No, they _think_ they can ban phones in classrooms. They can ban disruptive use of a phone (i.e., talking on it or having the ring volume way up), but simply having the thing and using it outside of the classroom? Nope, not within their power. And the 'hats in the cafeteria' is stupid; there's no federal body that retains all powers to regulate hats and explicitly forbids other parties from trying to do so.
It's not a privelege, it's a lease! I paid through the nose for campus housing, and I'll be damned if you're gonna tell me I was just living there out of the goodness of GaTech's heart. And no, I don't have to follow their rules of conduct if said rules are illegal. Only the FCC has the authority to prohibit use of unregulated spectrums. The university is not the FCC, ergo...
Easy. They'll just pass another law saying that you can't refuse to sell to the guvmint. Gives them total control over any piece of satellite info they want.
So no crime, no charges, no suspicion, no nothing but "We want to know who you are" and they can hold me for a day or three? Yeesh, and cops wonder why nobody likes them.
Yup, it was a sad, sad day when Zeus signed the DMCA (Deistic Millenium Combustion Act). Poor Prometheus, going around with that 'fire is free as in love' schtick, I couldn't believe what the Pantheon did to him. How much longer has he got to deal with that damned bird?
Interesting form of rental. A onetime fee, paid in cash, anonymously, with no conditions for return of the product or continued payments if it is kept. Why, after I walk out the store with the new CD I didn't _really_ purchase, I could drop it in the nearest trash can or give it to the first person I see and absolutely nothing would happen. Sounds an awful lot like a purchase to me.
Valenti's full of shit. He's incapable of seeing any difference between a physical object like a car and bits that can be replicated infinitely without any loss in quality. I would sooner ask my cat for insights into technology/copyright issues. Remember, Valenti is the guy who not only swore the VCR would be the death of the movie industry 20 years ago, but maintains to this day that he was correct.
LOL, nice mental image with the car rental. This is _exactly_ what the MPAA and RIAA are doing to us. They get all these laws passed with the idea they'll magically maintain the status quo, but it's the general population who ends up paying the real price for their legislative adventuring.
The problem with no-CD hacks is that they are exactly that. They tend to muck around with the binaries and doing so often precludes online play. Even the problem of getting them in the first place is rather chancy.
Far easier to rip images of the disc using CloneCD or Alcohol120 and then mount them as virtual drives. Alcohol120 does that, as well as Daemon-Tools. As an added bonus, if there's stuff actually baing read off the discs, the speed increase is enormous when you switch to reading it off the hdd.
They keep trying to cripple discs so that you can't do this sort of thing, but I've yet to come across one that the aforementioned utilities didn't just sneer at.
The Saudi's are worse than the Taliban because we literally look the other way when they act secular and execute people in the name of Islam.
Either you're confused as to the definition of 'secular' or there's a negative missing in here somewhere. Executing people in the name of Islam is quite the opposite of acting secular.
Clever analysis, but not quite accurate. The prisoner's dilemma depends on both sides being on more-or-less equal footing. They don't have to have the same goals or means of depriving the other of theirs, but they do have to be mutually exclusive.
The Israelis are more than capable of wiping out every single last Palestinian. If they wanted to, and if they did not care about the terrifically bad PR they'd incur doing it, it would not be difficult. Technical feasiblity in killing The Enemy is not amongst the Israelis problems. Furthermore, the Israelis ability to wipe out the Palestinians is not dependent on any sort of military resistance.
Flip the tables. Imagine if Arafat or Bin Laden could just push a button and wipe out every Jewish man, woman and child in Israel. I'd bet everything I own they'd push it so fast they'd break their hands.
It seems to me that the Palestinians could lay down their arms alone, and nothing else would change wrt their likelihood of survival. In effect, they lose nothing with either course of action. The Israelis really would be more vulnerable by disarming, and so have a reason to avoid doing so.
5. Yup, good plan there. Much better CD-key generation algorithms would also be a good plan - Doom 3's was cracked before it was even officially out, for example.
