So if Darl carried his weapon concealed in San Francisco, and he has not obtained a permit from Sheriff Hennessey (a reporter could easily ask), he's broken California state law, and should go to jail or at least pay a stiff fine. (Had the weapon remained in a locked container [state.ca.us], he would be okay.)
You need only obtain a permit from your country or sheriff of your primary residence. The permit is valid throughout the state.
A panel decision possesses almost as much precedential value as an en banc decision; the only difference is an en banc hearing can overturn a panel decision, while a panel decision cannot overturn an en banc decision.
To be clear, a panel decision cannot be reversed by another panel decision. Thus, they can be very binding with no en banc panels to guide the way.
(Note that this case was decided by a 3-judge panel and thus isn't binding precedent.)
False. I can't believe this is in the story header, it should be changed immediately. Appellate courts like the 9th Circuit generate binding precedent every time they publish an opinion (some other appellate courts also generate precedent through unpublished opinions).
Sure, it's on the lowest rung of binding precedent. It can be overruled by an en banc panel, or it can be overruled by the US Supreme Court. But it's still certainly can be cited in other cases.
Case law refers to decisions in the various court systems which set precedent for future decisions and are therefore part of the common law.
The effect of a court decision depends on the level of court at which a case was decided. A decision of an appellate court is binding precedent in all lower courts in its jurisdiction. A U.S. Supreme Court decision is binding precedent in all courts dealing with any aspect of federal law.
We have to distinguish between published and unpublished opinions in some districts, but the point basically stands.
(You must have a unicode character set on your computer to view this comment)
There is a great way to type characters by how they look, not how they are pronounced, do it in five or less keystrokes, and be unique almost every time. The Chinese do this with CangJie
æoeæ--¥ä produces æY¥ æoeæoe produces æz--
It's not always that easy, however.
ç"çæå produces é ååoeYåç"åf produces è½ çé£çå±± produces å...' (é£ is a special key, meaning "difficult")
I plan on learning it over the summer. It allows you to type quickly when you are good at it, and moreover (as a bonus for students), it helps you remember how to write the characters by hand!
Frameworks can be anywhere to be accessed by any part of the system. If an application already contains frameworks, there is no need to install them into a system directry. Not only can that application use them, but any other application can also use those frameworks, especially if the minor version number has been incremented.
Yes, frameworks within an application folder can be used by another application that has an older minor version of them. The only reason frameworks might need to be installed is because they are truly libraries that don't have applications attached to them, or because they are important enough that applications won't contain copies of the framework to save space. You rarely install frameworks.
It is the other way around. The FCC has done studies on traditional analog cellphones and determined that they should not be used by anyone on board an aircraft because of the wide interference that usage would cause. Similar studies were not performed for PCS and other digital networks, so there is no FCC regulation against using them in flight.
The FAA, on the otherhand still bans any cell phone use, believing that any phone may cause interference, mainly based upon hearsay and conjecture; under no controlled circumstances has interference ever been shown to occur in flight. IIRC, there are some 40 or 50 incidents a year where pilots believe that they fell victim to some sort of electronic interference, almost exclusively from laptops.
There was a congressional report a couple of years ago on this, I wish someone would post the link.
Actually, I'm sure the government could still release public domain code as GPL improvements both technically and legally. Legally, they could make the diffs public domain, such that one could use their code improvements however one wanted to. But if someone wanted to distribute the whole work -- the whole SELinux system -- it would have to be under GPL distribution terms.
I'm not sure about the distribution of the work as a whole, however.
If you felt the quake, or if you were in the area and didn't feel it, be sure to record your observations here so that the data can be displayed and analyzed.
It's amazing to see 700 responses be recorded in about 20 some minutes, and more data just helps the cause of the USGS. It was minor up here near the bay, but hey, it was my first:) You can access the current map as well.
Lessig has an interesting take on public domain, in that it is quite similar to the whole watermarking / DRM scheme.
