You are aware that you sound like an
idiot comparing media piracy to women's
suffrage or civil rights, aren't you?
I would have stayed out of this one, but
since you have invoked the all-powerful
"public opinion holds against you" argument,
I figured I'd add my $0.02.
First, he does *not* sound like an idiot
for that analogy. I agree some of his
other statements go to far but you have
ignored his actual point in favor of attacking
minutia.
The law currently protects copyright holders
to an excessive degree. No, Napster did not
count as fair use, although I do believe
a similar but better controlled system could
*benefit*, rather than hurt, media producers
if they use it correctly. No, pirating
LoTR:tTT off Gnutella does not count as
fair use, and I actually would consider that
a reasonably punishable copyright violation
(for distributors, not downloaders, however).
But our fair use has slowly eroded over time,
to the point where we can no longer practically
(thanks to "corrupt" CDs) or legally (thanks to
to DMCA making it illegal to "fix" "corrupt"
CDs) make archival backups of most media we purchase. We cannot even post stills on
websites, even though that has *always*
counted as fair-use in the past (for
newspapers, not websites, but the technology
doesn't change the issues involved).
So, getting back to what an "idiot" your
opponant looks like with his statement - He
only said that the law does not describe
reality, nor fairness, nor always tell us the
"right" thing to do. The law can err.
His examples prove that admirably.
As for his statement that YANAL, I don't
really care *what* you do for a living. If
you do practice law, surely you must realize
that public opinion matters far more than the
law, right? Hell, people could get off of
99% of crimes by justifying them with the
1st amendment, yet how far does such a defense
go in a real court? The prosecuting attourney
would probably die laughing. So yes, this
issue will find its fate in how the press
sways popular opinion, not in any court of
law. A few (possibly a lot of) people may
do hard time for their overzealous fandom,
but only when enough people stand up and
realize that they *don't* need Britney's
new album if they can't actually play it
anywhere, will any real change happen.
Oh,puh-lease. Like *anyone* who would bother
downloading an unfinished 1+ gig movie won't
run to see it when it hits the theaters and
buy it the second the DVD comes out?
Although I do not really believe this exists,
since they haven't *finished* the movie, even
if it does, just think of it as "time shifting"
in the opposite direction of what we normally
hear about. As a protected "fair use" right,
so what if people time-shift to a period before
they actually buy the DVD? Has anyone *EVER*
seen a law that specifies that time-shifting
must only occur in the forward direction?;-)
Until there is some sort of public
infrastructure that allows anyone to
serve on the internet, free of charge,
almost all sites are going to have to
make some money, just to pay for
bandwidth
I agree with you in spirit, and you would have
to look hard to find someone as anti-corporate
as myself.
Keeping that in mind, people do not have the
"right" to put up fan-sites that the target
of their fandom has to pay for. Even if that
means selling clone merchandise, or media clips,
or even site memberships, that money *DOES*
come from a pool that otherwise may well have
gone to the "real" owners of such material.
Yes, hosting a site on the internet costs
money. No, the Yankees don't have any
obligation to pay little Billy's hosting
fees for his fan site.
I think that the underlying issue
here is "why is this a crime at all?
It counts as a crime because the *specific*
sites MLB targeted made money off the MLB,
in some cases *directly*. If they have a
local fabric printing shop make up a dozen
"classic team logo" hats and sell them "just
to cover hosting costs", they have still
*stolen* the property of those teams.
Now, if they did that just for personal
use, no one would care (though the legality
of it gets a bit questionable there). But
if they *sell* them on-line, they have most
certainly committed a crime.
In such a situation, these kids should feel
lucky that they *only* received a C&D letter.
Sporting groups generally pursue merchandising
rights infringement VERY heavily, putting as
many people behind bars as possible.
Basically, if people want to host fan sites,
they can. If, on the other hand, they start
selling apparently-MLB merchandise, posting
insider info, offering pirated media clips
of "The Best Home-Run Ever", etc, they cannot.
Personally, I don't see a problem with this,
and I believe people with *real* fan sites
will see this from a similar perspective - By
weakening the boundry between "infringement"
and "fandom", such sites as those from this
article risk bringing legal action down on
*all* fan sites (technically, even mentioning
team names and logos could count as infringing
use, but one tolerated due to it arguably
falling under the 1st amendment).
Actually, wrong. The x86's have a CISC
*instruction set*. All the major x86
chip makers have used RISC cores on
everything released since the original
Pentium-class chips.
RISC (greater-than) CISC
Another fallacy. RISC chips can usually
attain significantly higher clock speeds
than CISC chips, but at the expense of
doing less per clock. This does not make
either one automatically "faster" in terms
of total computational power, just different
in their approaches to speed.
C'mon, you jest, right? Right in the middle
of the article, the special offer from
doubleclick:
And, as a limited offer to our loyal
Slashdot readers, we present the following
offer on behalf of our newest sponsor,
DoubleClick. Just punch the monkey in the
flash animation below, and you can win
a new region-free DVD player, free hosting
for a year, or any of dozens of other
valuable prizes. Some restrictions may
apply.
SACDs don't use PCM, so the digital
signal, if you can find it, is totally
useless
First, regardless of the format on the
media itself, DACs generally convert from
a fixed word size to an analog level. To
cut costs (ie, not have to create their
own custom DAC *just* to handle this one
type of digital conversion), Sony would
presumeably use off-the-shelf parts,
meaning they basically need to convert to
boring ol' PCM *before* running the signal
through the DAC.
Second, and more important, the actual disk
just uses a 1-bit DPCM scheme. Sum that over
time with a moving average window having
the same temporal size as your desired
resolution (ie, 22.675s to convert to
the normal audio CD rate of 44.1khz), and
you end up with the same results, ie, a
"raw" PCM stream.
I will concede, though, that your average
MP3-lovin' cheapskate music pirate will
not have any clue how to do *any* of
the above (except maybe "open the case).
For those of us who actually *do* buy
music and just want a better way to listen
to it (such as off a file server), we'll
still have the convenience we want.
Okay, as a quick DMCA-violating exercise
(from someone who has never even *seen* a
SACD player, making claims that I may have
reverse engineered it laughable):
1) Open case.
2) Trace the analog-out back to a chip.
2b) If chip has heat-sink, trace back one more.
3) Look up the specs of the chip on-line.
4) Stick a probe on the digital input.
5) Record probe signal.
You now have a digital output, and this
will work on *ANY* device, not just an
SACD player. At worst, you might need
invert the bits and reverse the bit order,
which you can do easily in software.
