But that attitude fails the WWMI test utterly: those who need it the most are the least capable of installing it on their own.
If it came in the installer, and if a checkbox was set by default to provide assistance (not necessarily privacy assistance, just assistance in general) then the Moms of the world could get their cute puppy dog helpers. Those of use who find such agents condescending would turn them off (no doubt b!tching to slashdot the whole time), and the author would provide a way to allow us to default it "off" in future installations.
Oh, I absolutely agree with you on all the above points. This was simply a slashdot post of an idea, not a design for review (thus the 'something like' phrase above.) If we were to sit down and figure out what it actually should say, I imagine that would take rather longer.
That said, it's an incredibly tricky problem. When reduced to the "WWMI" problem (What Would Mom Install) it's apparent that you can't say things like "Helps protect privacy by preventing the browser from accepting cookies." Not only does my mom not know what a cookie is, she doesn't know what a browser is. She knows only that the blue "e" is the internet, or that now the red watermelon thing is the internet (in addition to poor cookie management, I think Firefox has horrible icons.)
I was serious when I mentioned an agent such as "Foxy" (stupid name.) Perhaps the checkbox should be labeled "[ ] Turn on 'Scorchy the Fox' to help me protect my online privacy." Maybe the icon on the toolbar could be a little henhouse, and Scorchy could come out belching feathers to offer suggestions about downloads, typing in names and passwords, accepting cookies, etc. While this probably ranks way up there among my more stupid ideas, the fact is many "normal" users absolutely love these cute agents. Clippy, Rocky the Dog, or whatever other Office Assistants come with Office these days, are really friendly ways to help uncomfortable people grasp difficult technical issues.
Out of the box (or out of the 'download' folder, I should say) Firefox has really poor cookie management. I have it set to prompt, but once I deny a site permission and realize I want to do business with them it takes many mouseclicks and a lot of stupid scrollbar searching to hunt down the cookieblock and delete it.
There are some cookie management extensions out there, but for "normal" people to better manage their privacy (or even to realize they have privacy right that they can manage) I'd like to see "prompt always, deny third party" turned on by default, and a cookie toolbar/rightclick option that allows you to accept/decline/delete them. As a matter of fact, that would be a nice option for the Firefox installer: a checkbox that says something like "[ ] Help me manage my privacy rights online." We could debate whether or not it should be on or off by default.
Or, weirder yet, what about something like the infamous Clippy? "Hi, I'm Foxy, and I'm here to help you with online privacy so you don't become a victim of identity theft, or a pawn of corporate marketing strategies!"
Re:I know it's a cliché movie, but I can't he
on
Ending Spam
·
· Score: 1
If suddenly the masses are educated on spam filtering, wouldn't spammers just adobt tactics to avoid them?
But that's exactly what we've been seeing over the years.
Granny has never filtered a spam in her life. The ISPs have taken up automated spam filtering on her behalf. That's why the spammers can't stand still and let just us techies filter their sludge. The techies took the fight to the next level, blocking spam further up the chain so the benefits of spam-blocking translated to everyone. Thus, we've seen the counterevolution of spam -- when "viagra" got blocked we saw simple 133t-sp33k substitutions for things like "vi4gra"; with the advent of Bayes filtering we now see random text words combined with pictures of the real spam text.
The spam filterers should have taken a page from the hospitals. Doctors NEVER issue prescriptions for vancomycin outside of a hospital, in hopes that the practices that have led to so many antibiotic-resistant diseases wouldn't allow bugs to evolve to resist vancomycin. They kept the most potent stuff in reserve. Like them, the filterers should never have given Bayes filtering to companies like AOL. If they just quietly ran it on their own boxes, they'd be spam free today.
Re:You can't catch it all
on
Ending Spam
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
You've missed the last two years in spammer technology, haven't you?
Spam is no longer simply the domain of a giant server with a huge database. It's increasingly being sent out by zombie PCs, infected with viruses or trojans. Spammers pay the zombie-farmers to send their crap. Zombies send the email masquerading as the PC owner, using their credentials. Sender-ID? No problem, he's got one. SMTP? Sure, use the victim's server.
Zombies mean that no matter what technology is used for sending validated, signed, pre-paid, whatever email, the zombies will have access to those resources and will still spew their crap. No anti-spam server technologies are going to prevent Windows machines from getting infested.
I was actually thinking of the HUD in Red Orchestra when I wrote that. It was really cool to have a game that didn't tell you too much: that the magazine is 'heavy' is useful and realistic, that it has 4 rounds is way over the top for what a Russian soldier had to deal with. It's a great minimalist interface, and very "period" for that game.
