Ya know, I really want to pirate DirecTV, but not to get all the channels... just to get a damn FOX affiliate over my dish so I could use my DirecTivo for The Family Guy and That 70s Show. Is that to much to ask?
There's actually a pretty simple way around this dilemma, Taco. Get a relative/friend/willing slashdotter/etc who lives out in the middle of nowhere to let you use their address for the bills. You're then considered out of range of local broadcasters and they'll let you have your local channels. After that, you can get all the Family Guy and That 70's Show you can TiVO
Look into getting a good case for your palm pilot. Yeah, the device itself is insufficiently ruggedized for your uses, but they do offer add-ons that can get you a near bulletproof item. It'll be damn hard to get a pda that can survive the abuses of being used while kayaking (who'd want to, anyways?), but you should be able to get one that could survive the trip, if you get a sufficient case.
An you already can email from a palm, and you can get news, if you get the wireless models, or sync up with a modem. These devices are pretty functional, when you get down to it.
Just hit reload when it pops the uptime your way. The server's up, but feeling the full brunt of the dreaded slashdot effect, so just keep plugging at it and you'll get the info after a reload or three.
Read
this article on the equation. Basically, when you start doing high-end simulations, you need insane amounts of precision or else the results become meaningless.
Besides, how else are you supposed to do to show you are a 1337 g33k if you can't rattle off a couple hundred digits of the most famous infinitely long constant.
Whatever happened to Dean Kamen's mysterious Ginger project?
It's in that fermenting hype stage. People are wondering what the fsck it is. Kamen's saying that it's going to be released next year.
Could that be some sort of flying machine?
Probably not. Kamen filed a patent application not to long back which described a self-righting scooter powered by a Sterling Engine. My opinion is that this is what it is, and that the engine is the revolutionary part - it is incredibly efficient, and runs on damn near anything.
And why does Amazon list it under "Electronics"?
Probably for their own purposes. Most of the people interested in perhaps one of the greatest hype jobs of all time are more tech-oriented, so that seemed like the "natrual" place to put it.
seriously, how many local police depts have a computer crimes division?
Depends on the location/size of the city. If you're talking about some small town in the middle of nowhere, then no, there probably won't be a computer crimes division. But if you're talking about a larger metro area or a technically savvy area, then you'll probably have at least a few knowledgable officers, or access to such.
All you should have to do is check the headers and to standard spamcopesque ip tracing. At that point, you have an IP address. Take that info to the ISP the crook is using, and ask for the dialup node log. You'll probably need at the very least a subpoena to get the cid logs, but you should have no problem as long as you can prove that it is coming from your property.
If you could post the Headers of the offending emails, I'll bet most people here could tell you where the thief is in 5 minutes.
If I want to develop "Bob's Foo Farm" as a closed-source program, I can compile it with gcc and not have to worry about the GPL. Unless GCC is inserting some code of its own into what it has compiled, then the GPL does not apply.
The only reason you can do that is because the libraries you link to - glibc and friends, are not GPL, they are LGPL. The LGPL is a license which allows linking, etc, to a non-free program, so one can do something like that; the GPL doesn't allow non-gpled programs to link to it. If the C libraries were GPLed instead, then you could not link to the programs without making your programs GPLed.
The PS2 has USB and firewire ports, thus you can install a hard drive, broadband adapter, modem, keyboard, or whatever else suits your fancy. Add the fact that it's TV ready, it would make a pretty cool net appliance.
I got the technical part of the article just fine - sounds like it's about time to move beyond paper ballots, but I'm confused about what thing. WTF is the Hare-Clark preferential voting system, and why does it take so long to see who actually won an election. Is this one of those kinds of systems where you are voting more for a party to represent you than an individual congressman?
THX in advance
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Guess the Times takes it's TV seriously
on
The Joys of HDTV
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· Score: 5
From the URL: http://www.latimes.com/features/religion/la-000020 341jun30.column?coll=la%2Dnews%2Dreligion
Of course, this is the LA area, so I guess it should be taken as a given
The way I figure it, by using massive amounts of Javascript, one could, in theory, set up the entire game as one huge web page. Of course, the page would probably crash most browsers, but it would probably get my vote as clever HTML hack of the year.
Has anyone out there tried such a feat? If so, how successful were you?
