Suppose I fly into your town and take a ten mile taxi ride from the airport into downtown wherever, but instead of paying the taxi driver, I jump out and run for it when we arrive. I have deprived him of no physical property, nor do I possess anything of his...Make sure you exclude any mention of potential lost revenue in your explanation, and be sure to detail exactly how something of his has had its value diminished.
Invalid comparison. You've taken up his time, his gasoline, and exacted wear upon his vehicle without providing compensation. Decoding extant satellite signals deprives DTV of nothing. Try again.
Especially if it's a quadra glitch loader with multi level cross glitch technology.....heh. Some of you know what I mean...=)
WE HAVE THE ONLY PROVEN P4 ECM PROOF BOOTLOADER 3M GLITCHER LOADER!!! THIS IS NOT A SCAM! WE ARE THE ONLY GROUP WITH A WORKING PPV WIPER! GUARANTEED SATISFACTION! SEND US A BLANK POSTAL MONEY ORDER FOR $250 AND ENJOY GUARANTEED ECM-FREE TV!
heh
And when you walk past a corporate building, the 802.11b wireless is beaming into your skull as well. Oh wait, your MOTHERFUCKING skull. Sorry. That doesn't mean you are allowed to crack the WEP key and associate to the access point. The situation is no different with cable descramblers. It's coming over the coax into your GODDAMN house.
His central point was about diminished value. Cracking the WEP key and using that corporate network diminishes capacity on that network. Additional unpaid-for descrambling devices on a coax cable network diminishes signal strength. Placing a dish on the roof to receive a signal that is there regardless of the presence of the dish diminishes absolutely nothing. His argument is that it doesn't fit the common sense definition of "theft". Indeed laws have been passed to define this act that deprives no one of property* as "theft", but in the rational world this is no more "theft of service" than "intellectual property" is property.
* before anyone tries to argue the point, "lost potential revenue" is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a loss of "property".
Also if I were going to do access control for anything, smart card technology would be the first place I'd look. It is FAR more secure than something like magnetic stripe and allegedly more reliable. If I had a bussiness that needed key-type access restrictions to rooms or computers or the like, I'd probably try and do it with smartcards.
SmartCards are overkill for straight access control. Unless you're controlling access to encrypted data by keeping a very large key on the card itself, all you need is a unique identifier. Most card-based access control is done with prox cards nowadays. The days of having to stick a card in a slot or swipe one through a reader to open doors are over. The advantages of prox cards are numerous: You can mount the reader at [pocket|purse] level by the door so one doesn't even need to get the card out of one's wallet to enter. You can hide the reader behind a stucco or wood surface of an exterior wall redering it nearly impervious to vandalism. Prox cards aren't susceptible to physical deterioration of the electrical contacts or exposed magnetic stripe.
Actualy, when push comes to shove, DirecTV's content protection scheme is weaker, which is one of the reasons they have such a problem with piracy.
DirecTV doesn't have a problem with piracy right now. They shut down the entire P3 series of cards (the hackable ones) and there is no known hack for the P4 or higher cards. Currently there are hacks for Dish.
I suspect part of the reason DirecTV has softened on this is that the particular series of access cards these programmers were designed to hack are no longer functional. In mid-april DirecTV switched from the older encryption stream decoded by the (hackable) P3 cards to the new encryption only decodable by the P4 or higher series. They figured that few enough legit customers were still running on old P3 cards (they'd been sending P4's to all subscribers with P3's for months) that they could safely shut down the old cards entirely. So DirecTV promising not to be so heavy-handed in the future is a moot point. Anyone buying a smartcard programmer to hack DirecTV now is an idiot throwing their money away.
Much of what I have doesn't need a backup - is that not that case with most people?
That is usualy true with individuals, yes. Commercial enterprises, however, are a different sort of situation. I have no need to back up my porn MPEG collection, so there's about 1.5 terrabytes I don't worry about. A cinematic special effects house, well, they might very well have 1.5TB of MPG video to back up every few days. I have a couple hundred megs of source code, but the incremental changes are negligible and I can back them up by burning a CD week or so. MicroSoft, on the other hand, probably has a couple hundred megs of changes to their source code library every week or so, so they'd want more than my "occasional CD" method. I download my banking and investment info to my laptop and back it up on my server every few weeks and call that good enough. Mellon Global Investments, from whom I get my investment info, probably has a more rigorous backup protocol.
It's all about need. You and I are all the way at one end of the spectrum, so our backup needs are hardly representative.
It seems more likely to be useful on Bradleys and the like, but don't the army hate those anyway?
