They realistically couldn't do anything about it... the 'microsoft' in 'microsoft.sucks.com' is a sub-domain. The owner of the domain name, 'sucks.com', can make any number of sub-domains, and do not have to buy or register them, but just make proper DNS entries. In order to give 'microsoft.sucks.com' to Microsoft, they would have to give 'sucks.com' to microsoft as well.
Unfortunately, the WIPO is almost stupid enough to do it.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Maybe if this gets enough publicity, and people fight it violently enough, it might wake everyone up to the whole shitstorm that's happenning due to the DMCA. This totally sickens me, in some way more than the attack of Napster, more than the whole DeCSS case... because Libraries have been around and available freely in this country for over 100 years. No one has challenged our right to free learning via books until now. This truly angers me!
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
And that's assuming you ante-up and buy their services. You don't have to of course. You could go elsewhere (eg, cable) or forget about TV altogether (the real world is outside your window, not on MTV). Even if every pirate just stopped stealing DirecTV's services (yes, they might be "your" airwaves but I bet they are not your patented encryption and decryption algorithms), the company would benefit immensely. It would no longer have to pump it's resources into fighting the theft of it's services, and the money constantly spent on newer, more secure encryption, educating their markets, legal actions, etc could be better spent elsewhere.
Do you honestly think that there are enough people out there that have the time, knowledge, or money to keep up with this? Those cards go for $400-$600 on ebay! It takes a lot of work to keeping it running. It also takes technical knowledge, which is frowned upon in our society.
I do not do any of this, but I would had I the time to invest, because it's interesting and educational. Knowing more about cryptology helps me in my profession, and in my personal exploits as a free software developer for the GNU project and the KDE project.
Again, DirecTV has EVERY right to defeat the hackers at thier own game. In fact, hats off to them. They totally rock. The logic bomb they set up was brilliant, and masterfully done. I believe hackers should be allowed to do anything they want with anything someone broadcasts to them. I also believe that the sender should be able to do anything they want with the data stream they are sending, and the hardware they own (the H cards). To disallow either side from doing what they need to, you tip the balance in thier favor.
If DirecTV and other companies stop taking such measures, seedier users will milk it for everything they are worth, and the content providers will simply stop offering service.
If, on the other hand, hackers are stopped from learning what they are learning now, we will walk right into the hands of the MPAA and RIAA. We will become a pay-per-play society. We won't be able to buy any content for unlimited use, such as CD's. They might charge us 10 cents each time we play a song. $10 each time we watch a movie.
Niether situation is good. What we need is a balance like we have now, before our world is able to accept a new market driven by service, where scarcity is no longer an economic principal, and where intellectual property is an antiquated concept.
And there will be ways to "steal" DirecTV in a couple months, I'm sure. It's just a matter of time. And then, it's a simple matter of time before DirecTV figures out how to block unsubscribed viewers.
And the whole thing is going to be a blast to watch from my console.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Let me get this straight, you're suggesting that the continual hacks of DirecTV's technology and their widespread dissemination was done to help DirecTV in some way? Next you will be suggesting that it's OK to go around stealing cars because, without car crime, vehicle owners would buy fewer new vehicles.
DirecTV made it's system more secure because of the widespread distribution. And in the case of stealing a car, you are physically taking something away of someone else. DirecTV is simply bombarding MY air waves with this encrypted content, so I'm listening in. It's a different thing from stealing cable... if you tap into the cable company's line, you ad yourself to their circuit degrade the signal, thus hurting the service to others. You're statement is every bit as asinine as Judge Kaplan stating that Jon Johannessan (sp?) just wrote DeCSS to get his rocks off.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
You're missing the point. I'm actually one of those people who downloaded DeCSS to see how CSS worked. I find this sort of thing (encryption, access control mechanisms, etc.) interesting. I don't have time to hack the damn thing myself, but reading the source code or other information about how a hacker went about attacking the problem. This helps ME learn.
