You may not be able to punish the guy running the foreign server, but you can limit access to it from within our borders, thereby removing it as an offender.
In other words, we should implement our own version of "The Great Firewall of China." Except in America, it will "protect" the citizens from illegal IP rather than, say, Falun Gong websites.
Who gets to decide what makes it through the "Freedom Shield" or whatever newspeak you'd like to call it? Ashcroft? He won't even dance with his wife because he thinks dancing is immoral! The Copyright Holders of IP? They won't allow anything; the firewall will scan the page for "Ford" or "Friends" or "Star Wars" and deny access, just like BESS does at my girlfriend's school. The web will become useless. Utterly fucking useless.
Great plan, dipshit.
Remind me: Why is the government spending my money to protect Sony's IP again? Doesn't Sony have their own lawyers?
It's not that I'm not looking very hard to find out, it's that I can't understand any of Microsoft's market-speak. I think it's what someone a few posts above described it as -- the ability to write your code in any MS-endorsed language and have it compile and run on any MS-allowed OS, and allow more interaction bewteen application components. To me, it sounds like it fills the same functional requiremnt as Java, except it should be faster (since it compiles) and there will be less arguing about standards (since MS will dictate and not deliberately bollocks it up, as they did with Java.)
I'm not exactly seeing how this is any *better* than Java, though. Java is great for the little tasks it has to do, like playing backgammon on Yahoo!, and anything more complicated than that (like say Photoshop or a custom in-house app) probably won't really be able to achieve (or have any need to achieve) true platform-independence, despite what the marketdroids say.
I mean, I can't imagine wanting to run Photoshop.NET on my 240x230x16-bit color Micrcosoft PocketPC device, can you?
Though I guess if the mono thing is "for real," which I very strongly doubt, then I could run Photoshop.NET on a handheld running Linux with a much higher resolution display.
I'm still wondering how much damage that would do. 100 Kilowatts, isn't that like 67 hairdryers? How much damage can you do with 67 hairdryers? (Mental image from Diamond Age: an army of girls armed with hairdryers marching on the city at the end of the book.)
Seriuosly, I'm wondering if the laser isn't affected by clouds and stuff, or it can track the target for a while, because I guess I'm not sure what effect this weapon is going to have. I could see it being bad for metal, like a tank, but what will it do to brick or concrete? What does it do when you shine it on someone? Really bad sunburn in like one second? Third degree burns after two?
Won't the beam be all un-collilmated and shit after passing through six miles of atmospheric effects, or is 100 kW so much that it laughs at minor perturbations?
At first I was kinda horrified by the prospect of airborne killer lasers, and well I guess I still am. But I'm afraid of a fully-loaded F-18 even without the lasers. Cluster bombs in particular are something I never want to have dropped anywhere near me. Unlike cluster bombs, when the laser turns off, it won't leave behind unexploded little bomblets for the kids to play with.
And I bet that huge killer lasers are a lot more environmentall friendly than the current nasty chemicals used in conventional weapons.
Unless they use freon for dissipating that extra 900 KW.
VICE is a Versatile Commodore Emulator, i.e. a program that runs on a Unix, MS-DOS, Win95/NT, OS/2, Acorn RISC OS or BeOS machine and executes programs intended for the old 8-bit Commodore computers. The current version emulates the C64, the C128, the VIC20, all the PET models (except the SuperPET 9000, which is out of line anyway) and the CBM-II (aka C610).
Yeah, and that case was really weird too. It's not like there were soldiers in our homes. Unless your "home" consists of a prison which is in lockdown after a riot, and police/troops were stationed there to keep things in order.
That they got away with it is no surprise. Your "rights" are so marginalized as a convict; prisoners don't even get minimum wage when they book your flights on American Airlines.
The definition of "terrorism" is something like "the use of violence or the threat of violence for political or ideological purposes".
To expand on that, George W. Bush and the current administration are terrorists. Are they not promoting a political purpose of "regime change" in Iraq? Are they not threatening violence to achieve their political purpose?
Yes, I know that's exactly what you said later in your post. I just wanted to reinforce your point.
When I was in public school, I did so myself on numerous occasions, and no one tried to stop me.
