Scroll down and look at the other stories that master of editoral disaster, Zonk, has posted over night.
I'd normally bet it was a night of drinking followed by lapses in judgement, but its actually just his normal quality of work.
And its indicitive of the fact that no one at Slashdot has given two squirts about the site since it was bought by VA or whoever it was back in the day.
And I can say that with the authority of someone with a 4 digit user id.;-)
I'm sure you can find something more reputable than a first hand account on Slashdot, though, with a little google searching.
I have a) mistakenly gotten into and started a car before, b) ordered a key online with just the VIN, and c) ordered a key online for a 40 year old European-delivery Porsche 911 with nothing but the three digit code stamped on the original key, and d) a sister who works in high risk car financing who is involved with repos on a regular basis.
It may be US-only that the VIN MUST be visible through the window, but it seems strange that would be the case. In either way here, its mandatory.
Most car models that don't have a radio immobilizer of some kind (which is most cars) only have maybe 30 different keys for the whole model production. A lot of repo guys have key rings with all the standard keys for high-repo models.
I've actually found a color/key collision before when I was a kid. My mom and I almost drove off with someone else's car until we realized it was WAY too clean to be our car and we were in the wrong one.
Thats also why you can go online and order key dupes using the number stamped on the key or in some cases the VIN.
(Not many people seem to know all you need is the VIN and a contact at a dealer to get a key, as well... and the VIN is visible on modern cars through the windshield)
There is no real security with cars. If someone wants it, they can take it.
You sure about that? I've never seen a "real" data center with just four inches below the floor. I think the least I've ever seen was maybe 3 feet, and I've been in several you could comfortably stand under.
The bigger the space, the more serious the data center. I did six months of consulting working in a data center that had a six foot raised floor, which wasn't enough to walk easily under because of the ducting and cable trays, but made moving around and finding stuff a lot easier. They had great filtration, too... it was spotless under there, and ironically a lot warmer, so you'd occasionally see people sitting under the floor.
In the real world, there's a funamental cost to production of any physical good. Some percentage of that goes to the IP production, some percentage goes to manufacturing. A $500 sign may have a negligable portion of its cost be from the former, but other goods like, for example, a Ferrari, have MUCH higher percentage of their cost covering the development of the IP prior to manufacturing.
Moving to the digital world doesn't change that in the slightest. The is still a real world cost to the development of the IP, and a real world cost to the management of the distribution of it. Sure the cost is very tiny for a publisher to produce and distribute an electronic copy, but they have the fractional cost of the production of that property they must get paid for. If you make a copy of that to give to a friend, they don't lose out on the physical production costs as if you stole a sign, but they absolutely lose out on the fraction of the development costs that sale would've represented.
So, hippie leanings of Slashdot aside, it is NOT an artificial limitation, its a critical limitation because of those development costs.
Now one can argue the profit producers of content are making is unreasonable, but as producers, thats their business, not yours.
There are pleanty of others. Virtually every licensing organization globally has said that they are not licensed to distribute the music at all, much less internationally.
Its illegal. Deal with it. If you're paying for the service for ease of access to the music, great. If you're doing it out of some misguided sense of morality, you ought to rethink it.
I have a DVD player that upconverts over HDMI. It requires the end-point support HDCP.
I plugged it into my TV, and it just works.
And thats precisely why no one will care. It'll just work. A vocal minority who flips about not being able to watch content they don't even have yet will get upset. College students who cry "my rights!" who really want to rips movies, trade then and do all the other things the technology is intended to block will be upset. No one else will.
No, you saw a national defense contractor welfare program bring food, water, supplies and new equipment to a massively expensive international defense contractor welfare program that will never be completed.
The point of the WSJ editorial is simple: the difference between what we could be doing and what we are doing is enormous, and when you step back and look at what we are doing, its not very impressive or useful in the first place. Whoopty-do. An astronaut left his ship and did a "repair" in space. Repairs orders of magnitude more complicated have been done in the past (Hubble?), space stations have been supplied for two decades now (space stations that were FAR more useful, and FAR cheaper).
If you can't get used to that being a common occurance, or see that its really rediculous that we're impressed by that these days, that shortcoming is your own, not the parent poster's.
This pretty much proves the pathetic state of Slashdot. The fact that essentially everyone can not RTFA and apply basic reading comprehension to understand the two are not the same. I can understand that slashdot 5 years ago may have gotten a different result now based on changes in society... But we're talking here about basic reading skills with two stories in a very close proximity in time. I think its time for some educational reform.
