Was anybody else even slightly scared that they were going to get Goatse?
Oh, come on... It was the first picture posted to the Web; it would have taken at least an hour for someone to come up with the idea of setting up a site to be used for linkforging non-work-safe images to burn people's eyes out... And even longer for the domain-name standards to be in place so that the.cx domain was there to make the hostname pun work.
Yes, but it's brillant marketing. The company only spent $1000. They've already gotten a link from the main page of Slashdot; what more press are they going to see now? The spyware removal business has gotten pretty competitive and now thousands more geeks know about their product. Kudos to the company for a neat, non-evil marketing idea.
Yes... thousands more geeks know about their products... and how many are going to want to actually install it after they read the article and pay attention to the paragraph from the EULA that is quoted in the article:
"GAIN Publishing offers some of the most popular software available on the Internet free of charge ("GAIN-Supported Software") in exchange for your agreement to also install GAIN AdServer software ("GAIN"), which will display Pop-Up, Pop-Under, and other types of ads on your computer based on the information we collect as stated in this Privacy Statement. We refer to consumers who have GAIN on their system as 'Subscribers.'"
Can I see a show of hands of all the regular/. readers who want to install a popup-ad delivery utility on their system and allow it to suck whatever personal information it wants to deliver to GAIN for whatever use it decides to put that data?
IIRC the US had a project in the late 60's which tried to determine how hard it would be to build a nuclear bomb. They employed some freshly graduated physic students which had no prior knowledge about bomb designs but were allowed to use any material being in public domain. After about 3 man years they presented a working design. Taking into account that nowadays there is much more information available to the public it is likely that it would take even less time.
Well, given that Analog magazine published, in their April 1979 issue, a science-fact article titled "Build Your Own A-Bomb and Wake Up the Neighborhood!" which laid out in clear terms how to build a brute-force gun-type bomb, I'd have to say that the only limitation would be their ability to get enough bomb-grade nuclear material. Admittedly, the device is crude, and not transportable at all; it's essentially a two-story pipe mounted vertically in a building, with one hemisphere of nuclear material at the bottom and one at the top mounted on a heavy lead cylinder that can be dropped down the pipe. However, it's perfectly functional, and aside from the production of the two hemispheres, doesn't require anything more than basic handyman skills to produce -- the 'detonator' involving nothing more complex than pulling out a rod that keeps the upper cylinder from falling down the pipe, and getting someone willing to be there to yank out the rod probably isn't going to be a problem.
The article spends more time focussing on the problem of getting enough bomb-grade material from what was, at the time, the most accessible source of fissiles -- hijacking a truck full of fuel rods and refining the nuclear fuel to get bomb-grade material. With the breakup of the Soviet Union, it's probably a lot easier to get either the fuel or bomb-grade material directly, and getting an actual nuclear device eliminates all of the grunt work. Given the amount of effort needed to refine power-plant grade enriched nuclear fuel, the article suggested, IIRC, that a more effective use of the terrorists' effort would be to grind the fuel into a powder, take it up in a small private aircraft, and dump it out over a large city as they fly around, getting more effective distribution of the contamination. Additionally, spreading the nuclear material directly increases the cost to their target from the hysteria associated with a public announcement of the contamination and the government's attempts to clean it up, not to mention being able to repeat the attack once or twice using nothing more lethal than, say, table salt and still get the same hysteria and government reaction from the residents of the city you claim you've contaminated.
It's not going to prevent anything. People who want to harass those who have restraining orders against them will continue to do so. Being able to prove it because they're wearing a GPS device is only an additional expense that will be absorbed by taxpayers.
And this is something that needs careful consideration. GPS itself is a passive system; it just locates the GPS receiver. If the tracking device just records the convict's location, then it provides no deterrent, because the convict can cut off the device and destroy it, and any violation could only be determined when the convict met their case officer. To be a deterrent, it would have to transmit its location on a periodic basis, allowing the convict's position to be tracked remotely. Then, to identify violations, there has to be some identification of the convict's location against prohibited areas. Using people for this would be economically unfeasible, so you would be implementing some sort of geographic database to allow forbidden areas to be designated, the ability to associate forbidden areas with individual tracking units, and a continuous monitor to throw an alert when a violation occurs.
