Come on... if you can burn it once, you can make unlimited lossless digital copies. Just use a CD-copying tool instead of your music player to do it.
That's not the point. I and probably any respectable slashdotter could easily defeat the DRM in various ways. The hoop shouldn't be there for me to jump through in the first place.
I know most people who drink the GNU/Kool-Aid absolutely hate DRM because all content should be free, but that just ain't happening any time soon...
No. I absolutely hate DRM because a) my computer should do what I tell it to and not be subject to the arbitrary whims of a 3rd party, and b) DRM restricts my reasonable desire to listen to legally acquired music the way I want.
I should be able to burn to CD 11 times a playlist I purchased, because I can use these 11 CDs in a legal manner. Instead the restriction is 10 or less (with iTunes). This would be a reasonable compromise, but the way it's enforced is by turning my own machine against me. This is a draconian solution, and the ability to listen to music whose owners favor this is not worth it to me. Companies should be paid for their product, but the price we pay for the DRM solution is fundamentally too high.
How many folks will pull out this card, hold it up to their faces, and say:
"ChangeMe"
Actually, I think they'll be saying things like "First Bank of Foo Mastercard" or "I love my Visa". A sneaky way to advertise the cards every time they are used.
It is common knowledge among Indians that corruption is rampant within the Indian government. I would be amazed if this is pulled off without serious problems.
Not long after however he died (flatlined and all that). Twenty minutes later, before being taken away he sat straight up and asked if he could go home.
This seems like Lazarus phenomenon, of which little is known, because experiments required to learn more about it in humans would be very unethical. There is thought that perhaps the adrenalin administered to combat cardiac arrest made it to the heart slowly (Resuscitation. 1998 Oct-Nov;39(1-2):125-8.) Or, perhaps the patient overdosed on a depressant.
Anyway the point I'm trying to make is that we should be careful not to dismiss these possibilities outright because of a desire to consider it a miracle.
This statement, I believe, says a great deal about non-theists. Even if someone WAS raised from the dead, you apparently have already decided that it couldn't possibly be God. Faced with even an apparent (possibly real) resurrection, and you'll start with the pre-supposition that it could not possibly be God, and work back from that and try to find a "scientific" answer.
Actually, the idea is to start with no presuppositions at all, and use actual defensible evidence to come to conclusions. You seem to be implying that we should throw up our hands and give up trying to figure out why something happened when it looks like there may have been divine intervention. The danger I see here is a lack of critical thinking - a faculty nobody should be without.
I can tell you a story of a friend who was raised from the dead, of a Chinese preacher who lived for 74 days in prison without food or water, of people with incurable diseases being healed but this will not change a thing. Science cannot explain these things yet your head will not let your heart entertain the idea that there may be a God.
Claims of the nature "science can't explain $foo, so therefore there's a God" interest me. I'd like to hear the story of your friend who was "raised from the dead". I'm a biology person so maybe I can offer some insight.
In my experience 10kbps is not enough to have a smooth desktop experience.
Of course not. The 150K/s is probably an mean over time of all clients' usage, not a sustained transfer - if it were, Ethernet would been designed to be circuit switched like the PSTN and not packet switched;) I'd expect any individual client to have spikes of high bandwidth usage separated by long periods of low bandwidth usage, consistent with pointing and clicking. When you combine a bunch of clients, the spikes combine too and even out to the quoted 150K/s.
This is the last place I expected to see such a widespread misunderstanding of the implications of what this program does.
It does the same DRM removal that iTunes does for you already.
In iTunes, you can burn tracks to CD. Then, you can rip them as unprotected tracks. There's a slight quality hit, but it's still equivalent to the original for purposes of copyright law. All PlayFair does for you above iTunes is save you a CD-RW, a few minutes, and the quality hit. You are left with a non-DRM track that is not substantially different from the PlayFair-stripped track. The copyright violation occurs if you distribute the track to those not licensed to have it.
<RANT> I'm amazed that any slashdotters at all are willing to put up with any sort of DRM, even the relatively friendly Apple version. It's reasonable for the copyright holder to expect me not to distribute it, but restricting my ability in any way to listen to it on all my computers is ludicrous.
