As we chatted and he posed for photos and signed the CD insert of one of his latest albums, I told him that I wouldn't have bought it if I hadn't downloaded it first. He told me it was fine and that he downloads music all the time too. He said that if I had to download music to discover whether I liked it or not then I should go ahead. After all, I'd just proven to him (by handing him the insert to sign) that if I do llike it then I will buy it.
>>When you read it directly in other computer all you get is nearly random gibberish. If it's nearly random, then it isn't encrypted properly. Decent encryption produces truly random outputs.
Your solution is still vulnerable to a few attacks. The simplest one being a physical keystroke logger, installation of the logger and recovery of the log is left as an excercise for the reader. There are also attacks which use microphones to listen for the slight differences between the sounds of the different keys as they are pressed. It might not get you the full passphrase, but might get enough to make bruteforcing the rest feasable.
There are a lot of folk on here who don't know a thing about the UK or what a typical student rented house would be like. Advice about A/C is irrelavent.
Anyway. Assuming no structural changes allowed (so you can't touch wall cavities etc) and assuming you don't have UPVC double glazing etc.
1. Draught insulation on all doors and windows. Find every draught and stop it. You can get thses strips in Homebase, Do It All etc. They come in different thicknesses so choose wisely. Be prepared to get dirty cleaning all the spaces in the joints where the spiders live otherwise the strips won't stick. 2. When it's cold, wear more clothes and only heat the rooms you use and keep the doors shut so you don't heat the rooms you're not using. 3. If you want to heat a room quickly (say you're the first one back after being at lectures all day) get a small desk fan and set it blowing across the radiator in the living room. It will cirulate the warm air surprisingly quickly. 4. Cook and eat meals together as a group. This is cheaper, you'll eat better and it's relaxing to have everyone sit down together after they have all been out (hopefully) studying all day . Do the obvious like learn how to skin and quarter a fresh chicken rather than buy expensive chicken pieces (hint: kitchen scissors). You don't need to be a great cook, learn to do one simple meal such as a Chilli Con Carne, expand your repotoir later. We had a complicated looking list (it would be a spreadsheet today) of money spent by each person either for the group or for other individuals so we could work out who owed each other what at the end of the term. It saved any arguments and meant the whole 'cooking for the group' thing did work. 5. Much has been said about computers already. If you can get to a power socket in the library, consider working there. This would obviously require a laptop but you keep warm, have free electricity and hopefully *don't* have a distracting net connection. 6. If you have big windows, consider that platic double glazing stuff you can get. For what ammounts to some double sided tape and a sheet of clear plastic stuck over the window, then shrunk tight with a hair dryer you do get pretty good insulation.
One more thing. University is getting stupidly expensive now in the UK, you are going to get into a lot of debt anyway. But you are not there to get a degree as cheaply as possible. You are there to enjoy yourself, to learn about life and yes; to get a degree. So have some fun along the way and don't sit freezing in a room when being warm isn't going to make much difference to the £20k debt you might well be facing at the end. Which is why I don't suggest not drinking beer. You'll be spending more on beer than on food and possibly utility bills as well.
>> They're in the UK - that'll never be a problem;)
I wish. My last rented flat must have had close to zero loft insulation. Very cold in winter and very hot in summer. The loft space trapped the heat making it 25 - 30 Centigrade at night, maybe more. It was very inpleasant. Of course, venting heat was never the correct solution, proper loft insulation would have been.
I think there might be a viable niche market for a 'MP3' CD player... that can read DVDs (and play other codecs). 4.x GB of your tunes per disk, or double if it can read dual layer disks. Then your CD case can carry >160 GB which gets close to "all my CDs; losslessly" for a lot of people.
It really irritates me when people tell me they think board games are boring, when all they mean is that they've only ever played monopoly/clue(do)/game of life etc and that they found those boring.
Try to pick something with maximum impact that requires little planning so it can be a spur of the moment thing.
Hold up a bank Go carjacking Take a high powered rifle to the top of a water tower etc etc, I'm sure you'll think of something
Nothing gets the adrenaline rushing quite like spot of high crime. Plus, the early sunsets (northern hemisphere) make getaways a little easier. The exercise is good for you too.
