This actually happened at a _very_ shitty company I worked at. They hired a whole bunch of people and set them to work poring over tons of one of their client's Cobol source. Everybody eagerly went to work, except one young fellow fresh from school with speech disabilities who somehow felt his talent was wasted on searching through cobol code for 6 character long numeric string fields.
I was working across the hall from these people on a slightly more mind-boggling and fascinating project and had struck up a cigarrette smoking relationship with our secretary. One day the young man I was talking about was told to see the boss. He got fired and then after leaving the boss's office immediately squatted down in the hallway and shat on the carpet. I didn't see it happen but his pile drew a crowd and the boss was enraged. The next day when I was out smoking with the secretary we talked about the kid shitting on the carpet. She told me the boss had made her clean it up. (!). A week or two after the little shithead sent us a huge apple pie as a going-away present. It sat there in the kitchen all week and went into the trash untouched on friday.
In case you're wondering, I got really upset with the company after they terminated the admittedly fun project our team worked on (we made it fun, the bosses did what they could to make it as non-fun as possible)and sent me across the hall to the Y2K-Gulag. After locating one Y2K-conversion candiate field of exactly 6 characters and numeric I spent an entire week there working on my personal projects. The next week the boss wanted to see me and told me he doesn't give a fuck about how mind-numbing and dumb the work is and I told him get me a real project. The next week I called in sick and after two wonderful weeks of extra vacation I got my notice. A month later, I went to work for a bank but that story is not juicy enough for slashdot.
"First Contact" with Romulus or Cardassia.. whatif
on
Should Star Trek Die?
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· Score: 1
I think the correct saying is:
The comfort of the ruling elite outweighs even the most basic needs of the many.
A cultural precept practiced in such advanced and enlightened societies such as the Romulan Empire, the Cardassian Empire and Earth.
Btw, a funny thought just crossed my mind. What if our real life Earth was part of the Star Trek Universe and we would have made first contact with the Cardassians and/or the Romulans?
If you ask me this, our Earth would integrate very well into the Romulan or Cardassian Empires. If we made contact with both at the same time however it would probably get very messy with Cardassians and Romulans duking it out just outside the moon orbit:-) It would be a messy because the American Bush/Kerry/Kennedy etc. elite would probably opt for the Cardassian Empire (their legal system resembles the American Post911-system the most and our execution-happy Fuehrer Bush would really "dig" Cardassia because they have the most executions in the quadrant), while the ecosocialist european elites would probably opt for the surveillance-happy, secret police state of the "you are nothing your people is alles" Romulans which corresponds to their "all of nature is valuable except humans" mindset.
A man was sueing because his children were taken away and put to sleep because the local Citizen Corpse blockwatcher reported them as unsupervised during the day.
Remember a few years ago when they oculdn't take away your children and kill them?
___
Okay... So this is parody but still, a couple years back the parent post would have sounded just like this parody. We're sliding down a very slippery road here into a police state far worse than either East Germany or the Soviet Union itself was. Those two regimes pulled the same kind of stunts Bush, Kerry and the rest are pulling (secret courts, secret laws etc.). The only reason people could halfways breathe in such totalitarian regimes was because the power of the state was limited by the technology they had at their disposal. There were only so and so many tape recorders to record phone conversations, their best computer equipment was S/370 ("ESER") or a couple of stolen VAX 780s. We have an ever growing web of wireless/wired data services, more computing power than ever, exabytes of datawarehouse storage and petabytes of archives. Think about that.
There's something called lane manners that Germans seem to adhere to fairly well, meaning that they stick to the right lanes unless passing.
The Strassenverkehrsordnung (Road Traffic Regulations):
STVO Paragraph 2 Road use by vehicles (1) Vehicles must use the roadway. In case of more than two lanes the right lane must be used. The breakdown-lane is not a component of the roadway.
(2) Not limited to oncoming traffic, travelling through curves or over hill-crests, or vague or not fully discernible driving situations, it is required that vehicles drive as far to the right as possible.
