Re:First they came for the Indians...
on
Shop Till It Drops
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· Score: 2
There is one problem w/it though. Most people who go to the store see the U-Scan and think "wow, how easy!"
I got stuck behind a UCLA student at the grocery store who kept waving his groceries over the scanner and nothing was happening. Then I noticed that he was facing the product label so the machine could "read" what it was in english. I quietly told him that the machine only reads bar codes and he said "oh, is that how these work?" Kids nowadays.
Re:This may be new in the USA
on
Shop Till It Drops
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· Score: 3, Insightful
low crime rates, which allow for such machines to be operated with minimal concerns about theft.
Not true. Crime against vending machines is quite rare everywhere primarily because a vending machine can be built like a tank and locked up six ways from Sunday. Even in the worst neighborhoods you can still find vending machines. The reasons why Japan has so many vending machines are primarily a) lack of real estate necessary to accommodate a traditional walk-in store, and b) technological solutions are readily accepted (often they are the first considered) in Japan.
But, I did do my faithful Slashdotter duty and ran a Google search, and the top link did not contradict the information I had.
So the first link you looked at didn't say it wasn't staged, therefore it must've been staged? I'm sorry, I don't follow your logic. I've searched the entire whitehouse.gov site for denials that GWB is an alien in a rubber mask, but found none. Therefore he must be an alien. (???)
And also, speed is really important if you play games.
One month ago, I ran Super Mario Bros. 3 at full speed on an NES emulator running on a Pentium 100 computer owned by a school. My current sub-GHz machine runs Game Boy Advance games at full speed. Games != bleeding-edge 3D games.
Hint: in all languages there is a concept called "context". By applying this notion one can tell that the full content of the original statement is: "And also, [CPU clock] speed is really [fucking] important if you play [graphics intensive] games."
Your anecdotal "refutation" is irrelevant to the discussion. We are all well aware that many tasks do not require fast CPU's. We do not need anyone to give us a list of said tasks. Emulators for old consoles are classified as this sort of task, as are Pong, Minesweeper, Solitaire, Choplifter, Wizardry II, and Lotus 1-2-3.
Like the historic photo of the soldiers raising the flag on Iwo Jima. Turns out, they'd already put up a flag earlier in the day, but the photographer missed it. So he convinced them to raise it again, and posed six soldiers so he could get a good shot.
Incorrect. First, the flag in the photo is not the same flag being re-raised. The first flag was a small one on a short pole. The second one (as photographed) was a large ship's flag on a 100lb pole (erected on the order of an unknown naval commander). Second, while a smaller flag had indeed already been raised earlier in the day, Joe Rosenthal's picture of the flag raising was not staged. He simply tagged along with the marines charged with erecting the larger, more visible flag. See here and here for more complete accounts of the event. I implore all of you to try a simple Google search before you mindlessly parrot unsubstatiated accusations of chicanery you heard through "a friend of a friend".
If it is just a key change, they would have been better off if they had used one-time PROM cells inside the chip to hold the key. Then, the key could be set as the last step before the box leaves the factory. No need to throw away chips.
Chances are that is the way they do it. The chips they're tossing were likely already burned in anticipation of MS's next order. Can't undo a PROM.
Copyright infringement is not theft, as it deprives no one of property.
It deprives them of payment for work done; the question of whether it deprives them of something physical as well is not relevant; it's still theft.
Not relevant? The definition of theft is "The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same". The legally granted right to payment does not qualify as property. Property must be physical, i.e. if I take your property, you no longer have it. Copying media deprives no one of physical property, which by definition means that it is not theft. It is indeed illegal, but calling it "theft" is a straight-up propaganda move on the part of the industry. Copyright infringement is a crime on the same moral level as sneaking into a movie without paying.
What if sharing is a central part of my religious beliefs?
