I'd be shit-pissed if I pulled jury duty and had to sit in on a case like this. I expect the DirectTV thugs probably expect most of their victims to just pay up and settle out of court, but if there's just hundreds of these cases that end up in court, I'd say that's an awful waste of legal resources. A pox on their corporate asses...
The wording of the article makes it abundantly clear that Tulip is not content with putting a few new C64 products up for sale and finding customers in the retro-computing community on fair business terms.
Tulip will instead put their lawyer muscle to work on shaking down the individual smalltime hobbyist operators of anything and everything commodore 64 related and attempt to collect fees and issue C&D's left and right. Most of those sites and services operate on goodwill alone with minimal budgets, often at a loss.
It usually takes only a stern letter from a DMCA litigation-bot for a c64 site operator to comply and pull down material even if they're related by a coincidence of filenames to the things that triggered the bot. Tulip's lawyers should therefore have a relatively easy time souring the whole thing and destroying the community as we know it, or at least dragging it underground. Unhappy times, indeed.
I can't imagine many members of today's c64 community flocking to join Tulip's "official" community portal. Especially if they succeed in destroying a bunch of the existing portals and taking offline the key emulators and games repositories. Tulip will sooner be known as corporate scum than benevolent saviors.
What can Tulip provide that the fans can't? Great sites like lemon64.com have an immensely rich and vibrant culture with genuine heart. People fondly share memories of when they first played this game or that... the emulators are fine, the games are easy to find and they're so utterly obsolete that no-one would want to spend a penny on them. Besides, most of the companies that made those games in the 1980s, are long gone.
Why are Tulip doing this? The c64 is an obsolete platform. While the games in some cases are appropriate for small handheld screens, and potentially may be of value for the mobile phone and PDA market, there exist far better graphics hardware today and 6501 emulation on PDA chips is generally not a useful option.
So maybe they make a 6501-native handheld computer that plays the old games. So they should sell the damn thing instead of thuggishly deploying lawyer drones. Why would they want to sour up the community of fans that would seem to constitute the very customer base for such hardware?
It doesn't make any sense. Certainly they cannot realistically expect the fans who kept the c64 spirit alive all these years to suddenly begin to pay royalties and voluntarily submit to branding guidelines and and migrate their sites to the domain of some greedy corporate bastards just because they purchased some long-obsolete IP.
There are no money to be made from this market any more than you can draw blood from a stone.
What Tulip is doing is dumb and stupid and nobody will benefit. If Tulip has their way, The c64 will be rebranded and repurposed and soon it'll just be another corporate McPlatform for McLicensing into portable products.
I have a feeling this could be like how many fans felt betrayed when the old golden-age Warner Bros. cartoons was destroyed by the Cartoon Network and Warner Bros. studio stores, merchandising and whoring their characters left and right and milking the 'intellectual property' for every last dime until it was all spent.
Sort of related - I remember in the 1980s when the old cartoons were still relatively obscure and difficult to obtain, how rich and colorful the collectors' communities were. After Ted Turner opened the floodgates and put everything on heavy repeat and altered / censored the cartoons in the process, they began to lose their flavor, they faded away into nothingness.
I hope you realize that by 'spidering' URLs you get in spam, the spammers learn that your email address is valid. Most of those spam URLs have a unique signature tying it to the email it was sent along with.
Soon we'll see all kinds of different neat OLED tech. Smart windows can be transparent, with a lo-rez LCD layer forming solid black backgrounds behind the windows of a transparent OLED display panel. You can imagine embedding this on a mirror or anywhere there is a glass surface, providing full-contrast see-thru windows. Imagine bank tellers and ticket counters of the future -- the display will be right in the middle of the transaction area, with both parties seeing the same image, flipped appropriately on either side. Cool stuff. I want a 50 inch diagonal fishtank that turns into a color television when switched on!
I could agree that -- the fee, 'prize' or whatever -- is mostly irrelevant in non-for-profit matters, but this is plainly obvious a revenue generating for-profit venture. Considering the vast user base of slashdork, there is potential sales volume in the thousands. So the $75 prize plus three units, is not just a bit cheap, it's an insult.
That's not the worst of it. The apparently random, unexplained exclusions of a handful of U.S. states (and the rest of the world) from participation in the contest. It would have been decent of Taco & co. to at least state why they feel so inclined to disregard the vast international community around slashdot. What's wrong with t-shirt designs from England, Austria, Belgium, Sweden?
The contemptous boilerplate legalese bullshit their reptilian lawyer pulled out of his ass, Taco can go cram up HIS ass. So much horseshit for seventy-five fucking bucks? Bah!
This is a neat hack. Of course you should be able to do anything you want and execute any kind of software you like, on hardware you own.
I don't want to buy a device or platform built to fight actively me and prevent me from fully utilizing my purchase.
However, when such hacks become available, I sometimes make compromises... I happily purchase DVD players that can be region hacked. Last year I purchased an Epson printer with those stupid chips on the ink cartridges only after I found a cheap hack kit to reset the ink cartridge chips and a syringe kit with inexpensive refill bottles. Just maybe I'll get an Xbox now.
Fuck the corporations. Fuck the loss-leader products with their true cost offset by grotesuqely overpriced, proprietary consumables. This is what happens on razors and all the game platforms too.
In the 1980s my dad worked as a programmer for a german computer manufacturer, Mannesmann Kienzle GmbH. They made proprietary non-PC terminals with super ergonomics (they had stuff like 100Hz refresh rates on hi-rez eye-friendly paperwhite terminals years before anything like it appeared in the PC world.)
The keyboards they made were particularly cool: The circuit board was sealed and coated and had holes for each key. The circuitry on the board formed spiral coils around each hole, and the key presses sent small rubber-cushioned magnet rods moving through the holes, causing magnetic induction to register the keypresses. No mechanical switches, no exposed contact surfaces. Great reliability, and easy maintenance.
