So, am I being a DMCA violator for taking the system apart and putting it back together like it wasn't intended? I ask this question, because many people have done odd things like take apart a perfectly good new or used car and assemble it into some crazy artistic, but functional creation to show off to their peers. The same could and will be done to the xbox.
Or does the DMCA only apply to programmable devices? Thanks to the xbox, will it now be illegal for me to take apart my programmable air conditioner and modify it to be a dehumidifier?
I don't know about you, but when I see a product at the store, I look for its other uses too. Can it be taken apart and modified to suit me better? What parts does it have inside to make my other projects more worthwhile? Does the sum of the parts inside make it worth my purchase? Does the $200 xbox have $700 worth of discrete parts inside for my graphics project? Is the black van parked down the street going to bust down my door and tell me There Are No User Servicable Parts Inside and I should be a good consumer and not do what God had not intended for Adam and Eve were commanded to do? That sounds silly. I see an opportunity.
The xbox is my toy. I find the hardware a challenge. Its the worlds greatest technical challenge. Many people run 26 miles to win a race, but the first to crack this puzzle wins and takes a one-time place in history. There can only be one. Who will it be?
Simply refuse the EULA and wipe the useless and annoying default xbox software, replace with useful Linux, problem solved. Surely, they didn't make it so easy...
The only thing I would be worried about is a hardware implimented suicide logic bomb. Let's say Microsoft hid a little calendar watchdog that sends the operating system a special interrupt ever so often, demanding a special answer.
I'm thinking about this from the hardware designer's point of view, if they were smart enough to do this... If the software refuses to honor this request, the watchdog would update the death counter. Let's say they made this counter 4 bits long to be forgiving. When it counts down to zero without being reset, the security watchdog knows for sure rebel scum have defeated the imperial forces. The watchdog then simply sends out some low level hardware instructions through the IO ports for every programmable chip. The logic bombs have been set.
To further obfuscate this event, the hardware could have been designed to trigger the event upon the next power up cycle. Once this state is triggered, the xbox enteres a comotose state and is effectively dead. Or is it? Do they have an option for "factory service" to revive these things? Is the bomb reset by placing a certain IO line at an odd voltage level? Or is it permently latched?
The teflon has an unusually low coefficent of friction, allowing it to slip past plastic fibered (ballistic kevlar and nylon fabrics) materials. For piercing metal armor, teflon would be a very poor choice. Using teflon against steel armor would be like throwing tomatoes at a brick wall. Something very massive would work better. Softness of the material will allow maximum damage from its mass, hardness will promote penetration.
They use uranium, due to its large mass. The weight/size ratio of a bullet is very important if you want it to go far. You'd be much better off shooting an ounce of lead than an ounce of feathers.
And the softer the bullet is, the better for maximum damage. Hardness will give you maximum penetration, but it will only make a tiny hole. If snipers used a hardened steel bullet, they might as well toss syringes at the victim.
The referrer is set in the browser (client side), it is not something that any browser has to use. And it can be easily spoofed or disabled.
Cookies set from the main page can enforce the refer policing of traffic.
And if sites like ticketmaster want to do this? Most likely they aren't visited. It is sites like these that annoy those who create webpages and as a result are likely to be ignored by search engines. If they want to make their own bed, they are going to have to sleep in it too.
Its within ticketmaster's right to analyze refer and cookies to police traffic and my right to ignore them. But they shouldn't have the right to make laws preventing how I communicate and making web pages is one way I communicate. Ticketmaster can kiss my ass and sue me when I deep link their showing of the goatsex movie.
Why couldn't tickmaster simply check for the refer link and have their webserver decide the policy, rather than sicking lawyers on "bad" people? Are ticketmaster's webmasters that clueless?
I have a little story about air filters and overheating...
At work, one of the PM guys wanted to protect all the large, expensive DC motors on the manufacturing lines with an air filter on the blower motors. Well, next thing we know, there's filter fabric zip-tied to every blower opening on every motor.