Unfortunately, this line of argument won't fly. The right to freely practice one's religion is generally interpretted as meaning "free to practice, so long as the rights of others are not infringed". This is why things such as female circumcision, slaying infidels, and burning witches are currently prohibitted whether they are part of your religious beliefs or not. Copyright law is-- as the name implies-- law, and the Feds don't freely grant exceptions based on religious beliefs. Heck, just look at the fit the DEA threw over a bunch of native americans using peyote in religious ceremonies; they weren't infringing upon others' rights and they had to fight like the dickens in order to get the Feds off their backs. No, I'm afraid the "religious practice" angle will never work for anything other than actually practicing religions-- which is as it should be. Finding loopholes isn't the answer. Reforming the law is.
Our arguments that we use to defend our theft (as p2p users)...Theft is theft - that is simple
Copyright infringement is not theft, as it deprives no one of property. But this is only a side issue.
But now, because of scale, file sharing actually is putting a serious economic dent in the music biz.
so says the "music biz". I, however, would classify this as a straw man. The real cause of the downturn is the industry's overpricing. For a long time they were able to get away with it because there was no way around them. THey had a de-facto monopoly on distribution and are now upset that technology has weakened that control. The fact that people are abusing their fair-use rights does not, in my opinion, warrant revocation of those rights. Instead, the industry should review what they can do to encourage people to acquire music legitimately. Their complaint is along the lines of "We can't get $18 for a CD anymore"; the solution to said problem isn't "curtail the public's rights". Lower pricing is clearly indicated in this case. I'd wager that if the recording industry halved the price of music (and offered it for download even cheaper) it'd make up for the difference in volume. Well, perhaps not anymore. They may be too late. Their abuse of the power of distribution may have driven a great many customers away. I know it has me.
The point was that procurement by government funds by itself is not enough justification to claim ownership by that government
True, but the whole "government funds" angle is quite common in governmental policy. If Joe Schome's Moon Transport was hired by the gov't to go get moon rocks, then the gov't could claim ownership of the rocks. They specify "gov't funds" as a shorhand way of saying "not only did our employees go there and get it, we paid every cent of the cost of doing so, so there's no frickin' way anyone can claim part of the loot we brought back".
what I want to know is why wer are still using TP when we have fiber available?
Simple: money. Everything about fiber is more expensive than twisted pair. The switching, the network cards, the fiber itself, and (most importantly) the labor cost of installing it. I install cabling for a living, and my company charges for fiber installs about double what we charge for TP cable. Any monkey with a 110 punchdown can terminate a TP patch panel, but terminating fiber? Anything that requires a microscope is a pain in the ass.
Another interesting observation about QWERTY I've heard is that the word "typewriter" uses keys that live in one row. Speculation is that Sholes included as one of his layout criteria "must be able to type product name quickly in demos".
Note that the original poster mentioned tinfoil, which is a reasonable shield against microwaves. If he had intended to imply ionizing radiation (other than alpha particles), lead (as you stated) would make a much better shield.
If he'd meant NON-ionizing radiation, he wouldn't have advised protecting the testicles. Please read the article I linked to previously, as it contains actual facts about microwaves vs. testicles. As for his choice of aluminum foil instead of lead, this fits nicely with my theory that he is ill-informed. If he thinks microwaves can hurt your nuts without you knowing it, it seems reasonable to expect him to think.001" aluminum will protect him from ionizing radiation (tin foil hat crowd). HE is the worst sort of fool: one who knows nothing but thinks he knows everything.
anyways, i was just letting the less informed know about this; but since you're so gung-ho about these things, make sure you wrap your fucking balls in tin-foil, because these things can give off a dangerous amount of radiation also. but you already knew that, didn't you.
When someone claims to be "letting the less informed know", but doesn't know there's a difference between ionizing (cancer causing, e.g. X-rays) radiation and non-ionizing radiation, I find it hard to take anything they say seriously. Do people get cancer from steam radiators in old apartment buildings? They radiate heat, so I guess I'd better wrap my family jewels in lead to be safe. Moron.
Re:Could someone just please explain...
on
Minority Report
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· Score: 2
what does this movie have to do with minorities?
