I've seen roundabouts in the UK, they worked great, especially with intersections that aren't 4-way intersections. I have no problem and in many cases like roundabouts. Around here though, it's a different story. First, they don't build them properly. Yes, you can build a roundabout wrong. Let's start with too small, or the right size, but then has a giant barrier in it that makes it too small. The semis and other large vehicles abhor those, and end up having to drive over the grass/sidewalks to get through. Second, there are tons of idiot drivers around here and they either don't care how they are supposed to act in one, or are too confused/stupid to do so safely. I've even seen a moron come to a complete stop in the roundabout before he eventually took the exit. (The exit was clear, the driver was a moron.) I have lots of other local horror stories of brainless/suicidal driving from here, and even more regarding bicycles, but that's another rant. (Just a note, on average 2/3rds of the bicyclists around here are breaking the law. Just one example, a huge percentage of them are riding against traffic. But since the lazy cops don't want to bother with it, they keep doing it.)
Even before USB based storage was on the market, people were still infecting computers with their junk. Even supposedly 'isolated' computer that had the media drives removed, and with non-worms. The only common denominator was humans doing something that was against policy. So, no - it's not the specific technology, yes- the problem is people.
I will admit that the more you limit a computer using unauthorized stuff, the less likely it is to get infected. On the other hand, it's also less useful. Balance your choices based on need, and live with the consequences.
To try and avoid the lawsuits for selling a defective product. Of course, having this information in the manual instead of viewable on the outside of the packaging will nullify their attempted defense, but it will still slow things down on the legal front. (ianal, I just have an opinion, like everyone else on slashdot.)
Brawn is, among other things, a synonym for strength. Braun is, a long with the rest of his family, a friend of mine, aka a human. Braun also plays various games, including those in which he's the GM, Coordinator, or Referee. "Rule by Braun" definitely does not mean controlling others by brute force. See, he's a geek also, and he goes for outsmarting the troublemakers and trying to keep things working smoothly.
This isn't being a spelling nazi, it's just people either pointing out the error so it may be corrected and hopefully not repeated, or else it's people pointing and laughing.
By the way, in D&D the Vorpal weapons are traditionally only treated at +3 with respect to hit and damage, but they have the special power to lop off heads if the die rolls high enough. Also, TSR advised against changing the bonuses on those weapons, so if your GM was handing out +5 Vorpal weapons, he was Monty Hauling you.
There's no such thing as a pirate flag in those files.
Now you can search for anything that doesn't have the full metadata or tags, but that still doesn't say what it's source is, but at least they index better. You can search for ones with non-conformist metadata like "rIppED bY BoZo" or other weird stuff. But no matter what you choose to do, it's going to be on your decisions since the computer has no way of telling which of these you legally own.
Now some people have mentioned audio watermarks. Those are only going to exist if someone added them to the music. Those are almost never going to come from ones ripped by pirates, but rather might come from those downloaded from commercial sites like itunes. (I have no idea if itunes watermarks their audio, but it's just an example.)
If it doesn't have a method of removing the smells, it will fail like all the others. (You do know these things have been failing since something like the 1950s, right?)
I read the article, and it sounds like they don't have a solution for this. Heck, they even talk about using coffee beans between testing smells to act as a nasal palette cleanser. I'd guess from that little tidbit that not only have they not solved the problem, but have definitely encountered it in use and have no clue what to do.
Of course, the more the people being tested know about how it's tested, the easier it is for them to cheat. (Plenty of past history from both Nvidia and ATI doing that with video cards.)
(Note: Always investigate claims of benchmark cheating, sometimes it's a misunderstanding. One example deals with a claim of cheating because an optimization routine found the same process being hit constantly, so it cached it. There were screams of cheating and 'tuning' the driver to trick the benchmark when all it really was is caching doing what it's supposed to. Even though it did give artificially high scores in that one test. Once the issue was known, the benchmarkers changed their program to not do a stupid repetitive test that would just get cached.)
Of course this isn't an issue of cheating, but it sure feels like it. Makes you wonder what AMD is really worried about...
To pay not only encourages them to do it again, but helps finance their next criminal activity.
