My turntables are piped straight in to my studios master mixer, so instead of getting a crappy signal based on an imperfect scan, I can just record the track and use one of about a hundred different pieces of software to denoise the track, though most of my stuff is pretty new and has very little noise anyway. Yeah... great.
... can I reprogram it to clean my dorm room? Obviously my roomate never will... but maybe something more intelligent like a robot dog could manage it...
Fair points. And thanks for the clarification about the efficiency. Actually, I sorta realized that had to be it by the time I finished the post. By the time I got to the last paragraph, I didn't really agree with much of the first paragraph myself anymore. I'll agree that leaked hydrogen is definately not dangerous. And actually, as a burnable fuel is great because hydrogen burns "clean". Also, good writup on the Hindenburg disaster, thank you.
The Internet, one place where if you're not right, someone else will set you straight.
what does 20% efficient mean? There's this lovely quote that it's twice as efficient as our current 20% efficient systems... does this mean you get 20% more out of it than what you put in? If so, it's not bad considering we have more than enough raw sewage to process. However, we have this other problem. What do you do with hydrogen? Sure, you might be able to make some sort of power plant to process the stuff. In fact... some researcher have done it... check this out...
93% efficiency... not bad. But hydrogen is dangerous stuff. I'd say a large amount of hydrogen is more dangerous than a large amount of reactor-grade uranium... considering all it takes to make hydrogen explode is air and heat. That's one of the reason we don't have hydrogen-powered cars. I don't know anybody else... but if they're looking a something like this, they'd better find a safer way to store hydrogen first. Maybe make a big tank out of a bucky ball and put the hydrogen in there...
A. Attempting to use the DMCA to restrict dissemination of a computer program is prohibited by the First Amendment, because computer code is protected speech.
-End Quote-
I was a policy debator in high school, we actually had a case that used, as far as I can recall, exactly that quote (or at least exactly the same idea). The problem with that article though is that computer *code* may be protected speech, but what the code *does* is not. Which is an extremely important distinction. Something tells me he won't be paying any damages, but if it goes to court, I don't see him being on the winning side.
2600 archive on the DeCSS case... http://www.2600.com/dvd/docs/
Copy of the ruling... http://www.2600.com/dvd/docs/2000/0817- order.pdf
The list of mirrors... http://www.2600.com/news/1227-help.htm l
This may seem sort of irrelevent to the article at hand, but I'm just trying to show how pointless it is to try to enforce such stupid rules. This whole debacle does seem a haunting reminder of that case though...
This is sorta funny, because a couple of days ago I was bounced from something on Angelfire with the message, "In order to ensure that pages can be delivered faster, you cannot link to an Angelfire member page from another site." What I found hilarious about this is that although you can't click a hyperlink, you can right click, copy the URL, paste it in the location bar and go there.
Actually, for a very similar reminder of how this copywrite can be beaten, let's look back to the big RIAA case against 2600.com 2600 decided they would post links to every mirror carrying DeCSS or relevent source on the web. The RIAA told them they couldn't, so instead of posting links, they posted a huge text list of the URLs instead, which was entirely legal and the RIAA couldn't do anything about it. Same issue here, they're pushing these huge copywrite laws that can easily be bypassed with a few seconds of thought on anyone's part who wants to reference someone to the story.
Bottom line: Not allowing links to sites is a lot like not allowing peoeple to walk through the right side of a double door thinking it'll prevent anyone from entering the building.
Anyone remember those commercials during the PS2 hype with the theoretical "PS9" console with the neural interface? Who else thinks that Sony actually aspires to do it now, and that, it will, in fact, be some iterations of the Playstation line? Scary...
"Our new machine will go in your head, take your old thoughts out, and put new ones in... it'll be the greatest video game experience ever, and you'll never buy anything but Sony again!"
The article is rather vague, so maybe I'm not getting this right (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong). But it sounds to me like they're saying that they're actually doing the work on software running under Linux? I'm just sort of wondering.. where are they getting this software? Last I checked there's not a huge abundancy of high-end digital animation production software floating around for Linux. It took me awhile to find software that would suit my own purposes for audio recording. Even then, I can do everything and about 3 times more on a Mac with ProTool/Logic or on a PC with SoundForge/ProTools/Cakewalk... I mean, not that I'm criticizing... it's major step forward for these companies to crank enough power out of RedHat servers to power a production studio. But the article is little more than a vague plug for Linux without some sort of specifics about what exactly is going on.