A minority is the opposite of a majority. If you're thinking of "minorities" as "people with dark skin", then you've absorbed too much progressive propaganda. Here in Los Angeles, latinos are still frequently called "minorities" in the press, even though they make up for than 50% of the population.
As you're mother always said, "look it up in the dictionary"
If you live near the Mexican border, more than likely those powerful stations are in Mexico. Here in LA, there are a few AM radio stations broadcasting from Tijuana that come in better than locals. Why? Because in mexico the FCC can't tell you that 100,000 watts is too much...
My god in heaven! Bears? Loons? Freekin' hockey? What's next, every fiver will have a different cartoon strip on it? Is this what you people want our dignified US currency to become?
I've become a master with Numega/Compuware's Driver Studio. It goes for $2500. The weird part is that other than a couple simple USB drivers I wrote, most of my Driver Studio experience has been cracking with SoftIce. The only guilt I feel is that I didn't pay for Driver Studio 2.6 and it really has proved itself a valuable cracking tool...
I hold responsible the designer of an operating system so unstable that a printer driver can take it down. Is this the best excuse they can come up with? Because that sort of computing isn't "trustworthy" in my book.
Though it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, I kind of have to agree with Mundie on this. You have to keep in mind that an OS is just a software platform for running apps; it provides interfaces and file handling and hardware control so the wheel does not have to be reinvented repeatedly. Saying an OS should be crash-proof vs bum 3rd party drivers is like saying the C programming language shouldn't let you kick over the stack with an out-of-bounds array assignment. If you want to operate in a totally padded-cell environment, switch to Pascal (where doing anything efficiently is impossible). Admittedly, the notion of a printer driver nuking your kernel is a bit disgusting, but all it really takes is one really badly fnorded pointer. Such bugs would be taken care of in an open-source situation rather quickly, but it really is too much to ask for an Truly Unbreakable Consumer OS.
These laws target liability for any damage caused by software, so that if XP or Linux crashed and buried by $1M data, the vendor would be liable this $1M, not the price I paid for the software. So it will potentially affect commercial as well as Open Source software, since the damage caused by software has nothing to do with its price.
To me this looks like a half-assed attempt to codify into specific law something that is currently covered under the catch-all of "implied warranty". Basically, (as illustrated by lemon laws for cars) when you buy something from someone you are entitled to a product that actually works as intended and/or advertised; if it doesn't you get your money back. You can only collect on liability claims if you can prove negligence or malicious intent. The reason it's unlikely that open-source software will be covered under this is that it's free. Under automotive lemon laws, one cannot sell a car "as-is, no returns", but it is perfectly legal to give away a car "as-is". There is no implied warranty on free stuff because if it turns out to be worthless, the recipient has lost nothing. Liability for negligence and/or malicious intent is essentially a seperate issue and remedies for those are already quite available in civil or criminal court. Even if they passed a law requiring "software that doesn't crash and cause damage", it wouldn't witstand court scrutiny any more than a law requiring "automobiles that don't crash and cause injury". Any legislature can pass any law they please, even a law prohibiting bad weather, but there's no way to make it pass constitutional muster in the courts.
Re:to the deniers of global warming...
on
Baked Alaska
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· Score: 2
increased CO2 concentrations invariably will lead to higher temperatures.
Really? And where does one find proof of this? I understand that many people accept that as true, but as yet no one has proved that more atmospheric CO2 increases temperature. There appears to be a correlation, but correlation != cause. Uncomplicated lab experiments with CO2 are not an accurate simulation of the global climate system.
Re:I have searched this entire thread...
on
Baked Alaska
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· Score: 2
Maybe I would if you'd perhaps listed some, but as it is I can only find one Nobel Laureate (Professor Paul Crutzen, 1995, chemistry) who dealt with the greenhouse effect at all, and his main focus was the nature of atmospheric ozone fluctuation.
So maybe you should look into a better suggestion than "Some smart guys wrote reports on it".
