim a _little_, fire a _little_, and gravity just does the difficult work for you. and think about it, even if you DID get outside the solar system somehow, space is REALLY large and REALLY empty. the chances of coming across anything are almost nonexistently small.
----
On March 17, 2000, the motorola corporation set the boosters on its 66 Iridium satellites to fire into deep space, into which they flew at random, travelling further and further through the limitless empty void..
By random coincidence, iridium satellite #37 did, about 7.8 billion years later, reach something.
COMMANDER YYYYT: What's going on? why have we stopped?
ENGINEER ALTWK: We are having minor fluctuations in the quantum integrity stabiliser. I have slowed us to General Relativity speeds for about fifty seconds to give it a chance to cool down.
COMMANDER YYYYT: What's broken? Is this bad?
ENGINEER ALTWK: There's no problem. Probably just needs more stasis fluid. It can wait until port, we won't have to stop again.
COMMANDER YYYYT: Alright.
Suddenly there is a deafening thud, and the ship is jarred a bit. The shielding light blinks softly for several seconds.
NGLB: What the hell was that?
Altwyk reaches for the external sensors and sets them in pictoral projection mode. The screens focus on a wad of metal, battered, twisted, and dented from the effects of time, with two jagged, decaying panellike things sticking out, slowly spiralling away.
ENGINEER ALTWK: An asteroid.
NGLB: Damn, for an asteroid it looks pretty wierd.
COMMANDER YYYYT: I've seen wierder.
ENGINEER ALTWK [into intercom] Resuming travel speeds. Disassociation to commence shortly, please sit down.
And thus ended Humanity's final contact with the universe.
"no problem"? um, unless:
.rpm, even if you have rpm installed you can't do much of anything with it.
you're using linux/ppc. or linux/alpha. or linux/dreamcast or linux running on some processor i made in my basement using technology i recovered from a crashed alien spacecraft. or linux on any other non-intel processor.
can't exactly convert one type of machine code to another, now can you? so if you wind up on a non-intel platform and are handed an intel
you could just say that software companies shouldn't be expected to go to the bother of supporting/coding for alternative platforms. i say that's a horrible way to look at it. whether the platform is widely used is a non-issue; even if the platform has no users, that shouldn't matter. one of linux's greatest strengths (OK, one of GNU's greatest strengths) is its cross-platform functionality.. once you have the kernel and gcc and hardware drivers ported, any linux program will go over perfectly fine. So linux erases hardware boundaries; makes the hardsware aspects irrelivant. Which is how things should be. If you ship for one platform only, and make hardware relevant in the least, you are breaking something fundamental about what makes linux powerful.
There _are_ ways around it; they _could_ just compile for all conceivable platforms, and then refuse to test the compiled rpms or verify they work. Would be better than nothing, anyway..
and of course they could just do something where the source is available to any user, but not open; that is, give the user no rights to distribute, reuse, or do anything else with the code beyond tweak and compile it.. but of course then we'd have all kinds of flames against them, because for some reason people are angered by restrictively liscensed source code more than unavailable source code. and they would probably refuse to do it anyway. i think there is something of a problem here.
does AMD's 1-ghz chip, while having the same high clockspeed, have the same level of Innovation?
for example does it Make the Internet More Fun?
**walks away snickering**
> Yes, and I've only seen one ISP (UUNet) which actually uses that as their primary address. Many of the other big ISP's hold on to the .net TLD, but it's nothing more than a redirect to the .com address, which is by your definition another "ridiculous misuse of the namespace."
.net domain is the one that they all use for reverse DNS resolves of people on their networks.
earthlink.net/psi.net, if you want the local big national bethemoth.
swbell.net (and pacbell.net, etc...) basically your major telcoms and thus major DSL providers.
pdq.net and concentric.net. i know nothing about these but they're the only ISPs i ever see ads for around here.
wt.net.
except for the cable access, RoadRunner, netcom and AOL, these are about the only ISPs in the area i can think of off the top of my head. and the
ok, maybe a bit of a nitpick, but still..
pangeasoft has their priorities WAY, WAY out of line. what they REALLY ought to be porting is "gerbils".. NOT nanosaur. :)
:)
of course let's keep in mind this is why Quickdraw 3d was originally created; so that people could _do_ things like porting a 3d app crossplatform ("crossplatform" at the time meaning "windows and mac os", of course) without massive rewrites (although i never saw anyone do this except for the makers of the game "Havoc"). Of course, then OpenGL came along and made QD3D irrelivant, but we didn't _know_ that was going to happen when QD3D first came out.. at the time, sitting there staring for hours at pangeasoft's gerbils demo, and to a lesser extent their (still very cool) 3DTicTacToe and Wormhole 3D demos.. oh man. it just seemed like the coolest thing in the world. Esp. right after we were recovering from Quicktime VR.. we may never find a use for quicktime VR, but damn, it was nifty.
