Special Agent Steve Lazarus, the FBI's media coordinator in Atlanta, said in an e-mail describing the problem.
Is this some sort of intelligence test? You get an email press release from someone saying the email account they use for press releases isn't reliable?
It's perfectly legeal in the USA to buy a cable descrambler. You can't use it to access content you don't have the legal right to access already (like HBO, if you aren't paying for HBO) but it's been legeal for many years.
I've had folks ask what legitimate use anyone could possibly have for a cable descrambler -- I've had one for a few years.
My TiVo has a lifetime subscription (which is for the lifetime of the box) but the antenna connection is busted, so i can't just plug it into the cable line. I bought a cable box off eBay for $25 and use it to give me an SVideo feed into my TiVo -- problem solved. Yeah, i could pay TiVo $50 to fix my box, and be without it for 4-6 weeks. Or I could "rent" a cable box from my cable company for $5-15 a month. My solution works and is exactly the kind of situation the US Congress was thinking about when they eliminated the monopoly on cable boxes.
I doubt uptime has any effect on advertising -- it's usually charged by page views or clickthroughs. If the site is down for an hour, then they missed out on an hour's worth of pageviews to charge for.
Yeah, but you can get all that stuff on the street in NYC, too. It doesn't mean the US turns a blind eye to copyright/trademark laws, only that the NYPD and DA have better things to do most days.
Currently, the fastest continuous shooting digital camera (the Nikon D2X) can only take 4 shots in a row before its memory buffers get full and the whole camera becomes useless
I beg your pardon? Just about every digital SLR on the market is able to handle more than 4 images in buffer at a time. My year and a half old 10D can buffer 9 RAW images, and the D70 processes JPEGs before they hit the buffer, so it can buffer JPEGs in the dozens.
I doubt this is intended for any use other than archiving of images, where it will kick ass. It's clearly processor-intensive from the timing results, but for long-term storage that makes little difference.
I've got a few TB of images in storage and I'd love to be able to save 20-30% of that space, regardless of how cheap it is. That means a little longer between burning DVDs, and having more stuff on mounted drives for reference.
We first had this discussion in an English class when reading Huck Finn (if you recall, Mark Twain says in the introduction specifically that you shouldn't read any meaning into the story, blah, blah).
So of course we all said that we shouldn't be reading into the story, the author specifically said not to!
Years later, as an artist, I can honestly say that yes, 85% of the stuff people "read into" my work is totally random and stupid (or optimistic on their part). But the other 15% is either outright correct or something that rings very true even though I hadn't intended it.
So much of the creative process is subconscious that I have to grudgingly agree with my old English teacher that the author doesn't always realize (or even recognize!) all of the things they put into a work.
So even when an author says "I didn't mean to represent X as Y", it doesn't make it any less true that X is represented as Y, or that it tells us something about the story, the author, or the characters. it just means the author didn't intend it consciously (or wants to disavow it after the fact).
But of course, 85% of the theories are still utter crap.
People have been discussing change of election laws for decades and decades. One of the most frequent complains ever made about US elections is that they are held at a time that is not often possible for citizens to go to a designated voting location.
(for those outside the USA, we vote on a Tuesday and folks have been trying to get that moved to a weekend day ever since the weekend was invented)
I don't know how much "reverence" we need to have for the act of voting. I'm more concerned about it being accurate and accessible than some mystical process. I think the general increase in mail-in ballots and such may bite us due to vote-buying and such, but the general availability of early voting is long overdue.
There are SO many circumstances where voting a day or two (or a week or two) early is appropriate because of personal schedules. Do you miss out on last-minute information and analysis? Of course. But what about all the information that comes out on the wednesday after the election, shouldn't we wait until we all hear that, too? Has there ever been an election where no new information was revealed about either candidate between November and january?
My own experience is that I was definitely more informed about the issues (overall) when I was 18-24ish.
Being a "grown-up" gives me a better perspective on experiencial matters like taxes and health care, but when it comes to global warming, wars halfway around the world and other issues that require genuine study and research to fully grasp, I simply don't have the time to do as much independent research as I'd like to.
Oh yeah -- the space combat sims were the best ever.
Hopping in an A-wing, all power to the engines and rocketing around like everything else was standing still.
I'd jump at the chance to pay $50 for an updated version of X-Wing or Tie Fighter that ran at 1600x1200 with great lighting effects and massive texture detail.
Drug companies show little corrolation between R&D and end cost.