(Disclaimer - If you fry your new toy, don't
come whining to me. You shoul have had a
friend-with-a-clue do the above instead of
trying it yourself)
A quick calculation, assuming those figures
represent "typical" mpeg-4 cd-length content
(~650MB), I get a total of 372TB/day, at
that rate (possibly double, since to get any
reasonable quality a full-length movie takes
two or more CDs).
Based on
this site (and extrapolating, they only
have the numbers I wanted for 2000), the total
internet traffic amounts to only 2700 terabytes
per day. So fully one seventh of the total
internet traffic results from pirated movies?
That strikes me as somewhat unbelievable.
Or, to put that in perspective (since one
seventh doesn't really "mean" much),
according to
this site, by the end of 2002 the world
will have a total digital storage capacity of
12 exabytes. Yet we somehow transmit that
much data, JUST IN PIRATED MOVIES, every
month? I don't think so!
For deep iteration, I won't say (since I didn't
do most of the work on it, I don't consider it
mine to reveal). Suffice it to say that I have
written a decent amount of parallel code (MPI,
for my 8-node Beowulf cluster), and IMO Jason's
solution would work very well.
For the distributed Lychrel search, I
uniformly divide the search range up
into a number of large chunks (currently 9000,
giving each client between one third and one
half of a billion numbers to check). The
client programs work on one chunk at a time,
finding a set of "relative" Lychrels to an
arbitrary depth (currently 10k digits). The
client then returns its set of relative
Lychrels, and by running what amounts to a
standalone version of the client on the amassed
results of all clients over the entire range,
I end up with an accurate listing of all
Lychrels in the target search range (or,
more accurately, a set of "relative" Lychrels
over an input set consisting of all positive
base-10 integers).
Perhaps the non-obvious part here involves
the idea of "relative" Lychrels... Basically,
Lychrels only exist relative to earlier known
Lychrels (ie, they don't converge with earlier
ones). Merging those lists into one larger
list takes little effort (compared to the
task of identifying the Lychrels relative to
each list in the first place).
As an example, consider the lists {0,..., 499}
and {500,..., 999}. From the first list, 196
starts the only unique series that does not
terminate. From the second, both 879 and 887
form unique nonterminating sequences. This
gives us a combined result (such as the
distributed clients would return) of {196,
879, 887}. Doing the *exact* same processing
with this new list as the input, we find 887
results directly from 196, and 879 does not.
So, as a final result we get {196, 879},
correctly identifying all Lychrels (over
the set of all integers) under 1000.
And, the post processing took only
0.333% of the CPU time of the "real"
work. Implementation-wise, on a fast enough
machine this post-processing could occur in
real-time, merging a client's returned list
of results with a master list of all results
known so far.
From http://www.math.niu.edu/
~rusin/known-math/96/palindrome...
First, there is a regular family which can be
shown to extend to any power of 2:
Base 2: 10(n 1s)1101(n 0s)00
After 4 iterations, becomes same thing
with n increased by 1.
Base 4: 10(n 3s)3323(n 0s)00
After 6 iterations, becomes same thing
with n increased by 1.
Base 8: 10(n 7s)7767(n 0s)00
After 8 iterations, becomes same thing
with n increased by 1.
Base 16: 10(n Fs)FFEF(n 0s)00
After 10 iterations, becomes same thing
with n increased by 1. ...
Base 11: 1246277(n
As)A170352495681825A5026571A506181864A5143171(n
0s)0872542
After 6 iterations, becomes same thing
with n increased by 1.
Base 17: 10023AB83E3B983CFGEC556G4G010(n
0s)0FGCG10FG505GF020CGF(n
Gs)GG11G4F655DDGGB299B3D38BB320G
After 6 iterations, becomes same thing
with n increased by 1.
I will look for the "missing" proofs under
10, and post again later if I find them.
Incidentally, I agree with you that iteration
will not "prove" anything, and we can't even
say with certainty that the numbers we find
count as Lychrels (since we can't even prove
that any non-terminating base-10 numbers exist
under repeated reverse-and-add, without which
Lychrels simply do not exist).
However, our search *has* illustrated quite
a few properties of reverse-and-add, and we
hope that will lead us in the direction of
a proof.
For example, at our current "solved" size,
1E9, the set of Lychrels
grows by a factor of 17 for each new
decimal order of magnitude. Simply
extrapolating that shows that this trend
cannot continue forever (in fact, it *must*
end by 1E27), so why such a high rate of
growth at lower numbers?
Basically, although I have a reasonably
good (though certainly non-expert) ability
to create formal proofs, neither I nor
anyone else (including a few "real"
mathematicians, not just hobbyist hacks
such as myself) really know where to
begin in proving the existance of Lychrels.
If you have any ideas on this, feel free
to let me know.;-)
As the primary author of the distributed
Lychrel search, I would like to point out
a few things (I have paraphrased all
"quotes" below based on a perusal of
comments so far)...
Does this have any use?
Absolutely none. If you have a use, let
us know. Otherwise, it doesn't really
have any application. We *have* discovered
that iteration of reverse-and-add has
fractal nature, does that at least get
us a few "coolness" points?
This won't work, the algorithm has too
much serial dependancy.
Wrong on two counts. First, the core concept
of reverse-and-add *does* yield to parallel
implementation (Jason Doucette worked through
this one, and has come up with a *really*
elegant solution). Second, searching for
Lychrels does not involve "deep" iteration
of reverse-and-add. It only requires taking
a *lot* of numbers to a certain arbitrary
depth (10000 digits more than suffices at
the starting value range we currently can
deal with). So, although deep iteration
takes some work to efficiently parallelize,
Lychrel searching gives a nearly linear
speedup with the CPU count.
Why limit yourselves to base-10?
For the simple answer, all lower bases have
trivial proofs of either an infinite number
of non-terminating sequences, or no known non-terminating sequences. This makes base-10
the lowest "interesting" base to work in.
Of course, the question strikes me as odd...
Why not ask why we use base 10 for counting?
Why not base 2, or 7, or 60? Just as meaningful
of a question.
What does "Lychrel" Mean?
196 exists as the lowest (base-10) number
that does not seem to terminate on iteration
of reverse-and-add, but not the only one.
Obviously, any consequent of 196 (such as
887) will also never terminate. Other numbers
also never terminate, such as 879, and they
never converge with the series generated by
earlier numbers either. So, needing a name
for these numbers, Wade VanLandingham picked
the word "Lychrel" (pronounced la-shrel),
and the active 196 community accepted it
into common use.