Slashdot Mirror
There is one problem w/it though. Most people who go to the store see the U-Scan and think "wow, how easy!"
I got stuck behind a UCLA student at the grocery store who kept waving his groceries over the scanner and nothing was happening. Then I noticed that he was facing the product label so the machine could "read" what it was in english. I quietly told him that the machine only reads bar codes and he said "oh, is that how these work?"
Kids nowadays.
low crime rates, which allow for such machines to be operated with minimal concerns about theft.
Not true. Crime against vending machines is quite rare everywhere primarily because a vending machine can be built like a tank and locked up six ways from Sunday. Even in the worst neighborhoods you can still find vending machines. The reasons why Japan has so many vending machines are primarily a) lack of real estate necessary to accommodate a traditional walk-in store, and b) technological solutions are readily accepted (often they are the first considered) in Japan.
Their PR Rating (back in the Pentium Days) is the biggest piece of BullShit there ever was..
No, Cyrix's PR Rating was bullshit. AMD marked their CPUs in the normal way back then.
But, I did do my faithful Slashdotter duty and ran a Google search, and the top link did not contradict the information I had.
So the first link you looked at didn't say it wasn't staged, therefore it must've been staged? I'm sorry, I don't follow your logic. I've searched the entire whitehouse.gov site for denials that GWB is an alien in a rubber mask, but found none. Therefore he must be an alien. (???)
And also, speed is really important if you play games.
One month ago, I ran Super Mario Bros. 3 at full speed on an NES emulator running on a Pentium 100 computer owned by a school. My current sub-GHz machine runs Game Boy Advance games at full speed. Games != bleeding-edge 3D games.
Hint: in all languages there is a concept called "context". By applying this notion one can tell that the full content of the original statement is: "And also, [CPU clock] speed is really [fucking] important if you play [graphics intensive] games."
Your anecdotal "refutation" is irrelevant to the discussion. We are all well aware that many tasks do not require fast CPU's. We do not need anyone to give us a list of said tasks. Emulators for old consoles are classified as this sort of task, as are Pong, Minesweeper, Solitaire, Choplifter, Wizardry II, and Lotus 1-2-3.
Like the historic photo of the soldiers raising the flag on Iwo Jima. Turns out, they'd already put up a flag earlier in the day, but the photographer missed it. So he convinced them to raise it again, and posed six soldiers so he could get a good shot.
Incorrect. First, the flag in the photo is not the same flag being re-raised. The first flag was a small one on a short pole. The second one (as photographed) was a large ship's flag on a 100lb pole (erected on the order of an unknown naval commander). Second, while a smaller flag had indeed already been raised earlier in the day, Joe Rosenthal's picture of the flag raising was not staged. He simply tagged along with the marines charged with erecting the larger, more visible flag. See here and here for more complete accounts of the event. I implore all of you to try a simple Google search before you mindlessly parrot unsubstatiated accusations of chicanery you heard through "a friend of a friend".
If it is just a key change, they would have been better off if they had used one-time PROM cells inside the chip to hold the key. Then, the key could be set as the last step before the box leaves the factory. No need to throw away chips.
Chances are that is the way they do it. The chips they're tossing were likely already burned in anticipation of MS's next order. Can't undo a PROM.
Copyright infringement is not theft, as it deprives no one of property. It deprives them of payment for work done; the question of whether it deprives them of something physical as well is not relevant; it's still theft.
Not relevant? The definition of theft is "The act of stealing; specifically, the felonious taking and removing of personal property, with an intent to deprive the rightful owner of the same". The legally granted right to payment does not qualify as property. Property must be physical, i.e. if I take your property, you no longer have it. Copying media deprives no one of physical property, which by definition means that it is not theft. It is indeed illegal, but calling it "theft" is a straight-up propaganda move on the part of the industry. Copyright infringement is a crime on the same moral level as sneaking into a movie without paying.
What if sharing is a central part of my religious beliefs?