Sorry... can't resist... seeing as this fell right after the article on transformers... does this mean that the new transformers will run under RedHat? Will Kermit know how to use them? The world may soon know...
Oh yeah...and a third thing I missed. I wanted to address someone's argument that you lose fidelity when you take a signal and go from digital to analog to digital. The argument here seems to be more about whether or not we can make an MP3 out of the CD, more than getting a "perfect copy". Even if your system isn't good, it's probably better than the quality limitations of 128 kb/s MP3. And at least on my system, the signal-noise ratios across every piece of equipment are as close to perfect as makes a difference, and the DAW I use to grab analog to digital will sample at 96 KHz, which won't lose anything off the sampled signal. So even going A-D-A, you can get copies that are so near to perfect that a human ear would never be able to tell the difference. Just a thought.
Oh...and to add to that...most people's solution of just running to the line-in on a sound card won't work because it's mono and you'll lose the entire left channel. So you have to take a couple extra steps and have a few extra cables (ie a 3.5 mm stereo - dual 3.5 mm [or 1/4" TRS, depending on how many toys you have on your machine] mono or single RCA - 3.5 mm mono, etc). Nevertheless, there's plenty of us that have a dedicated input on our mixers for digitizing tapes and/or CD's that give us shit;-)
How naive are they thinking that can ever work? Anyone that either has a) a way of recording a stereo signal or b) a way of splitting a stereo out in to two mono outs, recording both and splicing them together can just record the CD to digital and encode to MP3 from there. I use the former method to digitize mix tapes for people all the time...each song takes about 1.5 times it's length to do...oooh...what a barrier!
Wow...there's some flaimbait. I agree entirely that cheating is in the intention. If you feel the need to have relationships both on line and in real life, you may as well admit to yourself that you're a player.
However, howly crap was that a pretentious comment about seperation of church and state. If you want to flaunt Christian morality, I can give lecture for hours about why I (as the sole member of a religion I created myself) am more ethical than 90% of Christians, and likely more moral as well. The problem does not start in the schools, it starts in the homes.
Anyhow, I don't necessarily disagree with trying to start relationships online, however, it's got to eventually become more than online, or it's not a relationship. Sure. There's plenty of people with sick intentions, but there's plenty more that don't. You be the judge. Make the choice yourself. But at least think about it.
::sings::
The sound card's connected to the stereo mini-dual mono adapter.
The adapter's connected to the mixer.
The mixer's connected to the ADAT
And I'll record my songs.
The joys of being a musician. Bite me, Microsoft.
I don't know if I'm the only one that ever checked up on this, but I was never able to find any reliable corroborating source that said there is any fungal infestation on Mir. I'm pretty sure that story that was run awhile ago was a crock. If anyone can assemble a few sources (important, more than one) that prove me wrong, please do, I'm interested.
Because we don't have an efficient way of doing it. If we had a good way to seperate hydrogen from water, it would revolutionize energy as we know it. An efficient, almost 100% clean source of energy? It'd replace all other formed of power in 10 years. But there's still that nagging little problem of, "We can't do it," between humanity and the prize.
It's not like people don't *know* that there isn't any such thing as an inhackable system, because there isn't. It's like trying to make something idiot-proof. The problem is that somebody out there is going to approach it differently than the person that designed it.
Essentially, that's what people that design security systems do. They start with something, start trying to think of all of the holes they can. But people aren't omniscient and they'll miss things. That's also why I lot of security organizations and government institutions look to the prisons for "reformed" hackers to look over their code and try to break it. But even there, there's always going to be a way through.
They can say that a system is more solid because they alarm the systems, but it didn't say anything about how they do it. I mean, what's it supposed to be doing that any different from any other system when a user enters the system? It seems like this was more of a teaser than a truly informative review.
I'm not so sure that using an eye control would be a good idea. Although it would be okay for moving the mouse around, there are some problems. First off, you blink naturally many times a minute, so who knows what you might accidently click on? Also, our eyes have a tendency to wander to take in the whole picture. So you'd probably be subconsciously moving the mouse around and clicking all over the screen, which would probably mess things up quite readily.
