You like running back and forth across the same areas because the game design is such that any two consecutive events are the maximum distance apart? Or maybe you like running around pulling up bushes for hours collecting enough coins to buy some necessary item?
Or, in Z64, perhaps you love the Tomb Raider-esque camera that swings around at inconvenient moments, rarely shows the things you need to see, and the hideous control system for manually moving the camera?
Maybe it's the endless reflex-based puzzles in the middle of what's billed as an RPG or an adventure?
How about the complete lack of customized character development?
Zelda is a lousy game, loved only by people who haven't seen the depth that's possible in a PC game. (Where a save-game can store the state of the world, not just the number of EXP and GOLD that you found.)
Seriously, in the adventure/rpg (well, almost anything except fighting or racing games) PCs blow away consoles.
Afghanistan? The Taliban doesn't seem to like women doing anything...
Really, any government with an official religion is worthy of mocking, take your pick.
Re:The backup protection system
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I agree, we should fight it in all ways. I have purchasing approval at my company and I'll never approve CPRM hardware, as long as anything else is on the market. And I'll speak up to the HD manufacturers about it.
And as to the sticking with the computer... My Apple2 couldn't play music and videos as well as a stereo and TV. If they go with the watermarking and it can't be cracked, I'll simply wait for the DeCSS of the future and play the watermarked video on my current PC.
I don't mean I'll never upgrade, just that I'll keep my current hardware as well, if they build backdoors into the new stuff.
Re:The backup protection system
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Yeah, there is that. Myself, I'm never going to give up my un-CPRM hardware, so I'll always be able to do what I want with media.
But, I doubt it'll take long for the watermarking to be cracked. Detecting watermarking isn't something you're going to do in an custom chip, it's going to require a fair bit of horsepower and a general purpose CPU. This essentially means that the watermark reader is 'just' software, and thus much easier to crack. Once it's cracked, we'll know what it looks for and how to block it. Watermarking is *only* security by obscurity. Once you know what they're doing, you know what to undo.
This assumes that the watermark checking is done in the speakers and monitors. If it's done in Media Player, for example, it'll be even easier to crack. (That is, assuming the next hacker at MS doesn't just grab the source for WMP.)
Finding the purloined key
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Finding the key a device is using will be easy. The content creators will have a list of all of the keys they used (true even if there were thousands or millions of possible keys, in a search space of 2^128) and can simply feed the device a media stream encoded with various keys until it decodes it.
Whereas hackers can't do this because we'd have to try all possible keys, not just a short list of potentially valid ones.
Hackers also aren't likely to build a device in such a way as to make reverse engineering the hardware difficult. (My company makes custom hardware and it's quite expensive to make something that a skilled engineer can't figure out.)
FPGAs are out, because you send the 'program' to them on startup. You can do clever bootstrapping where there are multiple layers of encryption, but that just takes more time - proportionally more of yours than of the attackers. ASICs are more expensive (being custom) and are usually a fairly standard chip, like an FPGA, except that it's preconfigured (and static). This means that if you do open it up and examine it, it's not that hard to decipher. So you're looking at a special-made chip, designed not for efficiency, but to be hard to understand.
That's massively expensive, you need HUGE volume to make the cost bearable.
A hacker would just use an FPGA and some flash-ram, to allow reconfiguring with new keys when they were needed. Who cares about killing WMP by invalidating all its keys...
As for why it's hard to get all the keys from a device...
It would decrypt one key at a time and use it. Only if that key didn't work would it use another, probably encrypted much differently. You'd have to wait till media without the first key was released to be able to 'easily' snoop on the device with logic probes and capture the key.
Finally, software... The idea is to not give WMP a decryption key. WMP would have an access key, to perform the basic 'release the encrypted data stream.' It'd then pass this off to the USB speakers which would perform the actual decryption, in a chip right on the back of the actual speaker, to reduce the length of the wire with the unencrypted signal in it.
The industry won't do another DVD CSS, where it plays on 'open' hardware. They know the weak link is software. They'll put CPRM in all the devices, without using it, and when the market is saturated with it, they'll release media that requires a CPRM HD, a CPRM monitor, and CPRM speakers.
Of course, now that the DeCSS has woken us up, and more people know/care about the issue, it'll be worth a few talented engineers ripping the actual hardware apart and decoding this. And when it does come tumbling down, it'll *kill* the industry behind it. They'll have basically given the encryption chips away for free to manufacturers (to encourage their use) intending to make it up on licensing fees from the media people. When the scheme gets broken and companies get POed that their DVD player is being excluded from new media, they'll drop the scheme. And when the media people realize that their user base is drying up they won't try anything basic on hardware again.
It does raise the bar on hackers, but it REALLY raises the bar on designers and implementers. And it only takes one skilled hacker to bring it tumbling down.
Nope, to do that basic thing you'd find someone with music you liked and then browse their collection. The problem is the user-based stuff. That person would log off and you'd never find them again. You'd have to save the names of stuff you wanted and try to find it again, or you'd have to go through the process again with someone new.
AudioGalaxy is *MUCH* better. Too bad the web interface is a little slow. In all other ways, it's MUCH better than Napster.
To non-AudioGalaxy users: It supports resume! You select a song and it downloads from one person until they disconnect, then switches to someone else with the same file (uses CRCs for verification) and downloads the rest. If nobody is on with that song, it waits until they are.
