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User: marxmarv

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  1. Re:Why so expensive? on War Brewing on the Inexpensive Laptop Front · · Score: 1

    You can, if you can commit 25000 other people to buying one and have some capital on hand. If you only want one, observe that your requested feature set isn't that different from a high-end portable media player.

  2. "SHARERS PAY FULL PRICE" on Dan Rutter Suggests Tossing Some Wi-Fi At the Neighbors · · Score: 1

    Buffet restaurants can and do add those "restrictive terms" into their "contracts". If your Internet service is metered as your electricity and water are, I doubt they really care who uses it.

  3. Re:I like it on Dan Rutter Suggests Tossing Some Wi-Fi At the Neighbors · · Score: 1

    There is no simple answer and an analogy to cable stealing doesn't work because bandwidth sharing is not illegal. In Michigan, the simple answer is that it's the very same law. See MCL 750.540c, subsection 1(c) and this post.

    MCL 750.540c
    (1) A person shall not assemble, develop, manufacture, possess, deliver, or use any type telecommunications access device with the intent to defraud by doing, but not limited to, any of the following:
    (c) To receive, disrupt, decrypt, transmit, retransmit, acquire, or intercept any telecommunications service without the express authority of the telecommunications service provider.
  4. Re:Power issues on Dan Rutter Suggests Tossing Some Wi-Fi At the Neighbors · · Score: 1

    In cities, there's power in every streetlamp, and we need to find ways to get the municipal authorities to give us access to that, and in every café or restaurant, and we need to explain to café owners that it's just a few watts.

    Metricom read utility meters over their mesh data network. If you can add value like that, you're in.
  5. Re:Someone please explain on Taser International Wins Lawsuit to Change Cause of Death · · Score: 1

    How is the medical opinion of experts (right or wrong) a judicial matter at all? It weighs for liability in a civil suit for wrongful death.

    Isn't it akin to taking me to a court because I published an erroneous theorem? No, it's akin to taking you to court because you published a true account of facts that expose a corporation to liability and shame.

    Isn't the way to correct such things is the "usual way" of doing science? But then maybe litigating is the usual way these days. Too many Americans put faith before science. Litigation has more to do with the former than the latter.
  6. Re:Taser use == MEDICAL PROCEDURE??? on Taser International Wins Lawsuit to Change Cause of Death · · Score: 1

    Uncontrollable mania?

    The unfortunate fact is that the richies are pouring a ton of money into protecting them against us when TSHTF rather than spending the same money to KTSFHTF. Some sort of regulation has a better chance of happening than a ban.

  7. Do what I do... on Pidgin Controversy Triggers Fork · · Score: 1

    Link pidgin-2.old (2.2.2 in my case) against libpurple-2.4.1. Works perfectly and does everything I might want it to do.

  8. The purpose of Pidgin on Pidgin Controversy Triggers Fork · · Score: 1
    The problem seems to be thus:
    • The users seem to think Pidgin is an IM client.
    • The developers seem to think Pidgin is a UI testbed.
    That sort of difference in direction calls for a fork, no?
  9. Throwing away mod points to say this... on The File-System Fallout of the Reiser Verdict · · Score: 1

    People of unusual intelligence who assist government agencies but whose personal avocations run counter to or diverge from The Man's tend to get railroaded, like Sasha Shulgin, John Ramsey and Alan Turing. Take into account that Reiser was partially funded by DARPA and see if that produces any reasonable doubt...

  10. Dude. You're in the SF Bay area. on Unreleased Atari 2600 Game Found At Flea Market · · Score: 2, Funny
    You probably can't swing a cat without finding someone who has a proper EPROM reader/programmer or can cobble together a little circuit to read out each location in the PROM. It could be terribly simple; two chips, a socket for your EPROM, a parallel printer cable and a bit of bit-banging code.

    But to echo what Guido said, EPROMs typically aren't rated for "eternal" data retention and depending on storage conditions there could be anything from bit errors to blank chips. If both copies of the Park roms were the same you've at least got something to work with.

