Quite possibly this article is a troll. However, seeing as it has attracted some nibbles...
First off, I take issue with the fact that you describe youself as "a moral family." All families are moral-- and which morals are passed onto the other members of the family, depends on the particular family...
As for Star Wars, Mr Luucas is telling a story. This story reflcets Mr Lucas's ideas about the worl, including no doubt, mant of his morals. In that respect, the Star Wars films are "moral" films.
Some might argue that the very values you seek to dissuade you children from inhariting, such as an appreciation for the fantastic-- are the very stuff of most children's literature, and not coincidentally, the very subjects that lead children from fuctional literacy into bibliophilia.
Many of the themes developed in Mr. Lucas's works are derived from common themes in Greek, Roman, and Hebreic mythology. The incidents you so blandly describe as "several different aliens working together" refelect a common core in literature stretching back perhaps thousands of years.
However, I digress. You obviously are not familiar with the games Black Isle has thus far produced. In Baldur's Gate and Torment, characters can buy various alcoholic beverages, and there are plenty of prostitutes. In Fallout (1&2), the drugs are stronger, and I am given to understand that one of the moneymaking opertunities in Fallout 2 involves working in a brothel (either as a pimp or as a prostitute) and the choice is more dependent on ones sexual identity rather than on one's chromosome. In Baldur's Gate and Torment, the level of bloodshed is quite high, and you can play as an evil character.
Indeed, in LucasArt's Dark Forces II, you could succesfully complete the games as a "dark jedi." (Read: "evil bastard"). In addition, the so called "Golden Age of the Sith", which I assume is the time period covered by this planned RPG, involves a certain amout of moral ambiguity, as evidenced by some of the comic books.
Even the movies welcome this kind of moral questioning. In Return of the Jedi, the theme that, I think, redeems the movie, from being too simplistic is the confronation between Luke and Vader. Both characters prove themselve to be fallible: Vader ultimately embraces the Light Side, as Luke embraced (part of) the Dark.
As for unspeakable violence-- perhaps you might be more comfortable with a family film such as "Reservior Dogs."
Actually, if you're working on coding an ac3 or mpeg2 decoder, an unencrypted vob file is a great asset. I have several ac3 files on my hard drive that I have used to test and debug my multichannel ac3 decoder.
A real player is being written. DeCSS was a part of the development process.
The site mentions that only one card is installable, because the software can only work with a maximum of eight processors (2^3), and heat and power requirements effectively limit this to 6 per card. Perhaps your willingness to dedicate $2000 to the SETI project is to be commended, though
The last sentence is puzzling: "ATI is currently the world leader in graphics acceleration for both the PC and Macintosh." It reads like a press release.
I think nVidea and 3dfx will certainly contest that statement, since it is not qualified by "in sales."
Video Vison? I don't remember anything called that. There was a 14 inch AppleVision monitor with built in adb, sound in/out (analogue microplugs), video in/out (rca/svhs), microphone, speakers, and oh yes, a monitor. The High Density Display Port incorporated inputs for all of these ports, and I suppose it was great news for people who bought this somehat overprice monitor, but most people just used the HDDP15 pin adaptor.
As for digital video ports-- they do exist. It turns out that a digital video connection to LCD panels is cheaper and of higher quality. But such ports have been around for some time, and are, by no means limited to Apple products
Technically, (but not legally), region protection codes have little to do with the DVD encryption. The encryption (a piss-poor system known as CSS), "ensures" that only liscenced players get to play the disc. Of course, only player manufacturers that promise to abide by the region codes get licensed to use CSS.
As far as masquerading as Warner Brothers, well it should be possible, but I don't know if the proper keys have been published (yet).
Well DUH.. Sorry if that comes out as offensive - but I thought that DeCSS was proven illegal a long time ago.
This case is about linking to the DeCSS program.. NOT about whether or not said program is illegal. Sheesh.. figure out what your protesting.
No, this is not true. Legally, DeCSS has not been proven to be a circumvention device. That's what the trial is supposed to prove. (Of course, the outcome of the trial is not seriously in doubt.) The previous legal battles were primarily over preliminary injunctions.
