Technically, there is no current unit called "SEAL Team 6". The unit formerly known by that name is now the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group, AKA DEVGRU. Further, as DEVGRU is a Tier One Special Operations Force (the other one being Delta Force), they may not officially exist, in that no official records of them are kept. Finally, some sources are saying that the unit has been yet again renamed, this time to something classified. Thus, Disney (and anyone else, probably) could register a trademark on the name, and DoD wouldn't object (as they seem surprisingly versed in the Streisand Effect).
Yep. I considered myself fortunate to find a shop that had HDMI cables for $15/10ft. And I've heard that it's possible to make your own HDMI cable, just like you can make your own Ethernet cable, which would probably be even cheaper.
Yeah, I probably would try to log in. Booting from my own OS disk would be my second trick, followed by pulling the hard drive and putting it into one of my own machines as a secondary (gets around any BIOS-based protection).
And I'm moderately educated about the subject. The average rebel is probably about that well-educated - possibly less.
Not necessarily. Set up your server to run "cat/dev/prandom >/dev/sd0c" after three failed logins. Odds are, whoever first tries to hack in is going to try the easy stuff first - no password, password of "password", password of "123456". By the time someone who knows their stuff gets to it, the data is gone.
As usual, the summary completely misses the point.
The thing I would call the "big deal" in LA Noire is the facial animation technology. For (AFAICT) the first time, actual facial mocap is being used. While mocap isn't that new for broad animations, its use for facial expressions really could be revolutionary. Just watch some of the gameplay trailers - the facial animation in them is literally better than some pre-rendered cutscenes in other games. Hell, it's better than some CGI movies I've seen. The ability to make faces that genuinely seem alive like this is potentially game-changing (if you'll pardon the pun). I've done stuff with facial animation in other game engines - even with a HUGE amount of work, they still don't seem quite right. If you could just record an actor's performance, instead of having to make ramps for every muscle in the face...
The summary seems to be claiming that, in LA Noire, cutscenes ARE gameplay (and vice versa). Half-Life was the first game to have the cutscenes be continuous with the gameplay (there's no break, and there's no shift in view), but the cutscenes are still segregated from gameplay. You aren't playing the conversations, just watching them. If LA Noire actually pulls this off, it would be another potential revolution. It's a longer shot, though - it would require drastic changes to game design to make it work, and even then many players may not like it. You'll note that, even a decade after Half-Life, many games still use the "end level, break to cutscene" style, because it does have it's own advantages.
I wasn't saying that "distributing without permission" should be legal. I was saying that MAFIAA needs to realize that they're only hurting themselves by insisting on spreading their content as thin as possible by restricting everything. They need to switch to a single, unified release - when a movie comes out, it comes out everywhere, in every way. That would reduce piracy (half the movies I've pirated was just because I didn't want to spend a fortune at the theater to watch it, but couldn't get it otherwise), and you know what? it would make their advertising more effective.
And for what it's worth, the company in question actually does have permission, implicitly, to rent out the movies. They're paying for the same license Blockbuster or the ilk use. They're exploiting a loophole, certainly, but it's a loophole that only exists because of legal sleight-of-hand in the first place.
Or - bear with me for a moment - we could abolish the ridiculous concept that media is somehow different depending on how you access it (and should thus priced, released and controlled differently) and realize that it's the same legal object, whether it's played in a theater, bought on DVD, bought on pay-per-view, watched on broadcast TV, downloaded, or streamed.
Seriously, when you think about it, the entire concept is ridiculous. The whole system is preposterous. Staggered release by region. Staggered release by medium. Street dates. Pre-screenings. No-resale clauses. It's all patently absurd.
More like "They weren't evil in this specific instance". As an ex-Comcast customer, I know they are more than capable of evil - they just know not to do so when they'll get caught.
Seriously, what is the point of this? You don't WANT software responding to what it thinks you're going to do, you want it responding to what you actually do. I (and many others, I'm sure) tend to rest their fingers on the keys when not actively typing - if the keyboard were to detect that as input typing would become impossible.
And don't even think about applying it to gaming. First, there's the fact that if it mis-guesses, you're screwed on any sort of twitch shooter, platformer or fighting game. Second, if it DOES work properly, you've increased the already-massive gap between PC gamers and console gamers (multiplayer interplay between PC and consoles is extremely rare in no small part because gaming on a mouse/keyboard is so superior to using a gamepad - even with the console players having autoaim, it's still completely unfair).