I still don't like things like enemies get "red" names and friendlies get "green" names. If names are even necessary (and they're not, really) everyone should have a "white" name, and you better switch your Eyeball-IFF-Mark 1 to "on" before pulling the trigger. Of course, you can't really afford to turn off any options in a game situation. If you do, the time you spend identifying a silhouette is time your fully HUD-equipped opponent is using to place your forehead in his crosshairs.
The more I think about it, the more this could really enhance realism to gaming by removing onscreen clutter.
It'll be interesting to try it out. I like to play America's Army in a darkened room, and for total immersion I'd love to get rid of all the status bars, bullet counts, magazine counts, health, steadiness, objectives, etc. Just show me a picture out the soldiers eyes. A small glowing compass and current weapon indicator down below my line of sight would be perfect. In a firefight or tense "scan for opfor" situation, all you see is either nothing or targets. Once the action has passed, though, you can steal a quick glance down to see how you're doing for ammo, is there a medic call, etc. And as in the real world, when you divert attention away from the situation to check on the mundane details, you might miss something.
Yeah, this looks really interesting. It might not improve my frag rate, but it sure could improve my enjoyment.
It's not an unrealistic presumption. It's a case of "if they build it, support will come" or more likely "if they sell a million, support will come faster."
The press release said that several games will release support for it yet this year. And even if they don't, given the abilities of the community I expect third parties will write mods for the biggies, such as WoW and UT 2K4. Even if Blizzard provides native WoW support for it, I suspect other WoW plugin authors will rush to add even more functionality.
Regarding your other question: who looks at their keyboard? I don't know, I painted mine black a couple years ago:-)
Actually, there are several environmental problems with drilling in ANWR. The effects of an elevated pipeline would be perhaps the smallest. Yes, the caribou have shown to have been frightened by the Alaskan pipeline, but that may be something the animals hunger may drive them to accept. At best it's still an unknown, and people can argue both sides of the animal behavior issue.
There are real demonstrable problems, though. The first is the geologists need more detailed imagery of the subterranian geology. The way to obtain this is to drive a train of equipment (several large trucks with soft tires) around the area in a grid pattern, stopping occasionally to detonate an explosive charge beneath one of the trucks and measure the echoes from the others. The first time the ANWR was explored, they drove a one mile grid. They now want to drive it again in a 1000 foot grid. The tire damage to the tundra caused those 20+ years ago is still almost as visible as it was when it first occurred. They now need to drive over 25 times as much tundra. And this is just for exploration -- no drilling yet.
There's a different problem, too, and understanding it requires a bit of knowledge. To bring the heavy drilling and construction equipment in requires a road that can support very large trucks. What they did in the arctic petroleum reserve was to make a temporary road from ice. The winter before construction they sprayed water from tanker trucks to construct a road solid enough to support their gear; they spent the rest of that first winter trucking in all the equipment, pipe, and storage tanks they needed to build the drilling rigs. When spring arrived the ice road melted, leaving not too much damage behind. And now the road is gone: everything consumed at the sites must be ferried in and out by helicopters, while the oil is pumped out the pipeline. Ice roads are not a bad approach, and are proven effective.
The problem is that liquid water required to make the road is "perishable" in the arctic. It can be trucked only a short time before risk of freezing solid in the tanker truck requires it be emptied. This gives the tanker trucks an effective range of about 20 miles from fresh water. The first arctic fields (to the west of ANWR) had adequate local water supplies. But the ANWR is a desert climate and has very few lakes deep enough to have liquid water beneath their ice. As a matter of fact, the lakes that are within 20 miles don't even have enough liquid water needed to produce the road required. This means that they will basically need to drain the local lakes dry to produce the road. Draining a lake means virtually every fish in it will die. Draining all the lakes means all the fish in the region will die. Fish are a vital component of the food chain in ANWR, and are the primary food of the native carnivores. And with the climate being close to desert, there is little chance of the lakes refilling themselves the next summer -- even if they are restocked, there won't be enough liquid water beneath the ice the next winter.
The only counter I have to your suggestion is that real-world employment is usually so far removed from acadamia that whether you enter your major field or not won't make a difference as far as the actual lessons you end up learning.
Usually, the real-world lessons you learn include: identify who will take advantage of you; identify people you can trust for assistance; discover that you misjudged your boss' penchant for sadism; salaries sometimes seem to have precious little to do with who does the real work; everything costs even more than in school; HR is going to screw up your paperwork; etc. You'll learn all of them equally well whether you intern for Google, Microsoft, or Septic-Kleen.