The demos at the shows had the operator flooding the unit with lukewarm coffee while the operator kept on typing (slosh, slosh, slosh!) Cleaning the keyboard required just flushing it with water.
Nowadays I use an old-skool IBM model "M" keyboard scavenged on an auction for a buck or two. I love it very much! I feel my typematic rate going through the roof and I make very few typos while using it. My Dell laptop has a PS/2 port, so I can use it on that when at my desk, but my Compaq unfortunately has only USB. How do you connect a PS/2 keyboard to a USB-only machine?
I bet that getting his machines hauled away by the feds was probably not in the plan. They'll have some certified engineer take a glance at the black boxes and he'll the discover garden variety lead batteries hidden behind the "Flux Capacitor" panel where all the flashing LEDs are mounted. Scam over. He'll probably try again in a few years. Probably not with a DeLorean next time.
Most of these schemes end with the Device mysteriously exploding on the big demo day just about the time the battery woulda run out. (The 'bad wheel bearing' thing on the race track demo seems to coincide with this pattern nicely. I recall one such demo where an onlooker got hurt or killed by the mandatory demo day explosion.
Anyway, it's interesting that he had more than one vehicle. If he was intending to demo them all at the same time, that would have seemed to preclude a plausible demo day explosion unless the whole fucking garage was supposed to blow...
It stands to reason that a genuine free energy invention would be a monumental world-changing discovery. Why tinker on a silly little gadget car in the garage, funded only by petty donations by smalltime individual investors? Think big! Nikola Tesla partnered with Westinghouse and demo'ed his monumental, world-changing Alternating Current system by harnessing the hydro power of the Niagara Falls, powering thousands of homes.
Only a fool throws a dollar after a black box.
Tesla had a system that actually worked, with both theories, engineering drawings and elaborate patent papers to back them up. At no point were Westinghouse and other corporate investors required to just believe his word when he claimed that his system worked. He let anyone visit his lab and play with his machines, none of which were black boxes.
Patents, obnoxious such as they are, provide adequate protection against asset hijacking, the 'big secret' can be out in the open and well known, and you can still be the one who makes all the money from it.
// spam bait with host signature by sonny w. // use freely
// this creates dummy email address with IP // of email harvester, but it is less obvious // than some examples posted earlier.
define( "_SPAM_SIGNATURE","goatse");// custom prefix (for your mail filter) define( "_MAIL_HOST","mydomain.com");// your mail honeypot domain define( "_SPAM_OFFSET",131435);// whatever you like
One study I once read about, of the so-called "out-of-body" experiences had the person doing the studies placing a scrolling LED sign with bright letters facing the ceiling, on top of the partitions between beds in a ward for critical cases where near-deaths and (sometimes) temporary heart stoppages occured with some regularity. The patients were not made aware of the sign's presence, but if they indeed were in a position to view the room from an elevated perspective (anywhere near the ceiling), this sign would be clearly visible and readable.
I shouldn't have to mention this, but naturally, no patients who ever 'came back' mentioned seeing the sign on the 'way up'. It's all bogus.... Most people who have NDE's claim they just fade to black and there's just nothing there. I give such claims much more credibility!
On a related note, from personal observation, it seems to me that the types of people who go on about 'tunnels' and 'angels' and 'bright lights' also tend to collect Precious Moments figurines and watch TV a lot. Coincidence? OR NOT??
Does dogs experience life after death? Do they go to heaven? Does rats? Slugs? Banana flies? Bacteria?
It's all rubbish and hogwash, stemming from the antique and grotesque religious belief that humans are special supernatural beings somehow separate from the continuum of DNA-replicating organic goo which all living things on the planet that is and ever were, are part of. We're merely one rather interesting iteration along one tangent, but go back far enough and all living things have common ancestry.
Some people think we're special only because our brains are 'divine' and unique to all life on earth gifted with 'soul' which gives us reason, empathy, emotions, imagination and creativity.
But if you ever had a pet cat or dog you should know deep down that we have no exclusivity on empathy and emotions. Affection, fear, hatred, jealousy, sadness, happiness.. I've seen all these things in the mammals I've known. I know a simple dog knows such complex concepts as betrayal and pride.
A dog will try to comfort his unhappy master as best he can. He may be dim, but he cares, and he loves you with all his heart. We're nothing special with regard to empathy. (cats are mostly selfish assholes, but that's a different matter)
Dogs and cats are only VERY distant relatives and we can assume that what we call emotions very probably extends to most of mammal kingdom.
Reason? We share reason with higher primates. Look at www.koko.org to see what Koko the sign-speaking gorilla says, thinks and paints. Higher primates, us included, are different from other animals only in that we have LARGER brains which gives us the ability to contemplate larger problems and solve them creatively. Truly, big brains are neat. But are they divine?
Although we have yet to build a self-aware AI with any degree of intellect, we understand the basic building blocks of brains well enough to emulate their function adequately. There's just nothing mysterious about it.
Everything that we are -- our thoughts, our personality, is in the whole of the interaction between our roughly 100 billion neurons along thousands times that number of synaptical pathways. The scale of complexity is almost as staggering as the simplicity of any one part.
We can study any neuron or synapse and perceive its function, predict and build accurate models simulating its reaction to stimulation, and because we find nothing 'magical' and unknowable in the workings of any one studied part of the brain, and because we know that the whole brain is composed of such knowable parts, we can therefore say with absolute fidelity that there's room for no divine magical mumbo jumbo 'soul' business in there, at all.