What would have happenned if this hacker kept the secret for him and his small group of underground friends? DirecTV would have never found out about it, and never fixed the problem, and never been able to fight back. The widespread distribution of the methodologies used to circumvent the encryption meant that DirecTV would eventually have to hear about it, and have the power to stop it.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
While there are no "noble" goals for hacking a smart card to steal services, I see it as a true hacker's rights, privelege, and duty. Why? Because it's a challenge. Because it proves skill.
IANLAH (I Am No Longer a Hacker), mainly because I don't have time any more. I remember in my youger days the joy of taking apart a piece of electronics just and trying to figure out how it works. I love technology for techology's sake. Why is it wrong to hack for hacking's sake? DirecTV is broadcasting their programming to EVERYONE in America. Is it wrong if you simply figure out how to listen in?
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Hackers will find a way around the new system. They always find a way, and they will have fun doing it.
Doubtful... if you read the article correctly, this last act effectively destroyed the smart cards.
What would be cool is if someone found a way to actually revers-engineer and manufacture smart cards that recieved the regular updates, and acted exactly like legit ones, except they didn't dial into DirecTV.
This is the way companies should combat hackers that are "stealing" or "bypassing access control methods"... not tracking them down and suing them, and getting laws put in place to ban things that are useful to the community at large. DirecTV was able to attack hackers without infringing on their paying customers!
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
A more interesting idea based on your point might be to make a place like nupedia a great backplane storing the data for the encyclopedia, then write an API in which other web sites and even standalone applications can retrieve, index, search, catagorize, and all-around produce different front-ends to. I could see a Knupedia and Gnupedia apps that allow for much more customization by the user.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
In the newly formed Anime U, found in Neo-hyper-mega-Tokyo IX, Will add this to there curriculum for a BS in Ultrapower Combat Engineering. The new class will be called Morphing Metcha Design. It's pre-requisites will be:
Bypassing Newton's 1st and 3rd Laws II
Changing gravitational constants via martial arts.
Advanced Transformable Mecha
Improbable Hair
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
This is the message I get when browsing via Netscape directly, i.e., cutting and pasting the URL into a new browser window.
Sorry, the browser you currently use is not supported by this site.
This column focuses on Microsoft (only) technologies (take data binding and xsl for example) and, as an intranet applications developer, I dont see any reason for me to bother myself with works of horror such as netscape (no offense, its a fact).
This site's traffic (as well as the world's) is 90% Internet Explorer, I wont bother with compatibility issues over a misely 10% who use an inferior browser.
In order to view this resource please switch to Internet Explorer 4 or higher.
Finally, make certain that he uses a good OO language to implement his OS, and tell him that putting #ifdefs inside of his code is punishable by death.
Are you nuts? If one is going to write an OS kernel, #ifdefs are you're friend! They allow you to make your code portable between different architectures and compilers. Although I am an avid promotter of OO languages for application development, the overhead added by OO (especially when using nifty things like exception handling and RTTI) is really too much for something so low level as an OS kernel and surrounding support structures. Would I write a video game or word processor in C or Perl? Hell no! I'd use C++. Not for a kernel, though.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
I heard that CD... I thought it sounded like crap... not because of the DTS compression, but because of the mix. They created a soundfield that made it sound like the varios musicians were set up in a circle around you, with added really silly procussive sound in the rears. Very stupid. Stereo makes more sense for emulating a concert performance. Do do music in 5.1 properly, one should ignore the LFE track, use the center only for directionality of vocals in some cases, and use the rear speakers for ambient sounds (like echos, crowds cheering, background noise, etc) ONLY.
CD-Audio is superior in sound quality to DTS in every way, primarily, there's no loss. DTS is an inefficient lossy compression. Dolby Digital is more efficient, but it's dated... new standards like AAC and Vorbis should kick its ass.