  11. Re:Expect abortion opponents to jump on this. on 'Predecessor' Neurons to Human Brain Discovered · · Score: 1
    (condoms are "couples contraception", if she says "you ain't fuckin' me with that thing on" you know damned well you're taking it off and sticking it in. It's simple biology).
    Uh, I know damned well I ain't fucking her at all. Simpletons, disease vectors and oopses-waiting-to-happen are NOT allowed in my pants without appropriate protective gear, and only rarely then.

    female dominated politically correct culture
    Ah, clearly she grabbed your (the "royal" your) little head in a testosterone Vise-Grip (tm), demanded you take that thing off and start working it for the three minutes you were worth, and you had NO CHOICE but to slip her the baby batter? I find myself, a male, an unabashed slut and a sexual submissive, in the ironic position of reminding you that abstinence is a viable option!

    -jhp
  12. Re:Not sure how this works on Capacitors to Replace Batteries? · · Score: 1
    Basically, the voltage of a capacitor is proportional to the amount of charge stored, whereas a battery provides more or less constant voltage.

    Lithium ion batteries are at the "less" end of the spectrum. Their output varies smoothly with amount of charge remaining from a fully charged 4.2 V to delivering the last useful amount of energy at 2.8 V. (The numbers might be off by a few tenths; I read about this several weeks ago and I don't have time to research this right now.) No reason we couldn't do the same for caps.

    As far as space goes, high-frequency voltage converters are extremely small (10 W/in^2 of board space isn't unrealistic) and pretty efficient (90%, give or take). Incremental improvements will undoubtely outstrip the conversion losses fairly quickly.

    -jhp

  13. "feel the energy"? Fiddlesticks. on Freshman MIT Students Automate Dorm Room · · Score: 2, Funny
    I'd rather have "The system... is down..."

    -jhp

  14. A chicken and an egg... on Chicken and Egg Problem Solved · · Score: 1
    ... were in bed. The chicken rolls over and lights a cigarette and the egg says "I guess that answers that question"

    -jhp

  15. Apex Digital tried that and WON. on New DRM Scheme To Make Current DVD Players Obsolete · · Score: 1
    I'll bet there are a lot of hardware manufacturers that don't own music or movie companies that would love more hardware marketshare.
    Anyone hear of a little backwater budget CE company called Apex Digital? Of course you did, unless you just logged into /. yesterday. Anywho, this is exactly what they did maybe four years ago: leave a "manufacturing menu" in the system that was only slightly obscure to get to, and would let you set region (as many times as you want), disable Macrovision and UOP, etc. Their model 600 player was famous on /. for a good while. Then the good old DVDCCA apparently smacked 'em around for noncompliance, and that's about where I lost track of the story. I think that future players had no such menu in them, and the old model 600's were mad popular on eBay. But, a standalone DVD player is just as much a computer as your PC, and BIOS hacking isn't really THAT hard as long as you know what kind of processor you're targeting. ... BUT these days it's only a week or two of engineering effort to design a simple RISC processor from the ground up. ... BUT it's certainly well within the realm of possibility to figure out the instruction set, in many cases. ... BUT -- blah, it's all just an arms race anyway.

    -jhp

  16. Sweatshop-free licensed products on A College Guide to EA · · Score: 1
    How successful have the "sweatshop-free" drives been in other sports products?

    -jhp

  17. Re:Uh huh on Dept. of Homeland Security Enforces Expired Patent · · Score: 1
    I'm glad I'm not the only person who sees that big = bad when it comes to organizations. The question is: now what?

    -jhp

  18. It's not ATH0 on WebTV/MSNTV Virus Dials 911 · · Score: 2
    if it causes the box to disconnect, reboot and dial a new number. More likely, there's some "extended" tags in an HTML mail that update the 1-800 number (probably in EEPROM) that the boxes call to get your local dialup numbers, then makes the box forget the cached local dialup numbers and resets the box. Not very tricky if you happen to know the tags. Unfortunately I've lost touch with most of my internal contacts so I have no idea whether my knowledge is out of date or not.