Unfortunately, this line of argument won't fly. The right to freely practice one's religion is generally interpretted as meaning "free to practice, so long as the rights of others are not infringed". This is why things such as female circumcision, slaying infidels, and burning witches are currently prohibitted whether they are part of your religious beliefs or not. Copyright law is-- as the name implies-- law, and the Feds don't freely grant exceptions based on religious beliefs. Heck, just look at the fit the DEA threw over a bunch of native americans using peyote in religious ceremonies; they weren't infringing upon others' rights and they had to fight like the dickens in order to get the Feds off their backs. No, I'm afraid the "religious practice" angle will never work for anything other than actually practicing religions-- which is as it should be. Finding loopholes isn't the answer. Reforming the law is.
Our arguments that we use to defend our theft (as p2p users)...Theft is theft - that is simple
Copyright infringement is not theft, as it deprives no one of property. But this is only a side issue.
But now, because of scale, file sharing actually is putting a serious economic dent in the music biz.
so says the "music biz". I, however, would classify this as a straw man. The real cause of the downturn is the industry's overpricing. For a long time they were able to get away with it because there was no way around them. THey had a de-facto monopoly on distribution and are now upset that technology has weakened that control. The fact that people are abusing their fair-use rights does not, in my opinion, warrant revocation of those rights. Instead, the industry should review what they can do to encourage people to acquire music legitimately. Their complaint is along the lines of "We can't get $18 for a CD anymore"; the solution to said problem isn't "curtail the public's rights". Lower pricing is clearly indicated in this case. I'd wager that if the recording industry halved the price of music (and offered it for download even cheaper) it'd make up for the difference in volume. Well, perhaps not anymore. They may be too late. Their abuse of the power of distribution may have driven a great many customers away. I know it has me.
The point was that procurement by government funds by itself is not enough justification to claim ownership by that government
True, but the whole "government funds" angle is quite common in governmental policy. If Joe Schome's Moon Transport was hired by the gov't to go get moon rocks, then the gov't could claim ownership of the rocks. They specify "gov't funds" as a shorhand way of saying "not only did our employees go there and get it, we paid every cent of the cost of doing so, so there's no frickin' way anyone can claim part of the loot we brought back".
20? try 40. It was first fielded during the johnson administration.
what I want to know is why wer are still using TP when we have fiber available?
Simple: money. Everything about fiber is more expensive than twisted pair. The switching, the network cards, the fiber itself, and (most importantly) the labor cost of installing it. I install cabling for a living, and my company charges for fiber installs about double what we charge for TP cable. Any monkey with a 110 punchdown can terminate a TP patch panel, but terminating fiber? Anything that requires a microscope is a pain in the ass.
Another interesting observation about QWERTY I've heard is that the word "typewriter" uses keys that live in one row. Speculation is that Sholes included as one of his layout criteria "must be able to type product name quickly in demos".
Note that the original poster mentioned tinfoil, which is a reasonable shield against microwaves. If he had intended to imply ionizing radiation (other than alpha particles), lead (as you stated) would make a much better shield.
.001" aluminum will protect him from ionizing radiation (tin foil hat crowd). HE is the worst sort of fool: one who knows nothing but thinks he knows everything.
If he'd meant NON-ionizing radiation, he wouldn't have advised protecting the testicles. Please read the article I linked to previously, as it contains actual facts about microwaves vs. testicles. As for his choice of aluminum foil instead of lead, this fits nicely with my theory that he is ill-informed. If he thinks microwaves can hurt your nuts without you knowing it, it seems reasonable to expect him to think
anyways, i was just letting the less informed know about this; but since you're so gung-ho about these things, make sure you wrap your fucking balls in tin-foil, because these things can give off a dangerous amount of radiation also. but you already knew that, didn't you.
When someone claims to be "letting the less informed know", but doesn't know there's a difference between ionizing (cancer causing, e.g. X-rays) radiation and non-ionizing radiation, I find it hard to take anything they say seriously. Do people get cancer from steam radiators in old apartment buildings? They radiate heat, so I guess I'd better wrap my family jewels in lead to be safe. Moron.
what does this movie have to do with minorities?