If you can have an interface that can translate your thoughts in to words on the screen, why not use the same thing for the mouse? It'd be much more effective (though harder to design). Anyway, I'm not saying you don't have an interesting idea, I'm just saying that I don't think it's compatible with our biology.
I'd have to agree that it would really depend on the strength of the retaliation if one could plausibly use an automatic system for it. If it was just a nice little script to ban the IP and bounce any packets that come from it back, then it's not really a big deal. Granted, if whoever's cracking the system ping bombs it and they faked the IP then the poor sap on the other side might get hit, but you could compensate by limiting the max packet size to something reasonable. Now, if you have a system that traces the IP, then takes every packet received from it, clones it 500 times then returns it, you've got a problem because you have a high risk of hitting a third party (or yourself). It's the difference between blocking someone when they try to hit you and pulling a gun and shooting the guy next to him. All in all, the issue seems to be what is the scale rather than should it be.
I don't really see Gibson's view of virtual reality ever coming to light. It almost seems like if Microsoft took over VR. You'd have every moron and his brother jacked in pretending they know what they're doing while the people that do know what they're doing end up with less and less potential to do it because all the corperations bump up their security standards to keep the morons from accidently breaking in. Sound familiar? I would have to say that a lot of the ideas that Arthur C Clarke proposed would be extremely interesting. His proposals of using ultra-thin crystal strands as wire for suspension and repelling and manmade rings that circumnavigate the Earth were very interesting (sort of a massive scale difference there). I think what they need to sort out is not what author is more credible, because if the scientists can make it work, it becomes credible. What's important is what is achievable with the resources we have right now? I still think that it's funny that after all these years someone has finally realized that science fiction authors have done almost as much to come up with new inventions as scientists themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
My turntables are piped straight in to my studios master mixer, so instead of getting a crappy signal based on an imperfect scan, I can just record the track and use one of about a hundred different pieces of software to denoise the track, though most of my stuff is pretty new and has very little noise anyway. Yeah... great.
... can I reprogram it to clean my dorm room? Obviously my roomate never will... but maybe something more intelligent like a robot dog could manage it...
I don't know about that specific robot arm, but a lot of things seem to use H2O2 engines...
h tm
2 O2.html
Firebird
http://www.intora-firebird.com/power.
A few other applications of H2O2
http://www.near.no/gallery/h2o2/h2o2.htm
Also, here's a new approach to H2O2 production...
http://www.es.anl.gov/htmls/cbt6-H
H2O2 is also produced by your very own cells... crazy, eh?
Fair points. And thanks for the clarification about the efficiency. Actually, I sorta realized that had to be it by the time I finished the post. By the time I got to the last paragraph, I didn't really agree with much of the first paragraph myself anymore.
I'll agree that leaked hydrogen is definately not dangerous. And actually, as a burnable fuel is great because hydrogen burns "clean". Also, good writup on the Hindenburg disaster, thank you.
The Internet, one place where if you're not right, someone else will set you straight.
That's actually really easy. My step-dad's in the water treatment business. He designs systems that filter raw sewage back to drinkable water.
Sorry about the bad URL... here's a new one.
3 18 / uantumcorp.html
http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Lab/9
Interesting though...
Okay... a few thingns...
3 18 / uantumcorp.html
what does 20% efficient mean? There's this lovely quote that it's twice as efficient as our current 20% efficient systems... does this mean you get 20% more out of it than what you put in? If so, it's not bad considering we have more than enough raw sewage to process. However, we have this other problem. What do you do with hydrogen? Sure, you might be able to make some sort of power plant to process the stuff. In fact... some researcher have done it... check this out...
http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Lab/9
93% efficiency... not bad. But hydrogen is dangerous stuff. I'd say a large amount of hydrogen is more dangerous than a large amount of reactor-grade uranium... considering all it takes to make hydrogen explode is air and heat. That's one of the reason we don't have hydrogen-powered cars. I don't know anybody else... but if they're looking a something like this, they'd better find a safer way to store hydrogen first. Maybe make a big tank out of a bucky ball and put the hydrogen in there...
Quote:
DMCA additions to 17 U.S.C. are unconstitutional
A. Attempting to use the DMCA to restrict dissemination of a computer program is prohibited by the First Amendment, because computer code is protected speech.