Only a pirate would watch offline. Or perhaps only a pirate would take his portable machine offline for more than 30 days.
Picture a car system with wi-fi. You pull into the garage at night, and your car media player says "Oh, good, here's an internet connection, let me quick update my media player authorizations." It's good for another 30 days. Or your portable media player, when you bring it online to upload more music, it'll establish the connection then.
And those farmers out in Bumblestump, North Dakota, who may never get internet access? Sony'll will be happy to sell them a "car-authorizing-kit" which will just be a secured wi-fi to phone internet bridge (and probably a $5.00 month subscription.)
Yeah, this is the greatest marketing idea evar. They'll probably sell over a hundred of them!
Besides, what's to prevent a hacker from filtering out this self-destruct code from the downstream content anyway? I mean, it's not like this internet connection is protected or anything. If the content provider sends a packet to reflash the player, just don't let it get to the player. Have something in between to filter it out.
Just to answer the question (not to defend the stupidity of DRM systems) they'll encrypt the entire phone-home channel. The players are not going to even spin up the discs unless they're online to the mothership, and have an "approval to play" ticket in their hands. As an outsider without access to the contents of the encrypted stream, you won't be able to tell a good packet from one with the evil bit set. They might not even be "individual packet" based in that they could require a complete, continuous stream. A simplistic way to look at it would be to give them numbered packets, meaning don't process packet #38 until you've received and processed packet #37. Even if you killed off the "evil bit" packet (say you somehow knew that #37 was the self-destruct packet), the protocol would have your player re-requesting #37 before it would proceed to #38 to authorize your new BLU-RAY of "Star Wars Episode 10: Venegance of the Billionaires." And when #37 arrives it turns your machine into landfill.
This is going to take some tricky secure hardware to pull all this off. The guys who used to decrypt satellite TV used some pretty fancy equipment to read the firmware in the smart cards so they could reverse engineer the protocols. I expect these players are likely to be eggshell fragile, destroying themselves at the drop of a pin rather than let some hacker have his way with a logic probe. And that means Joe Sixpack is going to have a lot of dead players initially, meaning these things will get a crap reputation right out of the blocks. Viva DivX!
I don't feel bad that Sony's plan involves hobbling themseleves. I loathe Sony simply because they've been pimping copy protection / DRM since forever.
I also don't plan to buy one. There's just so little that they're releasing on disc that I want to watch that it really doesn't make sense. (I rarely use my DVD player now.) Anyway I figure that someone will crack the protection sooner rather than later, and anything people really want to watch will hit the torrents soon enough.
What I do predict is that we'll see a repeat of the Hughes satellite TV fiasco. Remember the market for satellite TV decoders and smart cards; and Hughes sending down a smart-card self-destruct program a byte at a time in their update logic? That's what the whole "self-destruct" quote in TFA made me think of.
Regardless, the pirates are going to make their copies. And those copies are going to get redistributed. It's just that now they're going to actively piss regular customers off far more than ever. I wish them lots of luck with all that, and I hope they get everything they're due.
I liked this line describing the patent from El Reg: "rotating an input device to navigate in a linear fashion through a user interface"
Did Sony not patent the scroll wheel on the Clie? Has Sony not used this on cell phones, too? Those devices were introduced in the 90s, not 2002 as Microsoft's prior art patent claims.
I walked into the local Target store with a CF with a dozen pictures for my brother in law. They were pictures of "warranty work" on his roof, so I didn't care about quality, all I knew is I didn't want to spend the money printing them on my Canon pixma inkjet (after paper and ink, it's about $0.60 per photo, and about 90-120 seconds each to print.)
30 minutes and $0.20 per picture later, I had my photos in hand. The photographic quality of the pictures is excellent, but the nicest part is that they're exposed on traditional photo paper and developed chemically. That means they'll have an equal lifetime to that of other color photos, rather than fading the way inkjet inks frequently do.
I was pleasantly surprised -- I thought they'd just print digital photos off on some dye-sub or thermal transfer printer and call it good enough, so I wasn't expecting much. Now, if I have more than 20 pictures it is not only cheaper but faster to get in my car and drive to Target than to wait for 20 pictures to come out of the Canon.
If you want to help yourself dodge some of this you can go to http://www.optoutprescreen.com, a web site run by the big four credit reporting agencies. I got a "preapproval" spam from a bank, and they had the 1-888-5-OPTOUT number listed, or the optoutprescreen website. I went there and chose to be permanently delisted.