My experience in college radio has shown me that RIAA labels are slimy bastards. I'm not willing to give up rights so they can apply an overzealous solution to a "problem" that might not actually exist. Even if all labels ceased to exist tomorrow, we'd all still be alive, folks. </RANT>
Maybe I'm smoking crack on this one; would someone care to correct me?
Can you actually write a shell script that takes control of the system?
Do you need to? I wouldn't give a flying SCO if my/usr/bin got nuked. It's my $HOME that I care about, and a worm only needs user privileges to kill that.
Installing packages on Debian: apt-get install packagename Installing packages on Slackware: swaret --install packagename Installing packages on Gentoo: emerge packagename
Installing on windows: - go to store - buy software - go home - pop CD in and run installer - reboot computer
I'm not sure what side you are taking here:)
Everybody knows how to do each of the individual steps you list to install a Windows program. Most would perceive that as easier than learning how to bring up an xterm, type in su, update the package database, guess what the package name is (or dig through thousands of choices), and type in apt-get or whatever. And with Gentoo, waiting for the compiler (unless they set it to use binary packages).
Think of it this way - which would your mother rather do: 1) relearn how to integrate a simple equation 2) go to the store and buy a calculator? The first takes less time, but requires more overall effort. The second is brainless.
As the POWER arcitecture is in reverse-ENDIAN order from the x86 arictecture, and to my knowledge, the x86 cannot switch order on the fly, I believe...
Such an emulator would necessarily be dog-slow compared to the real thing.
Keep in mind that this is only a constant cost, and only for reads and writes to things outside the processor (most commonly RAM). Once a value is in a register, you can leave it in the host endianness. Certainly there is a speed hit for every access, but you take a bigger hit in other things. For example: emulating the MMU, doing the math for every virtual memory access. Maybe you could leverage the host MMU for this in some way, but then good luck writing emulator code portable across architectures.
The parent post isn't saying building streets soley for people to walk/ride bikes...he's saying building them so car's aren't the only option.
OK, I see that now, but some of my points are still valid. One might make a case that making walking/biking easier is directly at odds with making driving easier (stopping your bike every block to let cars by is counterproductive). Anyway car-laden cities do have sidewalks...
How about building cities so you can walk or ride a bike to where you need to go, instead of building strictly for car-sized vehicular traffic?
I live in Manhattan and do not have a car. I walk everywhere or take the subway, since everything I need is so close, and even if I did have a car driving in this traffic would be aggravating and expensive besides. It works fine, but I really miss the Good Old Days(TM) when I lived in suburban environments and had a car.
- Purchasing large objects: In a carless city, I don't know how I would buy large things, such as furniture. I get that stuff delivered nowadays but if there were no roads how would it get to my door? - Groceries: Walking back to my apartment carrying a bunch of grocery bags is no fun. - Weather: Walking in general is not fun in the snow. Getting takeout food is a pain in this situation, and I don't really have much option since I didn't buy groceries (see above).
Once the carless city expanded beyond a small town, it would quickly become inconvenient to live there, if my experience is worth jumping to conclusions from. A subway/train system really helps, but you have to run it with an iron fist if you don't want it to become a urine-soaked pit. (Side note: Singapore's train system is spotless and all around wonderful. But the necessary authoritarianism wouldn't fly here in the US.)
On the other hand, maybe I'm just lazy. Manhattan would be a much cleaner place without cars, and maybe the tradeoff is worth it.
...simple as that. Just like every other multibillion dollar industry, it would have been dominated by a few major players.
A better question perhaps is: what if Windows wasn't such crap for so long?
Subquestions: What if Win16 had died when the 286 did, and we didn't end up in a state where Windows and its apps were 16 bit but required a fast 32 bit machine to run at a usable speed, negating the benefit of backward compatibility? What if the Win32 API wasn't so bletcherous? What if there weren't so many security exploits?
So what I'm getting at is: What would have happened to the OSS movement if Windows hadn't created the need for a non-crap and Free software system?
This is amazingly petty of me, but I can't stomach using OpenOffice since they changed the name of the software to "OpenOffice.org". What, was "OpenOffice" not getting the point across?
I think naming things after TLDs is stupid too but in this case if you mention it to someone who has never heard of it before, they know where to get it. The URL is encoded right in the name. That's got to be worth something.
maybe I'm out of line here, but this is not a good topic to brain storm. Why do we want to devises more deviant ways to spam? And why hurt our precious Google!