Reality TV plotline: Contestants are dropped into an inhospitable region of land, given minimal supplies and expected to get home. Cameras are following said competetors at all time, in the background, commentators are giving an analysis of what's going on. Is this the latest reality TV show from NBC or CBS? No, this is from a science fiction story written almost thirty years ago (I'm sorry, don't have the name, it's been a while since I've read it).
The reality tv phase is going on right now simply because it's cheap and it gets pretty good returns. You want to fix it, watch a different channel. Watch Animal Planet, or TCM, or Bravo. Go on the internet and visit a good website, read a book. Vote with your eyes and this shit will be off the air.
Yes, but icannisfucking is a registered trademark of my company AndHellHasFrozenOver, and your use of said name is in violation of the Trademark Dilution Act. Registration of icannisfucking has diminished my company's ability to earn massive amounts of profits.
To remediate this measure, you must send me the following $10^9, your first born child, all of your Body Thetans, your immortal soul, and a bowl of clam chowder (hey, I'm hungry here).
Now, jurisdiction issues aside, what's left to do?
...
And the non-cynic side of me can't think of any reason that its not true.
For starters, probably the rarely-used legal device known as
jury nullification. Basically, if a law is unethical, unconstitutional, or immoral, the juries have a right to find a person violating one of these laws not guilty. Juries don't have to follow the law, they have to do what's right. Yeah, this technique isn't as totally effective as getting the law thrown out altogether, but it is a good start
Wrong reading of the law. You can create all the decryption algorithms you want, as long as you're either the copyright owner, or have the permission of the copyright owner to do such actions. This is why performing ROT-13 "encryption" is covered under the DMCA, even though with enough practice, one can perform such decryption realtime in ones head.
I do know that there is already a law on the books WRT realistic depictions of child pornography; you can't even use your favorite graphics program to create an image that looks like child porn. So it would be a very safe bet to say that those same laws would apply to someone wanting to create a child doll to be used for pleasure.
Not a bad idea. IIRC, the monetary costs with a corporate entity receiving a payment is ~$0.10, so, if one were to flood them with payments amounting to a few cents a pop, you could, in theory, cost them a substantial amount of money in collecting their $2000.00.
In the crazy wars of politics and political causes, such things have been known to occur, where one side gives a few cents as a "donation" just to wreak havok
Back in 1985, a magazine called Phrack, which at one time was the voice for the underground community (crackers, phreakers, etc.) published an article regarding cracking Master locks. Now, of course, Master bitched and moaned over the publication of the info, but in the end, could do nothing legally, and subsequently were forced to redesign their locks as to be more secure. Yeah, it was a short-term loss for Master as they had to redesign their locks and perform some spin control, but the long-term gain for everyone was much greater, as the information was known in some circles, that was simply the first time that the information was disseminated so widely.
Move that case into this post-DMCA case we live in today, and you would likely see the publisher of the magazine thrown in jail for creating an anti-circumvention device, and the PR people saying that this is a great victory for everyone because those evil hacker people were thrown in jail. Of course they'd also neglect to say that this information would probably become much more wide-spread than it otherwise would have been, and that a lot of innocent people would be adversely affected because the manufacturer would have little motivation to fix a glaring security flaw.
The result? The flaws are not fixed and there is the possibility of even more damage. People still know the flaws, but the problem is not fixed.
Problem is the intentional breaking is done at a level where a firmware fix would be needed to fix the errors caused by this new copy protection system. Basically, they perform a bunch of tweaks which breaks how at CD-Rom will read it. It's designed to intentionally break burners in such a way that you'd have to do some very heavy re-engineering of how the firmware reads audio and data CDs. That'll take time, which means that for at least a few years, it'll mean digital->audio->digital solutions being used to get around these kinds of measures.
They may have stopped the most casual of audio duplication, but anyone who wants the music will still get it.
My bet is on 4 weeks before something hits Slashdot about someone cracking this code....any takers?
There was an article here on slashdot a few months ago about a CD by some country artist where this tech is used. Basically, they break the CD enough that a computer CDRom drive will choke on it, but a plain-old 20-year-old CD play will play it just fine, as the audio player was designed to handle a more "broken" CD. However, the point is moot as one can take the CD info out from the player, pump it into a computer via the analog jacks, preferably with a very short run and good quality cables to minimize signal loss, and then re-encode the signal. Yeah, there will be some signal loss, but you use one of those easily available audio restoration programs and you'll get the music really close to CD quality again. Of course, if you rip it to MP3, you can probably skip the restoration step as any signal restoration will be more than likely lost when you compress via MP3.