They basically charge whatever the hell they can get away with short of having people burn down their homes, and make up for it by spending billions and billions of dollars on running ads convincing you that you need the drug, as well as incenitves and gifts to doctors to convince them that you need the drug, rather than the one that does the same thing for 50% less.
As Cheney said the other day, there isn't much profit to be made in flu vaccines. The fact that so many people want them, they are (relatively) cheap and easy to produce are meaningless -- if you can't somehow make 6,000% profit off of it, why bother?
Kal-El was born an average kid to a gifted scientist. Bruce Wayne was born an average kid to a wealthy doctor.
Both of them had things happen to change what would otherwise have been ordinary lives (and short comic series!).
I hardly think its a matter of semantics to say that personal identity has something to do with how we act over the course of our lifetime, day after day, and how we perceive ourselves.
That was, in fact, the entire point of what Bill was saying in the movie -- that he liked Superman BECAUSE he sympathized with him having to PRETEND to be a human being, walking around making coffee and going to work, when he was so much more. Her marriage couldn't have worked because she would have always felt dissatisfied, out of place, a fraud.
But he (Bill/Tarantino) is wrong because while Clark Kent is PHYSICALLY more than human, his identity has NEVER been that of a Kryptonian playing dress-up and holding himslef back. He's not pretending to be Clark Kent -- that IS his identity and has been since he was a baby. He's a kid from the farm who moved to the big city and -- by the way -- can leap buildings in a single bound, so he feels a responsibility to help people. He puts on the Superman suit for the same reason every other character does, to protect his day-to-day life from those who would seek to hurt him through it.
It's not like he wore a cape every day until he decided to work at the Daily Planet for kicks. He didn't get married to Lois and get a job and apartment because he's bored with a lack of heavy objects to lift and people to rescue. He does those things because they are his life -- his real life. When he's out helping people, he doesn't begrudge them, but he wants to go back home to reading the paper with Lois as soon as he can.
Batman/Bruce Wayne has none of those things. He doesn't have a "normal" life except for the completely fictional character of a wealthy playboy he uses for convenience to fool other people. He's playing dress-up when he puts on a tux and goes to a party. He's playing dress-up when he goes to a board meeting.
All he's thinking when he's interacting with people as Bruce Wayne is "how little can I do here, how few people can I speak to, before I can go back to the cave and do some work?"
He DOES feel constrained by Bruce Wayne, he DOES feel imposed upon by the time he has to spend attending to that character.
You're listening to too much Tarantino. While it sounds neat that Superman is the only guy whose "fake" identity is the "mere mortal", its just not true.
Bruce Wayne is the birth name of the character Batman, but Bruce Wayne doesn't exist and hasn't existed for that man since he was a child. Every moment he spends in regular clothes being a normal joe is an act -- he is Batman 24/7, and was even before he had renamed himself.
If you want to do it strictly by metrics (for all the managers out there), Clark Kent exists on a daily basis -- he goes to work, lives a life, and only acts as Superman when necessary. Bruce Wayne exists only for short periods when it is necessary to put on a show. When he wakes up in the morning, when he goes to bed at night, he's Batman, thinking about whatever case or Batman issue is at hand. He spends his free time in the Batcave, not in Stately Wayne Manor.
Actually, what Apple has been doing the past few years is what we've all been bitching at software companies to do for the past few decades -- each major version release of OSX has been more stable, faster, and better on older hardware.
They aren't throwing in every marginally intersting feature and gadget, they keep optimizing and improving the basic system. (note that this is also one of the complaints, as developers have to deal with more incompatibilities from version to version than a Windows developer would going from 2k to XP)
Pretty much any Mac purchased in the past 3 years gets more of a speed boost by installing the newest major OS release than from any ~$130 hardware upgrade.
Peature-wise, Panther has saved more than $130 worth of my time with Expose alone. Out of the blue Apple came up with a system that makes virtual desktops and alt-tab feel like kindergarten toys.
The MS remote desktop is usually going to be faster than VNC, the limitation being obviously that you're dependant on MS to provide the client and server side for both systems you're using.
I use it daily on my mian desktop box (OSX) to control my XP box, but use Chicken of the VNC for anything more remote. I found that strangely TightVNC actually is more responsive over a ~100kb/s connection than MS Remote Desktop was, so I use VNC to control my XP desktop at work, even from my XP desktop at home.
I remember dying to get a commercial standalone player able to play DivX, XVid, etc a few years ago, but even the super-expensive ones had woefully underpowered Sigma decoder chips.
Now, there are dozens out there, and none of them have half the functionality, much less the low price, of a modded XBox.