Remember always: the ONLY goal of audio systems should be to faithfully reproduce the audio signal, not to modify it, or make it better. Anyone who tells you otherwise is an uneducated fool who would be happy with a $50 boom box as thier home theater sound system, but got an expensive one to show off to thier friends. Having a live performance from the Eagles recorded in DTS mixed to sound like they are standing around you in a circle is NOT accurate reproduction. Having it sound like they are in front of you is.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
I just bought an APEX AD-800A yesterday which does all of the above (and MP3's etc, reply if you want a full list) at Circuit City for 299$ (actually they gave it to me for 199$ because I also bought a digital 55" projector;))
Umm... you just talked about superior video quality and purchased an APEX player? You should have taken a look at the Toshiba SD5109 if your projector (or future output device) supports progressive scan. If progressive scan isn't in your equasion, you should look at any of the Sony, Toshiba, or Pioneer players. They all look much better than the APEX ones.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
I don't know for sure if you need an HDTV(-ready) for this, or if there are 'normal' TV's with Component Video in.
Most higher-end TV's that are 32" or larger support component inputs.
The Dulux website does not mention DTS audio, which is (correct me if I'm wrong) DVD disks with audio on it. The audio is much higher quality and I think it's also possible to have true surround effects. Although the player has analog audio outputs, the real way to play DTS is through the digital output and a DTS amplifier. There's not much content out there yet, but it does sound awesome!
Um... there are 3 sound formats supported by DVD players in the US: Dolby Digital AC3 (mono, stereo, or 5.1 surround, lossy compression), DTS (5.1 surround, lossy compression), or linear PCM (mono or stereo, uncompressed). DTS generally has a higher bitrate than Dolby Digital, but that does NOT mean it sounds better. Dolby Digital is a much more efficient compression algortithm than DTS, and can sound better. While Dolby simply runs the 6-channel analog master through an encoder to generate the DD bitstream, DTS makes the studio send the sound off to thier studio, and generally tweaks the audio, usually artificially boosting the rear channels and the bass. Since the average moron thinks more bass==better sound, it is preferred by consumers. The same effect could easilly be done by setting up one's DD reciever to boost the rear channels and the bass. This is not accurate reproduction of sound, so it is incorrect, and stupid to do so. It is equally moronic for DTS to do so.
I suggest you read up on home theater if you are truly interested, or email me if you want more info.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
How about this: DVD Audio. The primary reason I got a CD-RW was to make custom music CD's. I have hundreds of discs, dozens of which I purchased because I really liked one or two songs on the album. I burn my own CD's with custom mixes, I rip the tracks into MP3's and upload them to my portable MP3 player. If I purchase a copy of a CD, I can do basically anything with it for personal use. I commit a crime when I give copies to others. I also burn copies of CD's I want to keep in my car.
DVD-Audio is supposedly a higher-fidelity audio standard than standard redbook audio used by CD's. Although there is little danger of DVD-Audio taking over soon, I can see the RIAA ceasing all production on CD's within 5 years, because of the additional protection granted to them by encrypting/watermarking/whatever on DVD-Audio. Although the encryption will be broken (DVD-Audio uses a different method than video DVD's), it will be illegal to distribute information about doing this. Thus, people will have to pay more money for additional copies, services like CD-NOW that let you make custom CD's for a price, and purchase individual songs on MP3 at higher price. Fair use, as I described in the paragraph above, will be dead.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
I feel the same way about the GNOME Foundation. I don't understand why free projects need these silly corporate steering and promotion committees. Why not let people choose on the merits of the system, not the hype surrounding it? I moved away from Windows as my primary desktop OS at home years ago before all the damn hype started. Although Linux is arguably a better and more feature-rich OS today, I liked the community back then a lot better.
I got involved developing for KDE because of it's technical merits and ease of programming. I think having big name companies with a bottom line handle PR for projects like KDE and GNOME as a bad thing.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Some packages, such as Lightwave and Maya, have real physics engines for animation. Realistic cloth simulation is not all that difficult... unless you have to do it real time.