You have no guarantee other than the word of a criminal and extortionist that they won't do it anyhow, or jack you for more cash next month.
Terrorism?!?! Not unless your system runs life support systems or something. It's amazing what some bozos call terrorism... No, I take that back, they tend to call everything they don't like terrorism, even unpopular ice cream flavors.
Protecting the stockholders. Only in the short term, as in this quarter. Spending that million to fix the systems and keep them more secure is a much better deal. After all, how many times will you pay out that $100k? How long do you think it will stay that low? And what will your customers think about a company that hands big money checks out to every hooligan that sends them a threat?
By the way, now that the criminals know your company is a sucker, you can bet they are just lining up to take potshots at your bank accounts.
I don't know if paying extortionists is illegal there, but it's never a good idea.
Imagine if lots of sites started requiring their own custom apps. Pretty soon your device (computer, ijunk, etc) would be filled with just that garbage, and the browser would be relegated to homebrew and marginal sites.
Bad idea, even worse than the ten billion toolbars that everyone already wants you to load into your browser. (I immediately delete any toolbar, they are unwanted, unnecessary, and very annoying.)
I'm not an expert, so others can add a lot to this, but here are some reasons I've heard of from the government in the past. Those satellites are expensive high-tech toys that a lot of countries either can't make or afford. Launching them is also expensive and few of the countries that can afford them even have launching facilities. The data from those satellites is valuable for military purposes, and always suspected of spying by everyone else. The ground stations for those things tend to be expensive as well. How many redundant and mega expensive systems can you get your country to deploy?
That's pretty much all the reasons I've heard from various gov sites over the decades, and I'm sure it's all still valid, and only a fraction of the reasons out there.
At least not with non-homemade devices. Although it generates a neutrons, which pretty much ignore shielding, if it's portable it's not going to generate that much. Also, it's not a neutron detector. Now here's the fun part, properly manufactured nuclear devices are shielded to such a level you could use it to shield yourself from other radiation sources. They do NOT show up as radiation sources until you detonate them. Any neutron source that would cause the core to become so radioactive it can be detected is going to be impractical and probably be the source of other issues if used.
As to uniqueness, the process being used is known, and various government agencies have multiple detection systems for nuclear weapons, but it's not like they openly talk about them.
All in all, it's a neat thing he did. Hollywood is full of B.S., but it might still work on poorly made homejobs. Of course, one of those shadowy government groups may already have something like it.
It is old news, months old. We've been able to do it here for months now (only several weeks after the announcement by Redbox), and we are definitely NOT a test market.
Activities by public employees in public areas or viewable from said areas while in the performance of their jobs can not be considered private. IANAL, but several judges have made the above statements several times over the past decade. (That is a paraphrase, not an exact quote.)
So basically, if you've already paid (preordered) your copy, you get a demo, something that's used to promote the game and entice you to buy it. That's kind of like the drunk asking the bar owner if he'd like a drink...
resistant to potato blight does NOT mean "...less effort and greater use of artificial fertilizers..." ! Potato Blight is a huge destroyer of entire potato crops worldwide and a cause of famine. Have you ever heard of the Great Famine, or the Irish Potato Famine? If you took history in school, I'm sure they covered it, all my schools did, multiple times. Guess what, it was caused by the potato blight, the very thing this experiment was working towards preventing or at least reducing it's impact when it hits.
Most of the fears of GM foods are unreasonable and just bizarre if you've passed 6th grade science class. You won't get alien genes from eating them. The risk of allergic reaction is about the same as with any new crop variant. They won't turn you into some kind of science fantasy monster.
Hmmm, so a law in another country that he might not know about and would be considered utterly bizarre and alien from his country is being used to persecute him for something that he didn't even do in or to that country, and in fact, he didn't even do as he simply provided a link to someone elses book, which is what says the things that he's getting arrested for, so for that insane chain of circumstances, you think he's the equivalent of some low-life thug and somehow he should have been omnisciently aware that he would be at risk of arrest in that country?
