I love sci fi, but Farscape just looks like the Muppet Show. I can't take it seriously enough to give it a chance.
Stargate SG-1 is currently my favorite show. I'm addicted.
Re:If this can't break Microsoft's back nothing wi
on
Code Red Back For More
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· Score: 2
- Operating systems are more complex than cars.
- Operating systems don't require a license to be operated.
Irrelevant. There are plenty of products that are more complex than cars, and consumers are still protected if they fail dramatically. Pharmaceuticals, for example. Designing a molecule and testing it is at least as difficult as designing a car.
Do you seriously think that the complexity of the product is an excuse? That's crazy. Far better to ask the companies to simply know their limitations, and not ship products that they can't build to reasonable standards of quality.
The licensing issue is irrelevant too. If my microwave catches fire, I can sue somebody. If my custom-built house collapses, I can sue somebody. If my shotgun explodes, I can sue somebody.
I don't mean to sound sue-crazy -- but the only deterrent we, the public, have, is our ability to use the legal system to whack companies that try to pull a fast one on us. If we lose that ability, we'll have nothing but crap to choose from.
Re:I hope I like it, I hated the first one
on
Review: Rush Hour 2
·
· Score: 2
Yeah, I think that was the point. Tucker's using a joke that's usually directed at black people. It's irony
Where I come from there are a hell of a lot more asian than black folks, so I hear the "they all look alike" in the wild, so to speak. So it didn't strike me as ironic, but plain racist.
If you want a black actor acting seriously as an intelligent person...
I never said I had a problem with comedy. And I know there are some great dramatic black actors. But how about a black *comedian* who isn't in the Chris Tucker style?
In my area, @home can't tell what's out. It takes many hours for an outage to make it onto "the board." If you call before this time, they will make you reboot the computer, reset the modem, etc etc. and then they will schedule a tech to come out. Because, again, let me repeat myself: they have no ability to monitor the network in real-time. I am comvinced that "the board" only shows outage data that they collect from outraged customers.
(side note: the idiot techs always make you reboot... even though the modem's ability to sync to the network has NOTHING TO DO with the kind of computer it is attached to, or even indeed if the computer is ON or OFF. Sigh.)
@home is a freaking circus. A monkey house.
I actually prefer it that way, they are apparently too dense to notice all the servers I run in violation of the TOS.
Re:I hope I like it, I hated the first one
on
Review: Rush Hour 2
·
· Score: 2
Plenty of stupid racist stereotypes in Rush Hour 2 as well, from the previews anyway.
At one point, Tucker punches Chan and says, "sorry, you guys all look alike." Hey, why not let Jackie Chan make some watermelon-eating jokes while we're at it? Jebus. Pathetic.
On a semi-related topic, why aren't black people (can I say that? or do I have to say African-American?) furious that they keep being represented as these shrill-voiced, jive-talkin' caricatures? I would think it's insulting, but I'm just a European-American.
Where's that troll Tyrone Fine when you need him?:)
Re:If this can't break Microsoft's back nothing wi
on
Code Red Back For More
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Unlike a car that explodes to a design flaw, software that explodes due to a design flaw seems to be immune to the civil justice system.
Keep in mind that introducing a bill is a long long way from making any changes in the law, and even this bill doesn't necessarily solve all of the current problems with copyright law.
As soon as I read about ANY new legislation my first thought is, "god, how are they going to screw it up now?" I have lost so much confidence in the government that I really can't imagine a new law making anything BETTER. I just keep my eye on court cases, and hope things get struck down that way.
Theoretically, I suppose it is possible to fix a problem through legislation. But I'm a cynic and I have a hard time believing it!
It's simple. 95% of the computer-using public doesn't know that there is anything besides Microsoft out there. I have had people tell me crazy things like "of course Macs run Windows."
So, naturally they'll call this an "email virus" or "computer virus" instead of "a shoddy security flaw particular to one operating system." The level of analysis in the latter description is far, far over the head of most computer users. And MS doesn't have any competition to make security a big deal in their OS advertisements.
(I love Apple, but we Apple users just don't count. There are not enough of us. Like it or not, we are the lunatic fringe. Long live the fringe though!)
To most folks, Microsoft is a benevolent, Barney- like giant without which there wouldn't be computers at all. "How can you blame such a wonderful company for what some misceant hackers do? It certainly isn't Microsoft's fault that computers have these fundamental flaws, or that there are people that exploit them. Ooh! Someone emailed me a magic elf animation!"
Like ex-Pres Clinton, Microsoft has a teflon coating. Fascinating, and disturbing.