Maybe the NVIDIA GeForce 12 mega-hyper-championship-edition with it's Strategic Motivation Engine(TM) or the newly advertized PlayStation IX will have the power we all need to see realistic clothing on in Quake MXCCLIV, and this technology can also be applied to organic material simulation, so that the body parts flying, as one get gibbed, can be perfectly accurate and anatomically correct.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
You are wrong about the P4... it's not targetted to the server market. It's targetted to the high-end desktop and workstation market. Itanium is thier server product, as it's thier new 64-bit architecture.
The P4 is going to fail for one reason: RAMBUS. They are contractually forbidden to make a DDR-SDRAM chipset for it. DDR-SDRAM is cheap, and faster than RAMBUS.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Some of us who support alternative candidates think that the US government should look less outside our borders... we act like the world's babysitters, having troups in other countries, starting wars with nations that don't "play nice", and giving aid to foreign countries, as long as they agree to the "bed times" we set for them.
The US government should look only inside its own borders. How other nations run thier governments and such is thier own damn business.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Have you ever written code at a low level? Most programs often do a small set of operations multiple times in succession, and perform complex tasks. How often does Word draw a character on the screen? How often does Excel add two numbers?
Most of my coding experience involves taking large amounts of stuff to do, breaking them into smaller, re-usable parts, and using those parts in various order to perform complex tasks.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Exactly... if I want a mini-laptop like one of those slick VAIO's that's based on the crusoe, or a cool webpad, or something similar, I don't care how well it will run Quake, 3DStudio, or how many Linux kernels it will compile per second. I'd want to be able to run a browser, a word processor, an email client, and maybe a DVD player. My old K6-III/400 handles that beautifully. Price, heat dissipation, size, and power consumption are all one should worry about in this case.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
I have no real problem with making "cracking" other peoples boxen without permission illegal. Outlawing posession or construction of "hacking tools" or discussion of exploits is wrong, and dangerous. The US has already outlawed reverse-engineering, breaking of any encryption (if CSS simply negated every bit, that would be enough to warrant legal protection), and linking to sites that do. This seems like the next logical step. The only problem is, here we are preaching to the choir. We need to tell industry and our political figures that we WILL NOT stand for such things, and will fight them every step of the way! We need more big name places like 2600 gumming up the legal system so much that it becomes futile to sue over such things, and we are left alone.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, the WIPO is almost stupid enough to do it.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Maybe if this gets enough publicity, and people fight it violently enough, it might wake everyone up to the whole shitstorm that's happenning due to the DMCA. This totally sickens me, in some way more than the attack of Napster, more than the whole DeCSS case... because Libraries have been around and available freely in this country for over 100 years. No one has challenged our right to free learning via books until now. This truly angers me!
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Do you honestly think that there are enough people out there that have the time, knowledge, or money to keep up with this? Those cards go for $400-$600 on ebay! It takes a lot of work to keeping it running. It also takes technical knowledge, which is frowned upon in our society.
I do not do any of this, but I would had I the time to invest, because it's interesting and educational. Knowing more about cryptology helps me in my profession, and in my personal exploits as a free software developer for the GNU project and the KDE project.
Again, DirecTV has EVERY right to defeat the hackers at thier own game. In fact, hats off to them. They totally rock. The logic bomb they set up was brilliant, and masterfully done. I believe hackers should be allowed to do anything they want with anything someone broadcasts to them. I also believe that the sender should be able to do anything they want with the data stream they are sending, and the hardware they own (the H cards). To disallow either side from doing what they need to, you tip the balance in thier favor.
If DirecTV and other companies stop taking such measures, seedier users will milk it for everything they are worth, and the content providers will simply stop offering service.