Short version, that's utterly illogical and unconscionable. You're either nuts or a total douche. Hope you don't travel to any other countries, you never know what b.s. they'll arrest you for.
yeah, RMS, like various ships, or the root mean square, or risk management solutions, or roosevelt middle school, or so many others. Only an idiot or an egotistical jerk that's also an idiot would refer to themselves by a tla (that's three letter acronym).
No, I've never met the guy, but if he really refers to himself as rms, the previous comments stand. If it's just the media doing this, then those 'reporters' are the ones the comments refer to.
I can't say anything about calibrating, but an easy way to check it's functionality and great way to demonstrate science is as follows:
Go outside, preferably during the day, take a reading. This is background radiation, you live in it your entire life, it varies, and the sun puts out a lot so it will be lower during the night. Don't panic, Hollywood, like usual, got the science wrong. (Think about it, how often do cars actually explode in real life. Yeah, Hollywood science is useless.)
Great, now go inside a building, take another reading. If you've got access to a nice sturdy concrete building with a basement, or some caves, those are even better. See how much it dropped? That's because of the building (or earth and solid rock) blocking the radiation coming from the sky.
Now keeping an eye on the changing levels is probably what someone in Japan really wants, but you might have to ask someone that's in the science department at a university to find out what the readings were before the Fukishima incident. Also, distance from source will effect intensity by a lot! So a chunk of radioactive material 1 meter away will read much much higher than one 10 meters away. Since the sun and other stars are so far away, the measly distance of the Earths diameter won't make much different to those, so unless there's a flare or something, only the terrestrial sources will be a big worry.
Anyhow, this is all high school stuff, or it used to be before they started dumbing down science in schools, so it's easy to find books about it in most libraries.
As a side note, you can NOT detect a modern unexploded nuke with a geiger counter, their cases are so heavily shielded you can use them for radiation shielding. Again, Hollywood is so full of it.:)
Slashdot Mirror
sounds to me like 'interfering with a police investigation' and 'tampering with evidence'.
I've seen roundabouts in the UK, they worked great, especially with intersections that aren't 4-way intersections.
I have no problem and in many cases like roundabouts.
Around here though, it's a different story.
First, they don't build them properly. Yes, you can build a roundabout wrong. Let's start with too small, or the right size, but then has a giant barrier in it that makes it too small. The semis and other large vehicles abhor those, and end up having to drive over the grass/sidewalks to get through.
Second, there are tons of idiot drivers around here and they either don't care how they are supposed to act in one, or are too confused/stupid to do so safely.
I've even seen a moron come to a complete stop in the roundabout before he eventually took the exit. (The exit was clear, the driver was a moron.)
I have lots of other local horror stories of brainless/suicidal driving from here, and even more regarding bicycles, but that's another rant. (Just a note, on average 2/3rds of the bicyclists around here are breaking the law. Just one example, a huge percentage of them are riding against traffic. But since the lazy cops don't want to bother with it, they keep doing it.)
1984 called and George Orwell wants everyone to stop stealing his copyrighted dystopian society.
shhh! There's no such thing as Ninjas. And if you don't quiet down they might hear you and come and kill us all in the night... :)
Even before USB based storage was on the market, people were still infecting computers with their junk. Even supposedly 'isolated' computer that had the media drives removed, and with non-worms. The only common denominator was humans doing something that was against policy. So, no - it's not the specific technology, yes- the problem is people.
I will admit that the more you limit a computer using unauthorized stuff, the less likely it is to get infected. On the other hand, it's also less useful. Balance your choices based on need, and live with the consequences.
To try and avoid the lawsuits for selling a defective product. Of course, having this information in the manual instead of viewable on the outside of the packaging will nullify their attempted defense, but it will still slow things down on the legal front. (ianal, I just have an opinion, like everyone else on slashdot.)
Brawn is, among other things, a synonym for strength.
Braun is, a long with the rest of his family, a friend of mine, aka a human. Braun also plays various games, including those in which he's the GM, Coordinator, or Referee. "Rule by Braun" definitely does not mean controlling others by brute force. See, he's a geek also, and he goes for outsmarting the troublemakers and trying to keep things working smoothly.
This isn't being a spelling nazi, it's just people either pointing out the error so it may be corrected and hopefully not repeated, or else it's people pointing and laughing.
