In Tivo's defense here, they are really caught in bind that the various media licensing companies have set up. In order for Tivo to get a license to officially support DVDs, they also have to agree to support digital Macrovision. But Macrovision has a requirement in their license that any licensee must also support DRM including red flagging. So Tivo had a choice of a) never supporting DVDs b) fighting these inter-locking contractual requirements in court c) swallowing the entire bitter pill of restrictions.
Since Tivo is a barely profitable company under severe pressure from cable company PVRs, they (wisely IMO) chose option C. They were assured by Macrovision that red flagging would only be used on a very small number of programs, mainly PPV and special broadcasts. However, the reality is that the flags are under the control of local stations. The red-flagged King of the Hill episode mentioned in BoingBoing was apparently accidently flagged by a local affiliate, not by Tivo.
Maybe it'll act as a box cutter shield too?
When will we learn that fancy weapons don't protect us from 1920's era opponents.
But then again, a lot of the hawks still think we're at war with the communists.
The best box cutter shield is the 100+ enraged passengers who know they have nothing to lose by attacking a suicidal hijacker. Oh that and the armored cockpit doors. No lasers needed.
Also depending on where these systems are deployed and what kind of power/cooling/space constraints they had, the Navy may have been more focused on flops/watt rather than absolute performance.
You're probably referring to the Liberator, a single-shot.45 pistol, that the US manuafactured during WWII. Supposedly they cost less than $5 to make and were designed to be dropped behind Axis lines to allow resistance members to kill an enemy soldier and take his weapon. Today they are extremely rare and are worth up to a $1000.
QB or an equivalent is not on MS boxes anymore, right?
Actually all MS OS's since 2000 have had VBscript built in, which is a pretty full-featured BASIC with file IO and can access most of the common controls. It's mostly used for web scripting, but it will run on any system. Just type it into a text file, give it a.vbs extension, and double click on it.
Here's an example that displays disk info:
dim drvpath, fso, message
Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") Set dc = fso.Drives
For Each d in dc If d.IsReady then message = message & "Drive " & d.DriveLetter & ": " & d.VolumeName & "Size: " & d.TotalSize & vbCr Else message = message & "Drive " & d.DriveLetter & " is not available." & vbCr End if Next
Remember processors will always get faster and compilers will optimize better over time, but programmers probably won't ever become much smarter, so you should always write your code with the programmer working on it five years from now in mind. Other than tight loops in an application with real-time requirements, clear and simple code is the better choice.
I would add that up until the invasion of Kuwait, the former Bush Administration was selling arms to Saddam. Additionally, most of the WMD raw materials including bioweapons cultures came from Saddam's good buddies in the US. So it is really funny to watch all this criticism of the UN when it was the Regan Administration (and later the first Bush administration) who gave active support to Saddam's WMD ambitions.
The U.S. did sell arms to Iraq in the 80's, however when you look at the amounts, you can see that these were miniscule compared to what they received from the USSR, France, and China. Even at its largest in 1988, U.S. sales only accounted for only 5% of Iraq's arms purchases. In fact based on these numbers, France has a lot to answer for.
Also the 'bioweapons cultures' that you refer to were most likely plain anthrax spores which were quite easy for anyone to order from a catalog back in the 80's. These have legitimate use for agricultural research and are not particularly dangerous unless they are 'weaponized' i.e. finely ground up, mixed with other substances to keep the spores viable, and mixed into an aerosol - a non-trivial task.
5) the army and police won't let you join if you've had it, rather tellling I think
Having lasik eye surgery doesn't disqualify you for military service. In fact the Army is now offering it for free to soldiers in certain specialties (mostly combat). Whether pilots are allowed to have eye surgery varies from service to service. See here for more details.
If you're doing simple one-off projects, the BasicStamp is all you need. If you think you'll be doing more projects, it's probably worth investing the time to learn a more complete architecture like the AVR from Atmel.
For $135 you can get a complete development kit for the AVR complete with programmer, leds, and push buttons that will work with almost any chip in the AVR family. You can get a complete GCC toolchain for the AVR free here and lots of support at AvrFreaks.com. That's pretty much all you need to start developing real applications.
I am too dumb to know how my audio-visual equipment works and feel it is easier to write this to slashdot than to research anything. Please tell me what to do 'cause I can't be bothered to read the manual, check a website, or consult google. Oh, and I am also so damn rich (bling bling), I have both a TiVo and a ReplayTV. Please help me out, I am in such a bind.
One of the benfits of asking technical questions on Slashdot is that almost always there's someone there who can point you to an even better source of information such as Tivo Community.