As the saying goes, "So long as there are tests, there will be prayer in public schools."
I was right there with you, in a sense, not saying "under God" when that part came around during the Pledge of Allegiance. Nobody ever tried to make me say the words "under God." Though I am still disgusted that I was compelled to pledge my allegiance to a republic which considered me a legal infant unworthy of basic Constitutional protections such as freedom of speech (try distributing "objectionable" flyers on school grounds) and freedom from search (drug-sniffing dogs and random locker inspections.)
It was during my high school years that I decided this country isn't worth dying for. The pay is nice, but I'm not going to go shoot some brown kid for freaking McDonalds and Wal*Mart.
Microsoft has a monopoly in PC OPERATING SYSTEMS, not game consoles.
What does Sony have a monopoly in? Aside from Betamax??
The whole point is: Microsoft can use their MONOPOLY POWER in the PC market to illegally influence that market. For example, they have so much money that they told a maker of great PC games to never make a PC game again. The company agreed.
Do you understand how that might be "more badder" than the sleaziness of Sony and Nintento?
(Here come the bad analogy...) It's like if I had a monopoly on oil painting, and dominated the market and was filthy rich from it. Then I decided to port my painting skills into watercolors. Let's say you are a great water color artist. My millions talk you in to giving up water colors so I can try to dominate that segment as well.
The thing is: nobody has a monopoly on consoles (though Sony sems to be winning from where I am, and that is behind a Windows PC) and that's why the competition is so fierce.
Supposedly we little people benefit from this kind of thing. Fierce, cutthroat business tactics are apparently the paradigm on which to base your civlization. Go figure.
NVIDIA is like a breath of fresh air when it comes to corp policy
That explains their stock price...$8.95 down from a 52-week high of $72.66. Of course, part of that is that Microsoft changed the Xbox chips, leaving NVidia holding the bag (or goodwill as they say in the industry). I don't quite see how yet another company getting screwed by Microsoft qualifies as a breath of fresh air, but what the hell.
Not that ATI stock is anything to write home about -- down about 50% on the past 5 years. I attribute that to some of the worst drivers knows to man. ATI up until about six months ago reminds me of Apple in the Amelio era.
For the record my computer has a nforce chipset and a radeon video card. And it runs windows just fine!
Fuck all you all. Here is the shit. Berlin Airlift. East Germinay ()sp coorety cosuthamuhcas() was under coocupatopn from the Soviets. Like tanks and shit. So, berlin said "that's fudcking bullshit" and so did the U.S> troops there. And for 18 months (some assholve will corrext me) they dropped shit (VVietnam/Khe san stilye, ecxpet this waw 1950...) into berlin so that they could WITHSTAND THE SIEGE.
(nobody understands me. sighj...)
You know, like in Medieval Madness or whatever. There was this big wall, and planes dropped food and stuff... A lot like afghanistan, except the food packets wrere'nt so clearly labeled as to look like bombs. ((And the bombing didn't COINCIDE with the food being dropped))) because back in 9243, or something like that, bombs mostly blew up when they atcually made contact wtih the "groudn" instead of resemb,ing food packets. Well, that's progress I guess. Does anyone remember the little crates fromn that freaky animation movei "Forbidden Planet?" eveutnaulally the "ohms" blasted off and formed a new world. If only the world were so big. Thanx a fuzznucking lot, Disney.
I would also recommend wiping the hard drives on the computers every week or so -- you probably want to reimage those boxes pretty frequently anyway since they must get filled up with a million random pieces of crap from all the various surfers at the public library.
I like the idea of paper records. They are much easier to destroy than data stored on a computer system. Burn paper, info gone. reformat a HD (despite what I said earlier) and Darwin can get the info with his SQUID brain implants. All it will cost you is a fix. (If you don't get that reference, it's William Gibson)
We need a free flow of information and ideas to prevent the "Big Lie"
Fortunately, Michael Powell (whose daddy is on the board of huge media company AOL-Time Warner) is going to completely deregulate the mass media. The coming consolidation of radio, television, and print media into the hands of five or six old white men will surely lead to the free flow of diverse opinion and information necessary for an educated, enlightened citizenry.
One thing about the Nazi seizure of power: it was all completely legal. The German government voted to "give it up to Hitler" in 1933, if I'm not mistaken.