No, the press hated the Bradley. They tried to make it look like a boondoggle by comparing its cost to older, less advanced vehicles, and comparing its armor to that of a tank, which is a spurious comparison. They also liked to point out that it carried fewer men than the M113 it replaced, which is a totally irrelevant observation. This was all twenty years ago, though. The Bradley has proven itself in combat in two wars since then.
As another poster noted, they'd only record the CODIS score of one's DNA, which is essentially a hash. That being the case, It's probably not as big a deal as people are making it out to be.
What idiot rated the above "redundant"? It's a short, simple answer to the question. The other poster is in a different thread on the second page, not this thread. It's only redundant if, upon reading the comment, one says something like "I just read a comment two spots up that says the same thing". Here's a link to the FBI's page about the COmbined DNA Index System for whatever mod thinks a post is redundant if it doesn't provide info that's not replicated somewhere in the huge list of posts under the story in question.
there is a test for self-awareness. i saw it in a movie called Dune. the scene with the gomjibar and the pain box. in the movie tho i think the test was used to see if you were human vs animal. apparently animals react to instinct and withdraw. but humans that have the ability to choose hot to respond with any given stimulus can choose to keep their hand in the pain box even while their bodies are signalling a withdrawal.
this isnt a test of one's pain tolerance, simply a test of the human ability to choose how to respond in a given situation. the self-awareness test will likely be a derivation of this test.
That's not a human vs. animal test. It's pretty much a oral instruction comprehension test. No human would keep his hand in a "pain box" unless he knew there was a reason to tough it out. If you stuck your hand in a mailbox in which there was concealed a "pain box", you'd jerk your hand out pretty fast. If one could convince a dog that it'd be worth ten pounds of steak to hold his paw in a "pain box" for 20 seconds, you better believe he'd do it.
Best not to get one's "scientific" tests from works of fiction. Fiction writers are liars. You can't really trust anything they say to be true.
But would it be possible to store a hash of a person's DNA?
As another poster noted, they'd only record the CODIS score of one's DNA, which is essentially a hash. That being the case, It's probably not as big a deal as people are making it out to be.
is if the RIAA created a new digital radio that had a CDR in it, and the user could select "download & rip" for 1$ like in iTunes and the radio would compress the song into FLAC, ogg, or mp3, and burn it to the next track.
No, you see, that would be innovation. The RIAA isn't a company that comes out with products, it's an association of old-school record companies trying to protect their old-school business model.
COMDEX puts magnetic stirps on the back of your badge so that if you want info from a vendor, you just swipe your card.
...and then the vendor cross-references the number on your [mag stripe/bar code] with the COMDEX attendee registration database to get your information. The OP was wondering why we can't do that with business cards. The short answer is that there's not a lot of room in a [bar code/mag stripe] for much information. They usually carry 24 to 48 bits-- enough for a unique number, but not much else. No way to pass name, contact info, etc. without a central business card database.
Saying Bill's a nutcase for this and that it somehow invalidates his opinion on the risks of nanotech is as wrong as...
Oh, I don't think it invalidates his opinion. I just think it let's you know where he's coming from. Remember, Bill Joy brought up the movie selection method himself as an example of properly applied risk management. I think all hackers are a little bit nuts. The soda story reminds me of one of my father's coworkers, an engineer. He had a hot water circulating pump in his house. In order to not pay for keeping the water in the pipes hot at night while he was sleeping, he had a timer put in. This wasn't good enough though. What if he was out of town? Or got up at noon one day? The water didn't need to be circulated unless he was actually in the house to use it! So he had an electrician wire up the pump to a wall switch next to his sink. He turns it on in the morning and off at night. The bizarre part is, he probably paid about $500 in parts and labor to have that switch installed in order to save what likely amounts to no more than 20 or 30 cents a month worth of natural gas. This is the "far side" of the hacker nature, where it just starts looking like run-of-the-mill crazy. I'm not saying Bill Joy's movie selection scheme is quite that bad, but it sure looks to me like it's in the same neighborhood.
However, an accent-translation system ought to be possible and relatively cheap.
The problem with such a system is not in getting the system to recognize what the Indian dude is saying, but in getting it to synthesize a voice that doesn't sound like a machine. The human brain is very good at gauging subtle nuances of speech; nuances that just don't come out properly via synthesis. People hate having to talk to machines more than they hate having to talk to foreigners.
Even though most paintball games were broken up into "teams", your average paintballer was a lone wolf type who did not play well with others.
This is why I eventually quit playing, myself. I could never find enough people with the discipline to stick to basic fire and maneuver tactics. They'd get up to "leapfrog" while I was laying down covering fire, and just keep on going!