And, the big question...
Can I run your distributed client?
Yes and no. First of all, it will take me
about another 3 weeks of development to
finish the client (the server program already
works adequately, for now). Second, our
currently available server machine can only
handle around 100 clients, and just within
the 196 community we have offers to run about
half of those already.
So, although we will gladly consider offers
to run the client, as our single biggest need
for help we require a nice server with a fat
pipe. The actual bandwidth needed won't go that
high, but the total could (our next data set,
1E10, we predict will take 20-40MB of traffic.
The 1E11 set will take up to 17 times that,
and so on... It grows quickly).
Additionally, most Slashdot readers run
Linux. Although I plan to write a Linux
client, at the moment my optimized
reverse-and-add routine only builds under
Windows (mostly because I hate AT&T syntax
assembler, I actually prefer coding for
Linux otherwise). So, if anyone wants to
volunteer to convert a 250+ line inline
assembler function (with MMX) from intel
format to AT&T, drop me a line (you would
of course get full credit for your
contribution).
While reading the article, I wondered
that as well. Since he never wrote his
idea down, how could they prove it if
he gives them the "wrong" idea?
Since the guy thought it over for 25
years, he no doubt ran across *hundreds*
of sub-solutions that seemed like they
would work but on deeper consideration
proved incorrect. What stops him from
just reavealing to Alcatel a handfull of
his "bad" ideas, keeping his good ideas
to himself? "Oh well, guess it
doesn't work, after all. Too bad".
Or even more blantant (but still, they
may have the contract, but they can't
prove the contents of his head), "Well,
my idea involves learning to read
machine language. Then, they executable
will look just like source code!"
I mean, sure, he'd get caught if he
tried to market it himself later,
but, in his situation my goal would
consist of "screw Alcatel at all costs".
They would find my cold dead body
"colorfully" scattered across the
CEO's lawn before I'd actually surrender
such an idea to them.
The legal fees kinda suck, though, and
forced him to sell his house to pay them.
I think Alcatel might want to carefully
consider his comment at the end of the
article as possibly literal... "sticking
to his guns", eh? They'd better frisk
him carefully when he visits for
his forced disclosure...
So, just out of curiousity, what does
Alcatel actually *make*, so I can
advise people to start avoiding them?
You spend ~$2k for a machine that crunches
numbers and lets you escape into a virtual
fantasy world for a few hours a day.
Ah, *GREAT* suggestion! Buy her a kickass
computer instead. Rather than just lying
around gathering dust, waiting for her to
lose it (or pawn it if you happen to fall
into the over 50% of Americans that later
get a divorce), it will let her "crunch
numbers" and "escape into a virtual fantasy
world". What more could she ask?
And, rather than having no resale value due
to its inherently useless nature (referring
to diamonds), if she *does* eventually decide
to pawn it, it has no value for a much better
reason, namely, faster machines will exist.
All very poetic, extends the idea of "looking
for a newer model" into a whole new realm.
Actually, though, if she *really* wants a
ring, use the $2-5k as a downpayment on a
chunk of land somewhere. Have a pebble from
the plot set into a ring, and when she looks
at you like you have just grown a third head,
explain the meaning. If she doesn't like it
more than a similar pebble from South Africa,
ditch the impractical wench.
People seem to act like love depends on giving
a woman a particularly expensive lump of rock.
If it *does*, find someone less materialistic.
Wow, just downloaded it, and I really do
like it! Great interface, *tons* of
options, and it didn't crash the first
time I opened a movie in it.
One question, though, any chance it will
support Vidomi-style subtitle streams any
time soon?
(Yeah, I know, open-source purists consider
Vidomi "evil", but where it used to take me
*hours* to do the setup steps in converting
a DVD to DIVX (now XVID), I can get perfect
video, sound sync, and subtitle sync in
about two minutes setup time with Vidomi.
When Flask has that ease of use, I'll
switch back.)
those 10 seconds of fbi warnings are so
costly aren't they.
...And just as necessary. Do we *really* need
a reminder, every time we watch a movie, about
all the rights we lack with respect to it?
I think we all understand the idea fairly
well...
How many audio CDs do you have that start
each track with "Federal law provides severe
penalties..." and won't let you FF through
it? Zero? That about sums up *my* count,
and yet, I *still* understand that copying
CDs to give to all my friends breaks the
law. Freaky, eh?
Honestly, though, the FBI warnings don't
bother me so much as the damned ads. If
I *buy* a movie, why do I have ads on it? Presumeably ads justify our "free" TV
reception, so how do they belong on a DVD
I purchase? *That* really pisses me off,
and I would not even *consider* owning
a player that honors a button lockout,
forcing me to watch them.
besides there really isn't any "better"
way to access content on a dvd.
Yes, actually, better ways *do* exist, which
seems to me like exactly what the original
poster here requested. I've seen a few
comments on players that ignore software
button lockouts, ways to rip-and-reburn
DVDs to get right to the point, ways to
just do it all in software with a DVI-out
video card, and a host of other ideas. So
yes, "better" ways *do* exist.
Personally, I back-up all my DVDs to MPEG4
(WITHOUT including the FBI warning and ads),
then lose them in a drawer somewhere (the
same drawer as my obsolete-physical-audio-CD
collection, incidentally). They look better
on my monitor than my TV anyway, and I have
a million choices of players with more
features than I could ever use. And, if
I want to just watch one scene of a movie,
I don't have to actually figure out where
I left the disc, if I've loaned it
to a friend, if the dog ate it, whatever.
I have it on my file server, just waiting
for me to watch it at the touch of a button.
I pop it open, move the slider to the
scene I want, and I've found and finished
watching the scene I want in less time than
I could have gotten the actual movie playing
in a physical player.
The current feeling is that until they stop
using a commodity CPU, whatever they do can be
worked around in greater or lesser time.
And, as the thriving console emulation scene has
amply demonstrated, it won't even matter if they
use 100% proprietary hardware, even *conceptually*
incompatible with everything else out there. In
a decade, we'll just run their games on purely
virtual hardware, simultated in realtime by our
shiny new 90GHz Pentium-VI CPUs.
Of course, given M$'s trend of releasing many
XBox games for normal PCs 6 months after the
initial release, I doubt anyone will even need
to bother writing an XBox emulator... I mean, I
consider SNES9X less inconvenient than having
to fight with my 10 year old SNES every time
I want to play Super Mario World, but if I
could get the exact same game without the hassle
of either an emulator *or* the original console,
I'll take the reproduction hands down. Only
the total purists would care enough about the
slight differences, and they tend to have half
a dozen "spare" consoles lying around "just in
case" anyway.