Oh well. Maybe someone could get hold of the gerbils source or something-- i dunno. i can't even find a place to download the binaries anymore, nor can i find a 3dtictactoe or wormhole 3d, or for that matter any of those small yet at the time mind-blowingly cool (3DCalc!!!) original Quickdraw 3D apps.. they used to all be linked from apple's website but now that's all gone. What happened to all this stuff?
What the hell is WRONG with you people??
/. summary (which nobody in their right mind would pay attention to) was inadequate, is just slightly more than i can handle. Especially when some of these posts are at score:3.
SLASHDOT ISN'T JOURNALISM!! OK, so it is sometimes when they post original articles, but this ISN'T one of those times. This is a link, a summary, and a discussion forum. PERIOD. it isn't MEANT to be journalism. it isn't supposed to be "reporting" shit. it isn't a "story". it isn't intended to be accurate or anything. it is intended to give you a LINK, and a vague description as to the link's content. that's IT. the entire point here is, they show you where to read information on the subject and ask you to respond. they are not "reporting facts" in any way, shape or form. they are telling you where to get facts. I'm amazed i have to EXPLAIN this.
the article/headline was phrased in such a way that anyone with half a brain cell could figure out what it meant. esp. the part about "As you might expect, the coursework is (an interdisciplinary approach to) designing and coding games, not playing them." apparently half a braincell is not too common a thing to have, judging from the huge number of people bitching "this is a misleading headline blah blah blah".
Hey, guess what: Actually reading the article IS NOT THAT IMPRESSIVE. Lots of people do it. You haven't really "discovered" anything by finding out, hey, if you read the first couple sentances of the article linked, the headline which is obviously a flippant joke turns out to be somewhat misleading when taken out of context!
so given that none of this was intended to be or attempting to be journalism, why are you people so unable to handle it not being journalism..?
go away and stop cluttering my screen!! if they posted a blatantly misleading summary of something important that's bound to start a flamewar that would be one thing; but no. This is slight irritating goofiness in an article that doesn't matter much.. why do you feel compelled to act offended by it??
I dunno. excuse me if i am overreacting, but more than six semiidentical comments bitching about how the
What we want stopped?
:P
Microsoft throwing a bunch of crud into open protocols, cluttering up the procotol JUST so they can put their names on it, say "look! microsoft did something in creating this standard!" Microsoft does not do extend these things to get a technical benefit from the extention; they do it to show people who's boss, to point out that MIT, the linux community, et all, is NOT in control here; this is MICROSOFT'S world, not theirs, and if they think that a community decision is going to be allowed to dictate what happens, then they have another thing coming. And, of course, in the process of extending, they propeitarize, which directly hurts the community currently using the protocol because it means that for a longish while, the original supporters of the protocol will be unable to adapt their software to be operable with microsoft's supporters; and even after the original supporters support microsoft's extention, the way they do this will more than likely be reverse-engineered and highly dodgy (*cough *cough *SAMBA* cough*).
We don't really want microsoft to stop extending; more importantly what we want is microsoft to design their extentions to the standards in such a way as to ENCOURAGE INEROPABILITY. If you are going to be extending a standard, this is not evil in itself; if you are going to add something to the standard in order to get some kind of feature or benefit that you would not get without the extention, this is almost certainly a good thing. But if whatever is on the other side of the protocol from you does not comply with your extention, the result should be that neither side benefits from the presense of the extention. The result should NOT be interopability. All recent extendable standards i can think of-- HTML being the first to come to mind-- attempt to stress methods by which failure by both ends to support the same extention results in the extention not being used, NOT in the standard becoming nonfunctinonal between the two sides.
a better way to phrase the original question, i think, woudl be: How do we get the media, the public, and everything to the point where microsoft can no longer get away with doing this? Microsoft does not neccicarily need to be stopped in this respect; but what needs to happen is people need to be _aware_ that microsoft is doing this; that microsoft is purposefully breaking functionality in a product _they paid for_ in a situation where that functionality that could have easily be retained. People need to begin asking themselves the question of why microsoft is doing this. People need to be aware of the extent to which microsoft wants everything propeitary to them. If people in general were aware of what was going on, and more importantly UNDERSTOOD it, they would almost certainly disapprove; but instead we wind up with the people (who probably never go to anything requiring more authentication than My Yahoo) just going, "Kerberos? Huh?". You think "propeitary" is even in most people's vocabulary?
I apologize if my writing here is somewhat unwieldy. I've had a bad day.
-mcc-baka
MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1. PH33R.
they make Firewire<->SCSI crossovers already.
they make USB<->ADB crossovers already.