Your logic makes no sense, because if the source code isn't ready for release, then it's obvious that the resulting binaries aren't going to be release-worthy either. Google could easily have just called Honeycomb "Android for Tablets (Beta)" - they've ALWAYS had long-running but stable betas, and most companies are treating Honeycomb as unstable anyways. So they gain little by releasing the binary, and would lose nothing by releasing the source at the same time.
Further, you're arguing against a position nobody is taking. No one is up in arms, calling for a massive lawsuit against Google for violating the GPL. Most of us are a bit uncertain about this, and we're certainly questioning everything, but so far, I've seen no comments regarding a lawsuit except yours.
Now, if Google were to simply say "we're never going to release the code", that would be a different matter. I'd definitely expect some lawyers to get involved, but that would most likely end with a settlement involving Google releasing the code as required, not a bajillion-dollar license violation case.
Woah woah woah. Where did anyone ever say "sue the fuckers"? Worst-case, we turn this into a bad publicity event for Google. Maybe not even that
And is suing someone really that bad? If Honeycomb does actually include modified GPL code, and was released in binary form, but never had the source released, that is a clear and blatant GPL violation, and thus a clear and blatant violation of the law. I would think less of anyone advocating against suing them.
I'm not well-versed in Android, nor a lawyer, but I do know that if you release anything that uses modified GPL code, you have to release the code under the GPL as well. And I find it hard to believe that Android didn't modify any of the GNU/Linux/whatever code they used. Anyone more knowledgeable in the subject care to comment?
Because that was what was in my spare box. Seriously, the machine's cobbled together from salvage - a CPU/mobo from one machine, a video card from another (GeForce 2, not that it actually accelerates anything), RAM from two different sources, hard drives from three, and miscellaneous CD drives and floppy drives, just because. And the software is equally... Frankensteinian. Samba, Apache, MySQL, a full X desktop (it's my backup backup ordinary-use computer), FTPD, a couple other things I've forgotten, and DosBox.
On the bright side, I'm comfortable experimenting with it. If I break it, I know how to do a full reinstall, and with three hard drives (not in any sort of RAID), I can keep a backup "image" ready. If the hardware breaks, I can just grab slightly older stuff from the Big Bin of Parts. It's practically disposable.
Yeah - Slashdot's system is the worst content moderation system there is, except for all the other ones. It's got problems, but it's hardly the worst. Possibly a decent contender for the best.
Actually, I'm personally totally in favor of reducing copyright to ten years (with a single, optional, 10-year extension if the work is still in active commercial use) with full Fair Use exemptions, and I dislike any DRM more restrictive than Steam's "check with an online server when you start the program, include an offline mode, and the only encrypted data are unreleased preloads".
I just think the/. community gets way too worked up about it.
I have the virus scanner on my BSD box so I can scan suspicious files before accessing them from my Windows boxes (the BSD box is my general-purpose "server", including running Samba). And to be fair, it's been months since I found a file suspicious enough to deserve the full treatment.
Good thing I already run Chrome inside another sandbox (Sandboxie). Sure, there's been exploits for that sandbox, too, but it's uncommon enough that it's extraordinarily unlikely someone would combine the exploits needed. And I have a virus-scanner and firewall running behind all that, just for good measure.
And even then I don't 100% trust it - any particularly suspicious sites are accessed by ssh-ing into my OpenBSD box (with it's own virus-scanner and custom PF rules), then running Firefox (with Javascript disabled, Java not installed, and Flash not even available on that OS) on that. I don't think any existing exploit could crack that.
There's one major flaw I've noticed in the/. system: groupthink and herd mentality. Anything that perfectly fits a certain mentality will get upmodded, most things that disagree with it get downmodded. Thus, people who disagree with that thinking (or even just don't care about it) have a disincentive to post, and the site attracts people fanatical about that viewpoint, perpetuating the problem.
For/., the "mentality" is "MAFIAA evil, government evil and incompetent, big corporations bad (except google 'cuz they're good guys)", but it could just as easily be anything. If, say, a firearms news site adopted the/. system, it would probably end up with a strong "Kalashnikov gas-operated rotating-bolt system is perfect, Stoner direct-impingement system is evil" bias (or vice versa). Or an indie gaming site might end up with a "no sequels, artsy plot-heavy faux-retro side-scrollers only, and if it becomes popular YOU SOLD OUT" mentality.
PS: Don't deny that it happens. I've seen anti-MAFIAA comments get +5 Insightful in articles about space travel. And I've never seen anything even vaguely pro-copyright get above a 2.
