The University of Illinois banned me due to my outspoken views on personal freedoms and censorship. I also had a 1.2 GPA, but I don't think that was the main reason.
Why iCraveTV chose to show up in that PA court I will never know, I sure wouldn't have as it has no jurisdiction
iCraveTV was incorporated in PA by an American citizen. That puts them firmly in the juristiction of the PA courts. If you're going to try and avoid federal laws, do it properly like paradisepoker.com does, in Costa Rica.
As much as we like to criticize big media corporations for thier evil acts, they had every reason to beat some ass on this one. At the end of the football game when the play by play guy rattles off that statement, "This broadcast is property of the NFL and cannot be replayed, rebroadcast, or used in any way without the expressed written consent of the NFL.", this is exactly what he's talking about. Those sports contracts cost BILLIONS. They cost so much because the networks get exclusive rights to those sporting events. Corporate America does plenty of other things for us to get upset about. Let this one go.
Yesterday's episode reeked of sci-fi-by-numbers. Computer programs that refuse to accept commands from thier masters, physical matter disappearing into "computer space", heroes who go in and "defeat the program on its own turf". I thought it had some funny moments and was a good showing of sets and FX, but a damn poor episode. Especially considering how few episodes are left in the series (6? 7?) it was disappointing. Hell, I'm happy when my computer programs run at all. If one started running on its own, I would be happy.
I don't know about wireless data, but I know that here in downtown Indianapolis, don't even try to make a cell phone call between 5pm and 5:30pm. Everyone leaving work tries to make calls on a network with set capacity and it just fills up. Larger cities have moved to a system called microcell. Cells made up of small, inexpensive equipment (sometimes on top of street lights), that don't have nearly the range of large cell towers, but can be deployed in large numbers. So instead of one tower with a range of 5 miles than can handle 10,000 people, you have a shoe box sized system that only serves one square block and can handle 50 people. Overall, you're in much better shape. Also, you then have massive redundancy of overlapping cells. I would imagine that wireless broadband would work the same way, starting with giant centralized systems and moving to a distributed system as more people use it. To respond to the question, I would imagine that you would be sharing bandwidth, but ideally with only a handfull of other people.
I haven't seen any indication that anyone actually has the capability to brute force a 128 bit key in real-time. The NSA doesn't exactly mail out press releases saying "We can now crack 128 bit keys in 0.3 seconds. We rock." I'm no crypto fanatic, but I do find the whole situation interesting, specifically the human side more than the math. My reasons for believing that the NSA can crack just about anything out there are based on two things: money and brains. They have more of both than just about any other department in the government. We sit here and make fun of stupid things our govenment as a whole does, but of the three best programmers I know, all three have worked for the government at some point. Also, the ammount of money that the NSA has at thier disposal is pretty much outside the comprehension of the average person. When you're talking about computers, money buys you the biggest toys and the biggest toys do the coolest stuff.
A violated key could be tracked down and revoked over a satellite broadcast network, for example My friends that have cracked DSS systems just don't plug the unit into the phone jack. The system works perfectly (every pay per view channel 24/7) but they stay off RCA's radar.
Would a satellite hookup be required for the operation of this Intel system or is it just a way of them keeping tabs on you? It seems like a lot of cost and trouble if it adds nothing for the consumer.
Besides all that, I don't see any real market for this stuff outside of the DOD or DOE. You can pick out the target market because they have aluminium foil around their heads to keep out the alien mind control.
Shhhh...do you want the movie distributor thugs to knock at your door late at night? Did you ever wonder why movie theaters make no attempt to prevent you from sneaking into the theater or to make you leave after watching one movie? There's a theater here in Indianapolis that has a side hallway going from the main lobby into the "theater" hallway, completely bypassing the ticket taker. Why? because 15 year old kids show up by the hundreds with $10 to their name, knowing that they can sneak in, and are happy to spend 6 bucks on candy.
I think that all three Parker/Stone movies are funnier than a majority of the recent South Park episodes. If you havn't seen them, they're Orgazmo, BASEketball, and Cannibal: The Musical. If anyone likes South Park at all and hasn't seen Orgazmo, go rent it immediately.