AudioGalaxy is also immune to Cuckoo Eggs, when some shithead with something to prove takes a valid song, replaces the middle with something non-music, and re-offers it on Napster, to screw over other people. AudioGalaxy shows you a list of the versions of the song available, with the lengths and quality, as well as the number of users with each version. As long as more people have the real song than the screwed one, you just pick the most common file and you're fine.
Right. #1 is more likely, and a better solution. But, #1 is only possible because #2 is possible. If the masses were easily and completely controlled nobody would care what they thought. We'd all work in the slave mines (mining slaves?) supporting the mega-rich.
We're free only because there are so many of us that if we grab weapons and revolt, we will win.
Life is about threats. People pay a traffic ticket because their car will be 'boot'ed if they don't, and at some point down the line, the national guard will be called in to stop them if they keep resisting. Law is enforced by power, and as Mao said, power comes from the barrel of a gun.
Luckily, veiled threats are almost always enough, but it all depends on the eventual willingness of each side to go to desperate ends.
>I think part of the problem is that we're coming from different domains here. My company writes
>software for people putting images onto film. (Visual effects, mostly.) Therefore we need to
>handle the huge dynamic range of film. People playing Quake don't need that.
Quite right. I want something that makes my graphics look nicer. Dithering is a hack we shouldn't have to use, so I want more detail where it would do me good.
Now, I wouldn't complain if it was decided to stop at 12bpcc (4096 levels) and make the rest headroom, for the benefit that would have for people working with film. (16bpcc is a bit excessive).
And yes, in this quest for less banding, I'd love floating point rendering so that fog effects didn't look so ugly.
As for the aliasing, I was talking only of a stairstep effect on a diagonal line. I agree that there are other aliasing problems, like oversampling, or moire effects from rendering fine lines. Those do need more sophisticated handling than simply more resolution.
As for the "only where it matters"... it would be a nice step if we made better decisions about that, when to drop the quality on a model so as to not make it a visible difference. The problem that I see is that when a model is dropped in complexity the textures tend to shimmy. We need a better way of locking textures, maybe to the center of a polygon instead of the edge.
As for Moore's law, yes, people seem to expect us to be done soon. What's really happening is that we're discovering tasks that couldn't even be considered until recently, faster than we're 'finishing' old ones. (For reference, Doom tops out of 35fps, and I don't know how to change that, Quake 1 gets 300+ fps, Q2 gets 220+, Q3 gets 110+, and Q3TA (larger, more complex maps) gets 75+.) And it has a long way to go before it looks real.
Actually, yeah, I think you'd be a sucker to volunteer at a for-profit hospital. Would you volunteer to flip burgers at a for-profit McDonald's?
If you do something that directly helps patients and doesn't help the hospital (like going to various children's wards and reading to the kids.) then I can see the point. But if you do something the hospital would have had to pay someone to do, yeah, I think you are a sucker.
If someone makes money off of something I do, I want a cut. Otherwise they can go do it themselves. If someone wants my help because they can't get it any other way, instead of just being too greedy to shell out for it, then we'll talk.
Rant, Rant, Karma Whore, Karma Whore. (Oh yay, another moron insulting the editors. That's insightful. Yawn.)
If you want to help, run Folding@Home. It's a much more open process (the results and the license) and stands to benefit us in many ways, not just cancer. (CJD, Mad Cow Disease, is caused by a protein folding into a different shape, and causing a cascade.)
Not everything done by a corporation is evil. Sure, nobody said it was. What is 'evil' is essentially lying to people about what the client is doing. There's an expectation (it's a law as well, just ask AOL who got sued over it.) that if you help someone with something in a volunteer basis, that you will be paid for your efforts if it's a for-profit business. I'll bet their 'license' disclaims this though.
You're just a troll, one who discovered the latest fad. Bash editors, gain karma. It's as old as "You slashdotters as so hypocritical..." or "Microsoft is just misunderstood..."
Because that has as many problems as the US system of each side paying their own way (for the most part.)
Someone like SGI is still able to pay a much larger legal bill, but if they do win, you've got to pay for their expensive lawyers as well as the cheap one you've got. Their potential cost goes from $200,000 to $204,000, yours goes from $4,000 to $204,000...
Both systems are screwed. But I can't think of a good system.
Maybe, both sides pool all legal expenses, based on their total wealth. If SGI sued me, their $4B (let's say) vs my $100K, means that one of my dollars is forty-thousand of theirs. That way they couldn't bankrupt me, because my $100K is equivalent to their $4B (or whatever) and we'd both go bankrupt at the same time.
Then after the case a judge reviews the spending, looks at how reasonable the initial claims were, and assigns one party to pick up more of the bill.
There needs to be a way for the poor to sue the rich, and for reasonable suits too. If I want to sue McDonals for something my only hope is to ask for a few hundred million in damages and to get a lawyer to take it on contingency so that when it gets argued down it's still worth it. It'd be easier to sue them for five billion dollars than for fifty thousand. (Say I choked on a piece of metal in a burger and needed medical treatment.)
So there needs to be a way of letting someone without much money access the courts, but you don't want to let everyone sue McD's for made-up expenses just for extortion reasons.
Theft is when you deprive the original owner of their property. Check a dictionary.
The law is irrelevant to this. Theft involves depriving the original owner of the PROPERTY, not of a potential to make money, or of sole ownership.
That being said, what was done is against the law. Yes. You should be able to sue, but I agree, you'd never win against someone bigger.
But use the correct terminology. Piracy means theft and murder at sea. Theft means depriving of property. Redefining those terms to mean something completely different doesn't make it so...
Actually, I want a much larger numeric range to cover the color range currently represented by 0-256. I don't want the top end to be much brighter, or anything. Just a smaller difference between levels.