By all accounts, it's not even in the same ballpark as a decent CD-key system. People are typing in random gibberish and the game's accepting it.
Anyway, it's all a moot point. Game designers should operate under the assumption that any algorithm is going to get outside no matter what they do. Technically, they are shipping the algorithm on every CD sold, so to assume it'll never be made public is folly at its finest. Net result: people will _always_ be able to install it; all you can do is piss off your own customers. So, cut your losses and defend what you can. Only do CD-key checks for online play, which depends on a database the company controls. This allows them to forgo the whole 'CD-key generating algorithm' thing and just generate random numbers, print them in boxes, and add them to the DB as valid.
When, oh, when will they learn that trying to control what goes on on their customer's home PCs is a losing battle?
Look, I appreciate that, barring another summer heat wave, the English neither want nor need the ice as much as we do here. And if I don't request otherwise, I have no expectation to get anything other than what the waiter happens to be used to serving out.
But when I specifically say, "Give me ice. Loads and loads of ice. I want the ice to extend past the top of the glass. I want there to be so much ice there's no room for the water I'm going to be pouring into it" (this is an exaggeration, but not by much), and still they give me a 3 whole cubes? I think we've reached the point where it's acceptable for me to bitch about it. If they brought out your scotch on the rocks even after you asked for it neat, would you just shrug and say, "Well, I guess that's just how they do things here"? No, you'd want your drink the way you asked for it.
And as far as I could tell, in England, there's no such thing as an inexpensive restaurant. Christ, I spent as much on a meal at Garfunkle's as I would have at the Melting Pot here.
No, no, I recently went on a trip to England and Spain. In England I had exactly the problem the parent described. In Spain they know all about hot weather and so when you ask for agua con mucho hielo, that's exactly what you get.
I noticed this on a trip to England. Drove me nuts; I'd tell them I want a glass of water with "lots of ice, fill the damned thing up with ice if you have to", and then I'd get 2 cubes. Maybe 3. They just don't understand that here in Florida your life consists of staggering from one cool refreshing drink to the next.
It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried.
It's important to remember that democracy is a good thing, not in and of itself, but for its properties. Let's face it, a government, _any_ government, is a monstrous, cruel, and indifferent wielder of vast sums of power. Keeping it accountability to the people being ruled (i.e., a democracy of some form) is, to date, the best means we have of keeping the damage from misuse of a government to a minimum and the productive uses to a maximum. But as you pointed out, the majority isn't always right, though the founding fathers knew it and tried to account for it.
Government-designing is like playing Calvinball, a game where the players are allowed to replace careful planning with selfish, short-sighted nonsense if they so desire. It seems like the human condition precludes any form of large-scale governance that can simultaneously represent the will of the Many but protect the freedom of the Few, and do so into perpetuity without the rules being rewritten so as to benefit some power-hungry group, as seems to be happening today.
All of which, oddly enough, bears highly on the current topic: space. We need a frontier to let off steam and we need it badly. The extra-terrestrial prospects of vast wealth and ultimate long-term survival for the species are moot if we legislate ourselves into a corner nobody can escape from.
You sound like a fan of Stephenson's. I would recommend "The Transparent Society" by David Brin (sort-of fictionalized in his novel "Kiln People"), as well as "Across Realtime" by Vernor Vinge.
No, no, buying the first lottery ticket improves your odds the most. By a factor of infinity, from 0% to 0.00002%. Buying ticket #2 'merely' doubles the odds.
Thank you! So many people seem to not be realizing that if we used our current planet-detecting methods on our own star system, our own home, we probably wouldn't see anything at all, what with Earth being too small and Juptier being too far away.
A) The star can be dimmer and the planet closer in, or brighter and the planet further away. You're right about problems with it being too bright and thus too short-lived, though.