Where would it be? How would it pull the strings? It would have to somehow affect the ordinary, observable chemical and electrical processes taking place, but no such 'external soul controlling influence' of a neuron or synapse has ever been measure
I work with cutting-edge digital video entertainment systems and have seen a bunch of compression and display technologies. I was not impressed by the Star Wars ep 2 digital theater projection I watched at a theater in Arlington, VA last year.
I watched the show at a distance of about two screen heights, and I could make out pixels and annoying aliasing problems throughout.
The colors were good, the picture was steady, no compression artifacts to speak of, but the resolution was clearly inferior to the 35mm projection I had seen the day before on a comparable screen. The end credits in particular were hard to read and had visible scaling artifacts.
This is clearly unsatisfactory. Will the 'standard' for digital theater projection have significantly higher resolution than what we saw last year? Will the early adopters get burned?
According to the Star Wars website, ep II was shot on a Sony digital movie camera with a resolution of 2.2 megapixels, which is just slightly more than regular HD. I don't even think the theater projection used had full HD resolution. The projection system seemed to have an odd pixel resolution which didn't match that of the movie, which may account for the apparent blur and pixel artifacts.
I'm generally not a fan of the idea of all-digital theaters. Too much control from Hollywood and potential for dirty tricks - in the future, when you see a movie in the theater one day may, your friend who sees it the next day may have a wholly different experience as the picture could be continously 'tweaked' and digitally re-edited to 'reflect' the whims of mass audience and address their concerns. Ick. Revisionism abounds.
If Star Wars ep 4 was released today, Lucas might have launched the picture with Han shooting first, the next day wimping out and deciding Greedo should be shown shooting first. Ya know?
Not to mention the asshats who wants to build 'macrovision' into the theater projection systems foiling would-be camcorder bootleggers; this technology supposedly alters the framerate erratically so that a camcorder will fail to sync up with it. But what will THAT do to the playing experience?
I hope the Imagemagick guys will now relese a new binary with gif support pre-compiled into the win32 version.:)
Yes, I still use GIFs for tiny icons and logo graphics requiring sharp and unsoftened edges. PNGs don't cut it... files typically 25-30% bigger than equivalent GIFs, support is less than 99%, can't reliably use alpha blending anyway. Why bother?
One poster mentioned that on 9/11 the journalists and staff on Airforce One were told EXTRAORDINARILY to switch their phones off so the bogeymen couldn't track Dubya.
(The same Dubya who just spent 20+ minutes after being told about the second tower strike, doing NOTHING, issuing NO ORDERS, lounging on a known, pre-advertised, unprotected location, cheerfully reading a fucking book about goats - all true, look it up. In the forthcoming Dubya-glorifying 'biopic' movie about 9/11 this will be substituted with a scene where immediately upon being whispered in the ear, the fearless, nearly-elected president speaks some befitting gumball cracker corny line and rushes to his personal harrier jump jet guns ablaze.)
(repugs, simpletons, dittoheads mod -1, flamebait)
Anyway, this gave me the impression that normal rules aboard that particular plane is that passengers may yak freely with no restrictions. It makes good sense that the plane avionics and comms are as safe as they can get, but does this not clash with the FCC regulations and concerns among cellular network operators? One cellphone a couple miles up can be 'seen' by a lot of cells. This would seem to potentially cause undue strain on the cell network resources. Are journalists excempt from FCC rules?
Btw, I've flown in a Robinson R22 helicopter on a photo shoot last year. Some dumbass (me) left a live cellphone in a camera bag right behind and to the left of the instrument console. Said cellphone received a (silent) call, and the clicks and ticks you sometimes hear in a radio with a cell nearby, were clearly audible in the intercom headphones, obscuring normal conversation! The pilot didn't like that one bit. It also interfered with the tower radio... this is of course mostly a nuisance, but frankly I like to know that the captain out front can receive his weather reports and tower directions with some fidelity.
I believe that the in-flight cellphone regulations are in place for those two valid reasons. Radio interference and cellular network overloading. It's a somewhat serious problem and I am concerned that so much rest on trust and goodwill of bored passengers increasingly addicted to their cellphones, texting and gaming perpetually. With still more phone/PDA functionality merging, people WILL be switching on their phones in-flight because they have to check their calendars or whatever. Phone-PDAs have no standard unified way of reliably powering down the antenna and radio circuits so that it is safe. At least not so that cabin crew can verify for themselves that the devices are in safe mode. What will happen here?
You'd think all those fans would make for a bunch of noise. Can't help wondering why he placed the audio/video interface ports *above* the display... when you plug anything in there you have to fold the wires back down and around or they'll be dangling down in front obscuring the screen. I'd have settled for one drive for such a device (you need a second drive, hook up something on firewire externally). Fan control shoulda been fully automatic.
Yeah, something like that. The Starfire thing looks interesting, from the still on that page it appers they envision a desktop that also extends horizontally onto the physical desk, which may be somewhat useful, but I think a wireless tablet with a chunk of screen space on it would serve mostly the same purpose and provide a bit more mobility. I don't imagine many people would want a huge monolithic desk with everything locked into one position.
Btw, the movie "Toys" also had some gaming consoles with curving screens. The idea isn't that far out, it's rather obvious, but current CRT and LCD technology doesn't allow it yet. That's why I'm saving big investment in desktop screens until OLED starts to become a big player.
This would allow more monitors to be put side by side forming a giant panoramic screen. One benefit of such screens would be uniform eye-to-screen distance which should greatly reduce eye stress (since you won't have to refocus when looking at a different part of the screen.)
The actual optimal resolution of the screen should be determined by intended viewing distance : Individual pixels would still need to be discernable at a distance of about 3 feet, which makes me think the Panasonic resolution is only slightly under par.
The curving screen technology will almost certainly be available with the advent of OLED screens - perhaps even with semi-flexible, adjustable curvature.