USB<->Firewire crossovers should be relatively easy for any decent peripheral manufacturer who finds a reason to develop them. Fact is though that practically all computers using firewire are macs (which already _have_ USB), and hooking up something firewire to a USB port would just be silly when you consider how little bandwidth USB has and how much bandwidth most firewire devices need. So there wouldn't be much of a target market for a USB<->Firewire crossover; so if such a connector does not already exist, i'd imagine that would be the reason why..
when the consititution of the United States was first being written, most of the people behind it worried that "political parties" would rise into power and ruin the democratic system, the way that they had in Britain.
Political parties rose into power anyway within a fairly short amount of time, and more or less ruined the democratic system in america.
Please, please-- let's not let this happen to ICANN. Never mind whether or not normal "at large membership" voters have much say-- choosing who you vote for on the basis of whether they have a specific orginisation's endorsement, as opposed to the individual candidates themselves, is a recipe for disaster in many ways.
Not that the different candidates shouldn't be _discussed_ on slashdot.. just that if we get to the point where people just go in the booth and vote a "straight democratic ticket" or "straight republican ticket" or "straight slashdot ticket", you can expect all kinds of bad effects.
-mcc-baka
i'm tired
What are you talking about? Amazon can't have the patent on air-- it's taken.
Microsoft got the patent. About five years ago, about the time they bought the Roman Catholic Church.
How were you not aware of this? Apparently you were not a USENET reader, or you definately would have heard about it.
i still like this one better:
Hornyfem, the friendly ircii scriptbot..
hitting on who you think is a sex-starved woman only to discover "she" is actually a man laughing at you.. is bad. hitting on who you think is a sex-starved woman only to discover "she" is actually an inanimate object.. is maybe even worse.
especially the lesbian cybersex chats.
#biteenfem on EFNET more than likely has a lower concentration of actual bisexual teen females than any other place in the entire world.
> I think they pulled the Map in OS8.
They didn't. They just moved it.
The map is still in the "apple extras" folder of every mac os 8 and 9 installation.
Many apps (ok, not many, but a couple) still use the information from the Map control panel to figure out exact geographical location.
the map never shadowed timezones, though, btw.
this is really cool.. i don't think anything like this has ever been done before, really. :)
so the important question is, what are the prices? they're going to have to price low enough that they make it worth it to buy from them instead of the VCD piraters.. esp. since if you buy from a bootlegger, you get a nice physical copy of it on a CD and it doesn't take up hard drive space or whatever. but they should be able to do that, since they will have almost no operating expenses.. just pay for bandwidth, and give the people who made the movie their money and, um, that's it.
Hell, if you wind up with some system where you can pay a small fee to get the movie and appears that most of the money is going to the actual people who made the movie and not to some big theater-owning corporation.. you may get a good bit of money back from some of the rampant over-the-internet VCD pirating. Although you won't get to that point until you're doing something except hong kong films.. And it will only happen with movies that are good.
How's the chineese government feel about this? Exactly how much strict control are they exerting over Hong Kong now that they control it? any?
anyway if the prices are good enough to make it worth it.. oh God, i hope they don't stop with hong kong. i hope they move on to anime.
FOOL!! do NOT take the muppets lightly!! we will destroy you!! :D this is VERY important to some of us; the Muppets take on religion-like importance for some of us. It's even as important to some of us as, say, linux. Perhaps ordinarily you could get away with slightly uninformed posts, but not this time!! THIS TIME YOU'VE GONE TOO FAR!! 4N1M4L \V1LL 0\VN J00 817C|-|!! PH33R!!! AAAUUUUUEGH
What do you mean "relaxed"?? Why were you expecting this to be relaxed? Weren't you paying attention a couple months ago during the "who's your favorite muppet" poll? that's the most heated, impassioned discussion i've seen on slashdot yet. : D There are _strong_ feelings around here on this subject; you best watch yo' step, homeboy
-mcc
"my belly button blew up!"
y'know, they _did_ try to ressurect the muppet "show" in a way about four, five years ago.. i can't remember the name, but i watched a couple episodes (the show was tragically put on at the same time as either the x-files or sliders, i forget which. Either way it was a very difficult choice as to which to watch, and i only chose the new muppets a couple times..) it had some really clever bits in it.. the first episode basically came down to the muppets in some kind of meeting, looking over the ABC fall scedule, and then suddenly realizing the time slot that begins in three minutes didn't have anything in it. and then basically trying to throw together a letterman-style talk show in four minutes. It really did feel a lot like the old-school muppet show, but wasn't as wasn't nearly as consistent. It was kind of hit-or-miss, and about half of the material was kind of dull, but when it hit it was really funny. The stock Mrs. Piggy/Kermit characters weren't technically part of the show being produced itself, but they kept wandering in and out backstage and interfering with things, seeming like a bunch of old people who think they know everything. which was kind of funny to watch. I can't really remember it well enough to pass judgement on it though, really..