I really hope you copied and pasted this off USENET and didn't write it special for the occasion. I saw somebody copy/paste a Visual Basic help file earlier today, but this was way funnier. I say, If you're going to troll, troll huge.
How could a red blooded American male pass up that opportunity. That's like making a fart noise with your armpit, but instead of just a 30 person class, you get the western world as your audience. It wasn't a premeditated, mean spirited thing, the guy saw a chance, and was as suprised as anyone when it let him change his nick. I thought he did a pretty good job under the circumstances. The Howard Stern fan that got a phone call into a Q&A with Prince Charles asked something like "I heard you put your head up a bear's ass". This guy didn't say anything "dirty". He just poked fun at the idea that our President porn surfs and questioned Wolf Blitzer about his feelings on the subject. No harm, no foul. If CNN or the US gov goes after this guy, I will be very disappointed.
Did he even see it? I'm sure someone was reading the questions to him. Nobody can look cool while reading. Think of how stupid local newscasters look when they're obviously reading the teleprompter. They aparently ignored the event while it was going on, but I'll bet that Clinton laughed his butt off when he found out.
Do they claim copyright on all original material stored on those machines?
I doubt that Ford is going to bother copyrighting brownie recipies and vacation pictures taken from employee computers. If anyone's going to cure cancer, it probably won't be done on a home PC of a Ford employee.
I think we all need to be very excited about the news. *We* all have computers, but millions of people don't. Every day, those people are getting further and further behind. This kind of program will go a long way towards pulling those people into the 21st century. Are there going to be some restrictions? Sure. But I can't think of any restrictions that will make it worse than not having a computer at all.
I didn't catch a price in the article. They make references to it being unreasonably high but no numbers. The standard progression in computers, and electronics in general, are that things debut at high prices to hit people that *have* to have something new and don't mind paying big bucks (think HDTV). From there, as newer technology hits the market, the people who have to have the newest thing are looking elsewhere and you have to lower prices to hit a more mainstream market.
In computers, your yields are going to rise as you learn to make your product more efficiently and with higher quality. Since you're throwing out fewer units, you don't have to pass as much of that cost on to the consumer. From what I understand, yields on LCD screens are terrible and don't get much better over time. Now triple the number of things that can go wrong and see what the yield looks like. It's a cool product and I'm sure we're all salivating, but I doubt that it will be a mainstream consumer item for *years*. By that time, we may not even be using LCD displays.
And if the numbers in the article are correct, it will execute 32 bit code at about the speed of a 500 MHz Celeron. Considering that the Cellys cost about $100, and I can't believe an Itanium will run less than 2 grand in the near future, that's quite a speed hit. The article touches on the fact that when comparing an Itanium and a 4 way Athlon that is just as fast, costs the same, and can also run 32 but instructions, it's not a hard choice.
I don't know if you got all the way through the article (it's long but worth it), but the author explains why Crusoe will probably never compete in the same arena as Intel and AMD. He lists as many details as he can without having a Crusoe of his own to test.
Do I think Transmeta can build a profitable company supplying chips for long battery life notebook computer and small PDA/ Webpad products? Absolutely. But it comes down to a business equation, not a technical one. The margins on Xeon class high end workstation/ small server CPUs are amazing. The margins on CPUs for a web pad with a retail price of $500 are nice, but nothing spectacular.
I was looking forward to the Transmeta press conference as much as anyone. The fact that they didn't have any real benchmarks bothered me a lot. I think that many Slashdot folks are letting their love of a certain Finn cloud their judgement about Transmeta.
The minute that any civil liberty is taken away because it is unpopular, we're all screwed. Once we start, there's no line to make us stop. I'm hardly the first person to say this, but I felt the need to jump in here. It would be easy to pass a law putting blocks on neo-Nazi propganda because 99.9% of the population despises it. From there, what's the difference in blocking Mormon literature because 98% of the population doesn't agree with it?