You are wrong. While Internet descended from US Arpanet network, WWW itself is an European invention. Invented at CERN laboratory, Switzerland. ---
As an European, I am aware of two historical mistakes of my nation - to colonize America and to give Americans the Web.
[Sigh. This is probably a troll, but I...cannot...resist...]
First of all, Europe is not a nation, at least not yet. While the European Union is moving towards some kind of political integration, it's still a good ways off (no single political structure, no unified military, no single constitution, voting membership in the UN, etc.).
Secondly 'Europe' did not colonize America - England, Spain, France, and others nations of the time did.
Technically, the WWW (i.e. HTML and HTTP) was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in Europe (in Switzerland to be exact). While WWW is synonymous with the internet in most people's mind, remember that telnet, ftp, smtp, nntp, and gopher existed before http. In fact I believe they still account for the majority of traffic at the physical layer.
The entire letter was "acceptable" until his closing paragraph where he told them to stop wasting his time and their time... If you want to sound professional you do not tell someone to stop wasting your time in a letter. Find another way to put it.
I don't see what was unprofessional about his closing paragraph. He didn't insult them or call them names. The fact that he responded with a thoughtful, detailed and unambiguous letter addressing their points was professional. He also has a duty to see to it that his company's time and money is not wasted on vague (and almost assuredly baseless) legal claims. Sometimes being professional means giving direct and unambiguous communication priority over 'professional sounding' ear candy.
Actually I think you missed the point I was making:
If you define successful to be not having a catastrophic failure, then the Apollo program was succesful for a couple of reasons:
1. Simpler, more robust designs (along with reduced capabilities and expectations).
2. A vast support team of designers, QA testers, engineers, etc. with practically unlimited access to resources at every step.
3. A good amount of luck. With a 1% probability of catastrophic failure on each mission, there's only a 26% chance of a failure occuring during 30 missions, but this probability rises to 87% after 120 missions. No Apollo design has ever flown as many missions as the shuttle.
Switching to designs similar to the Apollo ones only replicates one of these factors. Without the huge amount of man-hours and money that went into making the Apollo missions successful, the newer versions may end up not being that much more robust than the shuttle.
That said, I really am in favor of reconsidering the capsule + booster approach. The shuttle was an all-things-to-all-people solution that was always severely constrained by a lack of adequate funding. It's time for it to be replaced with a newer design. Looking back at older, successful technology is definitely worth doing, but only if we're prepared to provide the resources that made that technology successful in the first place.
The old technology worked, even in the face of catstrophic disaster.
The new technology does not.
Just remember that the old technology was from the mid-60's and required huge budgets and support staffs.
The 'new' technology (i.e. the space shuttle) is actually from the mid to late 70's and was constrained by a vastly reduced budget.
Also the results of the shuttle program are probably a more reliable measure of the long term safety of space flight since they've flown for a lot more missions. The Gemini and Apollo programs had a combined total of less than 30 missions, each using custom, throw away vehicles.
Cuase it's not like the U.S. is the only country to have used nuclear weapons in a war, right?
The U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Today both cities have been rebuilt and have little or no residual nuclear contamination. I've actually been to Nagasaki, and other than the monuments and museums, you would never guess that it was obliterated in a nuclear blast less than 60 years ago. I would hardly call these little poison pills.
If future archeologists do find areas comtaminated by weapons, it will far more likely to be the results of nuclear exchanges in Asia due to ongoing ethnic conflicts than anything due to Anglo-American civilization.
Of course, if South America were overflowing with oil, well I'm sure someone would come up with a nice excuse.
Actually South America (and the Americas in general) is full of oil. In fact the U.S. imports far more of it's oil from Canada, Venezuela, and Mexico than it does from the middle east.
It seems that it will be the case that the ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Chinese etc. left beautiful ruins and philosophy, and Anglo-American civilization will leave little poison pills for future archeologists to uncover.
Cause it's not like the Chinese, Russians, French, Indians, Pakistanis, Israelis, or North Koreans have nuclear weapons or anything. Oh wait...
Re:Another interesting project
on
Floppy the Robot
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
You can also build your own nuclear weapon using a discarded smoke detector and a cell phone.
Well actually you could use the thorium from Coleman lantern mantles to make a breeder reactor like this enterprising young man did.
But then, water and power plants are protected under Article 54 of the Fourth Protocol of the Geneva Conventions [deoxy.org]. Britain and America are both signatories of the protocol, yet they bombed Iraqi water, sewerage and power systems during the last Gulf War. Neither party has been charged with war crimes.
