2. People who receive gift certificates feel obligated to use them to their full amount, otherwise they will lose the value of the card. The only problem is few things are exactly worth $20, so the consumer is forced to either pay up their own money for something, or buy something for less than the value of the card.
This is probably the biggest benefit to the retailers. I myself just received a 300-yen gift certificate from amazon.co.jp good for three months or so, and while I know enough about the system not to run out and spend it (plus my own money) on some random thing, I have to admit the temptation is there to find something I'd want anyway and get it before the gift certificate expires.
If Japan had a law preventing expiration, that psychological pressure would definitely be lessened.
Videotaping a movie in the theater isn't an important crime. The real crime is in thinking that any random movie is worth copying at all in the first place, and the victims get self judged and self sentenced, even though most of them don't think of themselves as victims.
So what would you have us do to enjoy ourselves otherwise? Count how many ways there are to twiddle our thumbs?
I agree that Hollywood's (possibly unintentional, possibly not) purpose in modern society is to provide the unwashed masses with bread and circuses. I definitely agree that videotaping a movie isn't an important crime, and I even agree that most movies put out these days aren't even worth seeing, much less copying.
The crime of people copying movies, however, is not enjoying themselves. (Remember those little phrases "pursuit of happiness" and "to each their own"?) Their real crime is ignoring the ubiquitous abuses of power committed by those in charge. I submit that pursuing happiness and keeping watch on societal leaders are not mutually exclusive activities.
By definition, if one (1) "unethical" employee can sink the entire ship - there is no effective security system.
And I ask again--what would you suggest as an alternative? For example, how would you propose protecting AOL's database from an employee with physical access to the database servers?
Redundancy is required in robust systems. Singularity is death.
Redundancy has nothing to do with this. If anything, redundant systems would have made it easier to get the data out--spread the queries across all the redundant databases to avoid triggering alarms. The "redundancy" argument works only for mechanical failures, not social ones.
As I said before, AOL may well be in the wrong, but making extreme claims like yours without actually suggesting any alternatives just makes you sound like a hypocrite.
For the record, I think that even under the best circumstances, incidents like thie are, to an extent, an unavoidable risk. If you really want to screw somebody over, all it takes is time and effort. (There was a recent incident here in Tokyo where a thief spent several thousand dollars to gain the trust of a jewelry store, tricked the owner into showing him to the "trusted customers only" room, then knocked the owner out and made off with something like $30M worth of stuff.) All you can really do is clean up as quickly and smoothly as possible.
Oops, that's right - they have no security system. That's why some idiot can swipe 92meg of users
What would you suggest instead? A system nobody can access? Oops, looks like we lost a hard drive . . . but nobody's allowed to access the system to replace it, so I guess we're SOL!
No matter how much security you implement, if you want a tool to be useful you have to at some point trust the people who were using it. Given that the guy who sold the user list was (according to the article) a software engineer, I'd say it's pretty likely he had access to the raw database, even if the front-line people didn't. There is no security system that completely eliminates the possibility of malicious abuse.
Now, I have no idea how AOL's system is set up--maybe they don't have any security at all, and if that's the case they definitely ought to be fined up the ass. But if they were making good efforts to avoid problems like this, they shouldn't take the blame for one unethical employee.
The poll indicates 62% of the/. crowd would happily fly in that ship on monday. It would be interesting to repeat the poll now and see if it is still this high.
Perhaps some would change, but I'd still have been willing. Admittedly, that's more emotion than anything else, since I don't have any skills that would have been useful in such a flight, but damn, given a chance to go into space, even on an experimental craft . . .
Speaking of which, where are they holding the signups for being ballast on the X-Prize flights? I at least have the skill of sitting around and being massful;)
88/100th of a second per lap?
Isn't that well within the margin of error that the human drivers would introduce?
Yes, but that doesn't negate its value (assuming the measurement is viable on the physical racetrack and not just in simulations). If you have a normal die A with sides labeled from 1 to 6 and another die B with sides labeled from 2 to 7, then there will certainly be rolls where A is higher than B, but on average, B will roll higher than A. In racing, this would translate to a slightly greater chance of winning--and while that may not be a breakthrough improvement, it's certainly better than none at all.
I understand that rationalization, I just don't believe it'll be effective. (Okay, I suppose it does count as "trying" . ..) As others have said, it only takes one person to put it onto P2P. If anything, it seems to me that this "protection" will make it harder for casual users to make mix CDs of protected music, causing that music to gain less exposure and leading to a decrease in sales.