That's why in one sense we're pushing to advance the public domain, but as a compromise position we're also pushing to enable people to make their work available in the public domain in an extremely easy way. So we're going to build machinery to build licenses that allow people to mark their content as available in any number of ways to the public domain, so that search engines can find and link to that content, and people can easily get it and understand the terms under which they're getting it.
This idea should sound familiar. This strikes me as a scheme quite similar to Digital Rights Management, but in a different direction. Instead of restricting the distribution of content, this technological measure would allow anyone to readily identify the license of a particular work.
Let's face it, small-time writers, musicians, and artists do not want to see their works used inappropriately in a commercial setting (and maybe not even inappropriately in a noncommercial setting), but they might want to allow individuals to share their respective works. This scheme would allow people to mark that situation so that anyone with the file could readily understand the author's wishes.
But, if this licensing scheme is put into wide use, it makes it trivial to implement a DRM management system that disallowed copying of files tagged with a restrictive license. So you have to ask yourselves, is the aforementioned benefit of marking your works as copyable or not in a commercial or noncommercial setting worth it if it means that all commercial music will tag themselves as commercial and noncopyable?
The modulus is not a prime number p, but a composite integer n created by multiplying two large primes together. These two primes are basically the only two things that determine the structure of the private key. Factor the modulus (it is part of the public key), and you can trivially create the private key.
The DSS system is a bit of an anomaly, because DirectTV controls both the service and the smart-card encryption technology, so that people still do not know exactly how the card functions. In fact, the most popular way to get around paying for a subscription is by emulating the card's basic functions and sending all crypto-related requests to the card for processing.
In the case of HDCP, the protocol must remain public, so there is no chance for security through obscurity. They must solely rely on the strength of the protocol to cracking, whereas DirectTV has the strong advantage that no one outside the company secrets knows how the cryptography works.
This is why HDCP has fallen just as easily as DeCSS. Both relied on the security of the private keys, but ignored possible flaws in the protocol itself.
Numbers themselves cannot be copyrighted. Try sending in a copyright application for a number and watch it get rejected.
*However* suppose that a song is written and copyrighted. All well and good. Now it is coverted into an MP3. The MP3 is a directly derived work, and is still copyrighted similarly. If a number is a derived from that MP3 or WAV file, it is still directly derived from the original piece, and thus copyrighted just the same.
Copyrights are always about works themselves (of protected classes, of course) and their derivations. If some text/song/art/whatever is put into another form directly representing the original, the copyright works just the same.
Note: I am not a lawyer nor copyright expert. But this sure seems logical to me. Correct me if I'm wrong, however.
Just last week, I downloaded over 4 *gigabytes* of SHN encoded music (about half the size, lossless). All legal, live music that the bands have authorized as OK to be distributed for non-profit use. I would feel sickened if I had to pay a tax to the RIAA for music that was copied legally.
Wake up RIAA: many of us distribute music that he bands *allow* us to.
You said something about Pi, that if one number had a higher frequency, it could be compressed while still being random. Well, the sense of random that we were using is a random probability distribution. The digits of Pi are not random in the sense that they are calculated by some random means. They can be calculated. We were using the sense of random that they had an even distribution.
If indeed one number had a higher frequency (leading to compression), Pi would cease being "random" in the sense that we have been using it.
Huh? For the sequence to be random, each subsequent outcome must have an equal probability of occurring. That is, each subsequent digit must have an equal likelihood of being a zero or a one.
Look at it this way. Let's say you have a conversation between two people. One person (A) is the "generator" of the sequence. Now you seem to have the point of view of (B) where the digits are allegedly "random". But (A) is simply generating digits with a 90% chance of a 0, 10% chance of 1. Is that random?? Of course not. Your definition of random is confusing at best, and let's be straight -- you are redefining "random".
Any mathematically random data cannot be compressed.
If the Americans would suck it up and learn to use their amazingly fast IBMs we would hear whining from the other side of both ponds.