I agree that it is art. Some kind of art. Functionally useless art which in no way affects the performance or capabilities of the hardware inside the elaborately decorated box. Which is why decoration topics such as this shouldn't be posted as an "hardware" item. Can we please have a separate topic for mods?
Germany switched from their native currency to Euro a few years back... you still find vending machines accepting Mark only. Most of these places I've come upon, you just go to cashier and have a few Euros exchanged with a few old obsolete and dinged Mark coins for the machine.
I dunno how big economic impact the problem of counterfeit 20s has in the United States, but it probably doesn't justify the huge investment required for changing all the cash-handling hardware to a new standard. At least not now. But wait a few more years - Ashcroft & BushCo, Inc. will probably do theirs to outlaw anonymous transactions, ie. cash, altogether. The problem with cash being, you can't TRACK what the TERRORISTS are buying, see? If everyone would just use national-ID-registered cash cards, even casual transactions between individuals would by necessity have to go through the system and get reported to the PROPER AUTHORITIES. Fascist tomorrowland! Total Information Awareness!
Oh, come off it. Creationism is bogus! You guys haven't got a single sliver of "evidence" that stands up to examination. Evolution is provable and proven; intelligent design is an absurd notion based on childish, imaginary supernatural explanations for entirely straightforward and ordinary processes which are readily understandible for anyone equipped with a mind uncluttered by the dark shroud of medieval religion. Let's get Science back in schools and let medieval speculation on supernatural imaginary beings relegated to the lesser fiction shelves.
Americans : Ever been away on vacation only to find your mailbox stuffed full of mail? Likely one or two important letters was in that big heaping wad of damp and compressed paper and coupons and shit.
So now you must sit and spend an hour or more sorting through this mess, time wasted on a menial dumb stupid sorting task for which you receive no pay. Is this fair? Is this freedom? From what? It feels like slavery to a dumb system.
At least in some enlightened European countries you can magically block bulk mail delivery using nothing more than a free sticker applied to your mailbox, which the postal service is then obligated to respect. Why don't USPS offer this?
NOBODY watches movies ripped with camcorders; nearly everything good floating around on the net is ripped from a screener, so the whole point of defeating would-be camcorder rippers is moot.
It's still not clear how this picture-degrading flicker technology is going to be applied, but it's probably either something like a) irregular staccato timing of the individual frames - which WILL be annoying AND perceptible, or b) putting infrared light strobes on the screen which WILL be invisible and thus non-perceptible, or c) a combination of both.
Only a) is problematic, because it may be difficult to record on a standard camcorder without lowering the shutterspeed so several frames blur together, making the picture nearly unwatchable. b) is easily fixed with an infrared-blocking filter.
It may be possible to modify some prosumer digital camcorder firmwares so their already variable framerates can be timed to coincide with each 'flicker' of a frame, but that's speculation and will be in the league of clever tech student hacks, and probably not for amateurs. Which leaves only the pros in the game, and they get screener copies anyway, so it's all bullshit for nothing.
None of this matters one whit, except they shouldn't fuck with the picture and degrade it no matter what excuse they come up with. Camcorder rips are utterly insignificant on the bottom line, but the theatrical experience IS.
People still go to the movies and eat overpriced sludge soaked cardboard popcorn and watered-down flat soda inspite of the fact that your couch at home is probably a better seat; your 5.1 amplifier probably has better sound than your local theater, and the DVD would be out in just a few weeks down the line and everybody on broadband or who knows anybody can get the bootleg off the net anyway. However, until HD 1080i DVDs and VOD services becomes commonplace, the theatrical screens still provide the best picture experience. If they fuck with the screens, there's just no reason at all to go to the theater in the end.
I've watched dozens of screener copies; the few movies I bothered to watch all the way to the end I usually end up purchasing on DVD. Only once or twice have I encountered the notorious Asian camcorder rips with Cantonese subtitles -- it's crud, it's an intrinsically worthless product (like most hollywood movies, actually.)
At best, camcorder rips serves as an extended advertisement or trailer for the real product, which the educated would-be consumer can then choose to purchase properly in order to get the whole experience.
Btw, don't let George Lucas fool you - digital theaters ARE shit. The standard spec sets a LOWER resolution than standard High-Def... your home HD set has BETTER resolution than the digital theaters! I was so disappointed when I watched Star Wars Ep II digital in a cineplex in Virginia - yes, the movie sucked, but so did the digital projection.
The colors were fine, but it was all pixelated to hell. The end credits were barely readable, and near-vertical and horizontal lines had clearly visible aliasing problems. I wasn't even near the first rows, I could see this from 2/3rds in the back of the theater. I never thought for a minute they were serious when they said this shit would replace 35mm, but they are. Scary!
The whole point seems to be to destroy movie theaters and make people stay at home watching TV. If there's anything vaguely redeeming at all over this, it may be the possibility of covering live events with a "movie-like" 24fps picture "nearly" as good as 35mm. A little better than 16mm anyway. But they can do that on HD much better, and at 60fps, so what's the big idea with digital theaters?
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be shit-pissed if I pulled jury duty and had to sit in on a case like this. I expect the DirectTV thugs probably expect most of their victims to just pay up and settle out of court, but if there's just hundreds of these cases that end up in court, I'd say that's an awful waste of legal resources. A pox on their corporate asses...
The wording of the article makes it abundantly clear that Tulip is not content with putting a few new C64 products up for sale and finding customers in the retro-computing community on fair business terms.
... the emulators are fine, the games are easy to find and they're so utterly obsolete that no-one would want to spend a penny on them. Besides, most of the companies that made those games in the 1980s, are long gone.
