I dread the day that computers, particularly handhelds, get truely useable voice recognition capability. Then, besides the ass sitting in the restaurant bellowing into his cell phone, I can look forward to legions of idiots doing the same with their Palm Pilots. Instead of the business dweeb clicking away at his laptop keys in the next airline seat, he'll be talking at the damned thing. Time to invent that portable HEMP generator.
Out of curiosity, how will the UK handle the tax issue on TiVo units? I know that you have to pay a per-tv tax, and I wonder whether you will also have to pay an additional tax on a TiVo?
Piezoelectric materials are brittle and thus limited in how they can be used. This stuff is essentially metallic particles coated with a conductive polymer, and can be used in a variety of ways. Their claim to uniqueness is that no matter how high the metallic loading, conductive paths aren't formed. More info here.
Re:Besides, check out the picture carefully, TACO.
on
Sony's Wireless Webpad
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· Score: 2
The 'countertop' comment was mine. You might be right, but it looked fancier than the docking cradles I've seen for other devices. When the thing is shipped, it'll be interesting to see who's right. I've thought web pads were cool ever since I saw my first picture of one. If it's truely flat, I wouldn't mind having one.
I've emailed Rob my apology for my contribution to this duplication. I say that I'm more to blame than he; if you've ever been involved in maintaining a web site, much less one the scope of SlashDot, you'd know how easy it is for things to get by you. I can't even imagine what it must be like for the SlashDotters. So take your shots in my direction and cut Rob some slack.
(I guess somebody should submit these cuecat-documents to the Swedish parlament:-)
Thanks for reminding me of that. Maybe I can take advantage of the large donations I give my congressbeing to get the CueCat info put in the Congressional Record. May as well add DeCSS while I'm about it...:-)
Does anyone else think that if Digital Submergence would ignore all this activity, there'd be a lot less interest in it? Just the fact that they're blanketing the hacker community with their "cease and desist"s is getting my back up enough to put up a mirror site myself. Their struggles are just attracting more sharks, in my estimation. Anyway, when the CueCat becomes the obvious failure that is its destiny, DC isn't going to have any money left to pay a law firm to harrass a bunch of hobbyists, so this is a short-term problem for the tinkerers, in my opinion.
I agree with the posters that typing a letter on a piece of paper is better in terms of impact. However, you can go ahead fax the result and still get their attention. Seeing the fax machine melt down is just as effective as bags of mail (faster and cheaper delivery too, and the sudden onslaught can make it look like a revolt is in progress). Phone calls to the office are also a good way to get a legislator's staff to tell him/her "hey, people are worked up about this."
I have some personal experience with this. A friend of mine is in PR and she had a client who wanted to really call attention to a local city issue. By recruiting as few as 100 people to write letters, call, and fax, she got the entire city council buzzing about the sudden citizen uprising. You need a surprisingly small number of people to leverage your issue to the top of the agenda.
I wouldn't say that it's completely ineffective to email, but having been married to a former congressional staffer, I have to agree that a typed (or better, legibly handwritten) letter carries much more weight. That said, do something. Even a less-effective email is better than bitching to your fellow SlashDot members. I can guarantee that that's useless in terms of getting things changed.
I think naming the new technology after a defunct one qualifies as a hanging offense. When I first heard of DivX I went looking for more info on it, and all I could locate at the time was stuff pertaining to the failed digital video distribution scheme that was the original DivX. Arrgh. At least with a smiley added it's clear that it's the new one.
I love efforts like this. My ambition is to build a TiVo-like unit one day, except with some of the features that TiVo isn't ever going to have (at least, that's what TiVo CEO Mike Ramsay says in this article on Salon.com), like commercial-skip. A good compression scheme will be an important part of the job.
Everyone I know who has DSL had trouble with the installation phase. Some had trouble with the installers keeping appointments, others had to have multiple visits, and some had reliability problems that started with the install and continue to this day. Opinion writer Holman Jenkins in today's Wall St. Journal, in a piece titled "How a Telecom Meltdown Will Cause the Next Recession" (if you can get yourself a copy, I recommend reading the whole piece. If you subscribe to the WSJ online, here's a link to the story.) had this to say about DSL: "Verizon, formerly New York Tel and now merged with Bell Atlantic and GTE, has been pretending since May to get my high-speed DSL working. Why do I begin to suspect Verizon only wanted to stall me from signing up for Time Warner's competing cable modem access?"
Being an A.C., not to mention semi-literate, I doubt that you'll see this, but just in case others do:
go here . Take a look at the template for how an oppressive government goes about its business. I wish you well in your island Gulag, Brits.
If you'd like to see how this type of law can be applied, look no further than our friends in the UK. If you attempt to enter the U.K. with a computer, they want to inspect it for illicit material like child porn. If you have encrypted data on it and the authorities have reason to think that you know the key, you can be thrown in the slammer for not giving it to them. At the least, they'll keep the machine until you give them the key, or hell freezes over, whichever comes first.
I have a question. Does it really matter if they watch you? There are laws covering what they can and cannot use as evidence agianst you. If they had a folder of you doing subversive freaky things....so what? They can't use it unless they had a reason to suspect you in the first place.