B) We do _not_ need a magnetic field. Magnetism doesn't affect our receiving gamma or x-ray radiation, an nice thick atmosphere does that. A magnetic field is useful for diverting high-energy particles (solar wind, cosmic rays, etc), but again, the atmosphere does most of that anyway. The only reason we could say we need a magnetic field is that it's presence means there is an active, liquid core, and thus geological action, which is useful for keeping the biosphere flexible and preventing it from getting stuck in a rut. But contrary to Hllywood science, the magnetic field could disappear tomorrow and the only consequence would be that Boy Scouts would no longer learn how to use a compass
C) Carbon is easy to come by, and given it's prediliction for chemistry, organic compounds are common as dirt. We find them nebulae all the time.
D) Temperature is tricky, but is largely regulated by established ecological systems anyway. Depending on the atmospheric content, this planet is as likely to be a frozen ball of ice or a Venus-like inferno as it is the comparative paradise we enjoy. A planet too far from it's sun would develop ecologies that maintained a higher CO2 level than we have.
Fact of the matter is, we have 3 planets in just this one star system close enough to the sun to support liquid water and life. Unfortunately, Venus was a bit too large to be so close, and Mars not large or dense enough to retain an atmosphere, but still! There's nothing outrageously improbable about the location, size, and composition of Earth, and I think that the odds were against _only_ one planet developing life here.
The Society asserts that the Earth is flat and has five sides, that all places in the Universe named Springfield are merely links in higher-dimensional space to one place, and that all assertions are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true false and meaningless in some sense.
What is the "middle corner"?
If one was to draw a line from each corner to the centre of the opposing side of the Earth, the line would intersect in the middle of the Flat Earth. This place is known as the Middle Corner. Does the "middle corner" prove that 5=6?
Yes. Does Idaho exist
No. The existence of Idaho is a lie, fabricated by a conspiracy of cartographers, as is England (see question 10). What about North Dakota?
That doesn't exist either.
And there's more like it. This is someone's idea of a joke gone way too far. Anyone capable of saying that and believing it would have a hard time puting their pants on the right way every morning, to say nothing of running a website.
If not, judges these days are pretty good at making stuff up, like declaring a publically voted law to be unconstitutional, as was the case this week in Washington State.
I can see how you would find this to be frustrating, but think on it for a second. The Constitution is there, among other things, to protect the rights of the minority from the tyrrany of the majority. It does not matter how a law was passed, if it goes against the law of the land, it's out. The People answer to the law, the law answers to the Constitution, the Constitution answers to the People. The rules don't allow for shortcuts. That would require rewriting the rules, which can be done, of course, but takes far more than a simple majority.
It's trivially easy to think up cases where 51% of the population could be convinced to vote for a law that trampled on the freedom of the other 49%, particularly in certain areas where matters of race or religion are paramount. I don't know what the Seattle case you are referring to was all about, and if I did I might not agree with the decision, but the fact remains that the judge had the right and even the duty to decide if a law, any law, even one voted for directly by the Great Unwashed, was up to Constitutional standards.
Re:Evil Katie's lawyer wants to hear from you....
on
The Saga of Katie.com
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· Score: 2, Funny
Hmmm, I think I'll write a song entitled "201-463-8663" and then sue her for the number. After all, it'd violate my first ammendment rights to not have the phone number of the song I wrote!
Did you ever think that use of the product inconsistent with its labeling means using it to make poison gas, not pouring in an extra cut?
So what? If it doesn't say, and the law just leaves off with "inconsistent use", or even a terribly vague "potentially dangerous", then what's to stop it being peversely interpreted when someone in power has it in for you?
I still don't see how bootlegging a movie and sharing them would be considered a fair use.
I suppose it's not, but there's no way to stop it without also stopping things that _are_ fair use. You may be willing to throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater, but many of us are not.
Just send 10 of them and switch them out when somthing goes wrong. Don't forget it going to cost somewhere around 10 - 100+ times the cost to send 1 human to mars as it would to send one robot.
One person will be far more effective than 10 robots, or even 100 robots. They don't stack up in serial. Don't forget the level of robotics here for the forseeable future. They aren't powerful, articulated, dextrous bodies with realtime intelligent control straight out of Terminator. They're creaking, hulking, weaklings with _so much_ intelligence that NASA can barely trust them to drive themselves at 1/10 MPH for 10 or 20 meters, ceartainly not to clean off optics. Compressed air? What if it takes a good scrubbing?