Even Der Fuehrer who himself operated a vehicle on the Roads of the German Reich in the early years before he freed das Volk from the yokes of Versailles, even of HIM it was expected to drive as far as possible on the right side of the road. The law is that old if not even older. (BTW, HE was also busted for operating a vehicle without a driver's license in those early years.).
You see, even though staying on the right lane except passing, even having to drive as far right as possible (Das Rechtsfahrgebot!) has been the law for more than a hundred years, and even though this law is so ancient that even Germany's Fuehrer HIMSELF was subject to it, I sincerely WONDER WHY PEOPLE INSIST ON CHANGING OVER TO THE LEFT LANES passing traffic only insignificantly faster than the right LANE and BEST OF ALL not even use their flashers to signal their intent and DON'T GIVE A FUCK WHETHER THEY'RE DOING MAYBE 100 KM/H WHILE I'M COMING AT THEM WITH 240KM/H WITH SCREECHING BRAKES!
See you all on the Autobahn, preferentially in the right lane.
I don't know which one group of lobbyist is worse but if you ask me it's the eco fascists. They're in the govt where I live and their laws and regulations have hurt me far worse than the religious nuts.
"Sustainable" and "Sustainability". These two terms are flogged to death by the eco-agenda driven green socialist ngo/govt "non-profit" lobby aka as the "Greens", "Sierra Club" and many others.
Some of you will probably shake your heads and wonder why I get so upset just because he used the word "sustainable". I have spent a lot of time on the side, researching and reading up on these people and "sustainable" is a word they're _extremely_ fond of using in all kinds of contexts such as population growth, food and water consumption, CO2 emission etc.
Fire up Google or your favorite searchengine and see for yourself. Search for phrases like "sustainable development". Read what they put up on their sites. You will be surprised how open and candid these people are about their plans for our future: a future where a tree is far more valuable than human life.
Re:Oh yeah...? Well then would you mind solving th
on
The End of Encryption?
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· Score: 1
You're not understanding me. I'm not trying to claim that DES is easy to break. Quite the opposite, actually, and DES is a very well-respected algorithm.
Where did I say I believe your think DES is easy to break?
DES is hard because of the complex and non-linear way in which it employs bunches of different simple, easy operations. Shifts, rotates, S-box substitutions, pre- and post- permutations, etc. are all simple, reversible and easily breakable functions. But enough of them ganged together, in the right way, creates a mathematical function that is very hard to describe in any kind of an accessible, closed form. It's inherently iterative, sequential and algorithmic.[...]
Yes. I see where you draw the distinction. The way I see it, even when things get "algorithmic", in other words, even when the result of the substition step is a parameter for a transposition step and back and forth, even then certain patterns will emerge and mathematicians will have to find formal ways of describing those patterns.
Ever wonder what a 3D space looks like where X is all plaintext values from 0 to 2^64-1, Y is all key values from 0 to 2^56-1 and Z is of course DESECB(X,Y)? I wonder what rythms or maybe even geometry there is to be found in something like that. Then I wonder what a autistic but gifted child might notice that we wont:-)
Oh yeah...? Well then would you mind solving this?
on
The End of Encryption?
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· Score: 1
Okay... so you say symmetric ciphers are not based on 'hard' mathematical problems. Would you mind solving this?
Find k which yields above results for each k assuming function DES is electronic code book mode DES. Do not brute force or use quantum computing. Do not channel or employ other parapsychological phenomena.
When I was a high school senior, and mind you back then we were very naive about cryptography, I thought, gee I got a bunch of cipher/plaintext pairs and I know it is DES. Given the ciphertext, it should be easy to roll back the algorithm and get at the key bits. To cut a long story short, at least for me, there is simply no way to reverse the algorithm and derive key text from the cipher/plain-text, though I am sure a mathematician could formally describe the reversing process and classify the mathematical problems involved.