1) Because it's our intrinsic human right to think about whatever we want. 2) Because some of us, as server administrators, must deal with spam in all its vile forms, and we therefore must know our enemy.
Actually, I think it looks pretty good compared to the current crop of games.
- The people throw shadows. - There's a leaf floating in one of the barrels (look carefully). - There's random crap lying around down below. (I think this is really important to have).
On the other hand, there are some problems:
- Shadows may be too crisp. Is everything under a spotlight? Either soften the shadows or (preferably) throw multiple shadows. There can't just be one bright light in that scene. - The people should throw shadows onto themselves. - The railings, among other things, appear as if they are held together by superglue. How about rivets? Screws? - The flying debris resulting from the gunshot doesn't appear to have broken off anything. It just magically spawned there. Also the flash of light from that doesn't seem to throw a shadow. - The pattern of rust on the platform the soldier is kneeling on is duplicated in the platform directly below. - Do doorframes exist in videogames? Electrical outlets? - Mortar lines in brick walls are not carried all the way around. - The background should be just slightly out of focus. - Et cetera ad nauseum.
I realize it's easy to say these things from the comfort of my non-game-developer chair. But I'd be surprised if I didn't see these things happen as technology catches up. It's the little things (and there are a lot of them) that will make all the difference.
My guess is that this sort of thing will move into the procedural realm. Developers will license libraries that do nothing but generate nice-looking world geometry procedurally, as well as textures, physics, etc., and plug into the rest of the game engine. When you upgrade to the Geforce42, you'll be able to display 2x the screws in metal structures and 3x the litter on the street.
Slashdot Mirror
Come on... if you can burn it once, you can make unlimited lossless digital copies. Just use a CD-copying tool instead of your music player to do it.
That's not the point. I and probably any respectable slashdotter could easily defeat the DRM in various ways. The hoop shouldn't be there for me to jump through in the first place.
I know most people who drink the GNU/Kool-Aid absolutely hate DRM because all content should be free, but that just ain't happening any time soon...
No. I absolutely hate DRM because a) my computer should do what I tell it to and not be subject to the arbitrary whims of a 3rd party, and b) DRM restricts my reasonable desire to listen to legally acquired music the way I want.
I should be able to burn to CD 11 times a playlist I purchased, because I can use these 11 CDs in a legal manner. Instead the restriction is 10 or less (with iTunes). This would be a reasonable compromise, but the way it's enforced is by turning my own machine against me. This is a draconian solution, and the ability to listen to music whose owners favor this is not worth it to me. Companies should be paid for their product, but the price we pay for the DRM solution is fundamentally too high.
I've also noted that you can type in things like "fuck off and die" into Clippy's help balloon, and he'll point you to info on turning him off.
How many folks will pull out this card, hold it up to their faces, and say:
"ChangeMe"
Actually, I think they'll be saying things like "First Bank of Foo Mastercard" or "I love my Visa". A sneaky way to advertise the cards every time they are used.
It is common knowledge among Indians that corruption is rampant within the Indian government. I would be amazed if this is pulled off without serious problems.
Agreed. As long as neither side is shoving their ideology down everyone else's throats, I'm happy.
Not long after however he died (flatlined and all that). Twenty minutes later, before being taken away he sat straight up and asked if he could go home.
This seems like Lazarus phenomenon, of which little is known, because experiments required to learn more about it in humans would be very unethical. There is thought that perhaps the adrenalin administered to combat cardiac arrest made it to the heart slowly (Resuscitation. 1998 Oct-Nov;39(1-2):125-8.) Or, perhaps the patient overdosed on a depressant.
Anyway the point I'm trying to make is that we should be careful not to dismiss these possibilities outright because of a desire to consider it a miracle.
This statement, I believe, says a great deal about non-theists. Even if someone WAS raised from the dead, you apparently have already decided that it couldn't possibly be God. Faced with even an apparent (possibly real) resurrection, and you'll start with the pre-supposition that it could not possibly be God, and work back from that and try to find a "scientific" answer.
Actually, the idea is to start with no presuppositions at all, and use actual defensible evidence to come to conclusions. You seem to be implying that we should throw up our hands and give up trying to figure out why something happened when it looks like there may have been divine intervention. The danger I see here is a lack of critical thinking - a faculty nobody should be without.