The fabric didn't restrict the air flow too much. Until a week later, when the grease and dust in the air clogged them up. Then the problems really started showing up. If you look up the prices of DC motors in supply cataloges, you may notice the prices run up to $100,000 each for the large 500 horsepower models. It seems our desire to protect these babies created an intense smell of burned enamel. When you have about 300 of these motors laying around, many in obscure places, we learned its better to have dust caked up inside the motor than have an undersized filter trying to protect it.
So, the question is, are you going to change or clean this filter on a regular basis?
I used to work with an engine similar to ones in the trains. It was a CAT twin turbo 2800 horsepower V16 that ran at 1800 rpm. This was the perfect speed for the attatched 3 phase 480 volt peaking generator that needed to make a few thousand amps. When the engine was fired up, the circuit breaker waited for the normal operating temperature to be reached, correct rpm, and the phases to sync, and the contacts clamped the generator right onto the mains, allowing the full 1.6 megawatts directly onto our grid. It was easy for it to reach that speed and hold onto it. When the phases matched, that's when the control relay closed.
If they weren't synced up or had a large voltage differential, the circuit breaker would most likely trip. And the cables on the cabletrays would likely jump. Never seen it happen, but it would have been cool. The inductance of the 14.4KV substation it led into would give it a few milliseconds to break the circuit.
Once the switch was closed, the rotation was magnetically syncronized with the mains. When power demand increased (voltage dropping,) the turbos opened up and the pistons pounded harder, causing the ground to shake harder. The rpm's never changed, the engine just got louder. When our air compressors in the other room loaded up, you could hear the generator meet the demand almost instantly.
We used it as a peaking generator. It wasn't designed to run on its own, but to peak our demand usage when there wasn't enough power to go around. The cost was much more expensive than the 2 cents/kilowatt hour industrial rate. I'd estimate the cost of diesel for electricity was about ten times as much, but far cheaper than shutting down the manufacturing plant for an hour.
No, to me this appeared to be yet another loophole they had found in telemarketing laws. When that girl told me it would be three months for the call list to take effect for that company and only last for a year, that's when I knew there was a problem. That does not work for me. A few more months at 25 cents per minute was not to my satisfaction. I had to go through the hassle of changing my phone number.
I also live in Missouri, the state of the great No Call List. This three month thing may have something to do with that law. In my case, it wasn't much help.
You can tell them it's your cell phone, and ask them where you can bill them for your minutes, but they just hang up on you.
I did this. They didn't hang up. But I did find out it was FirstUSA who gave out my number. After telling them I wished to be put on their no call list, they told me it would be three months before that would take effect. I told them this was unacceptable.
I also learned that these no call lists are only valid for one year at which time they can opt me right back in. Nine months of no calls by that *one* company? It was a coincidence that I was over my airtime minutes that month and paid 25 cents a minute for that nonsense. No thanks.
I promptly cancelled my credit card and the calls still came rolling in. It was satisfying to tell them why I was cancelling my card. That didn't stop the calls either. My final solution was to change my phone number. Other companies know this is my "home" phone number, yet I haven't been getting calls since.
So, what happens when these search engines digest enough intelligence and become self aware?
Re:Possible MS Project Names
on
Microsoft Freon
·
· Score: 2
It gets better with Freon(tm). To most people, this is a cool gas, pretty much inert, and has good heat conductivity.
Everyone knows about the potential to destroy the atmosphere by letting in the cancerous spectrum of UV, but there is a very deadly form of Freon. If Freon happens to be burned, it forms a mortally toxic acid and phosgene gas. If freon in your car were released and entered the engine's intake, the resulting exaust can wipe out bystanders.
Its interesting Microsoft used Du Pont's Freon tradmark. Why? If you try to burn Freon on your computer, would there be certain death?
I'm on a cablemodem and I tried getting the trojaned version hours after this was discovered. Apparently, the ftp server was fixed as I tried from multiple IP addresses and ways... Fortunately, I happened to have the tarball that I compiled from and the md5sum matched the good version.