It's barely obvious where the color bars meet if you do a 256-step gradiant from black to full red, for example. I think with each of those steps being represented by another 256 steps, it's be impossible to see the difference.
And going to a higher resolution DOES solve the aliasing problem. Take a 2048x1536 picture, shrink it to 256x192. Display both full-screen. See the jaggies in the smaller one? Those diagonal lines were just as rough at high resolution, but the pixels were smaller and less obvious. Once the size of a pixel drops below our visible threshold we won't see that anymore.
Of course, perfect knife-edge rocks against a blood-red sky happen rarely in real life, so Q3 won't appear 'correct' but the jaggies will be gone.
Dithering isn't the best solution for approximating a color, it's merely the best available.
I was thinking about the US constitution recently, when I was mulling over government design issues.
If they hadn't allowed the constitution to be changed, I'm sure it would be gone by now. Someone would have come up with a knee-jerk issue (flag burning) and they'd have convinced everyone a document which DIDN'T forbid that, and didn't allow for changes, was a bad one. They'd have stricken it, and replaced it with a much different document.
But because it can be changed, even though it's hard, it's actually much more stable. It makes people realize that they have to have a good reason to change it, but that those good reasons might exist.
IMHO, that makes it more stable than if they weren't allowed to change it. Like the difference between telling a kid that they can never do something and to just forget about it... they'll do it right away. But, take the time to explain why the shouldn't do it, except in extraordinary circumstances and they'll be less likely to want to do it...
I think I agree with you about the headroom aspect - I saw a demo with a landscape generator. They used logrithmic brightness because it let them have nice bright mountains and still have the sun appear brighter. (I say "I think" because it's not quite clear what your point was.)
But, how does wanting 16bpcc (color channel) require a monitor capable of 256 times more light output? The problem is that if you display 256 equal width bars of a color across the screen they appear as distinct bars. That's with 8bpcc. So wouldn't it be nice if you could draw 65536 (or rather, as many as you had lines of resolution) different shades of a single color across the screen to avoid the banding?
And yes, FP pixels would be great. It'd remove the inaccuracy we get simply from repeated truncation of the values, after every blending effect.
And you won't accept the words of people like myself who went through the same harassment.
So, who will you listen to? Anyone who agrees with you? Any 'expert' on network TV?
Some of the killers had diaried, for years, about the harassment at school, and how they were getting more and more upset about it. Then they committed suicide after the act. What do they stand to gain from tricking you? And how much work do you think some kid is going to put into it? Years of their time?
Sometimes, Mr Psychologist, a cigar is just a cigar, and a suicide note is an honest view into the despressed person psyche.
Hah. What a cop out. Would that be the "I'm gonna lose, so I'll pretend it's on purpose" strategy? Practice it well, you'll need it.
The difference is that the killers themselves said that the bullying was a problem. In diaries, to teacher, parents, in essays. Never did the kids say that Doom was causing them to want to kill.
I think I'll accept the words and actions of the people involved.
If every child in this situation that the media has covered has complained, often endlessly, about bullying and harassment, it doesn't take a genius to see the strong connection. So why can't you see it?
> Do you know even one thing about psychology?
You say that as if it would be relevant either way. It's the falacy of irrelevant authority. I should ask if you know anything about psychic spoon bending for all the matters in this case.
Even if psychology was a science, a degree would hardly be required to recognize that proding someone endlessly can drive them crazy. (Any fields where a great number of the 'experts' follow the teachings of Jung or Freud and actually get any respect from their peers isn't a scientific one. Imagine a bunch of physicists, some of whom believed that a large stone would fall faster than a small stone.)
>Great, an eye for an eye. So much for being civilized. Killing is always a bad thing and I
>feel bad for you that you're too ignorant to realize that.
And I feel bad that you're too ignorant to see how right I am.
There, I win the argument.
What? It only works when YOU do it?
First, killing isn't always a bad thing. Often it's a GREAT thing. Had Hitler's generals been able to assasinate him early in the war millions of lives would have been saved. Sure, it's an outrageous case, but it proves that a blanket "killing is ALWAYS wrong" statement is false.
Killing is a good thing, when the consequences are more positive than negative. Like *everything* else, it depends on context. Eating chlorine is ALWAYS bad, unless it's bound to sodium. Having your leg eaten by weasels is a good thing, when the alternative is waiting in the trap to be completely eaten by a bear. Context is everything.
If a bully is causing the deaths of others, and is likely to keep doing this (I know some people who were bullies in school and they're just the same as adults, still with a complete contempt for everyone else) then I really don't see why it's a bad thing if the bully dies and someone else lives instead.
As for "an eye for an eye", that refers to punishment. Killing a bully seems much more like self defense.
Now, had the adults in these cases actually attempted to help the victims in their often repeated cries for help, then maybe resorting to ultimate measures like killing wouldn't have been too bad. But if you force a child to spend every day with someone who torments them, punish them when they respond, and reward the tormenter, you don't expect to drive them crazy?
Killing the bully will prevent that bully from hurting others, and may serve as a warning to others. Now, if that little nerd who was being pushed around had belted the bully in the nose as soon as it started, the bully might have learned and the only casualty would be a sore nose. Ditto if the bully had been suspended by the authorities. But if it's let progress to this point a simple suspension won't seem like punishment to them or anyone else; we'll be teaching them that their actions are without consequence.