I hope this will give me a "smaller profile" with respect to the identity thieves, in that I won't have all this account activity going on all the time. Some of the ID thief rings seem to be watching for these "in transit." Well, now my numbers won't be in transit as much.
By the way, you probably shouldn't just click on the link above. I mean, this is Slashdot after all. I could be an evil phisher trying to dupe you*. Always consider the source.
*I'm not, of course, but you really have no way of knowing that based on what I say.
Hate to demolish your conspiracy theory, but there's actually a cottage industry built around stealing from major retailers.
I've seen a price-list that was taken as evidence from a professional shoplifter. They were paid something like 75 cents for each packet of some product, 50 cents per packet for others. They delivered the stolen goods to a guy with a truck, where they were paid. The trucker worked for a fence, who operated an warehouse selling on the gray market to ethically-challenged convenience store owners and flea-market booth operators. They had a fleet of trucks and a warehouse. They ran a repackaging and reboxing plant. They were founded and funded entirely on shoplifting from large chain stores. And similar operations have been uncovered in several cities around the United States. (I was just trying to google for a link to a PDF of the evidence, but I don't remember the right keywords to find the article at the moment.)
Yet you think the emphasis on "a con or two" is some kind of smokescreen, and that this is somehow the fault of retailers selling crap, and going under as a result? Retailers are being plundered by some pretty sophisticated crime rings, and it's a big money operation. They're taking it very seriously.
Technology can never totally solve such a thing. At some point you have to just give up and admit that a certain percentage of people are out there having fun cheating the system and there's not a damned thing you can do about it except plan ahead for it.
Ummm... no. There's always something you can do about it.
Thieves are like viruses. If a particular theft is profitable (fake receipts, for example), they'll repeat it and exploit it. As more thieves learn about it, more thieves will attempt that theft. So the stores will adapt, and put in some technology to defeat the faked receipts.
But the thieves also learn and adapt, and start looking for new ways to defraud retailers. So the stores learn and counter.
The point I'm making is that if a store "stands still" and does nothing about a particular type of fraud, then that store will get sucked dry as more and more thieves learn about the fraud. There is no such thing as a "tiny loss per quarter". Maybe the first quarter, yes, but by the second, it will double. Left unchecked, in a year it'll be a hemmorhage of red ink.
Investing the money wisely in anti-theft technology (of all sorts, both hardware systems like RFID and software systems like giant databases) does pay off. As I mentioned, the ongoing frauds need to be stopped. Also the fraud tactics that are discovered by one retailer are quickly shared with others via consultants and professional organizations. These new threats also need to be countered (or prepared for) as quickly as possible to minimize losses.
As an earlier poster mentioned, the retailers keep the numbers secret. However, you're correct in estimating that anti-theft technologies can cost large organizations millions of dollars per year. And they pay for themseleves. Think about that.
It's a problem for all retailers, large and small alike.
The large retailers are being targeted by organized criminal fraud gangs. These are people who learn how the retailer does business (and learn it anonymously) and then take advantage of the lapses in security. They learn how to steal large amounts at one time. The "stamped out of a mold" nature of chain stores means that once they learn how to do a crime in Hayward, California, they can tell their buddies "do this to steal at these stores everywhere, from Orlando to New York."
The smaller retailers are hurt because of the economies of scale: even 'casual' shoplifting at a Mom and Pop store can sometimes mean the difference between making the weekly payroll or not.
But every one of those retailers that survives will take the unrecovered losses back from the paying customers in the form of higher prices.
The larger chains do have one advantage, in that they can spend a large amount of money on systems that will help them identify and prevent some forms of this theft -- receipt tracking as mentioned in the article, for example, isn't something the independent stores typically do. And theft is the primary driver behind RFID tagging of merchandise -- not marketing, as the tinfoil beanie wearers among us might otherwise believe.
Also, while it may seem somewhat strange, there are some smaller unethical stores that purchase "grey market" merchandise; loot that was stolen in bulk from the big chains by the gangs I mentioned above. Not every Mom and Pop is as above board as you might think.
I was five years old in 1967 when my dad brought me into his company's computer room (he was a programmer,) sat me down at a drafting table with a flowchart template, and had me "flowchart" my day. And I was playing ring-toss with the write-enable rings from the reel-to-reel tapes. One of my favorite christmas presents of that era was a marble-rolling game, DR. NIM, which was actually a simple state machine using literal plastic flip-flops to store state. I wrote my first programs in BASIC on an HP timesharing machine at age 11, and at 13 was learning RPG-II (which fortunately I have never had to use.)