I tried to post this to engadget.com but for some reason they wouldn't let me. Now I know most of the people here on Slashdot will definitely hate me for this (we all know where the/. crowds buttons are) and I will even admit to that this IS a troll post (targeted at engadget), but I DARE YOU(!) to show that anything I have written is so entirely off=base and untrue or outside of technology and law as we know it.
Keep in mind, the basic tenets are: IP owners get to say what happens with their IP, there is technology that prevents casual copying, stealing is wrong (some will disagree), draconic laws can be used to enforce all of this and don't tell me there isn't even more legislation on the lines of the DMCA in the pipe.
Original title: Clarifications
Most of the people here don't get this:
When you buy digital content such as a movie or a sound recording you have obtained the right to view/listen to the content AS IT IS on the medium it is supplied on (and within other limits of the license, such as not broadcasting, showing it to the public or lending it). That means, if you buy Jurassic Park on VHS which may retail at $5 in your market, you have acquired rendering of the content that is either formatted for analog PAL or NTSC with a resolution of about 500-525 vertical lines and so and so many horizontal dots sans Dolby Digital surround. That is what may get for $5. If you want crisp digital 1000 lines+ interpolated image with Dolby Digital then you can have that too, but that may then retail at $15 or more. "Buying the movie" for $5 on VHS is NOT THE SAME THING as "getting it on DVD", and you have in no way acquired a license to the higher resolution digitally enhanced rendering of the movie just because you bought a low-res analog tape.
Now to answer another question some of you had: Why should I upgrade to post-DVD equipment if I already know it will prevent me from arbitrarily pirating digital content? Content providers will make available digital content that will by far surpass DVDs already superb viewing (and listening) experience. Some day you may have, as a consumer, access to technology that will render digital content at the highest resolution the content provides themselves acquired the content at (for example the resolution of the camera that filmed a scene in a movie, can't go higher than that really). Today, it takes about an hour to steal a 650Mb MP4 transcoded movie today, tomorrow it will take an hour to steal an full-blown DVD and by the time we get to the really hires content it will probably take an hour to steal that too! Would you want to risk that as content provider?? I didn't think you would so don't expect the content providers to take this risk.
Now on to another favorite subject of the online pirate community. I saw that some of you poked fun at Valenti for saying that more technology will stop digital piracy. I'm not sure how well Valenti is into the technological side of this but I for one work in the field. More (and better!) technology will indeed put an end to CASUAL copying. I can personally envision hardware components that authenticate each other with authentication keys deeply buried in the silicon and that exchange only encrypted content where someone with a circuit probe could get at it. Oh and don't think, just because someone uses a million dollar lab and cuts one of the chips into slices and extracts key material that it will do him good. If piracy started to become as rampant again as it is now we would just mark all those compromised components invalid (over the air!) FORCING YOU to go out and buy new uncompromised hardware. (No way to escape that, as your equipment would periodically want to hear from an activation-authority whether or not it is still okay to operate and just shutdown if you don't let the activation authority through). But don't worry. This will not happen very often and I can assure you that those criminals would be __VERY(!)__ sorry if they got caught. For these technological countermeasu
History is always written by the victor and will always favor the author, but obviously only a "history" so off-base and incredibly untruthful needs laws protecting it. Usually it is businesses that are protected by laws, and in this context they are called shoah business or holocaust industry.
Re:Skills you learn could save your real relations
on
Virtual Girlfriend
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· Score: 1
Tell you what, one lady I had a short & extremely ugly relationship with, happened to hail from the wonderful eastern-european country of Poland. She would have thrown a fit for not giving her the $200 in cash. I sincerely hope you are doing better, but my short but painful introduction to the eastern-european mindset reinforced all the prejudices. I will never again pursue any romantic interest outside my own Volk:-)
Skills you learn could save your real relationship
on
Virtual Girlfriend
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· Score: 3, Funny
It is indeed one of the most pathetic things on earth, but tell you what, I think most of the "boyfriend/husband skills" you learn with "Female Simulators" like this pay off in real life.