You have a brand-new deadbolt lock
installed on your front door.
A month later, a master key for your lock's
exact model leaks out.
Every thief within a hundred miles has a
key to your front door, they just have to
notice that it fits to rob you blind.
Fortunately, a neighborhood watch group
got wind of the leaked key, and started
publicising it heavily, saving countless
people from break-ins.
So who does the lock manufacturer go after,
on learning of this problem?
Not the engineer who stupidly designed
a master-keyed lock for the general
public...
Not the thieves who make use of this
information...
Not even the problem itself, which would
take only a limited recall and almost no
effort to correct...
Instead, they go after the neighborhood
watch group, on some shaky grounds about
loss of confidence in the company.
It strikes me as a *DAMNED* good thing that
we only have such f'd up laws relating to
computers, rather than physical security.
Oh, wait, one *could* read the DMCA as
applying to physical security. Oops.
Time to go install a 2x4 on a latch-and-hinge
across my front door.
The day I get blasted with an add for
Coke beamed directly into my head while
walking down the street is the day I quit
my job and start organizing consumer
boycotts full time.
Nah. Just claim it whacked you with a
painfully loud sound, and you had to
trash their equipment in self defense.
Who can prove you wrong, since only you
could hear it?
I have three pictures, with roughly 2/3rds
overlap.
I ran them pairwise (1 and 2, then 2 and 3)
through estpchirp2m. Good, I get
two output sets of 8 reals. I stuff them
into a single file, one on each line.
So I pintegrate that file, using
picture #2 as the reference frame. Cool,
I now have three sets of eight reals.
Next, I pchirp2nocrop all three
separately, passing the appropriate line
from pintegrate on the command
line (why bother with text files here,
if I need to cut-and-past at this step
anyway?). I now have three new.pbm
files, which seems like what I should
have according to the extremely limited
documentation.
Step four, I cement the three new.pbm's together, and get a single file
as the output. "Great!", I think, it
worked and didn't give me too many
problems.
So I open up the picture. Or try to.
It seems that whatever the output file
has in it, valid.pbm data doesn't top
that list.
I tried again, but since I had followed
the (limited) directions carefully the
first time, my results did not differ.
So, I have three suggestions
for Mr. Cyborg...
First, it doesn't matter *how* cool of a
program you write, if no one can figure out
how to use it (WRITE SOME REAL DOCS!!!).
Second, it doesn't matter how cool your
program *sounds*, if it doesn't work.
Third, 99% of people playing with this will
either not want to tweak any of the in-between
stages' results. Of those that *do*, 99%
will just hack the source. Ditch the four
(and then some) programs, and make a single
executable that takes as its arguments just
the name of the input files, in order, and
perhaps a *few* tweaking options (like enable
or disable filtering, which sounds useful,
except YOU DON'T HAVE IT DESCRIBED
ANYWHERE!).
Ahem.
Otherwise, great program. No doubt one of the
many companies doing the same thing for the
past 20 years will soon have their lawyers
send their congrats.
Re:so any recommendations for us Joe 6-packs?
on
Digital Dark Ages?
·
· Score: 1
As such, does anyone have any recommendations
for average people like me out there who have
data that is very important to them, but for
whom corporate measures like commercial data
backup services just aren't practical.
I use CDs. In a year or two, I will switch to
DVDs.
A few years ago, CDs fit the bill perfectly,
though they have gotten a little tight on
space lately... My home file server has (only)
80Gb on it, so I can basically back up to a
100ct spindle of CD media. Every week or so,
just burn a new CD with all your new and
changed files. Once a year I like to make a
complete fresh backup, both to limit the number
of CDs I need to search through in case of a
crash or accidental deletion, and to protect
against the eventual decay of the physical
media (Heard of CD fungus? It really exists,
and eats CDs over a span of a couple years
rather than a couple decades).
Overall, the current topic seems like a
non-issue. It all boils down to good
backup practices, and to tradeoffs between
price, speed, size, and longevity of the
chosen backup media. At the moment, CDs
by far make the best tradeoffs (with DVDs
rapidly approaching as price drops and
speed rises). In another decade, something
we haven't even heard of, or only in places
like Star Trek (Mmm, isolinear chips! Great
with salsa), will probably make the best
choice.
Every few years, I look into the possibility of
buying a tape drive.
Every time (most recently about two months ago),
I come away with the same conclusion...
It costs almost the same amount to just buy
another HDD. Literally. Right now, we can
buy 80 gig drives for just *under* a dollar
a gig. By comparison, a 100gig Ultrium
cartridge costs the same price, except
the drives start at $3000 (yes, thousand).
I would have to go through over 13 TERABYTES
before the drive would pay for itself compared
to just buying HDD's by the case. Perhaps
some companies and/or governments would see
that as worth it, but not too many individuals
or companies smaller than IBM would...
Perhaps more importantly, though, in another
year or two, the size of a HDD costing around
$100 will double. The tape drive will not
magically take media twice as large. So not
only does it seem like a large invenstment,
it ends up an expensive dead-end. If a buyer
gets lucky, the company making drives for
their particular choice of tape will make
future drives backward compatible. If not,
when the rest of the world considers 80TB
drives "a bit small", that buyer will still
have all their backups on something smaller
than whatever equivalent of floppy disks we
have by then.
Puh-lease. Perhaps if he didn't try to
hype trivialities that would have some
validity, but really... Last two I can
think of, the iPod and the flat-screen
iMacs. Whoop-de-freakin-do. Two things
that already existed (albeit in slightly
less convenient forms), and people should
get all excited? "Now with 18% more
Spleem! Act fast, supplies are limited!"
Of *course* fans will feel dissapointed
compared to the rumors, when the company
hasn't made a real innovation in years.
About the best thing they've done since
the early 90's consists of switching to
OS-X, but they managed to "dilute" that
one by only pushing it on the high-end
market at first.
Overall, sad. Mac fans talk about what
a nice, friendly, innovative company
Apple seems like, yet every major bit of
news we hear about has them screwing someone
else. No aqua-clones (even though they
lost *that* suit to M$ years ago). No
rumor-mills (1st amendment, anyone?). No
3rd-party hardware (amazingly, when they
did allow that for a short time, their
popularity reached an all-time high).
Just keep screwing the customers. It appears
that artists and business-weenies don't notice
anyway, and will defend Apple with their
dying breath (sucked out by Apple itself), so
no harm done.
