Cox is working on that actually. They just rolled out 'Entertainment on Demand', which is basicly streaming movies with pause, fast forward and rewind capabilities.
I emailed them and asked about it and the said that they were planning on getting the most popular broadcast shows put up on the service too. Not quite a PVR, but still a few more steps in the right direction.
Why do people drive SUVs that get 16MPG and are less safe (due to their higher center of gravity) than a hybrid which costs less and gets 50MPG?
Because I can't take 3 kids to the grocery store in a car that only has two seats?
I'd love to have a hybrid, but nobody makes one that seats 7 people and has room for groceries.
Make a hybrid minivan and I'll buy it. Course, then people will bitch when they see me driving this big beast to work all by myself. 'Why doesn't he get a little hybrid to go to work' they'll say.
there's write-once storage in a crypto processor on the motherboard and as the machine boots each software component (BIOS, kernel, application) writes a crypto-secure signature to it. Applications can read this string of signatures. Visiting a bank web-site (or music shop or ticketmaster or...) your machine would be required to present a valid string of signatures
I understand that this is a pretty simplified overview, but I don't see how this could possibly give a remote machine any idea what your machine is running. My linux machine can feed the crypto hardware whatever signatures I want to give it, including those from windows and IE. And if the crypto hardware isn't secret or computationally infeasable, I could run windows in a fully virtual environment with virtual DRM.
Re:Missing the point of CMYK?
on
Gimp Hits 2.0
·
· Score: 1
Competition is important because the average business doesn't want to pay for something that their competitor can get for free
I'm not sure if this is your point, but businesses are under no obligation to release changes they have made to open source software. Their competitors only get the changes if they release their modifications to the community, which they don't have to do if they don't want to.
Ok, easy question. How do I disable Outlook Express and IE on the computers I maintain for family so they won't use those programs instead of what I provide?
I'm looking for something a little more secure than just removing the icons. Those can come back, and there are other ways the offending programs can be launched.
You may be splitting hairs about the source of the program. P2P users typically view the resources as nothing more than a common pool, and they shout their requests for everyone to hear. Users don't choose a specific machine from which to retrieve files (frequently they try to get it from as many as possible), they take it from whomever has the file.
Mostly I just don't think that people who are obtaining illegal copies of things should expect too much legal protection when they don't 'steal' what they thought they were 'stealing'.
(No, I don't think of copyright violation as theft, but I don't have a good verb for 'engaging in copyright infringment').
Cox in my area just got their Entertainment on Demand feature going two days ago.
I go to channel 998 and I get a menu of about 100 or so movies I can buy for between $1.50 and $4.00. The movie starts playing immediately and I can use the remote to pause, rewind, fast forward and stop the movie. I get to watch it as many times as I want within 24 hours from the purchase. This is all without any hardware upgrade, I'm just using the digital cable box the came with the service (A GP2000 or something like that).
I would pay them another 20 bucks a month if they would take the programs I have selected to watch (the cable box guide will let me mark a show so that the cable box and TV will turn on when the show comes on, and it can turn on the VCR for me), and store them on their servers, so I can watch them the same way I watch these movies. Then I won't have to get a Tivo or deal with trying to configure MythTV.
Eventually they'll figure out that they can stop wasting all that bandwidth broadcasting all but the most popular shows and live events, and just do everything on demand.
I still think a much better idea than trying to 'fix' Mars is to just develop humans that suit the environment. I mean, its pretty inefficent to have to maintain Earth-like conditions everywhere we go, it would be much better if we could develop the technologies necessary to harden human physiology to withstand cold vaccum conditions with minimal protection. Beef up radition damage correction mechanisims by an order of magnitude or two and maybe build in some powered materials recycling equipment (why carry along oxygen when you can extract CO2 and such from blood and convert it right in to O2 and sugar?).
The probably isn't that the universe is wrong and needs to be fixed, its that we are delicate, squishy things that require lots of external short cuts to keep our biology going. With sufficent energy input and on-board recycling technology (designed to last indefinately rather than just long enough to reproduce successfully), we would have a much easier time with this whole space colonization thing.
