One problem with that idea - Tor doesn't keep logs, and
anyone capable of analyzing a captured machine would know
that. Therefore the police took these machines as more
of a petulant "fuck you for exercising your rights and
wanting anonymity" rather than as any plausible form
of evidence.
Yes, we all need to fight to keep our rights eroding
as slowly as possible (but still eroding, make no
mistake - Thus the need for a legislative reboot,
aka "revolution", every few hundred years). But
never forget that those we fight against won't
just smile and merrily tolerate our refusal to become
their willing slaves.
You have a good point, but still miss the core problem - The
web, by virtue of NOT still looking like Gopher, contains
more than just textual content.
The blind can have text read to them automatically. For the
deaf, you can subtitle any spoken soundclips (not automatic,
but at least not too burdensome). Fine so far...
How do you make a Mondarin "accessible" to the blind? How do you
make one of Mozart's string quartets "accessible" to the deaf?
Do hiking oriented websites discriminate against the wheelchair-bound?
Does a garish palette discriminate against the colorblind? Does a
cooking site unfairly tempt the obese?
Before the modern age of liberal pansyism (and I say that not even
remotely as a conservative), such people would simply have died.
Now, our society has VERY graciously, and usually at great expense to
others, allowed them to live. Rubbing that in all our faces by
making them even more of a burden seems a poor way to repay
society's kindness, and certainly not the best way to promote
tolerance... "You have to go out of your way to accomodate my ass if
you want to keep your job, so your tax dollars can keep me alive. Oh,
and smile about it or I'll feel bad."
Some people can do things that others can't. Deal with it - Nothing can
change that, not even watering down all forms of media to nothing more
than subtitled talk-radio so everyone can appreciate it (or not) equally.
Or, put more bluntly - Do you think I should sue the NBA because,
as a 5'10" early-middle-aged white guy, they refuse to hire me?
When your content is DVD-quality, S-Video cable is
plenty sufficient for carrying the signal.
Correction - When you have an NTSC-quality TV, S-Video
can provide as close to an optimal picture as you can
get.
You can't, however, do progressive-scan over Y/C... Meaning
that most newer DVDs will look considerably better
over component (Y/Pb/Pr) or even digital interconects (when
going to a display of sufficient quality, of course).
What I fear is MPAA spin saying "Oh, well we tried to
sell downloadable movies, but no one wanted them. People
would rather pirate instead."
Why? They've already bought draconian anti-fair-use
laws that make the fines for "copyright violation" high enough
to bankrupt most upper middle-class families, along with punishments
for breaking DRM comparable to murder. Even if they go whining
to the government, what more do you fear they'll get?
They really can't get any more, with current technology.
We have effectively "lost" as badly as we can, with only a few
freedom fighters such as DVD Jon as the last holdouts. And the
media cartels have only our growing hatred to show for it.
Honestly, I don't get this web 2.0 "problem" of more
adds = angry community.
Well, let me put it in very simple terms - We found ways to
gather and chat, for free, LONG before "Buzzword 2.0" ever
appeared on the scene. Why should we have to start paying (with
our time) for what we've had all along for free, just because some
Johhny-come-lately media megacorp gave the same-ol a spitshine?
WAKE up... money makes the internet tick.
Wrong.
Those who have money want you to think they
run the internet. The internet, however, exists without
CBS and MSNBC (you could argue it wouldn't have existed
without Ma Bell, but she only owns one of many possible
physical layers that it can use).
YouTube, while not necessarily a viable business model,
serves to prove this point - Copyright violations
aside (though I don't mean to minimize how much they
help), people flock to seeing all the low-quality home-made
content - All the stupid pet tricks, stupid accidents leading
to minor injury, camwhores, accidental news coverage, and
even some of the less pathetic video blogs. NONE of
that depends on having oodles of money. It all comes from
the users, not the distribution method.
Yes, someone has to serve all that content, but without
YouTube, we'd just find it scattered around the 'net,
hosted at a million tiny personal sites rather than one
large aggregation of such content.
But please, don't ever make he mistake of considering
the internet anything like traditional broadcast media,
where only the Big Boys with Big Bucks can ever even hope
to have any control over it. WE currently control the net,
and will continue to do so unless we throw that away for
glass beads and whiskey.
So it's not totally horrible... though I'm sure (and the
article agrees here) that M$ will be quick to fix their fix.
Not a problem. They can have a ball with that - Because by the
time they do, v9 and v10 will remain only as a distant bad memory,
as will everything using v11 up to this point.
And in a few more years, someone will kindly break 11, 12, 13, with a
partial fix for 14. Rinse, wash, repeat.
One day, the backers of DRM will realize that they waste their
money on an arms race that only serves to buy them a few months at
a time, at the expense of pissing off their actual customers with
endless verifications, prohibited uses, and general annoyances.