    Disclaimer: this is Slashdot, so everyone has to shoot their mouths off without knowing what they're talking about, right?

    -jhp

  19. Re:I don't get it on Unauditable Voting Machines · · Score: 2
    How then did you manage to elect Hitler chancellor?
    Maybe they hadn't switched to proportional representation yet.

    -jhp

  20. Open-source audits are the key on Unauditable Voting Machines · · Score: 2
    How can such a system can be implemented without spartan audits, is beyond me...
    That's exactly how you do it. I briefly described the procedure long long ago in a /. comment far far away, but smart cards and digital signatures can be used to give each user a certified copy of their own ballot and allow them to verify that their counted and posted ballot are the same as the voted ballot.

    Every voter would be issued a smart card containing a private key and a serial number, signed by the election authority. All cards would be accounted for. The voter's identity and the matching public key would be recorded in the voter registry. At the close of registration and before the election, the list of valid ballot numbers would be published.

    At polling time, the user would insert the smart card into a voting terminal and make their choices. The smart card would generate a pseudonymous key pair which never leaves the card. The choices and a ballot number, signed by the ballot machine key and the election authority key, would be sent to the smart card, where a copy is recorded and a pseudonymous signature applied. The double-signed ballot would be returned to the machine and stored in bulk. For confidentiality, the voting machine would not record the identity of the voter's key. As far as we know, 512 bit RSA is still resistant to attack in the necessary window of a few weeks, and the strength used can easily increase given sufficient smartcard and bulk storage.

    At the close of the election, the results would be posted in their entirety (200 million * 200 bytes = 40GB uncompressed, possibly collated by the last few digits of the voting machine key) so that a voter could look up their own ballot number and confirm that their choices were as they selected and that the signatures on the ballot and on the card match. Anonymity would be preserved through the pseudo-key arrangement. All unregistered cards would be read out to ensure they were not voted and are accounted for.

    Ballots must be secure against addition, change, or deletion. The system is somewhat resistant to addition because the voting machine would verify the card is on the list of issued and thus votable cards, and refuse to work if the card is not. Cards can also be compared to the valid card list post-vote. It may be possible to issue false cards before registration closes and to vote them later, but the same problem exists with paper ballots and tighter inventory control can help. Losing ballots could happen if an entire voting machine "falls off the back of a truck", or more likely malfunctions, but many if not all such ballots could be recovered when people verifying their own ballot notice their ballots not present in the results.

    Ballots are secured against post-vote malicious editing by being publicized. Pre-vote, a voting machine could ask the card to sign a ballot other than the voter voted. This could be prevented by allowing the voter to compose their ballot on a separate machine than stores the ballot, allowing a user to confirm their vote on a third machine if desired before it is recorded. Alternately, the user, given appropriate equipment, could compose their vote at home before going to the polling place.

    Any possible attacks I forgot here that don't involve subverting the entire system end-to-end?

    So with open-source auditing, a fair and accurate vote can be held. The problem is that the powers that be don't want that. It's far more important at the present time, IMHO, to change the voting system so that voters can more expressively state their preferences and so that races can handle more than two candidates.

    -jhp

  21. Just the facts, man on Sorenson Countersues Apple · · Score: 4, Informative
    I wasn't surprised to read that an old version of Sorenson had been cracked. How long can it be until the latest versions are too?
    You didn't read the thread well enough. Someone did in fact crack SVQ3 but refused to release it with their own name on it, and several folks advised them to release it anonymously, ala the RC4-compatible arcfour module. (Oh, that was a fun Usenet thread)
    And what will that mean for the lawsuits?
    The most curious thing about that whole thread was a marketing manager for Sorenson posting a note that they don't mind the use of their file formats if it's done in an approved fashion or some such rot, and recommended holding off for the next 30-60 days pending certain announcements. I think it was moderated up to 2, so I had to have been really bored to find it.
    If I was going to create a closed codec, I'd make damn sure there were players for pretty much every platform out there. I'd make high quality players for Windows, Linux and maybe the Mac, and then a library for everybody else so people can write their own players if they need to.
    Yeah, but you're a /. weenie and probably wouldn't create a binary-only codec anyway. Besides SVQ1 wasn't much more than H.323 with a slightly tricky codebook and some obligatory scrambling in an attempt to keep people out.
    Otherwise, the moment good content gets encoded using it, by by secrects.
    It took something like two years (+/- 50%) for SVQ1 to be cracked, and slightly less time for SVQ3. The QDomain music codec remains imprisoned, and without that no one's going to watch QT trailers on Linux.