He was elected as a moderate, and has governed, largely, from the far right.
Only in your imagination.
It's always struck me as odd that people "on the left" in the US tend to regard anyone more conservative than Vladimir Lenin as "far right". My girlfriend is a slightly bitter former communist who considers the Los Angeles Times, perpetual parrot of the Democratic Party line that it is, to be a right wing rag! Fortunately, neither of us think voting is even worth the effort so we get along nicely.
Being xml, couldn't the reader just ignore the parts it isn't designed to use?
If you're implementing your own parser, sure. The inconsistency gets problematic when you're trying to use software written by someone else to connect to software written by a third person.
Why did atom even come into existance? Was not RSS already established, or is there some kind of deficiancy in RSS that i'm missing here?
I think the deficiency with RSS was lack of a consistent implementation. There were too many minor variations within the assorted RSS instances to guarantee compatibility from one to another. Atom had the advantage of being self-consistency.
Why can't the machines extract the electrochemical charges that run through our bodies?
Same reason why our electrical grid isn't supplemented by lightning rods. It's easier to deal with steady, controlled power than huge unpredictable jolts at irregular intervals.
But politicians come and go. The military is a big, self perpetuating bureaucracy and it has ways to get what it wants over time.
Hate to say it, but the government in general which is made up of those politicians (and their staff) is a larger self-perpetuating bureaucracy than the military could ever hope to be. Politicians don't just serve for a term or two then go home. They stay there FOREVER. Even people who lose elections don't go away-- they become lobbyists.
The full paragraph I quoted from illuminates this:
"Joy is a film buff, and he recently outfitted his basement with a spectacular home entertainment system. He also happens to be a bibliophile, so he bought three handbooks -- ''Halliwell's Film Guide,'' Pauline Kael's ''5001 Nights at the Movies'' and the ''Time Out Film Guide'' -- to compare reviews. ''I was going through the books and found out there are only about 2,000 movies in history in which there's critical consensus that they're really good,'' he told me. ''So I bought 600 of them.'' No bad movies, fewer possible bad outcomes."
The "critical consensus" consists of reviews from those three books all agreeing thast the movie is worth seeing. I think the weak point of this method is that you have to trust the opinions of film dorks. What if you get three guys who all happen to think Lars von Trier is a directorial genius?
True for the soldiers, but they still need cooks and janitors:) Take away the psycho's guns and give them a potato.
The army doesn't work that way. Everyone is trained to be a soldier to some minimum degree (if you're in the Finance Corps, that tends to be a very minimum degree). Besides, do you really think a psycho would be a good cook? A good janitor? Better to send the psychos home to their mommies so they can play paintball and counterstrike and tell their friends that the army sent them home to be "civilian special forces" and do secret missions against terrorists occasionally on weekends*. Besides, there is no job of "janitor" in the army-- everyone is a janitor in the army (at least in the enlisted ranks).
* True story. Well, the story itself isn't true, but I definitely heard a jackass paintball guy tell it. That one went in my file of "chairborne warrior" stories, along with the one from the guy who claimed to have been a Tank Commander, a Sniper, and an Airborne Infantryman all within the same 3-year enlistment.
Bill Joy, while clearly a genius, is (like any good genius) a nutcase. Seriously, the man is paranoid! He's a compulsive risk-mitigator:
"I was going through the books and found out there are only about 2,000 movies in history in which there's critical consensus that they're really good," he [Bill Joy] told me. "So I bought 600 of them." No bad movies, fewer possible bad outcomes.
This told to the reporter during the interview about nanotech risk-mitigation. Sure, it's a perfectly rational way to choose your movie library, but it's almost too rational. Most people don't consider watching a bad movie an outcome to be avoided at all costs. Mainstream critical consensus is a very conservative method of choosing movies. I've watched a lot of bad movies, but I've found a few that I really liked that were panned by critics. Is Mr. Joy so risk-averse that he needs his movies to be guaranteed satisfactory?
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Invalid comparison. You've taken up his time, his gasoline, and exacted wear upon his vehicle without providing compensation. Decoding extant satellite signals deprives DTV of nothing. Try again.
Especially if it's a quadra glitch loader with multi level cross glitch technology.....heh. Some of you know what I mean...=) WE HAVE THE ONLY PROVEN P4 ECM PROOF BOOTLOADER 3M GLITCHER LOADER!!! THIS IS NOT A SCAM! WE ARE THE ONLY GROUP WITH A WORKING PPV WIPER! GUARANTEED SATISFACTION! SEND US A BLANK POSTAL MONEY ORDER FOR $250 AND ENJOY GUARANTEED ECM-FREE TV! heh
You know of a P4 hack? Please share this, as nobody else in the DTV "testing" scene seems to know about it yet!