In my experience as a hiker, it takes
very little to prevent a GPS receiver
from obtaining a good lock. Now, I
suppose these companies *could* literally
track the cars by satellite, ala LoJack,
but far more likely they just have a GPS
receiver in the vehicle together with a
transmitter that "calls home" every few
minutes to report a position.
So, for the EE geeks out there, what would
it take to block (or render unintelligible)
either signal, the GPS in or the position
reporting out? Would this take an active
device, or would some sort of hack as simple
as wrapping the antenna in grounded metal
foil work?
Just a thought. I don't suppose this would
actually work, the corporate scum probably have
a clause in the contract that "if your car
doesn't report home at least once per hour,
we automatically charge you the maximum of
every fine we can possibly think of."
Oh yeah, I'd *jump* at the chance to sign
up it something similar appeared in the US.
Imagine the convenience of only having to
block *one* spam site, something like
"spam.usps.gov"... Ahh, gives me a warm
and tingly feeling just thinking of the
possibility.
Slashdot Mirror
You are aware that you sound like an idiot comparing media piracy to women's suffrage or civil rights, aren't you?
I would have stayed out of this one, but since you have invoked the all-powerful "public opinion holds against you" argument, I figured I'd add my $0.02.
First, he does *not* sound like an idiot for that analogy. I agree some of his other statements go to far but you have ignored his actual point in favor of attacking minutia.
The law currently protects copyright holders to an excessive degree. No, Napster did not count as fair use, although I do believe a similar but better controlled system could *benefit*, rather than hurt, media producers if they use it correctly. No, pirating LoTR:tTT off Gnutella does not count as fair use, and I actually would consider that a reasonably punishable copyright violation (for distributors, not downloaders, however).
But our fair use has slowly eroded over time, to the point where we can no longer practically (thanks to "corrupt" CDs) or legally (thanks to to DMCA making it illegal to "fix" "corrupt" CDs) make archival backups of most media we purchase. We cannot even post stills on websites, even though that has *always* counted as fair-use in the past (for newspapers, not websites, but the technology doesn't change the issues involved).
So, getting back to what an "idiot" your opponant looks like with his statement - He only said that the law does not describe reality, nor fairness, nor always tell us the "right" thing to do. The law can err. His examples prove that admirably.
As for his statement that YANAL, I don't really care *what* you do for a living. If you do practice law, surely you must realize that public opinion matters far more than the law, right? Hell, people could get off of 99% of crimes by justifying them with the 1st amendment, yet how far does such a defense go in a real court? The prosecuting attourney would probably die laughing. So yes, this issue will find its fate in how the press sways popular opinion, not in any court of law. A few (possibly a lot of) people may do hard time for their overzealous fandom, but only when enough people stand up and realize that they *don't* need Britney's new album if they can't actually play it anywhere, will any real change happen.
Oh,puh-lease. Like *anyone* who would bother downloading an unfinished 1+ gig movie won't run to see it when it hits the theaters and buy it the second the DVD comes out?
;-)
Although I do not really believe this exists, since they haven't *finished* the movie, even if it does, just think of it as "time shifting" in the opposite direction of what we normally hear about. As a protected "fair use" right, so what if people time-shift to a period before they actually buy the DVD? Has anyone *EVER* seen a law that specifies that time-shifting must only occur in the forward direction?
Until there is some sort of public infrastructure that allows anyone to serve on the internet, free of charge, almost all sites are going to have to make some money, just to pay for bandwidth
I agree with you in spirit, and you would have to look hard to find someone as anti-corporate as myself.
Keeping that in mind, people do not have the "right" to put up fan-sites that the target of their fandom has to pay for. Even if that means selling clone merchandise, or media clips, or even site memberships, that money *DOES* come from a pool that otherwise may well have gone to the "real" owners of such material.
Yes, hosting a site on the internet costs money. No, the Yankees don't have any obligation to pay little Billy's hosting fees for his fan site.
I think that the underlying issue here is "why is this a crime at all?
It counts as a crime because the *specific* sites MLB targeted made money off the MLB, in some cases *directly*. If they have a local fabric printing shop make up a dozen "classic team logo" hats and sell them "just to cover hosting costs", they have still *stolen* the property of those teams. Now, if they did that just for personal use, no one would care (though the legality of it gets a bit questionable there). But if they *sell* them on-line, they have most certainly committed a crime.
In such a situation, these kids should feel lucky that they *only* received a C&D letter. Sporting groups generally pursue merchandising rights infringement VERY heavily, putting as many people behind bars as possible.
Basically, if people want to host fan sites, they can. If, on the other hand, they start selling apparently-MLB merchandise, posting insider info, offering pirated media clips of "The Best Home-Run Ever", etc, they cannot. Personally, I don't see a problem with this, and I believe people with *real* fan sites will see this from a similar perspective - By weakening the boundry between "infringement" and "fandom", such sites as those from this article risk bringing legal action down on *all* fan sites (technically, even mentioning team names and logos could count as infringing use, but one tolerated due to it arguably falling under the 1st amendment).
x86 = CISC architecture
Actually, wrong. The x86's have a CISC *instruction set*. All the major x86 chip makers have used RISC cores on everything released since the original Pentium-class chips.
RISC (greater-than) CISC
Another fallacy. RISC chips can usually attain significantly higher clock speeds than CISC chips, but at the expense of doing less per clock. This does not make either one automatically "faster" in terms of total computational power, just different in their approaches to speed.
C'mon, you jest, right? Right in the middle of the article, the special offer from doubleclick:
;-)
And, as a limited offer to our loyal Slashdot readers, we present the following offer on behalf of our newest sponsor, DoubleClick. Just punch the monkey in the flash animation below, and you can win a new region-free DVD player, free hosting for a year, or any of dozens of other valuable prizes. Some restrictions may apply.
Others *must* have seen this, right?
SACDs don't use PCM, so the digital signal, if you can find it, is totally useless
First, regardless of the format on the media itself, DACs generally convert from a fixed word size to an analog level. To cut costs (ie, not have to create their own custom DAC *just* to handle this one type of digital conversion), Sony would presumeably use off-the-shelf parts, meaning they basically need to convert to boring ol' PCM *before* running the signal through the DAC.
Second, and more important, the actual disk just uses a 1-bit DPCM scheme. Sum that over time with a moving average window having the same temporal size as your desired resolution (ie, 22.675s to convert to the normal audio CD rate of 44.1khz), and you end up with the same results, ie, a "raw" PCM stream.