If, on the other hand, hackers are stopped from learning what they are learning now, we will walk right into the hands of the MPAA and RIAA. We will become a pay-per-play society. We won't be able to buy any content for unlimited use, such as CD's. They might charge us 10 cents each time we play a song. $10 each time we watch a movie.
Niether situation is good. What we need is a balance like we have now, before our world is able to accept a new market driven by service, where scarcity is no longer an economic principal, and where intellectual property is an antiquated concept.
And there will be ways to "steal" DirecTV in a couple months, I'm sure. It's just a matter of time. And then, it's a simple matter of time before DirecTV figures out how to block unsubscribed viewers.
And the whole thing is going to be a blast to watch from my console.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
- Let me get this straight, you're suggesting that the continual hacks of DirecTV's technology and their widespread dissemination was done to help DirecTV in some way? Next you will be suggesting that it's OK to go around stealing cars because, without car crime, vehicle owners would buy fewer new vehicles.
DirecTV made it's system more secure because of the widespread distribution. And in the case of stealing a car, you are physically taking something away of someone else. DirecTV is simply bombarding MY air waves with this encrypted content, so I'm listening in. It's a different thing from stealing cable... if you tap into the cable company's line, you ad yourself to their circuit degrade the signal, thus hurting the service to others. You're statement is every bit as asinine as Judge Kaplan stating that Jon Johannessan (sp?) just wrote DeCSS to get his rocks off."Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
You're missing the point. I'm actually one of those people who downloaded DeCSS to see how CSS worked. I find this sort of thing (encryption, access control mechanisms, etc.) interesting. I don't have time to hack the damn thing myself, but reading the source code or other information about how a hacker went about attacking the problem. This helps ME learn. What would have happenned if this hacker kept the secret for him and his small group of underground friends? DirecTV would have never found out about it, and never fixed the problem, and never been able to fight back. The widespread distribution of the methodologies used to circumvent the encryption meant that DirecTV would eventually have to hear about it, and have the power to stop it.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
IANLAH (I Am No Longer a Hacker), mainly because I don't have time any more. I remember in my youger days the joy of taking apart a piece of electronics just and trying to figure out how it works. I love technology for techology's sake. Why is it wrong to hack for hacking's sake? DirecTV is broadcasting their programming to EVERYONE in America. Is it wrong if you simply figure out how to listen in?
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
- Hackers will find a way around the new system. They always find a way, and they will have fun doing it.
Doubtful... if you read the article correctly, this last act effectively destroyed the smart cards.What would be cool is if someone found a way to actually revers-engineer and manufacture smart cards that recieved the regular updates, and acted exactly like legit ones, except they didn't dial into DirecTV.
This is the way companies should combat hackers that are "stealing" or "bypassing access control methods"... not tracking them down and suing them, and getting laws put in place to ban things that are useful to the community at large. DirecTV was able to attack hackers without infringing on their paying customers!
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
A more interesting idea based on your point might be to make a place like nupedia a great backplane storing the data for the encyclopedia, then write an API in which other web sites and even standalone applications can retrieve, index, search, catagorize, and all-around produce different front-ends to. I could see a Knupedia and Gnupedia apps that allow for much more customization by the user.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
This column focuses on Microsoft (only) technologies (take data binding and xsl for example) and, as
an intranet applications developer, I dont see any reason for me to bother myself with works of horror
such as netscape (no offense, its a fact).
This site's traffic (as well as the world's) is 90% Internet Explorer, I wont bother with compatibility issues
over a misely 10% who use an inferior browser.
In order to view this resource please switch to Internet Explorer 4 or higher.
ASP Alliance
Complain
- Dagon
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Finally, make certain that he uses a good OO language to implement his OS, and tell him that putting #ifdefs inside of his code is punishable by death.
