Isn't it obvious that they're just using that as a counterexample? What the Grokster/Morpheus lawyers are saying is that OF COURSE the ISP's aren't at fault, and that they aren't doing anything the ISP's aren't. I've been arguing this from the very beginning.
Is the US Postal Service at fault when a letterbomb or anthraxed letter gets sent? What's the difference?
I will write this (strictly for the purposes of discussion) from the perspective of a moral agnostic, in that I won't even take into consideration things that some/most people would perceive as evil or morally repugnant. Strictly scientifically speaking:
The creation of an artificial womb would give geneticists a MUCH more powerful tool for study. They would be able (although not under current US law) to perform genetic experiments on embryos and observe them developing into fetuses. The science of gene therapy would be furthered immensely. We could theoretically cure genetic blindness, deafness, ugliness, stupidity, and sterility. We could create evolution. The Apotheosis of Man. A humanist's dream come true.
Also, don't forget that people with genetic disabilities are often sensitive about their condition. Given people's natural feelings toward their offspring (naturally developed or otherwise), I find it hard to believe that many people with genetic disorders would want their children to grow up with the same pain as they did themselves.
IIRC, the depth information given by that technique is not very robust. It might be able to place one object behind or in front of another, but for any kind of precision you'd probably need an aperture speed that would make both images irresolvably blurry.
Our eyes gather most of their depth information by focusing on a particular object, then doing some really cool neural-network trigonometry to measure the inward angle each eye is at to approximate the distance to the object. This could be done with cameras on extremely sensitive servos, but the information is only obtained for a single object, not everything else in the scene.
Here is a very in-depth look at the networking model for StarSeige: Tribes and Tribes2. It is written by Mark Frohnmayer and Tim Gift, who kinda wrote the thing. It goes into great detail about all the things you're going to have to think about, including construction of the stream layer, the perception of real-time play, preemptive client prediction, etc. A must-read if you're thinking about programming this kind of thing.
You might also want to check out GarageGames for some other game development resources.
Re:Won't someone think about the mob?
on
Transparent Concrete
·
· Score: 2, Funny
But then again, "Glass Slippers" sounds so much better than "Concrete Overshoes".
IIRC, keenspot does not pay the comic authors for their content. It benefits the authors only by providing them hosting, with the burden of having Keen's ads, sidebars, etc. So the "business model" of keenspot doesn't financially benefit the authors, and that's why they have to sell t-shirts, ask for donations, etc.
The authors probably do get royalties on the special-offer comic books etc that keen sells.
But this actually sounds like just the shot in the arm Linux needs.
AOL must be going after redhat for some reason, perhaps to get their fingers into the OS market.
Any updates they do to the OS as it stands will be necessarily open-source. They could add new closed-source software, but AOL is sure to develop all the open-source stuff that's already there, make it better etc.
Many linux users (like myself) don't really care what happens to redhat, as long as linux/OSS itself remains strong.
If someone DOES care what happens to redhat, they still have source rights to redhat as it currently stands. Besides there are dozens of other distros, many of which are better than RH anyway.
Corporate/OSS matchups have been doing pretty well lately. Mozilla is going great guns with both netscape employees and random hackers working on it. AOL hardly killed Netscape; many people would argue that they rescued Netscape from being crushed by MS. I think we can expect similar results with RH, and by extension, the rest of linux.
Redhat is NOT some AOL competitor like CompuServ that they're buying out to fend off competition. They want to do something with it, and the entire OSS community stands to benefit.
Why do they bother?
on
Million Man LAN
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Why do they even bother calling it a "Million Man Lan" if they are only going to accept 5,000?
Seems to me they're undercutting themselves.
Well-designed crypto software would allow arbitrarily long keys to be used through runtime user specification or perhaps a #define in the source code. If a well-designed crypto program is compiled with a #define keylength 40, it would have a built-in keylength of 40, probably not run-time specifiable. It would be possible, but not easy to edit the binary to change this value.