There's a doctrine in U.S. case law, articulated by the Supreme Court as "Fruit of the poisoned tree". It means that you can't use evidence obtained illegally as the reason for going in and collecting legitmate evidence. If you don't know that they're collecting data and you send email talking about your marijuana farm and then the DEA is tipped off (by an 'anonymous' source), this would be a violation of that doctrine, but you'd never be able to prove it.
Since I don't really care, I'm not going to do this myself, but one way to find out what Napster puts on the drive is to do the install with GoBack active. GoBack keeps a log of what files are changed/created on the drive and you could look at that to see what it does. You can also use GoBack to make a pseudo drive that contains the exact state of the hard disk files prior to installation, so you can do a comparison of the changed files to see exactly what was done to them. This seems like a lot of trouble to go to when you can just get one of the many Napster clones out there and install it.
"The only way to get back on is to buy a new computer." Oh, puhleeze. Even if one were a total idiot, the worst that would be necessary would be to format the disk and reinstall the OS. Any other comments from this guy should be considered in the light of his uttering this silliness.
Sorry, but that answer doesn't cut it for me. Sure you can interfere with the existing air traffic control system with a cheap radio. Do you want to perpetuate this sort of vulnerability into perpetuity? If we're going to spend gazillions putting in a new system, how about we make it more secure than "it happens"?
Uhhh. It's a little more difficult to get away with blowing up a fixed piece of equipment than it is to buy some inexpensive gear and set up shop somewhere within thousands of square miles. You wouldn't even need to stay with it - activate it with a timer and be well away by the time the authorities track it down. Then you start up the next one...
Having redundant base stations does you no good if somebody has set up some equipment to lie to them about what's really out there.
... or that he is really what he looks like: a psychopathic right-winged extremist?
I'm getting tired of hearing every religious wacko called 'right-wing'. The loony liberal left (how do ya like it when you're labeled, politico-bigots?) has plenty of religious nutlogs as well, among them Joe Lieberman, Louis Farrakan, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton. Just being a God zealot doesn't automatically qualify you for membership in the Republican Party.
I see some potential danger here. Since the system relies on the aircraft to report its position and other data, someone with malicious intent could dummy up that data and make it appear that a nonexistent aircraft is present where it actually isn't. Having the data from other aircraft available, you could make it appear that another plane is on a collision course. You could potentially put dozens or hundreds of dummy planes in the area, making the system useless for air traffic control. Someone who wanted to disrupt our air traffic system would have a great tool at their disposal.
Who cares what these people are doing with CueCat data? No one I know is inclined in the least to install the CueCat, much less use it to scan magazine bar codes. I think the idea comes from some marketing drone's graduate thesis, and s/he was lucky enough to find a company dumb enough to implement it. The.001% who actually use it deserve to have whatever passes for their personal lives invaded.</GRUMPINESS>
Good info. Maybe I'm unusual, but I can focus on objects that close. It probably helps that I'm pretty nearsighted. Given what you say, it sounds like you'd just need a different lens in the goggles to accomodate people with differing focal abilities.
Slashdot Mirror
I dread the day that computers, particularly handhelds, get truely useable voice recognition capability. Then, besides the ass sitting in the restaurant bellowing into his cell phone, I can look forward to legions of idiots doing the same with their Palm Pilots. Instead of the business dweeb clicking away at his laptop keys in the next airline seat, he'll be talking at the damned thing. Time to invent that portable HEMP generator.
Out of curiosity, how will the UK handle the tax issue on TiVo units? I know that you have to pay a per-tv tax, and I wonder whether you will also have to pay an additional tax on a TiVo?
Better yet, no more lost remote controls (although the power struggle between two people wearing 'remote-enabled' pajamas might be fierce.)
Piezoelectric materials are brittle and thus limited in how they can be used. This stuff is essentially metallic particles coated with a conductive polymer, and can be used in a variety of ways. Their claim to uniqueness is that no matter how high the metallic loading, conductive paths aren't formed. More info here.
The 'countertop' comment was mine. You might be right, but it looked fancier than the docking cradles I've seen for other devices. When the thing is shipped, it'll be interesting to see who's right. I've thought web pads were cool ever since I saw my first picture of one. If it's truely flat, I wouldn't mind having one.
I've emailed Rob my apology for my contribution to this duplication. I say that I'm more to blame than he; if you've ever been involved in maintaining a web site, much less one the scope of SlashDot, you'd know how easy it is for things to get by you. I can't even imagine what it must be like for the SlashDotters. So take your shots in my direction and cut Rob some slack.
Thanks for reminding me of that. Maybe I can take advantage of the large donations I give my congressbeing to get the CueCat info put in the Congressional Record. May as well add DeCSS while I'm about it ... :-)
Does anyone else think that if Digital Submergence would ignore all this activity, there'd be a lot less interest in it? Just the fact that they're blanketing the hacker community with their "cease and desist"s is getting my back up enough to put up a mirror site myself. Their struggles are just attracting more sharks, in my estimation. Anyway, when the CueCat becomes the obvious failure that is its destiny, DC isn't going to have any money left to pay a law firm to harrass a bunch of hobbyists, so this is a short-term problem for the tinkerers, in my opinion.