I can tell you a story of a friend who was raised from the dead, of a Chinese preacher who lived for 74 days in prison without food or water, of people with incurable diseases being healed but this will not change a thing. Science cannot explain these things yet your head will not let your heart entertain the idea that there may be a God.
Claims of the nature "science can't explain $foo, so therefore there's a God" interest me. I'd like to hear the story of your friend who was "raised from the dead". I'm a biology person so maybe I can offer some insight.
In my experience 10kbps is not enough to have a smooth desktop experience.
;) I'd expect any individual client to have spikes of high bandwidth usage separated by long periods of low bandwidth usage, consistent with pointing and clicking. When you combine a bunch of clients, the spikes combine too and even out to the quoted 150K/s.
Of course not. The 150K/s is probably an mean over time of all clients' usage, not a sustained transfer - if it were, Ethernet would been designed to be circuit switched like the PSTN and not packet switched
This is the last place I expected to see such a widespread misunderstanding of the implications of what this program does.
It does the same DRM removal that iTunes does for you already.
In iTunes, you can burn tracks to CD. Then, you can rip them as unprotected tracks. There's a slight quality hit, but it's still equivalent to the original for purposes of copyright law. All PlayFair does for you above iTunes is save you a CD-RW, a few minutes, and the quality hit. You are left with a non-DRM track that is not substantially different from the PlayFair-stripped track. The copyright violation occurs if you distribute the track to those not licensed to have it.
<RANT>
I'm amazed that any slashdotters at all are willing to put up with any sort of DRM, even the relatively friendly Apple version. It's reasonable for the copyright holder to expect me not to distribute it, but restricting my ability in any way to listen to it on all my computers is ludicrous.
My experience in college radio has shown me that RIAA labels are slimy bastards. I'm not willing to give up rights so they can apply an overzealous solution to a "problem" that might not actually exist. Even if all labels ceased to exist tomorrow, we'd all still be alive, folks.
</RANT>
Maybe I'm smoking crack on this one; would someone care to correct me?
Now what if, that someone has a mission-critical position somehwere (Doctor, EMT, Fireman, or even a IT sys admin).
Doctors use pagers because cellphones aren't nearly as reliable. Would a cellphone jammer also cause problems with pagers?
Can you actually write a shell script that takes control of the system?
/usr/bin got nuked. It's my $HOME that I care about, and a worm only needs user privileges to kill that.
Do you need to? I wouldn't give a flying SCO if my
Installing packages on Debian: apt-get install packagename
:)
Installing packages on Slackware: swaret --install packagename
Installing packages on Gentoo: emerge packagename
Installing on windows:
- go to store
- buy software
- go home
- pop CD in and run installer
- reboot computer
I'm not sure what side you are taking here
Everybody knows how to do each of the individual steps you list to install a Windows program. Most would perceive that as easier than learning how to bring up an xterm, type in su, update the package database, guess what the package name is (or dig through thousands of choices), and type in apt-get or whatever. And with Gentoo, waiting for the compiler (unless they set it to use binary packages).
Think of it this way - which would your mother rather do: 1) relearn how to integrate a simple equation 2) go to the store and buy a calculator? The first takes less time, but requires more overall effort. The second is brainless.
Confound this evil plot! (Score:4, Informative)
You can defeat this plot by putting the homeless person in a microwave.
I love meta-humor. The moderation of the parent Informative is funnier than the parent's joke itself, and way funnier than the story.
As the POWER arcitecture is in reverse-ENDIAN order from the x86 arictecture, and to my knowledge, the x86 cannot switch order on the fly, I believe...
Such an emulator would necessarily be dog-slow compared to the real thing.
Keep in mind that this is only a constant cost, and only for reads and writes to things outside the processor (most commonly RAM). Once a value is in a register, you can leave it in the host endianness. Certainly there is a speed hit for every access, but you take a bigger hit in other things. For example: emulating the MMU, doing the math for every virtual memory access. Maybe you could leverage the host MMU for this in some way, but then good luck writing emulator code portable across architectures.
The parent post isn't saying building streets soley for people to walk/ride bikes...he's saying building them so car's aren't the only option.
OK, I see that now, but some of my points are still valid. One might make a case that making walking/biking easier is directly at odds with making driving easier (stopping your bike every block to let cars by is counterproductive). Anyway car-laden cities do have sidewalks...