INteresting link. Would RLL be a suitable compression scheme for digital radio communication?
I'm using the RF stage from a ZipZap SE (a Radio Shack brand 1/64th scale RC car) to transmit my own data. The link normally operates at about 1430 transitions per second, using an FM encoding for a raw data rate of 715 bps. I'm curious if RLL encoding of the data would bump the raw data rate up closer to 2000 bps. I'm pretty sure the RF stuff will handle it, its just using a carrier present/absent signaling method (I forget what this scheme is called).
Many a college campus network has had it's Internet pipe saturated by both spam and users of P2P software, and many an ISP has been affected in the same manner by both as well.
This would be much less of an issue if network bandwidth providers would simply charge for actual amount of this limited resource that each user actually uses. Yes, its a bit more work for the provider to monitor actual usage, but it would more firmly link supply to demand.
It would also encourage people to demand better security from their operating systems so they don't have to pay the bandwidth charges incurred by DDoS and spam clients installed without their knowledge. ISP's could even provide abnormal usage warnings to give people a clue that something is happening (ie, Hello user, your email traffic has gone up by 123,475% this week, perhaps you should run a virus scan).
That varies considerably from person to person. At the extremes you have people like the high-functioning autistic author of
Thinking in Pictures
who thinks entirely in an 3D graphical enviroment, which, to paraphrase her, puts to shame every computer-based 3D tool ever designed. She says that she has encountered other people who appear to be at the other end of the spectrum, who almost completely lack the ability to visualize images and instead think purely in words. She finds it more difficult to communicate with these people, IIRC.
I agree with your point about symbolic thought and the modes in which we express those thoughts.
I wonder if the particular ratio of original thinkers to the rest of the population has been optimized by evolution. New ideas are good, but only if there are enough people to test them and filter out the stuff that doesn't work. If everybody was busy coming up with new ideas instead of using what they already had, the entire world would look like... well, like programming.
You are correct. However, it doesn't matter. Quit thinking in terms of governments and corporations. All that matters is that there are a small number of really powerful people that control the money, and they will continue to control it regardless of how it is organized.
Screwing with these people is the kind of stuff that causes sudden heart attacks and broken kneecaps.
Plus, I'm not convinced it needs screwing with. It is in the best interest of the people in charge to make the money supply work well at the same time that it keeps them powerful. One of those Nash equilibrium-like things.
Last time I read about it they had not drilled all they way through to the water. They are concerned about contaminating the water with crap from their drills. It's an interesting excersize and they are thinking it may give some ideas about retrieving samples from Jupiters frozen moons too (Europa?)
Radio Shacks ZipZap Special Edition 1/64th scale RC cars use a digital proportional control system for throttle and steering. When it works correctly you get about 7 discreet steering steps to the left and right, 5 foward speeds and 3 reverse.
Unfortunately Radio Shack can't seem to get the manufacturing right and the steering usually sucks in a big way. There are three models of the PCB (so far), one can be fixed and works beautifully, the other two pretty much just suck.
You can find lots of information about the various cars on the micro RC forums, one of which can be found here . Just be aware that most of the contributors are in the 10-15 year old age range.
I'd certainly agree that evolution has well equipped us for surviving in an Earth-like environment when using natural foods as an energy source.
However, as our knowledge of how the body works expands, and our technology to manipulate the workings improves, I see no reason why we should not change those things to make us better suited for the ways and places we choose to live.
I'm not so much interested in military applications as harsh or remote environments. Exploration of hostile environments (deep sea, arctic, space) would be much easier if we did not have limitations imposed by our bodies being specialized for this environment. For instance, if we are going to explore and develop the Moon, its a given that we will always have equipment that requires electrical power. So instead of requiring the humans present to derive their power from large amounts of food that must be carried in, they should be modifed to accept electrical power directly so that they can recycle their own waste products internally. This would not be as efficent as eating is in our normal enviroment where food is one of the available natural resources, but it is much better suited to places where we must generate our own resources. Generating electric or heat power is far easier than generating foodstuffs.