Adults have choice, they can leave and get a new job, they can call the police and claim they're being criminally harassed. Children have no good options, their only recourse is to parents and teachers, both of whom are trained to believe that the way to cure these problems are to ignore them. They just keep sending the kids right back to school with a little pep talk.
And you'd blame the children for taking the only option left to them and trying to stop the bullying by stopping the bully...
I'm just glad that they took the right way out and shot the bully before shooting themselves. One less social disease for us to clean up later when the bully would become an adult.
Certainly they must be mentally unstable, but when looking at outside influences, what do you say is the likely cause when someone seeks, in their own word, vengance against the bullies... tv perhaps? Maybe NAFTA? Or, perhaps, bullies and harassment?
Besides, I think it's reasonable to wish death upon people who harass you with the intent to make you hate yourself and perhaps commit suicide. Bullies know the effects they can have, they see the news too. If they bully someone, they deserve everything they get. My only regret is that kids wait so long to retaliate that they end up taking out bystanders. A little bully killing isn't necessarily a bad thing; the bully intends to hurt you as much as possible...
If adults don't step in and prevent this - if they give the bully free reign to torment, how can they claim to be suprised when one or the other gets hurt? And very few people are ready to admit their precious little jocks could ever be at fault.
Oh well, once that one gets a few holes, maybe they'll watch what their next kid does a little more carefully.
I didn't compare drunk driving to harassment. I compared drunk driving influencing accidents to harassment influencing violence (specifically killing).
Harassment could very well be the primary cause - which would just mean that there are no more important influences.
I would tend to think that harassment is the primary cause of *school* shootings. If someone is feeling like killing someone, enough that they often diary their feelings before the event, and/or seek specific targets, it suggests that those people had a large influence. Being that the largest influence a nerd is likely to have with a jock is harassment, it seems to suggest that harassment is the primary cause of the shootings.
The shooter might have been slightly cracked, or otherwise influenced in such a way as to make them kill when others (myself included) responded in lesser ways. That doesn't change the fact that the harassment would be a bigger influence than other, like potentially video games or TV.
Many people drive drunk and survive, yet when someone gets in an accident while drunk we attribute that to the alcohol. This doesn't mean that everyone who drinks will crash, just that drunks are more likely to.
Similarly, not every bullied teen turns killer, but when a teen turns killer we can attribute that partly to the bullying. It's not the only cause, but it's silly to deny that it is a cause.
Dude. Unless you're 200 years old, you weren't involved. Neither was the poster you're responding to. There are many things that *we* didn't do. We didn't keep slaves. We didn't imprison the japanese during ww2. We didn't drives the Indians off their land. We didn't break off from the British. etc.
It's all this sins of the father thing. I *ONLY* take responsibility for *MY* actions. If I wasn't there agreeing that it should be done, and helping it to happen, it's not my fault.
It's like this whole social contract. I didn't agree to it. The only thing keeping me in check is that I happen to believe that some of the laws are just, and that I'll get shot/imprisoned for breaking the rest. (For example, I think copyrights *could* be good, but I didn't agree to this continually extending term bullshit, so imho, copyrights have no more than moral force. That means I'll respect the authors rights to a living, but I'll be damned if some corp bribing a politician is going to dictate how I run my life.)
And in that note, an armed populace is the *ONLY* thing preventing this sort of thing from getting out of hand. Just the memory of the french revolution and many like it, keep the corrupt in check. But if they could completely disarm the people, they'd be acting just insane monarchs committing the worst injustices you can imagine.
If someone is committing suicide because they're lonely, or depressed at the loss of a loved one, I don't think it's very likely they'll try to take anyone else out...
But if they're suicidal because of constant humiliation, physical violence, taunting, and general bullying, I think it's fairly likely for them to try to hurt the attacker. If the attacker is making them feel they're ready to die, they'll probably be ready to kill.
I think in every case in the media, the shooter has been bullied. We haven't heard of the popular jock (who did the bullying) going to school and shooting the place up. These are obviously desperate acts by despressed people. If bullying depresses people I think the link it fairly easy to see.
You buy the CD, to see if it functions as advertised. So far, all we have are speculations that it doesn't work.
If it doesn't work, and they refuse to take it back, you make such a stink that they claim to not know that it does not work.
Then, if they continue to sell it (without a big warning sticker) they'll be misrepresenting the product.
Someone else comes in (unrelated to you), they buy it, and it fails. They come back and complain, the store tells them it's too bad.
Here, they've sold something even though they've known it wasn't what they've advertised, and it wasn't to someone who knew in advance.
So you go to this person and arrange to help them in a civil suit. You can prove (via a hidden tape recording, or witnesses, etc) that you made the staff fully aware that the product was being misrepresented. Your testimony should be enough for a small-claims judge (along with proper documents, etc).
You sue for a small ammount, the cost of the CD, a days wages, and your filing fee. They're out that much, plus the cost of a lawyer for a day, the wage of the manager on trial, the wage of the clerk on trial, and other expenses. Plus the bad publicity.
If you can arrange to get any media attention for it, the future case against any other store in the area would be pretty well guaranteed (how could they not know the CD was defective.)
Hopefully the legal hassles and threats of more to come would cause the stores to not sell the CD, thus sending a really strong message to the RIAA.
If enough people got together, you might even be able to extend this to the RIAA, the stores might back it too, because the RIAA is selling goods that they not only have reason to know are defective, but are defective by design.
Slashdot Mirror
Zelda is near perfection? WHAT!?
You like running back and forth across the same areas because the game design is such that any two consecutive events are the maximum distance apart? Or maybe you like running around pulling up bushes for hours collecting enough coins to buy some necessary item?