The fact that the Xbox also plays games is essentially a bonus feature -- it's a $150 universal media player that sets up in minutes and plays very well with other high-end AV components.
I switched around 6 months ago, and have to agree that this is one of the things that absolutely has impressed me consistently. You can even move a file to the trash while you have it open (deleting a screwed-up MP3 file while it is playing in iTunes, for example).
I got sick of "that file is open" errors in Windows, especially the notorious AVI "file is in use by an application" bug that's been around for several years.
Expectations of privacy are vastly different for private citizens versus political candidate. Convention delegates, like it or not, are elected by their local political parties to represent them at the national conventions, and by participating in that process are ceding some rights to privacy -- the only question is how much.
Your elected dogcatcher has a much greater right to privacy than the president, but they both have less than you or I.
Why do people think Libertarians want total ruleless chaos?
Well, because a LOT of libertarians DO come from the Ayn Rand pseudo-anarchist school of thought. They honestly believe that ANYONE telling them to stop dumping toxic chemicals into the drinking water is stifling the free market.
You would get more bang for the buck with a true blue PC. This is true, can't argue this. The only xbox benifit is that it's small, and has good tv output.
I would argue it pretty hard. The main advantage to the Xbox is that it's a ubiquitous, standard hardware platform that has a standard software layout.
If you want to add a remote control to a homebrew PC, you have a dozen different choices with 3 or 4 different technologies, some of which are supported directly by your software and some of which require extensive configuration. Some will never work at all, though you have no way of knowing this until you've spent $$ and hours of your time.
If you want to add a remote control to an Xbox, you go to Target, pay $30, and buy the remote. Plug in the IR reciever and all of the modded software is usable by remote -- you can use it to navigate through any third-party launcher, file manager or media player. No configuration, no setup, no troubleshooting.
When the guys work on the Xbox player software, they know exactly what hardware its going to run on. It's going to be a certain processor with a certain amount of RAM, etc. So they can tune the heck out of it, and if it runs choppy they know they need to work on the code, not just tell people to buy more RAM.
Slashdot Mirror
Special Agent Steve Lazarus, the FBI's media coordinator in Atlanta, said in an e-mail describing the problem.
Is this some sort of intelligence test? You get an email press release from someone saying the email account they use for press releases isn't reliable?
It's perfectly legeal in the USA to buy a cable descrambler. You can't use it to access content you don't have the legal right to access already (like HBO, if you aren't paying for HBO) but it's been legeal for many years.
I've had folks ask what legitimate use anyone could possibly have for a cable descrambler -- I've had one for a few years.
My TiVo has a lifetime subscription (which is for the lifetime of the box) but the antenna connection is busted, so i can't just plug it into the cable line. I bought a cable box off eBay for $25 and use it to give me an SVideo feed into my TiVo -- problem solved. Yeah, i could pay TiVo $50 to fix my box, and be without it for 4-6 weeks. Or I could "rent" a cable box from my cable company for $5-15 a month. My solution works and is exactly the kind of situation the US Congress was thinking about when they eliminated the monopoly on cable boxes.
I doubt uptime has any effect on advertising -- it's usually charged by page views or clickthroughs. If the site is down for an hour, then they missed out on an hour's worth of pageviews to charge for.
PA isn't charging people $15 a month to read PA. If they were, you're absolutely right -- they WOULD be getting bitched at about downtime.
Yeah, but you can get all that stuff on the street in NYC, too. It doesn't mean the US turns a blind eye to copyright/trademark laws, only that the NYPD and DA have better things to do most days.
Currently, the fastest continuous shooting digital camera (the Nikon D2X) can only take 4 shots in a row before its memory buffers get full and the whole camera becomes useless
I beg your pardon? Just about every digital SLR on the market is able to handle more than 4 images in buffer at a time. My year and a half old 10D can buffer 9 RAW images, and the D70 processes JPEGs before they hit the buffer, so it can buffer JPEGs in the dozens.
I doubt this is intended for any use other than archiving of images, where it will kick ass. It's clearly processor-intensive from the timing results, but for long-term storage that makes little difference.
I've got a few TB of images in storage and I'd love to be able to save 20-30% of that space, regardless of how cheap it is. That means a little longer between burning DVDs, and having more stuff on mounted drives for reference.
The FBI doesn't kick in doors of legitimate businesses
Tell that to Steve Jackson Games and their bankruptcy attorneys.
Fap, fap, fap...
Did i say that out loud?
We first had this discussion in an English class when reading Huck Finn (if you recall, Mark Twain says in the introduction specifically that you shouldn't read any meaning into the story, blah, blah).