Quouth the author: Even hardware companies are jumping on Linux and using it to help their users make sure that all the pieces work together. One example is Abit who has released Gentus. This distribution, unlike the others, is specially designed to work with Abit's motherboards, 3D accelerators, and other products.
There are numerous uncomplimentary posts about Gentus on kernel traffic . It seems that they've been accused of GPL violations.
At one time, it was believed that leisure time enable the underclasses to plot against their oppressors. If you worked a man 10-12 hours a day in the mine, he had no time (or energy) that could be diverted into revolutionary thoughts. He was simply "too tired" to throw off the bounds of his oppressors. After all, "idle hands do the devil's work." Leisure time on sundays is most expeditiously removed through long sermons...
Conversely, it was Marcuse's view that the creation of leisure activities does much to stabilize an "advanced capitalist" society. If the working day is reduced to eight hours, but societal pressures are able to fill that void with recreational activities, the worker is satisfied by a marginally better working environment but does not spend the excess time in a politically transormative manner.
(Hey, Marcuse should have at least, if not more credibility than Ayn Rand)
for all intents and purposes there is zero Marginal cost for every song sold digitally, so each song would probably only cost a few to fifty cents to download for one device.
But the cost of distribution has little to do with media costs nowdays. A lot of a CD's $18.99 list price is pure profit.
Today, I read a Washington Post article on the adult movie business and was struck by the following set of statements:
"Adult movie suppliers such as the Hot Network and New Frontier Media also make their products available to satellite and cable TV companies on a generous basis. When it comes to a typical Hollywood movie, a cable or satellite company usually keeps only 45 percent of the $3 to $4 fee paid by a subscriber. In the case of adult movies, however, cable and satellite companies keep up to 80 percent of a subscriber's pay-per-view fee. Those lopsided deals are possible in part because it costs relatively little to produce an adult film--$30,000 to $40,000--compared with $75 million for the average mainstream film.
Those savings are not passed on the customer, however. Instead, AT&T and Starpower charge as much as $7.95 for each adult movie, about double the price of a Hollywood blockbuster on a pay-per-view channel."
Media companies rarely "pass the savings on to you."
The pages on the 100m telescope cover this. Basically, interferometry isn't as effective as a filled aperture telescope in terms of field of view and magnitude limits. However, the authors of that study do speculate, briefly, on the possibility of 1km-100km interferometers.
Of course, now www.dragontales.com links to a PBS site featuring the children's program. The.org site does as well, and the.net site is currently unoccupied.
also, if you care about the environment, do not push for printed manuals! But peole will try to print out the manuals. A paper manual is so much more useful. You can read it while commuting, for example. In addition, it it somehat difficult to read a online manual and work with an application at the same time-- screen real estate becomes a big problem. Of course, Microsoft could use this "environmental" sentiment to its advantage and require Microsoft Reader/Windows CE to view its documentation.
The biggest coontribution to box size used to be floppy disks. I think there was even a edition of vissual C++ that came on more than 100 floppies. Of course, in those days, they didn't skimp on documentation either.
Sometimes projects fail not because of lack of coders but because the original programmers don't have the time to finish the projects. Jobs and school can end a project quickly. And, there areprojects that fall apart becuase of mismanagement.
The projects, though, might still have good code attached to them.
A cynic might point out that the only thing saving Taiwan from being occupied by the PLA is the unfeasibilty of launching an assault across ~100 miles of ocean. Of course, now that the PLA has achieved this capability, this lack of formal recognition might well be tested.
It shouldn't matter what you were thinking when you killed someone. What matters is whether you killed them or not and whether you intended to kill them or not. But intentions are thoughts.
Considering that OpenLaw is composed of both lawyers and programmers, its not surprising that some of the more "childish" tactics have been shot down. The DeCSS case could well be critical in determining the legality of "anti-circumvention" laws, and so it important that the hacker community doesn't "blow it." On the other hand,OpenLaw forum has tried to defend the world wide linking campaign. As for the faux DeCSS program-- you might be interested in reading some of the forum's archives
The concepts of anonymity and privacy are, in my opin[ion, very much intertwined. Right now, there exists the capacity to record details of one's "life on the net". If I surf anonymously, or act through pseudonyms, that information, however invasive, is ultimately of no worth, because that information cannot be cross-tabulated or used to gain any insight into personal habits. If, on the other hand, such information can be connected to an individual, that information ultimately has a great deal of potential worth, precisely because it is a window into "private life." Anonymity is a method of retaining privacy. It is important tools because it offers the user a brief respite from the panopticon of modern life.