Keep in mind its not particularly hard to be a millionaire.
If you made $35k a year and bought a house ten years ago around here, you'd be a millionaire now.
If you make $100k/year, and invest wisely, even lacking a real-estate bubble having $1m in assets isn't terribly hard.
What would be VERY hard is being a millionaire and having $200k in liquid capital you can access easily and afford to lose.
To afford $200k, you're talking about having a VERY large pool of investments where using it might be a percent or less drop in your holdings, or having a very high income. Someone making $25k a month can probably justify saving for a trip like that if their other assets are used responsibly, but I know pleanty of people who are millionaires and would be hard pressed to scrape up $1k/month to put towards something like that.
So don't put too much faith in that 7 million figure. The percentage of those who have the kind of money you think being a millionaire entails is very very small. 1% maybe.
The American public is, collectively, a bunch of bumbling morons. Take as witness the enormous number of people trading in their giant SUVs for an economy car because gas is up fifty cents. They never ask themselves how much money they'll save on gas (typically less than $50/month) and how much of a loss they're taking on the depreciation of the SUV at trade in ($10k?). At $600/year in fuel savings, it takes a LONG time to make that up!
You do realize daylight savings time changes on different days in every country? That parts of the US don't even have it?
Hardware and software already deal with the problem. It'll be a minor patch to system libraries to solve the problem for software. It already has to ask "what day is it, and where are you" to figure out when and if to apply DST changes.
This is one more if statement when your locale is in the US.
And most hardware doesn't really understand DST. I've never seen a VCR that did. Why would someone sell a VCR that can't be sold anywhere but the US?
It doesn't seem to be universally known that DST rules vary not only across the country but around the world. Starting and stopping times vary by country, and as we all ought to know there are places in the US that don't have it.
What does that mean?
This is a non-issue. Most products either don't deal with DST (VCR's, clocks, etc) or are driven by outside signals (automatically set radio clocks, TV clocks, cable boxes, cell phones), are easily updated (all computer software, which already has to ask the OS for the translation).
It'll be a rare product or a buggy program that is badly affected by the problem. This isn't Y2K all over again. Its a trivial fix for most things and won't even be broken on half the stuff the panic articles about it talk about.
When two sucky cellular providers merge is that bad because you've got one double sucky provider, or is it better because you've got one less sucky provider?
They know there's no real risk from any of these things... the whole point is to get experience in fixing things when it doesn't matter if it works or not, so when it does matter, you know you can do it.
I wish I had mod points... because thats a key thing people seem to miss, and is related to the other/. story this morning about NASA replacing the Shuttle.
Even NASA knew the Shuttle was a bad design, not just the Soviets. They've known that since before the shuttle first was launched. There was a LOT of disagreement in NASA about it during the 70's between "super-Apollo" models and the Shuttle model.
It was obvious very quickly that the Shuttle took too much maintennance to ever recoup costs in volume. It may be reusable, but per amount of weight lofted into space, it still costs a lot more. Its been rediculous since day one.
No idea. Considering the opportunity for using it to smuggle cocaine into the country, its probably not a very favorable position.
Its all very stupid, IMHO. Cocaine in comparable quantities is a safer stimulant than caffeine. Like most of the "war on drugs" and and other such rediculousness during the 20th century, this is all politics, nothing more.
Actually you couldn't reverse engineer Coca-Cola's taste in the US legally. Under the guise of "vegitable extracts", "natural flavors" or whatever other description used in the ingredients depending on the country is decocainized coca leaf extracts. (The favor of the coca leaf with the cocaine removed).
There's only one company in the US legally allowed to import coca leaves for processing, Stephan Co, in New Jersey. They have an exclusive contract with Coca-Cola to provide the extract, and an exclusive license from the DEA to import the leaves.
It wouldn't matter if you knew Coke's recipe, you couldn't make it anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Scroll down and look at the other stories that master of editoral disaster, Zonk, has posted over night.
;-)
I'd normally bet it was a night of drinking followed by lapses in judgement, but its actually just his normal quality of work.
And its indicitive of the fact that no one at Slashdot has given two squirts about the site since it was bought by VA or whoever it was back in the day.
And I can say that with the authority of someone with a 4 digit user id.
Yeah, actual experience with it.
I'm sure you can find something more reputable than a first hand account on Slashdot, though, with a little google searching.