Moral of the story: *always* check md5sums, or use a packaging system that always checks it for you. Doesn't rpm automatically do this? Gentoo's portage does.
Don't forget about those little black boxes inside old photocopiers. You know those ones that take 12 volts and have this thick insulated wire on the other end that spits out nearly 10,000 volts. There is often a few of these in each copier.
These little DC power supplies have cool uses. My favorite is to ground the unit, turn it on with a 9 volt battery, stand on a chair, grab the wire, and have others watch my hair stand on end.
They can also charge up big capacitors for destroying things and making loud explosions. But they do have good value when checking long cable links for defects. I used to work at a wire manufacturing plant, and we used 7.5KV for testing wire. If there was a defect that could show up in later time, such as an entry for water, it would burn a hole in it and be flagged for scrap.
Now if I only had a good supply of old copiers. I could have boxes of gears, motors, shafts, brackets, and a complete set of hardware to build any automated machine imaginable.
I hate it when people throw their computer into the landfill.
Most of the parts in a typical computer make great tools. All those electronic parts have great uses. Capacitors, transistors, PCI bridges, memory chips, level translaters, connectors, simple logic chips, stepper motors, etc...
When I was young, my best friend and I always dreamed of taking parts other people threw away and build a robot. Used computers are a goldmine for these parts. I once took a stack of old floppy drives, cut the stepper motor/slide assembly from the case and had great axis drives for a remote control webcam driven from the parallel port. Total time to build it was the spare time at work one night.
You can't go wrong with saving old parts. When the pile gets high, you know its time to build something, not throw something out!
Slashdot Mirror
So, am I being a DMCA violator for taking the system apart and putting it back together like it wasn't intended? I ask this question, because many people have done odd things like take apart a perfectly good new or used car and assemble it into some crazy artistic, but functional creation to show off to their peers. The same could and will be done to the xbox.
Or does the DMCA only apply to programmable devices? Thanks to the xbox, will it now be illegal for me to take apart my programmable air conditioner and modify it to be a dehumidifier?
I don't know about you, but when I see a product at the store, I look for its other uses too. Can it be taken apart and modified to suit me better? What parts does it have inside to make my other projects more worthwhile? Does the sum of the parts inside make it worth my purchase? Does the $200 xbox have $700 worth of discrete parts inside for my graphics project? Is the black van parked down the street going to bust down my door and tell me There Are No User Servicable Parts Inside and I should be a good consumer and not do what God had not intended for Adam and Eve were commanded to do? That sounds silly. I see an opportunity.
The xbox is my toy. I find the hardware a challenge. Its the worlds greatest technical challenge. Many people run 26 miles to win a race, but the first to crack this puzzle wins and takes a one-time place in history. There can only be one. Who will it be?
Simply refuse the EULA and wipe the useless and annoying default xbox software, replace with useful Linux, problem solved. Surely, they didn't make it so easy...
The only thing I would be worried about is a hardware implimented suicide logic bomb. Let's say Microsoft hid a little calendar watchdog that sends the operating system a special interrupt ever so often, demanding a special answer.
I'm thinking about this from the hardware designer's point of view, if they were smart enough to do this... If the software refuses to honor this request, the watchdog would update the death counter. Let's say they made this counter 4 bits long to be forgiving. When it counts down to zero without being reset, the security watchdog knows for sure rebel scum have defeated the imperial forces. The watchdog then simply sends out some low level hardware instructions through the IO ports for every programmable chip. The logic bombs have been set.
To further obfuscate this event, the hardware could have been designed to trigger the event upon the next power up cycle. Once this state is triggered, the xbox enteres a comotose state and is effectively dead. Or is it? Do they have an option for "factory service" to revive these things? Is the bomb reset by placing a certain IO line at an odd voltage level? Or is it permently latched?
The teflon has an unusually low coefficent of friction, allowing it to slip past plastic fibered (ballistic kevlar and nylon fabrics) materials. For piercing metal armor, teflon would be a very poor choice. Using teflon against steel armor would be like throwing tomatoes at a brick wall. Something very massive would work better. Softness of the material will allow maximum damage from its mass, hardness will promote penetration.