Until then - "DVD" Jon for global overlord!
Oh, and just for good measure, here.
You can verify the MD5 (4E32DE2AEA26C3250A94EAE3EAC52C17) as good
against the official one. (probably won't last long, so get it
quick).
So let me get this straight: Writing a program that people find
useful and offering it for sale is somehow an evil deed?
Well... When that program solves a problem with a solution
already included with the base OS (ie, just change your
shortcut to "start/low foo.exe") while pretending to do
something more wonderful than sliced bread - Yes, we've entered
the realm of less-than-kosher.
As an aside, I wrote a very similar program back in the Win2k days,
as it didn't support setting process affinity on the command
line. Not to minimize the underlying knowledge required, but
I can assure you that we deal with basically a "toy" program
here - you can do the core task in ten lines of vanilla C, and
my final pretty bells-n-whistles-added version came out to under
50 lines.
So yes, charging people for a toy program, I would consider evil.
Or at least, dishearteningly greedy.
However, I might have to replace my aging Radeon 8500 graphics card.
You really shouldn't need to, unless it doesn't support a high enough
screen resolution. Playback of HD content has nothing to do with 3d
rendering, just a series of 1920x1080 (at 1080p) 2d framebuffer fills.
Granted, you may find that you get a better framerate by having the player
fake the data as textures, but that has more to do with driver optimization
favoring gamers over media playback, than the nature of the data itself.
So the real problem is coming up with CAPTCHAs in real-time with no
permanent (this session ID) correlation made between the image link and
the answer. Then hiring "slave labor" to make this mapping for you will
be completely useless.
Yes and no - That solves the problem of precreated CAPTCHAs, by throwing
CPU time at it, but the FP's complaint doesn't actually involve what
CAPTCHAs solve.
CAPTCHAs, if effective (which a market for human solvers suggests), only
prove that a human has responded. If a human solves it for pay on behalf
of a spammer - The CAPTCHA worked perfectly. Virtually every suggestion
on this topic has missed that key point. Using culturally-dependant
information, or judgements of aesthetics, or awkwardly-phrased audio
clips, or even time-wasting math problems, all still just prove that
a human answered the question.
The real problem here involves the misuse of CAPTCHAs by those
who assume they do something which they don't. They don't weed out
"undesireables". They weed out non-humans. It really doesn't matter
how complex you make them; if a human can solve it, you still
have the same underlying flaw - Namely, that we have a HUMAN enemy in
this battle.
Instead, we need to exploit a human vulnerability - Mortality. We
need to hunt down spammers and kill them, slowly and painfully. We need
to torture their wives and kids in front of them, then string the lot of
'em up in town squares as an example to others. We then need to hunt
down all the companies funding these spammers as a form of advertising
and castrate their boards of directors.
Or better yet, we need to trick them into running P2P nodes and let
them and the RIAA weaken each other to the point that we can easily
eliminate the winner.
he may have even used GEOS to store his data on floppy disks...
or stored all his information on a hard disk or CMD formatted floppy disk
You make the assumption that Austrian police can't obtain similar hardware.
This doesn't involve some bizarre one-off homebrew computer; the C-64 counts
as the single most popular pre-PC computer, with probably tens of thousands
still in use and a still-active user group in most major cities.
Stop saying that the information was already public. It was not.
If your profile said "In a relationship with X" yesterday, and says "Single"
today, then yes, the fact that between yesterday and today you broke up with
X most certainly does count as public information. Sorry you don't
like the idea, but a small temporal separation between two facts doesn't
magically make them incomparable.
This is adding more information which a large number of users
do not want shared.
So, uh... Don't share it.
Wow. Mind-blowing idea, I know, but just don't post information
you don't want known. You want anonymity? STOP SHOUTING THE MIND-NUMBINGLY
BORING DETAILS OF YOUR DAY-TO-DAY LIFE TO THE WHOLE FRICKIN' WORLD!
Apparently these days college doesn't teach people that posting who you
had for breakfast to Facebook or Myspace or even Slashdot amounts to
hiring a billboard painted with the same information.
Well, at least the next generation of politicians aught to really
suck at lying to us.
Yes, and endanger every aircraft, cruise ship, and clueless-SUV-driving-mommy
that uses GPS. And for proof, you need look no further than the occasional
"test" that SA still works conducted every now and then. Have no
doubt whatsoever that the moment a "terrorist" uses (or comes close to
using) a GPS-enabled attack, SA will go back on.
GPS recievers have been able to correct for SA *before* it was turned off.
Key phrase missing - "over time". Yes, SA averages out over the course of 5-15 minutes.
If you stand still (or maintain a fixed course and speed) for that long, you can get a
fairly good idea of your position. The applications most dependant on GPS, however, tend
to need results immediately, and while making course corrections.