So now you've got this tracking system, which is tracking the handful of convicts who are participating in the program. Well, obviously the system is going to have to have excess capacity. So some inventive official is going to come up with the idea of using the system to track other things, too. City buses -- being able to tell if a city bus isn't moving or has left its route would be useful, as would tracking other city vehicles (like police cars). Then someone will come up with a reason why the city should track something else. Then something else, and at some point it will slide inexorably into a rationalization for a privacy-invasive use, such as tagging schoolkids to make sure they stay on or near campus during the school day.
It may not happen this way, or at all -- but once the capability is there, so is the potential for abuse, and it's much more inconvenient to defend against a slow encroachment on your rights than against a massive assault, because each little step can be presented much more plausibly.
Wasn't there also one in the late 70's or early 80's about a jail in the desert (Nevada?) that had no fences, but the inmates wore collars that would explode if they went too far?
That would be The Running Man, from 1987, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Maria Conchita Alonzo, and Richard Dawson (in a lampoon of his 'Family Feud' game-show host role). The inmates wore collars with explosive charges that would detonate if they crossed a 'sonic deadline'.
There is a distinct difference between art held in a gallery and art put on public display. When this distinction is blurred we run into the issue of putting an unfair limitation on photographers. If the display is on public lands and the upkeep is paid for from public funds then there should be no legal impediment to it being photographed.
The solution to this is to file a class-action lawsuit (on behalf of all the photographers in the city) back at the city on the basis that posting the sculpture in a public park and attempting to claim copyright infringement on photographs of the park that happen to include the sculpture constitutes a legal taking of the public's right to use the park, and require that the city immediately remove the sculpture, with damages to be paid to anyone who can present to the court a photograph of the park as proof of their use of the park for photographic purposes...
Well, now SF fans will have something besides The Eye of Argon that they can use to hold competitions to see who can read aloud further without breaking into laughter...
We can't communicate with dolphins because we have no common frames of reference of any sort. Were we to contact an alien race however, it's implied just by that scenario existing that we have something in common with them; whether it be a similar understanding of electromagnetics, a written language, or even just the concept of extraspecies communication.
As a counterexample to your supposition that we would be able to be able to communicate with an alien species because we had certain characteristics in common, I would point out that we were unable to understand a language developed by our own species until a document was found that presented the same information in the unknown language and languages that were known. I'm referring, of course, to the Rosetta Stone. Even with the active cooperation of a member of the alien race, there will likely be concepts that cannot be communicated effectively, and the likelihood of miscommunication will rise as the amount of deviation between our sensorium and theirs increases -- for an example from science fiction, the concept of 'color' having no meaning to the Kdatlyno in Larry Niven's 'Known Space' fiction.
Nowadays, with the web-based system, it's much easier to find exactly what I want, but I still sometimes miss the thrill of the hunt, as it were, flipping through cards organized by subject, title, and author, searching for just the right book.
Not to mention the enjoyment of running across something in the card catalog on a subject you weren't looking for which piques your interest and turns out to be interesting enough for you go go back researching that subject.
In Denmark the marketing rules forbid people to send uninvited marketing material. Unless you specifically accept to receive it - it will be illegal (and punishable by court) to send it.... So unless you check the checkbox somewhere in your hotmail registration, you will be able to sue MS - in Denmark at least...
Except for that paragraph waaaay down at the bottom of the "user agreement" that you just clicked past when you signed up for your Hotmail account, where it says something like "Microsoft reserves the right to send you advertisements from various business partners and other organizations. By accepting this User Agreement, you are consenting in advance to receiving these advertisements." You use someone else's free service, you play by their rules.
I'm surprised that no one has filed suit claiming ownership of a patent which describes the mechanisms of email based spam.
No, the smart money would have been in filing a patent on something described in the article:
"... the practice of first suing small companies to win settlements that would then be used to finance lawsuits against larger litigants with bigger legal budgets."