Sig for today: "He who casts the votes decides nothing. He who counts the votes decides everything." -- J. Stalin
You don't think that maybe they have two connections, one for their web page and another that they snoop on? Because if they didn't, wouldn't it be too easy to firewall 209.204.138.224?
(We should all probably firewall at least the/24, or maybe their isp's whole netblock which accoring to arin is 208.224.128/18 if I can still do binary)
By the way, did anyone else notice that their DNS server is snitch.production.baytsp.com.? At least they're honest!
That would be cool. I want one where the computer is part of this 1960's ergonomic console like on Star Trek, where you had to take panels off of furniture once in a while. I want a computer as big as my living room, with integrated furniture and space-age martinis.
You are right. I can find out what I need to know by pressing ESC when Windows 98 boots. One line, saying like "press ESC now to see what's happening" would be fine, and everyone sees pretty clouds.
Sometimes I watch that UNIX shit go by on the screen and I think that in the old days, no one would ever see that shit go by because the cold electron gun in the display took like three minutes to warm up.
Xandros looks and feels quite a bit like Windows98 in places, possibly this was intentional.
I dunno, maybe it was a complete fluke that the Xandros Group came up with a Launch! button where Start is, a resizable Quick Launch area, applications tiled as buttons on the Taskbar, a System Tray, and a Clock. (A clock. Holy shit. I should have patented that.)
C'mon, people. You could have at least tried to put the Trash in the bottom right corner or something. I'm no big fan of current trends in IP law, but this is a total ripoff of the Windows(TM) desktop.
I think there might be a few improvements, like the little up-arrow at the end of the taskbar buttons to pop up another colums for when your drunken porn cruise has OnLoaded and OnUnloaded so many windows that the buttons are taller than they are wide. The four desktops thing is good if you have four monitors (which video card does that again??) But seriously, this desktop looks a whole lot like my current Windows XP desktop. Maybe I can install Xandros on the secretary's computer over the weekend and she'll never notice.:-)
WARNING!! Singularity Approaching! Open Source computer indistinguishable from Monopolist Capitalism.
If they wanted to find out which reviewers were releasing previews, the easiest way would be to send out a few hundred gold CD-Rs with each one individually steganographically encoded.
I don't think that would work. The steganographic information would probably be lost during the conversion to MP3. And it would mutate differently depending on the bit rate chosen to encode at. Aphex Twin has that song where an image of his face shows up in Winamp, but only if you're playing the actual CD. The subtle noise added to create the effect is lost when you convert to MP3.
It might be possible to insert "noise" that will respond in a known way to the MP3 conversion process but as someone mentioned earlier, this just prevents another roadblock that can be easily routed against -- maybe by taking the data track from the CD and adding a second of empty space at the end, and then converting to MP3.
I'm not really shocked or horrified that the record labels are doing this. It makes a lot of sense, actually, it's easy and I think it might achieve the goal of keeping the new product hidden from the mass market until they want to release it. Well, actually there is a problem. If it only takes one "rotten apple" to post the album on Napster, then the labels will be very selective in choosing reviewers. They may only send out five or six CDs (to Rolling Stone, Spin, and a few others) since that covers most of the market. Ultimately I think this process will backfire; as someone else pointed out "They wouldn't send me an advance of the CD to review, I guess it must suck." But with the increasing consolidation of media ventures, and the willingness of the masses to eat from Hollywood's feed bag, it doesn't really matter anymore if the music on the CD sucks or not -- it's all about image and lifestyle now. Limp Bizkit anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
You may not be able to punish the guy running the foreign server, but you can limit access to it from within our borders, thereby removing it as an offender.
In other words, we should implement our own version of "The Great Firewall of China." Except in America, it will "protect" the citizens from illegal IP rather than, say, Falun Gong websites.
Who gets to decide what makes it through the "Freedom Shield" or whatever newspeak you'd like to call it? Ashcroft? He won't even dance with his wife because he thinks dancing is immoral! The Copyright Holders of IP? They won't allow anything; the firewall will scan the page for "Ford" or "Friends" or "Star Wars" and deny access, just like BESS does at my girlfriend's school. The web will become useless. Utterly fucking useless.