Great, what the hell do you think we are doing over at Argonne National Labs? I mean, have you tried to paralellize an atmospheric climate modeler? I don't think so. Coding for a vector-based machine is pretty straight forward. You concentrate on once machine as if it had one processor and one bank of memory, and code away, occasionally noting if your loops are not easily vectorized. The compiler magically does the rest, and your program runs really fast. That's why the Japanese machines are nice.
On the other hand, imagine designing an atmospheric climate modeler on a large cluster. The current paradigm being used and developed is MPI Let's see what you have to worry about. One, since the processors are not sharing memory, messages have to be passed between them to share memory. No biggie. But now consider that the whole atmosphere has to be broken up into pieces of a grid. On the boundaries, grid points must be shared by two or more processors. At each timestep, those points must be synchronized. Code must exist to know the processors that border one another and that know which points to share.
Now what happens if you want to combine different models together, as in the atmosphere, ocean, land, and sea-ice models. This is known as a climate coupler. Well, now you have differing grids for each of the models because they were developed independently. Now your program must handle interpolation of the grid points and must again know which processors border one another so that data is efficiently transfered. Finally, there must be decent load handling so that each processor is doing its fair share of the work.
I'm now working on the climate coupler project here at Argonne. Vector machines are quite easy to program, but we do know that they will lose out to massively parallelized clusters. It's just that the programming is much more difficult, since the messaging is always the bottle neck. Communications development follows a rate similar Moore's Law, but with a longer doubling time. For maximum efficiency, the programmer must handle the messaging model directly.
The modeling group here at Argonne understands the issue, and we are working on a general climate system to run quickly on parallized machines. No you know why you can't just do a simple code rewrite. You need to redesign the whole system.
There are a few people in space right now that experience the turn of the clock repeatedly as they circle the globe every 90 minutes. A toast to the astronauts that have the unique opportunity to demonstrate how far we have come over a millenium.
Compensation of $10,000 will be divided among the persons who submit a successful unique attack on any individual technology during the duration of the SDMI Public Challenge. In exchange for such compensation, all information you submit, and any intellectual property in such information (including source code and other executables) will become the property of the SDMI Foundation and/or the proponent of that technology. In order to receive compensation, you will be required to enter into a separate agreement, by which you will assign your rights in such intellectual property. The agreement will provide that (1) you will not be permitted to disclose any information about the details of the attack to any other party, (2) you represent and warrant that the idea for the attack is yours alone and that the attack was not devised by someone else, and (3) you authorize us to disclose that you submitted a successful challenge. If you are a minor, it will be necessary for you and your parent or guardian to sign this document, and any compensation will be paid to your parent or guardian.
This article has it backwards. The hacker community should not participate in this contest, as it will prove to be a loss for the community as a whole. After all, if the details cannot be disclosed, they must be planning to still implement it. (If they were planning to make a new system if they defeated it, why would they want the details of breaking it hidden from public view?!)
What should happen? As mentioned before in the last time slashdot discussed it, it should be attacked, but not for the contest, and not for the money. $10,000 is a worthless sum when it would have cost them tens of millions to try to break it on their own.
Language data formatted to be put on a cd surely does not work like a one time pad. A one time pad is truly random, while the point of this cd is to show the patterns in the language. A cd, no matter what data is put on there, with the possible exception of random noise, will have patterns to it.
We are in a pickle, but any method of preservation that does not encrypt the data can be thought of as essentially the same: no plain text, no sense of the output.
But it will take a long time to decipher any method we choose.
Well, all those layers of abstraction will not really matter. It is really just like a cryptographic challenge, as if the writings are somehow encoded onto a disc. They will start by assuming that the data is written along the rings, indicated by it's circular nature. Studying the pits, they will realize that they are repetitive, and the proper character length will be conjectured, and then acted upon. Thus, all that is left is to crack the meaning of the characters, and eventually come to understand the language.
It's not going to be that easy, but neither is trying to decipher a written language. It may be that in 50,000 years they will have no concept of a character based language, and as in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, they may use a language based upon glyphs, similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics.