I'll give you a real-life example.. The other week I forgot our anniversary. This is one of the dumbest mistakes that you can make as a man and regardless of the experience you may have it may happen to you. I came home, and T. didn't even want to speak to me. She just looked away. Thank God, I remembered just in time and bought $200(!) worth of red roses. At first she told me to shove those roses up my ass but I kept producing them one after another telling her how sorry I was and how much I love her (I do, you know) and after a bunch of roses she fell around my neck and told me straight to my face what a miserable bastard I am and how much she loves me. (NEVER EVER underestimate the power of red roses!).
I whipped my "Chick-Tamagotchi" silly.
on
Virtual Girlfriend
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· Score: 1
I had a game like that years ago. It plugged into the windows systray and featured a blonde chick tamagotchi with big tits that you had to feed, medicate, "play"-with, send to sleep, buy presents and whip. I didn't really get around to exploring the full potential of this tamagotchi rip-off but I enjoyed medicating and whipping her for a while then making it okay again by buying her presents.
"To be honest though, I am fairly impressed that Hollywood is actually making a stand and telling them off. I don't know too many other businesses that would be so wary."
Hollywood and Microsoft are organizations immersed in deceit, manipulation and treachery but not stupidity.
Just because they can't afford to buy a fullblown XP/whatever license they can still fire up Soft-ICE and get to work on patching the 3 user process restriction.
German state-controlled television "ARD" & "ZDF" which are also like the BBC with compulsory tv-fees spent USD 1.6 BILLION (!!!). If it's available on their servers ARD or ZDF be my guest, after all I had to pay for this shit and I don't even watch.
You remember it totally wrong. The software running on the PDP was multitasking, one task being the user interface task the other responsible for configuring the radiation machine itself for treatment. Under certain conditions when the operator entered an 'x' in the character ui for x-ray treatment but had intended 'e' for electron treatment and then immediately corrected this typing mistake the machine had already been configured wrong by the machine setup task. The way I remember it, the electron beam did not scan, in other words move but remained stationary on one spot punching a hole through the patient.
This is what I can dig out of my memory and it may not be entirely correct. The only factual thing about your post was the last sentence "It was a design flaw".
The only interesting thing about your post was how confident slashdotters will report half to non-truths.
I was in the hospital last year hooked up to a heart monitor for an entire week. Thank God it was running Windows 98 with IE 5.5 and I got to surf the web all week long when I discovered how to move the mouse pointer by shorting the pads on my chest.
Or perhaps the only message we'll ever see from them would be a giant laser beam that instantly fries our planet, making everything in this discussion irrelevant.
Maybe that's how you get modded down on an interstellar slashdot as -5 flamebait:-)
Even though most parking garage systems appear simple and vulnerable they are not. Many parking systems (but probably not all) keep track of whether your car is in the garage or not. A couple of years ago I let a friend park in our garage. We left in the evening and I drove out of the garage with my car. I handed the card to my friend the system let him leave too. The next day however, when I tried to get into the garage it didn't let me. Instead the garage attendant came over and screamed at me that he had me and my friend on video and if I ever did that again they would take my card and charge me with fraud.
A better way of hacking the system is to have your friend drive behind you bumper to bumper after you. That way the system registers only one car passing through.
True. Forking PHP and building a successful community around the fork would send two powerful messages to corporations.
Message 1: You can profit from OSS but you can't (successfully) dictate its politics.
Message 2: Normal people are in control of OSS, not corporations.
If you ask me, Message #2 will upset them the most.
American felons don't get a vote. Spare me the knee-jerk reaction, slashdot, most of the people with felony convictions did not make their mother-in-law shut up with a magnum (tempting!), rob a bank or rape little girls. Most of them were caught with a small bag of grass, committed multiple minor offenses or "cheated" taxes. Why some were thrown into the slammer for writing visual basic scripts:-) or cheating phone companies out of billions of vapor profits. With MPAA/RIAA criminalizing America, with legislation like the DMCA and the Patriot Act, how far do you think your felony conviction is away??