His central point was about diminished value. Cracking the WEP key and using that corporate network diminishes capacity on that network. Additional unpaid-for descrambling devices on a coax cable network diminishes signal strength. Placing a dish on the roof to receive a signal that is there regardless of the presence of the dish diminishes absolutely nothing. His argument is that it doesn't fit the common sense definition of "theft". Indeed laws have been passed to define this act that deprives no one of property* as "theft", but in the rational world this is no more "theft of service" than "intellectual property" is property.
* before anyone tries to argue the point, "lost potential revenue" is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a loss of "property".
SmartCards are overkill for straight access control. Unless you're controlling access to encrypted data by keeping a very large key on the card itself, all you need is a unique identifier. Most card-based access control is done with prox cards nowadays. The days of having to stick a card in a slot or swipe one through a reader to open doors are over. The advantages of prox cards are numerous: You can mount the reader at [pocket|purse] level by the door so one doesn't even need to get the card out of one's wallet to enter. You can hide the reader behind a stucco or wood surface of an exterior wall redering it nearly impervious to vandalism. Prox cards aren't susceptible to physical deterioration of the electrical contacts or exposed magnetic stripe.
DirecTV doesn't have a problem with piracy right now. They shut down the entire P3 series of cards (the hackable ones) and there is no known hack for the P4 or higher cards. Currently there are hacks for Dish.
I suspect part of the reason DirecTV has softened on this is that the particular series of access cards these programmers were designed to hack are no longer functional. In mid-april DirecTV switched from the older encryption stream decoded by the (hackable) P3 cards to the new encryption only decodable by the P4 or higher series. They figured that few enough legit customers were still running on old P3 cards (they'd been sending P4's to all subscribers with P3's for months) that they could safely shut down the old cards entirely. So DirecTV promising not to be so heavy-handed in the future is a moot point. Anyone buying a smartcard programmer to hack DirecTV now is an idiot throwing their money away.
That is usualy true with individuals, yes. Commercial enterprises, however, are a different sort of situation. I have no need to back up my porn MPEG collection, so there's about 1.5 terrabytes I don't worry about. A cinematic special effects house, well, they might very well have 1.5TB of MPG video to back up every few days. I have a couple hundred megs of source code, but the incremental changes are negligible and I can back them up by burning a CD week or so. MicroSoft, on the other hand, probably has a couple hundred megs of changes to their source code library every week or so, so they'd want more than my "occasional CD" method. I download my banking and investment info to my laptop and back it up on my server every few weeks and call that good enough. Mellon Global Investments, from whom I get my investment info, probably has a more rigorous backup protocol.
It's all about need. You and I are all the way at one end of the spectrum, so our backup needs are hardly representative.
No, the press hated the Bradley. They tried to make it look like a boondoggle by comparing its cost to older, less advanced vehicles, and comparing its armor to that of a tank, which is a spurious comparison. They also liked to point out that it carried fewer men than the M113 it replaced, which is a totally irrelevant observation. This was all twenty years ago, though. The Bradley has proven itself in combat in two wars since then.
What idiot rated the above "redundant"? It's a short, simple answer to the question. The other poster is in a different thread on the second page, not this thread. It's only redundant if, upon reading the comment, one says something like "I just read a comment two spots up that says the same thing". Here's a link to the FBI's page about the COmbined DNA Index System for whatever mod thinks a post is redundant if it doesn't provide info that's not replicated somewhere in the huge list of posts under the story in question.
Now I'll probably get modded "flamebait"...
That's not a human vs. animal test. It's pretty much a oral instruction comprehension test. No human would keep his hand in a "pain box" unless he knew there was a reason to tough it out. If you stuck your hand in a mailbox in which there was concealed a "pain box", you'd jerk your hand out pretty fast. If one could convince a dog that it'd be worth ten pounds of steak to hold his paw in a "pain box" for 20 seconds, you better believe he'd do it.
Best not to get one's "scientific" tests from works of fiction. Fiction writers are liars. You can't really trust anything they say to be true.
As another poster noted, they'd only record the CODIS score of one's DNA, which is essentially a hash. That being the case, It's probably not as big a deal as people are making it out to be.
No, you see, that would be innovation. The RIAA isn't a company that comes out with products, it's an association of old-school record companies trying to protect their old-school business model.