But in source code form, it would be trivial to change this value to a higher keylength, like 128 or 1024 or however strong you want. Recompiling would also be trivial.
So my question is, does "only weak encryption software is legal for export" mean that the only exportable software uses =40-bit encryption AND is in binary format? Is open-source crypto completely non-exportable?
Very soon I will be able to travel between these alternate universes, and assassinate all my alternate selves. By doing this, I shall transfer all their energy to my own body. I will be the posessor of godlike speed, strength, and intelligence! It's not murder, I'm just collecting all the excess energy into one container.
I also read somewhere about a PC AOL was building with a quick AIM interface on the faceplate and AOL 7.0 implemented in hardware on the network card. It even has a full 5.1 surround system so you can really know when You've Got Mail.
This was pretty big news last year when the University of Rochester filed the largest patent lawsuit in US history against Pfizer and Searle for infringement of their Cox-2 inhibitor (Celebrex, super-aspirin) patent.
I'm not sure what MS will do with a rights-management OS. If it goes mainstream, will most web content/music/video become rights-managed, rendering everything obsolete except Windows?
MS creates the first complete rights-managed OS.
media creators (record companies, web publishers, movie industry) release everything as rights-managed media.
MS holds the patent on rights magement, so other operating systems are legally unable to do basic things like browse the web and listen to CD's (CSS anyone?)
Since windows only runs on X86 hardware, all other architectures become either curiosities or research tools
New media also can't be played on old cd/dvd players, making forcing customers to either buy expensive (MS-liscensed??) new rights-managed players or stop buying media.
Let this email represent a right to use, distribute, modify, enhance and
otherwise make available in a nonexclusive manner the CP/M technology as
part of the "Unofficial CP/M Web Site" with its maintainers, developers and
community.
I further state that as Chairman and CEO of Lineo, Inc. that I have the
right to do offer such a license.
Lineo and its affiliates, partners and employees make no warranties of any
kind with regards to this technology and its usefulness or lack thereof.
Since Lineo is the previous license holder and here they have effectively released all previous licenses, doesn't this put the CP/M technology in the public domain? I can't see anything that would suggest that any of the Free Software/Open Source licenses should apply, only that the previous ones are gone. Can anyone confirm this?
if that bucket of electronic components was big enough, it probably/could/ run linux!
A tangled mess of transistors for a processor, arrays of caps for the memory (and disk space too, I guess... Ramdisk anyone?), microswitch keyboard, LED text terminal... Yeah, sure. I could do it!
Interesting info Caid. I had underestimated how much storage it takes to run a scientific satellite.
However, the data rate for the satellite is "a dozen computer hard drives" per hour, which I estimated at 100-150 GB/hour, conservatively. That's 1.2-1.8 terabytes per day. 100 GB/day housekeeping/calibration is chump change, esp. considering you could throw some of it out as soon as you decide that nothing is wrong.
NASA has lots of satellite images on the web that are helpful in getting an idea of image size. Unfortunately many of the images themselves are offline due to server renovations until Nov. 27, but there's this one. This is a 13 MB lossless TIFF image of Los Angeles. Pretty poor resolution for spy satellite purposes. But let's say that we can double the resolution and quadruple the file size. This means we could double the resolution four times and the resulting image would be less than a gigabyte. The data capture rate for this satellite would allow for ~100 high-resolution land shots per hour, even factoring in the whole instrumentation/HK dealie.
Like I said before, I know this isn't a spy satellite. If it were, though, it'd make a damn good one!
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying this is being secretly developed as a spy satellite. I also understand the necessity of fine precision in spaceborne environmental study.
All I'm saying is that at some t in the future we might have to take a look at the powers that be during t and wonder if they are using the "largest and most advanced Earth observation satellite ever built" to spy on people.