As in earlier tests by BMG and SunnComm, the copy protection on the Velvet Revolver disc can be simply disabled by pushing the "Shift" key on a computer while the CD is loading, which blocks the SunnComm software from being installed. The companies say they have long been aware of the work-around but that they were not trying to create an unhackable protection.
Okay, I'm completely boggled now . . . what exactly are they're trying to accomplish?
Mozilla Mail - I haven't forgotten you. An excellent client that integrates nicely with the browser.
Dumb question: can Mozilla Mail handle getting mail directly from spool files? I'm considering looking into it for CJK mail (handling all three languages on an xterm looks to be a pain), but I don't want to install a POP server just for Mozilla.
While I agree with the majority here that this is not a good idea for rental DVDs, I think it would be a good thing for awards show screeners (i.e., Oscars, Golden Globes, etc).
And how, exactly, would this keep someone from taking the disk straight from its sealed container to their DVD-R drive?
What you're thinking of doing is creating an entangled pair, and keeping one particle on Earth, and keepting the other on a spaceship. Then by changing the state of the Earth particle, you could affect the state of the spaceship particle. Right?
Yup, exactly.
The problem is, we have no way to choose what state the particles will go into when we observe one. Its a random outcome, and you can't acheive any communication if the output is just random noise.
But I thought that's exactly what this experiment accomplished. The Physics Web article and diagram certainly suggest that they're teleporting a known state, via the use of a third particle to influence one side of the pair; am I reading them wrong?
Furthermore, from the spaceship's viewpoint, how do you tell if your particle's state has changed due to an incoming transmission?
I'd assume you just repeatedly observe it at fixed intervals to generate a bitstream (or whatever-stream) of incoming information. Even if your clocks shift a bit, you can include periodic timing bits to calibrate--sort of like the Atari 400/800 did with programs recorded on cassette, where stretching of the tape would change the lengths of the recorded bits. This eliminates the need for a subchannel to say "we just made an observation"; just observe all the time and ignore anything that looks like static.
Can someone explain why this can't be used for FTL communication? The folks at Cornell seem pretty convinced that FTL communication is impossible, but from my reading of the article, in this experiment the first particle is forced into a known state, so (IANANuclearPhysicist but) it seems to me that if the state of the second particle can be measured (even if that measurement causes the state to change), communication has been accomplished. What am I missing?
"... He shall have no community rights whatsoever, neither shall his name be uttered in any sacred place, nor his handiwork to be exhibited with 100 feet of a sacred place, school nor voting booth....
"... nor either count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out..."
Note how MSIE is showing a slight downward trend over the last year, while Mozilla and "Other" are growing. Granted, the difference is still huge, but if Longhorn keeps being delayed, who knows what will happen?
Of course, the physicists will never guess that it's really the gravitational effects of huge surveying ships taking measurements for a hyperspatial express route . . .
In my experience memory usage of Linux running a desktop is now greater than Windows. Gone are the days when it was as much as 10 times smaller (remember runing FVWM?).
What's this "remember"? I'm running fvwm now, and quite happy with it. I honestly don't see the appeal of big bulky desktop systems like GNOME or KDE--a 1600x1200 screen, four terminals, and a root window menu are plenty sufficient. Out of honest curiosity, what do people find useful about GNOME/KDE, or is it just a "the-default-is-good-enough" thing?
They have something of the sort (I'm living in an apartment so I'm not sure of the details), but on the other hand, there's pretty much no space left in Tokyo--land around Tokyo Station, for example, goes for something like 6 million yen per square meter--so they have to squeeze new buildings wherever they can fit them. As soon as somebody sells off their house/land, big corps or real estate guys snatch it up for yet another office building or apartment complex or what have you. The neighborhood I used to live in had a mix of ordinary houses, 4-5 story apartments, and random stores. Sometimes the apartments were on top of the stores. Bizarre stuff.
that most Japanese streets don't have names--only the highways and major arteries have names, and the rest are just "the third left after Akishima Station on Edo-kaido". It is incredibly difficult to find your way to a given address without a map.
Slashdot Mirror
It was a promotion from Amazon. I'm not sure for what, but they must have been running something last time I bought from them. <shrug>
2. People who receive gift certificates feel obligated to use them to their full amount, otherwise they will lose the value of the card. The only problem is few things are exactly worth $20, so the consumer is forced to either pay up their own money for something, or buy something for less than the value of the card.