I will concede, though, that your average MP3-lovin' cheapskate music pirate will not have any clue how to do *any* of the above (except maybe "open the case). For those of us who actually *do* buy music and just want a better way to listen to it (such as off a file server), we'll still have the convenience we want.
Okay, as a quick DMCA-violating exercise (from someone who has never even *seen* a SACD player, making claims that I may have reverse engineered it laughable):
1) Open case.
2) Trace the analog-out back to a chip.
2b) If chip has heat-sink, trace back one more.
3) Look up the specs of the chip on-line.
4) Stick a probe on the digital input.
5) Record probe signal.
You now have a digital output, and this will work on *ANY* device, not just an SACD player. At worst, you might need invert the bits and reverse the bit order, which you can do easily in software.
(Disclaimer - If you fry your new toy, don't come whining to me. You shoul have had a friend-with-a-clue do the above instead of trying it yourself)
A quick calculation, assuming those figures represent "typical" mpeg-4 cd-length content (~650MB), I get a total of 372TB/day, at that rate (possibly double, since to get any reasonable quality a full-length movie takes two or more CDs).
Based on this site (and extrapolating, they only have the numbers I wanted for 2000), the total internet traffic amounts to only 2700 terabytes per day. So fully one seventh of the total internet traffic results from pirated movies? That strikes me as somewhat unbelievable.
Or, to put that in perspective (since one seventh doesn't really "mean" much), according to this site, by the end of 2002 the world will have a total digital storage capacity of 12 exabytes. Yet we somehow transmit that much data, JUST IN PIRATED MOVIES, every month? I don't think so!
okay, i gott ask, how are you parallelizing this
..., 499}
and {500, ..., 999}. From the first list, 196
starts the only unique series that does not
terminate. From the second, both 879 and 887
form unique nonterminating sequences. This
gives us a combined result (such as the
distributed clients would return) of {196,
879, 887}. Doing the *exact* same processing
with this new list as the input, we find 887
results directly from 196, and 879 does not.
So, as a final result we get {196, 879},
correctly identifying all Lychrels (over
the set of all integers) under 1000.
And, the post processing took only
0.333% of the CPU time of the "real"
work. Implementation-wise, on a fast enough
machine this post-processing could occur in
real-time, merging a client's returned list
of results with a master list of all results
known so far.
For deep iteration, I won't say (since I didn't do most of the work on it, I don't consider it mine to reveal). Suffice it to say that I have written a decent amount of parallel code (MPI, for my 8-node Beowulf cluster), and IMO Jason's solution would work very well.
For the distributed Lychrel search, I uniformly divide the search range up into a number of large chunks (currently 9000, giving each client between one third and one half of a billion numbers to check). The client programs work on one chunk at a time, finding a set of "relative" Lychrels to an arbitrary depth (currently 10k digits). The client then returns its set of relative Lychrels, and by running what amounts to a standalone version of the client on the amassed results of all clients over the entire range, I end up with an accurate listing of all Lychrels in the target search range (or, more accurately, a set of "relative" Lychrels over an input set consisting of all positive base-10 integers).
Perhaps the non-obvious part here involves the idea of "relative" Lychrels... Basically, Lychrels only exist relative to earlier known Lychrels (ie, they don't converge with earlier ones). Merging those lists into one larger list takes little effort (compared to the task of identifying the Lychrels relative to each list in the first place).
As an example, consider the lists {0,
I will look for the "missing" proofs under 10, and post again later if I find them.
Incidentally, I agree with you that iteration will not "prove" anything, and we can't even say with certainty that the numbers we find count as Lychrels (since we can't even prove that any non-terminating base-10 numbers exist under repeated reverse-and-add, without which Lychrels simply do not exist).
However, our search *has* illustrated quite a few properties of reverse-and-add, and we hope that will lead us in the direction of a proof.
For example, at our current "solved" size, 1E9, the set of Lychrels grows by a factor of 17 for each new decimal order of magnitude. Simply extrapolating that shows that this trend cannot continue forever (in fact, it *must* end by 1E27), so why such a high rate of growth at lower numbers?
Basically, although I have a reasonably good (though certainly non-expert) ability to create formal proofs, neither I nor anyone else (including a few "real" mathematicians, not just hobbyist hacks such as myself) really know where to begin in proving the existance of Lychrels. If you have any ideas on this, feel free to let me know.
As the primary author of the distributed Lychrel search, I would like to point out a few things (I have paraphrased all "quotes" below based on a perusal of comments so far)...
Does this have any use?
Absolutely none. If you have a use, let us know. Otherwise, it doesn't really have any application. We *have* discovered that iteration of reverse-and-add has fractal nature, does that at least get us a few "coolness" points?
This won't work, the algorithm has too much serial dependancy.
Wrong on two counts. First, the core concept of reverse-and-add *does* yield to parallel implementation (Jason Doucette worked through this one, and has come up with a *really* elegant solution). Second, searching for Lychrels does not involve "deep" iteration of reverse-and-add. It only requires taking a *lot* of numbers to a certain arbitrary depth (10000 digits more than suffices at the starting value range we currently can deal with). So, although deep iteration takes some work to efficiently parallelize, Lychrel searching gives a nearly linear speedup with the CPU count.
Why limit yourselves to base-10?
For the simple answer, all lower bases have trivial proofs of either an infinite number of non-terminating sequences, or no known non-terminating sequences. This makes base-10 the lowest "interesting" base to work in. Of course, the question strikes me as odd... Why not ask why we use base 10 for counting? Why not base 2, or 7, or 60? Just as meaningful of a question.
What does "Lychrel" Mean?
196 exists as the lowest (base-10) number that does not seem to terminate on iteration of reverse-and-add, but not the only one. Obviously, any consequent of 196 (such as 887) will also never terminate. Other numbers also never terminate, such as 879, and they never converge with the series generated by earlier numbers either. So, needing a name for these numbers, Wade VanLandingham picked the word "Lychrel" (pronounced la-shrel), and the active 196 community accepted it into common use.
And, the big question...
Can I run your distributed client?
Yes and no. First of all, it will take me about another 3 weeks of development to finish the client (the server program already works adequately, for now). Second, our currently available server machine can only handle around 100 clients, and just within the 196 community we have offers to run about half of those already.
So, although we will gladly consider offers to run the client, as our single biggest need for help we require a nice server with a fat pipe. The actual bandwidth needed won't go that high, but the total could (our next data set, 1E10, we predict will take 20-40MB of traffic. The 1E11 set will take up to 17 times that, and so on... It grows quickly).