Certainly this is all going to be far in the future, but I believe that reshaping and redesigning of the human body will be one of the critical steps in making homes away from Earth. A huge number of the problems we face in space exploration are rooted in the way our bodies work. Changing the basic parameters can avoid many of those problems.
Implant a small nuclear thermoelectric unit (alternately, provide an inductive coupling for equipment-supplied electrical power for crews of plans and tanks and whatnot) and a chemical factory that extracts metabolic waste products from the blood. CO2 and whatever glucose is converted into then use the extra power to change it back into O2, glucose, and other useful substances.
What you get are soldiers that don't have to breath or eat nearly as much. You also get power for any on-board implanted electronics, perhaps a GPS and damage sensors distributed through the body injured soldiers can be located and evaluated remotely.
If it is required on every car sold in New Mexico they will just cause their local auto dealerships to loose business to a neighboring state without the law.
Easily circumvented by requiring the device in order to register the car in NM. One would have to register the car out of the state to get around it then, and thats probably more of a pain than most people would put up with.
I would expect it to be much more common that the device is simply bypassed with a hidden switch such that it can be enabled for inspections and disabled for normal usage.
Of course this will lead to a requirement that the device use the mobile phone network (similar to OnStar) to report violations of the usage of the device. And to make spoting violators easier, they'll want to install a GPS to locate the vehicle, accelerometers to detect erratic, drunken driving, and a remotely activeateable kill switch to disable the vehicle.
Since all of this stuff could still be disabled, but only a drunk would want to disable it, it will be assumed that anyone disabling the system is always drunk, and will have their license revoked.
Slashdot Mirror
[I]can tolerate product placement. I think more shows will head that way
Great, Pepsi, Tampax and Swiffer in shows like Bab5 and Farscape, just what I want to see.
The day they have HD TV on Demand[...]
Cox is working on that actually. They just rolled out 'Entertainment on Demand', which is basicly streaming movies with pause, fast forward and rewind capabilities.
I emailed them and asked about it and the said that they were planning on getting the most popular broadcast shows put up on the service too. Not quite a PVR, but still a few more steps in the right direction.
Why do people drive SUVs that get 16MPG and are less safe (due to their higher center of gravity) than a hybrid which costs less and gets 50MPG?
Because I can't take 3 kids to the grocery store in a car that only has two seats?
I'd love to have a hybrid, but nobody makes one that seats 7 people and has room for groceries.
Make a hybrid minivan and I'll buy it. Course, then people will bitch when they see me driving this big beast to work all by myself. 'Why doesn't he get a little hybrid to go to work' they'll say.
It's interesting that he couldn't just will himself to forgive humans without all the show and display
Oh come on now, you know how important marketing is!
I think he was more of a decendant really.
there's write-once storage in a crypto processor on the motherboard and as the machine boots each software component (BIOS, kernel, application) writes a crypto-secure signature to it. Applications can read this string of signatures. Visiting a bank web-site (or music shop or ticketmaster or...) your machine would be required to present a valid string of signatures
I understand that this is a pretty simplified overview, but I don't see how this could possibly give a remote machine any idea what your machine is running. My linux machine can feed the crypto hardware whatever signatures I want to give it, including those from windows and IE. And if the crypto hardware isn't secret or computationally infeasable, I could run windows in a fully virtual environment with virtual DRM.
Competition is important because the average business doesn't want to pay for something that their competitor can get for free
I'm not sure if this is your point, but businesses are under no obligation to release changes they have made to open source software. Their competitors only get the changes if they release their modifications to the community, which they don't have to do if they don't want to.
Don't use a Microsoft E-mail client
Ok, easy question. How do I disable Outlook Express and IE on the computers I maintain for family so they won't use those programs instead of what I provide?
I'm looking for something a little more secure than just removing the icons. Those can come back, and there are other ways the offending programs can be launched.
This despite our sysadmin religiously installing patches.
Is that another way of saying 'patch 'n pray'?
From the article:
Give a TiVo to your friends for a month and you'll have to pry the remote out of their cold, dead hands.
Umm... thanks buddy, but if it has that effect on people, you can keep it!