Taking up the anti-porn filtering side of the debate is similar to taking up the anti-war on drugs debate. The pro-filtering/ pro-war on drugs people are trying to fight against a "vice", and don't seem to grasp that you're not pro-vice, you just oppose their way of fighting it. A perfect example is how after New Mexico's governor Gary Johnson critisized federal drug policy, the drug czar Barry McCaffrey began referring to him as "Puff Daddy".
Before this post swerves into a completely anti-war on drugs rant, I'll quit. I do think that both issues have quite a bit in common.
Does Romero actually code? I thought he did more of the design end of things. Romero thinks he's a rock star. Carmack has the kind of ego that comes with knowing that you do something better than almost anyone else on the planet. Romero left id to start Ion Storm a while ago. So far, Ion Storm has done nothing noteworthy that I know of.
My only guess is to make a chain of elipses with overlapping focal points. A change at one end focal point would be miraged to the opposite focal point of that elipse, which is where another cobalt atom is sitting at the focal point of another elipse, which then cascades down the chain. To trash my own theory, here's a quote from the article, "The intensity of the mirage is about one-third of the intensity around the cobalt atom." A chain of just a few elipse "links" would have an enormous power loss. The theoretical response is "If you could form the elipses better, you could get a 99.9% intensity mirage". Improving from 33% to 99.9% efficiency would be impressive, but not unheard of.
Microsoft gets called many things around here, but stupid is rarely one of them. They know full well that 30 seconds after they release this media player, people will start picking it apart. It may end up being crappy, but they just can't afford to do anything underhanded. That PR department has enough on its hands right now.
Are they going to call this program "Windows Media Player for Linux"? That's funny as hell.
Slashdot Mirror
The University of Illinois banned me due to my outspoken views on personal freedoms and censorship. I also had a 1.2 GPA, but I don't think that was the main reason.
-B
Why iCraveTV chose to show up in that PA court I will never know, I sure wouldn't have as it has no jurisdiction
iCraveTV was incorporated in PA by an American citizen. That puts them firmly in the juristiction of the PA courts. If you're going to try and avoid federal laws, do it properly like paradisepoker.com does, in Costa Rica.
-B
As much as we like to criticize big media corporations for thier evil acts, they had every reason to beat some ass on this one. At the end of the football game when the play by play guy rattles off that statement, "This broadcast is property of the NFL and cannot be replayed, rebroadcast, or used in any way without the expressed written consent of the NFL.", this is exactly what he's talking about. Those sports contracts cost BILLIONS. They cost so much because the networks get exclusive rights to those sporting events. Corporate America does plenty of other things for us to get upset about. Let this one go.
-B
Yesterday's episode reeked of sci-fi-by-numbers. Computer programs that refuse to accept commands from thier masters, physical matter disappearing into "computer space", heroes who go in and "defeat the program on its own turf". I thought it had some funny moments and was a good showing of sets and FX, but a damn poor episode. Especially considering how few episodes are left in the series (6? 7?) it was disappointing. Hell, I'm happy when my computer programs run at all. If one started running on its own, I would be happy.
-B
I don't know about wireless data, but I know that here in downtown Indianapolis, don't even try to make a cell phone call between 5pm and 5:30pm. Everyone leaving work tries to make calls on a network with set capacity and it just fills up. Larger cities have moved to a system called microcell. Cells made up of small, inexpensive equipment (sometimes on top of street lights), that don't have nearly the range of large cell towers, but can be deployed in large numbers. So instead of one tower with a range of 5 miles than can handle 10,000 people, you have a shoe box sized system that only serves one square block and can handle 50 people. Overall, you're in much better shape. Also, you then have massive redundancy of overlapping cells. I would imagine that wireless broadband would work the same way, starting with giant centralized systems and moving to a distributed system as more people use it. To respond to the question, I would imagine that you would be sharing bandwidth, but ideally with only a handfull of other people.
-B
I haven't seen any indication that anyone actually has the capability to brute force a 128 bit key in real-time.