As to building things um robots build things all the time.
Please name the building that has been built _entirely_ automatically with robotic equipment dumped unceremoniously onto a site, with only occasional oversight by real people. Time lag would prevent anything better.
We have already sent robots that use a drill to gather samples and vaperise the content's and tell you what there made out of.
Sure, samples from a few inches down, wherever it was they landed, almost certainly on a nice, large, flat plain. Want to get a 100-foot deep sample from somewhere on Olympus Mons, or even just from a mile away from the landing point over rough terrain? Sorry, you're out of luck.
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It's not a privelege, it's a lease! I paid through the nose for campus housing, and I'll be damned if you're gonna tell me I was just living there out of the goodness of GaTech's heart. And no, I don't have to follow their rules of conduct if said rules are illegal. Only the FCC has the authority to prohibit use of unregulated spectrums. The university is not the FCC, ergo...
War on Terror
War on Poverty
War on Internet Piracy
What exactly does 'only during wartime' mean these days?
Easy. They'll just pass another law saying that you can't refuse to sell to the guvmint. Gives them total control over any piece of satellite info they want.
So no crime, no charges, no suspicion, no nothing but "We want to know who you are" and they can hold me for a day or three? Yeesh, and cops wonder why nobody likes them.
Out of idle curiosity, what happens if I lie, and do so very blatantly? Like, "Call me Ishmael", or "My name is Holden McGroin".
Yup, it was a sad, sad day when Zeus signed the DMCA (Deistic Millenium Combustion Act). Poor Prometheus, going around with that 'fire is free as in love' schtick, I couldn't believe what the Pantheon did to him. How much longer has he got to deal with that damned bird?
In that case use CloneCD. It has a free trial mode, which I believe limits burn speeds to 1x but doesn't affect the read. And Daemon Tools is free.
Valenti's full of shit. He's incapable of seeing any difference between a physical object like a car and bits that can be replicated infinitely without any loss in quality. I would sooner ask my cat for insights into technology/copyright issues. Remember, Valenti is the guy who not only swore the VCR would be the death of the movie industry 20 years ago, but maintains to this day that he was correct.
LOL, nice mental image with the car rental. This is _exactly_ what the MPAA and RIAA are doing to us. They get all these laws passed with the idea they'll magically maintain the status quo, but it's the general population who ends up paying the real price for their legislative adventuring.
Far easier to rip images of the disc using CloneCD or Alcohol120 and then mount them as virtual drives. Alcohol120 does that, as well as Daemon-Tools. As an added bonus, if there's stuff actually baing read off the discs, the speed increase is enormous when you switch to reading it off the hdd.
They keep trying to cripple discs so that you can't do this sort of thing, but I've yet to come across one that the aforementioned utilities didn't just sneer at.
Either you're confused as to the definition of 'secular' or there's a negative missing in here somewhere. Executing people in the name of Islam is quite the opposite of acting secular.
The Israelis are more than capable of wiping out every single last Palestinian. If they wanted to, and if they did not care about the terrifically bad PR they'd incur doing it, it would not be difficult. Technical feasiblity in killing The Enemy is not amongst the Israelis problems. Furthermore, the Israelis ability to wipe out the Palestinians is not dependent on any sort of military resistance.
Flip the tables. Imagine if Arafat or Bin Laden could just push a button and wipe out every Jewish man, woman and child in Israel. I'd bet everything I own they'd push it so fast they'd break their hands.
It seems to me that the Palestinians could lay down their arms alone, and nothing else would change wrt their likelihood of survival. In effect, they lose nothing with either course of action. The Israelis really would be more vulnerable by disarming, and so have a reason to avoid doing so.
By all accounts, it's not even in the same ballpark as a decent CD-key system. People are typing in random gibberish and the game's accepting it.