Just remember, wipe all the prints carefully, establish an alibi ahead of time and leave the iPod at home so you can better hear the sirens.
>The 'reply to list' functionnality is still available, albeit not in the context menu. It is now only available using the 'CTRL-L' keyboard combination.
Now I'm really confused. CTRL + L is forward on my v1.0.7 copy of TBird. Not only that but it _is_ in the context menu.
Reply to all doesn't quite fit the bill here because it sends a reply to the mailing list AND to the person on the list who sent the message I'm replying to. But the person who sent the message I'm replying to is on the list so he therefore gets two copies of my reply. So I do reply to all but I have to do some editing to the addresses before I can send the message.
I like Evolution, I really do. I miss the 'reply to list' option (even though forums are sadly taking the place of mailing lists and rendering this point mute). But I found that Evolution with built-in Spamassassin from FC4 just wasn't stopping either piece of spam I got each week and it was really starting to annoy me. So I tried out Thunderbird and I'm finding that it does what I need and it's stopping the spam.
Some (most?) of the services want you to send the CDs to them on spindles. I have several CDs that not only don't have track names on but some don't have album names or even band names on. If the cddb is wrong or has a few different choices[1] that are not just spelling variations then how do they make sure your tracks end up being tagged correctly?
[1] This happens more for CD singles but I think I've seen it for regular albums.
> How about using tools like bl or ledcontrol for controlling the standard keyboard leds?
On a corporate PC? We both know how likely that is. It tends to be hard enough to get permission to run software other than what is issued on the PC (eg Office + erm, well just Office really), never mind switching away from the corporate desktop OS.
When I worked at HP (the part that became Agilent) we had HP PCs with keyboards that included an email LED (next to the Caps, Scroll and Num lock LEDs). It also had some quicklaunch buttons but they aren't so interesting.
It was really useful to not have to unlock the computer just to check if you had been sent that email yet.
Funny, my 'try before you buy' policy has recently led me to buy CDs from artists I hadn't heard of until recently and certainly wouldn't have purchased CDs from. My CD purchases have risen since getting broadband internet, not fallen.
There's a TV/cinema advert here in the UK that shows several crimes taking place along with slogans such as "You wouldn't steal a handbag!" or "You wouldn't steal a car!". No, I wouldn't steal a car, nor would I buy one without a test drive.
My idea. Make _all_ recorded music available for free download. Every bit of it. Straight from easily navigable high-bandwidth record company servers. What I try and like, I'll buy on CD. The catch? Make the downloads low data rate. I can tell if I like a song if I hear it on AM radio in the car. That's mono and comes with engine noises mixed in and the odd bridge induced drop-out. As that is the case I can tell if I like an album from a 72kb/s data rate OGG/MP3/etc file.
Not only that but IIRC 60GHz is an Oxygen absorption line. This means the atmospheric range is really low.
I think there are American military satellites that communicate with each other at 60GHz precisely because the O2 absorption makes ground intercept that much harder.
IIRC The mirror segments were deformed during construction. The mirror segments need to be ground to the correct shape (with a pretty tight definition of correct). I belive they were deformed in such a way that the actual shape ground was an easy one to do. When the mirrors were released they sprung back to their original overall shape but with the surface ground to what was needed for the final mirror. Neat way of getting around the problem.
All the music I've 'pirated' has actually led to increased sales.
I once read about band A supporting bands B and C on tour. B and C I already knew about and liked. I downloaded some of A's material and then proceeded to buy more than the record industry was willing to sell to me. IE I got a friend from the US to bring some of their CDs over to the UK when he visited, CDs that you can't get here.
I also bought Dark Angel on DVD after watching a downloaded copy of the first episode. Same effect.
Slashdot Mirror
You're assuming only one truck can use the road at a time.
>I'm not sure if this is still the case, but SELinux and the nVidia graphics drivers do not seem to get along either. I had this problem in FC4.
I don't think it is a problem any more. At least, it isn't for me.
Ah yes, the "Black and Decker" hack.
As we chatted and he posed for photos and signed the CD insert of one of his latest albums, I told him that I wouldn't have bought it if I hadn't downloaded it first. He told me it was fine and that he downloads music all the time too. He said that if I had to download music to discover whether I liked it or not then I should go ahead. After all, I'd just proven to him (by handing him the insert to sign) that if I do llike it then I will buy it.