The computer abstraction is a rather minor detail, but I think that it more accurately shows how data was transported in the year 2000. We didn't convert things into writing, we used bits.
All the specifics do not matter, as when you encrypt data, just moving it around and adding headers will not stop any decent cryptanalyst. The hardest part, no matter how the languge is preserved, will always be deciphering the language.
Looking at all the details, one can see that the X-box really seems to be just a regular computer with a few things disabled.
Win32 API
Microsoft Direct3D
USB support
TCP/IP based networking
And it is only missing such obvious things as services, hot docking, and -- multiple-procesor support. Hmmm...
This begs the question: who would want a computer that is simply disabled just to play games?
With a system like the PSX2, or the Dreamcast, at least the buyer is assured that this system provides something that they do not already have. The separation between game console and computer has been distinct for some time now, and most gamers already have access to computers and consoles, and more often than not will prefer the console.
And of course this all seems to be part of a Microsoft plan to build up the rumors that the Xbox will be released 'real soon' just to scare some people from investing in a console such as the PSX2. I doubt that Microsoft will be successful in this venture, as many other companies already provide exactly what gamers want. Oh, and keep in mind that if you do decide to get the Xbox when (and if) it comes out, you'll be happily tied down in using Microsoft's multiplayer management.
I don't know if many of you realize this, but whenever some one signs up for a domain name with network solutions, apparently they agree to settle all disputes via arbitration with the WIPO.
Take a look at the list that someone else mentioned, and you see that nearly all of the disputes were settled by transfer of the domain name.
Some are very obvious domain squatters, but some of them are honest, non-trademark-infringing domains. Yet another reason not to use NetSol
Ok, but that sort of introduces a new type of bias - audience based. Yes, that will generally work well, but what if you had a piece of linux news (say, 'I got Linux to work on a Packard-Bell machine!') which only has maybe a 1% audience but to that1%, it's rather important. If you do audience polling, such articles will never be posted.
This is exactly what Kuro5hin is trying to avoid. Rather than having stories posted that concern only a minority of the viewers, the stories that get posted have general interest towards everyone. Remember, this is the point of having a general web site.
But this is not to say that Kuro5hin will not have those stories; in fact, one of the plans for Kuro5hin will be to have sections for different classes of users, so that stories that are very specific to the group are only seen by those members, but more general stories will be seen by all.
Slashdot Mirror
So if Darl carried his weapon concealed in San Francisco, and he has not obtained a permit from Sheriff Hennessey (a reporter could easily ask), he's broken California state law, and should go to jail or at least pay a stiff fine. (Had the weapon remained in a locked container [state.ca.us], he would be okay.)
You need only obtain a permit from your country or sheriff of your primary residence. The permit is valid throughout the state.
See the Brainfuck solution here.
It begins like (lameness filter prevents a longer excerpt, just click the link):
The first stack frame (0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0)
is used to abort the recursion
>>>>>>>>
These are the parameters for the program
(1 4 1 0 'a 'b 'c 3)
+>++++>+>>
>>>>++++++++[-]+>+>-]++>+++>+++>
And so on.
I just saw it; it wasn't that bright, but was still very cool.
I caught the third pass, the one north of the San Francisco Bay Area.
A panel decision possesses almost as much precedential value as an en banc decision; the only difference is an en banc hearing can overturn a panel decision, while a panel decision cannot overturn an en banc decision.
To be clear, a panel decision cannot be reversed by another panel decision. Thus, they can be very binding with no en banc panels to guide the way.
False. I can't believe this is in the story header, it should be changed immediately. Appellate courts like the 9th Circuit generate binding precedent every time they publish an opinion (some other appellate courts also generate precedent through unpublished opinions).
Sure, it's on the lowest rung of binding precedent. It can be overruled by an en banc panel, or it can be overruled by the US Supreme Court. But it's still certainly can be cited in other cases.
Not to give any credibility to this site, but
We have to distinguish between published and unpublished opinions in some districts, but the point basically stands.