Great plan, dipshit.
Remind me: Why is the government spending my money to protect Sony's IP again? Doesn't Sony have their own lawyers?
Science is the discovery of God's methods. To deny science is to deny God. -- Me
Can I deny God but still believe in Science? Because I don't go in for all that flowing-beard-and-sandals nonsense.
It's not that I'm not looking very hard to find out, it's that I can't understand any of Microsoft's market-speak. I think it's what someone a few posts above described it as -- the ability to write your code in any MS-endorsed language and have it compile and run on any MS-allowed OS, and allow more interaction bewteen application components. To me, it sounds like it fills the same functional requiremnt as Java, except it should be faster (since it compiles) and there will be less arguing about standards (since MS will dictate and not deliberately bollocks it up, as they did with Java.)
I'm not exactly seeing how this is any *better* than Java, though. Java is great for the little tasks it has to do, like playing backgammon on Yahoo!, and anything more complicated than that (like say Photoshop or a custom in-house app) probably won't really be able to achieve (or have any need to achieve) true platform-independence, despite what the marketdroids say.
I mean, I can't imagine wanting to run Photoshop.NET on my 240x230x16-bit color Micrcosoft PocketPC device, can you?
Though I guess if the mono thing is "for real," which I very strongly doubt, then I could run Photoshop.NET on a handheld running Linux with a much higher resolution display.
Sigh.NET I'm probably still not getting it.
My question is about the Microsoft .NET product. It's rather a simple question, but one that nobody seems to be able to answer:
.NET??? Will it dramatically change the world? What do you think the results of .NET are going to be?
What the heck is
I'm still wondering how much damage that would do. 100 Kilowatts, isn't that like 67 hairdryers? How much damage can you do with 67 hairdryers? (Mental image from Diamond Age: an army of girls armed with hairdryers marching on the city at the end of the book.)
Seriuosly, I'm wondering if the laser isn't affected by clouds and stuff, or it can track the target for a while, because I guess I'm not sure what effect this weapon is going to have. I could see it being bad for metal, like a tank, but what will it do to brick or concrete? What does it do when you shine it on someone? Really bad sunburn in like one second? Third degree burns after two?
Won't the beam be all un-collilmated and shit after passing through six miles of atmospheric effects, or is 100 kW so much that it laughs at minor perturbations?
At first I was kinda horrified by the prospect of airborne killer lasers, and well I guess I still am. But I'm afraid of a fully-loaded F-18 even without the lasers. Cluster bombs in particular are something I never want to have dropped anywhere near me. Unlike cluster bombs, when the laser turns off, it won't leave behind unexploded little bomblets for the kids to play with.
And I bet that huge killer lasers are a lot more environmentall friendly than the current nasty chemicals used in conventional weapons.
Unless they use freon for dissipating that extra 900 KW.
VICE, anyone?
VICE is a Versatile Commodore Emulator, i.e. a program that runs on a Unix, MS-DOS, Win95/NT, OS/2, Acorn RISC OS or BeOS machine and executes programs intended for the old 8-bit Commodore computers. The current version emulates the C64, the C128, the VIC20, all the PET models (except the SuperPET 9000, which is out of line anyway) and the CBM-II (aka C610).
Yeah, and that case was really weird too. It's not like there were soldiers in our homes. Unless your "home" consists of a prison which is in lockdown after a riot, and police/troops were stationed there to keep things in order.
That they got away with it is no surprise. Your "rights" are so marginalized as a convict; prisoners don't even get minimum wage when they book your flights on American Airlines.
So crashing a jet into the pentagon is one thing, but crashing a jet into the world trade center is something different?
Got it.
The definition of "terrorism" is something like "the use of violence or the threat of violence for political or ideological purposes".
To expand on that, George W. Bush and the current administration are terrorists. Are they not promoting a political purpose of "regime change" in Iraq? Are they not threatening violence to achieve their political purpose?
Yes, I know that's exactly what you said later in your post. I just wanted to reinforce your point.
When I was in public school, I did so myself on numerous occasions, and no one tried to stop me.
As the saying goes, "So long as there are tests, there will be prayer in public schools."