So of course we all said that we shouldn't be reading into the story, the author specifically said not to!
Years later, as an artist, I can honestly say that yes, 85% of the stuff people "read into" my work is totally random and stupid (or optimistic on their part). But the other 15% is either outright correct or something that rings very true even though I hadn't intended it.
So much of the creative process is subconscious that I have to grudgingly agree with my old English teacher that the author doesn't always realize (or even recognize!) all of the things they put into a work.
So even when an author says "I didn't mean to represent X as Y", it doesn't make it any less true that X is represented as Y, or that it tells us something about the story, the author, or the characters. it just means the author didn't intend it consciously (or wants to disavow it after the fact).
But of course, 85% of the theories are still utter crap.
Grammatical errors on Slashdot? That's unpossible!
"It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times!? Stupid monkeys!"
I'll take the under on there being 104 Senators at the end of the night. :)
:)
That's what Diebold says, and everyone knows computers don't make mistakes!
People have been discussing change of election laws for decades and decades. One of the most frequent complains ever made about US elections is that they are held at a time that is not often possible for citizens to go to a designated voting location.
(for those outside the USA, we vote on a Tuesday and folks have been trying to get that moved to a weekend day ever since the weekend was invented)
I don't know how much "reverence" we need to have for the act of voting. I'm more concerned about it being accurate and accessible than some mystical process. I think the general increase in mail-in ballots and such may bite us due to vote-buying and such, but the general availability of early voting is long overdue.
There are SO many circumstances where voting a day or two (or a week or two) early is appropriate because of personal schedules. Do you miss out on last-minute information and analysis? Of course. But what about all the information that comes out on the wednesday after the election, shouldn't we wait until we all hear that, too? Has there ever been an election where no new information was revealed about either candidate between November and january?
My own experience is that I was definitely more informed about the issues (overall) when I was 18-24ish.
Being a "grown-up" gives me a better perspective on experiencial matters like taxes and health care, but when it comes to global warming, wars halfway around the world and other issues that require genuine study and research to fully grasp, I simply don't have the time to do as much independent research as I'd like to.
Oh yeah -- the space combat sims were the best ever.
Hopping in an A-wing, all power to the engines and rocketing around like everything else was standing still.
I'd jump at the chance to pay $50 for an updated version of X-Wing or Tie Fighter that ran at 1600x1200 with great lighting effects and massive texture detail.
Drug companies show little corrolation between R&D and end cost.
They basically charge whatever the hell they can get away with short of having people burn down their homes, and make up for it by spending billions and billions of dollars on running ads convincing you that you need the drug, as well as incenitves and gifts to doctors to convince them that you need the drug, rather than the one that does the same thing for 50% less.
As Cheney said the other day, there isn't much profit to be made in flu vaccines. The fact that so many people want them, they are (relatively) cheap and easy to produce are meaningless -- if you can't somehow make 6,000% profit off of it, why bother?
Kal-El was born an average kid to a gifted scientist. Bruce Wayne was born an average kid to a wealthy doctor.
Both of them had things happen to change what would otherwise have been ordinary lives (and short comic series!).
I hardly think its a matter of semantics to say that personal identity has something to do with how we act over the course of our lifetime, day after day, and how we perceive ourselves.
That was, in fact, the entire point of what Bill was saying in the movie -- that he liked Superman BECAUSE he sympathized with him having to PRETEND to be a human being, walking around making coffee and going to work, when he was so much more. Her marriage couldn't have worked because she would have always felt dissatisfied, out of place, a fraud.
But he (Bill/Tarantino) is wrong because while Clark Kent is PHYSICALLY more than human, his identity has NEVER been that of a Kryptonian playing dress-up and holding himslef back. He's not pretending to be Clark Kent -- that IS his identity and has been since he was a baby. He's a kid from the farm who moved to the big city and -- by the way -- can leap buildings in a single bound, so he feels a responsibility to help people. He puts on the Superman suit for the same reason every other character does, to protect his day-to-day life from those who would seek to hurt him through it.
It's not like he wore a cape every day until he decided to work at the Daily Planet for kicks. He didn't get married to Lois and get a job and apartment because he's bored with a lack of heavy objects to lift and people to rescue. He does those things because they are his life -- his real life. When he's out helping people, he doesn't begrudge them, but he wants to go back home to reading the paper with Lois as soon as he can.
Batman/Bruce Wayne has none of those things. He doesn't have a "normal" life except for the completely fictional character of a wealthy playboy he uses for convenience to fool other people. He's playing dress-up when he puts on a tux and goes to a party. He's playing dress-up when he goes to a board meeting.