Tulip will instead put their lawyer muscle to work on shaking down the individual smalltime hobbyist operators of anything and everything commodore 64 related and attempt to collect fees and issue C&D's left and right. Most of those sites and services operate on goodwill alone with minimal budgets, often at a loss.
It usually takes only a stern letter from a DMCA litigation-bot for a c64 site operator to comply and pull down material even if they're related by a coincidence of filenames to the things that triggered the bot. Tulip's lawyers should therefore have a relatively easy time souring the whole thing and destroying the community as we know it, or at least dragging it underground. Unhappy times, indeed.
I can't imagine many members of today's c64 community flocking to join Tulip's "official" community portal. Especially if they succeed in destroying a bunch of the existing portals and taking offline the key emulators and games repositories. Tulip will sooner be known as corporate scum than benevolent saviors.
What can Tulip provide that the fans can't? Great sites like lemon64.com have an immensely rich and vibrant culture with genuine heart. People fondly share memories of when they first played this game or that
Why are Tulip doing this? The c64 is an obsolete platform. While the games in some cases are appropriate for small handheld screens, and potentially may be of value for the mobile phone and PDA market, there exist far better graphics hardware today and 6501 emulation on PDA chips is generally not a useful option.
So maybe they make a 6501-native handheld computer that plays the old games. So they should sell the damn thing instead of thuggishly deploying lawyer drones. Why would they want to sour up the community of fans that would seem to constitute the very customer base for such hardware?
It doesn't make any sense. Certainly they cannot realistically expect the fans who kept the c64 spirit alive all these years to suddenly begin to pay royalties and voluntarily submit to branding guidelines and and migrate their sites to the domain of some greedy corporate bastards just because they purchased some long-obsolete IP.
There are no money to be made from this market any more than you can draw blood from a stone.
What Tulip is doing is dumb and stupid and nobody will benefit. If Tulip has their way, The c64 will be rebranded and repurposed and soon it'll just be another corporate McPlatform for McLicensing into portable products.
I have a feeling this could be like how many fans felt betrayed when the old golden-age Warner Bros. cartoons was destroyed by the Cartoon Network and Warner Bros. studio stores, merchandising and whoring their characters left and right and milking the 'intellectual property' for every last dime until it was all spent.
Sort of related - I remember in the 1980s when the old cartoons were still relatively obscure and difficult to obtain, how rich and colorful the collectors' communities were. After Ted Turner opened the floodgates and put everything on heavy repeat and altered / censored the cartoons in the process, they began to lose their flavor, they faded away into nothingness.
I hope you realize that by 'spidering' URLs you get in spam, the spammers learn that your email address is valid. Most of those spam URLs have a unique signature tying it to the email it was sent along with.
http://www.universaldisplay.com/toled.php
Soon we'll see all kinds of different neat OLED tech. Smart windows can be transparent, with a lo-rez LCD layer forming solid black backgrounds behind the windows of a transparent OLED display panel. You can imagine embedding this on a mirror or anywhere there is a glass surface, providing full-contrast see-thru windows. Imagine bank tellers and ticket counters of the future -- the display will be right in the middle of the transaction area, with both parties seeing the same image, flipped appropriately on either side. Cool stuff. I want a 50 inch diagonal fishtank that turns into a color television when switched on!
That's not the worst of it. The apparently random, unexplained exclusions of a handful of U.S. states (and the rest of the world) from participation in the contest. It would have been decent of Taco & co. to at least state why they feel so inclined to disregard the vast international community around slashdot. What's wrong with t-shirt designs from England, Austria, Belgium, Sweden?
The contemptous boilerplate legalese bullshit their reptilian lawyer pulled out of his ass, Taco can go cram up HIS ass. So much horseshit for seventy-five fucking bucks? Bah!
In your face, chairman bill!
This is a neat hack. Of course you should be able to do anything you want and execute any kind of software you like, on hardware you own.
I don't want to buy a device or platform built to fight actively me and prevent me from fully utilizing my purchase.
However, when such hacks become available, I sometimes make compromises... I happily purchase DVD players that can be region hacked. Last year I purchased an Epson printer with those stupid chips on the ink cartridges only after I found a cheap hack kit to reset the ink cartridge chips and a syringe kit with inexpensive refill bottles. Just maybe I'll get an Xbox now.
Fuck the corporations. Fuck the loss-leader products with their true cost offset by grotesuqely overpriced, proprietary consumables. This is what happens on razors and all the game platforms too.
You better get the vector art to go with the copyright.
It started as a 3-color design, but ended up as a 5-color design once I read the happy-fun and absolutely agreeable T&C's. Yay! Lawyers!
In the 1980s my dad worked as a programmer for a german computer manufacturer, Mannesmann Kienzle GmbH. They made proprietary non-PC terminals with super ergonomics (they had stuff like 100Hz refresh rates on hi-rez eye-friendly paperwhite terminals years before anything like it appeared in the PC world.)
The keyboards they made were particularly cool: The circuit board was sealed and coated and had holes for each key. The circuitry on the board formed spiral coils around each hole, and the key presses sent small rubber-cushioned magnet rods moving through the holes, causing magnetic induction to register the keypresses. No mechanical switches, no exposed contact surfaces. Great reliability, and easy maintenance.
The demos at the shows had the operator flooding the unit with lukewarm coffee while the operator kept on typing (slosh, slosh, slosh!) Cleaning the keyboard required just flushing it with water.
Nowadays I use an old-skool IBM model "M" keyboard scavenged on an auction for a buck or two. I love it very much! I feel my typematic rate going through the roof and I make very few typos while using it. My Dell laptop has a PS/2 port, so I can use it on that when at my desk, but my Compaq unfortunately has only USB. How do you connect a PS/2 keyboard to a USB-only machine?
No, it's not.