(You must have a unicode character set on your computer to view this comment)
There is a great way to type characters by how they look, not how they are pronounced, do it in five or less keystrokes, and be unique almost every time. The Chinese do this with CangJie
æoeæ--¥ä produces æY¥
æoeæoe produces æz--
It's not always that easy, however.
ç"çæå produces é
ååoeYåç"åf produces è½
çé£çå±± produces å...' (é£ is a special key, meaning "difficult")
I plan on learning it over the summer. It allows you to type quickly when you are good at it, and moreover (as a bonus for students), it helps you remember how to write the characters by hand!
Huh?
Frameworks can be anywhere to be accessed by any part of the system. If an application already contains frameworks, there is no need to install them into a system directry. Not only can that application use them, but any other application can also use those frameworks, especially if the minor version number has been incremented.
Yes, frameworks within an application folder can be used by another application that has an older minor version of them. The only reason frameworks might need to be installed is because they are truly libraries that don't have applications attached to them, or because they are important enough that applications won't contain copies of the framework to save space. You rarely install frameworks.
What would be the point of your "best approach"?
It is the other way around. The FCC has done studies on traditional analog cellphones and determined that they should not be used by anyone on board an aircraft because of the wide interference that usage would cause. Similar studies were not performed for PCS and other digital networks, so there is no FCC regulation against using them in flight.
The FAA, on the otherhand still bans any cell phone use, believing that any phone may cause interference, mainly based upon hearsay and conjecture; under no controlled circumstances has interference ever been shown to occur in flight. IIRC, there are some 40 or 50 incidents a year where pilots believe that they fell victim to some sort of electronic interference, almost exclusively from laptops.
There was a congressional report a couple of years ago on this, I wish someone would post the link.
Actually, I'm sure the government could still release public domain code as GPL improvements both technically and legally. Legally, they could make the diffs public domain, such that one could use their code improvements however one wanted to. But if someone wanted to distribute the whole work -- the whole SELinux system -- it would have to be under GPL distribution terms.
I'm not sure about the distribution of the work as a whole, however.
If you felt the quake, or if you were in the area and didn't feel it, be sure to record your observations here so that the data can be displayed and analyzed.
It's amazing to see 700 responses be recorded in about 20 some minutes, and more data just helps the cause of the USGS. It was minor up here near the bay, but hey, it was my first :) You can access the current map as well.
Lessig has an interesting take on public domain, in that it is quite similar to the whole watermarking / DRM scheme.
This idea should sound familiar. This strikes me as a scheme quite similar to Digital Rights Management, but in a different direction. Instead of restricting the distribution of content, this technological measure would allow anyone to readily identify the license of a particular work.Let's face it, small-time writers, musicians, and artists do not want to see their works used inappropriately in a commercial setting (and maybe not even inappropriately in a noncommercial setting), but they might want to allow individuals to share their respective works. This scheme would allow people to mark that situation so that anyone with the file could readily understand the author's wishes.
But, if this licensing scheme is put into wide use, it makes it trivial to implement a DRM management system that disallowed copying of files tagged with a restrictive license. So you have to ask yourselves, is the aforementioned benefit of marking your works as copyable or not in a commercial or noncommercial setting worth it if it means that all commercial music will tag themselves as commercial and noncopyable?
The modulus is not a prime number p, but a composite integer n created by multiplying two large primes together. These two primes are basically the only two things that determine the structure of the private key. Factor the modulus (it is part of the public key), and you can trivially create the private key.
The DSS system is a bit of an anomaly, because DirectTV controls both the service and the smart-card encryption technology, so that people still do not know exactly how the card functions. In fact, the most popular way to get around paying for a subscription is by emulating the card's basic functions and sending all crypto-related requests to the card for processing.
In the case of HDCP, the protocol must remain public, so there is no chance for security through obscurity. They must solely rely on the strength of the protocol to cracking, whereas DirectTV has the strong advantage that no one outside the company secrets knows how the cryptography works.
This is why HDCP has fallen just as easily as DeCSS. Both relied on the security of the private keys, but ignored possible flaws in the protocol itself.