I also might have misread the article, I still can't tell. Does
Early in 2002 an Ariane 5 rocket will launch the largest and most advanced Earth observation satellite ever built in Europe from the European Spaceport at Kourou in French Guiana.
mean it's the most advanced one ever or just of those built in Europe?
Presumably if there are larger and more advanced ones launched by America/others, it would make more sense to worry about those, unless Europe turns into a police state.
Let's see... a dozen "hard disks" of data per hour might be 100-150 GB of data on an extremely conservative estimate.
This is a LOT of data. More data than (I would think at least) would be useful for environmental monitoring. Especially taking bandwidth into consideration for transmitting all or some of this data back to earth.
I'm sure the designers have scientific uses in mind, but I'm wondering how powerful the spy capabilities of this beast would be... imagine how closely, for example, you could look on a 150 GB jpeg of the earth. (I know this figure doesn't apply to the jpeg images, but it's still the same order of magnitude of data resolution). And it supposedly takes 3 days of such data collection to make a map of the earth, so it's like an 11 terabyte map of the earth. I also wonder who is getting access to the information collected by it!
Interesting question, but I think it needs some clarification. Since the Evil Dead movies (maybe before, but AoD did it for me) I think the term "B-movie' has changed meaning. Whereas "b-movie" used to imply mediocrity, there is now a whole genre of B-movies. It is not contradictory to say "Let's rent a really good B-movie tonight," which means that there exist really good B-movies. Like AoD. Really good B-movies excel at over-the-top humor and plainfaced cheeziness, something that nobody does better than Bruce.
So while the above question got it right to ask him about being typecasted, one should remember that Bruce isn't necessarily typecast into mediocre movies any more than Kevin Costner is typecast into good movies.
-3Suns
~~~
The revolution will be Slashdotted
Not just any art... the next generation of art!
on
Are Videogames Art?
·
· Score: 1
First of all, we have to distingush the concept of art from entertainment. I see art as an expressive medium that allows the artist to convey feelings, emotions and ideas. The better the artist, the more interesting these things are and the better they are conveyed. Entertainment, on the other hand, is a medium who's purpose is to make people happy, and let them have fun. The better the entertainment, the more fun people have.
It is notable that these categories are overlapping but distinct. What is classically thought of as art (paintings, sculptures, etc.) are mostly art and have only a little entertainment value. Good literature almost always has elements of both art and entertainment. Movies are a mixed bag: some art movies, some entertainment movies, some both. Music is the same way.
Video games are historically thought of as entertainment. Pac-man has virtually no artistic elements. Quake doesn't really either. However, there are many games that do have artistic value. Many good RPG's, such as the Ultima series or Fallout, tell artistic stories and convey emotions and ideas. Deus Ex recently revolutionized the FPS genre and gaming as a whole by providing great entertainment and strong artistic qualities seamlessly intertwined, like a good movie or book. I'm sure there are good examples from console gaming as well.
It's important to realize that even though video games are historically an entertainment medium, they completely superset of all other art forms. A game could have an entire novel in it, or a movie playing that you can watch in entirety. The quality of reproduction of these other art forms is only limited to the gaming technology of the time. This fact alone establishes gaming as an art form.
Gaming also provides an entirely new dimension that artistic designers can exploit: interactivity. In no other art form that I can think of can the audience be an integral part of the presentation. Game developers can finally convey emotions from a first-person perspective, making the player feel sorry or triumphant or whatever for his/her own actions. Games are only just starting to scratch the surface of the artistic potential here.
We are starting to see game designers get more and more recognition for their games, especially the artistic ones. Peter Molyneux was personally lauded for the very artisic Black and White. Everyone loves Warren Spector for bringing us Deus Ex, and retroactively for System Shock and Ultima Underworld. I'm sure Richard Garriot's next project will probably bring him the attention he deserves. Game designers are the artists of gaming, and gaming as an art form is about to come into it's own.
If that's you're ticket, you definitely have to play Homeworld. Ender's game was the first thing I thought of when I first loaded up homeworld. It even won Game of the Year a couple years ago.