There's always an upside and a downside to regulating transparency. On the one hand, increasing transparency allows citizens to keep tabs on the workings of their governement and guard against fraud and incompetence. On the o ther hand, increasing transparency will often violate rights of privacy.
A couple of illustative cases may be in order: In Washington DC, several cases of child abuses and neglect by court appointed guardians have occurred, and privacy laws have shielded the persons responsible from the glaring eyes of the press, private investigators, and oversight commissions.
Several people have tried to use "Freedom of Information Act" type laws to gather and publish the internet browser histories of government employees and officials, obstensibly to root out people who were looking at "porn" sites instead of doing their jobs. This would open up a pandora's box of complicating factors:
University faculty are, at some point, considered to be state governemnet employees. Ignoring, for now, the Harvard Divinity school administrator who was fired for his online pornography habits, I would expect that University employees do a great deal of browsing that is either personal, or related to ongoing research. Such information should probably not be published.
Why should governement employees be subject to more scrutiny than other workers. I know for a fact that more than a few corporate mirrors of the "Victoria's Secret" fashion show were local mirrored by corporate IT networks to take the load off the external feed. And I would imagine that more than a few employees have been fired for obnoxious web surfing habits, but few presses have tried to "expose" similar "scandals" at private companies.
My mistake. The first brief was in reference to the "Conclusions of Law." This PDF file documents the SIAA's poistion on splitting microsft into three companies. The Internet Explorer company would probably encompass Expedia, MSN, Carpoint, and number of other "Content" businesses.
As an American, I can verify that the Cuban American National Foundation, a group of vociferous immigrants who apprently want to restore Batista, constitutes a large block of voters in what apperently is a terribly important state in trms of presidential electoral politics. In addition, China has one advantage that Cuba lacks-- one billion consumers- (or to put it another way, two billion armpits.) It's a market that many American companies, not just deoderant manufacturers, are salivating over.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite possibly this article is a troll. However, seeing as it has attracted some nibbles...
First off, I take issue with the fact that you describe youself as "a moral family." All families are moral-- and which morals are passed onto the other members of the family, depends on the particular family...
As for Star Wars, Mr Luucas is telling a story. This story reflcets Mr Lucas's ideas about the worl, including no doubt, mant of his morals. In that respect, the Star Wars films are "moral" films.
Some might argue that the very values you seek to dissuade you children from inhariting, such as an appreciation for the fantastic-- are the very stuff of most children's literature, and not coincidentally, the very subjects that lead children from fuctional literacy into bibliophilia.
Many of the themes developed in Mr. Lucas's works are derived from common themes in Greek, Roman, and Hebreic mythology. The incidents you so blandly describe as "several different aliens working together" refelect a common core in literature stretching back perhaps thousands of years.
However, I digress. You obviously are not familiar with the games Black Isle has thus far produced. In Baldur's Gate and Torment, characters can buy various alcoholic beverages, and there are plenty of prostitutes. In Fallout (1&2), the drugs are stronger, and I am given to understand that one of the moneymaking opertunities in Fallout 2 involves working in a brothel (either as a pimp or as a prostitute) and the choice is more dependent on ones sexual identity rather than on one's chromosome. In Baldur's Gate and Torment, the level of bloodshed is quite high, and you can play as an evil character.
Indeed, in LucasArt's Dark Forces II, you could succesfully complete the games as a "dark jedi." (Read: "evil bastard"). In addition, the so called "Golden Age of the Sith", which I assume is the time period covered by this planned RPG, involves a certain amout of moral ambiguity, as evidenced by some of the comic books.
Even the movies welcome this kind of moral questioning. In Return of the Jedi, the theme that, I think, redeems the movie, from being too simplistic is the confronation between Luke and Vader. Both characters prove themselve to be fallible: Vader ultimately embraces the Light Side, as Luke embraced (part of) the Dark.