Somewhere around age 18 I looked up to find I was spending over 80 hours per week on line, writing programs but mostly hanging out on XTALK. That's where my friends were hanging out at that time.
(So yeah, I can totally appreciate how MMOREPIGS can suck a person in. And I consider it "mostly harmless." People can grow out of it.)
Anyway, my point is that I can lay full claim to "Digital Native" as my birthright. Second generation!
P.S. We ate at Divinci's a few weekends ago. The food wasn't brilliant, and the service was a bit "rough". It seems like they're trying to figure out if they should be a pizza joint or if they should be an upscale restaurant. I'll cut them a little slack just because they're new, and they're obviously very new to running a restaurant business. We probably won't be back in the near future, but if they survive six more months we'll give them another try.
I don't know if you ate at Enjoy up in Apple Valley when they first opened, but that was rough too. Now, we think they're great (the beef medallions -- wow!) and they have a pretty fair selection of scotch. Of course, they're priced to match.
Luckily, my daughter knew that game wasn't appropriate.
You're too modest. That's what parenting is supposed to be, teaching your children right from wrong. If your child knows it's wrong, it's because you taught her well. Congratulations, you have a healthy kid!
No, that graph in TFA was stacked. Like any statistic, it's being used to support the viewpoint of the author, and is not necessarily an honest representation of what's happening.
On one hand you have violent crime going "down". On the other, you have money going "up". But what does this money represent? Money spent on violent games, or all games? Are violent games going for a higher or lower price relative to other games? Are violent games now 1%, 10%, 50% or 90% of the game market? Or look at the other side: prison sentences for violent crimes were increased in the 90s, so there are fewer repeat offenders on the streets. There are way too many variables to draw any meaning from that statement.
And that's only if you could: this is mere correlation, not causality. This is in no way evidence of video games causing (or not causing) violence. It's just two unrelated charts pasted together invalidly in an attempt to swing the reader's viewpoint to that of the author.
Slashdot Mirror
But that attitude fails the WWMI test utterly: those who need it the most are the least capable of installing it on their own.
If it came in the installer, and if a checkbox was set by default to provide assistance (not necessarily privacy assistance, just assistance in general) then the Moms of the world could get their cute puppy dog helpers. Those of use who find such agents condescending would turn them off (no doubt b!tching to slashdot the whole time), and the author would provide a way to allow us to default it "off" in future installations.
That said, it's an incredibly tricky problem. When reduced to the "WWMI" problem (What Would Mom Install) it's apparent that you can't say things like "Helps protect privacy by preventing the browser from accepting cookies." Not only does my mom not know what a cookie is, she doesn't know what a browser is. She knows only that the blue "e" is the internet, or that now the red watermelon thing is the internet (in addition to poor cookie management, I think Firefox has horrible icons.)
I was serious when I mentioned an agent such as "Foxy" (stupid name.) Perhaps the checkbox should be labeled "[ ] Turn on 'Scorchy the Fox' to help me protect my online privacy." Maybe the icon on the toolbar could be a little henhouse, and Scorchy could come out belching feathers to offer suggestions about downloads, typing in names and passwords, accepting cookies, etc. While this probably ranks way up there among my more stupid ideas, the fact is many "normal" users absolutely love these cute agents. Clippy, Rocky the Dog, or whatever other Office Assistants come with Office these days, are really friendly ways to help uncomfortable people grasp difficult technical issues.
There are some cookie management extensions out there, but for "normal" people to better manage their privacy (or even to realize they have privacy right that they can manage) I'd like to see "prompt always, deny third party" turned on by default, and a cookie toolbar/rightclick option that allows you to accept/decline/delete them. As a matter of fact, that would be a nice option for the Firefox installer: a checkbox that says something like "[ ] Help me manage my privacy rights online." We could debate whether or not it should be on or off by default.
Or, weirder yet, what about something like the infamous Clippy? "Hi, I'm Foxy, and I'm here to help you with online privacy so you don't become a victim of identity theft, or a pawn of corporate marketing strategies!"
But that's exactly what we've been seeing over the years.
Granny has never filtered a spam in her life. The ISPs have taken up automated spam filtering on her behalf. That's why the spammers can't stand still and let just us techies filter their sludge. The techies took the fight to the next level, blocking spam further up the chain so the benefits of spam-blocking translated to everyone. Thus, we've seen the counterevolution of spam -- when "viagra" got blocked we saw simple 133t-sp33k substitutions for things like "vi4gra"; with the advent of Bayes filtering we now see random text words combined with pictures of the real spam text.