All he's thinking when he's interacting with people as Bruce Wayne is "how little can I do here, how few people can I speak to, before I can go back to the cave and do some work?"
He DOES feel constrained by Bruce Wayne, he DOES feel imposed upon by the time he has to spend attending to that character.
You're listening to too much Tarantino. While it sounds neat that Superman is the only guy whose "fake" identity is the "mere mortal", its just not true.
:)
Bruce Wayne is the birth name of the character Batman, but Bruce Wayne doesn't exist and hasn't existed for that man since he was a child. Every moment he spends in regular clothes being a normal joe is an act -- he is Batman 24/7, and was even before he had renamed himself.
If you want to do it strictly by metrics (for all the managers out there), Clark Kent exists on a daily basis -- he goes to work, lives a life, and only acts as Superman when necessary. Bruce Wayne exists only for short periods when it is necessary to put on a show. When he wakes up in the morning, when he goes to bed at night, he's Batman, thinking about whatever case or Batman issue is at hand. He spends his free time in the Batcave, not in Stately Wayne Manor.
I'm going to go kill myself now
Actually, what Apple has been doing the past few years is what we've all been bitching at software companies to do for the past few decades -- each major version release of OSX has been more stable, faster, and better on older hardware.
They aren't throwing in every marginally intersting feature and gadget, they keep optimizing and improving the basic system. (note that this is also one of the complaints, as developers have to deal with more incompatibilities from version to version than a Windows developer would going from 2k to XP)
Pretty much any Mac purchased in the past 3 years gets more of a speed boost by installing the newest major OS release than from any ~$130 hardware upgrade.
Peature-wise, Panther has saved more than $130 worth of my time with Expose alone. Out of the blue Apple came up with a system that makes virtual desktops and alt-tab feel like kindergarten toys.
The MS remote desktop is usually going to be faster than VNC, the limitation being obviously that you're dependant on MS to provide the client and server side for both systems you're using.
I use it daily on my mian desktop box (OSX) to control my XP box, but use Chicken of the VNC for anything more remote. I found that strangely TightVNC actually is more responsive over a ~100kb/s connection than MS Remote Desktop was, so I use VNC to control my XP desktop at work, even from my XP desktop at home.
I remember dying to get a commercial standalone player able to play DivX, XVid, etc a few years ago, but even the super-expensive ones had woefully underpowered Sigma decoder chips.
Now, there are dozens out there, and none of them have half the functionality, much less the low price, of a modded XBox.
The fact that the Xbox also plays games is essentially a bonus feature -- it's a $150 universal media player that sets up in minutes and plays very well with other high-end AV components.
I switched around 6 months ago, and have to agree that this is one of the things that absolutely has impressed me consistently. You can even move a file to the trash while you have it open (deleting a screwed-up MP3 file while it is playing in iTunes, for example).
I got sick of "that file is open" errors in Windows, especially the notorious AVI "file is in use by an application" bug that's been around for several years.
Expectations of privacy are vastly different for private citizens versus political candidate. Convention delegates, like it or not, are elected by their local political parties to represent them at the national conventions, and by participating in that process are ceding some rights to privacy -- the only question is how much.
Your elected dogcatcher has a much greater right to privacy than the president, but they both have less than you or I.
Why do people think Libertarians want total ruleless chaos?
Well, because a LOT of libertarians DO come from the Ayn Rand pseudo-anarchist school of thought. They honestly believe that ANYONE telling them to stop dumping toxic chemicals into the drinking water is stifling the free market.
You would get more bang for the buck with a true blue PC. This is true, can't argue this. The only xbox benifit is that it's small, and has good tv output.
I would argue it pretty hard. The main advantage to the Xbox is that it's a ubiquitous, standard hardware platform that has a standard software layout.
If you want to add a remote control to a homebrew PC, you have a dozen different choices with 3 or 4 different technologies, some of which are supported directly by your software and some of which require extensive configuration. Some will never work at all, though you have no way of knowing this until you've spent $$ and hours of your time.
If you want to add a remote control to an Xbox, you go to Target, pay $30, and buy the remote. Plug in the IR reciever and all of the modded software is usable by remote -- you can use it to navigate through any third-party launcher, file manager or media player. No configuration, no setup, no troubleshooting.
When the guys work on the Xbox player software, they know exactly what hardware its going to run on. It's going to be a certain processor with a certain amount of RAM, etc. So they can tune the heck out of it, and if it runs choppy they know they need to work on the code, not just tell people to buy more RAM.