As for unspeakable violence-- perhaps you might be more comfortable with a family film such as "Reservior Dogs."
Actually, if you're working on coding an ac3 or mpeg2 decoder, an unencrypted vob file is a great asset. I have several ac3 files on my hard drive that I have used to test and debug my multichannel ac3 decoder.
A real player is being written. DeCSS was a part of the development process.
The site mentions that only one card is installable, because the software can only work with a maximum of eight processors (2^3), and heat and power requirements effectively limit this to 6 per card.
Perhaps your willingness to dedicate $2000 to the SETI project is to be commended, though
The last sentence is puzzling: "ATI is currently the world leader in graphics acceleration for both the PC and Macintosh." It reads like a press release.
I think nVidea and 3dfx will certainly contest that statement, since it is not qualified by "in sales."
Video Vison? I don't remember anything called that. There was a 14 inch AppleVision monitor with built in adb, sound in/out (analogue microplugs), video in/out (rca/svhs), microphone, speakers, and oh yes, a monitor. The High Density Display Port incorporated inputs for all of these ports, and I suppose it was great news for people who bought this somehat overprice monitor, but most people just used the HDDP15 pin adaptor.
As for digital video ports-- they do exist. It turns out that a digital video connection to LCD panels is cheaper and of higher quality. But such ports have been around for some time, and are, by no means limited to Apple products
Technically, (but not legally), region protection codes have little to do with the DVD encryption. The encryption (a piss-poor system known as CSS), "ensures" that only liscenced players get to play the disc. Of course, only player manufacturers that promise to abide by the region codes get licensed to use CSS.
As far as masquerading as Warner Brothers, well it should be possible, but I don't know if the proper keys have been published (yet).
Well DUH..
Sorry if that comes out as offensive - but I thought that DeCSS was proven illegal a long time ago.
This case is about linking to the DeCSS program.. NOT about whether or not said program is illegal. Sheesh.. figure out what
your protesting.
No, this is not true. Legally, DeCSS has not been proven to be a circumvention device. That's what the trial is supposed to prove. (Of course, the outcome of the trial is not seriously in doubt.) The previous legal battles were primarily over preliminary injunctions.
There are numerous uncomplimentary posts about Gentus on kernel traffic . It seems that they've been accused of GPL violations.
At one time, it was believed that leisure time enable the underclasses to plot against their oppressors. If you worked a man 10-12 hours a day in the mine, he had no time (or energy) that could be diverted into revolutionary thoughts. He was simply "too tired" to throw off the bounds of his oppressors. After all, "idle hands do the devil's work." Leisure time on sundays is most expeditiously removed through long sermons...
Conversely, it was Marcuse's view that the creation of leisure activities does much to stabilize an "advanced capitalist" society. If the working day is reduced to eight hours, but societal pressures are able to fill that void with recreational activities, the worker is satisfied by a marginally better working environment but does not spend the excess time in a politically transormative manner.
(Hey, Marcuse should have at least, if not more credibility than Ayn Rand)
But the cost of distribution has little to do with media costs nowdays. A lot of a CD's $18.99 list price is pure profit.
Today, I read a Washington Post article on the adult movie business and was struck by the following set of statements:
"Adult movie suppliers such as the Hot Network and New Frontier Media also make their products available to satellite and cable TV companies on a generous basis. When it comes to a typical Hollywood movie, a cable or satellite company usually keeps only 45 percent of the $3 to $4 fee paid by a subscriber. In the case of adult movies, however, cable and satellite companies keep up to 80 percent of a subscriber's pay-per-view fee. Those lopsided deals are possible in part because it costs relatively little to produce an adult film--$30,000 to $40,000--compared with $75 million for the average mainstream film.
Those savings are not passed on the customer, however. Instead, AT&T and Starpower charge as much as $7.95 for each adult movie, about double the price of a Hollywood blockbuster on a pay-per-view channel."
Media companies rarely "pass the savings on to you."
The pages on the 100m telescope cover this. Basically, interferometry isn't as effective as a filled aperture telescope in terms of field of view and magnitude limits. However, the authors of that study do speculate, briefly, on the possibility of 1km-100km interferometers.