You may be splitting hairs about the source of the program. P2P users typically view the resources as nothing more than a common pool, and they shout their requests for everyone to hear. Users don't choose a specific machine from which to retrieve files (frequently they try to get it from as many as possible), they take it from whomever has the file.
Mostly I just don't think that people who are obtaining illegal copies of things should expect too much legal protection when they don't 'steal' what they thought they were 'stealing'.
(No, I don't think of copyright violation as theft, but I don't have a good verb for 'engaging in copyright infringment').
I'm not sure how someone who is OK with violating copyrights this way can condem distribution of code like this.
Freedom is not just about getting to do what you want to do, its also about letting others do what they want to do.
If you download and run programs from untrusted sources without protecting your environment, don't complain when you don't get what was advertised.
Damn Straight.
Cox in my area just got their Entertainment on Demand feature going two days ago.
I go to channel 998 and I get a menu of about 100 or so movies I can buy for between $1.50 and $4.00. The movie starts playing immediately and I can use the remote to pause, rewind, fast forward and stop the movie. I get to watch it as many times as I want within 24 hours from the purchase. This is all without any hardware upgrade, I'm just using the digital cable box the came with the service (A GP2000 or something like that).
I would pay them another 20 bucks a month if they would take the programs I have selected to watch (the cable box guide will let me mark a show so that the cable box and TV will turn on when the show comes on, and it can turn on the VCR for me), and store them on their servers, so I can watch them the same way I watch these movies. Then I won't have to get a Tivo or deal with trying to configure MythTV.
Eventually they'll figure out that they can stop wasting all that bandwidth broadcasting all but the most popular shows and live events, and just do everything on demand.
I still think a much better idea than trying to 'fix' Mars is to just develop humans that suit the environment. I mean, its pretty inefficent to have to maintain Earth-like conditions everywhere we go, it would be much better if we could develop the technologies necessary to harden human physiology to withstand cold vaccum conditions with minimal protection. Beef up radition damage correction mechanisims by an order of magnitude or two and maybe build in some powered materials recycling equipment (why carry along oxygen when you can extract CO2 and such from blood and convert it right in to O2 and sugar?).
The probably isn't that the universe is wrong and needs to be fixed, its that we are delicate, squishy things that require lots of external short cuts to keep our biology going. With sufficent energy input and on-board recycling technology (designed to last indefinately rather than just long enough to reproduce successfully), we would have a much easier time with this whole space colonization thing.
INteresting link. Would RLL be a suitable compression scheme for digital radio communication?
I'm using the RF stage from a ZipZap SE (a Radio Shack brand 1/64th scale RC car) to transmit my own data. The link normally operates at about 1430 transitions per second, using an FM encoding for a raw data rate of 715 bps. I'm curious if RLL encoding of the data would bump the raw data rate up closer to 2000 bps. I'm pretty sure the RF stuff will handle it, its just using a carrier present/absent signaling method (I forget what this scheme is called).
Many a college campus network has had it's Internet pipe saturated by both spam and users of P2P software, and many an ISP has been affected in the same manner by both as well.
This would be much less of an issue if network bandwidth providers would simply charge for actual amount of this limited resource that each user actually uses. Yes, its a bit more work for the provider to monitor actual usage, but it would more firmly link supply to demand.
It would also encourage people to demand better security from their operating systems so they don't have to pay the bandwidth charges incurred by DDoS and spam clients installed without their knowledge. ISP's could even provide abnormal usage warnings to give people a clue that something is happening (ie, Hello user, your email traffic has gone up by 123,475% this week, perhaps you should run a virus scan).
That varies considerably from person to person. At the extremes you have people like the high-functioning autistic author of
- Thinking in Pictures
who thinks entirely in an 3D graphical enviroment, which, to paraphrase her, puts to shame every computer-based 3D tool ever designed. She says that she has encountered other people who appear to be at the other end of the spectrum, who almost completely lack the ability to visualize images and instead think purely in words. She finds it more difficult to communicate with these people, IIRC.I agree with your point about symbolic thought and the modes in which we express those thoughts.