A minority is the opposite of a majority. If you're thinking of "minorities" as "people with dark skin", then you've absorbed too much progressive propaganda. Here in Los Angeles, latinos are still frequently called "minorities" in the press, even though they make up for than 50% of the population.
As you're mother always said, "look it up in the dictionary"
If you live near the Mexican border, more than likely those powerful stations are in Mexico. Here in LA, there are a few AM radio stations broadcasting from Tijuana that come in better than locals. Why? Because in mexico the FCC can't tell you that 100,000 watts is too much...
My god in heaven! Bears? Loons? Freekin' hockey? What's next, every fiver will have a different cartoon strip on it? Is this what you people want our dignified US currency to become?
recognizing shapes takes more brain power than colours
Aha! So that's why we 'mericans is smarter than everyone else: our money makes us think more!
I've become a master with Numega/Compuware's Driver Studio. It goes for $2500. The weird part is that other than a couple simple USB drivers I wrote, most of my Driver Studio experience has been cracking with SoftIce. The only guilt I feel is that I didn't pay for Driver Studio 2.6 and it really has proved itself a valuable cracking tool...
I hold responsible the designer of an operating system so unstable that a printer driver can take it down. Is this the best excuse they can come up with? Because that sort of computing isn't "trustworthy" in my book.
Though it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, I kind of have to agree with Mundie on this. You have to keep in mind that an OS is just a software platform for running apps; it provides interfaces and file handling and hardware control so the wheel does not have to be reinvented repeatedly. Saying an OS should be crash-proof vs bum 3rd party drivers is like saying the C programming language shouldn't let you kick over the stack with an out-of-bounds array assignment. If you want to operate in a totally padded-cell environment, switch to Pascal (where doing anything efficiently is impossible). Admittedly, the notion of a printer driver nuking your kernel is a bit disgusting, but all it really takes is one really badly fnorded pointer. Such bugs would be taken care of in an open-source situation rather quickly, but it really is too much to ask for an Truly Unbreakable Consumer OS.
These laws target liability for any damage caused by software, so that if XP or Linux crashed and buried by $1M data, the vendor would be liable this $1M, not the price I paid for the software. So it will potentially affect commercial as well as Open Source software, since the damage caused by software has nothing to do with its price.
To me this looks like a half-assed attempt to codify into specific law something that is currently covered under the catch-all of "implied warranty". Basically, (as illustrated by lemon laws for cars) when you buy something from someone you are entitled to a product that actually works as intended and/or advertised; if it doesn't you get your money back. You can only collect on liability claims if you can prove negligence or malicious intent. The reason it's unlikely that open-source software will be covered under this is that it's free. Under automotive lemon laws, one cannot sell a car "as-is, no returns", but it is perfectly legal to give away a car "as-is". There is no implied warranty on free stuff because if it turns out to be worthless, the recipient has lost nothing. Liability for negligence and/or malicious intent is essentially a seperate issue and remedies for those are already quite available in civil or criminal court. Even if they passed a law requiring "software that doesn't crash and cause damage", it wouldn't witstand court scrutiny any more than a law requiring "automobiles that don't crash and cause injury". Any legislature can pass any law they please, even a law prohibiting bad weather, but there's no way to make it pass constitutional muster in the courts.
increased CO2 concentrations invariably will lead to higher temperatures.
Really? And where does one find proof of this? I understand that many people accept that as true, but as yet no one has proved that more atmospheric CO2 increases temperature. There appears to be a correlation, but correlation != cause. Uncomplicated lab experiments with CO2 are not an accurate simulation of the global climate system.
Maybe I would if you'd perhaps listed some, but as it is I can only find one Nobel Laureate (Professor Paul Crutzen, 1995, chemistry) who dealt with the greenhouse effect at all, and his main focus was the nature of atmospheric ozone fluctuation.
So maybe you should look into a better suggestion than "Some smart guys wrote reports on it".