Why you ask, can't felons vote [or even leave the country!!]?? Who do you think someone would vote for that was locked away for smoking some grass and burning a couple of CDs?
It'll be up to the lobbyists and their bribed politicians to decide what is terrorism and what is not. I remember a while ago, Hollywood blamed SMS texting for lost profits at the box office, equating critique of their movies with slander and libel.
This is America, where they want you to watch what you say, watch you when you say it and say when you can watch it.
It would also be commercial terrorism. Never mind that the Utah law on Commercial Terrorism has been struck down thanks to the ACLU, it'll be back, I promise you and it wont matter if most Americans are stupid enough to vote just between either Bush or Kerry, either of the two will make it happen on federal level.
Read up on commercial terrorism here, and here
Slashdot Mirror
This actually happened at a _very_ shitty company I worked at. They hired a whole bunch of people and set them to work poring over tons of one of their client's Cobol source. Everybody eagerly went to work, except one young fellow fresh from school with speech disabilities who somehow felt his talent was wasted on searching through cobol code for 6 character long numeric string fields.
I was working across the hall from these people on a slightly more mind-boggling and fascinating project and had struck up a cigarrette smoking relationship with our secretary. One day the young man I was talking about was told to see the boss. He got fired and then after leaving the boss's office immediately squatted down in the hallway and shat on the carpet. I didn't see it happen but his pile drew a crowd and the boss was enraged. The next day when I was out smoking with the secretary we talked about the kid shitting on the carpet. She told me the boss had made her clean it up. (!). A week or two after the little shithead sent us a huge apple pie as a going-away present. It sat there in the kitchen all week and went into the trash untouched on friday.
In case you're wondering, I got really upset with the company after they terminated the admittedly fun project our team worked on (we made it fun, the bosses did what they could to make it as non-fun as possible)and sent me across the hall to the Y2K-Gulag. After locating one Y2K-conversion candiate field of exactly 6 characters and numeric I spent an entire week there working on my personal projects. The next week the boss wanted to see me and told me he doesn't give a fuck about how mind-numbing and dumb the work is and I told him get me a real project. The next week I called in sick and after two wonderful weeks of extra vacation I got my notice. A month later, I went to work for a bank but that story is not juicy enough for slashdot.
I think the correct saying is:
:-) It would be a messy because the American Bush/Kerry/Kennedy etc. elite would probably opt for the Cardassian Empire (their legal system resembles the American Post911-system the most and our execution-happy Fuehrer Bush would really "dig" Cardassia because they have the most executions in the quadrant), while the ecosocialist european elites would probably opt for the surveillance-happy, secret police state of the "you are nothing your people is alles" Romulans which corresponds to their "all of nature is valuable except humans" mindset.
The comfort of the ruling elite outweighs even the most basic needs of the many.
A cultural precept practiced in such advanced and enlightened societies such as the Romulan Empire, the Cardassian Empire and Earth.
Btw, a funny thought just crossed my mind. What if our real life Earth was part of the Star Trek Universe and we would have made first contact with the Cardassians and/or the Romulans?
If you ask me this, our Earth would integrate very well into the Romulan or Cardassian Empires. If we made contact with both at the same time however it would probably get very messy with Cardassians and Romulans duking it out just outside the moon orbit
A man was sueing because his children were taken away and put to sleep because the local Citizen Corpse blockwatcher reported them as unsupervised during the day.
Remember a few years ago when they oculdn't take away your children and kill them?
___
Okay... So this is parody but still, a couple years back the parent post would have sounded just like this parody. We're sliding down a very slippery road here into a police state far worse than either East Germany or the Soviet Union itself was. Those two regimes pulled the same kind of stunts Bush, Kerry and the rest are pulling (secret courts, secret laws etc.). The only reason people could halfways breathe in such totalitarian regimes was because the power of the state was limited by the technology they had at their disposal. There were only so and so many tape recorders to record phone conversations, their best computer equipment was S/370 ("ESER") or a couple of stolen VAX 780s. We have an ever growing web of wireless/wired data services, more computing power than ever, exabytes of datawarehouse storage and petabytes of archives. Think about that.