I bet that getting his machines hauled away by the feds was probably not in the plan. They'll have some certified engineer take a glance at the black boxes and he'll the discover garden variety lead batteries hidden behind the "Flux Capacitor" panel where all the flashing LEDs are mounted. Scam over. He'll probably try again in a few years. Probably not with a DeLorean next time.
Most of these schemes end with the Device mysteriously exploding on the big demo day just about the time the battery woulda run out. (The 'bad wheel bearing' thing on the race track demo seems to coincide with this pattern nicely. I recall one such demo where an onlooker got hurt or killed by the mandatory demo day explosion.
Anyway, it's interesting that he had more than one vehicle. If he was intending to demo them all at the same time, that would have seemed to preclude a plausible demo day explosion unless the whole fucking garage was supposed to blow...
It stands to reason that a genuine free energy invention would be a monumental world-changing discovery. Why tinker on a silly little gadget car in the garage, funded only by petty donations by smalltime individual investors? Think big! Nikola Tesla partnered with Westinghouse and demo'ed his monumental, world-changing Alternating Current system by harnessing the hydro power of the Niagara Falls, powering thousands of homes.
Only a fool throws a dollar after a black box.
Tesla had a system that actually worked, with both theories, engineering drawings and elaborate patent papers to back them up. At no point were Westinghouse and other corporate investors required to just believe his word when he claimed that his system worked. He let anyone visit his lab and play with his machines, none of which were black boxes.
Patents, obnoxious such as they are, provide adequate protection against asset hijacking, the 'big secret' can be out in the open and well known, and you can still be the one who makes all the money from it.
Why not make a laptop with two folding
/brainfart.
panels in front of the main display?
http://www.kobotica.com/inline/p3b.gif
<?
// custom prefix (for your mail filter) // your mail honeypot domain // whatever you like
( [0-9]{1,3})", $IPquad, $result)) // arbitrary offset to foil simple spambot honeypot detection // crappy workaround PHP << leftshift 32bit limitations.
r esult)) .= ($MyIP >> ($i*8)) % 256; .= ".";
// spam bait with host signature by sonny w.
// use freely
// this creates dummy email address with IP
// of email harvester, but it is less obvious
// than some examples posted earlier.
define( "_SPAM_SIGNATURE","goatse");
define( "_MAIL_HOST","mydomain.com");
define( "_SPAM_OFFSET",131435);
function SpamCode($IPquad)
{
if (ereg("([0-9]{1,3})\.([0-9]{1,3})\.([0-9]{1,3})\.
{
$MyIP = _SPAM_OFFSET;
$Multiplier = 1;
for ($i=0;$i<4;$i++)
{
$MyIP += $result[$i+1] * $Multiplier;
$Multiplier *= 256;
}
$MyCode = base_convert($MyIP,10,36);
$Email = _SPAM_SIGNATURE.$MyCode."@"._MAIL_HOST;
return $Email;
}
}
function SpamDecode($Email)
{
if (ereg("^"._SPAM_SIGNATURE."([0-9a-z]+)@",$Email,$
{
$MyIP = base_convert($result[1],36,10) - _SPAM_OFFSET;
$outIP = "";
for ($i=0;$i<4;$i++)
{
$outIP
if ($i<3) $outIP
}
return $outIP;
}
}
$Email = SpamCode($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);
echo ($Email);
// use SpamDecode(email) to decode IP from spam email
?>
One study I once read about, of the so-called "out-of-body" experiences had the person doing the studies placing a scrolling LED sign with bright letters facing the ceiling, on top of the partitions between beds in a ward for critical cases where near-deaths and (sometimes) temporary heart stoppages occured with some regularity. The patients were not made aware of the sign's presence, but if they indeed were in a position to view the room from an elevated perspective (anywhere near the ceiling), this sign would be clearly visible and readable.
I shouldn't have to mention this, but naturally, no patients who ever 'came back' mentioned seeing the sign on the 'way up'. It's all bogus.... Most people who have NDE's claim they just fade to black and there's just nothing there. I give such claims much more credibility!
On a related note, from personal observation, it seems to me that the types of people who go on about 'tunnels' and 'angels' and 'bright lights' also tend to collect Precious Moments figurines and watch TV a lot. Coincidence? OR NOT??
Does dogs experience life after death? Do they go to heaven? Does rats? Slugs? Banana flies? Bacteria?
It's all rubbish and hogwash, stemming from the antique and grotesque religious belief that humans are special supernatural beings somehow separate from the continuum of DNA-replicating organic goo which all living things on the planet that is and ever were, are part of. We're merely one rather interesting iteration along one tangent, but go back far enough and all living things have common ancestry.
Some people think we're special only because our brains are 'divine' and unique to all life on earth gifted with 'soul' which gives us reason, empathy, emotions, imagination and creativity.
But if you ever had a pet cat or dog you should know deep down that we have no exclusivity on empathy and emotions. Affection, fear, hatred, jealousy, sadness, happiness.. I've seen all these things in the mammals I've known. I know a simple dog knows such complex concepts as betrayal and pride.
A dog will try to comfort his unhappy master as best he can. He may be dim, but he cares, and he loves you with all his heart. We're nothing special with regard to empathy. (cats are mostly selfish assholes, but that's a different matter)
Dogs and cats are only VERY distant relatives and we can assume that what we call emotions very probably extends to most of mammal kingdom.
Reason? We share reason with higher primates. Look at www.koko.org to see what Koko the sign-speaking gorilla says, thinks and paints. Higher primates, us included, are different from other animals only in that we have LARGER brains which gives us the ability to contemplate larger problems and solve them creatively. Truly, big brains are neat. But are they divine?