They use uranium, due to its large mass. The weight /size ratio of a bullet is very important if you want it to go far. You'd be much better off shooting an ounce of lead than an ounce of feathers.
And the softer the bullet is, the better for maximum damage. Hardness will give you maximum penetration, but it will only make a tiny hole. If snipers used a hardened steel bullet, they might as well toss syringes at the victim.
it makes no sense but why do you drive on the parkway, and park in a driveway?
Why then, do they call them buildings, when they are already built?
The referrer is set in the browser (client side), it is not something that any browser has to use. And it can be easily spoofed or disabled.
Cookies set from the main page can enforce the refer policing of traffic.
And if sites like ticketmaster want to do this? Most likely they aren't visited. It is sites like these that annoy those who create webpages and as a result are likely to be ignored by search engines. If they want to make their own bed, they are going to have to sleep in it too.
Its within ticketmaster's right to analyze refer and cookies to police traffic and my right to ignore them. But they shouldn't have the right to make laws preventing how I communicate and making web pages is one way I communicate. Ticketmaster can kiss my ass and sue me when I deep link their showing of the goatsex movie.
Why couldn't tickmaster simply check for the refer link and have their webserver decide the policy, rather than sicking lawyers on "bad" people? Are ticketmaster's webmasters that clueless?
A serious problem for them?
The IRS is going to love me come audit day...
I have a little story about air filters and overheating...
At work, one of the PM guys wanted to protect all the large, expensive DC motors on the manufacturing lines with an air filter on the blower motors. Well, next thing we know, there's filter fabric zip-tied to every blower opening on every motor.
The fabric didn't restrict the air flow too much. Until a week later, when the grease and dust in the air clogged them up. Then the problems really started showing up. If you look up the prices of DC motors in supply cataloges, you may notice the prices run up to $100,000 each for the large 500 horsepower models. It seems our desire to protect these babies created an intense smell of burned enamel. When you have about 300 of these motors laying around, many in obscure places, we learned its better to have dust caked up inside the motor than have an undersized filter trying to protect it.
So, the question is, are you going to change or clean this filter on a regular basis?
I used to work with an engine similar to ones in the trains. It was a CAT twin turbo 2800 horsepower V16 that ran at 1800 rpm. This was the perfect speed for the attatched 3 phase 480 volt peaking generator that needed to make a few thousand amps. When the engine was fired up, the circuit breaker waited for the normal operating temperature to be reached, correct rpm, and the phases to sync, and the contacts clamped the generator right onto the mains, allowing the full 1.6 megawatts directly onto our grid. It was easy for it to reach that speed and hold onto it. When the phases matched, that's when the control relay closed.
If they weren't synced up or had a large voltage differential, the circuit breaker would most likely trip. And the cables on the cabletrays would likely jump. Never seen it happen, but it would have been cool. The inductance of the 14.4KV substation it led into would give it a few milliseconds to break the circuit.
Once the switch was closed, the rotation was magnetically syncronized with the mains. When power demand increased (voltage dropping,) the turbos opened up and the pistons pounded harder, causing the ground to shake harder. The rpm's never changed, the engine just got louder. When our air compressors in the other room loaded up, you could hear the generator meet the demand almost instantly.
We used it as a peaking generator. It wasn't designed to run on its own, but to peak our demand usage when there wasn't enough power to go around. The cost was much more expensive than the 2 cents/kilowatt hour industrial rate. I'd estimate the cost of diesel for electricity was about ten times as much, but far cheaper than shutting down the manufacturing plant for an hour.
No, to me this appeared to be yet another loophole they had found in telemarketing laws. When that girl told me it would be three months for the call list to take effect for that company and only last for a year, that's when I knew there was a problem. That does not work for me. A few more months at 25 cents per minute was not to my satisfaction. I had to go through the hassle of changing my phone number.