Numbers themselves cannot be copyrighted. Try sending in a copyright application for a number and watch it get rejected.
*However* suppose that a song is written and copyrighted. All well and good. Now it is coverted into an MP3. The MP3 is a directly derived work, and is still copyrighted similarly. If a number is a derived from that MP3 or WAV file, it is still directly derived from the original piece, and thus copyrighted just the same.
Copyrights are always about works themselves (of protected classes, of course) and their derivations. If some text/song/art/whatever is put into another form directly representing the original, the copyright works just the same.
Note: I am not a lawyer nor copyright expert. But this sure seems logical to me. Correct me if I'm wrong, however.
Just last week, I downloaded over 4 *gigabytes* of SHN encoded music (about half the size, lossless). All legal, live music that the bands have authorized as OK to be distributed for non-profit use. I would feel sickened if I had to pay a tax to the RIAA for music that was copied legally.
Wake up RIAA: many of us distribute music that he bands *allow* us to.
You said something about Pi, that if one number had a higher frequency, it could be compressed while still being random. Well, the sense of random that we were using is a random probability distribution. The digits of Pi are not random in the sense that they are calculated by some random means. They can be calculated. We were using the sense of random that they had an even distribution.
If indeed one number had a higher frequency (leading to compression), Pi would cease being "random" in the sense that we have been using it.
Huh? For the sequence to be random, each subsequent outcome must have an equal probability of occurring. That is, each subsequent digit must have an equal likelihood of being a zero or a one.
Look at it this way. Let's say you have a conversation between two people. One person (A) is the "generator" of the sequence. Now you seem to have the point of view of (B) where the digits are allegedly "random". But (A) is simply generating digits with a 90% chance of a 0, 10% chance of 1. Is that random?? Of course not. Your definition of random is confusing at best, and let's be straight -- you are redefining "random".
Any mathematically random data cannot be compressed.
If the Americans would suck it up and learn to use their amazingly fast IBMs we would hear whining from the other side of both ponds.
Great, what the hell do you think we are doing over at Argonne National Labs? I mean, have you tried to paralellize an atmospheric climate modeler? I don't think so. Coding for a vector-based machine is pretty straight forward. You concentrate on once machine as if it had one processor and one bank of memory, and code away, occasionally noting if your loops are not easily vectorized. The compiler magically does the rest, and your program runs really fast. That's why the Japanese machines are nice.
On the other hand, imagine designing an atmospheric climate modeler on a large cluster. The current paradigm being used and developed is MPI Let's see what you have to worry about. One, since the processors are not sharing memory, messages have to be passed between them to share memory. No biggie. But now consider that the whole atmosphere has to be broken up into pieces of a grid. On the boundaries, grid points must be shared by two or more processors. At each timestep, those points must be synchronized. Code must exist to know the processors that border one another and that know which points to share.
Now what happens if you want to combine different models together, as in the atmosphere, ocean, land, and sea-ice models. This is known as a climate coupler. Well, now you have differing grids for each of the models because they were developed independently. Now your program must handle interpolation of the grid points and must again know which processors border one another so that data is efficiently transfered. Finally, there must be decent load handling so that each processor is doing its fair share of the work.
I'm now working on the climate coupler project here at Argonne. Vector machines are quite easy to program, but we do know that they will lose out to massively parallelized clusters. It's just that the programming is much more difficult, since the messaging is always the bottle neck. Communications development follows a rate similar Moore's Law, but with a longer doubling time. For maximum efficiency, the programmer must handle the messaging model directly.
The modeling group here at Argonne understands the issue, and we are working on a general climate system to run quickly on parallized machines. No you know why you can't just do a simple code rewrite. You need to redesign the whole system.
Accelerated Climate Prediction Initiative.
Happy New Millenium to all.