I have a) mistakenly gotten into and started a car before, b) ordered a key online with just the VIN, and c) ordered a key online for a 40 year old European-delivery Porsche 911 with nothing but the three digit code stamped on the original key, and d) a sister who works in high risk car financing who is involved with repos on a regular basis.
It may be US-only that the VIN MUST be visible through the window, but it seems strange that would be the case. In either way here, its mandatory.
Most car models that don't have a radio immobilizer of some kind (which is most cars) only have maybe 30 different keys for the whole model production. A lot of repo guys have key rings with all the standard keys for high-repo models.
I've actually found a color/key collision before when I was a kid. My mom and I almost drove off with someone else's car until we realized it was WAY too clean to be our car and we were in the wrong one.
Thats also why you can go online and order key dupes using the number stamped on the key or in some cases the VIN.
(Not many people seem to know all you need is the VIN and a contact at a dealer to get a key, as well... and the VIN is visible on modern cars through the windshield)
There is no real security with cars. If someone wants it, they can take it.
You sure about that? I've never seen a "real" data center with just four inches below the floor. I think the least I've ever seen was maybe 3 feet, and I've been in several you could comfortably stand under.
The bigger the space, the more serious the data center. I did six months of consulting working in a data center that had a six foot raised floor, which wasn't enough to walk easily under because of the ducting and cable trays, but made moving around and finding stuff a lot easier. They had great filtration, too... it was spotless under there, and ironically a lot warmer, so you'd occasionally see people sitting under the floor.
In the real world, there's a funamental cost to production of any physical good. Some percentage of that goes to the IP production, some percentage goes to manufacturing. A $500 sign may have a negligable portion of its cost be from the former, but other goods like, for example, a Ferrari, have MUCH higher percentage of their cost covering the development of the IP prior to manufacturing.
Moving to the digital world doesn't change that in the slightest. The is still a real world cost to the development of the IP, and a real world cost to the management of the distribution of it. Sure the cost is very tiny for a publisher to produce and distribute an electronic copy, but they have the fractional cost of the production of that property they must get paid for. If you make a copy of that to give to a friend, they don't lose out on the physical production costs as if you stole a sign, but they absolutely lose out on the fraction of the development costs that sale would've represented.
So, hippie leanings of Slashdot aside, it is NOT an artificial limitation, its a critical limitation because of those development costs.
Now one can argue the profit producers of content are making is unreasonable, but as producers, thats their business, not yours.
Well it was meant as a joke. I'm not the one who moderated it +5 Insightful.
/. when an obvious attempt at black humor gets modded as insightful instead of funny.
Its a sad state of affairs on
Only if he gets his sister or cousin to move with him.
Real estate is probably going to be cheap.
Yup you're right. Its legal because you think it is.
/., legality is defined by how readers want things to work...
You're a contract law attorney, after all.
Right?
Oh wait, this is
You must be going out of your way to avoid the massive amounts of information.
First hit of the first search:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2115868/
There are pleanty of others. Virtually every licensing organization globally has said that they are not licensed to distribute the music at all, much less internationally.
Its illegal. Deal with it. If you're paying for the service for ease of access to the music, great. If you're doing it out of some misguided sense of morality, you ought to rethink it.
I have a DVD player that upconverts over HDMI. It requires the end-point support HDCP.
I plugged it into my TV, and it just works.
And thats precisely why no one will care. It'll just work. A vocal minority who flips about not being able to watch content they don't even have yet will get upset. College students who cry "my rights!" who really want to rips movies, trade then and do all the other things the technology is intended to block will be upset. No one else will.
No, you saw a national defense contractor welfare program bring food, water, supplies and new equipment to a massively expensive international defense contractor welfare program that will never be completed.
The point of the WSJ editorial is simple: the difference between what we could be doing and what we are doing is enormous, and when you step back and look at what we are doing, its not very impressive or useful in the first place. Whoopty-do. An astronaut left his ship and did a "repair" in space. Repairs orders of magnitude more complicated have been done in the past (Hubble?), space stations have been supplied for two decades now (space stations that were FAR more useful, and FAR cheaper).
If you can't get used to that being a common occurance, or see that its really rediculous that we're impressed by that these days, that shortcoming is your own, not the parent poster's.