Are you nuts? If one is going to write an OS kernel, #ifdefs are you're friend! They allow you to make your code portable between different architectures and compilers. Although I am an avid promotter of OO languages for application development, the overhead added by OO (especially when using nifty things like exception handling and RTTI) is really too much for something so low level as an OS kernel and surrounding support structures. Would I write a video game or word processor in C or Perl? Hell no! I'd use C++. Not for a kernel, though.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
I heard that CD... I thought it sounded like crap... not because of the DTS compression, but because of the mix. They created a soundfield that made it sound like the varios musicians were set up in a circle around you, with added really silly procussive sound in the rears. Very stupid. Stereo makes more sense for emulating a concert performance. Do do music in 5.1 properly, one should ignore the LFE track, use the center only for directionality of vocals in some cases, and use the rear speakers for ambient sounds (like echos, crowds cheering, background noise, etc) ONLY. CD-Audio is superior in sound quality to DTS in every way, primarily, there's no loss. DTS is an inefficient lossy compression. Dolby Digital is more efficient, but it's dated... new standards like AAC and Vorbis should kick its ass. Remember always: the ONLY goal of audio systems should be to faithfully reproduce the audio signal, not to modify it, or make it better. Anyone who tells you otherwise is an uneducated fool who would be happy with a $50 boom box as thier home theater sound system, but got an expensive one to show off to thier friends. Having a live performance from the Eagles recorded in DTS mixed to sound like they are standing around you in a circle is NOT accurate reproduction. Having it sound like they are in front of you is.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
-
I just bought an APEX AD-800A yesterday which does all of the above (and MP3's etc, reply if you want a full list) at Circuit City for 299$ (actually they gave it to me for 199$ because I also bought a digital 55" projector
;))
Umm... you just talked about superior video quality and purchased an APEX player? You should have taken a look at the Toshiba SD5109 if your projector (or future output device) supports progressive scan. If progressive scan isn't in your equasion, you should look at any of the Sony, Toshiba, or Pioneer players. They all look much better than the APEX ones."Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
-
I don't know for sure if you need an HDTV(-ready) for this, or if there are 'normal' TV's with Component Video in.
Most higher-end TV's that are 32" or larger support component inputs.-
The Dulux website does not mention DTS audio, which is (correct me if I'm wrong) DVD disks with audio on it. The audio is much higher quality and I think it's also possible to have true surround effects. Although the player has analog audio outputs, the real way to play DTS is through the digital output and a DTS amplifier. There's not much content out there yet, but it does sound awesome!
Um... there are 3 sound formats supported by DVD players in the US: Dolby Digital AC3 (mono, stereo, or 5.1 surround, lossy compression), DTS (5.1 surround, lossy compression), or linear PCM (mono or stereo, uncompressed). DTS generally has a higher bitrate than Dolby Digital, but that does NOT mean it sounds better. Dolby Digital is a much more efficient compression algortithm than DTS, and can sound better. While Dolby simply runs the 6-channel analog master through an encoder to generate the DD bitstream, DTS makes the studio send the sound off to thier studio, and generally tweaks the audio, usually artificially boosting the rear channels and the bass. Since the average moron thinks more bass==better sound, it is preferred by consumers. The same effect could easilly be done by setting up one's DD reciever to boost the rear channels and the bass. This is not accurate reproduction of sound, so it is incorrect, and stupid to do so. It is equally moronic for DTS to do so.I suggest you read up on home theater if you are truly interested, or email me if you want more info.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
How about this: DVD Audio. The primary reason I got a CD-RW was to make custom music CD's. I have hundreds of discs, dozens of which I purchased because I really liked one or two songs on the album. I burn my own CD's with custom mixes, I rip the tracks into MP3's and upload them to my portable MP3 player. If I purchase a copy of a CD, I can do basically anything with it for personal use. I commit a crime when I give copies to others. I also burn copies of CD's I want to keep in my car.