The NSA doesn't exactly mail out press releases saying "We can now crack 128 bit keys in 0.3 seconds. We rock."
I'm no crypto fanatic, but I do find the whole situation interesting, specifically the human side more than the math. My reasons for believing that the NSA can crack just about anything out there are based on two things: money and brains. They have more of both than just about any other department in the government. We sit here and make fun of stupid things our govenment as a whole does, but of the three best programmers I know, all three have worked for the government at some point. Also, the ammount of money that the NSA has at thier disposal is pretty much outside the comprehension of the average person. When you're talking about computers, money buys you the biggest toys and the biggest toys do the coolest stuff.
-B
When the sheep start giggling at you, you've got problems.
-ODB
My friends that have cracked DSS systems just don't plug the unit into the phone jack. The system works perfectly (every pay per view channel 24/7) but they stay off RCA's radar.
Would a satellite hookup be required for the operation of this Intel system or is it just a way of them keeping tabs on you? It seems like a lot of cost and trouble if it adds nothing for the consumer.
Besides all that, I don't see any real market for this stuff outside of the DOD or DOE. You can pick out the target market because they have aluminium foil around their heads to keep out the alien mind control.
-B
Shhhh...do you want the movie distributor thugs to knock at your door late at night? Did you ever wonder why movie theaters make no attempt to prevent you from sneaking into the theater or to make you leave after watching one movie? There's a theater here in Indianapolis that has a side hallway going from the main lobby into the "theater" hallway, completely bypassing the ticket taker. Why? because 15 year old kids show up by the hundreds with $10 to their name, knowing that they can sneak in, and are happy to spend 6 bucks on candy.
-B
I think that all three Parker/Stone movies are funnier than a majority of the recent South Park episodes. If you havn't seen them, they're Orgazmo, BASEketball, and Cannibal: The Musical. If anyone likes South Park at all and hasn't seen Orgazmo, go rent it immediately.
-B
I really hope you copied and pasted this off USENET and didn't write it special for the occasion. I saw somebody copy/paste a Visual Basic help file earlier today, but this was way funnier. I say, If you're going to troll, troll huge.
-ODB Jr.
Mudge is meeting with the President of the United States next week? What's on your schedule?
-B
you spelled loser wrong, even phonetically.
How could a red blooded American male pass up that opportunity. That's like making a fart noise with your armpit, but instead of just a 30 person class, you get the western world as your audience. It wasn't a premeditated, mean spirited thing, the guy saw a chance, and was as suprised as anyone when it let him change his nick. I thought he did a pretty good job under the circumstances. The Howard Stern fan that got a phone call into a Q&A with Prince Charles asked something like "I heard you put your head up a bear's ass". This guy didn't say anything "dirty". He just poked fun at the idea that our President porn surfs and questioned Wolf Blitzer about his feelings on the subject. No harm, no foul. If CNN or the US gov goes after this guy, I will be very disappointed.
-B
Did he even see it? I'm sure someone was reading the questions to him. Nobody can look cool while reading. Think of how stupid local newscasters look when they're obviously reading the teleprompter. They aparently ignored the event while it was going on, but I'll bet that Clinton laughed his butt off when he found out.
-B
Run Lola Run. Watch it in German if you're in the mood to read, watch it dubbed if you're feeling lazy. And Rounders, because it's awesome.
-ODB Jr.
Do they claim copyright on all original material stored on those machines?
I doubt that Ford is going to bother copyrighting brownie recipies and vacation pictures taken from employee computers. If anyone's going to cure cancer, it probably won't be done on a home PC of a Ford employee.
I think we all need to be very excited about the news. *We* all have computers, but millions of people don't. Every day, those people are getting further and further behind. This kind of program will go a long way towards pulling those people into the 21st century. Are there going to be some restrictions? Sure. But I can't think of any restrictions that will make it worse than not having a computer at all.
-B
I didn't catch a price in the article. They make references to it being unreasonably high but no numbers. The standard progression in computers, and electronics in general, are that things debut at high prices to hit people that *have* to have something new and don't mind paying big bucks (think HDTV). From there, as newer technology hits the market, the people who have to have the newest thing are looking elsewhere and you have to lower prices to hit a more mainstream market.