Although we have yet to build a self-aware AI with any degree of intellect, we understand the basic building blocks of brains well enough to emulate their function adequately. There's just nothing mysterious about it.
Everything that we are -- our thoughts, our personality, is in the whole of the interaction between our roughly 100 billion neurons along thousands times that number of synaptical pathways. The scale of complexity is almost as staggering as the simplicity of any one part.
We can study any neuron or synapse and perceive its function, predict and build accurate models simulating its reaction to stimulation, and because we find nothing 'magical' and unknowable in the workings of any one studied part of the brain, and because we know that the whole brain is composed of such knowable parts, we can therefore say with absolute fidelity that there's room for no divine magical mumbo jumbo 'soul' business in there, at all.
Where would it be? How would it pull the strings? It would have to somehow affect the ordinary, observable chemical and electrical processes taking place, but no such 'external soul controlling influence' of a neuron or synapse has ever been measure
I work with cutting-edge digital video entertainment systems and have seen a bunch of compression and display technologies. I was not impressed by the Star Wars ep 2 digital theater projection I watched at a theater in Arlington, VA last year.
I watched the show at a distance of about two screen heights, and I could make out pixels and annoying aliasing problems throughout.
The colors were good, the picture was steady, no compression artifacts to speak of, but the resolution was clearly inferior to the 35mm projection I had seen the day before on a comparable screen. The end credits in particular were hard to read and had visible scaling artifacts.
This is clearly unsatisfactory. Will the 'standard' for digital theater projection have significantly higher resolution than what we saw last year? Will the early adopters get burned?
According to the Star Wars website, ep II was shot on a Sony digital movie camera with a resolution of 2.2 megapixels, which is just slightly more than regular HD. I don't even think the theater projection used had full HD resolution. The projection system seemed to have an odd pixel resolution which didn't match that of the movie, which may account for the apparent blur and pixel artifacts.
I'm generally not a fan of the idea of all-digital theaters. Too much control from Hollywood and potential for dirty tricks - in the future, when you see a movie in the theater one day may, your friend who sees it the next day may have a wholly different experience as the picture could be continously 'tweaked' and digitally re-edited to 'reflect' the whims of mass audience and address their concerns. Ick. Revisionism abounds.
If Star Wars ep 4 was released today, Lucas might have launched the picture with Han shooting first, the next day wimping out and deciding Greedo should be shown shooting first. Ya know?
Not to mention the asshats who wants to build 'macrovision' into the theater projection systems foiling would-be camcorder bootleggers; this technology supposedly alters the framerate erratically so that a camcorder will fail to sync up with it. But what will THAT do to the playing experience?
I hope the Imagemagick guys will now relese a new binary with gif support pre-compiled into the win32 version.
Yes, I still use GIFs for tiny icons and logo graphics requiring sharp and unsoftened edges. PNGs don't cut it
One poster mentioned that on 9/11 the journalists and staff on Airforce One were told EXTRAORDINARILY to switch their phones off so the bogeymen couldn't track Dubya.
(The same Dubya who just spent 20+ minutes after being told about the second tower strike, doing NOTHING, issuing NO ORDERS, lounging on a known, pre-advertised, unprotected location, cheerfully reading a fucking book about goats - all true, look it up. In the forthcoming Dubya-glorifying 'biopic' movie about 9/11 this will be substituted with a scene where immediately upon being whispered in the ear, the fearless, nearly-elected president speaks some befitting gumball cracker corny line and rushes to his personal harrier jump jet guns ablaze.)
(repugs, simpletons, dittoheads mod -1, flamebait)
Anyway, this gave me the impression that normal rules aboard that particular plane is that passengers may yak freely with no restrictions. It makes good sense that the plane avionics and comms are as safe as they can get, but does this not clash with the FCC regulations and concerns among cellular network operators? One cellphone a couple miles up can be 'seen' by a lot of cells. This would seem to potentially cause undue strain on the cell network resources. Are journalists excempt from FCC rules?
Btw, I've flown in a Robinson R22 helicopter on a photo shoot last year. Some dumbass (me) left a live cellphone in a camera bag right behind and to the left of the instrument console. Said cellphone received a (silent) call, and the clicks and ticks you sometimes hear in a radio with a cell nearby, were clearly audible in the intercom headphones, obscuring normal conversation! The pilot didn't like that one bit. It also interfered with the tower radio... this is of course mostly a nuisance, but frankly I like to know that the captain out front can receive his weather reports and tower directions with some fidelity.
I believe that the in-flight cellphone regulations are in place for those two valid reasons. Radio interference and cellular network overloading. It's a somewhat serious problem and I am concerned that so much rest on trust and goodwill of bored passengers increasingly addicted to their cellphones, texting and gaming perpetually. With still more phone/PDA functionality merging, people WILL be switching on their phones in-flight because they have to check their calendars or whatever. Phone-PDAs have no standard unified way of reliably powering down the antenna and radio circuits so that it is safe. At least not so that cabin crew can verify for themselves that the devices are in safe mode. What will happen here?
You'd think all those fans would make for a bunch of noise. Can't help wondering why he placed the audio/video interface ports *above* the display ... when you plug anything in there you have to fold the wires back down and around or they'll be dangling down in front obscuring the screen. I'd have settled for one drive for such a device (you need a second drive, hook up something on firewire externally). Fan control shoulda been fully automatic.
Yeah, something like that. The Starfire thing looks interesting, from the still on that page it appers they envision a desktop that also extends horizontally onto the physical desk, which may be somewhat useful, but I think a wireless tablet with a chunk of screen space on it would serve mostly the same purpose and provide a bit more mobility. I don't imagine many people would want a huge monolithic desk with everything locked into one position.