It's pretty obvious that Microsoft is to lazy and inept to get any use out of the security community. Not only is it correct in principle for security gurus to post exploit concepts, but it is better in practice.
Take (see this coming?) linux for example. The linux/open source community pays attention to proof-of-concept experiments published by the security community. Hence, Linux and linux applications tend to be extremely secure. Security patches for Debian tend to be released only days after the exploit is made public. Apache has maintained its tight security record.
On the other hand, Microsoft security is notoriusly terrible. Outlook express has been the springboard for the last 2^n email worms. Most windows installations can be hacked with the press of a button. IIS is... well, I'm sure you all know about IIS. The common theme here is that every single exploit used against Microsoft products has been well documented and demonstrated by the security community well before they became major security issues. Microsoft ignores the security community until customers start griping about K1dd33z hacking their software. Instead, they whine about how the security community is causing the problem.
The moral of the story? Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, and if you do, don't sue him for biting your nose off!
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't it obvious that they're just using that as a counterexample? What the Grokster/Morpheus lawyers are saying is that OF COURSE the ISP's aren't at fault, and that they aren't doing anything the ISP's aren't. I've been arguing this from the very beginning.
Is the US Postal Service at fault when a letterbomb or anthraxed letter gets sent? What's the difference?
Is anyone up for writing SINE (Sine Is Not an Emulator)?
I will write this (strictly for the purposes of discussion) from the perspective of a moral agnostic, in that I won't even take into consideration things that some/most people would perceive as evil or morally repugnant. Strictly scientifically speaking:
The creation of an artificial womb would give geneticists a MUCH more powerful tool for study. They would be able (although not under current US law) to perform genetic experiments on embryos and observe them developing into fetuses. The science of gene therapy would be furthered immensely. We could theoretically cure genetic blindness, deafness, ugliness, stupidity, and sterility. We could create evolution. The Apotheosis of Man. A humanist's dream come true.
Also, don't forget that people with genetic disabilities are often sensitive about their condition. Given people's natural feelings toward their offspring (naturally developed or otherwise), I find it hard to believe that many people with genetic disorders would want their children to grow up with the same pain as they did themselves.
IIRC, the depth information given by that technique is not very robust. It might be able to place one object behind or in front of another, but for any kind of precision you'd probably need an aperture speed that would make both images irresolvably blurry.
Our eyes gather most of their depth information by focusing on a particular object, then doing some really cool neural-network trigonometry to measure the inward angle each eye is at to approximate the distance to the object. This could be done with cameras on extremely sensitive servos, but the information is only obtained for a single object, not everything else in the scene.
Here is a very in-depth look at the networking model for StarSeige: Tribes and Tribes2. It is written by Mark Frohnmayer and Tim Gift, who kinda wrote the thing. It goes into great detail about all the things you're going to have to think about, including construction of the stream layer, the perception of real-time play, preemptive client prediction, etc. A must-read if you're thinking about programming this kind of thing.
You might also want to check out GarageGames for some other game development resources.
But then again, "Glass Slippers" sounds so much better than "Concrete Overshoes".
IIRC, keenspot does not pay the comic authors for their content. It benefits the authors only by providing them hosting, with the burden of having Keen's ads, sidebars, etc. So the "business model" of keenspot doesn't financially benefit the authors, and that's why they have to sell t-shirts, ask for donations, etc.
The authors probably do get royalties on the special-offer comic books etc that keen sells.
Redhat is NOT some AOL competitor like CompuServ that they're buying out to fend off competition. They want to do something with it, and the entire OSS community stands to benefit.
Why do they even bother calling it a "Million Man Lan" if they are only going to accept 5,000?
Seems to me they're undercutting themselves.
I'm a little hazy on the export laws..