-End Quote-
I was a policy debator in high school, we actually had a case that used, as far as I can recall, exactly that quote (or at least exactly the same idea). The problem with that article though is that computer *code* may be protected speech, but what the code *does* is not. Which is an extremely important distinction. Something tells me he won't be paying any damages, but if it goes to court, I don't see him being on the winning side.
A little extra info...
- order.pdf
m l
2600 archive on the DeCSS case...
http://www.2600.com/dvd/docs/
Copy of the ruling...
http://www.2600.com/dvd/docs/2000/0817
The list of mirrors...
http://www.2600.com/news/1227-help.ht
This may seem sort of irrelevent to the article at hand, but I'm just trying to show how pointless it is to try to enforce such stupid rules. This whole debacle does seem a haunting reminder of that case though...
This is sorta funny, because a couple of days ago I was bounced from something on Angelfire with the message, "In order to ensure that pages can be delivered faster, you cannot link to an Angelfire member page from another site." What I found hilarious about this is that although you can't click a hyperlink, you can right click, copy the URL, paste it in the location bar and go there.
Actually, for a very similar reminder of how this copywrite can be beaten, let's look back to the big RIAA case against 2600.com 2600 decided they would post links to every mirror carrying DeCSS or relevent source on the web. The RIAA told them they couldn't, so instead of posting links, they posted a huge text list of the URLs instead, which was entirely legal and the RIAA couldn't do anything about it. Same issue here, they're pushing these huge copywrite laws that can easily be bypassed with a few seconds of thought on anyone's part who wants to reference someone to the story.
Bottom line: Not allowing links to sites is a lot like not allowing peoeple to walk through the right side of a double door thinking it'll prevent anyone from entering the building.
Anyone remember those commercials during the PS2 hype with the theoretical "PS9" console with the neural interface? Who else thinks that Sony actually aspires to do it now, and that, it will, in fact, be some iterations of the Playstation line? Scary...
"Our new machine will go in your head, take your old thoughts out, and put new ones in... it'll be the greatest video game experience ever, and you'll never buy anything but Sony again!"
Brilliant.
Thanks for the info everyone. I greatly appreciate it.
The article is rather vague, so maybe I'm not getting this right (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong). But it sounds to me like they're saying that they're actually doing the work on software running under Linux? I'm just sort of wondering.. where are they getting this software? Last I checked there's not a huge abundancy of high-end digital animation production software floating around for Linux. It took me awhile to find software that would suit my own purposes for audio recording. Even then, I can do everything and about 3 times more on a Mac with ProTool/Logic or on a PC with SoundForge/ProTools/Cakewalk...
I mean, not that I'm criticizing... it's major step forward for these companies to crank enough power out of RedHat servers to power a production studio. But the article is little more than a vague plug for Linux without some sort of specifics about what exactly is going on.
Sorry... can't resist... seeing as this fell right after the article on transformers... does this mean that the new transformers will run under RedHat? Will Kermit know how to use them? The world may soon know...
Oh yeah...and a third thing I missed. I wanted to address someone's argument that you lose fidelity when you take a signal and go from digital to analog to digital. The argument here seems to be more about whether or not we can make an MP3 out of the CD, more than getting a "perfect copy". Even if your system isn't good, it's probably better than the quality limitations of 128 kb/s MP3. And at least on my system, the signal-noise ratios across every piece of equipment are as close to perfect as makes a difference, and the DAW I use to grab analog to digital will sample at 96 KHz, which won't lose anything off the sampled signal. So even going A-D-A, you can get copies that are so near to perfect that a human ear would never be able to tell the difference. Just a thought.
Oh...and to add to that...most people's solution of just running to the line-in on a sound card won't work because it's mono and you'll lose the entire left channel. So you have to take a couple extra steps and have a few extra cables (ie a 3.5 mm stereo - dual 3.5 mm [or 1/4" TRS, depending on how many toys you have on your machine] mono or single RCA - 3.5 mm mono, etc). Nevertheless, there's plenty of us that have a dedicated input on our mixers for digitizing tapes and/or CD's that give us shit ;-)
How naive are they thinking that can ever work? Anyone that either has a) a way of recording a stereo signal or b) a way of splitting a stereo out in to two mono outs, recording both and splicing them together can just record the CD to digital and encode to MP3 from there. I use the former method to digitize mix tapes for people all the time...each song takes about 1.5 times it's length to do...oooh...what a barrier!