Or, in Z64, perhaps you love the Tomb Raider-esque camera that swings around at inconvenient moments, rarely shows the things you need to see, and the hideous control system for manually moving the camera?
Maybe it's the endless reflex-based puzzles in the middle of what's billed as an RPG or an adventure?
How about the complete lack of customized character development?
Zelda is a lousy game, loved only by people who haven't seen the depth that's possible in a PC game. (Where a save-game can store the state of the world, not just the number of EXP and GOLD that you found.)
Seriously, in the adventure/rpg (well, almost anything except fighting or racing games) PCs blow away consoles.
Afghanistan? The Taliban doesn't seem to like women doing anything...
Really, any government with an official religion is worthy of mocking, take your pick.
I agree, we should fight it in all ways. I have purchasing approval at my company and I'll never approve CPRM hardware, as long as anything else is on the market. And I'll speak up to the HD manufacturers about it.
And as to the sticking with the computer... My Apple2 couldn't play music and videos as well as a stereo and TV. If they go with the watermarking and it can't be cracked, I'll simply wait for the DeCSS of the future and play the watermarked video on my current PC.
I don't mean I'll never upgrade, just that I'll keep my current hardware as well, if they build backdoors into the new stuff.
Yeah, there is that. Myself, I'm never going to give up my un-CPRM hardware, so I'll always be able to do what I want with media.
But, I doubt it'll take long for the watermarking to be cracked. Detecting watermarking isn't something you're going to do in an custom chip, it's going to require a fair bit of horsepower and a general purpose CPU. This essentially means that the watermark reader is 'just' software, and thus much easier to crack. Once it's cracked, we'll know what it looks for and how to block it. Watermarking is *only* security by obscurity. Once you know what they're doing, you know what to undo.
This assumes that the watermark checking is done in the speakers and monitors. If it's done in Media Player, for example, it'll be even easier to crack. (That is, assuming the next hacker at MS doesn't just grab the source for WMP.)
Finding the key a device is using will be easy. The content creators will have a list of all of the keys they used (true even if there were thousands or millions of possible keys, in a search space of 2^128) and can simply feed the device a media stream encoded with various keys until it decodes it.
Whereas hackers can't do this because we'd have to try all possible keys, not just a short list of potentially valid ones.
Hackers also aren't likely to build a device in such a way as to make reverse engineering the hardware difficult. (My company makes custom hardware and it's quite expensive to make something that a skilled engineer can't figure out.)
FPGAs are out, because you send the 'program' to them on startup. You can do clever bootstrapping where there are multiple layers of encryption, but that just takes more time - proportionally more of yours than of the attackers. ASICs are more expensive (being custom) and are usually a fairly standard chip, like an FPGA, except that it's preconfigured (and static). This means that if you do open it up and examine it, it's not that hard to decipher. So you're looking at a special-made chip, designed not for efficiency, but to be hard to understand.
That's massively expensive, you need HUGE volume to make the cost bearable.
A hacker would just use an FPGA and some flash-ram, to allow reconfiguring with new keys when they were needed. Who cares about killing WMP by invalidating all its keys...
As for why it's hard to get all the keys from a device...
It would decrypt one key at a time and use it. Only if that key didn't work would it use another, probably encrypted much differently. You'd have to wait till media without the first key was released to be able to 'easily' snoop on the device with logic probes and capture the key.
Finally, software... The idea is to not give WMP a decryption key. WMP would have an access key, to perform the basic 'release the encrypted data stream.' It'd then pass this off to the USB speakers which would perform the actual decryption, in a chip right on the back of the actual speaker, to reduce the length of the wire with the unencrypted signal in it.
The industry won't do another DVD CSS, where it plays on 'open' hardware. They know the weak link is software. They'll put CPRM in all the devices, without using it, and when the market is saturated with it, they'll release media that requires a CPRM HD, a CPRM monitor, and CPRM speakers.
Of course, now that the DeCSS has woken us up, and more people know/care about the issue, it'll be worth a few talented engineers ripping the actual hardware apart and decoding this. And when it does come tumbling down, it'll *kill* the industry behind it. They'll have basically given the encryption chips away for free to manufacturers (to encourage their use) intending to make it up on licensing fees from the media people. When the scheme gets broken and companies get POed that their DVD player is being excluded from new media, they'll drop the scheme. And when the media people realize that their user base is drying up they won't try anything basic on hardware again.
It does raise the bar on hackers, but it REALLY raises the bar on designers and implementers. And it only takes one skilled hacker to bring it tumbling down.
Nope, to do that basic thing you'd find someone with music you liked and then browse their collection. The problem is the user-based stuff. That person would log off and you'd never find them again. You'd have to save the names of stuff you wanted and try to find it again, or you'd have to go through the process again with someone new.
AudioGalaxy is *MUCH* better. Too bad the web interface is a little slow. In all other ways, it's MUCH better than Napster.
To non-AudioGalaxy users: It supports resume! You select a song and it downloads from one person until they disconnect, then switches to someone else with the same file (uses CRCs for verification) and downloads the rest. If nobody is on with that song, it waits until they are.
AudioGalaxy is also immune to Cuckoo Eggs, when some shithead with something to prove takes a valid song, replaces the middle with something non-music, and re-offers it on Napster, to screw over other people. AudioGalaxy shows you a list of the versions of the song available, with the lengths and quality, as well as the number of users with each version. As long as more people have the real song than the screwed one, you just pick the most common file and you're fine.