But then Article 56 has the 'military necessity' clause:
Article 56. 2. The special protection against attack provided by paragraph I shall cease:
a. for a dam or a dike only if it is used for other than its normal function and in regular, significant and direct support of military operations and if such attack is the only feasible way to terminate such support;
b. for a nuclear electrical generating station only if it provides electric power in regular, significant and direct support of military operations and if such attack is the only feasible way to terminate such support;
c. for other military objectives located at or in the vicinity of these works or installations only if they are used in regular, significant and direct support of military operations and if such attack is the only feasible way to terminate such support.
Let's think about that for a moment. Are you suggesting that the freedom of speech only exists on one's own property?
No. But your freedom of speech may be limited on someone else's property.
Suppose a landlord doesn't agree with a letter a tenant sent to the editor of a newspaper? Should that landlord be able to evict the tenant?
Leaseholders still have limited property rights even though they are not the legal owner of the property. So police still need search warrants to enter apartments, and the owners cannot enter without prior notice. However a lease agreement is a contract and if someone breaks a term of the contract, they could possibly be evicted. Local laws may limit which contract provisions are enforcable though.
Taking action against someone for criminal trespass is one thing. But you are talking about taking civil action against someone. A jury is not necessarily involved, and because civil law is about money rather than justice, you've just placed the first amendment in the purview of big money. See what happens when you confuse power with freedom?
So if someone was to wander into my store and defecate all over the carpet, having them arrested for trespassing is fine. But if I sued them for the costs of having carpets cleaned, I'm just a tool of big money?
Put a cup of water in the microwave along with the clothes. It should absorb enough of the energy to prevent serious arcing and heating of the metal while still letting the RFID be fried.
I single hit of heroin is all you need to become addicted. This has been documented, mentioned in interviews with many heroin addicts.
I think a better restatement would be:
A single hit of heroin is all you need to become addicted if you're already predisposed (psychologically or genetically) to addiction.
Many people have tried heroin or other opiates and not gotten addicted. If this weren't true, then you'd expect most people who had receive morphine either in the hospital or due to combat injuries to become opiate addicts, and this just isn't the case.
You don't tell a diabetic to just give up diabetes, do you? Just because the process by which a psychological addiction exerts its hold over you is a black box, that doesn't mean it's any more trivial to resolve.
Uhh, diabetes is actually an endocrine disorder resulting from failure to produce and/or metabolize insulin. Insulin is necessary to live so we're all 'addicted' to it. So far nobody has kicked the insulin habit and lived.
Slashdot Mirror
In Tivo's defense here, they are really caught in bind that the various media licensing companies have set up. In order for Tivo to get a license to officially support DVDs, they also have to agree to support digital Macrovision. But Macrovision has a requirement in their license that any licensee must also support DRM including red flagging. So Tivo had a choice of a) never supporting DVDs b) fighting these inter-locking contractual requirements in court c) swallowing the entire bitter pill of restrictions.
Since Tivo is a barely profitable company under severe pressure from cable company PVRs, they (wisely IMO) chose option C. They were assured by Macrovision that red flagging would only be used on a very small number of programs, mainly PPV and special broadcasts. However, the reality is that the flags are under the control of local stations. The red-flagged King of the Hill episode mentioned in BoingBoing was apparently accidently flagged by a local affiliate, not by Tivo.
Maybe it'll act as a box cutter shield too? When will we learn that fancy weapons don't protect us from 1920's era opponents. But then again, a lot of the hawks still think we're at war with the communists.
The best box cutter shield is the 100+ enraged passengers who know they have nothing to lose by attacking a suicidal hijacker. Oh that and the armored cockpit doors. No lasers needed.
Also depending on where these systems are deployed and what kind of power/cooling/space constraints they had, the Navy may have been more focused on flops/watt rather than absolute performance.
You're probably referring to the Liberator, a single-shot .45 pistol, that the US manuafactured during WWII. Supposedly they cost less than $5 to make and were designed to be dropped behind Axis lines to allow resistance members to kill an enemy soldier and take his weapon. Today they are extremely rare and are worth up to a $1000.
Actually all MS OS's since 2000 have had VBscript built in, which is a pretty full-featured BASIC with file IO and can access most of the common controls. It's mostly used for web scripting, but it will run on any system. Just type it into a text file, give it a
Here's an example that displays disk info:
Remember processors will always get faster and compilers will optimize better over time, but programmers probably won't ever become much smarter, so you should always write your code with the programmer working on it five years from now in mind.
Other than tight loops in an application with real-time requirements, clear and simple code is the better choice.
I would add that up until the invasion of Kuwait, the former Bush Administration was selling arms to Saddam. Additionally, most of the WMD raw materials including bioweapons cultures came from Saddam's good buddies in the US. So it is really funny to watch all this criticism of the UN when it was the Regan Administration (and later the first Bush administration) who gave active support to Saddam's WMD ambitions.