    -jhp

  22. Re:"angry ex-customers" on RoadRunner Blocking Use of Kazaa · · Score: 4, Funny
    These programs {KaZaA, etc.) are blocked because the owners feel that they promote activities which are immoral and wrong.
    Would you mind naming this ISP, so that the rest of us can, uh, give them our God-fearing Merkin-loving business?

    -jhp

  23. Re:Threat by Form Letter?! on MPAA Goes After Its Customers · · Score: 3, Insightful
    The DMCA requires that a binding takedown order swear under penalty of perjury that the file is illegally distributed. Someone who suffers as a result of such a sworn statement ought to have some sort of recourse against them. Share your non-MPAA music exclusively and make them suffer death by a thousand paper cuts.

    If the orders are not sworn under penalty of perjury, they are non-binding and therefore ISPs should give them exactly as much weight as any "ENLARGE YOUR PENIS!!1" spam, because that's exactly what it is.

    -jhp

  24. Re:Palladium is least important thing in article on MS Palladium Patent · · Score: 2
    It took [your friend] days to download The Matrix divx over [their] broadband connection on Kazaa.
    Cringely releases relatively short segments. At one minute per megabyte of encoded video (which is about 130kbps), the average modem user will have downloaded a ten-minute segment in under an hour, probably much closer to half an hour, at fringe-area broadcast quality.

    Your friend was probably also downloading from a severely under-engineered server. A commercial server would more likely be engineered to the task of serving up multi-megabyte downloads at a reasonable pace, and/or a user limit might be imposed, and/or Akamai-style local caching might be implemented. That way, overnight downloads for modem users become somewhat useful for media transfers, and even a tightly capped cable modem could replace Netflix if a user is willing to sacrifice a bit of quality.

    -jhp

  25. Palladium is least important thing in article on MS Palladium Patent · · Score: 2
    While y'all stupid wankers were salivating over "Ooh, ooh, a Palladium link that's been posted at least once, probably closer to a dozen times if you count comments", the REALLY revolutionary and important part of the column was buried way down here:
    But we're still faced with the problems of video quality and the high cost of distribution, both of which we propose to solve by encouraging viewers to make copies of the shows and give them to friends. This wouldn't work with traditional streaming, but in order to mandate a particular minimum level of video quality, we'll be downloading the show, not streaming it. (Emphasis mine.) Downloading means that modem users who are willing to download during dinner can get the same video quality as broadband users. It also means that anyone who watches the show HAS THE SHOW ON THEIR HARD DRIVE. They can delete it, make it available through a peer-to-peer file sharing system, make it available on their own website, or e-mail it to a friend. As a guy who seeks new viewers and readers, there is no downside for me in this. I will gladly accept anyone's bandwidth. And I'll accept new viewers, too -- viewers who would never have found me had a friend not shared their copy.
    At last someone is daring to consider the idea of DOWNLOADABLE CONTENT. This is important, because as Cringely goes on to state, streaming content takes a LOT of the user's control over content they've downloaded and puts it in the hands of Progressive Networks and Microsoft, which is not where you want it.

    This ought to be a condition of public funding for public media. Anyone pushing DRM is probably up to no good, but DRM or no, a commons of high-quality independent media is an essential pillar of a free society and we ought to be demanding it.

    -jhp