Being able to sue anyone who's trying to sue someone else for infringement of an idiotic intellectual-property patent... now there's a way to make money and serve the public.
Of course, by now it would take a time machine to be able to file the patent retroactively...
My guess would be because the XBox is a fixed set of hardware, with known capabilities. If I'm an XBox developer, I don't have to worry about making my game take advantage of Gee-Whiz Blip-Texture-Buffered Cell Shading (TM) that currently only exists on the Radeon 10K+1/2. If I choose to port my game from XBox to Windows, though, I'll be competing with games that do exploit these features, and I'll get a reputation of being "behind the curve."
You have the right reason, although your justification behind it isn't square. When you're writing for the Xbox, you know that you're always going to have a known set of graphic and sound capabilities; move to the PC, and you have to query DirectX to find out what the user's hardware can do. If the Xbox game uses a particular hardware acceleration, and the user's video card won't do that, you've got to have the code to do that in software as part of your graphics library, or change your code so that it can not use that particular graphics feature if it's not supported. All of which adds to the codebloat and the complexity of the port.
Indeed, if this rare occurrance could happen perchance, say 2004 years ago it truly would be a miricle birth. Maybe the lack off scientific understanding at that time would lead people to believe that the virgin mary had been impregnated by god.
Except that, lacking a 'Y' chromosome, any parthenogentic child of Mary's would have been female, not male -- which would have shut things down right there in the androcentric Judaic culture.
Re:Disposal is much more fun in an emergency
on
HDD Assault Cannon
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I worked at a DoD site once. If we were in danger of being overrun by the enemy (since it was in Hawaii, I guess that'd be either the North Koreans, China, or the Japanese out for a little payback), we were supposed to haul the crypto gear and all storage media out to the parking lot, smack the hell out of it with sledges, pile thermite on top and melt it into slag. I was sorely disappointed that I never got the opportunity.
I remember, years ago at work, running across a reference to and picture of a document-destruction device that was supposed to have been phased out; it was essentially a plate of thermite that would have sat on top of a file cabinet. To destroy the documents in the file cabinet, you pulled a pair of rings on wires out of the upper surface, which set off a fuse (allowing you to get away) that ignited the thermite, which would burn down through the file cabinet, destroying the documents inside. Something like that must have been really impressive to watch, judging from the demonstrations with a few grams of thermite that I watched in high-school chemistry.
4/2003: "2003: The Year of the Penguin?" 4/2002: "2002: The Year of the Penguin?" 4/2001: "2001: The Year of the Penguin?" 4/2000: "2000: The Year of the Penguin?" 4/1999: "1999: The Year of the Penguin?"
Thereby establishing the Year of the Penguin as a serious candidate for the Vaporware Hall of Fame.
(1) Contracting Parties shall provide adequate legal protection and effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by broadcasting organizations in connection with the exercise of their rights under this Treaty and that restrict acts, in respect of their broadcasts, that are not authorized or are prohibited by the broadcasting organizations concerned or permitted by law.
It sounds to me as if a competent lawyer could drive an eighteen-wheeler through the implied loophole here. If a technological measure to prevent unauthorized reproduction is implemented, and someone comes up with a way to bypass this protection easily, it would seem to me that this would, by definition, not be an 'effective technological measure', and therefore the legal remedies would be negated.
Truckers in South Africa also used to also carry a water bag in a wet sand filled canvas bag outside their trucks to provide a constant source of cool water.
When I was growing up, I remember on several of the cross-country PCS transfers my father made that for the part of the trip through the southwest desert (grandparents in Tucson), we had a large coarse canvas bag that we'd fill with water and sling over the grill of our car to help keep the radiator from boiling over, using the water pulled from the bag by evaporation both to cool the air flowing over the radiator and to increase the thermal capacity of that air (colder air->better heat transfer, water in the air->more thermal mass to absorb heat). Same principle, different application.
In the last picture in chapter 9, there is this big slogan across the room. In Ukrainian, it reads: "Long live communism - the bright future for the whole mankind!"
Well, if we're all glowing in the dark, that's a bright future, isn't it?
For THIRTY FOUR YEARS of operation of both a Moon base and Mars operations I'd say that's reasonable.