The U.S. did sell arms to Iraq in the 80's, however when you look at the amounts, you can see that these were miniscule compared to what they received from the USSR, France, and China. Even at its largest in 1988, U.S. sales only accounted for only 5% of Iraq's arms purchases. In fact based on these numbers, France has a lot to answer for.
Also the 'bioweapons cultures' that you refer to were most likely plain anthrax spores which were quite easy for anyone to order from a catalog back in the 80's. These have legitimate use for agricultural research and are not particularly dangerous unless they are 'weaponized' i.e. finely ground up, mixed with other substances to keep the spores viable, and mixed into an aerosol - a non-trivial task.
5) the army and police won't let you join if you've had it, rather tellling I think
Having lasik eye surgery doesn't disqualify you for military service. In fact the Army is now offering it for free to soldiers in certain specialties (mostly combat). Whether pilots are allowed to have eye surgery varies from service to service. See here for more details.
If you're doing simple one-off projects, the BasicStamp is all you need. If you think you'll be doing more projects, it's probably worth investing the time to learn a more complete architecture like the AVR from Atmel.
For $135 you can get a complete development kit for the AVR complete with programmer, leds, and push buttons that will work with almost any chip in the AVR family. You can get a complete GCC toolchain for the AVR free here and lots of support at AvrFreaks.com. That's pretty much all you need to start developing real applications.
I am too dumb to know how my audio-visual equipment works and feel it is easier to write this to slashdot than to research anything. Please tell me what to do 'cause I can't be bothered to read the manual, check a website, or consult google. Oh, and I am also so damn rich (bling bling), I have both a TiVo and a ReplayTV. Please help me out, I am in such a bind.
One of the benfits of asking technical questions on Slashdot is that almost always there's someone there who can point you to an even better source of information such as Tivo Community.
You are wrong. While Internet descended from US Arpanet network, WWW itself is an European invention. Invented at CERN laboratory, Switzerland. ---
As an European, I am aware of two historical mistakes of my nation - to colonize America and to give Americans the Web.
[Sigh. This is probably a troll, but I...cannot...resist...]
First of all, Europe is not a nation, at least not yet. While the European Union is moving towards some kind of political integration, it's still a good ways off (no single political structure, no unified military, no single constitution, voting membership in the UN, etc.).
Secondly 'Europe' did not colonize America - England, Spain, France, and others nations of the time did.
Technically, the WWW (i.e. HTML and HTTP) was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in Europe (in Switzerland to be exact). While WWW is synonymous with the internet in most people's mind, remember that telnet, ftp, smtp, nntp, and gopher existed before http. In fact I believe they still account for the majority of traffic at the physical layer.
The entire letter was "acceptable" until his closing paragraph where he told them to stop wasting his time and their time... If you want to sound professional you do not tell someone to stop wasting your time in a letter. Find another way to put it.
I don't see what was unprofessional about his closing paragraph. He didn't insult them or call them names. The fact that he responded with a thoughtful, detailed and unambiguous letter addressing their points was professional.
He also has a duty to see to it that his company's time and money is not wasted on vague (and almost assuredly baseless) legal claims. Sometimes being professional means giving direct and unambiguous communication priority over 'professional sounding' ear candy.
Hey weren't you featured in the Onion a while back...
You seem to have missed the point here.
Actually I think you missed the point I was making:
If you define successful to be not having a catastrophic failure, then the Apollo program was succesful for a couple of reasons:
1. Simpler, more robust designs (along with reduced capabilities and expectations).
2. A vast support team of designers, QA testers, engineers, etc. with practically unlimited access to resources at every step.
3. A good amount of luck. With a 1% probability of catastrophic failure on each mission, there's only a 26% chance of a failure occuring during 30 missions, but this probability rises to 87% after 120 missions. No Apollo design has ever flown as many missions as the shuttle.
Switching to designs similar to the Apollo ones only replicates one of these factors. Without the huge amount of man-hours and money that went into making the Apollo missions successful, the newer versions may end up not being that much more robust than the shuttle.
That said, I really am in favor of reconsidering the capsule + booster approach. The shuttle was an all-things-to-all-people solution that was always severely constrained by a lack of adequate funding. It's time for it to be replaced with a newer design. Looking back at older, successful technology is definitely worth doing, but only if we're prepared to provide the resources that made that technology successful in the first place.
The old technology worked, even in the face of catstrophic disaster. The new technology does not.
Just remember that the old technology was from the mid-60's and required huge budgets and support staffs.