Now, DGPS and WAAS also have the effect of cancelling out SA. Key difference, anyone
with a few grand (down to a few hundred these days?) can set up a DGPS beacon. Only
governments can send up SBAS corrections such as WAAS, meaning if Bush decided to turn
SA on tomorrow, he could also turn WAAS off. He couldn't (entirely) do the same
for DGPS. Remind me which one this topic discusses eliminating?
Plus, if the EU operators of the competing Galeleio system don't agree with Napoleon
they don't have to cooperate
True - But Galileo doesn't go live for another four years, and a LOT can happen in the
meantime.
Please, when using terms like "national", make it clear which
nation you're talking about.
The use of "GPS" and "WAAS" does make it clear. The FP did not
say "GLONASS", or "EGNOS", or "GAGAN", or "MSAS", or even the generic
term "SBAS".
The whole world can use GPS, but the US outright owns it and
controls every aspect of its operation, whether the rest of the
world likes it or not. Dubbya could order SA turned back on
tomorrow, and all the foreign users that have come to critically
require reasonably accurate GPS would have no say in the matter
whatsoever.
Poster is right-on. Attacking the way the voting was done when you don't like the result is just jive and sour grapes.
Everyone at my house just took a vote - We unanimously voted that BeeBeard should
send us all his money. And we don't want to hear about sour grapes, like "too few
people voted to have any meaning" or "you didn't consider my input first".;-)
The rest, I agree with. These guys have taken to arguing semantics, not a good sign
for their future. However, I don't think most of us need to worry, because no one
cares what they decide. Consider the definition of a "constellation" - Most of us
consider things like the Big Dipper or Orion as constellations; astronomers call those
"Asterisms" and refer to large nondescript (except by coordinates) parallelograms of
sky as "true" constellations.
...If you ignore that they live 3-10x longer than incandescents.
Not to mention that you save more than the purchase
price in electricity over their lifetime.
are a bit dimmer than their stated wattage equivalent standard bulbs
So buy one rated a bit higher than what you replace, and "only" have 1/3rd
rather than 1/4th the electricity usage...
take a bit of time to warm
Try a new one. I have nothing but CF bulbs in my house, and not a
single one has that annoying fluorescent delay to turn on... With one
exception - When they start doing that, you know you have
only a few months left (how amusing - roughly the lifespan of an
incandescent) before you'll need to replace it, and can prepare
accordingly.
don't have quite the same color temperature as standard bulbs
...Which in turn don't have the same spectrum as the sun, making that
argument a bit of a red herring, IMO.
sometimes don't fit under (e.g.) ceiling fan light domes,
especially the 100W equivalent models
I'll agree with you 100% on that, but point out that if you
know you have a small dome to put a bulb in, you can
get smaller ones that will fit. I have two in my house, and
had no trouble finding CFs that fit. But yes, I had to pay
about $0.50 more to get a suitable bulb.
I love CFLs and have replaced every single bulb in my house
with one, but I can imagine quite a few people resisting the
idea based on the list above.
Agreed. My parents use pretty much those same arguments, to
justify their 150-watt ceiling-mounted halogen lighting. Then
they complain about having such a high electric bill.
To each their own, I suppose. But the cost of electricity
will keep rising, and the cost of CFs will keep falling.
Or was the CTO shoved onto her proverbial sword as public sacrifice to blow over the controversy?
?
No no no! You clearly don't understand the business world, grasshopper...
She chose to "spend more time with her family", totally unrelated (in a
golden-parachute-deflating sense) to the leak. No doubt the evil actions by her
underlings, done entirely without her knowledge, made her job just too
stressful to keep putting in those gruelling 10 hour workweeks for a paltry seven-figure
salary.
Tsk! Did you even read the press releases? How can you remain skeptical in the
face of such incontrovertible proof as the noble and cherished Press Release?
When somebody has a problem that they want me to fix, my mere presence
and their attempt to repeat the problem makes it go away.
This should have an "insightful" mod, not "funny"... The same thing happens to
me constantly!
Personally, I suspect people with problems in this category have done something
they knew they shouldn't, and as they step me through how they caused the original
problem, they "censor" the known-bad steps out.
Or, perhaps the electron-faeries have just grown scared enough of me over
the years that they don't dare get uppity in my !vo237g@#$(O
*G5*2_%nvv~j1124^^^ws _afsd23
NO CARRIER
These products are knowingly removing DRM from an original tape.
I disagree with that premise.
The product in question removes unnecessary noise from an
analog signal for the purpose of a higher quality (in the
literal SNR sense) digital conversion and resultingly
better compression ratio.
The copy protection mechanism in question just happens to
look remarkably like useless noise in the original signal,
thus it gets stripped out.
The results suggest that the reliance of web users on search engines is actually suppressing the impact of popularity.