I have some personal experience with this. A friend of mine is in PR and she had a client who wanted to really call attention to a local city issue. By recruiting as few as 100 people to write letters, call, and fax, she got the entire city council buzzing about the sudden citizen uprising. You need a surprisingly small number of people to leverage your issue to the top of the agenda.
I wouldn't say that it's completely ineffective to email, but having been married to a former congressional staffer, I have to agree that a typed (or better, legibly handwritten) letter carries much more weight. That said, do something. Even a less-effective email is better than bitching to your fellow SlashDot members. I can guarantee that that's useless in terms of getting things changed.
I think naming the new technology after a defunct one qualifies as a hanging offense. When I first heard of DivX I went looking for more info on it, and all I could locate at the time was stuff pertaining to the failed digital video distribution scheme that was the original DivX. Arrgh. At least with a smiley added it's clear that it's the new one.
I love efforts like this. My ambition is to build a TiVo-like unit one day, except with some of the features that TiVo isn't ever going to have (at least, that's what TiVo CEO Mike Ramsay says in this article on Salon.com), like commercial-skip. A good compression scheme will be an important part of the job.
Everyone I know who has DSL had trouble with the installation phase. Some had trouble with the installers keeping appointments, others had to have multiple visits, and some had reliability problems that started with the install and continue to this day. Opinion writer Holman Jenkins in today's Wall St. Journal, in a piece titled "How a Telecom Meltdown Will Cause the Next Recession" (if you can get yourself a copy, I recommend reading the whole piece. If you subscribe to the WSJ online, here's a link to the story.) had this to say about DSL: "Verizon, formerly New York Tel and now merged with Bell Atlantic and GTE, has been pretending since May to get my high-speed DSL working. Why do I begin to suspect Verizon only wanted to stall me from signing up for Time Warner's competing cable modem access?"
Being an A.C., not to mention semi-literate, I doubt that you'll see this, but just in case others do: go here . Take a look at the template for how an oppressive government goes about its business. I wish you well in your island Gulag, Brits.
If you'd like to see how this type of law can be applied, look no further than our friends in the UK. If you attempt to enter the U.K. with a computer, they want to inspect it for illicit material like child porn. If you have encrypted data on it and the authorities have reason to think that you know the key, you can be thrown in the slammer for not giving it to them. At the least, they'll keep the machine until you give them the key, or hell freezes over, whichever comes first.
There's a doctrine in U.S. case law, articulated by the Supreme Court as "Fruit of the poisoned tree". It means that you can't use evidence obtained illegally as the reason for going in and collecting legitmate evidence. If you don't know that they're collecting data and you send email talking about your marijuana farm and then the DEA is tipped off (by an 'anonymous' source), this would be a violation of that doctrine, but you'd never be able to prove it.
Which is my way of saying, how is the NSA getting this surveillance data it's supposedly collecting without anyone noticing?
"The only way to get back on is to buy a new computer." Oh, puhleeze. Even if one were a total idiot, the worst that would be necessary would be to format the disk and reinstall the OS. Any other comments from this guy should be considered in the light of his uttering this silliness.
Sorry, but that answer doesn't cut it for me. Sure you can interfere with the existing air traffic control system with a cheap radio. Do you want to perpetuate this sort of vulnerability into perpetuity? If we're going to spend gazillions putting in a new system, how about we make it more secure than "it happens"?
Having redundant base stations does you no good if somebody has set up some equipment to lie to them about what's really out there.
I'm getting tired of hearing every religious wacko called 'right-wing'. The loony liberal left (how do ya like it when you're labeled, politico-bigots?) has plenty of religious nutlogs as well, among them Joe Lieberman, Louis Farrakan, Jesse Jackson, and Al Sharpton. Just being a God zealot doesn't automatically qualify you for membership in the Republican Party.
I see some potential danger here. Since the system relies on the aircraft to report its position and other data, someone with malicious intent could dummy up that data and make it appear that a nonexistent aircraft is present where it actually isn't. Having the data from other aircraft available, you could make it appear that another plane is on a collision course. You could potentially put dozens or hundreds of dummy planes in the area, making the system useless for air traffic control. Someone who wanted to disrupt our air traffic system would have a great tool at their disposal.
Who cares what these people are doing with CueCat data? No one I know is inclined in the least to install the CueCat, much less use it to scan magazine bar codes. I think the idea comes from some marketing drone's graduate thesis, and s/he was lucky enough to find a company dumb enough to implement it. The .001% who actually use it deserve to have whatever passes for their personal lives invaded.</GRUMPINESS>
Think of it a free shakedown of the new server. Why, /. ought to be charging them for this valuable service. ;-)
Good info. Maybe I'm unusual, but I can focus on objects that close. It probably helps that I'm pretty nearsighted. Given what you say, it sounds like you'd just need a different lens in the goggles to accomodate people with differing focal abilities.