The 'new' technology (i.e. the space shuttle) is actually from the mid to late 70's and was constrained by a vastly reduced budget.
Also the results of the shuttle program are probably a more reliable measure of the long term safety of space flight since they've flown for a lot more missions. The Gemini and Apollo programs had a combined total of less than 30 missions, each using custom, throw away vehicles.
Cuase it's not like the U.S. is the only country to have used nuclear weapons in a war, right?
The U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Today both cities have been rebuilt and have little or no residual nuclear contamination. I've actually been to Nagasaki, and other than the monuments and museums, you would never guess that it was obliterated in a nuclear blast less than 60 years ago. I would hardly call these little poison pills.
If future archeologists do find areas comtaminated by weapons, it will far more likely to be the results of nuclear exchanges in Asia due to ongoing ethnic conflicts than anything due to Anglo-American civilization.
Of course, if South America were overflowing with oil, well I'm sure someone would come up with a nice excuse.
Actually South America (and the Americas in general) is full of oil. In fact the U.S. imports far more of it's oil from Canada, Venezuela, and Mexico than it does from the middle east.
It seems that it will be the case that the ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Chinese etc. left beautiful ruins and philosophy, and Anglo-American civilization will leave little poison pills for future archeologists to uncover.
Cause it's not like the Chinese, Russians, French, Indians, Pakistanis, Israelis, or North Koreans have nuclear weapons or anything. Oh wait...
You can also build your own nuclear weapon using a discarded smoke detector and a cell phone.
Well actually you could use the thorium from Coleman lantern mantles to make a breeder reactor like this enterprising young man did.
But then, water and power plants are protected under Article 54 of the Fourth Protocol of the Geneva Conventions [deoxy.org]. Britain and America are both signatories of the protocol, yet they bombed Iraqi water, sewerage and power systems during the last Gulf War. Neither party has been charged with war crimes.
But then Article 56 has the 'military necessity' clause:
Article 56.
2. The special protection against attack provided by paragraph I shall cease:
a. for a dam or a dike only if it is used for other than its normal function and in regular, significant and direct support of military operations and if such attack is the only feasible way to terminate such support;
b. for a nuclear electrical generating station only if it provides electric power in regular, significant and direct support of military operations and if such attack is the only feasible way to terminate such support;
c. for other military objectives located at or in the vicinity of these works or installations only if they are used in regular, significant and direct support of military operations and if such attack is the only feasible way to terminate such support.
Let's think about that for a moment. Are you suggesting that the freedom of speech only exists on one's own property?
No. But your freedom of speech may be limited on someone else's property.
Suppose a landlord doesn't agree with a letter a tenant sent to the editor of a newspaper? Should that landlord be able to evict the tenant?
Leaseholders still have limited property rights even though they are not the legal owner of the property. So police still need search warrants to enter apartments, and the owners cannot enter without prior notice. However a lease agreement is a contract and if someone breaks a term of the contract, they could possibly be evicted. Local laws may limit which contract provisions are enforcable though.
Taking action against someone for criminal trespass is one thing. But you are talking about taking civil action against someone. A jury is not necessarily involved, and because civil law is about money rather than justice, you've just placed the first amendment in the purview of big money. See what happens when you confuse power with freedom?
So if someone was to wander into my store and defecate all over the carpet, having them arrested for trespassing is fine. But if I sued them for the costs of having carpets cleaned, I'm just a tool of big money?
The buttons are usually metal too, chief.
Put a cup of water in the microwave along with the clothes. It should absorb enough of the energy to prevent serious arcing and heating of the metal while still letting the RFID be fried.
Except that it's not fair. :)
It's fair or unfair depending on how you define fairness:
1. Fair = everyone pays the same percentage of their income
or
2. Fair = everyone experiences the same financial pain
While there's something to be said for mild progressivity in the tax structure, definition 1 has the benefit of being simple and verifiable.
I single hit of heroin is all you need to become addicted. This has been documented, mentioned in interviews with many heroin addicts.
I think a better restatement would be:
A single hit of heroin is all you need to become addicted if you're already predisposed (psychologically or genetically) to addiction.
Many people have tried heroin or other opiates and not gotten addicted. If this weren't true, then you'd expect most people who had receive morphine either in the hospital or due to combat injuries to become opiate addicts, and this just isn't the case.
You don't tell a diabetic to just give up diabetes, do you? Just because the process by which a psychological addiction exerts its hold over you is a black box, that doesn't mean it's any more trivial to resolve.
Uhh, diabetes is actually an endocrine disorder resulting from failure to produce and/or metabolize insulin. Insulin is necessary to live so we're all 'addicted' to it. So far nobody has kicked the insulin habit and lived.