I was right there with you, in a sense, not saying "under God" when that part came around during the Pledge of Allegiance. Nobody ever tried to make me say the words "under God." Though I am still disgusted that I was compelled to pledge my allegiance to a republic which considered me a legal infant unworthy of basic Constitutional protections such as freedom of speech (try distributing "objectionable" flyers on school grounds) and freedom from search (drug-sniffing dogs and random locker inspections.)
It was during my high school years that I decided this country isn't worth dying for. The pay is nice, but I'm not going to go shoot some brown kid for freaking McDonalds and Wal*Mart.
Microsoft has a monopoly in PC OPERATING SYSTEMS, not game consoles.
What does Sony have a monopoly in? Aside from Betamax??
The whole point is: Microsoft can use their MONOPOLY POWER in the PC market to illegally influence that market. For example, they have so much money that they told a maker of great PC games to never make a PC game again. The company agreed.
Do you understand how that might be "more badder" than the sleaziness of Sony and Nintento?
(Here come the bad analogy...)
It's like if I had a monopoly on oil painting, and dominated the market and was filthy rich from it. Then I decided to port my painting skills into watercolors. Let's say you are a great water color artist. My millions talk you in to giving up water colors so I can try to dominate that segment as well.
The thing is: nobody has a monopoly on consoles (though Sony sems to be winning from where I am, and that is behind a Windows PC) and that's why the competition is so fierce.
Supposedly we little people benefit from this kind of thing. Fierce, cutthroat business tactics are apparently the paradigm on which to base your civlization. Go figure.
NVIDIA is like a breath of fresh air when it comes to corp policy
That explains their stock price...$8.95 down from a 52-week high of $72.66. Of course, part of that is that Microsoft changed the Xbox chips, leaving NVidia holding the bag (or goodwill as they say in the industry). I don't quite see how yet another company getting screwed by Microsoft qualifies as a breath of fresh air, but what the hell.
Not that ATI stock is anything to write home about -- down about 50% on the past 5 years. I attribute that to some of the worst drivers knows to man. ATI up until about six months ago reminds me of Apple in the Amelio era.
For the record my computer has a nforce chipset and a radeon video card. And it runs windows just fine!
ATTN: People of Macedonia. All your bandwidths are belong to us!
Signed,
CmdrTaco
Fuck all you all. Here is the shit. Berlin Airlift. East Germinay ()sp coorety cosuthamuhcas() was under coocupatopn from the Soviets. Like tanks and shit. So, berlin said "that's fudcking bullshit" and so did the U.S> troops there. And for 18 months (some assholve will corrext me) they dropped shit (VVietnam/Khe san stilye, ecxpet this waw 1950...) into berlin so that they could WITHSTAND THE SIEGE.
(nobody understands me. sighj...)
You know, like in Medieval Madness or whatever. There was this big wall, and planes dropped food and stuff... A lot like afghanistan, except the food packets wrere'nt so clearly labeled as to look like bombs. ((And the bombing didn't COINCIDE with the food being dropped))) because back in 9243, or something like that, bombs mostly blew up when they atcually made contact wtih the "groudn" instead of resemb,ing food packets. Well, that's progress I guess. Does anyone remember the little crates fromn that freaky animation movei "Forbidden Planet?" eveutnaulally the "ohms" blasted off and formed a new world. If only the world were so big. Thanx a fuzznucking lot, Disney.
I pity the fool who calls A-Team terrorists!
This antenna cannot be seen. Unfortunately, it has chosen a rather obvious piece of cover...
BOOM!
On a lighter note:
http://www.denounce.com/nsaol.html
Thank you for taking the threat posed by the USA-PATRIOT act seriously.
Unaccountable Secret Agencies - Perusing Anything They Reckon Identifies Objectionable Thinkers
I would also recommend wiping the hard drives on the computers every week or so -- you probably want to reimage those boxes pretty frequently anyway since they must get filled up with a million random pieces of crap from all the various surfers at the public library.
I like the idea of paper records. They are much easier to destroy than data stored on a computer system. Burn paper, info gone. reformat a HD (despite what I said earlier) and Darwin can get the info with his SQUID brain implants. All it will cost you is a fix. (If you don't get that reference, it's William Gibson)
(This post is not for the sarcasm impaired.)