I also live in Missouri, the state of the great No Call List. This three month thing may have something to do with that law. In my case, it wasn't much help.
You can tell them it's your cell phone, and ask them where you can bill them for your minutes, but they just hang up on you.
I did this. They didn't hang up. But I did find out it was FirstUSA who gave out my number. After telling them I wished to be put on their no call list, they told me it would be three months before that would take effect. I told them this was unacceptable.
I also learned that these no call lists are only valid for one year at which time they can opt me right back in. Nine months of no calls by that *one* company? It was a coincidence that I was over my airtime minutes that month and paid 25 cents a minute for that nonsense. No thanks.
I promptly cancelled my credit card and the calls still came rolling in. It was satisfying to tell them why I was cancelling my card. That didn't stop the calls either. My final solution was to change my phone number. Other companies know this is my "home" phone number, yet I haven't been getting calls since.
A college student sued? What is the RIAA going to win? Their college loans?
I wish they'd sue me, so they can pay off my loans.
That isle will be the most dangerous place to be.
Watch out for incoming nerf rockets from both sides.
Even better, make a bit bucket account for opt-ins:
/dev/null
adduser devnull
and put a symlink of its mailbox to
All your spam problems solved.
So, what happens when these search engines digest enough intelligence and become self aware?
It gets better with Freon(tm). To most people, this is a cool gas, pretty much inert, and has good heat conductivity.
Everyone knows about the potential to destroy the atmosphere by letting in the cancerous spectrum of UV, but there is a very deadly form of Freon. If Freon happens to be burned, it forms a mortally toxic acid and phosgene gas. If freon in your car were released and entered the engine's intake, the resulting exaust can wipe out bystanders.
Its interesting Microsoft used Du Pont's Freon tradmark. Why? If you try to burn Freon on your computer, would there be certain death?
I'm on a cablemodem and I tried getting the trojaned version hours after this was discovered. Apparently, the ftp server was fixed as I tried from multiple IP addresses and ways... Fortunately, I happened to have the tarball that I compiled from and the md5sum matched the good version.
Moral of the story: *always* check md5sums, or use a packaging system that always checks it for you. Doesn't rpm automatically do this? Gentoo's portage does.
Uh oh, slashgoth just got slashdotted.
The undead are now dead.
Does one need to get licensed and permits from the FAA for flying? Or does that only apply to planes and not rockets, slingshots, or trebuchets?
Don't forget about those little black boxes inside old photocopiers. You know those ones that take 12 volts and have this thick insulated wire on the other end that spits out nearly 10,000 volts. There is often a few of these in each copier.
These little DC power supplies have cool uses. My favorite is to ground the unit, turn it on with a 9 volt battery, stand on a chair, grab the wire, and have others watch my hair stand on end.
They can also charge up big capacitors for destroying things and making loud explosions. But they do have good value when checking long cable links for defects. I used to work at a wire manufacturing plant, and we used 7.5KV for testing wire. If there was a defect that could show up in later time, such as an entry for water, it would burn a hole in it and be flagged for scrap.
Now if I only had a good supply of old copiers. I could have boxes of gears, motors, shafts, brackets, and a complete set of hardware to build any automated machine imaginable.
I hate it when people throw their computer into the landfill.
Most of the parts in a typical computer make great tools. All those electronic parts have great uses. Capacitors, transistors, PCI bridges, memory chips, level translaters, connectors, simple logic chips, stepper motors, etc...
When I was young, my best friend and I always dreamed of taking parts other people threw away and build a robot. Used computers are a goldmine for these parts. I once took a stack of old floppy drives, cut the stepper motor/slide assembly from the case and had great axis drives for a remote control webcam driven from the parallel port. Total time to build it was the spare time at work one night.
You can't go wrong with saving old parts. When the pile gets high, you know its time to build something, not throw something out!
"I need my particle accelerator, er, television fixed. Be careful with that degauss button..."
*boom!*
Here's a more detailed narrative of Mr. Gates spending time.
He's gotten better over the years.