If MS was really smart they'd offer free Windows licenses to all K-12 education. Not that they are having a problem keeping users, but that would probably insure vast amounts of Users for Life.
Federal law? I SERIOUSLY doubt that! I wonder if the guy made that up on the spot, or if they were coached to say that? You should call back and pretend to be a Senator.
Someday when my publishing company grows up, I will use the profits to start a PC bizness with a clue, and I will do my best to drive the likes of Dell out of business.
Whatever happened to "the customer is always right?" Customer service on the whole has really taken a dive lately.
Funny you should mention that, in the hippie-town where I live there is an old blue compact car that is painted like a duck pond... and there are rubber ducks glued all over the car. It's good to know that when that guy upgrades to an expensive car he can keep his ducks.
...and that won't happen because the general population doesn't have sufficient military strength anymore...
I think you are seriously underestimating the public's ability to resist or revolt.
Sure, the government has all this stuff: tanks, fuel-air explosives, atomic howitzer shells, nerve gas, artillery... But what are all those weapons good for? Mass destruction.
You can't use nerve gas to stop protestors -- unless you want to kill all of them. You can't use artillery to get people to stop taking pot shots at the Army dudes enforcing the curfew -- unless you want to kill everyone in the suspect area. And so on, and so on.
To control a population instead of destroying it, you have to moderate the force you use, and bingo -- they're playing in our ballpark again. Small arms.
Look at what the Russians had to do to the Chechens. To get ANYWHERE in that war, they LEVELED the Chechen capital city of Grozny with weeks of heavy artillery fire. They killed thousands of people, and displaced tens of thousands, most of which were non-combatants.
We surely can't stop the government from slaughtering us en masse if they decide to. But if things start to go downhill, the government won't resort to genocide right away. Instead they'll be shipping people off to "political re-education camps" and that sort of thing... that will require men coming to your home to get ya, and those men are vulnerable to good old fashioned rifle fire from the rooftops.
In the event that the government turns up the heat and starts bombing our own cities, I'd say that the hypothetical rebels have their cause justified.
I bet there would be enough dissenters in the armed forces to fubar a military campaign against the civilian population anyway.
It won't work that way. It will instead be the wedge that allows worse laws to get passed. "Your Honor, if it is legal to reasonably restrict criminal speech designed to allow pirates to steam content, is it not also reasonable to restrict the discussion of creating weapons?"
A few years from now you won't be able to print a picture of a gun ina book, or talk about the chemistry of explosives. This "circumvention" stuff is just the beginning.
If hacking was legal, there wouldn't be "no revenue stream." Today, hacking DTV is illegal, but it easy to do for technical people. Still, 90% of their subscribers DON'T hack.
Even if hacking was legal, the sat company would be free to make it a pain in the ass, and most people would just pay anyway.
I read something interesting the other day, someone was monkeying with altering the voltage supplies to the card slot. By lowering the voltage he was able to prevent the sat box from writing to the card, effectively ECM-proofing it. Neat. Why didn't I think of that? But surely the card must need to take some updates on occasion...
(you need to safe the rewriteable memory in the sat box too, that can be fried by ECM as well.)
If the knock ever comes, the DTV gear is the least of your worries. When the cops show up for hacking-type-crimes, they typically sieze every piece of electronic equipment in the place: printer cables, CDs, telephones, the works. They may have been clued in to you hacking DTV, but they'll get you for all those warez CDs you have too... and you can say goodbye to all your hardware and legitimate data.
Cloning research is necessary to let us figure out how to grow a "heart in a jar." Imagine: you get sick, they take a blood sample, 3 weeks later they have a new heart for you. If we can nail that, then there won't be any need to clone whole bodies, and most of the moral opposition to cloning vanishes.
This would be a Good Thing. Give science a chance to figure it out. Someone you know will need a new organ someday.
That kind of technology is SO far in the future that we may as well be discussing what kind of treaties we'll sign with the Klingons.
I love science as much as the next geek. Loved it enough to almost finish my MS.;) But talking about "gray goo" plagues and universal assemblers is a little premature right now! We're at the "Ogg make fire!" state in nanotechnology right now.
I wonder if there is any way to alert the web server that the client is running this kind of software. I'd love to pop up a window as a public service message, saying something like "Looks like your computer has been infested with..."
Is there a way to do something like that with JavaScript? Can JavaScript check for the existence of a file on the client's filesystem?
Slashdot Mirror
I love sci fi, but Farscape just looks like the Muppet Show. I can't take it seriously enough to give it a chance.