When I first read this summary, I thought, "WTF?".
So I read the article. And re-read the summary. And re-read the article.
And I think I finally "get" it.
Let's say you run a "popular" site like the BBC news. You get a hell of a lot
of traffic, and people tend to go directly to your site rather than via a link.
Alternately, you get a lot of links that only a small percent of people seeing
them follow.
Now compare that with an unknown site (most personal or academic webpages,
for example). They get very few visitors, but most of them come from
search engines.
So what does this tell us?
Almost nothing we didn't already know - Search engines DO indeed
negate the impact of popularity, because popularity has little to do with
relevance, while search engines generally try to maximize relevance.
This I consider a "good" thing. When searching for info on ripping a DVD
using the latest copy protection scheme, I don't care if the latest pop
idol calls ripping "totally not cool". I want methods, programs, and
real life examples that might only have gotten a few dozen hits ever.
I guess it would be helpful to know what modifications you're complaining about?
I thought s/he made it clear enough - Any of them. When first installing any version
of Windows, you have to agree to the EULA. Why should the terms of using the software change
for a frickin' patch to repair their bugs?
Spoken like someone who has never written software of any consequence. All software has
bugs. Do you consider every piece of software you own to be defective?
I've written in the gamut from firmware for bill accepters, to thinclient frontend code
that runs on one of the world's major lotto machine vendor's hardware. Some might say
that counts as "of consequence". And yes, all software has bugs.
The difference between me and Microsoft, I don't have the arrogance to say the
bearer of my paycheck has to renegotiate every time someone finds a bug. In some
markets, they call that "extortion". "Gee, really awful that your bill accepter
sees the new $5 bills as $100s... Someone should patch that for you ASAP! I'd do
it, but I already know what a nightmare the code looks like - But if you toss a
new house my way, I suppose I could suffer throught it. Say, could you set me up
with that new VP's cute daughter?".
OTOH, Microsoft's biggest problem here doesn't even come from the original product...
They actually have the arrogance to use their "fixes" to beta-test their next-gen
products on live systems in the wild. Consider just how different a fully updated
2000 looked from XP when XP first came out - Practically identical, I didn't even
bother upgrading until my 2k box needed reinstallation (and even then, after XP SP2,
it still looks and feels almost the same). And the most recent, we have.NET3 for XP, - Which will differ how from WinFX for Vista?
Cute idea, but I still need to sit down with my customers
next month and that means flying into LA.
No, you don't.
And you would start learning how much you don't if the flight cost
as much as buying a new car and driving it to LA, with the
added bonus of a strip-n'-cavity search to make sure you don't have
a deadly sharpened peanut-shell anywhere on (or in) your person.
You need to talk with your customers. If you work in some
form of sales, you need to send them samples to play with to
illustrate your conversation. Yes, I realize many people rely
heavily on their body-language to make a hard sell, but if the
product doesn't sell itself, you shouldn't push it in the
first place.
Of course, now you'll tell me you work as a crack neurosurgeon,
and fly around the world to save the lives of 8YO orphans with
complicated brain tumors...;-)
And the global manufacturing economy? It's not powered by planes.
It's powered by really big boats. And until workers in Toledo cost roughly
the same as workers in Thailand, the price of shipping will be worth it.
I agree, but the TSA has created a new hidden "cost" - If international
commerce and travel costs us our freedoms even while at home, then thankyouverymuch
but I'll pay the slight premium it costs to buy local organic produce over
slave-labor-powered industrial-ag veggies from someplace I can't even find
on a map.
I hate to risk my karma after FINALLY restoring it to neutral
Uhhh... You don't have a 3-digit UID or anything cool like that, so
why not just make a new account, rather than try to save the karma
of one you hosed (for whatever reason - inexperience, too much
posting-while-drunk, insulting Steve Jobs, etc)?
Can they really celebrate...
on
The Future of Flash
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
A decade of a product they just recently purchased?
Macromedia made flash ubiquitous on the web, like it or not.
Then Adobe-come-lately appears on the scene, and we start getting
"flash bugs"; every single site requests local storage; Flash
causes more browser crashes than ever...
Sorry, Adobe, but you don't get the credit here. The profits, yes,
but no Kudos for you!
How can you index a site where 90% of the words are one or 2 meaningless letters?
You mean you've never used 'Google Translate"? Apparently this represents a kind of new
acid-test for them, an attempt to make a language we'll call "Teenglish" searchable in
plain English.
More seriously, I wonder why Google would pay for this at all. Others have mentioned
the value of advertising, but that only happens if people do a search rather than go directly
to their target page. And Google doesn't need to do anything for the "right" to search
MySpace, they can "just do it". That's how Google works. I can find crap on Google I wrote
probably a decade ago, yet they've never signed an exclusive deal with me...