DVD-Audio is supposedly a higher-fidelity audio standard than standard redbook audio used by CD's. Although there is little danger of DVD-Audio taking over soon, I can see the RIAA ceasing all production on CD's within 5 years, because of the additional protection granted to them by encrypting/watermarking/whatever on DVD-Audio. Although the encryption will be broken (DVD-Audio uses a different method than video DVD's), it will be illegal to distribute information about doing this. Thus, people will have to pay more money for additional copies, services like CD-NOW that let you make custom CD's for a price, and purchase individual songs on MP3 at higher price. Fair use, as I described in the paragraph above, will be dead.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
WTF? How did he break a law? He was caught USING A CELL PHONE... If that's illegal, I see several hundred felonies on my commute to work every day!
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
I feel the same way about the GNOME Foundation. I don't understand why free projects need these silly corporate steering and promotion committees. Why not let people choose on the merits of the system, not the hype surrounding it? I moved away from Windows as my primary desktop OS at home years ago before all the damn hype started. Although Linux is arguably a better and more feature-rich OS today, I liked the community back then a lot better.
I got involved developing for KDE because of it's technical merits and ease of programming. I think having big name companies with a bottom line handle PR for projects like KDE and GNOME as a bad thing.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Anyone can do it with enough time and CPU power... the problem is doing it realtime. An 64-CPU SGI wouldn't be able to do it even close to real time.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Some packages, such as Lightwave and Maya, have real physics engines for animation. Realistic cloth simulation is not all that difficult... unless you have to do it real time. Maybe the NVIDIA GeForce 12 mega-hyper-championship-edition with it's Strategic Motivation Engine(TM) or the newly advertized PlayStation IX will have the power we all need to see realistic clothing on in Quake MXCCLIV, and this technology can also be applied to organic material simulation, so that the body parts flying, as one get gibbed, can be perfectly accurate and anatomically correct.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
You are wrong about the P4... it's not targetted to the server market. It's targetted to the high-end desktop and workstation market. Itanium is thier server product, as it's thier new 64-bit architecture.
The P4 is going to fail for one reason: RAMBUS. They are contractually forbidden to make a DDR-SDRAM chipset for it. DDR-SDRAM is cheap, and faster than RAMBUS.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Umm... the absentee ballots, which are largely partly military, have a VERY good chance of tipping the scales in favor of Bush. --Aaron
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Some of us who support alternative candidates think that the US government should look less outside our borders... we act like the world's babysitters, having troups in other countries, starting wars with nations that don't "play nice", and giving aid to foreign countries, as long as they agree to the "bed times" we set for them.
The US government should look only inside its own borders. How other nations run thier governments and such is thier own damn business.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Have you ever written code at a low level? Most programs often do a small set of operations multiple times in succession, and perform complex tasks. How often does Word draw a character on the screen? How often does Excel add two numbers?
Most of my coding experience involves taking large amounts of stuff to do, breaking them into smaller, re-usable parts, and using those parts in various order to perform complex tasks.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
Exactly... if I want a mini-laptop like one of those slick VAIO's that's based on the crusoe, or a cool webpad, or something similar, I don't care how well it will run Quake, 3DStudio, or how many Linux kernels it will compile per second. I'd want to be able to run a browser, a word processor, an email client, and maybe a DVD player. My old K6-III/400 handles that beautifully. Price, heat dissipation, size, and power consumption are all one should worry about in this case.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"
I have no real problem with making "cracking" other peoples boxen without permission illegal. Outlawing posession or construction of "hacking tools" or discussion of exploits is wrong, and dangerous. The US has already outlawed reverse-engineering, breaking of any encryption (if CSS simply negated every bit, that would be enough to warrant legal protection), and linking to sites that do. This seems like the next logical step. The only problem is, here we are preaching to the choir. We need to tell industry and our political figures that we WILL NOT stand for such things, and will fight them every step of the way! We need more big name places like 2600 gumming up the legal system so much that it becomes futile to sue over such things, and we are left alone.
"Evil beware: I'm armed to the teeth and packing a hampster!"