This is probably the biggest benefit to the retailers. I myself just received a 300-yen gift certificate from amazon.co.jp good for three months or so, and while I know enough about the system not to run out and spend it (plus my own money) on some random thing, I have to admit the temptation is there to find something I'd want anyway and get it before the gift certificate expires.
If Japan had a law preventing expiration, that psychological pressure would definitely be lessened.
Videotaping a movie in the theater isn't an important crime. The real crime is in thinking that any random movie is worth copying at all in the first place, and the victims get self judged and self sentenced, even though most of them don't think of themselves as victims.
So what would you have us do to enjoy ourselves otherwise? Count how many ways there are to twiddle our thumbs?
I agree that Hollywood's (possibly unintentional, possibly not) purpose in modern society is to provide the unwashed masses with bread and circuses. I definitely agree that videotaping a movie isn't an important crime, and I even agree that most movies put out these days aren't even worth seeing, much less copying.
The crime of people copying movies, however, is not enjoying themselves. (Remember those little phrases "pursuit of happiness" and "to each their own"?) Their real crime is ignoring the ubiquitous abuses of power committed by those in charge. I submit that pursuing happiness and keeping watch on societal leaders are not mutually exclusive activities.
By definition, if one (1) "unethical" employee can sink the entire ship - there is no effective security system.
And I ask again--what would you suggest as an alternative? For example, how would you propose protecting AOL's database from an employee with physical access to the database servers?
Redundancy is required in robust systems. Singularity is death.
Redundancy has nothing to do with this. If anything, redundant systems would have made it easier to get the data out--spread the queries across all the redundant databases to avoid triggering alarms. The "redundancy" argument works only for mechanical failures, not social ones.
As I said before, AOL may well be in the wrong, but making extreme claims like yours without actually suggesting any alternatives just makes you sound like a hypocrite.
For the record, I think that even under the best circumstances, incidents like thie are, to an extent, an unavoidable risk. If you really want to screw somebody over, all it takes is time and effort. (There was a recent incident here in Tokyo where a thief spent several thousand dollars to gain the trust of a jewelry store, tricked the owner into showing him to the "trusted customers only" room, then knocked the owner out and made off with something like $30M worth of stuff.) All you can really do is clean up as quickly and smoothly as possible.
Oops, that's right - they have no security system. That's why some idiot can swipe 92meg of users
What would you suggest instead? A system nobody can access? Oops, looks like we lost a hard drive . . . but nobody's allowed to access the system to replace it, so I guess we're SOL!
No matter how much security you implement, if you want a tool to be useful you have to at some point trust the people who were using it. Given that the guy who sold the user list was (according to the article) a software engineer, I'd say it's pretty likely he had access to the raw database, even if the front-line people didn't. There is no security system that completely eliminates the possibility of malicious abuse.
Now, I have no idea how AOL's system is set up--maybe they don't have any security at all, and if that's the case they definitely ought to be fined up the ass. But if they were making good efforts to avoid problems like this, they shouldn't take the blame for one unethical employee.
The poll indicates 62% of the /. crowd would happily fly in that ship on monday. It would be interesting to repeat the poll now and see if it is still this high.
Perhaps some would change, but I'd still have been willing. Admittedly, that's more emotion than anything else, since I don't have any skills that would have been useful in such a flight, but damn, given a chance to go into space, even on an experimental craft . . .
Speaking of which, where are they holding the signups for being ballast on the X-Prize flights? I at least have the skill of sitting around and being massful ;)
88/100th of a second per lap? Isn't that well within the margin of error that the human drivers would introduce?
Yes, but that doesn't negate its value (assuming the measurement is viable on the physical racetrack and not just in simulations). If you have a normal die A with sides labeled from 1 to 6 and another die B with sides labeled from 2 to 7, then there will certainly be rolls where A is higher than B, but on average, B will roll higher than A. In racing, this would translate to a slightly greater chance of winning--and while that may not be a breakthrough improvement, it's certainly better than none at all.
I understand that rationalization, I just don't believe it'll be effective. (Okay, I suppose it does count as "trying" . . .) As others have said, it only takes one person to put it onto P2P. If anything, it seems to me that this "protection" will make it harder for casual users to make mix CDs of protected music, causing that music to gain less exposure and leading to a decrease in sales.
Okay, I'm completely boggled now . . . what exactly are they're trying to accomplish?