Slashdot Mirror
You can publicize that you don't keep logs.
One problem with that idea - Tor doesn't keep logs, and anyone capable of analyzing a captured machine would know that. Therefore the police took these machines as more of a petulant "fuck you for exercising your rights and wanting anonymity" rather than as any plausible form of evidence.
Yes, we all need to fight to keep our rights eroding as slowly as possible (but still eroding, make no mistake - Thus the need for a legislative reboot, aka "revolution", every few hundred years). But never forget that those we fight against won't just smile and merrily tolerate our refusal to become their willing slaves.
How is the web an inherently visual medium?
You have a good point, but still miss the core problem - The web, by virtue of NOT still looking like Gopher, contains more than just textual content.
The blind can have text read to them automatically. For the deaf, you can subtitle any spoken soundclips (not automatic, but at least not too burdensome). Fine so far...
How do you make a Mondarin "accessible" to the blind? How do you make one of Mozart's string quartets "accessible" to the deaf? Do hiking oriented websites discriminate against the wheelchair-bound? Does a garish palette discriminate against the colorblind? Does a cooking site unfairly tempt the obese?
Before the modern age of liberal pansyism (and I say that not even remotely as a conservative), such people would simply have died. Now, our society has VERY graciously, and usually at great expense to others, allowed them to live. Rubbing that in all our faces by making them even more of a burden seems a poor way to repay society's kindness, and certainly not the best way to promote tolerance... "You have to go out of your way to accomodate my ass if you want to keep your job, so your tax dollars can keep me alive. Oh, and smile about it or I'll feel bad."
Some people can do things that others can't. Deal with it - Nothing can change that, not even watering down all forms of media to nothing more than subtitled talk-radio so everyone can appreciate it (or not) equally.
Or, put more bluntly - Do you think I should sue the NBA because, as a 5'10" early-middle-aged white guy, they refuse to hire me?
When your content is DVD-quality, S-Video cable is plenty sufficient for carrying the signal.
Correction - When you have an NTSC-quality TV, S-Video can provide as close to an optimal picture as you can get.
You can't, however, do progressive-scan over Y/C... Meaning that most newer DVDs will look considerably better over component (Y/Pb/Pr) or even digital interconects (when going to a display of sufficient quality, of course).
What I fear is MPAA spin saying "Oh, well we tried to sell downloadable movies, but no one wanted them. People would rather pirate instead."
Why? They've already bought draconian anti-fair-use laws that make the fines for "copyright violation" high enough to bankrupt most upper middle-class families, along with punishments for breaking DRM comparable to murder. Even if they go whining to the government, what more do you fear they'll get?
They really can't get any more, with current technology. We have effectively "lost" as badly as we can, with only a few freedom fighters such as DVD Jon as the last holdouts. And the media cartels have only our growing hatred to show for it.
Honestly, I don't get this web 2.0 "problem" of more adds = angry community.
Well, let me put it in very simple terms - We found ways to gather and chat, for free, LONG before "Buzzword 2.0" ever appeared on the scene. Why should we have to start paying (with our time) for what we've had all along for free, just because some Johhny-come-lately media megacorp gave the same-ol a spitshine?
WAKE up... money makes the internet tick.
Wrong.
Those who have money want you to think they run the internet. The internet, however, exists without CBS and MSNBC (you could argue it wouldn't have existed without Ma Bell, but she only owns one of many possible physical layers that it can use).
YouTube, while not necessarily a viable business model, serves to prove this point - Copyright violations aside (though I don't mean to minimize how much they help), people flock to seeing all the low-quality home-made content - All the stupid pet tricks, stupid accidents leading to minor injury, camwhores, accidental news coverage, and even some of the less pathetic video blogs. NONE of that depends on having oodles of money. It all comes from the users, not the distribution method.
Yes, someone has to serve all that content, but without YouTube, we'd just find it scattered around the 'net, hosted at a million tiny personal sites rather than one large aggregation of such content.
But please, don't ever make he mistake of considering the internet anything like traditional broadcast media, where only the Big Boys with Big Bucks can ever even hope to have any control over it. WE currently control the net, and will continue to do so unless we throw that away for glass beads and whiskey.
So it's not totally horrible... though I'm sure (and the article agrees here) that M$ will be quick to fix their fix.
Not a problem. They can have a ball with that - Because by the time they do, v9 and v10 will remain only as a distant bad memory, as will everything using v11 up to this point.
And in a few more years, someone will kindly break 11, 12, 13, with a partial fix for 14. Rinse, wash, repeat.
One day, the backers of DRM will realize that they waste their money on an arms race that only serves to buy them a few months at a time, at the expense of pissing off their actual customers with endless verifications, prohibited uses, and general annoyances. Until then - "DVD" Jon for global overlord!