Look, we're still far, far from just getting solar to be cost-comparable to anything else. And that's without factoring in all the stuff that we'd need to make solar work for a significant amount of power. Unless we can somehow wire the globe with superconducting lines (so we can just draw power from wherever the sun is shining), or install a monumental amount of power storage, solar can only supplement, not replace, other methods.
OK, Iceland is an exception. Mostly because they're in a rather peculiar geological situation, which is perfectly suited to geothermal.
Further, I do not believe ground-based solar will ever be effective, except in certain geological situations - mainly deserts. Any power source that completely fails during the night is just ludicrous. At least wind functions equally well (or equally poorly) throughout the day.
Now, something like satellite-based solar might work. And tidal is always an option, if you're on a coast (unless you expect the Moon to go away within the lifetime of your plant). And in n+50 years when fusion starts working, we can all switch to that.
A 50% reduction in dependence is not necessarily a 50% reduction in risk. A power plant is quite often still dangerous, even when off. Particularly nuclear - the most dangerous thing you can do to a nuclear reactor is try to shut it down. Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and even part of Fukushima (while the earthquake and tsunami did plenty of damage on their own, it was only when the power went out that the meltdown occured) were caused by attempts to shut down the reactors.
As opposed to coal/oil/gas plants, where the game is Russian Roulette. They're going to kill people eventually from all the shit they pump out - the game is just hoping it isn't you.
Hydroelectric is a game of Jenga - lots of fun, but eventually something'll make the dam break, which is actually the most massively devastating type of power plant failure. The Johnstown Flood (caused by a dam failure) remains the deadliest disaster in US history. Estimates for a failure of the Three Gorges dam usually have 6-7 digit body counts.
Solar/Wind/Tidal/Geothermal/Fusion are all games of "how the hell can we make this actually work?". AFAIK, nobody has ever run an entire full-sized country, or even a significant fraction of a country, off any of those. It would be nice if we could, but so far, they are either not cost-effective, not able to produce enough to meet demand, or not even fully functional.
Slashdot Mirror
Technically, there is no current unit called "SEAL Team 6". The unit formerly known by that name is now the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group, AKA DEVGRU. Further, as DEVGRU is a Tier One Special Operations Force (the other one being Delta Force), they may not officially exist, in that no official records of them are kept. Finally, some sources are saying that the unit has been yet again renamed, this time to something classified. Thus, Disney (and anyone else, probably) could register a trademark on the name, and DoD wouldn't object (as they seem surprisingly versed in the Streisand Effect).
Yep. I considered myself fortunate to find a shop that had HDMI cables for $15/10ft. And I've heard that it's possible to make your own HDMI cable, just like you can make your own Ethernet cable, which would probably be even cheaper.
Yeah, I probably would try to log in. Booting from my own OS disk would be my second trick, followed by pulling the hard drive and putting it into one of my own machines as a secondary (gets around any BIOS-based protection).
And I'm moderately educated about the subject. The average rebel is probably about that well-educated - possibly less.
Not necessarily. Set up your server to run "cat /dev/prandom > /dev/sd0c" after three failed logins. Odds are, whoever first tries to hack in is going to try the easy stuff first - no password, password of "password", password of "123456". By the time someone who knows their stuff gets to it, the data is gone.
All engineers take note of what they did and how they did it, it's up to us to do the same thing when something like that happens in our country.
Fixed.
As usual, the summary completely misses the point.
The thing I would call the "big deal" in LA Noire is the facial animation technology. For (AFAICT) the first time, actual facial mocap is being used. While mocap isn't that new for broad animations, its use for facial expressions really could be revolutionary. Just watch some of the gameplay trailers - the facial animation in them is literally better than some pre-rendered cutscenes in other games. Hell, it's better than some CGI movies I've seen. The ability to make faces that genuinely seem alive like this is potentially game-changing (if you'll pardon the pun). I've done stuff with facial animation in other game engines - even with a HUGE amount of work, they still don't seem quite right. If you could just record an actor's performance, instead of having to make ramps for every muscle in the face...
The summary seems to be claiming that, in LA Noire, cutscenes ARE gameplay (and vice versa). Half-Life was the first game to have the cutscenes be continuous with the gameplay (there's no break, and there's no shift in view), but the cutscenes are still segregated from gameplay. You aren't playing the conversations, just watching them. If LA Noire actually pulls this off, it would be another potential revolution. It's a longer shot, though - it would require drastic changes to game design to make it work, and even then many players may not like it. You'll note that, even a decade after Half-Life, many games still use the "end level, break to cutscene" style, because it does have it's own advantages.