In computers, your yields are going to rise as you learn to make your product more efficiently and with higher quality. Since you're throwing out fewer units, you don't have to pass as much of that cost on to the consumer. From what I understand, yields on LCD screens are terrible and don't get much better over time. Now triple the number of things that can go wrong and see what the yield looks like. It's a cool product and I'm sure we're all salivating, but I doubt that it will be a mainstream consumer item for *years*. By that time, we may not even be using LCD displays.
-B @ 800X600
And if the numbers in the article are correct, it will execute 32 bit code at about the speed of a 500 MHz Celeron. Considering that the Cellys cost about $100, and I can't believe an Itanium will run less than 2 grand in the near future, that's quite a speed hit. The article touches on the fact that when comparing an Itanium and a 4 way Athlon that is just as fast, costs the same, and can also run 32 but instructions, it's not a hard choice.
-B
I don't know if you got all the way through the article (it's long but worth it), but the author explains why Crusoe will probably never compete in the same arena as Intel and AMD. He lists as many details as he can without having a Crusoe of his own to test.
Do I think Transmeta can build a profitable company supplying chips for long battery life notebook computer and small PDA/ Webpad products? Absolutely. But it comes down to a business equation, not a technical one. The margins on Xeon class high end workstation/ small server CPUs are amazing. The margins on CPUs for a web pad with a retail price of $500 are nice, but nothing spectacular.
I was looking forward to the Transmeta press conference as much as anyone. The fact that they didn't have any real benchmarks bothered me a lot. I think that many Slashdot folks are letting their love of a certain Finn cloud their judgement about Transmeta.
-B
The minute that any civil liberty is taken away because it is unpopular, we're all screwed. Once we start, there's no line to make us stop. I'm hardly the first person to say this, but I felt the need to jump in here.
It would be easy to pass a law putting blocks on neo-Nazi propganda because 99.9% of the population despises it. From there, what's the difference in blocking Mormon literature because 98% of the population doesn't agree with it?
Taking up the anti-porn filtering side of the debate is similar to taking up the anti-war on drugs debate. The pro-filtering/ pro-war on drugs people are trying to fight against a "vice", and don't seem to grasp that you're not pro-vice, you just oppose their way of fighting it. A perfect example is how after New Mexico's governor Gary Johnson critisized federal drug policy, the drug czar Barry McCaffrey began referring to him as "Puff Daddy".
Before this post swerves into a completely anti-war on drugs rant, I'll quit. I do think that both issues have quite a bit in common.
-B
Does Romero actually code? I thought he did more of the design end of things. Romero thinks he's a rock star. Carmack has the kind of ego that comes with knowing that you do something better than almost anyone else on the planet. Romero left id to start Ion Storm a while ago. So far, Ion Storm has done nothing noteworthy that I know of.
-B
My only guess is to make a chain of elipses with overlapping focal points. A change at one end focal point would be miraged to the opposite focal point of that elipse, which is where another cobalt atom is sitting at the focal point of another elipse, which then cascades down the chain. To trash my own theory, here's a quote from the article, "The intensity of the mirage is about one-third of the intensity around the cobalt atom." A chain of just a few elipse "links" would have an enormous power loss. The theoretical response is "If you could form the elipses better, you could get a 99.9% intensity mirage". Improving from 33% to 99.9% efficiency would be impressive, but not unheard of.
Disclaimer: I got a C+ in physics
-B
Linus pronounces it wrong because he's foriegn. He can't speak English good like we do.
-B
My girlfriend has borrowed my copy of Car Wash Angels. But she's atypical.
-ODB
Microsoft gets called many things around here, but stupid is rarely one of them. They know full well that 30 seconds after they release this media player, people will start picking it apart. It may end up being crappy, but they just can't afford to do anything underhanded. That PR department has enough on its hands right now.
Are they going to call this program "Windows Media Player for Linux"? That's funny as hell.
-B