Oh, and just for good measure, here. You can verify the MD5 (4E32DE2AEA26C3250A94EAE3EAC52C17) as good against the official one. (probably won't last long, so get it quick).
So let me get this straight: Writing a program that people find useful and offering it for sale is somehow an evil deed?
/low foo.exe") while pretending to do
something more wonderful than sliced bread - Yes, we've entered
the realm of less-than-kosher.
Well... When that program solves a problem with a solution already included with the base OS (ie, just change your shortcut to "start
As an aside, I wrote a very similar program back in the Win2k days, as it didn't support setting process affinity on the command line. Not to minimize the underlying knowledge required, but I can assure you that we deal with basically a "toy" program here - you can do the core task in ten lines of vanilla C, and my final pretty bells-n-whistles-added version came out to under 50 lines.
So yes, charging people for a toy program, I would consider evil. Or at least, dishearteningly greedy.
However, I might have to replace my aging Radeon 8500 graphics card.
You really shouldn't need to, unless it doesn't support a high enough screen resolution. Playback of HD content has nothing to do with 3d rendering, just a series of 1920x1080 (at 1080p) 2d framebuffer fills.
Granted, you may find that you get a better framerate by having the player fake the data as textures, but that has more to do with driver optimization favoring gamers over media playback, than the nature of the data itself.
So the real problem is coming up with CAPTCHAs in real-time with no permanent (this session ID) correlation made between the image link and the answer. Then hiring "slave labor" to make this mapping for you will be completely useless.
Yes and no - That solves the problem of precreated CAPTCHAs, by throwing CPU time at it, but the FP's complaint doesn't actually involve what CAPTCHAs solve.
CAPTCHAs, if effective (which a market for human solvers suggests), only prove that a human has responded. If a human solves it for pay on behalf of a spammer - The CAPTCHA worked perfectly. Virtually every suggestion on this topic has missed that key point. Using culturally-dependant information, or judgements of aesthetics, or awkwardly-phrased audio clips, or even time-wasting math problems, all still just prove that a human answered the question.
The real problem here involves the misuse of CAPTCHAs by those who assume they do something which they don't. They don't weed out "undesireables". They weed out non-humans. It really doesn't matter how complex you make them; if a human can solve it, you still have the same underlying flaw - Namely, that we have a HUMAN enemy in this battle.
Instead, we need to exploit a human vulnerability - Mortality. We need to hunt down spammers and kill them, slowly and painfully. We need to torture their wives and kids in front of them, then string the lot of 'em up in town squares as an example to others. We then need to hunt down all the companies funding these spammers as a form of advertising and castrate their boards of directors.
Or better yet, we need to trick them into running P2P nodes and let them and the RIAA weaken each other to the point that we can easily eliminate the winner.
For one, the Commodore 64 uses PETSCII and not standard ASCII.
You can map PETSCII to Unicode without too much trouble.
he may have even used GEOS to store his data on floppy disks...
or stored all his information on a hard disk or CMD formatted floppy disk
You make the assumption that Austrian police can't obtain similar hardware. This doesn't involve some bizarre one-off homebrew computer; the C-64 counts as the single most popular pre-PC computer, with probably tens of thousands still in use and a still-active user group in most major cities.
Stop saying that the information was already public. It was not.
If your profile said "In a relationship with X" yesterday, and says "Single" today, then yes, the fact that between yesterday and today you broke up with X most certainly does count as public information. Sorry you don't like the idea, but a small temporal separation between two facts doesn't magically make them incomparable.
This is adding more information which a large number of users do not want shared.
So, uh... Don't share it.
Wow. Mind-blowing idea, I know, but just don't post information you don't want known. You want anonymity? STOP SHOUTING THE MIND-NUMBINGLY BORING DETAILS OF YOUR DAY-TO-DAY LIFE TO THE WHOLE FRICKIN' WORLD! Apparently these days college doesn't teach people that posting who you had for breakfast to Facebook or Myspace or even Slashdot amounts to hiring a billboard painted with the same information.
Well, at least the next generation of politicians aught to really suck at lying to us.
And endanger every flying aircraft using GPS?
Yes, and endanger every aircraft, cruise ship, and clueless-SUV-driving-mommy that uses GPS. And for proof, you need look no further than the occasional "test" that SA still works conducted every now and then. Have no doubt whatsoever that the moment a "terrorist" uses (or comes close to using) a GPS-enabled attack, SA will go back on.
GPS recievers have been able to correct for SA *before* it was turned off.
Key phrase missing - "over time". Yes, SA averages out over the course of 5-15 minutes. If you stand still (or maintain a fixed course and speed) for that long, you can get a fairly good idea of your position. The applications most dependant on GPS, however, tend to need results immediately, and while making course corrections.