By the way, in D&D the Vorpal weapons are traditionally only treated at +3 with respect to hit and damage, but they have the special power to lop off heads if the die rolls high enough. Also, TSR advised against changing the bonuses on those weapons, so if your GM was handing out +5 Vorpal weapons, he was Monty Hauling you.
It does now
There's no such thing as a pirate flag in those files.
Now you can search for anything that doesn't have the full metadata or tags, but that still doesn't say what it's source is, but at least they index better.
You can search for ones with non-conformist metadata like "rIppED bY BoZo" or other weird stuff.
But no matter what you choose to do, it's going to be on your decisions since the computer has no way of telling which of these you legally own.
Now some people have mentioned audio watermarks. Those are only going to exist if someone added them to the music. Those are almost never going to come from ones ripped by pirates, but rather might come from those downloaded from commercial sites like itunes. (I have no idea if itunes watermarks their audio, but it's just an example.)
If it doesn't have a method of removing the smells, it will fail like all the others.
(You do know these things have been failing since something like the 1950s, right?)
I read the article, and it sounds like they don't have a solution for this. Heck, they even talk about using coffee beans between testing smells to act as a nasal palette cleanser. I'd guess from that little tidbit that not only have they not solved the problem, but have definitely encountered it in use and have no clue what to do.
Of course, the more the people being tested know about how it's tested, the easier it is for them to cheat.
(Plenty of past history from both Nvidia and ATI doing that with video cards.)
(Note: Always investigate claims of benchmark cheating, sometimes it's a misunderstanding. One example deals with a claim of cheating because an optimization routine found the same process being hit constantly, so it cached it. There were screams of cheating and 'tuning' the driver to trick the benchmark when all it really was is caching doing what it's supposed to. Even though it did give artificially high scores in that one test. Once the issue was known, the benchmarkers changed their program to not do a stupid repetitive test that would just get cached.)
Of course this isn't an issue of cheating, but it sure feels like it. Makes you wonder what AMD is really worried about...
To pay not only encourages them to do it again, but helps finance their next criminal activity.
You have no guarantee other than the word of a criminal and extortionist that they won't do it anyhow, or jack you for more cash next month.
Terrorism?!?! Not unless your system runs life support systems or something. It's amazing what some bozos call terrorism... No, I take that back, they tend to call everything they don't like terrorism, even unpopular ice cream flavors.
Protecting the stockholders. Only in the short term, as in this quarter. Spending that million to fix the systems and keep them more secure is a much better deal. After all, how many times will you pay out that $100k? How long do you think it will stay that low? And what will your customers think about a company that hands big money checks out to every hooligan that sends them a threat?
By the way, now that the criminals know your company is a sucker, you can bet they are just lining up to take potshots at your bank accounts.
I don't know if paying extortionists is illegal there, but it's never a good idea.
Imagine if lots of sites started requiring their own custom apps. Pretty soon your device (computer, ijunk, etc) would be filled with just that garbage, and the browser would be relegated to homebrew and marginal sites.
Bad idea, even worse than the ten billion toolbars that everyone already wants you to load into your browser. (I immediately delete any toolbar, they are unwanted, unnecessary, and very annoying.)
I'm not an expert, so others can add a lot to this, but here are some reasons I've heard of from the government in the past.
Those satellites are expensive high-tech toys that a lot of countries either can't make or afford.
Launching them is also expensive and few of the countries that can afford them even have launching facilities.
The data from those satellites is valuable for military purposes, and always suspected of spying by everyone else.
The ground stations for those things tend to be expensive as well.
How many redundant and mega expensive systems can you get your country to deploy?
That's pretty much all the reasons I've heard from various gov sites over the decades, and I'm sure it's all still valid, and only a fraction of the reasons out there.
At least not with non-homemade devices.
Although it generates a neutrons, which pretty much ignore shielding, if it's portable it's not going to generate that much. Also, it's not a neutron detector.
Now here's the fun part, properly manufactured nuclear devices are shielded to such a level you could use it to shield yourself from other radiation sources. They do NOT show up as radiation sources until you detonate them. Any neutron source that would cause the core to become so radioactive it can be detected is going to be impractical and probably be the source of other issues if used.