However, having seen the financial management of previous projects, I would not consider it that much of a stretch, with cost overruns and mismanagement, for the government to be able to blow a trillion dollars on a single Mars expedition.
The staff at places like Air Combat USA have repeatedly admitted that people who play air-combat simulations, particularly against real opponents, do much better in the mock combat they present. One of the things that is the most difficult to learn is SA (Situational Awareness) -- the ability to keep track of where the other plane is relative to yours when both are maneuvering, with the basic ACM (Air Combat Maneuvers) being secondary, and air-combat simulations give the opportunity to learn those skills without the penalties that failure in a real airplane would produce.
It seems that everyone changes sides on the "piracy" debate depending on what's better for them personally. When the US was founded, all "IP" was rigidly controlled by Europeans, so the US had fairly loose patent and copyright laws, and it was common for US publishers to "pirate" European authors.
"It has been pretended by some (and in England especially) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when the relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is give late in the progress of society. It would be curious, then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening mine. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature. When she made them like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices."
Nobody wants to pay $300 for thier printer when they can pay $100 for it (and later pay $40 for the cartridges).
I'd be more than happy to buy one, provided I could refill the cartridges with a bottle. Presently I'm paying 30 U$S per liter for Epson replacemennt ink, so the ink cost is negligible, but the syringe process is an awful mess.
What you're looking for, then is a continuous-flow system like the ones here, where the ink feeds from bottles outside the printer, rather than via cartridges; it lets you continue to buy your ink in bulk, but when you're feeding ink from a four- or eight-ounce bottle instead of a 12cc cartridge, refilling the bottles will be a lot less messy than sticking syringes in the cartridges.
But in this case, the police should already have enough proof. There's a confession from the thief, and a matching transaction that fits the description on EB's records too.
And I don't see why EB isn't bending over backwards to cooperate -- there's an interesting thing called 'receiving stolen property', which is a felony, even if the actual theft of the property is a misdemeanor. The manager of the store and the clerk that actually bought the gear can go up for serious time, and both of them and the parent company become liable for a juicy suit for damages by the victim.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, come on... It was the first picture posted to the Web; it would have taken at least an hour for someone to come up with the idea of setting up a site to be used for linkforging non-work-safe images to burn people's eyes out... And even longer for the domain-name standards to be in place so that the .cx domain was there to make the hostname pun work.
Yes... thousands more geeks know about their products... and how many are going to want to actually install it after they read the article and pay attention to the paragraph from the EULA that is quoted in the article:
Can I see a show of hands of all the regular /. readers who want to install a popup-ad delivery utility on their system and allow it to suck whatever personal information it wants to deliver to GAIN for whatever use it decides to put that data?
Didn't think so.
Well, given that Analog magazine published, in their April 1979 issue, a science-fact article titled "Build Your Own A-Bomb and Wake Up the Neighborhood!" which laid out in clear terms how to build a brute-force gun-type bomb, I'd have to say that the only limitation would be their ability to get enough bomb-grade nuclear material. Admittedly, the device is crude, and not transportable at all; it's essentially a two-story pipe mounted vertically in a building, with one hemisphere of nuclear material at the bottom and one at the top mounted on a heavy lead cylinder that can be dropped down the pipe. However, it's perfectly functional, and aside from the production of the two hemispheres, doesn't require anything more than basic handyman skills to produce -- the 'detonator' involving nothing more complex than pulling out a rod that keeps the upper cylinder from falling down the pipe, and getting someone willing to be there to yank out the rod probably isn't going to be a problem.
The article spends more time focussing on the problem of getting enough bomb-grade material from what was, at the time, the most accessible source of fissiles -- hijacking a truck full of fuel rods and refining the nuclear fuel to get bomb-grade material. With the breakup of the Soviet Union, it's probably a lot easier to get either the fuel or bomb-grade material directly, and getting an actual nuclear device eliminates all of the grunt work. Given the amount of effort needed to refine power-plant grade enriched nuclear fuel, the article suggested, IIRC, that a more effective use of the terrorists' effort would be to grind the fuel into a powder, take it up in a small private aircraft, and dump it out over a large city as they fly around, getting more effective distribution of the contamination. Additionally, spreading the nuclear material directly increases the cost to their target from the hysteria associated with a public announcement of the contamination and the government's attempts to clean it up, not to mention being able to repeat the attack once or twice using nothing more lethal than, say, table salt and still get the same hysteria and government reaction from the residents of the city you claim you've contaminated.