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Re:Linux appliances I _really_ want
on
Death of a Rebel
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· Score: 1
I can't wait for linux to be ported to the following devices:
Toilets
Watches
Sprinklers
Lawn-mowers
My wife's eighteen inch black dildo
And my PS2 (cause that's be so useful)
Okay, dildos aside, how many of those actually are going to happen?
Okay, I'll run it down fer ya.
Toilets - hopefully never. They're mostly mechanical, a microprocessor wouldn't help, just mean that that expensive computer science degree will get you a job making toilets.
Watches - already done. IBM's got some working models that are actually fairly cool.
Sprinklers - could be done. Now putting an embedded system in a sprinkler head would be silly, but put that system in the controller and you can do cool things like download weather reports, monitor soil moisture, etc, to get the perfect lawn with the minimal amount of watering.
Lawn Mowers - again, could be done. Computerize the mower, and you can chill inside while the mower cuts the grass
Your wife's dildo - Not as silly as it sounds. Make the didlo an internet appliance and you can download sexual methods of the great porn stars onto your little friend.
Your PS2 - Done. It's just not widely circulated yet.
Don't give me ideas here. I'm enough of an evil genius to actually determine a use for damn near anything.
Slashdot Mirror
An you already can email from a palm, and you can get news, if you get the wireless models, or sync up with a modem. These devices are pretty functional, when you get down to it.
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/me ducks from the rotten vegetables thrown in my general direction.
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Besides, how else are you supposed to do to show you are a 1337 g33k if you can't rattle off a couple hundred digits of the most famous infinitely long constant.
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It's in that fermenting hype stage. People are wondering what the fsck it is. Kamen's saying that it's going to be released next year.
Probably not. Kamen filed a patent application not to long back which described a self-righting scooter powered by a Sterling Engine. My opinion is that this is what it is, and that the engine is the revolutionary part - it is incredibly efficient, and runs on damn near anything.
Probably for their own purposes. Most of the people interested in perhaps one of the greatest hype jobs of all time are more tech-oriented, so that seemed like the "natrual" place to put it.
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If you could post the Headers of the offending emails, I'll bet most people here could tell you where the thief is in 5 minutes.
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The only reason you can do that is because the libraries you link to - glibc and friends, are not GPL, they are LGPL. The LGPL is a license which allows linking, etc, to a non-free program, so one can do something like that; the GPL doesn't allow non-gpled programs to link to it. If the C libraries were GPLed instead, then you could not link to the programs without making your programs GPLed.
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THX in advance
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Of course, this is the LA area, so I guess it should be taken as a given
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But I always thought that computer science was about getting bugs out of computers...
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Has anyone out there tried such a feat? If so, how successful were you?
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The reality tv phase is going on right now simply because it's cheap and it gets pretty good returns. You want to fix it, watch a different channel. Watch Animal Planet, or TCM, or Bravo. Go on the internet and visit a good website, read a book. Vote with your eyes and this shit will be off the air.
D - M - C - A
To remediate this measure, you must send me the following $10^9, your first born child, all of your Body Thetans, your immortal soul, and a bowl of clam chowder (hey, I'm hungry here).
D - M - C - A
For starters, probably the rarely-used legal device known as jury nullification. Basically, if a law is unethical, unconstitutional, or immoral, the juries have a right to find a person violating one of these laws not guilty. Juries don't have to follow the law, they have to do what's right. Yeah, this technique isn't as totally effective as getting the law thrown out altogether, but it is a good start
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Though that guy doesn't seem to be doing that well.
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In the crazy wars of politics and political causes, such things have been known to occur, where one side gives a few cents as a "donation" just to wreak havok
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Move that case into this post-DMCA case we live in today, and you would likely see the publisher of the magazine thrown in jail for creating an anti-circumvention device, and the PR people saying that this is a great victory for everyone because those evil hacker people were thrown in jail. Of course they'd also neglect to say that this information would probably become much more wide-spread than it otherwise would have been, and that a lot of innocent people would be adversely affected because the manufacturer would have little motivation to fix a glaring security flaw.
The result? The flaws are not fixed and there is the possibility of even more damage. People still know the flaws, but the problem is not fixed.
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They may have stopped the most casual of audio duplication, but anyone who wants the music will still get it.
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Don't give me ideas here. I'm enough of an evil genius to actually determine a use for damn near anything.
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