As to uniqueness, the process being used is known, and various government agencies have multiple detection systems for nuclear weapons, but it's not like they openly talk about them.
All in all, it's a neat thing he did. Hollywood is full of B.S., but it might still work on poorly made homejobs. Of course, one of those shadowy government groups may already have something like it.
It is old news, months old. We've been able to do it here for months now (only several weeks after the announcement by Redbox), and we are definitely NOT a test market.
Activities by public employees in public areas or viewable from said areas while in the performance of their jobs can not be considered private.
IANAL, but several judges have made the above statements several times over the past decade.
(That is a paraphrase, not an exact quote.)
what if the cop is a total dope?
So basically, if you've already paid (preordered) your copy, you get a demo, something that's used to promote the game and entice you to buy it.
That's kind of like the drunk asking the bar owner if he'd like a drink...
Every law made that could be abused, has been abused. There's every reason to believe this will be abused as well.
I like using the term 'ijunk'. :D
(Doesn't mean I wouldn't like to get some, but I can't afford any of them.)
resistant to potato blight does NOT mean "...less effort and greater use of artificial fertilizers..." !
Potato Blight is a huge destroyer of entire potato crops worldwide and a cause of famine.
Have you ever heard of the Great Famine, or the Irish Potato Famine? If you took history in school, I'm sure they covered it, all my schools did, multiple times. Guess what, it was caused by the potato blight, the very thing this experiment was working towards preventing or at least reducing it's impact when it hits.
Most of the fears of GM foods are unreasonable and just bizarre if you've passed 6th grade science class. You won't get alien genes from eating them. The risk of allergic reaction is about the same as with any new crop variant. They won't turn you into some kind of science fantasy monster.
Hmmm, so a law in another country that he might not know about and would be considered utterly bizarre and alien from his country is being used to persecute him for something that he didn't even do in or to that country, and in fact, he didn't even do as he simply provided a link to someone elses book, which is what says the things that he's getting arrested for, so for that insane chain of circumstances, you think he's the equivalent of some low-life thug and somehow he should have been omnisciently aware that he would be at risk of arrest in that country?
Short version, that's utterly illogical and unconscionable. You're either nuts or a total douche. Hope you don't travel to any other countries, you never know what b.s. they'll arrest you for.
yeah, RMS, like various ships, or the root mean square, or risk management solutions, or roosevelt middle school, or so many others.
Only an idiot or an egotistical jerk that's also an idiot would refer to themselves by a tla (that's three letter acronym).
No, I've never met the guy, but if he really refers to himself as rms, the previous comments stand. If it's just the media doing this, then those 'reporters' are the ones the comments refer to.
I can't say anything about calibrating, but an easy way to check it's functionality and great way to demonstrate science is as follows:
:)
Go outside, preferably during the day, take a reading. This is background radiation, you live in it your entire life, it varies, and the sun puts out a lot so it will be lower during the night. Don't panic, Hollywood, like usual, got the science wrong. (Think about it, how often do cars actually explode in real life. Yeah, Hollywood science is useless.)
Great, now go inside a building, take another reading. If you've got access to a nice sturdy concrete building with a basement, or some caves, those are even better. See how much it dropped? That's because of the building (or earth and solid rock) blocking the radiation coming from the sky.
Now keeping an eye on the changing levels is probably what someone in Japan really wants, but you might have to ask someone that's in the science department at a university to find out what the readings were before the Fukishima incident.
Also, distance from source will effect intensity by a lot! So a chunk of radioactive material 1 meter away will read much much higher than one 10 meters away. Since the sun and other stars are so far away, the measly distance of the Earths diameter won't make much different to those, so unless there's a flare or something, only the terrestrial sources will be a big worry.
Anyhow, this is all high school stuff, or it used to be before they started dumbing down science in schools, so it's easy to find books about it in most libraries.
As a side note, you can NOT detect a modern unexploded nuke with a geiger counter, their cases are so heavily shielded you can use them for radiation shielding.
Again, Hollywood is so full of it.