How about building cities so you can walk or ride a bike to where you need to go, instead of building strictly for car-sized vehicular traffic?
I live in Manhattan and do not have a car. I walk everywhere or take the subway, since everything I need is so close, and even if I did have a car driving in this traffic would be aggravating and expensive besides. It works fine, but I really miss the Good Old Days(TM) when I lived in suburban environments and had a car.
- Purchasing large objects: In a carless city, I don't know how I would buy large things, such as furniture. I get that stuff delivered nowadays but if there were no roads how would it get to my door?
- Groceries: Walking back to my apartment carrying a bunch of grocery bags is no fun.
- Weather: Walking in general is not fun in the snow. Getting takeout food is a pain in this situation, and I don't really have much option since I didn't buy groceries (see above).
Once the carless city expanded beyond a small town, it would quickly become inconvenient to live there, if my experience is worth jumping to conclusions from. A subway/train system really helps, but you have to run it with an iron fist if you don't want it to become a urine-soaked pit. (Side note: Singapore's train system is spotless and all around wonderful. But the necessary authoritarianism wouldn't fly here in the US.)
On the other hand, maybe I'm just lazy. Manhattan would be a much cleaner place without cars, and maybe the tradeoff is worth it.
...simple as that. Just like every other multibillion dollar industry, it would have been dominated by a few major players.
A better question perhaps is: what if Windows wasn't such crap for so long?
Subquestions:
What if Win16 had died when the 286 did, and we didn't end up in a state where Windows and its apps were 16 bit but required a fast 32 bit machine to run at a usable speed, negating the benefit of backward compatibility? What if the Win32 API wasn't so bletcherous? What if there weren't so many security exploits?
So what I'm getting at is:
What would have happened to the OSS movement if Windows hadn't created the need for a non-crap and Free software system?
This is amazingly petty of me, but I can't stomach using OpenOffice since they changed the name of the software to "OpenOffice.org". What, was "OpenOffice" not getting the point across?
I think naming things after TLDs is stupid too but in this case if you mention it to someone who has never heard of it before, they know where to get it. The URL is encoded right in the name. That's got to be worth something.
maybe I'm out of line here, but this is not a good topic to brain storm. Why do we want to devises more deviant ways to spam?
And why hurt our precious Google!
1) Because it's our intrinsic human right to think about whatever we want.
2) Because some of us, as server administrators, must deal with spam in all its vile forms, and we therefore must know our enemy.
The problem here is that you can't know at which part of the screen the player's eyes are focused.
Good point! I didn't think of that.
That looks terrible.
Actually, I think it looks pretty good compared to the current crop of games.
- The people throw shadows.
- There's a leaf floating in one of the barrels (look carefully).
- There's random crap lying around down below. (I think this is really important to have).
On the other hand, there are some problems:
- Shadows may be too crisp. Is everything under a spotlight? Either soften the shadows or (preferably) throw multiple shadows. There can't just be one bright light in that scene.
- The people should throw shadows onto themselves.
- The railings, among other things, appear as if they are held together by superglue. How about rivets? Screws?
- The flying debris resulting from the gunshot doesn't appear to have broken off anything. It just magically spawned there. Also the flash of light from that doesn't seem to throw a shadow.
- The pattern of rust on the platform the soldier is kneeling on is duplicated in the platform directly below.
- Do doorframes exist in videogames? Electrical outlets?
- Mortar lines in brick walls are not carried all the way around.
- The background should be just slightly out of focus.
- Et cetera ad nauseum.
I realize it's easy to say these things from the comfort of my non-game-developer chair. But I'd be surprised if I didn't see these things happen as technology catches up. It's the little things (and there are a lot of them) that will make all the difference.
My guess is that this sort of thing will move into the procedural realm. Developers will license libraries that do nothing but generate nice-looking world geometry procedurally, as well as textures, physics, etc., and plug into the rest of the game engine. When you upgrade to the Geforce42, you'll be able to display 2x the screws in metal structures and 3x the litter on the street.
Does this include *all* of C? How do they compile the following C features into VM bytecode?
- Pointer arithmetic
- Hardcoded type sizes instead of using sizeof() (i.e. assuming sizeof(int) == 4)
- Lax rules for casting
- And so on
The idea of being able to SSH into your picture frame makes D&D enthusiasts look good by comparison...