Additionally, most Slashdot readers run Linux. Although I plan to write a Linux client, at the moment my optimized reverse-and-add routine only builds under Windows (mostly because I hate AT&T syntax assembler, I actually prefer coding for Linux otherwise). So, if anyone wants to volunteer to convert a 250+ line inline assembler function (with MMX) from intel format to AT&T, drop me a line (you would of course get full credit for your contribution).
Umm... That seems to cover most questions.
Anyway, I wonder how they'd enforce this.
While reading the article, I wondered that as well. Since he never wrote his idea down, how could they prove it if he gives them the "wrong" idea?
Since the guy thought it over for 25 years, he no doubt ran across *hundreds* of sub-solutions that seemed like they would work but on deeper consideration proved incorrect. What stops him from just reavealing to Alcatel a handfull of his "bad" ideas, keeping his good ideas to himself? "Oh well, guess it doesn't work, after all. Too bad". Or even more blantant (but still, they may have the contract, but they can't prove the contents of his head), "Well, my idea involves learning to read machine language. Then, they executable will look just like source code!"
I mean, sure, he'd get caught if he tried to market it himself later, but, in his situation my goal would consist of "screw Alcatel at all costs". They would find my cold dead body "colorfully" scattered across the CEO's lawn before I'd actually surrender such an idea to them.
The legal fees kinda suck, though, and forced him to sell his house to pay them. I think Alcatel might want to carefully consider his comment at the end of the article as possibly literal... "sticking to his guns", eh? They'd better frisk him carefully when he visits for his forced disclosure...
So, just out of curiousity, what does Alcatel actually *make*, so I can advise people to start avoiding them?
You spend ~$2k for a machine that crunches numbers and lets you escape into a virtual fantasy world for a few hours a day.
Ah, *GREAT* suggestion! Buy her a kickass computer instead. Rather than just lying around gathering dust, waiting for her to lose it (or pawn it if you happen to fall into the over 50% of Americans that later get a divorce), it will let her "crunch numbers" and "escape into a virtual fantasy world". What more could she ask?
And, rather than having no resale value due to its inherently useless nature (referring to diamonds), if she *does* eventually decide to pawn it, it has no value for a much better reason, namely, faster machines will exist. All very poetic, extends the idea of "looking for a newer model" into a whole new realm.
Actually, though, if she *really* wants a ring, use the $2-5k as a downpayment on a chunk of land somewhere. Have a pebble from the plot set into a ring, and when she looks at you like you have just grown a third head, explain the meaning. If she doesn't like it more than a similar pebble from South Africa, ditch the impractical wench.
People seem to act like love depends on giving a woman a particularly expensive lump of rock. If it *does*, find someone less materialistic.
Wow, just downloaded it, and I really do like it! Great interface, *tons* of options, and it didn't crash the first time I opened a movie in it.
One question, though, any chance it will support Vidomi-style subtitle streams any time soon?
(Yeah, I know, open-source purists consider Vidomi "evil", but where it used to take me *hours* to do the setup steps in converting a DVD to DIVX (now XVID), I can get perfect video, sound sync, and subtitle sync in about two minutes setup time with Vidomi. When Flask has that ease of use, I'll switch back.)
those 10 seconds of fbi warnings are so costly aren't they.
...And just as necessary. Do we *really* need
a reminder, every time we watch a movie, about
all the rights we lack with respect to it?
I think we all understand the idea fairly
well...
How many audio CDs do you have that start each track with "Federal law provides severe penalties..." and won't let you FF through it? Zero? That about sums up *my* count, and yet, I *still* understand that copying CDs to give to all my friends breaks the law. Freaky, eh?
Honestly, though, the FBI warnings don't bother me so much as the damned ads. If I *buy* a movie, why do I have ads on it? Presumeably ads justify our "free" TV reception, so how do they belong on a DVD I purchase? *That* really pisses me off, and I would not even *consider* owning a player that honors a button lockout, forcing me to watch them.
besides there really isn't any "better" way to access content on a dvd.
Yes, actually, better ways *do* exist, which seems to me like exactly what the original poster here requested. I've seen a few comments on players that ignore software button lockouts, ways to rip-and-reburn DVDs to get right to the point, ways to just do it all in software with a DVI-out video card, and a host of other ideas. So yes, "better" ways *do* exist.
Personally, I back-up all my DVDs to MPEG4 (WITHOUT including the FBI warning and ads), then lose them in a drawer somewhere (the same drawer as my obsolete-physical-audio-CD collection, incidentally). They look better on my monitor than my TV anyway, and I have a million choices of players with more features than I could ever use. And, if I want to just watch one scene of a movie, I don't have to actually figure out where I left the disc, if I've loaned it to a friend, if the dog ate it, whatever. I have it on my file server, just waiting for me to watch it at the touch of a button. I pop it open, move the slider to the scene I want, and I've found and finished watching the scene I want in less time than I could have gotten the actual movie playing in a physical player.
The current feeling is that until they stop using a commodity CPU, whatever they do can be worked around in greater or lesser time.
And, as the thriving console emulation scene has amply demonstrated, it won't even matter if they use 100% proprietary hardware, even *conceptually* incompatible with everything else out there. In a decade, we'll just run their games on purely virtual hardware, simultated in realtime by our shiny new 90GHz Pentium-VI CPUs.
Of course, given M$'s trend of releasing many XBox games for normal PCs 6 months after the initial release, I doubt anyone will even need to bother writing an XBox emulator... I mean, I consider SNES9X less inconvenient than having to fight with my 10 year old SNES every time I want to play Super Mario World, but if I could get the exact same game without the hassle of either an emulator *or* the original console, I'll take the reproduction hands down. Only the total purists would care enough about the slight differences, and they tend to have half a dozen "spare" consoles lying around "just in case" anyway.
Imagine...
You have a brand-new deadbolt lock installed on your front door.
A month later, a master key for your lock's exact model leaks out.
Every thief within a hundred miles has a key to your front door, they just have to notice that it fits to rob you blind.
Fortunately, a neighborhood watch group got wind of the leaked key, and started publicising it heavily, saving countless people from break-ins.
So who does the lock manufacturer go after, on learning of this problem?
Not the engineer who stupidly designed a master-keyed lock for the general public...
Not the thieves who make use of this information...
Not even the problem itself, which would take only a limited recall and almost no effort to correct...