The spam filterers should have taken a page from the hospitals. Doctors NEVER issue prescriptions for vancomycin outside of a hospital, in hopes that the practices that have led to so many antibiotic-resistant diseases wouldn't allow bugs to evolve to resist vancomycin. They kept the most potent stuff in reserve. Like them, the filterers should never have given Bayes filtering to companies like AOL. If they just quietly ran it on their own boxes, they'd be spam free today.
Spam is no longer simply the domain of a giant server with a huge database. It's increasingly being sent out by zombie PCs, infected with viruses or trojans. Spammers pay the zombie-farmers to send their crap. Zombies send the email masquerading as the PC owner, using their credentials. Sender-ID? No problem, he's got one. SMTP? Sure, use the victim's server.
Zombies mean that no matter what technology is used for sending validated, signed, pre-paid, whatever email, the zombies will have access to those resources and will still spew their crap. No anti-spam server technologies are going to prevent Windows machines from getting infested.
I still don't like things like enemies get "red" names and friendlies get "green" names. If names are even necessary (and they're not, really) everyone should have a "white" name, and you better switch your Eyeball-IFF-Mark 1 to "on" before pulling the trigger. Of course, you can't really afford to turn off any options in a game situation. If you do, the time you spend identifying a silhouette is time your fully HUD-equipped opponent is using to place your forehead in his crosshairs.
And porn surfers don't need a two-handed keyboard.
It'll be interesting to try it out. I like to play America's Army in a darkened room, and for total immersion I'd love to get rid of all the status bars, bullet counts, magazine counts, health, steadiness, objectives, etc. Just show me a picture out the soldiers eyes. A small glowing compass and current weapon indicator down below my line of sight would be perfect. In a firefight or tense "scan for opfor" situation, all you see is either nothing or targets. Once the action has passed, though, you can steal a quick glance down to see how you're doing for ammo, is there a medic call, etc. And as in the real world, when you divert attention away from the situation to check on the mundane details, you might miss something.
Yeah, this looks really interesting. It might not improve my frag rate, but it sure could improve my enjoyment.
The press release said that several games will release support for it yet this year. And even if they don't, given the abilities of the community I expect third parties will write mods for the biggies, such as WoW and UT 2K4. Even if Blizzard provides native WoW support for it, I suspect other WoW plugin authors will rush to add even more functionality.
Regarding your other question: who looks at their keyboard? I don't know, I painted mine black a couple years ago :-)
The story of a keyboard is fine, but pictures are worth more. See the G15 keyboard here.
There are real demonstrable problems, though. The first is the geologists need more detailed imagery of the subterranian geology. The way to obtain this is to drive a train of equipment (several large trucks with soft tires) around the area in a grid pattern, stopping occasionally to detonate an explosive charge beneath one of the trucks and measure the echoes from the others. The first time the ANWR was explored, they drove a one mile grid. They now want to drive it again in a 1000 foot grid. The tire damage to the tundra caused those 20+ years ago is still almost as visible as it was when it first occurred. They now need to drive over 25 times as much tundra. And this is just for exploration -- no drilling yet.
There's a different problem, too, and understanding it requires a bit of knowledge. To bring the heavy drilling and construction equipment in requires a road that can support very large trucks. What they did in the arctic petroleum reserve was to make a temporary road from ice. The winter before construction they sprayed water from tanker trucks to construct a road solid enough to support their gear; they spent the rest of that first winter trucking in all the equipment, pipe, and storage tanks they needed to build the drilling rigs. When spring arrived the ice road melted, leaving not too much damage behind. And now the road is gone: everything consumed at the sites must be ferried in and out by helicopters, while the oil is pumped out the pipeline. Ice roads are not a bad approach, and are proven effective.
The problem is that liquid water required to make the road is "perishable" in the arctic. It can be trucked only a short time before risk of freezing solid in the tanker truck requires it be emptied. This gives the tanker trucks an effective range of about 20 miles from fresh water. The first arctic fields (to the west of ANWR) had adequate local water supplies. But the ANWR is a desert climate and has very few lakes deep enough to have liquid water beneath their ice. As a matter of fact, the lakes that are within 20 miles don't even have enough liquid water needed to produce the road required. This means that they will basically need to drain the local lakes dry to produce the road. Draining a lake means virtually every fish in it will die. Draining all the lakes means all the fish in the region will die. Fish are a vital component of the food chain in ANWR, and are the primary food of the native carnivores. And with the climate being close to desert, there is little chance of the lakes refilling themselves the next summer -- even if they are restocked, there won't be enough liquid water beneath the ice the next winter.