And this is something that needs careful consideration. GPS itself is a passive system; it just locates the GPS receiver. If the tracking device just records the convict's location, then it provides no deterrent, because the convict can cut off the device and destroy it, and any violation could only be determined when the convict met their case officer. To be a deterrent, it would have to transmit its location on a periodic basis, allowing the convict's position to be tracked remotely. Then, to identify violations, there has to be some identification of the convict's location against prohibited areas. Using people for this would be economically unfeasible, so you would be implementing some sort of geographic database to allow forbidden areas to be designated, the ability to associate forbidden areas with individual tracking units, and a continuous monitor to throw an alert when a violation occurs.
So now you've got this tracking system, which is tracking the handful of convicts who are participating in the program. Well, obviously the system is going to have to have excess capacity. So some inventive official is going to come up with the idea of using the system to track other things, too. City buses -- being able to tell if a city bus isn't moving or has left its route would be useful, as would tracking other city vehicles (like police cars). Then someone will come up with a reason why the city should track something else. Then something else, and at some point it will slide inexorably into a rationalization for a privacy-invasive use, such as tagging schoolkids to make sure they stay on or near campus during the school day.
It may not happen this way, or at all -- but once the capability is there, so is the potential for abuse, and it's much more inconvenient to defend against a slow encroachment on your rights than against a massive assault, because each little step can be presented much more plausibly.
That would be The Running Man, from 1987, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Maria Conchita Alonzo, and Richard Dawson (in a lampoon of his 'Family Feud' game-show host role). The inmates wore collars with explosive charges that would detonate if they crossed a 'sonic deadline'.
The solution to this is to file a class-action lawsuit (on behalf of all the photographers in the city) back at the city on the basis that posting the sculpture in a public park and attempting to claim copyright infringement on photographs of the park that happen to include the sculpture constitutes a legal taking of the public's right to use the park, and require that the city immediately remove the sculpture, with damages to be paid to anyone who can present to the court a photograph of the park as proof of their use of the park for photographic purposes...
Sometimes stupid lawsuits have their uses...
Well, now SF fans will have something besides The Eye of Argon that they can use to hold competitions to see who can read aloud further without breaking into laughter...
As a counterexample to your supposition that we would be able to be able to communicate with an alien species because we had certain characteristics in common, I would point out that we were unable to understand a language developed by our own species until a document was found that presented the same information in the unknown language and languages that were known. I'm referring, of course, to the Rosetta Stone. Even with the active cooperation of a member of the alien race, there will likely be concepts that cannot be communicated effectively, and the likelihood of miscommunication will rise as the amount of deviation between our sensorium and theirs increases -- for an example from science fiction, the concept of 'color' having no meaning to the Kdatlyno in Larry Niven's 'Known Space' fiction.
Of course, by now it would take a time machine to be able to file the patent retroactively...
To spread the pain out among more sites, there is a review of this product over at eXtremeReviews.net.
It sounds to me as if a competent lawyer could drive an eighteen-wheeler through the implied loophole here. If a technological measure to prevent unauthorized reproduction is implemented, and someone comes up with a way to bypass this protection easily, it would seem to me that this would, by definition, not be an 'effective technological measure', and therefore the legal remedies would be negated.
The staff at places like Air Combat USA have repeatedly admitted that people who play air-combat simulations, particularly against real opponents, do much better in the mock combat they present. One of the things that is the most difficult to learn is SA (Situational Awareness) -- the ability to keep track of where the other plane is relative to yours when both are maneuvering, with the basic ACM (Air Combat Maneuvers) being secondary, and air-combat simulations give the opportunity to learn those skills without the penalties that failure in a real airplane would produce.