I wonder if the particular ratio of original thinkers to the rest of the population has been optimized by evolution. New ideas are good, but only if there are enough people to test them and filter out the stuff that doesn't work. If everybody was busy coming up with new ideas instead of using what they already had, the entire world would look like... well, like programming.
You are correct. However, it doesn't matter. Quit thinking in terms of governments and corporations. All that matters is that there are a small number of really powerful people that control the money, and they will continue to control it regardless of how it is organized.
Screwing with these people is the kind of stuff that causes sudden heart attacks and broken kneecaps.
Plus, I'm not convinced it needs screwing with. It is in the best interest of the people in charge to make the money supply work well at the same time that it keeps them powerful. One of those Nash equilibrium-like things.
Last time I read about it they had not drilled all they way through to the water. They are concerned about contaminating the water with crap from their drills. It's an interesting excersize and they are thinking it may give some ideas about retrieving samples from Jupiters frozen moons too (Europa?)
Radio Shacks ZipZap Special Edition 1/64th scale RC cars use a digital proportional control system for throttle and steering. When it works correctly you get about 7 discreet steering steps to the left and right, 5 foward speeds and 3 reverse.
Unfortunately Radio Shack can't seem to get the manufacturing right and the steering usually sucks in a big way. There are three models of the PCB (so far), one can be fixed and works beautifully, the other two pretty much just suck.
You can find lots of information about the various cars on the micro RC forums, one of which can be found here . Just be aware that most of the contributors are in the 10-15 year old age range.
Besides, the keys are all marked in braille. Even at the drive-up ATMs.
(I know, but old jokes are always funny)
I'd certainly agree that evolution has well equipped us for surviving in an Earth-like environment when using natural foods as an energy source.
However, as our knowledge of how the body works expands, and our technology to manipulate the workings improves, I see no reason why we should not change those things to make us better suited for the ways and places we choose to live.
I'm not so much interested in military applications as harsh or remote environments. Exploration of hostile environments (deep sea, arctic, space) would be much easier if we did not have limitations imposed by our bodies being specialized for this environment. For instance, if we are going to explore and develop the Moon, its a given that we will always have equipment that requires electrical power. So instead of requiring the humans present to derive their power from large amounts of food that must be carried in, they should be modifed to accept electrical power directly so that they can recycle their own waste products internally. This would not be as efficent as eating is in our normal enviroment where food is one of the available natural resources, but it is much better suited to places where we must generate our own resources. Generating electric or heat power is far easier than generating foodstuffs.
Certainly this is all going to be far in the future, but I believe that reshaping and redesigning of the human body will be one of the critical steps in making homes away from Earth. A huge number of the problems we face in space exploration are rooted in the way our bodies work. Changing the basic parameters can avoid many of those problems.
How about nuclear powered soldiers?
Seriously.
Implant a small nuclear thermoelectric unit (alternately, provide an inductive coupling for equipment-supplied electrical power for crews of plans and tanks and whatnot) and a chemical factory that extracts metabolic waste products from the blood. CO2 and whatever glucose is converted into then use the extra power to change it back into O2, glucose, and other useful substances.
What you get are soldiers that don't have to breath or eat nearly as much. You also get power for any on-board implanted electronics, perhaps a GPS and damage sensors distributed through the body injured soldiers can be located and evaluated remotely.
If it is required on every car sold in New Mexico they will just cause their local auto dealerships to loose business to a neighboring state without the law.
Easily circumvented by requiring the device in order to register the car in NM. One would have to register the car out of the state to get around it then, and thats probably more of a pain than most people would put up with.
I would expect it to be much more common that the device is simply bypassed with a hidden switch such that it can be enabled for inspections and disabled for normal usage.
Of course this will lead to a requirement that the device use the mobile phone network (similar to OnStar) to report violations of the usage of the device. And to make spoting violators easier, they'll want to install a GPS to locate the vehicle, accelerometers to detect erratic, drunken driving, and a remotely activeateable kill switch to disable the vehicle.
Since all of this stuff could still be disabled, but only a drunk would want to disable it, it will be assumed that anyone disabling the system is always drunk, and will have their license revoked.