We need a free flow of information and ideas to prevent the "Big Lie"
Fortunately, Michael Powell (whose daddy is on the board of huge media company AOL-Time Warner) is going to completely deregulate the mass media. The coming consolidation of radio, television, and print media into the hands of five or six old white men will surely lead to the free flow of diverse opinion and information necessary for an educated, enlightened citizenry.
One thing about the Nazi seizure of power: it was all completely legal. The German government voted to "give it up to Hitler" in 1933, if I'm not mistaken.
Sig for today: "He who casts the votes decides nothing. He who counts the votes decides everything." -- J. Stalin
You don't think that maybe they have two connections, one for their web page and another that they snoop on? Because if they didn't, wouldn't it be too easy to firewall 209.204.138.224?
/24, or maybe their isp's whole netblock which accoring to arin is 208.224.128/18 if I can still do binary)
(We should all probably firewall at least the
By the way, did anyone else notice that their DNS server is snitch.production.baytsp.com.? At least they're honest!
That would be cool. I want one where the computer is part of this 1960's ergonomic console like on Star Trek, where you had to take panels off of furniture once in a while. I want a computer as big as my living room, with integrated furniture and space-age martinis.
You are right. I can find out what I need to know by pressing ESC when Windows 98 boots. One line, saying like "press ESC now to see what's happening" would be fine, and everyone sees pretty clouds.
Sometimes I watch that UNIX shit go by on the screen and I think that in the old days, no one would ever see that shit go by because the cold electron gun in the display took like three minutes to warm up.
This is definitely the best line in the review:
:-)
Xandros looks and feels quite a bit like Windows98 in places, possibly this was intentional.
I dunno, maybe it was a complete fluke that the Xandros Group came up with a Launch! button where Start is, a resizable Quick Launch area, applications tiled as buttons on the Taskbar, a System Tray, and a Clock. (A clock. Holy shit. I should have patented that.)
C'mon, people. You could have at least tried to put the Trash in the bottom right corner or something. I'm no big fan of current trends in IP law, but this is a total ripoff of the Windows(TM) desktop.
I think there might be a few improvements, like the little up-arrow at the end of the taskbar buttons to pop up another colums for when your drunken porn cruise has OnLoaded and OnUnloaded so many windows that the buttons are taller than they are wide. The four desktops thing is good if you have four monitors (which video card does that again??) But seriously, this desktop looks a whole lot like my current Windows XP desktop. Maybe I can install Xandros on the secretary's computer over the weekend and she'll never notice.
WARNING!! Singularity Approaching! Open Source computer indistinguishable from Monopolist Capitalism.
If they wanted to find out which reviewers were releasing previews, the easiest way would be to send out a few hundred gold CD-Rs with each one individually steganographically encoded.
I don't think that would work. The steganographic information would probably be lost during the conversion to MP3. And it would mutate differently depending on the bit rate chosen to encode at. Aphex Twin has that song where an image of his face shows up in Winamp, but only if you're playing the actual CD. The subtle noise added to create the effect is lost when you convert to MP3.
It might be possible to insert "noise" that will respond in a known way to the MP3 conversion process but as someone mentioned earlier, this just prevents another roadblock that can be easily routed against -- maybe by taking the data track from the CD and adding a second of empty space at the end, and then converting to MP3.
I'm not really shocked or horrified that the record labels are doing this. It makes a lot of sense, actually, it's easy and I think it might achieve the goal of keeping the new product hidden from the mass market until they want to release it. Well, actually there is a problem. If it only takes one "rotten apple" to post the album on Napster, then the labels will be very selective in choosing reviewers. They may only send out five or six CDs (to Rolling Stone, Spin, and a few others) since that covers most of the market. Ultimately I think this process will backfire; as someone else pointed out "They wouldn't send me an advance of the CD to review, I guess it must suck." But with the increasing consolidation of media ventures, and the willingness of the masses to eat from Hollywood's feed bag, it doesn't really matter anymore if the music on the CD sucks or not -- it's all about image and lifestyle now. Limp Bizkit anyone?
i HAVE OT FIRE UP ie NOW to see if this shit is as wide as it is long