Btw, the movie "Toys" also had some gaming consoles with curving screens. The idea isn't that far out, it's rather obvious, but current CRT and LCD technology doesn't allow it yet. That's why I'm saving big investment in desktop screens until OLED starts to become a big player.
This would allow more monitors to be put side by side forming a giant panoramic screen. One benefit of such screens would be uniform eye-to-screen distance which should greatly reduce eye stress (since you won't have to refocus when looking at a different part of the screen.)
The actual optimal resolution of the screen should be determined by intended viewing distance : Individual pixels would still need to be discernable at a distance of about 3 feet, which makes me think the Panasonic resolution is only slightly under par.
The curving screen technology will almost certainly be available with the advent of OLED screens - perhaps even with semi-flexible, adjustable curvature.
I agree that it is art. Some kind of art. Functionally useless art which in no way affects the performance or capabilities of the hardware inside the elaborately decorated box. Which is why decoration topics such as this shouldn't be posted as an "hardware" item. Can we please have a separate topic for mods?
Germany switched from their native currency to Euro a few years back... you still find vending machines accepting Mark only. Most of these places I've come upon, you just go to cashier and have a few Euros exchanged with a few old obsolete and dinged Mark coins for the machine.
I dunno how big economic impact the problem of counterfeit 20s has in the United States, but it probably doesn't justify the huge investment required for changing all the cash-handling hardware to a new standard. At least not now. But wait a few more years - Ashcroft & BushCo, Inc. will probably do theirs to outlaw anonymous transactions, ie. cash, altogether. The problem with cash being, you can't TRACK what the TERRORISTS are buying, see? If everyone would just use national-ID-registered cash cards, even casual transactions between individuals would by necessity have to go through the system and get reported to the PROPER AUTHORITIES. Fascist tomorrowland! Total Information Awareness!
Oh, come off it. Creationism is bogus! You guys haven't got a single sliver of "evidence" that stands up to examination. Evolution is provable and proven; intelligent design is an absurd notion based on childish, imaginary supernatural explanations for entirely straightforward and ordinary processes which are readily understandible for anyone equipped with a mind uncluttered by the dark shroud of medieval religion. Let's get Science back in schools and let medieval speculation on supernatural imaginary beings relegated to the lesser fiction shelves.
Americans : Ever been away on vacation only to find your mailbox stuffed full of mail? Likely one or two important letters was in that big heaping wad of damp and compressed paper and coupons and shit.
So now you must sit and spend an hour or more sorting through this mess, time wasted on a menial dumb stupid sorting task for which you receive no pay. Is this fair? Is this freedom? From what? It feels like slavery to a dumb system.
At least in some enlightened European countries you can magically block bulk mail delivery using nothing more than a free sticker applied to your mailbox, which the postal service is then obligated to respect. Why don't USPS offer this?
Peel, apply, press, presto! No more bulk mail!
NOBODY watches movies ripped with camcorders; nearly everything good floating around on the net is ripped from a screener, so the whole point of defeating would-be camcorder rippers is moot.
... your home HD set has BETTER resolution than the digital theaters! I was so disappointed when I watched Star Wars Ep II digital in a cineplex in Virginia - yes, the movie sucked, but so did the digital projection.
It's still not clear how this picture-degrading flicker technology is going to be applied, but it's probably either something like a) irregular staccato timing of the individual frames - which WILL be annoying AND perceptible, or b) putting infrared light strobes on the screen which WILL be invisible and thus non-perceptible, or c) a combination of both.
Only a) is problematic, because it may be difficult to record on a standard camcorder without lowering the shutterspeed so several frames blur together, making the picture nearly unwatchable. b) is easily fixed with an infrared-blocking filter.
It may be possible to modify some prosumer digital camcorder firmwares so their already variable framerates can be timed to coincide with each 'flicker' of a frame, but that's speculation and will be in the league of clever tech student hacks, and probably not for amateurs. Which leaves only the pros in the game, and they get screener copies anyway, so it's all bullshit for nothing.
None of this matters one whit, except they shouldn't fuck with the picture and degrade it no matter what excuse they come up with. Camcorder rips are utterly insignificant on the bottom line, but the theatrical experience IS.
People still go to the movies and eat overpriced sludge soaked cardboard popcorn and watered-down flat soda inspite of the fact that your couch at home is probably a better seat; your 5.1 amplifier probably has better sound than your local theater, and the DVD would be out in just a few weeks down the line and everybody on broadband or who knows anybody can get the bootleg off the net anyway.
However, until HD 1080i DVDs and VOD services becomes commonplace, the theatrical screens still provide the best picture experience. If they fuck with the screens, there's just no reason at all to go to the theater in the end.
I've watched dozens of screener copies; the few movies I bothered to watch all the way to the end I usually end up purchasing on DVD. Only once or twice have I encountered the notorious Asian camcorder rips with Cantonese subtitles -- it's crud, it's an intrinsically worthless product (like most hollywood movies, actually.)
At best, camcorder rips serves as an extended advertisement or trailer for the real product, which the educated would-be consumer can then choose to purchase properly in order to get the whole experience.
Btw, don't let George Lucas fool you - digital theaters ARE shit. The standard spec sets a LOWER resolution than standard High-Def
The colors were fine, but it was all pixelated to hell. The end credits were barely readable, and near-vertical and horizontal lines had clearly visible aliasing problems. I wasn't even near the first rows, I could see this from 2/3rds in the back of the theater. I never thought for a minute they were serious when they said this shit would replace 35mm, but they are. Scary!
The whole point seems to be to destroy movie theaters and make people stay at home watching TV. If there's anything vaguely redeeming at all over this, it may be the possibility of covering live events with a "movie-like" 24fps picture "nearly" as good as 35mm. A little better than 16mm anyway. But they can do that on HD much better, and at 60fps, so what's the big idea with digital theaters?