Wow...there's some flaimbait. I agree entirely that cheating is in the intention. If you feel the need to have relationships both on line and in real life, you may as well admit to yourself that you're a player. However, howly crap was that a pretentious comment about seperation of church and state. If you want to flaunt Christian morality, I can give lecture for hours about why I (as the sole member of a religion I created myself) am more ethical than 90% of Christians, and likely more moral as well. The problem does not start in the schools, it starts in the homes. Anyhow, I don't necessarily disagree with trying to start relationships online, however, it's got to eventually become more than online, or it's not a relationship. Sure. There's plenty of people with sick intentions, but there's plenty more that don't. You be the judge. Make the choice yourself. But at least think about it.
::sings:: The sound card's connected to the stereo mini-dual mono adapter. The adapter's connected to the mixer. The mixer's connected to the ADAT And I'll record my songs. The joys of being a musician. Bite me, Microsoft.
The question is simple, would it REALLY have stopped anyone even if the ruling had been the reverse?
I don't know if I'm the only one that ever checked up on this, but I was never able to find any reliable corroborating source that said there is any fungal infestation on Mir. I'm pretty sure that story that was run awhile ago was a crock. If anyone can assemble a few sources (important, more than one) that prove me wrong, please do, I'm interested.
Because we don't have an efficient way of doing it. If we had a good way to seperate hydrogen from water, it would revolutionize energy as we know it. An efficient, almost 100% clean source of energy? It'd replace all other formed of power in 10 years. But there's still that nagging little problem of, "We can't do it," between humanity and the prize.
It's not like people don't *know* that there isn't any such thing as an inhackable system, because there isn't. It's like trying to make something idiot-proof. The problem is that somebody out there is going to approach it differently than the person that designed it. Essentially, that's what people that design security systems do. They start with something, start trying to think of all of the holes they can. But people aren't omniscient and they'll miss things. That's also why I lot of security organizations and government institutions look to the prisons for "reformed" hackers to look over their code and try to break it. But even there, there's always going to be a way through. They can say that a system is more solid because they alarm the systems, but it didn't say anything about how they do it. I mean, what's it supposed to be doing that any different from any other system when a user enters the system? It seems like this was more of a teaser than a truly informative review.
I'm not so sure that using an eye control would be a good idea. Although it would be okay for moving the mouse around, there are some problems. First off, you blink naturally many times a minute, so who knows what you might accidently click on? Also, our eyes have a tendency to wander to take in the whole picture. So you'd probably be subconsciously moving the mouse around and clicking all over the screen, which would probably mess things up quite readily. If you can have an interface that can translate your thoughts in to words on the screen, why not use the same thing for the mouse? It'd be much more effective (though harder to design). Anyway, I'm not saying you don't have an interesting idea, I'm just saying that I don't think it's compatible with our biology.
I'd have to agree that it would really depend on the strength of the retaliation if one could plausibly use an automatic system for it. If it was just a nice little script to ban the IP and bounce any packets that come from it back, then it's not really a big deal. Granted, if whoever's cracking the system ping bombs it and they faked the IP then the poor sap on the other side might get hit, but you could compensate by limiting the max packet size to something reasonable. Now, if you have a system that traces the IP, then takes every packet received from it, clones it 500 times then returns it, you've got a problem because you have a high risk of hitting a third party (or yourself). It's the difference between blocking someone when they try to hit you and pulling a gun and shooting the guy next to him. All in all, the issue seems to be what is the scale rather than should it be.
I don't really see Gibson's view of virtual reality ever coming to light. It almost seems like if Microsoft took over VR. You'd have every moron and his brother jacked in pretending they know what they're doing while the people that do know what they're doing end up with less and less potential to do it because all the corperations bump up their security standards to keep the morons from accidently breaking in. Sound familiar? I would have to say that a lot of the ideas that Arthur C Clarke proposed would be extremely interesting. His proposals of using ultra-thin crystal strands as wire for suspension and repelling and manmade rings that circumnavigate the Earth were very interesting (sort of a massive scale difference there). I think what they need to sort out is not what author is more credible, because if the scientists can make it work, it becomes credible. What's important is what is achievable with the resources we have right now? I still think that it's funny that after all these years someone has finally realized that science fiction authors have done almost as much to come up with new inventions as scientists themselves.