Now, DGPS and WAAS also have the effect of cancelling out SA. Key difference, anyone with a few grand (down to a few hundred these days?) can set up a DGPS beacon. Only governments can send up SBAS corrections such as WAAS, meaning if Bush decided to turn SA on tomorrow, he could also turn WAAS off. He couldn't (entirely) do the same for DGPS. Remind me which one this topic discusses eliminating?
Plus, if the EU operators of the competing Galeleio system don't agree with Napoleon they don't have to cooperate
True - But Galileo doesn't go live for another four years, and a LOT can happen in the meantime.
Please, when using terms like "national", make it clear which nation you're talking about.
The use of "GPS" and "WAAS" does make it clear. The FP did not say "GLONASS", or "EGNOS", or "GAGAN", or "MSAS", or even the generic term "SBAS".
The whole world can use GPS, but the US outright owns it and controls every aspect of its operation, whether the rest of the world likes it or not. Dubbya could order SA turned back on tomorrow, and all the foreign users that have come to critically require reasonably accurate GPS would have no say in the matter whatsoever.
Poster is right-on. Attacking the way the voting was done when you don't like the result is just jive and sour grapes.
;-)
Everyone at my house just took a vote - We unanimously voted that BeeBeard should send us all his money. And we don't want to hear about sour grapes, like "too few people voted to have any meaning" or "you didn't consider my input first".
The rest, I agree with. These guys have taken to arguing semantics, not a good sign for their future. However, I don't think most of us need to worry, because no one cares what they decide. Consider the definition of a "constellation" - Most of us consider things like the Big Dipper or Orion as constellations; astronomers call those "Asterisms" and refer to large nondescript (except by coordinates) parallelograms of sky as "true" constellations.
are 3x-10x the cost of an ordinary light bulb
...If you ignore that they live 3-10x longer than incandescents.
Not to mention that you save more than the purchase
price in electricity over their lifetime.
...Which in turn don't have the same spectrum as the sun, making that
argument a bit of a red herring, IMO.
are a bit dimmer than their stated wattage equivalent standard bulbs
So buy one rated a bit higher than what you replace, and "only" have 1/3rd rather than 1/4th the electricity usage...
take a bit of time to warm
Try a new one. I have nothing but CF bulbs in my house, and not a single one has that annoying fluorescent delay to turn on... With one exception - When they start doing that, you know you have only a few months left (how amusing - roughly the lifespan of an incandescent) before you'll need to replace it, and can prepare accordingly.
don't have quite the same color temperature as standard bulbs
sometimes don't fit under (e.g.) ceiling fan light domes, especially the 100W equivalent models
I'll agree with you 100% on that, but point out that if you know you have a small dome to put a bulb in, you can get smaller ones that will fit. I have two in my house, and had no trouble finding CFs that fit. But yes, I had to pay about $0.50 more to get a suitable bulb.
I love CFLs and have replaced every single bulb in my house with one, but I can imagine quite a few people resisting the idea based on the list above.
Agreed. My parents use pretty much those same arguments, to justify their 150-watt ceiling-mounted halogen lighting. Then they complain about having such a high electric bill.
To each their own, I suppose. But the cost of electricity will keep rising, and the cost of CFs will keep falling.
apathy towards waking up at a set time
;-)
I've never heard that one as a side effect of antidepressants... Interesting!
And, oddly enough, I have that all the time. I guess I just need to take depressants* to make it easier to wake up on time.
* Yes, I realize depressants do not do the opposite of antidepressants, no need to correct me.
Or was the CTO shoved onto her proverbial sword as public sacrifice to blow over the controversy?
? No no no! You clearly don't understand the business world, grasshopper...
She chose to "spend more time with her family", totally unrelated (in a golden-parachute-deflating sense) to the leak. No doubt the evil actions by her underlings, done entirely without her knowledge, made her job just too stressful to keep putting in those gruelling 10 hour workweeks for a paltry seven-figure salary.
Tsk! Did you even read the press releases? How can you remain skeptical in the face of such incontrovertible proof as the noble and cherished Press Release?
When somebody has a problem that they want me to fix, my mere presence and their attempt to repeat the problem makes it go away.
This should have an "insightful" mod, not "funny"... The same thing happens to me constantly!
Personally, I suspect people with problems in this category have done something they knew they shouldn't, and as they step me through how they caused the original problem, they "censor" the known-bad steps out.
Or, perhaps the electron-faeries have just grown scared enough of me over the years that they don't dare get uppity in my !vo237g@#$(O
*G5*2_%nvv~j1124^^^ws _afsd23
NO CARRIER
These products are knowingly removing DRM from an original tape.
I disagree with that premise.
The product in question removes unnecessary noise from an analog signal for the purpose of a higher quality (in the literal SNR sense) digital conversion and resultingly better compression ratio.