Instead, they go after the neighborhood watch group, on some shaky grounds about loss of confidence in the company.
It strikes me as a *DAMNED* good thing that we only have such f'd up laws relating to computers, rather than physical security. Oh, wait, one *could* read the DMCA as applying to physical security. Oops. Time to go install a 2x4 on a latch-and-hinge across my front door.
The day I get blasted with an add for Coke beamed directly into my head while walking down the street is the day I quit my job and start organizing consumer boycotts full time.
Nah. Just claim it whacked you with a painfully loud sound, and you had to trash their equipment in self defense. Who can prove you wrong, since only you could hear it?
Oops, pretend I replied to the parent article (Yeah, I said "No Text", but slashbot won't let me actually omit a message body).
Can we say "documentation", people?
.pbm
files, which seems like what I should
have according to the extremely limited
documentation.
.pbm's together, and get a single file
as the output. "Great!", I think, it
worked and didn't give me too many
problems.
.pbm data doesn't top
that list.
I have three pictures, with roughly 2/3rds overlap.
I ran them pairwise (1 and 2, then 2 and 3) through estpchirp2m. Good, I get two output sets of 8 reals. I stuff them into a single file, one on each line.
So I pintegrate that file, using picture #2 as the reference frame. Cool, I now have three sets of eight reals.
Next, I pchirp2nocrop all three separately, passing the appropriate line from pintegrate on the command line (why bother with text files here, if I need to cut-and-past at this step anyway?). I now have three new
Step four, I cement the three new
So I open up the picture. Or try to. It seems that whatever the output file has in it, valid
I tried again, but since I had followed the (limited) directions carefully the first time, my results did not differ.
So, I have three suggestions for Mr. Cyborg...
First, it doesn't matter *how* cool of a program you write, if no one can figure out how to use it (WRITE SOME REAL DOCS!!!).
Second, it doesn't matter how cool your program *sounds*, if it doesn't work.
Third, 99% of people playing with this will either not want to tweak any of the in-between stages' results. Of those that *do*, 99% will just hack the source. Ditch the four (and then some) programs, and make a single executable that takes as its arguments just the name of the input files, in order, and perhaps a *few* tweaking options (like enable or disable filtering, which sounds useful, except YOU DON'T HAVE IT DESCRIBED ANYWHERE!).
Ahem.
Otherwise, great program. No doubt one of the many companies doing the same thing for the past 20 years will soon have their lawyers send their congrats.
As such, does anyone have any recommendations for average people like me out there who have data that is very important to them, but for whom corporate measures like commercial data backup services just aren't practical.
I use CDs. In a year or two, I will switch to DVDs.
A few years ago, CDs fit the bill perfectly, though they have gotten a little tight on space lately... My home file server has (only) 80Gb on it, so I can basically back up to a 100ct spindle of CD media. Every week or so, just burn a new CD with all your new and changed files. Once a year I like to make a complete fresh backup, both to limit the number of CDs I need to search through in case of a crash or accidental deletion, and to protect against the eventual decay of the physical media (Heard of CD fungus? It really exists, and eats CDs over a span of a couple years rather than a couple decades).
Overall, the current topic seems like a non-issue. It all boils down to good backup practices, and to tradeoffs between price, speed, size, and longevity of the chosen backup media. At the moment, CDs by far make the best tradeoffs (with DVDs rapidly approaching as price drops and speed rises). In another decade, something we haven't even heard of, or only in places like Star Trek (Mmm, isolinear chips! Great with salsa), will probably make the best choice.
Hah! Priced media for a tape drive, recently?
Every few years, I look into the possibility of buying a tape drive.
Every time (most recently about two months ago), I come away with the same conclusion...
It costs almost the same amount to just buy another HDD. Literally. Right now, we can buy 80 gig drives for just *under* a dollar a gig. By comparison, a 100gig Ultrium cartridge costs the same price, except the drives start at $3000 (yes, thousand).
I would have to go through over 13 TERABYTES before the drive would pay for itself compared to just buying HDD's by the case. Perhaps some companies and/or governments would see that as worth it, but not too many individuals or companies smaller than IBM would...
Perhaps more importantly, though, in another year or two, the size of a HDD costing around $100 will double. The tape drive will not magically take media twice as large. So not only does it seem like a large invenstment, it ends up an expensive dead-end. If a buyer gets lucky, the company making drives for their particular choice of tape will make future drives backward compatible. If not, when the rest of the world considers 80TB drives "a bit small", that buyer will still have all their backups on something smaller than whatever equivalent of floppy disks we have by then.
Diminish Jobs' announcements?
Puh-lease. Perhaps if he didn't try to hype trivialities that would have some validity, but really... Last two I can think of, the iPod and the flat-screen iMacs. Whoop-de-freakin-do. Two things that already existed (albeit in slightly less convenient forms), and people should get all excited? "Now with 18% more Spleem! Act fast, supplies are limited!"
Of *course* fans will feel dissapointed compared to the rumors, when the company hasn't made a real innovation in years. About the best thing they've done since the early 90's consists of switching to OS-X, but they managed to "dilute" that one by only pushing it on the high-end market at first.
Overall, sad. Mac fans talk about what a nice, friendly, innovative company Apple seems like, yet every major bit of news we hear about has them screwing someone else. No aqua-clones (even though they lost *that* suit to M$ years ago). No rumor-mills (1st amendment, anyone?). No 3rd-party hardware (amazingly, when they did allow that for a short time, their popularity reached an all-time high).
Just keep screwing the customers. It appears that artists and business-weenies don't notice anyway, and will defend Apple with their dying breath (sucked out by Apple itself), so no harm done.
In my experience as a hiker, it takes very little to prevent a GPS receiver from obtaining a good lock. Now, I suppose these companies *could* literally track the cars by satellite, ala LoJack, but far more likely they just have a GPS receiver in the vehicle together with a transmitter that "calls home" every few minutes to report a position.
So, for the EE geeks out there, what would it take to block (or render unintelligible) either signal, the GPS in or the position reporting out? Would this take an active device, or would some sort of hack as simple as wrapping the antenna in grounded metal foil work?
Just a thought. I don't suppose this would actually work, the corporate scum probably have a clause in the contract that "if your car doesn't report home at least once per hour, we automatically charge you the maximum of every fine we can possibly think of."
Oh yeah, I'd *jump* at the chance to sign up it something similar appeared in the US.
Imagine the convenience of only having to block *one* spam site, something like "spam.usps.gov"... Ahh, gives me a warm and tingly feeling just thinking of the possibility.