Compensation of $10,000 will be divided among the persons who submit a successful unique attack on any individual technology during the duration of the SDMI Public Challenge. In exchange for such compensation, all information you submit, and any intellectual property in such information (including source code and other executables) will become the property of the SDMI Foundation and/or the proponent of that technology. In order to receive compensation, you will be required to enter into a separate agreement, by which you will assign your rights in such intellectual property. The agreement will provide that (1) you will not be permitted to disclose any information about the details of the attack to any other party, (2) you represent and warrant that the idea for the attack is yours alone and that the attack was not devised by someone else, and (3) you authorize us to disclose that you submitted a successful challenge. If you are a minor, it will be necessary for you and your parent or guardian to sign this document, and any compensation will be paid to your parent or guardian.
This article has it backwards. The hacker community should not participate in this contest, as it will prove to be a loss for the community as a whole. After all, if the details cannot be disclosed, they must be planning to still implement it. (If they were planning to make a new system if they defeated it, why would they want the details of breaking it hidden from public view?!)
What should happen? As mentioned before in the last time slashdot discussed it, it should be attacked, but not for the contest, and not for the money. $10,000 is a worthless sum when it would have cost them tens of millions to try to break it on their own.
Language data formatted to be put on a cd surely does not work like a one time pad. A one time pad is truly random, while the point of this cd is to show the patterns in the language. A cd, no matter what data is put on there, with the possible exception of random noise, will have patterns to it.
We are in a pickle, but any method of preservation that does not encrypt the data can be thought of as essentially the same: no plain text, no sense of the output.
But it will take a long time to decipher any method we choose.
Well, all those layers of abstraction will not really matter. It is really just like a cryptographic challenge, as if the writings are somehow encoded onto a disc. They will start by assuming that the data is written along the rings, indicated by it's circular nature. Studying the pits, they will realize that they are repetitive, and the proper character length will be conjectured, and then acted upon. Thus, all that is left is to crack the meaning of the characters, and eventually come to understand the language.
It's not going to be that easy, but neither is trying to decipher a written language. It may be that in 50,000 years they will have no concept of a character based language, and as in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, they may use a language based upon glyphs, similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics.
The computer abstraction is a rather minor detail, but I think that it more accurately shows how data was transported in the year 2000. We didn't convert things into writing, we used bits.
All the specifics do not matter, as when you encrypt data, just moving it around and adding headers will not stop any decent cryptanalyst. The hardest part, no matter how the languge is preserved, will always be deciphering the language.
- Win32 API
- Microsoft Direct3D
- USB support
- TCP/IP based networking
And it is only missing such obvious things as services, hot docking, and -- multiple-procesor support. Hmmm...This begs the question: who would want a computer that is simply disabled just to play games?
With a system like the PSX2, or the Dreamcast, at least the buyer is assured that this system provides something that they do not already have. The separation between game console and computer has been distinct for some time now, and most gamers already have access to computers and consoles, and more often than not will prefer the console.
And of course this all seems to be part of a Microsoft plan to build up the rumors that the Xbox will be released 'real soon' just to scare some people from investing in a console such as the PSX2. I doubt that Microsoft will be successful in this venture, as many other companies already provide exactly what gamers want. Oh, and keep in mind that if you do decide to get the Xbox when (and if) it comes out, you'll be happily tied down in using Microsoft's multiplayer management.
-zavyman
I don't know if many of you realize this, but whenever some one signs up for a domain name with network solutions, apparently they agree to settle all disputes via arbitration with the WIPO.
Take a look at the list that someone else mentioned, and you see that nearly all of the disputes were settled by transfer of the domain name.
Some are very obvious domain squatters, but some of them are honest, non-trademark-infringing domains. Yet another reason not to use NetSol
This is exactly what Kuro5hin is trying to avoid. Rather than having stories posted that concern only a minority of the viewers, the stories that get posted have general interest towards everyone. Remember, this is the point of having a general web site.
But this is not to say that Kuro5hin will not have those stories; in fact, one of the plans for Kuro5hin will be to have sections for different classes of users, so that stories that are very specific to the group are only seen by those members, but more general stories will be seen by all.