Right. #1 is more likely, and a better solution. But, #1 is only possible because #2 is possible. If the masses were easily and completely controlled nobody would care what they thought. We'd all work in the slave mines (mining slaves?) supporting the mega-rich.
We're free only because there are so many of us that if we grab weapons and revolt, we will win.
Life is about threats. People pay a traffic ticket because their car will be 'boot'ed if they don't, and at some point down the line, the national guard will be called in to stop them if they keep resisting. Law is enforced by power, and as Mao said, power comes from the barrel of a gun.
Luckily, veiled threats are almost always enough, but it all depends on the eventual willingness of each side to go to desperate ends.
>I think part of the problem is that we're coming from different domains here. My company writes
>software for people putting images onto film. (Visual effects, mostly.) Therefore we need to
>handle the huge dynamic range of film. People playing Quake don't need that.
Quite right. I want something that makes my graphics look nicer. Dithering is a hack we shouldn't have to use, so I want more detail where it would do me good.
Now, I wouldn't complain if it was decided to stop at 12bpcc (4096 levels) and make the rest headroom, for the benefit that would have for people working with film. (16bpcc is a bit excessive).
And yes, in this quest for less banding, I'd love floating point rendering so that fog effects didn't look so ugly.
As for the aliasing, I was talking only of a stairstep effect on a diagonal line. I agree that there are other aliasing problems, like oversampling, or moire effects from rendering fine lines. Those do need more sophisticated handling than simply more resolution.
As for the "only where it matters"... it would be a nice step if we made better decisions about that, when to drop the quality on a model so as to not make it a visible difference. The problem that I see is that when a model is dropped in complexity the textures tend to shimmy. We need a better way of locking textures, maybe to the center of a polygon instead of the edge.
As for Moore's law, yes, people seem to expect us to be done soon. What's really happening is that we're discovering tasks that couldn't even be considered until recently, faster than we're 'finishing' old ones. (For reference, Doom tops out of 35fps, and I don't know how to change that, Quake 1 gets 300+ fps, Q2 gets 220+, Q3 gets 110+, and Q3TA (larger, more complex maps) gets 75+.) And it has a long way to go before it looks real.
Actually, yeah, I think you'd be a sucker to volunteer at a for-profit hospital. Would you volunteer to flip burgers at a for-profit McDonald's?
If you do something that directly helps patients and doesn't help the hospital (like going to various children's wards and reading to the kids.) then I can see the point. But if you do something the hospital would have had to pay someone to do, yeah, I think you are a sucker.
If someone makes money off of something I do, I want a cut. Otherwise they can go do it themselves. If someone wants my help because they can't get it any other way, instead of just being too greedy to shell out for it, then we'll talk.
Rant, Rant, Karma Whore, Karma Whore. (Oh yay, another moron insulting the editors. That's insightful. Yawn.)
If you want to help, run Folding@Home. It's a much more open process (the results and the license) and stands to benefit us in many ways, not just cancer. (CJD, Mad Cow Disease, is caused by a protein folding into a different shape, and causing a cascade.)
Not everything done by a corporation is evil. Sure, nobody said it was. What is 'evil' is essentially lying to people about what the client is doing. There's an expectation (it's a law as well, just ask AOL who got sued over it.) that if you help someone with something in a volunteer basis, that you will be paid for your efforts if it's a for-profit business. I'll bet their 'license' disclaims this though.
You're just a troll, one who discovered the latest fad. Bash editors, gain karma. It's as old as "You slashdotters as so hypocritical..." or "Microsoft is just misunderstood..."
Because that has as many problems as the US system of each side paying their own way (for the most part.)
Someone like SGI is still able to pay a much larger legal bill, but if they do win, you've got to pay for their expensive lawyers as well as the cheap one you've got. Their potential cost goes from $200,000 to $204,000, yours goes from $4,000 to $204,000...
Both systems are screwed. But I can't think of a good system.
Maybe, both sides pool all legal expenses, based on their total wealth. If SGI sued me, their $4B (let's say) vs my $100K, means that one of my dollars is forty-thousand of theirs. That way they couldn't bankrupt me, because my $100K is equivalent to their $4B (or whatever) and we'd both go bankrupt at the same time.
Then after the case a judge reviews the spending, looks at how reasonable the initial claims were, and assigns one party to pick up more of the bill.
There needs to be a way for the poor to sue the rich, and for reasonable suits too. If I want to sue McDonals for something my only hope is to ask for a few hundred million in damages and to get a lawyer to take it on contingency so that when it gets argued down it's still worth it. It'd be easier to sue them for five billion dollars than for fifty thousand. (Say I choked on a piece of metal in a burger and needed medical treatment.)
So there needs to be a way of letting someone without much money access the courts, but you don't want to let everyone sue McD's for made-up expenses just for extortion reasons.
Got any good solutions?
Theft is when you deprive the original owner of their property. Check a dictionary.
The law is irrelevant to this. Theft involves depriving the original owner of the PROPERTY, not of a potential to make money, or of sole ownership.
That being said, what was done is against the law. Yes. You should be able to sue, but I agree, you'd never win against someone bigger.
But use the correct terminology. Piracy means theft and murder at sea. Theft means depriving of property. Redefining those terms to mean something completely different doesn't make it so...
Actually, I want a much larger numeric range to cover the color range currently represented by 0-256. I don't want the top end to be much brighter, or anything. Just a smaller difference between levels.
It's barely obvious where the color bars meet if you do a 256-step gradiant from black to full red, for example. I think with each of those steps being represented by another 256 steps, it's be impossible to see the difference.