There's something called lane manners that Germans seem to adhere to fairly well, meaning that they stick to the right lanes unless passing.
The Strassenverkehrsordnung (Road Traffic Regulations):
STVO Paragraph 2 Road use by vehicles
(1) Vehicles must use the roadway. In case of more than two lanes the right lane must be used. The breakdown-lane is not a component of the roadway. (2) Not limited to oncoming traffic, travelling through curves or over hill-crests, or vague or not fully discernible driving situations, it is required that vehicles drive as far to the right as possible.
Even Der Fuehrer who himself operated a vehicle on the Roads of the German Reich in the early years before he freed das Volk from the yokes of Versailles, even of HIM it was expected to drive as far as possible on the right side of the road. The law is that old if not even older. (BTW, HE was also busted for operating a vehicle without a driver's license in those early years.).
You see, even though staying on the right lane except passing, even having to drive as far right as possible (Das Rechtsfahrgebot!) has been the law for more than a hundred years, and even though this law is so ancient that even Germany's Fuehrer HIMSELF was subject to it, I sincerely WONDER WHY PEOPLE INSIST ON CHANGING OVER TO THE LEFT LANES passing traffic only insignificantly faster than the right LANE and BEST OF ALL not even use their flashers to signal their intent and DON'T GIVE A FUCK WHETHER THEY'RE DOING MAYBE 100 KM/H WHILE I'M COMING AT THEM WITH 240KM/H WITH SCREECHING BRAKES!
See you all on the Autobahn, preferentially in the right lane.
I don't know which one group of lobbyist is worse but if you ask me it's the eco fascists. They're in the govt where I live and their laws and regulations have hurt me far worse than the religious nuts.
That's just not sustainable .
"Sustainable" and "Sustainability". These two terms are flogged to death by the eco-agenda driven green socialist ngo/govt "non-profit" lobby aka as the "Greens", "Sierra Club" and many others.
Some of you will probably shake your heads and wonder why I get so upset just because he used the word "sustainable". I have spent a lot of time on the side, researching and reading up on these people and "sustainable" is a word they're _extremely_ fond of using in all kinds of contexts such as population growth, food and water consumption, CO2 emission etc.
Fire up Google or your favorite searchengine and see for yourself. Search for phrases like "sustainable development". Read what they put up on their sites. You will be surprised how open and candid these people are about their plans for our future: a future where a tree is far more valuable than human life.
You're not understanding me. I'm not trying to claim that DES is easy to break. Quite the opposite, actually, and DES is a very well-respected algorithm.
:-)
Where did I say I believe your think DES is easy to break?
DES is hard because of the complex and non-linear way in which it employs bunches of different simple, easy operations. Shifts, rotates, S-box substitutions, pre- and post- permutations, etc. are all simple, reversible and easily breakable functions. But enough of them ganged together, in the right way, creates a mathematical function that is very hard to describe in any kind of an accessible, closed form. It's inherently iterative, sequential and algorithmic.[...]
Yes. I see where you draw the distinction. The way I see it, even when things get "algorithmic", in other words, even when the result of the substition step is a parameter for a transposition step and back and forth, even then certain patterns will emerge and mathematicians will have to find formal ways of describing those patterns.
Ever wonder what a 3D space looks like where X is all plaintext values from 0 to 2^64-1, Y is all key values from 0 to 2^56-1 and Z is of course DESECB(X,Y)? I wonder what rythms or maybe even geometry there is to be found in something like that. Then I wonder what a autistic but gifted child might notice that we wont
Okay... so you say symmetric ciphers are not based on 'hard' mathematical problems. Would you mind solving this?
DES(k, 0x8c08280811114444) = 0x1ce2fd0a908b1cc3
DES(k, 0x111144448888dddd) = 0x2088c2bf0a3dfc24
DES(k, 0xcccc000000000000) = 0x1bff2081f3259304
Find k which yields above results for each k assuming function DES is electronic code book mode DES. Do not brute force or use quantum computing. Do not channel or employ other parapsychological phenomena.