This pretty much proves the pathetic state of Slashdot. The fact that essentially everyone can not RTFA and apply basic reading comprehension to understand the two are not the same. I can understand that slashdot 5 years ago may have gotten a different result now based on changes in society... But we're talking here about basic reading skills with two stories in a very close proximity in time. I think its time for some educational reform.
And yes, its you.
Keep in mind its not particularly hard to be a millionaire.
If you made $35k a year and bought a house ten years ago around here, you'd be a millionaire now.
If you make $100k/year, and invest wisely, even lacking a real-estate bubble having $1m in assets isn't terribly hard.
What would be VERY hard is being a millionaire and having $200k in liquid capital you can access easily and afford to lose.
To afford $200k, you're talking about having a VERY large pool of investments where using it might be a percent or less drop in your holdings, or having a very high income. Someone making $25k a month can probably justify saving for a trip like that if their other assets are used responsibly, but I know pleanty of people who are millionaires and would be hard pressed to scrape up $1k/month to put towards something like that.
So don't put too much faith in that 7 million figure. The percentage of those who have the kind of money you think being a millionaire entails is very very small. 1% maybe.
See, exactly my point.
Even people who think they get it don't understand the basic economics of it.
Thats not necessarily a good comparison, though.
The American public is, collectively, a bunch of bumbling morons. Take as witness the enormous number of people trading in their giant SUVs for an economy car because gas is up fifty cents. They never ask themselves how much money they'll save on gas (typically less than $50/month) and how much of a loss they're taking on the depreciation of the SUV at trade in ($10k?). At $600/year in fuel savings, it takes a LONG time to make that up!
Wow, how embarassing -- having something in common with a Fox reporter.
You do realize daylight savings time changes on different days in every country? That parts of the US don't even have it?
Hardware and software already deal with the problem. It'll be a minor patch to system libraries to solve the problem for software. It already has to ask "what day is it, and where are you" to figure out when and if to apply DST changes.
This is one more if statement when your locale is in the US.
And most hardware doesn't really understand DST. I've never seen a VCR that did. Why would someone sell a VCR that can't be sold anywhere but the US?
It doesn't seem to be universally known that DST rules vary not only across the country but around the world. Starting and stopping times vary by country, and as we all ought to know there are places in the US that don't have it.
What does that mean?
This is a non-issue. Most products either don't deal with DST (VCR's, clocks, etc) or are driven by outside signals (automatically set radio clocks, TV clocks, cable boxes, cell phones), are easily updated (all computer software, which already has to ask the OS for the translation).
It'll be a rare product or a buggy program that is badly affected by the problem. This isn't Y2K all over again. Its a trivial fix for most things and won't even be broken on half the stuff the panic articles about it talk about.
Actually in most cases the poles are owned by the power company or a 3rd party who leases them to both.
And if you wanted to come in and run your own lines, they'd probably let you. Just pay the same everyone else pays.
When two sucky cellular providers merge is that bad because you've got one double sucky provider, or is it better because you've got one less sucky provider?
They know there's no real risk from any of these things... the whole point is to get experience in fixing things when it doesn't matter if it works or not, so when it does matter, you know you can do it.
I wish I had mod points... because thats a key thing people seem to miss, and is related to the other /. story this morning about NASA replacing the Shuttle.
Even NASA knew the Shuttle was a bad design, not just the Soviets. They've known that since before the shuttle first was launched. There was a LOT of disagreement in NASA about it during the 70's between "super-Apollo" models and the Shuttle model.
It was obvious very quickly that the Shuttle took too much maintennance to ever recoup costs in volume. It may be reusable, but per amount of weight lofted into space, it still costs a lot more. Its been rediculous since day one.
No idea. Considering the opportunity for using it to smuggle cocaine into the country, its probably not a very favorable position.
Its all very stupid, IMHO. Cocaine in comparable quantities is a safer stimulant than caffeine. Like most of the "war on drugs" and and other such rediculousness during the 20th century, this is all politics, nothing more.
Actually you couldn't reverse engineer Coca-Cola's taste in the US legally. Under the guise of "vegitable extracts", "natural flavors" or whatever other description used in the ingredients depending on the country is decocainized coca leaf extracts. (The favor of the coca leaf with the cocaine removed).
There's only one company in the US legally allowed to import coca leaves for processing, Stephan Co, in New Jersey. They have an exclusive contract with Coca-Cola to provide the extract, and an exclusive license from the DEA to import the leaves.
It wouldn't matter if you knew Coke's recipe, you couldn't make it anyway.