>>When you read it directly in other computer all you get is nearly random gibberish.
If it's nearly random, then it isn't encrypted properly. Decent encryption produces truly random outputs.
Your solution is still vulnerable to a few attacks. The simplest one being a physical keystroke logger, installation of the logger and recovery of the log is left as an excercise for the reader.
There are also attacks which use microphones to listen for the slight differences between the sounds of the different keys as they are pressed. It might not get you the full passphrase, but might get enough to make bruteforcing the rest feasable.
There are many others.
There are a lot of folk on here who don't know a thing about the UK or what a typical student rented house would be like. Advice about A/C is irrelavent.
Anyway. Assuming no structural changes allowed (so you can't touch wall cavities etc) and assuming you don't have UPVC double glazing etc.
1. Draught insulation on all doors and windows. Find every draught and stop it. You can get thses strips in Homebase, Do It All etc. They come in different thicknesses so choose wisely. Be prepared to get dirty cleaning all the spaces in the joints where the spiders live otherwise the strips won't stick.
2. When it's cold, wear more clothes and only heat the rooms you use and keep the doors shut so you don't heat the rooms you're not using.
3. If you want to heat a room quickly (say you're the first one back after being at lectures all day) get a small desk fan and set it blowing across the radiator in the living room. It will cirulate the warm air surprisingly quickly.
4. Cook and eat meals together as a group. This is cheaper, you'll eat better and it's relaxing to have everyone sit down together after they have all been out (hopefully) studying all day . Do the obvious like learn how to skin and quarter a fresh chicken rather than buy expensive chicken pieces (hint: kitchen scissors). You don't need to be a great cook, learn to do one simple meal such as a Chilli Con Carne, expand your repotoir later. We had a complicated looking list (it would be a spreadsheet today) of money spent by each person either for the group or for other individuals so we could work out who owed each other what at the end of the term. It saved any arguments and meant the whole 'cooking for the group' thing did work.
5. Much has been said about computers already. If you can get to a power socket in the library, consider working there. This would obviously require a laptop but you keep warm, have free electricity and hopefully *don't* have a distracting net connection.
6. If you have big windows, consider that platic double glazing stuff you can get. For what ammounts to some double sided tape and a sheet of clear plastic stuck over the window, then shrunk tight with a hair dryer you do get pretty good insulation.
One more thing. University is getting stupidly expensive now in the UK, you are going to get into a lot of debt anyway. But you are not there to get a degree as cheaply as possible. You are there to enjoy yourself, to learn about life and yes; to get a degree. So have some fun along the way and don't sit freezing in a room when being warm isn't going to make much difference to the £20k debt you might well be facing at the end. Which is why I don't suggest not drinking beer. You'll be spending more on beer than on food and possibly utility bills as well.
>> They're in the UK - that'll never be a problem ;)
I wish. My last rented flat must have had close to zero loft insulation. Very cold in winter and very hot in summer. The loft space trapped the heat making it 25 - 30 Centigrade at night, maybe more. It was very inpleasant.
Of course, venting heat was never the correct solution, proper loft insulation would have been.
I think there might be a viable niche market for a 'MP3' CD player... that can read DVDs (and play other codecs). 4.x GB of your tunes per disk, or double if it can read dual layer disks. Then your CD case can carry >160 GB which gets close to "all my CDs; losslessly" for a lot of people.
Couldn't agree with you more.
It really irritates me when people tell me they think board games are boring, when all they mean is that they've only ever played monopoly/clue(do)/game of life etc and that they found those boring.
Try to pick something with maximum impact that requires little planning so it can be a spur of the moment thing.
Hold up a bank
Go carjacking
Take a high powered rifle to the top of a water tower
etc etc, I'm sure you'll think of something
Nothing gets the adrenaline rushing quite like spot of high crime. Plus, the early sunsets (northern hemisphere) make getaways a little easier. The exercise is good for you too.
Just remember, wipe all the prints carefully, establish an alibi ahead of time and leave the iPod at home so you can better hear the sirens.