When I was a high school senior, and mind you back then we were very naive about cryptography, I thought, gee I got a bunch of cipher/plaintext pairs and I know it is DES. Given the ciphertext, it should be easy to roll back the algorithm and get at the key bits. To cut a long story short, at least for me, there is simply no way to reverse the algorithm and derive key text from the cipher/plain-text, though I am sure a mathematician could formally describe the reversing process and classify the mathematical problems involved.
I tried to post this to engadget.com but for some reason they wouldn't let me. Now I know most of the people here on Slashdot will definitely hate me for this (we all know where the /. crowds buttons are) and I will even admit to that this IS a troll post (targeted at engadget), but I DARE YOU(!) to show that anything I have written is so entirely off=base and untrue or outside of technology and law as we know it.
Keep in mind, the basic tenets are: IP owners get to say what happens with their IP, there is technology that prevents casual copying, stealing is wrong (some will disagree), draconic laws can be used to enforce all of this and don't tell me there isn't even more legislation on the lines of the DMCA in the pipe.
Original title: Clarifications
Most of the people here don't get this:
When you buy digital content such as a movie or a sound recording you have obtained the right to view/listen to the content AS IT IS on the medium it is supplied on (and within other limits of the license, such as not broadcasting, showing it to the public or lending it). That means, if you buy Jurassic Park on VHS which may retail at $5 in your market, you have acquired rendering of the content that is either formatted for analog PAL or NTSC with a resolution of about 500-525 vertical lines and so and so many horizontal dots sans Dolby Digital surround. That is what may get for $5. If you want crisp digital 1000 lines+ interpolated image with Dolby Digital then you can have that too, but that may then retail at $15 or more. "Buying the movie" for $5 on VHS is NOT THE SAME THING as "getting it on DVD", and you have in no way acquired a license to the higher resolution digitally enhanced rendering of the movie just because you bought a low-res analog tape.
Now to answer another question some of you had: Why should I upgrade to post-DVD equipment if I already know it will prevent me from arbitrarily pirating digital content? Content providers will make available digital content that will by far surpass DVDs already superb viewing (and listening) experience. Some day you may have, as a consumer, access to technology that will render digital content at the highest resolution the content provides themselves acquired the content at (for example the resolution of the camera that filmed a scene in a movie, can't go higher than that really). Today, it takes about an hour to steal a 650Mb MP4 transcoded movie today, tomorrow it will take an hour to steal an full-blown DVD and by the time we get to the really hires content it will probably take an hour to steal that too! Would you want to risk that as content provider?? I didn't think you would so don't expect the content providers to take this risk.
Now on to another favorite subject of the online pirate community. I saw that some of you poked fun at Valenti for saying that more technology will stop digital piracy. I'm not sure how well Valenti is into the technological side of this but I for one work in the field. More (and better!) technology will indeed put an end to CASUAL copying. I can personally envision hardware components that authenticate each other with authentication keys deeply buried in the silicon and that exchange only encrypted content where someone with a circuit probe could get at it. Oh and don't think, just because someone uses a million dollar lab and cuts one of the chips into slices and extracts key material that it will do him good. If piracy started to become as rampant again as it is now we would just mark all those compromised components invalid (over the air!) FORCING YOU to go out and buy new uncompromised hardware. (No way to escape that, as your equipment would periodically want to hear from an activation-authority whether or not it is still okay to operate and just shutdown if you don't let the activation authority through). But don't worry. This will not happen very often and I can assure you that those criminals would be __VERY(!)__ sorry if they got caught. For these technological countermeasu
"Darn. another platform to port linux to! Just when we thought we had most architectures covered :-)"
Ask not what Linux can do for your platform. Ask your platform what it can do for Linux!
"These laws are here to protect history..."