The show really wasn't very developed enough though. They were just going out and experimenting, trying to see if they could hit anything that worked. You could tell they were trying really hard, but they didn't always pull the show off the way it should have been. And ABC didn't give them a chance to experiment until they got it right; they pulled the show after about a half a season, and it never got developed to the point where it fufilled its potential. I dunno. There was some kind of rumor floating around that a second season was made but only shown in Hawaii or something wierd like that, but i never found out what was going on with that..
It would be nice if they could somehow recapture the spirit that made everything Jim Henson did so wonderful-- the kind of creative, almost-edgy, almost-dangerous feel to everything he did that what he was doing had never been done before. Whatever else you may have to say about the Muppet Show or early Sesame Street or any of his movies, the fact is you were never quite sure what was about to happen.
As opposed to, say, Muppets in Space, where you could tell _exactly_ what was going to happen, and nothing was unpredictable. That was just sad. Muppet Treasure Island/Christmas Carol was more or less ok, as if the people working on it were violently trying to honor Jim's memory with something wierd, but Muppets In Space felt more like they were burying Jim.. the whole movie just seemed hollow, empty, on autopilot. LIke the soul and the mind of the Muppets were dead but the body was still moving. The hamster was gone but the wheel was still spinning.
i want to see them go back to unpredictability.. i'd like to see something truly different from the muppet franchise again. I'd like to see something as mold-breaking as Labyrinth or Dark Crystal was come out of JH Productions again.. i doubt i ever will.
Really they ought to hire the people who did Sifl and Olly.. -_- That was probably the coolest, most funny thing i've ever seen on a television. And they definately have Jim's wierdness down.. -_-
"cindy crawford's taking off her robe..!!!" <---if you can identify where this came from, give yourself a cookie.
-mcc-baka
Five to one, baby, one in five.. no one here gets out alive, now
::beats sig_11 over the head mercilessly::.. for God's sake, think before you post!!
- looking-for of, say, Labyrinth.
Jim Henson died in 1990 of pnemonia, right about the time Jim Henson Productions became 0wned by disney. And yes, the "new" muppets (i.e. pretty much everything since) has not had quite the same quality. his son has taken over the voice pretty well, the people around him have tried to carry on his style, but still there's a certain life to the muppets that died with Jim Henson. There was a level of depth to the "old" muppets that the people in charge now have trouble capturing. Which is why everything sense has had an extreme hit-or-miss quality, and why all the muppets stuff in the last ten years has stayed rather static-- they can try to emulate Jim's old style, but they can't change style the way Jim could. This is why you've seen _nothing_ from the muppet group in the last ten years coming close to the breathtaking innovation/novelty/creativity/what's-the-word-i'm
"a year or so ago.." bleaugh.
i think about "ponies for sale" and the first image that comes to mind is some long-haired bearded guy on acid, in a pool of his own vomit, pupils dilated, screaming "look at all the pretty horses!!!!".. anyone else have this reaction?
seriously, i think we need to put some of the important UI designers (rasterman, miguel, etc) on large amounts of lsd and other psychadelic drugs in order to increase their creativity. this should be looked upon as something that _has_ to be done in order to compete in terms of UI with the marijuana-soaked haze in cupertino that produced everything that makes the mac os (and mac os x) good to use.
Of course the downside is we'll probably wind up with enlightemnent 0.18's source code just being the words "NUMBER FOUR. NUMBER FOUR. NUMBER FOUR." over and over.. so maybe we should only let them have it during the design phase or something. i dunno.
yes, there will always be cracks around the banner ads.
.dll that makes the banner ad window not display.Which isn't to say people won't make the cracked .dll version anyway; a lot of the time defeating copy protection is done sheerly for the challenge and fun of it, not to actually use the program in question. Basically the more complex the copy protection is to break, the more interesting to break it is and thus the more likely it is to get broken by somebody. I know this one old guy who's been an expert at cracking software protection since he started doing it on the apple //.. these days he actually goes and buys all his software legally, but once he's bought it he goes and finds or figures out a way around the copy protection, just because that's more fun than actually putting the real S/N in the dialog box.
but the thing is they [qualcomm] aren't exactly _losing_ anything by releasing a banner ad version. look at it this way; anyone who would be willing to download a crack for the full w/ads version so they didn't have to look at the banner ads would be just as willing to just warez the normal, pay full version with no banner ads by default.
in fact this kind of person has probably _already_ warezed the normal full version, and is unaffected by the announcement of the banner-ad version.
anyway i'm sure it's easier to write an s/n generator for the full version than a cracked