And going to a higher resolution DOES solve the aliasing problem. Take a 2048x1536 picture, shrink it to 256x192. Display both full-screen. See the jaggies in the smaller one? Those diagonal lines were just as rough at high resolution, but the pixels were smaller and less obvious. Once the size of a pixel drops below our visible threshold we won't see that anymore.
Of course, perfect knife-edge rocks against a blood-red sky happen rarely in real life, so Q3 won't appear 'correct' but the jaggies will be gone.
Dithering isn't the best solution for approximating a color, it's merely the best available.
I was thinking about the US constitution recently, when I was mulling over government design issues.
If they hadn't allowed the constitution to be changed, I'm sure it would be gone by now. Someone would have come up with a knee-jerk issue (flag burning) and they'd have convinced everyone a document which DIDN'T forbid that, and didn't allow for changes, was a bad one. They'd have stricken it, and replaced it with a much different document.
But because it can be changed, even though it's hard, it's actually much more stable. It makes people realize that they have to have a good reason to change it, but that those good reasons might exist.
IMHO, that makes it more stable than if they weren't allowed to change it. Like the difference between telling a kid that they can never do something and to just forget about it... they'll do it right away. But, take the time to explain why the shouldn't do it, except in extraordinary circumstances and they'll be less likely to want to do it...
I think I agree with you about the headroom aspect - I saw a demo with a landscape generator. They used logrithmic brightness because it let them have nice bright mountains and still have the sun appear brighter. (I say "I think" because it's not quite clear what your point was.)
But, how does wanting 16bpcc (color channel) require a monitor capable of 256 times more light output? The problem is that if you display 256 equal width bars of a color across the screen they appear as distinct bars. That's with 8bpcc. So wouldn't it be nice if you could draw 65536 (or rather, as many as you had lines of resolution) different shades of a single color across the screen to avoid the banding?
And yes, FP pixels would be great. It'd remove the inaccuracy we get simply from repeated truncation of the values, after every blending effect.
So, whose word will you accept?
You won't accept that of the actual killers.
And you won't accept the words of people like myself who went through the same harassment.
So, who will you listen to? Anyone who agrees with you? Any 'expert' on network TV?
Some of the killers had diaried, for years, about the harassment at school, and how they were getting more and more upset about it. Then they committed suicide after the act. What do they stand to gain from tricking you? And how much work do you think some kid is going to put into it? Years of their time?
Sometimes, Mr Psychologist, a cigar is just a cigar, and a suicide note is an honest view into the despressed person psyche.
Hah. What a cop out. Would that be the "I'm gonna lose, so I'll pretend it's on purpose" strategy? Practice it well, you'll need it.
The difference is that the killers themselves said that the bullying was a problem. In diaries, to teacher, parents, in essays. Never did the kids say that Doom was causing them to want to kill.
I think I'll accept the words and actions of the people involved.
If every child in this situation that the media has covered has complained, often endlessly, about bullying and harassment, it doesn't take a genius to see the strong connection. So why can't you see it?
> Do you know even one thing about psychology?
You say that as if it would be relevant either way. It's the falacy of irrelevant authority. I should ask if you know anything about psychic spoon bending for all the matters in this case.
Even if psychology was a science, a degree would hardly be required to recognize that proding someone endlessly can drive them crazy. (Any fields where a great number of the 'experts' follow the teachings of Jung or Freud and actually get any respect from their peers isn't a scientific one. Imagine a bunch of physicists, some of whom believed that a large stone would fall faster than a small stone.)
>Great, an eye for an eye. So much for being civilized. Killing is always a bad thing and I
>feel bad for you that you're too ignorant to realize that.
And I feel bad that you're too ignorant to see how right I am.
There, I win the argument.
What? It only works when YOU do it?
First, killing isn't always a bad thing. Often it's a GREAT thing. Had Hitler's generals been able to assasinate him early in the war millions of lives would have been saved. Sure, it's an outrageous case, but it proves that a blanket "killing is ALWAYS wrong" statement is false.
Killing is a good thing, when the consequences are more positive than negative. Like *everything* else, it depends on context. Eating chlorine is ALWAYS bad, unless it's bound to sodium. Having your leg eaten by weasels is a good thing, when the alternative is waiting in the trap to be completely eaten by a bear. Context is everything.
If a bully is causing the deaths of others, and is likely to keep doing this (I know some people who were bullies in school and they're just the same as adults, still with a complete contempt for everyone else) then I really don't see why it's a bad thing if the bully dies and someone else lives instead.
As for "an eye for an eye", that refers to punishment. Killing a bully seems much more like self defense.
Now, had the adults in these cases actually attempted to help the victims in their often repeated cries for help, then maybe resorting to ultimate measures like killing wouldn't have been too bad. But if you force a child to spend every day with someone who torments them, punish them when they respond, and reward the tormenter, you don't expect to drive them crazy?
Killing the bully will prevent that bully from hurting others, and may serve as a warning to others. Now, if that little nerd who was being pushed around had belted the bully in the nose as soon as it started, the bully might have learned and the only casualty would be a sore nose. Ditto if the bully had been suspended by the authorities. But if it's let progress to this point a simple suspension won't seem like punishment to them or anyone else; we'll be teaching them that their actions are without consequence.
Adults have choice, they can leave and get a new job, they can call the police and claim they're being criminally harassed. Children have no good options, their only recourse is to parents and teachers, both of whom are trained to believe that the way to cure these problems are to ignore them. They just keep sending the kids right back to school with a little pep talk.