Stargate SG-1 is currently my favorite show. I'm addicted.
- Operating systems are more complex than cars.
- Operating systems don't require a license to be operated.
Irrelevant. There are plenty of products that are more complex than cars, and consumers are still protected if they fail dramatically. Pharmaceuticals, for example. Designing a molecule and testing it is at least as difficult as designing a car.
Do you seriously think that the complexity of the product is an excuse? That's crazy. Far better to ask the companies to simply know their limitations, and not ship products that they can't build to reasonable standards of quality.
The licensing issue is irrelevant too. If my microwave catches fire, I can sue somebody. If my custom-built house collapses, I can sue somebody. If my shotgun explodes, I can sue somebody.
I don't mean to sound sue-crazy -- but the only deterrent we, the public, have, is our ability to use the legal system to whack companies that try to pull a fast one on us. If we lose that ability, we'll have nothing but crap to choose from.
Yeah, I think that was the point. Tucker's using a joke that's usually directed at black people. It's irony
Where I come from there are a hell of a lot more asian than black folks, so I hear the "they all look alike" in the wild, so to speak. So it didn't strike me as ironic, but plain racist.
If you want a black actor acting seriously as an intelligent person...
I never said I had a problem with comedy. And I know there are some great dramatic black actors. But how about a black *comedian* who isn't in the Chris Tucker style?
In my area, @home can't tell what's out. It takes many hours for an outage to make it onto "the board." If you call before this time, they will make you reboot the computer, reset the modem, etc etc. and then they will schedule a tech to come out. Because, again, let me repeat myself: they have no ability to monitor the network in real-time. I am comvinced that "the board" only shows outage data that they collect from outraged customers.
(side note: the idiot techs always make you reboot... even though the modem's ability to sync to the network has NOTHING TO DO with the kind of computer it is attached to, or even indeed if the computer is ON or OFF. Sigh.)
@home is a freaking circus. A monkey house.
I actually prefer it that way, they are apparently too dense to notice all the servers I run in violation of the TOS.
Plenty of stupid racist stereotypes in Rush Hour 2 as well, from the previews anyway.
At one point, Tucker punches Chan and says, "sorry, you guys all look alike." Hey, why not let Jackie Chan make some watermelon-eating jokes while we're at it? Jebus. Pathetic.
On a semi-related topic, why aren't black people (can I say that? or do I have to say African-American?) furious that they keep being represented as these shrill-voiced, jive-talkin' caricatures? I would think it's insulting, but I'm just a European-American.
Where's that troll Tyrone Fine when you need him?
Unlike a car that explodes to a design flaw, software that explodes due to a design flaw seems to be immune to the civil justice system.
I wouldn't have thought they'd have faked three videos presented as evidence in a Federal court, either.
So that's where my fucking plane went.
Keep in mind that introducing a bill is a long long way from making any changes in the law, and even this bill doesn't necessarily solve all of the current problems with copyright law.
As soon as I read about ANY new legislation my first thought is, "god, how are they going to screw it up now?" I have lost so much confidence in the government that I really can't imagine a new law making anything BETTER. I just keep my eye on court cases, and hope things get struck down that way.
Theoretically, I suppose it is possible to fix a problem through legislation. But I'm a cynic and I have a hard time believing it!
It's simple. 95% of the computer-using public doesn't know that there is anything besides Microsoft out there. I have had people tell me crazy things like "of course Macs run Windows."
So, naturally they'll call this an "email virus" or "computer virus" instead of "a shoddy security flaw particular to one operating system." The level of analysis in the latter description is far, far over the head of most computer users. And MS doesn't have any competition to make security a big deal in their OS advertisements.
(I love Apple, but we Apple users just don't count. There are not enough of us. Like it or not, we are the lunatic fringe. Long live the fringe though!)
To most folks, Microsoft is a benevolent, Barney- like giant without which there wouldn't be computers at all. "How can you blame such a wonderful company for what some misceant hackers do? It certainly isn't Microsoft's fault that computers have these fundamental flaws, or that there are people that exploit them. Ooh! Someone emailed me a magic elf animation!"
Like ex-Pres Clinton, Microsoft has a teflon coating. Fascinating, and disturbing.
If MS was really smart they'd offer free Windows licenses to all K-12 education. Not that they are having a problem keeping users, but that would probably insure vast amounts of Users for Life.
Federal law? I SERIOUSLY doubt that! I wonder if the guy made that up on the spot, or if they were coached to say that? You should call back and pretend to be a Senator.