Of course, now www.dragontales.com links to a PBS site featuring the children's program. The .org site does as well, and the .net site is currently unoccupied.
also, if you care about the environment, do not push for printed manuals! But peole will try to print out the manuals. A paper manual is so much more useful. You can read it while commuting, for example. In addition, it it somehat difficult to read a online manual and work with an application at the same time-- screen real estate becomes a big problem. Of course, Microsoft could use this "environmental" sentiment to its advantage and require Microsoft Reader/Windows CE to view its documentation.
The biggest coontribution to box size used to be floppy disks. I think there was even a edition of vissual C++ that came on more than 100 floppies. Of course, in those days, they didn't skimp on documentation either.
Sometimes projects fail not because of lack of coders but because the original programmers don't have the time to finish the projects. Jobs and school can end a project quickly. And, there areprojects that fall apart becuase of mismanagement.
The projects, though, might still have good code attached to them.
A partial software implementation is available at LiVid
A cynic might point out that the only thing saving Taiwan from being occupied by the PLA is the unfeasibilty of launching an assault across ~100 miles of ocean. Of course, now that the PLA has achieved this capability, this lack of formal recognition might well be tested.
It shouldn't matter what you were thinking when you killed someone. What matters is whether you killed them or not and whether you intended to kill them or not. But intentions are thoughts.
Considering that OpenLaw is composed of both lawyers and programmers, its not surprising that some of the more "childish" tactics have been shot down. The DeCSS case could well be critical in determining the legality of "anti-circumvention" laws, and so it important that the hacker community doesn't "blow it." On the other hand,OpenLaw forum has tried to defend the world wide linking campaign. As for the faux DeCSS program-- you might be interested in reading some of the forum's archives
The concepts of anonymity and privacy are, in my opin[ion, very much intertwined. Right now, there exists the capacity to record details of one's "life on the net". If I surf anonymously, or act through pseudonyms, that information, however invasive, is ultimately of no worth, because that information cannot be cross-tabulated or used to gain any insight into personal habits. If, on the other hand, such information can be connected to an individual, that information ultimately has a great deal of potential worth, precisely because it is a window into "private life." Anonymity is a method of retaining privacy. It is important tools because it offers the user a brief respite from the panopticon of modern life.
It's McIntosh, and they are perhaps better known for their amplifiers.
There's always an upside and a downside to regulating transparency. On the one hand, increasing transparency allows citizens to keep tabs on the workings of their governement and guard against fraud and incompetence. On the o ther hand, increasing transparency will often violate rights of privacy.
A couple of illustative cases may be in order: In Washington DC, several cases of child abuses and neglect by court appointed guardians have occurred, and privacy laws have shielded the persons responsible from the glaring eyes of the press, private investigators, and oversight commissions.
Several people have tried to use "Freedom of Information Act" type laws to gather and publish the internet browser histories of government employees and officials, obstensibly to root out people who were looking at "porn" sites instead of doing their jobs. This would open up a pandora's box of complicating factors:
University faculty are, at some point, considered to be state governemnet employees. Ignoring, for now, the Harvard Divinity school administrator who was fired for his online pornography habits, I would expect that University employees do a great deal of browsing that is either personal, or related to ongoing research. Such information should probably not be published.
Why should governement employees be subject to more scrutiny than other workers. I know for a fact that more than a few corporate mirrors of the "Victoria's Secret" fashion show were local mirrored by corporate IT networks to take the load off the external feed. And I would imagine that more than a few employees have been fired for obnoxious web surfing habits, but few presses have tried to "expose" similar "scandals" at private companies.
My mistake. The first brief was in reference to the "Conclusions of Law." This PDF file documents the SIAA's poistion on splitting microsft into three companies. The Internet Explorer company would probably encompass Expedia, MSN, Carpoint, and number of other "Content" businesses.
The friend of the court brief is here
As an American, I can verify that the Cuban American National Foundation, a group of vociferous immigrants who apprently want to restore Batista, constitutes a large block of voters in what apperently is a terribly important state in trms of presidential electoral politics. In addition, China has one advantage that Cuba lacks-- one billion consumers- (or to put it another way, two billion armpits.) It's a market that many American companies, not just deoderant manufacturers, are salivating over.