I wasn't saying that "distributing without permission" should be legal. I was saying that MAFIAA needs to realize that they're only hurting themselves by insisting on spreading their content as thin as possible by restricting everything. They need to switch to a single, unified release - when a movie comes out, it comes out everywhere, in every way. That would reduce piracy (half the movies I've pirated was just because I didn't want to spend a fortune at the theater to watch it, but couldn't get it otherwise), and you know what? it would make their advertising more effective.
And for what it's worth, the company in question actually does have permission, implicitly, to rent out the movies. They're paying for the same license Blockbuster or the ilk use. They're exploiting a loophole, certainly, but it's a loophole that only exists because of legal sleight-of-hand in the first place.
Or - bear with me for a moment - we could abolish the ridiculous concept that media is somehow different depending on how you access it (and should thus priced, released and controlled differently) and realize that it's the same legal object, whether it's played in a theater, bought on DVD, bought on pay-per-view, watched on broadcast TV, downloaded, or streamed.
Seriously, when you think about it, the entire concept is ridiculous. The whole system is preposterous. Staggered release by region. Staggered release by medium. Street dates. Pre-screenings. No-resale clauses. It's all patently absurd.
More like "They weren't evil in this specific instance". As an ex-Comcast customer, I know they are more than capable of evil - they just know not to do so when they'll get caught.
Seriously, what is the point of this? You don't WANT software responding to what it thinks you're going to do, you want it responding to what you actually do. I (and many others, I'm sure) tend to rest their fingers on the keys when not actively typing - if the keyboard were to detect that as input typing would become impossible.
And don't even think about applying it to gaming. First, there's the fact that if it mis-guesses, you're screwed on any sort of twitch shooter, platformer or fighting game. Second, if it DOES work properly, you've increased the already-massive gap between PC gamers and console gamers (multiplayer interplay between PC and consoles is extremely rare in no small part because gaming on a mouse/keyboard is so superior to using a gamepad - even with the console players having autoaim, it's still completely unfair).
Your logic makes no sense, because if the source code isn't ready for release, then it's obvious that the resulting binaries aren't going to be release-worthy either. Google could easily have just called Honeycomb "Android for Tablets (Beta)" - they've ALWAYS had long-running but stable betas, and most companies are treating Honeycomb as unstable anyways. So they gain little by releasing the binary, and would lose nothing by releasing the source at the same time.
Further, you're arguing against a position nobody is taking. No one is up in arms, calling for a massive lawsuit against Google for violating the GPL. Most of us are a bit uncertain about this, and we're certainly questioning everything, but so far, I've seen no comments regarding a lawsuit except yours.
Now, if Google were to simply say "we're never going to release the code", that would be a different matter. I'd definitely expect some lawyers to get involved, but that would most likely end with a settlement involving Google releasing the code as required, not a bajillion-dollar license violation case.
Woah woah woah. Where did anyone ever say "sue the fuckers"? Worst-case, we turn this into a bad publicity event for Google. Maybe not even that
And is suing someone really that bad? If Honeycomb does actually include modified GPL code, and was released in binary form, but never had the source released, that is a clear and blatant GPL violation, and thus a clear and blatant violation of the law. I would think less of anyone advocating against suing them.
I'm not well-versed in Android, nor a lawyer, but I do know that if you release anything that uses modified GPL code, you have to release the code under the GPL as well. And I find it hard to believe that Android didn't modify any of the GNU/Linux/whatever code they used. Anyone more knowledgeable in the subject care to comment?
Because that was what was in my spare box. Seriously, the machine's cobbled together from salvage - a CPU/mobo from one machine, a video card from another (GeForce 2, not that it actually accelerates anything), RAM from two different sources, hard drives from three, and miscellaneous CD drives and floppy drives, just because. And the software is equally... Frankensteinian. Samba, Apache, MySQL, a full X desktop (it's my backup backup ordinary-use computer), FTPD, a couple other things I've forgotten, and DosBox.
On the bright side, I'm comfortable experimenting with it. If I break it, I know how to do a full reinstall, and with three hard drives (not in any sort of RAID), I can keep a backup "image" ready. If the hardware breaks, I can just grab slightly older stuff from the Big Bin of Parts. It's practically disposable.