Someday when my publishing company grows up, I will use the profits to start a PC bizness with a clue, and I will do my best to drive the likes of Dell out of business.
Whatever happened to "the customer is always right?" Customer service on the whole has really taken a dive lately.
Funny you should mention that, in the hippie-town where I live there is an old blue compact car that is painted like a duck pond... and there are rubber ducks glued all over the car. It's good to know that when that guy upgrades to an expensive car he can keep his ducks.
...and that won't happen because the general population doesn't have sufficient military strength anymore...
I think you are seriously underestimating the public's ability to resist or revolt.
Sure, the government has all this stuff: tanks, fuel-air explosives, atomic howitzer shells, nerve gas, artillery... But what are all those weapons good for? Mass destruction.
You can't use nerve gas to stop protestors -- unless you want to kill all of them. You can't use artillery to get people to stop taking pot shots at the Army dudes enforcing the curfew -- unless you want to kill everyone in the suspect area. And so on, and so on.
To control a population instead of destroying it, you have to moderate the force you use, and bingo -- they're playing in our ballpark again. Small arms.
Look at what the Russians had to do to the Chechens. To get ANYWHERE in that war, they LEVELED the Chechen capital city of Grozny with weeks of heavy artillery fire. They killed thousands of people, and displaced tens of thousands, most of which were non-combatants.
We surely can't stop the government from slaughtering us en masse if they decide to. But if things start to go downhill, the government won't resort to genocide right away. Instead they'll be shipping people off to "political re-education camps" and that sort of thing... that will require men coming to your home to get ya, and those men are vulnerable to good old fashioned rifle fire from the rooftops.
In the event that the government turns up the heat and starts bombing our own cities, I'd say that the hypothetical rebels have their cause justified.
I bet there would be enough dissenters in the armed forces to fubar a military campaign against the civilian population anyway.
It won't work that way. It will instead be the wedge that allows worse laws to get passed. "Your Honor, if it is legal to reasonably restrict criminal speech designed to allow pirates to steam content, is it not also reasonable to restrict the discussion of creating weapons?"
A few years from now you won't be able to print a picture of a gun ina book, or talk about the chemistry of explosives. This "circumvention" stuff is just the beginning.
If hacking was legal, there wouldn't be "no revenue stream." Today, hacking DTV is illegal, but it easy to do for technical people. Still, 90% of their subscribers DON'T hack.
Even if hacking was legal, the sat company would be free to make it a pain in the ass, and most people would just pay anyway.
I read something interesting the other day, someone was monkeying with altering the voltage supplies to the card slot. By lowering the voltage he was able to prevent the sat box from writing to the card, effectively ECM-proofing it. Neat. Why didn't I think of that? But surely the card must need to take some updates on occasion...
(you need to safe the rewriteable memory in the sat box too, that can be fried by ECM as well.)
Are you aware that Fox has bought Speedvision, and they are going to turn it into the all-NASCAR network?
There is a petition up to oppose this, as if it will help. (I still have it linked to all over my web sites anyway.)
I just don't think it should be /illegal/ to decode a signal.
I'll take it further: it should not be illegal to manipulate data in the privacy of my own home. Period.
If the knock ever comes, the DTV gear is the least of your worries. When the cops show up for hacking-type-crimes, they typically sieze every piece of electronic equipment in the place: printer cables, CDs, telephones, the works. They may have been clued in to you hacking DTV, but they'll get you for all those warez CDs you have too... and you can say goodbye to all your hardware and legitimate data.
...they'd have to prosecute each user individually, and what are they likely to get? A back bill for a few years' service at best?
Their goal would probably be to get a few "casual pirates" thrown in the slammer for a few years, as a message to the rest.
In this context it isn't called "faking," it's called "massaging the data."
Cloning research is necessary to let us figure out how to grow a "heart in a jar." Imagine: you get sick, they take a blood sample, 3 weeks later they have a new heart for you. If we can nail that, then there won't be any need to clone whole bodies, and most of the moral opposition to cloning vanishes.
This would be a Good Thing. Give science a chance to figure it out. Someone you know will need a new organ someday.
That kind of technology is SO far in the future that we may as well be discussing what kind of treaties we'll sign with the Klingons.
I love science as much as the next geek. Loved it enough to almost finish my MS.
IANAC (I am not a coder):
I wonder if there is any way to alert the web server that the client is running this kind of software. I'd love to pop up a window as a public service message, saying something like "Looks like your computer has been infested with..."
Is there a way to do something like that with JavaScript? Can JavaScript check for the existence of a file on the client's filesystem?