And you'd blame the children for taking the only option left to them and trying to stop the bullying by stopping the bully...
I'm just glad that they took the right way out and shot the bully before shooting themselves. One less social disease for us to clean up later when the bully would become an adult.
Certainly they must be mentally unstable, but when looking at outside influences, what do you say is the likely cause when someone seeks, in their own word, vengance against the bullies... tv perhaps? Maybe NAFTA? Or, perhaps, bullies and harassment?
Besides, I think it's reasonable to wish death upon people who harass you with the intent to make you hate yourself and perhaps commit suicide. Bullies know the effects they can have, they see the news too. If they bully someone, they deserve everything they get. My only regret is that kids wait so long to retaliate that they end up taking out bystanders. A little bully killing isn't necessarily a bad thing; the bully intends to hurt you as much as possible...
If adults don't step in and prevent this - if they give the bully free reign to torment, how can they claim to be suprised when one or the other gets hurt? And very few people are ready to admit their precious little jocks could ever be at fault.
Oh well, once that one gets a few holes, maybe they'll watch what their next kid does a little more carefully.
Your logic is flawed.
I didn't compare drunk driving to harassment. I compared drunk driving influencing accidents to harassment influencing violence (specifically killing).
Harassment could very well be the primary cause - which would just mean that there are no more important influences.
I would tend to think that harassment is the primary cause of *school* shootings. If someone is feeling like killing someone, enough that they often diary their feelings before the event, and/or seek specific targets, it suggests that those people had a large influence. Being that the largest influence a nerd is likely to have with a jock is harassment, it seems to suggest that harassment is the primary cause of the shootings.
The shooter might have been slightly cracked, or otherwise influenced in such a way as to make them kill when others (myself included) responded in lesser ways. That doesn't change the fact that the harassment would be a bigger influence than other, like potentially video games or TV.
Many people drive drunk and survive, yet when someone gets in an accident while drunk we attribute that to the alcohol. This doesn't mean that everyone who drinks will crash, just that drunks are more likely to.
Similarly, not every bullied teen turns killer, but when a teen turns killer we can attribute that partly to the bullying. It's not the only cause, but it's silly to deny that it is a cause.
Dude. Unless you're 200 years old, you weren't involved. Neither was the poster you're responding to. There are many things that *we* didn't do. We didn't keep slaves. We didn't imprison the japanese during ww2. We didn't drives the Indians off their land. We didn't break off from the British. etc.
It's all this sins of the father thing. I *ONLY* take responsibility for *MY* actions. If I wasn't there agreeing that it should be done, and helping it to happen, it's not my fault.
It's like this whole social contract. I didn't agree to it. The only thing keeping me in check is that I happen to believe that some of the laws are just, and that I'll get shot/imprisoned for breaking the rest. (For example, I think copyrights *could* be good, but I didn't agree to this continually extending term bullshit, so imho, copyrights have no more than moral force. That means I'll respect the authors rights to a living, but I'll be damned if some corp bribing a politician is going to dictate how I run my life.)
And in that note, an armed populace is the *ONLY* thing preventing this sort of thing from getting out of hand. Just the memory of the french revolution and many like it, keep the corrupt in check. But if they could completely disarm the people, they'd be acting just insane monarchs committing the worst injustices you can imagine.
There have been plenty of home invasions in Vancouver. Most have been gang related but they could easily go to the wrong house...
I know I'd feel more comfortable in a confrontation if I was armed as well as the assailant... preferably much better.
btw, don't talk about how you're going to lose karma. It's an obvious beg to the moderators.
If someone is committing suicide because they're lonely, or depressed at the loss of a loved one, I don't think it's very likely they'll try to take anyone else out...
But if they're suicidal because of constant humiliation, physical violence, taunting, and general bullying, I think it's fairly likely for them to try to hurt the attacker. If the attacker is making them feel they're ready to die, they'll probably be ready to kill.
I think in every case in the media, the shooter has been bullied. We haven't heard of the popular jock (who did the bullying) going to school and shooting the place up. These are obviously desperate acts by despressed people. If bullying depresses people I think the link it fairly easy to see.
I think you might be right.
I should have spelled it out more...
You buy the CD, to see if it functions as advertised. So far, all we have are speculations that it doesn't work.
If it doesn't work, and they refuse to take it back, you make such a stink that they claim to not know that it does not work.
Then, if they continue to sell it (without a big warning sticker) they'll be misrepresenting the product.
Someone else comes in (unrelated to you), they buy it, and it fails. They come back and complain, the store tells them it's too bad.
Here, they've sold something even though they've known it wasn't what they've advertised, and it wasn't to someone who knew in advance.
So you go to this person and arrange to help them in a civil suit. You can prove (via a hidden tape recording, or witnesses, etc) that you made the staff fully aware that the product was being misrepresented. Your testimony should be enough for a small-claims judge (along with proper documents, etc).
You sue for a small ammount, the cost of the CD, a days wages, and your filing fee. They're out that much, plus the cost of a lawyer for a day, the wage of the manager on trial, the wage of the clerk on trial, and other expenses. Plus the bad publicity.
If you can arrange to get any media attention for it, the future case against any other store in the area would be pretty well guaranteed (how could they not know the CD was defective.)
Hopefully the legal hassles and threats of more to come would cause the stores to not sell the CD, thus sending a really strong message to the RIAA.
If enough people got together, you might even be able to extend this to the RIAA, the stores might back it too, because the RIAA is selling goods that they not only have reason to know are defective, but are defective by design.