Usually, the real-world lessons you learn include: identify who will take advantage of you; identify people you can trust for assistance; discover that you misjudged your boss' penchant for sadism; salaries sometimes seem to have precious little to do with who does the real work; everything costs even more than in school; HR is going to screw up your paperwork; etc. You'll learn all of them equally well whether you intern for Google, Microsoft, or Septic-Kleen.
Picture a car system with wi-fi. You pull into the garage at night, and your car media player says "Oh, good, here's an internet connection, let me quick update my media player authorizations." It's good for another 30 days. Or your portable media player, when you bring it online to upload more music, it'll establish the connection then.
And those farmers out in Bumblestump, North Dakota, who may never get internet access? Sony'll will be happy to sell them a "car-authorizing-kit" which will just be a secured wi-fi to phone internet bridge (and probably a $5.00 month subscription.)
Yeah, this is the greatest marketing idea evar. They'll probably sell over a hundred of them!
Just to answer the question (not to defend the stupidity of DRM systems) they'll encrypt the entire phone-home channel. The players are not going to even spin up the discs unless they're online to the mothership, and have an "approval to play" ticket in their hands. As an outsider without access to the contents of the encrypted stream, you won't be able to tell a good packet from one with the evil bit set. They might not even be "individual packet" based in that they could require a complete, continuous stream. A simplistic way to look at it would be to give them numbered packets, meaning don't process packet #38 until you've received and processed packet #37. Even if you killed off the "evil bit" packet (say you somehow knew that #37 was the self-destruct packet), the protocol would have your player re-requesting #37 before it would proceed to #38 to authorize your new BLU-RAY of "Star Wars Episode 10: Venegance of the Billionaires." And when #37 arrives it turns your machine into landfill.
This is going to take some tricky secure hardware to pull all this off. The guys who used to decrypt satellite TV used some pretty fancy equipment to read the firmware in the smart cards so they could reverse engineer the protocols. I expect these players are likely to be eggshell fragile, destroying themselves at the drop of a pin rather than let some hacker have his way with a logic probe. And that means Joe Sixpack is going to have a lot of dead players initially, meaning these things will get a crap reputation right out of the blocks. Viva DivX!
I also don't plan to buy one. There's just so little that they're releasing on disc that I want to watch that it really doesn't make sense. (I rarely use my DVD player now.) Anyway I figure that someone will crack the protection sooner rather than later, and anything people really want to watch will hit the torrents soon enough.
What I do predict is that we'll see a repeat of the Hughes satellite TV fiasco. Remember the market for satellite TV decoders and smart cards; and Hughes sending down a smart-card self-destruct program a byte at a time in their update logic? That's what the whole "self-destruct" quote in TFA made me think of.
Regardless, the pirates are going to make their copies. And those copies are going to get redistributed. It's just that now they're going to actively piss regular customers off far more than ever. I wish them lots of luck with all that, and I hope they get everything they're due.
Did Sony not patent the scroll wheel on the Clie? Has Sony not used this on cell phones, too? Those devices were introduced in the 90s, not 2002 as Microsoft's prior art patent claims.
30 minutes and $0.20 per picture later, I had my photos in hand. The photographic quality of the pictures is excellent, but the nicest part is that they're exposed on traditional photo paper and developed chemically. That means they'll have an equal lifetime to that of other color photos, rather than fading the way inkjet inks frequently do.
I was pleasantly surprised -- I thought they'd just print digital photos off on some dye-sub or thermal transfer printer and call it good enough, so I wasn't expecting much. Now, if I have more than 20 pictures it is not only cheaper but faster to get in my car and drive to Target than to wait for 20 pictures to come out of the Canon.
I hope this will give me a "smaller profile" with respect to the identity thieves, in that I won't have all this account activity going on all the time. Some of the ID thief rings seem to be watching for these "in transit." Well, now my numbers won't be in transit as much.
By the way, you probably shouldn't just click on the link above. I mean, this is Slashdot after all. I could be an evil phisher trying to dupe you*. Always consider the source.
*I'm not, of course, but you really have no way of knowing that based on what I say.