Yeah - Slashdot's system is the worst content moderation system there is, except for all the other ones. It's got problems, but it's hardly the worst. Possibly a decent contender for the best.
Actually, I really disabled it because it's running on an Athlon 900 with 384MB of RAM. The security advantage is a side-benefit.
Actually, I'm personally totally in favor of reducing copyright to ten years (with a single, optional, 10-year extension if the work is still in active commercial use) with full Fair Use exemptions, and I dislike any DRM more restrictive than Steam's "check with an online server when you start the program, include an offline mode, and the only encrypted data are unreleased preloads".
/. community gets way too worked up about it.
I just think the
I have the virus scanner on my BSD box so I can scan suspicious files before accessing them from my Windows boxes (the BSD box is my general-purpose "server", including running Samba). And to be fair, it's been months since I found a file suspicious enough to deserve the full treatment.
Good thing I already run Chrome inside another sandbox (Sandboxie). Sure, there's been exploits for that sandbox, too, but it's uncommon enough that it's extraordinarily unlikely someone would combine the exploits needed. And I have a virus-scanner and firewall running behind all that, just for good measure.
And even then I don't 100% trust it - any particularly suspicious sites are accessed by ssh-ing into my OpenBSD box (with it's own virus-scanner and custom PF rules), then running Firefox (with Javascript disabled, Java not installed, and Flash not even available on that OS) on that. I don't think any existing exploit could crack that.
To be technical, GPL is copyleft, not copyright.
There's one major flaw I've noticed in the /. system: groupthink and herd mentality. Anything that perfectly fits a certain mentality will get upmodded, most things that disagree with it get downmodded. Thus, people who disagree with that thinking (or even just don't care about it) have a disincentive to post, and the site attracts people fanatical about that viewpoint, perpetuating the problem.
/., the "mentality" is "MAFIAA evil, government evil and incompetent, big corporations bad (except google 'cuz they're good guys)", but it could just as easily be anything. If, say, a firearms news site adopted the /. system, it would probably end up with a strong "Kalashnikov gas-operated rotating-bolt system is perfect, Stoner direct-impingement system is evil" bias (or vice versa). Or an indie gaming site might end up with a "no sequels, artsy plot-heavy faux-retro side-scrollers only, and if it becomes popular YOU SOLD OUT" mentality.
For
PS: Don't deny that it happens. I've seen anti-MAFIAA comments get +5 Insightful in articles about space travel. And I've never seen anything even vaguely pro-copyright get above a 2.
Look, we're still far, far from just getting solar to be cost-comparable to anything else. And that's without factoring in all the stuff that we'd need to make solar work for a significant amount of power. Unless we can somehow wire the globe with superconducting lines (so we can just draw power from wherever the sun is shining), or install a monumental amount of power storage, solar can only supplement, not replace, other methods.
OK, Iceland is an exception. Mostly because they're in a rather peculiar geological situation, which is perfectly suited to geothermal.
Further, I do not believe ground-based solar will ever be effective, except in certain geological situations - mainly deserts. Any power source that completely fails during the night is just ludicrous. At least wind functions equally well (or equally poorly) throughout the day.
Now, something like satellite-based solar might work. And tidal is always an option, if you're on a coast (unless you expect the Moon to go away within the lifetime of your plant). And in n+50 years when fusion starts working, we can all switch to that.
A 50% reduction in dependence is not necessarily a 50% reduction in risk. A power plant is quite often still dangerous, even when off. Particularly nuclear - the most dangerous thing you can do to a nuclear reactor is try to shut it down. Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and even part of Fukushima (while the earthquake and tsunami did plenty of damage on their own, it was only when the power went out that the meltdown occured) were caused by attempts to shut down the reactors.
As opposed to coal/oil/gas plants, where the game is Russian Roulette. They're going to kill people eventually from all the shit they pump out - the game is just hoping it isn't you.
Hydroelectric is a game of Jenga - lots of fun, but eventually something'll make the dam break, which is actually the most massively devastating type of power plant failure. The Johnstown Flood (caused by a dam failure) remains the deadliest disaster in US history. Estimates for a failure of the Three Gorges dam usually have 6-7 digit body counts.
Solar/Wind/Tidal/Geothermal/Fusion are all games of "how the hell can we make this actually work?". AFAIK, nobody has ever run an entire full-sized country, or even a significant fraction of a country, off any of those. It would be nice if we could, but so far, they are either not cost-effective, not able to produce enough to meet demand, or not even fully functional.