The copy protection mechanism in question just happens to look remarkably like useless noise in the original signal, thus it gets stripped out.
The results suggest that the reliance of web users on search engines is actually suppressing the impact of popularity.
When I first read this summary, I thought, "WTF?". So I read the article. And re-read the summary. And re-read the article. And I think I finally "get" it.
Let's say you run a "popular" site like the BBC news. You get a hell of a lot of traffic, and people tend to go directly to your site rather than via a link. Alternately, you get a lot of links that only a small percent of people seeing them follow.
Now compare that with an unknown site (most personal or academic webpages, for example). They get very few visitors, but most of them come from search engines.
So what does this tell us?
Almost nothing we didn't already know - Search engines DO indeed negate the impact of popularity, because popularity has little to do with relevance, while search engines generally try to maximize relevance.
This I consider a "good" thing. When searching for info on ripping a DVD using the latest copy protection scheme, I don't care if the latest pop idol calls ripping "totally not cool". I want methods, programs, and real life examples that might only have gotten a few dozen hits ever.
I guess it would be helpful to know what modifications you're complaining about?
.NET3 for XP, - Which will differ how from WinFX for Vista?
I thought s/he made it clear enough - Any of them. When first installing any version of Windows, you have to agree to the EULA. Why should the terms of using the software change for a frickin' patch to repair their bugs?
Spoken like someone who has never written software of any consequence. All software has bugs. Do you consider every piece of software you own to be defective?
I've written in the gamut from firmware for bill accepters, to thinclient frontend code that runs on one of the world's major lotto machine vendor's hardware. Some might say that counts as "of consequence". And yes, all software has bugs.
The difference between me and Microsoft, I don't have the arrogance to say the bearer of my paycheck has to renegotiate every time someone finds a bug. In some markets, they call that "extortion". "Gee, really awful that your bill accepter sees the new $5 bills as $100s... Someone should patch that for you ASAP! I'd do it, but I already know what a nightmare the code looks like - But if you toss a new house my way, I suppose I could suffer throught it. Say, could you set me up with that new VP's cute daughter?".
OTOH, Microsoft's biggest problem here doesn't even come from the original product... They actually have the arrogance to use their "fixes" to beta-test their next-gen products on live systems in the wild. Consider just how different a fully updated 2000 looked from XP when XP first came out - Practically identical, I didn't even bother upgrading until my 2k box needed reinstallation (and even then, after XP SP2, it still looks and feels almost the same). And the most recent, we have
Cute idea, but I still need to sit down with my customers next month and that means flying into LA.
;-)
No, you don't.
And you would start learning how much you don't if the flight cost as much as buying a new car and driving it to LA, with the added bonus of a strip-n'-cavity search to make sure you don't have a deadly sharpened peanut-shell anywhere on (or in) your person.
You need to talk with your customers. If you work in some form of sales, you need to send them samples to play with to illustrate your conversation. Yes, I realize many people rely heavily on their body-language to make a hard sell, but if the product doesn't sell itself, you shouldn't push it in the first place.
Of course, now you'll tell me you work as a crack neurosurgeon, and fly around the world to save the lives of 8YO orphans with complicated brain tumors...
And the global manufacturing economy? It's not powered by planes. It's powered by really big boats. And until workers in Toledo cost roughly the same as workers in Thailand, the price of shipping will be worth it.
I agree, but the TSA has created a new hidden "cost" - If international commerce and travel costs us our freedoms even while at home, then thankyouverymuch but I'll pay the slight premium it costs to buy local organic produce over slave-labor-powered industrial-ag veggies from someplace I can't even find on a map.
I hate to risk my karma after FINALLY restoring it to neutral
Uhhh... You don't have a 3-digit UID or anything cool like that, so why not just make a new account, rather than try to save the karma of one you hosed (for whatever reason - inexperience, too much posting-while-drunk, insulting Steve Jobs, etc)?
A decade of a product they just recently purchased?
Macromedia made flash ubiquitous on the web, like it or not.
Then Adobe-come-lately appears on the scene, and we start getting "flash bugs"; every single site requests local storage; Flash causes more browser crashes than ever...
Sorry, Adobe, but you don't get the credit here. The profits, yes, but no Kudos for you!
How can you index a site where 90% of the words are one or 2 meaningless letters?
You mean you've never used 'Google Translate"? Apparently this represents a kind of new acid-test for them, an attempt to make a language we'll call "Teenglish" searchable in plain English.
More seriously, I wonder why Google would pay for this at all. Others have mentioned the value of advertising, but that only happens if people do a search rather than go directly to their target page. And Google doesn't need to do anything for the "right" to search MySpace, they can "just do it". That's how Google works. I can find crap on Google I wrote probably a decade ago, yet they've never signed an exclusive deal with me...