I've seen a price-list that was taken as evidence from a professional shoplifter. They were paid something like 75 cents for each packet of some product, 50 cents per packet for others. They delivered the stolen goods to a guy with a truck, where they were paid. The trucker worked for a fence, who operated an warehouse selling on the gray market to ethically-challenged convenience store owners and flea-market booth operators. They had a fleet of trucks and a warehouse. They ran a repackaging and reboxing plant. They were founded and funded entirely on shoplifting from large chain stores. And similar operations have been uncovered in several cities around the United States. (I was just trying to google for a link to a PDF of the evidence, but I don't remember the right keywords to find the article at the moment.)
Yet you think the emphasis on "a con or two" is some kind of smokescreen, and that this is somehow the fault of retailers selling crap, and going under as a result? Retailers are being plundered by some pretty sophisticated crime rings, and it's a big money operation. They're taking it very seriously.
Ummm ... no. There's always something you can do about it.
Thieves are like viruses. If a particular theft is profitable (fake receipts, for example), they'll repeat it and exploit it. As more thieves learn about it, more thieves will attempt that theft. So the stores will adapt, and put in some technology to defeat the faked receipts.
But the thieves also learn and adapt, and start looking for new ways to defraud retailers. So the stores learn and counter.
The point I'm making is that if a store "stands still" and does nothing about a particular type of fraud, then that store will get sucked dry as more and more thieves learn about the fraud. There is no such thing as a "tiny loss per quarter". Maybe the first quarter, yes, but by the second, it will double. Left unchecked, in a year it'll be a hemmorhage of red ink.
Investing the money wisely in anti-theft technology (of all sorts, both hardware systems like RFID and software systems like giant databases) does pay off. As I mentioned, the ongoing frauds need to be stopped. Also the fraud tactics that are discovered by one retailer are quickly shared with others via consultants and professional organizations. These new threats also need to be countered (or prepared for) as quickly as possible to minimize losses.
As an earlier poster mentioned, the retailers keep the numbers secret. However, you're correct in estimating that anti-theft technologies can cost large organizations millions of dollars per year. And they pay for themseleves. Think about that.
The large retailers are being targeted by organized criminal fraud gangs. These are people who learn how the retailer does business (and learn it anonymously) and then take advantage of the lapses in security. They learn how to steal large amounts at one time. The "stamped out of a mold" nature of chain stores means that once they learn how to do a crime in Hayward, California, they can tell their buddies "do this to steal at these stores everywhere, from Orlando to New York."
The smaller retailers are hurt because of the economies of scale: even 'casual' shoplifting at a Mom and Pop store can sometimes mean the difference between making the weekly payroll or not.
But every one of those retailers that survives will take the unrecovered losses back from the paying customers in the form of higher prices.
The larger chains do have one advantage, in that they can spend a large amount of money on systems that will help them identify and prevent some forms of this theft -- receipt tracking as mentioned in the article, for example, isn't something the independent stores typically do. And theft is the primary driver behind RFID tagging of merchandise -- not marketing, as the tinfoil beanie wearers among us might otherwise believe.
Also, while it may seem somewhat strange, there are some smaller unethical stores that purchase "grey market" merchandise; loot that was stolen in bulk from the big chains by the gangs I mentioned above. Not every Mom and Pop is as above board as you might think.
Somewhere around age 18 I looked up to find I was spending over 80 hours per week on line, writing programs but mostly hanging out on XTALK. That's where my friends were hanging out at that time.
(So yeah, I can totally appreciate how MMOREPIGS can suck a person in. And I consider it "mostly harmless." People can grow out of it.)
Anyway, my point is that I can lay full claim to "Digital Native" as my birthright. Second generation!
I don't know if you ate at Enjoy up in Apple Valley when they first opened, but that was rough too. Now, we think they're great (the beef medallions -- wow!) and they have a pretty fair selection of scotch. Of course, they're priced to match.
You're too modest. That's what parenting is supposed to be, teaching your children right from wrong. If your child knows it's wrong, it's because you taught her well. Congratulations, you have a healthy kid!
On one hand you have violent crime going "down". On the other, you have money going "up". But what does this money represent? Money spent on violent games, or all games? Are violent games going for a higher or lower price relative to other games? Are violent games now 1%, 10%, 50% or 90% of the game market? Or look at the other side: prison sentences for violent crimes were increased in the 90s, so there are fewer repeat offenders on the streets. There are way too many variables to draw any meaning from that statement.
And that's only if you could: this is mere correlation, not causality. This is in no way evidence of video games causing (or not causing) violence. It's just two unrelated charts pasted together invalidly in an attempt to swing the reader's viewpoint to that of the author.