Good luck!
>The 'reply to list' functionnality is still available, albeit not in the context menu. It is now only available using the 'CTRL-L' keyboard combination.
Now I'm really confused. CTRL + L is forward on my v1.0.7 copy of TBird. Not only that but it _is_ in the context menu.
Reply to all doesn't quite fit the bill here because it sends a reply to the mailing list AND to the person on the list who sent the message I'm replying to. But the person who sent the message I'm replying to is on the list so he therefore gets two copies of my reply.
So I do reply to all but I have to do some editing to the addresses before I can send the message.
I like Evolution, I really do. I miss the 'reply to list' option (even though forums are sadly taking the place of mailing lists and rendering this point mute). But I found that Evolution with built-in Spamassassin from FC4 just wasn't stopping either piece of spam I got each week and it was really starting to annoy me. So I tried out Thunderbird and I'm finding that it does what I need and it's stopping the spam.
YMMV of course.
There is also Hewlett Packard's first product, the HP 200A from back in 1942. Deliberately numbered to make it appear more mature.
Some (most?) of the services want you to send the CDs to them on spindles. I have several CDs that not only don't have track names on but some don't have album names or even band names on. If the cddb is wrong or has a few different choices[1] that are not just spelling variations then how do they make sure your tracks end up being tagged correctly?
[1] This happens more for CD singles but I think I've seen it for regular albums.
Layer 0 - The JFDI's
> How about using tools like bl or ledcontrol for controlling the standard keyboard leds?
On a corporate PC? We both know how likely that is. It tends to be hard enough to get permission to run software other than what is issued on the PC (eg Office + erm, well just Office really), never mind switching away from the corporate desktop OS.
When I worked at HP (the part that became Agilent) we had HP PCs with keyboards that included an email LED (next to the Caps, Scroll and Num lock LEDs). It also had some quicklaunch buttons but they aren't so interesting.
It was really useful to not have to unlock the computer just to check if you had been sent that email yet.
Secret Service affair
Almost.
We need a games-that-are-not-computer-games games section.
Kind of like "news for nerds, stuff for people who know what FLGS means"
or
"news for nerds, stuff for people who don't know how many dice they own"
> Sony will only have an XYZ killer when they abandon Digital Restrictions Management.
I prefer the term "Digital Restrictions by the Monopolies".
It seems more correct to me.
Funny, my 'try before you buy' policy has recently led me to buy CDs from artists I hadn't heard of until recently and certainly wouldn't have purchased CDs from. My CD purchases have risen since getting broadband internet, not fallen.
There's a TV/cinema advert here in the UK that shows several crimes taking place along with slogans such as "You wouldn't steal a handbag!" or "You wouldn't steal a car!".
No, I wouldn't steal a car, nor would I buy one without a test drive.
My idea. Make _all_ recorded music available for free download. Every bit of it. Straight from easily navigable high-bandwidth record company servers. What I try and like, I'll buy on CD.
The catch? Make the downloads low data rate. I can tell if I like a song if I hear it on AM radio in the car. That's mono and comes with engine noises mixed in and the odd bridge induced drop-out. As that is the case I can tell if I like an album from a 72kb/s data rate OGG/MP3/etc file.
Not only that but IIRC 60GHz is an Oxygen absorption line. This means the atmospheric range is really low.
I think there are American military satellites that communicate with each other at 60GHz precisely because the O2 absorption makes ground intercept that much harder.
>not actually deforming the mirror segments
IIRC The mirror segments were deformed during construction. The mirror segments need to be ground to the correct shape (with a pretty tight definition of correct). I belive they were deformed in such a way that the actual shape ground was an easy one to do. When the mirrors were released they sprung back to their original overall shape but with the surface ground to what was needed for the final mirror. Neat way of getting around the problem.
All the music I've 'pirated' has actually led to increased sales.
I once read about band A supporting bands B and C on tour. B and C I already knew about and liked. I downloaded some of A's material and then proceeded to buy more than the record industry was willing to sell to me. IE I got a friend from the US to bring some of their CDs over to the UK when he visited, CDs that you can't get here.
I also bought Dark Angel on DVD after watching a downloaded copy of the first episode. Same effect.