Well-designed crypto software would allow arbitrarily long keys to be used through runtime user specification or perhaps a #define in the source code. If a well-designed crypto program is compiled with a #define keylength 40, it would have a built-in keylength of 40, probably not run-time specifiable. It would be possible, but not easy to edit the binary to change this value.
But in source code form, it would be trivial to change this value to a higher keylength, like 128 or 1024 or however strong you want. Recompiling would also be trivial.
So my question is, does "only weak encryption software is legal for export" mean that the only exportable software uses =40-bit encryption AND is in binary format? Is open-source crypto completely non-exportable?
Instead, how about a fleet of preprogrammed robotic Segways?
Are ICANN and ICAAN interchangable now?
ICANN do no wrong.
Very soon I will be able to travel between these alternate universes, and assassinate all my alternate selves. By doing this, I shall transfer all their energy to my own body. I will be the posessor of godlike speed, strength, and intelligence! It's not murder, I'm just collecting all the excess energy into one container.
I shall be The One!
I also read somewhere about a PC AOL was building with a quick AIM interface on the faceplate and AOL 7.0 implemented in hardware on the network card. It even has a full 5.1 surround system so you can really know when You've Got Mail.
This was pretty big news last year when the University of Rochester filed the largest patent lawsuit in US history against Pfizer and Searle for infringement of their Cox-2 inhibitor (Celebrex, super-aspirin) patent.
Is this what anyone besides MS wants???
Since Lineo is the previous license holder and here they have effectively released all previous licenses, doesn't this put the CP/M technology in the public domain? I can't see anything that would suggest that any of the Free Software/Open Source licenses should apply, only that the previous ones are gone. Can anyone confirm this?
if that bucket of electronic components was big enough, it probably /could/ run linux!
A tangled mess of transistors for a processor, arrays of caps for the memory (and disk space too, I guess... Ramdisk anyone?), microswitch keyboard, LED text terminal... Yeah, sure. I could do it!
Interesting info Caid. I had underestimated how much storage it takes to run a scientific satellite.
However, the data rate for the satellite is "a dozen computer hard drives" per hour, which I estimated at 100-150 GB/hour, conservatively. That's 1.2-1.8 terabytes per day. 100 GB/day housekeeping/calibration is chump change, esp. considering you could throw some of it out as soon as you decide that nothing is wrong.
NASA has lots of satellite images on the web that are helpful in getting an idea of image size. Unfortunately many of the images themselves are offline due to server renovations until Nov. 27, but there's this one. This is a 13 MB lossless TIFF image of Los Angeles. Pretty poor resolution for spy satellite purposes. But let's say that we can double the resolution and quadruple the file size. This means we could double the resolution four times and the resulting image would be less than a gigabyte. The data capture rate for this satellite would allow for ~100 high-resolution land shots per hour, even factoring in the whole instrumentation/HK dealie.
Like I said before, I know this isn't a spy satellite. If it were, though, it'd make a damn good one!
All I'm saying is that at some t in the future we might have to take a look at the powers that be during t and wonder if they are using the "largest and most advanced Earth observation satellite ever built" to spy on people.
I also might have misread the article, I still can't tell. Does
mean it's the most advanced one ever or just of those built in Europe?
Presumably if there are larger and more advanced ones launched by America/others, it would make more sense to worry about those, unless Europe turns into a police state.
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
Let's see... a dozen "hard disks" of data per hour might be 100-150 GB of data on an extremely conservative estimate.
This is a LOT of data. More data than (I would think at least) would be useful for environmental monitoring. Especially taking bandwidth into consideration for transmitting all or some of this data back to earth.
I'm sure the designers have scientific uses in mind, but I'm wondering how powerful the spy capabilities of this beast would be... imagine how closely, for example, you could look on a 150 GB jpeg of the earth. (I know this figure doesn't apply to the jpeg images, but it's still the same order of magnitude of data resolution). And it supposedly takes 3 days of such data collection to make a map of the earth, so it's like an 11 terabyte map of the earth. I also wonder who is getting access to the information collected by it!