Anyway, it's all a moot point. Game designers should operate under the assumption that any algorithm is going to get outside no matter what they do. Technically, they are shipping the algorithm on every CD sold, so to assume it'll never be made public is folly at its finest. Net result: people will _always_ be able to install it; all you can do is piss off your own customers. So, cut your losses and defend what you can. Only do CD-key checks for online play, which depends on a database the company controls. This allows them to forgo the whole 'CD-key generating algorithm' thing and just generate random numbers, print them in boxes, and add them to the DB as valid.
When, oh, when will they learn that trying to control what goes on on their customer's home PCs is a losing battle?
But when I specifically say, "Give me ice. Loads and loads of ice. I want the ice to extend past the top of the glass. I want there to be so much ice there's no room for the water I'm going to be pouring into it" (this is an exaggeration, but not by much), and still they give me a 3 whole cubes? I think we've reached the point where it's acceptable for me to bitch about it. If they brought out your scotch on the rocks even after you asked for it neat, would you just shrug and say, "Well, I guess that's just how they do things here"? No, you'd want your drink the way you asked for it.
And as far as I could tell, in England, there's no such thing as an inexpensive restaurant. Christ, I spent as much on a meal at Garfunkle's as I would have at the Melting Pot here.
No, no, I recently went on a trip to England and Spain. In England I had exactly the problem the parent described. In Spain they know all about hot weather and so when you ask for agua con mucho hielo, that's exactly what you get.
I noticed this on a trip to England. Drove me nuts; I'd tell them I want a glass of water with "lots of ice, fill the damned thing up with ice if you have to", and then I'd get 2 cubes. Maybe 3. They just don't understand that here in Florida your life consists of staggering from one cool refreshing drink to the next.
It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried.
It's important to remember that democracy is a good thing, not in and of itself, but for its properties. Let's face it, a government, _any_ government, is a monstrous, cruel, and indifferent wielder of vast sums of power. Keeping it accountability to the people being ruled (i.e., a democracy of some form) is, to date, the best means we have of keeping the damage from misuse of a government to a minimum and the productive uses to a maximum. But as you pointed out, the majority isn't always right, though the founding fathers knew it and tried to account for it.
Government-designing is like playing Calvinball, a game where the players are allowed to replace careful planning with selfish, short-sighted nonsense if they so desire. It seems like the human condition precludes any form of large-scale governance that can simultaneously represent the will of the Many but protect the freedom of the Few, and do so into perpetuity without the rules being rewritten so as to benefit some power-hungry group, as seems to be happening today.
All of which, oddly enough, bears highly on the current topic: space. We need a frontier to let off steam and we need it badly. The extra-terrestrial prospects of vast wealth and ultimate long-term survival for the species are moot if we legislate ourselves into a corner nobody can escape from.
You sound like a fan of Stephenson's. I would recommend "The Transparent Society" by David Brin (sort-of fictionalized in his novel "Kiln People"), as well as "Across Realtime" by Vernor Vinge.
No, no, buying the first lottery ticket improves your odds the most. By a factor of infinity, from 0% to 0.00002%. Buying ticket #2 'merely' doubles the odds.
Thank you! So many people seem to not be realizing that if we used our current planet-detecting methods on our own star system, our own home, we probably wouldn't see anything at all, what with Earth being too small and Juptier being too far away.
B) We do _not_ need a magnetic field. Magnetism doesn't affect our receiving gamma or x-ray radiation, an nice thick atmosphere does that. A magnetic field is useful for diverting high-energy particles (solar wind, cosmic rays, etc), but again, the atmosphere does most of that anyway. The only reason we could say we need a magnetic field is that it's presence means there is an active, liquid core, and thus geological action, which is useful for keeping the biosphere flexible and preventing it from getting stuck in a rut. But contrary to Hllywood science, the magnetic field could disappear tomorrow and the only consequence would be that Boy Scouts would no longer learn how to use a compass
C) Carbon is easy to come by, and given it's prediliction for chemistry, organic compounds are common as dirt. We find them nebulae all the time.