Mozilla Mail - I haven't forgotten you. An excellent client that integrates nicely with the browser.
Dumb question: can Mozilla Mail handle getting mail directly from spool files? I'm considering looking into it for CJK mail (handling all three languages on an xterm looks to be a pain), but I don't want to install a POP server just for Mozilla.
While I agree with the majority here that this is not a good idea for rental DVDs, I think it would be a good thing for awards show screeners (i.e., Oscars, Golden Globes, etc).
And how, exactly, would this keep someone from taking the disk straight from its sealed container to their DVD-R drive?
That line almost made me choke on my supper, you insensitive clod! I know /. is bad for your health, but geez . . .
What you're thinking of doing is creating an entangled pair, and keeping one particle on Earth, and keepting the other on a spaceship. Then by changing the state of the Earth particle, you could affect the state of the spaceship particle. Right?
Yup, exactly.
The problem is, we have no way to choose what state the particles will go into when we observe one. Its a random outcome, and you can't acheive any communication if the output is just random noise.
But I thought that's exactly what this experiment accomplished. The Physics Web article and diagram certainly suggest that they're teleporting a known state, via the use of a third particle to influence one side of the pair; am I reading them wrong?
Furthermore, from the spaceship's viewpoint, how do you tell if your particle's state has changed due to an incoming transmission?
I'd assume you just repeatedly observe it at fixed intervals to generate a bitstream (or whatever-stream) of incoming information. Even if your clocks shift a bit, you can include periodic timing bits to calibrate--sort of like the Atari 400/800 did with programs recorded on cassette, where stretching of the tape would change the lengths of the recorded bits. This eliminates the need for a subchannel to say "we just made an observation"; just observe all the time and ignore anything that looks like static.
Can someone explain why this can't be used for FTL communication? The folks at Cornell seem pretty convinced that FTL communication is impossible, but from my reading of the article, in this experiment the first particle is forced into a known state, so (IANANuclearPhysicist but) it seems to me that if the state of the second particle can be measured (even if that measurement causes the state to change), communication has been accomplished. What am I missing?
But will the bibles be inflatable as well?
At first glance, I could have sworn that said "babies" . . .
"... He shall have no community rights whatsoever, neither shall his name be uttered in any sacred place, nor his handiwork to be exhibited with 100 feet of a sacred place, school nor voting booth....
"... nor either count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out..."
With all the MSIE versions combined, like this.
Note how MSIE is showing a slight downward trend over the last year, while Mozilla and "Other" are growing. Granted, the difference is still huge, but if Longhorn keeps being delayed, who knows what will happen?
This is modded insightfull and informative??? Thats waaay more funny than the original joke. The moderators really are on drugs today...
Or perhaps they know something we don't . . . do you know where your towel is?
Of course, the physicists will never guess that it's really the gravitational effects of huge surveying ships taking measurements for a hyperspatial express route . . .
I've spent the last few years trying to UNLEARN this useless habit [of writing optimized code]. There is just no need.
Tell that to my P166/48MB server.
In my experience memory usage of Linux running a desktop is now greater than Windows. Gone are the days when it was as much as 10 times smaller (remember runing FVWM?).
What's this "remember"? I'm running fvwm now, and quite happy with it. I honestly don't see the appeal of big bulky desktop systems like GNOME or KDE--a 1600x1200 screen, four terminals, and a root window menu are plenty sufficient. Out of honest curiosity, what do people find useful about GNOME/KDE, or is it just a "the-default-is-good-enough" thing?
They have something of the sort (I'm living in an apartment so I'm not sure of the details), but on the other hand, there's pretty much no space left in Tokyo--land around Tokyo Station, for example, goes for something like 6 million yen per square meter--so they have to squeeze new buildings wherever they can fit them. As soon as somebody sells off their house/land, big corps or real estate guys snatch it up for yet another office building or apartment complex or what have you. The neighborhood I used to live in had a mix of ordinary houses, 4-5 story apartments, and random stores. Sometimes the apartments were on top of the stores. Bizarre stuff.
Not that I'm aware of--all the GPL stuff had source included ever since the first beta release here in Japan.
that most Japanese streets don't have names--only the highways and major arteries have names, and the rest are just "the third left after Akishima Station on Edo-kaido". It is incredibly difficult to find your way to a given address without a map.
with PS2 Linux. Granted it's a different subcompany, but what makes you automatically assume they won't comply with the GPL?