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted.
Interesting question, but I think it needs some clarification. Since the Evil Dead movies (maybe before, but AoD did it for me) I think the term "B-movie' has changed meaning. Whereas "b-movie" used to imply mediocrity, there is now a whole genre of B-movies. It is not contradictory to say "Let's rent a really good B-movie tonight," which means that there exist really good B-movies. Like AoD. Really good B-movies excel at over-the-top humor and plainfaced cheeziness, something that nobody does better than Bruce.
So while the above question got it right to ask him about being typecasted, one should remember that Bruce isn't necessarily typecast into mediocre movies any more than Kevin Costner is typecast into good movies.
-3Suns
~~~
The revolution will be Slashdotted
First of all, we have to distingush the concept of art from entertainment. I see art as an expressive medium that allows the artist to convey feelings, emotions and ideas. The better the artist, the more interesting these things are and the better they are conveyed. Entertainment, on the other hand, is a medium who's purpose is to make people happy, and let them have fun. The better the entertainment, the more fun people have.
It is notable that these categories are overlapping but distinct. What is classically thought of as art (paintings, sculptures, etc.) are mostly art and have only a little entertainment value. Good literature almost always has elements of both art and entertainment. Movies are a mixed bag: some art movies, some entertainment movies, some both. Music is the same way.
Video games are historically thought of as entertainment. Pac-man has virtually no artistic elements. Quake doesn't really either. However, there are many games that do have artistic value. Many good RPG's, such as the Ultima series or Fallout, tell artistic stories and convey emotions and ideas. Deus Ex recently revolutionized the FPS genre and gaming as a whole by providing great entertainment and strong artistic qualities seamlessly intertwined, like a good movie or book. I'm sure there are good examples from console gaming as well.
It's important to realize that even though video games are historically an entertainment medium, they completely superset of all other art forms. A game could have an entire novel in it, or a movie playing that you can watch in entirety. The quality of reproduction of these other art forms is only limited to the gaming technology of the time. This fact alone establishes gaming as an art form.
Gaming also provides an entirely new dimension that artistic designers can exploit: interactivity. In no other art form that I can think of can the audience be an integral part of the presentation. Game developers can finally convey emotions from a first-person perspective, making the player feel sorry or triumphant or whatever for his/her own actions. Games are only just starting to scratch the surface of the artistic potential here.
We are starting to see game designers get more and more recognition for their games, especially the artistic ones. Peter Molyneux was personally lauded for the very artisic Black and White. Everyone loves Warren Spector for bringing us Deus Ex, and retroactively for System Shock and Ultima Underworld. I'm sure Richard Garriot's next project will probably bring him the attention he deserves. Game designers are the artists of gaming, and gaming as an art form is about to come into it's own.
-3Suns
The revolution will be slasdotted.
If that's you're ticket, you definitely have to play Homeworld. Ender's game was the first thing I thought of when I first loaded up homeworld. It even won Game of the Year a couple years ago.
It's pretty obvious that Microsoft is to lazy and inept to get any use out of the security community. Not only is it correct in principle for security gurus to post exploit concepts, but it is better in practice.
Take (see this coming?) linux for example. The linux/open source community pays attention to proof-of-concept experiments published by the security community. Hence, Linux and linux applications tend to be extremely secure. Security patches for Debian tend to be released only days after the exploit is made public. Apache has maintained its tight security record.
On the other hand, Microsoft security is notoriusly terrible. Outlook express has been the springboard for the last 2^n email worms. Most windows installations can be hacked with the press of a button. IIS is... well, I'm sure you all know about IIS. The common theme here is that every single exploit used against Microsoft products has been well documented and demonstrated by the security community well before they became major security issues. Microsoft ignores the security community until customers start griping about K1dd33z hacking their software. Instead, they whine about how the security community is causing the problem.
The moral of the story? Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, and if you do, don't sue him for biting your nose off!