D) Temperature is tricky, but is largely regulated by established ecological systems anyway. Depending on the atmospheric content, this planet is as likely to be a frozen ball of ice or a Venus-like inferno as it is the comparative paradise we enjoy. A planet too far from it's sun would develop ecologies that maintained a higher CO2 level than we have.
Fact of the matter is, we have 3 planets in just this one star system close enough to the sun to support liquid water and life. Unfortunately, Venus was a bit too large to be so close, and Mars not large or dense enough to retain an atmosphere, but still! There's nothing outrageously improbable about the location, size, and composition of Earth, and I think that the odds were against _only_ one planet developing life here.
The Society asserts that the Earth is flat and has five sides, that all places in the Universe named Springfield are merely links in higher-dimensional space to one place, and that all assertions are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true false and meaningless in some sense.
What is the "middle corner"?
If one was to draw a line from each corner to the centre of the opposing side of the Earth, the line would intersect in the middle of the Flat Earth. This place is known as the Middle Corner.
Does the "middle corner" prove that 5=6?
Yes.
Does Idaho exist
No. The existence of Idaho is a lie, fabricated by a conspiracy of cartographers, as is England (see question 10).
What about North Dakota?
That doesn't exist either.
And there's more like it. This is someone's idea of a joke gone way too far. Anyone capable of saying that and believing it would have a hard time puting their pants on the right way every morning, to say nothing of running a website.
One or two guys here on /. use it as a sig. And it's true. As nice as democracy is, it is not a magic cure against the tyrrany of the majority.
I can see how you would find this to be frustrating, but think on it for a second. The Constitution is there, among other things, to protect the rights of the minority from the tyrrany of the majority. It does not matter how a law was passed, if it goes against the law of the land, it's out. The People answer to the law, the law answers to the Constitution, the Constitution answers to the People. The rules don't allow for shortcuts. That would require rewriting the rules, which can be done, of course, but takes far more than a simple majority.
It's trivially easy to think up cases where 51% of the population could be convinced to vote for a law that trampled on the freedom of the other 49%, particularly in certain areas where matters of race or religion are paramount. I don't know what the Seattle case you are referring to was all about, and if I did I might not agree with the decision, but the fact remains that the judge had the right and even the duty to decide if a law, any law, even one voted for directly by the Great Unwashed, was up to Constitutional standards.
Hmmm, I think I'll write a song entitled "201-463-8663" and then sue her for the number. After all, it'd violate my first ammendment rights to not have the phone number of the song I wrote!
So what? If it doesn't say, and the law just leaves off with "inconsistent use", or even a terribly vague "potentially dangerous", then what's to stop it being peversely interpreted when someone in power has it in for you?
I still don't see how bootlegging a movie and sharing them would be considered a fair use.
I suppose it's not, but there's no way to stop it without also stopping things that _are_ fair use. You may be willing to throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater, but many of us are not.
Don't forget it going to cost somewhere around 10 - 100+ times the cost to send 1 human to mars as it would to send one robot.
One person will be far more effective than 10 robots, or even 100 robots. They don't stack up in serial. Don't forget the level of robotics here for the forseeable future. They aren't powerful, articulated, dextrous bodies with realtime intelligent control straight out of Terminator. They're creaking, hulking, weaklings with _so much_ intelligence that NASA can barely trust them to drive themselves at 1/10 MPH for 10 or 20 meters, ceartainly not to clean off optics. Compressed air? What if it takes a good scrubbing?
As to building things um robots build things all the time.
Please name the building that has been built _entirely_ automatically with robotic equipment dumped unceremoniously onto a site, with only occasional oversight by real people. Time lag would prevent anything better.
We have already sent robots that use a drill to gather samples and vaperise the content's and tell you what there made out of.
Sure, samples from a few inches down, wherever it was they landed, almost certainly on a nice, large, flat plain. Want to get a 100-foot deep sample from somewhere on Olympus Mons, or even just from a mile away from the landing point over rough terrain? Sorry, you're out of luck.