Oh, I don't think it invalidates his opinion. I just think it let's you know where he's coming from. Remember, Bill Joy brought up the movie selection method himself as an example of properly applied risk management. I think all hackers are a little bit nuts. The soda story reminds me of one of my father's coworkers, an engineer. He had a hot water circulating pump in his house. In order to not pay for keeping the water in the pipes hot at night while he was sleeping, he had a timer put in. This wasn't good enough though. What if he was out of town? Or got up at noon one day? The water didn't need to be circulated unless he was actually in the house to use it! So he had an electrician wire up the pump to a wall switch next to his sink. He turns it on in the morning and off at night. The bizarre part is, he probably paid about $500 in parts and labor to have that switch installed in order to save what likely amounts to no more than 20 or 30 cents a month worth of natural gas. This is the "far side" of the hacker nature, where it just starts looking like run-of-the-mill crazy. I'm not saying Bill Joy's movie selection scheme is quite that bad, but it sure looks to me like it's in the same neighborhood.
The problem with such a system is not in getting the system to recognize what the Indian dude is saying, but in getting it to synthesize a voice that doesn't sound like a machine. The human brain is very good at gauging subtle nuances of speech; nuances that just don't come out properly via synthesis. People hate having to talk to machines more than they hate having to talk to foreigners.
This is why I eventually quit playing, myself. I could never find enough people with the discipline to stick to basic fire and maneuver tactics. They'd get up to "leapfrog" while I was laying down covering fire, and just keep on going!
It's always struck me as odd that people "on the left" in the US tend to regard anyone more conservative than Vladimir Lenin as "far right". My girlfriend is a slightly bitter former communist who considers the Los Angeles Times, perpetual parrot of the Democratic Party line that it is, to be a right wing rag! Fortunately, neither of us think voting is even worth the effort so we get along nicely.
If you're implementing your own parser, sure. The inconsistency gets problematic when you're trying to use software written by someone else to connect to software written by a third person.
I think the deficiency with RSS was lack of a consistent implementation. There were too many minor variations within the assorted RSS instances to guarantee compatibility from one to another. Atom had the advantage of being self-consistency.
Same reason why our electrical grid isn't supplemented by lightning rods. It's easier to deal with steady, controlled power than huge unpredictable jolts at irregular intervals.
Hate to say it, but the government in general which is made up of those politicians (and their staff) is a larger self-perpetuating bureaucracy than the military could ever hope to be. Politicians don't just serve for a term or two then go home. They stay there FOREVER. Even people who lose elections don't go away-- they become lobbyists.
"Joy is a film buff, and he recently outfitted his basement with a spectacular home entertainment system. He also happens to be a bibliophile, so he bought three handbooks -- ''Halliwell's Film Guide,'' Pauline Kael's ''5001 Nights at the Movies'' and the ''Time Out Film Guide'' -- to compare reviews. ''I was going through the books and found out there are only about 2,000 movies in history in which there's critical consensus that they're really good,'' he told me. ''So I bought 600 of them.'' No bad movies, fewer possible bad outcomes."
The "critical consensus" consists of reviews from those three books all agreeing thast the movie is worth seeing. I think the weak point of this method is that you have to trust the opinions of film dorks. What if you get three guys who all happen to think Lars von Trier is a directorial genius?
The army doesn't work that way. Everyone is trained to be a soldier to some minimum degree (if you're in the Finance Corps, that tends to be a very minimum degree). Besides, do you really think a psycho would be a good cook? A good janitor? Better to send the psychos home to their mommies so they can play paintball and counterstrike and tell their friends that the army sent them home to be "civilian special forces" and do secret missions against terrorists occasionally on weekends*. Besides, there is no job of "janitor" in the army-- everyone is a janitor in the army (at least in the enlisted ranks).
* True story. Well, the story itself isn't true, but I definitely heard a jackass paintball guy tell it. That one went in my file of "chairborne warrior" stories, along with the one from the guy who claimed to have been a Tank Commander, a Sniper, and an Airborne Infantryman all within the same 3-year enlistment.
Bill Joy, while clearly a genius, is (like any good genius) a nutcase. Seriously, the man is paranoid! He's a compulsive risk-mitigator:
This told to the reporter during the interview about nanotech risk-mitigation. Sure, it's a perfectly rational way to choose your movie library, but it's almost too rational. Most people don't consider watching a bad movie an outcome to be avoided at all costs. Mainstream critical consensus is a very conservative method of choosing movies. I've watched a lot of bad movies, but I've found a few that I really liked that were panned by critics. Is Mr. Joy so risk-averse that he needs his movies to be guaranteed satisfactory?