History is always written by the victor and will always favor the author, but obviously only a "history" so off-base and incredibly untruthful needs laws protecting it. Usually it is businesses that are protected by laws, and in this context they are called shoah business or holocaust industry.
Tell you what, one lady I had a short & extremely ugly relationship with, happened to hail from the wonderful eastern-european country of Poland. She would have thrown a fit for not giving her the $200 in cash. I sincerely hope you are doing better, but my short but painful introduction to the eastern-european mindset reinforced all the prejudices. I will never again pursue any romantic interest outside my own Volk :-)
It is indeed one of the most pathetic things on earth, but tell you what, I think most of the "boyfriend/husband skills" you learn with "Female Simulators" like this pay off in real life.
I'll give you a real-life example.. The other week I forgot our anniversary. This is one of the dumbest mistakes that you can make as a man and regardless of the experience you may have it may happen to you. I came home, and T. didn't even want to speak to me. She just looked away. Thank God, I remembered just in time and bought $200(!) worth of red roses. At first she told me to shove those roses up my ass but I kept producing them one after another telling her how sorry I was and how much I love her (I do, you know) and after a bunch of roses she fell around my neck and told me straight to my face what a miserable bastard I am and how much she loves me. (NEVER EVER underestimate the power of red roses!).
I had a game like that years ago. It plugged into the windows systray and featured a blonde chick tamagotchi with big tits that you had to feed, medicate, "play"-with, send to sleep, buy presents and whip. I didn't really get around to exploring the full potential of this tamagotchi rip-off but I enjoyed medicating and whipping her for a while then making it okay again by buying her presents.
"To be honest though, I am fairly impressed that Hollywood is actually making a stand and telling them off. I don't know too many other businesses that would be so wary."
Hollywood and Microsoft are organizations immersed in deceit, manipulation and treachery but not stupidity.
Just because they can't afford to buy a fullblown XP/whatever license they can still fire up Soft-ICE and get to work on patching the 3 user process restriction.
German state-controlled television "ARD" & "ZDF" which are also like the BBC with compulsory tv-fees spent USD 1.6 BILLION (!!!). If it's available on their servers ARD or ZDF be my guest, after all I had to pay for this shit and I don't even watch.
You remember it totally wrong. The software running on the PDP was multitasking, one task being the user interface task the other responsible for configuring the radiation machine itself for treatment. Under certain conditions when the operator entered an 'x' in the character ui for x-ray treatment but had intended 'e' for electron treatment and then immediately corrected this typing mistake the machine had already been configured wrong by the machine setup task. The way I remember it, the electron beam did not scan, in other words move but remained stationary on one spot punching a hole through the patient.
This is what I can dig out of my memory and it may not be entirely correct. The only factual thing about your post was the last sentence "It was a design flaw".
The only interesting thing about your post was how confident slashdotters will report half to non-truths.
I was in the hospital last year hooked up to a heart monitor for an entire week. Thank God it was running Windows 98 with IE 5.5 and I got to surf the web all week long when I discovered how to move the mouse pointer by shorting the pads on my chest.
Or perhaps the only message we'll ever see from them would be a giant laser beam that instantly fries our planet, making everything in this discussion irrelevant.
:-)
Maybe that's how you get modded down on an interstellar slashdot as -5 flamebait
Even though most parking garage systems appear simple and vulnerable they are not. Many parking systems (but probably not all) keep track of whether your car is in the garage or not. A couple of years ago I let a friend park in our garage. We left in the evening and I drove out of the garage with my car. I handed the card to my friend the system let him leave too. The next day however, when I tried to get into the garage it didn't let me. Instead the garage attendant came over and screamed at me that he had me and my friend on video and if I ever did that again they would take my card and charge me with fraud.
A better way of hacking the system is to have your friend drive behind you bumper to bumper after you. That way the system registers only one car passing through.
True. Forking PHP and building a successful community around the fork would send two powerful messages to corporations. Message 1: You can profit from OSS but you can't (successfully) dictate its politics. Message 2: Normal people are in control of OSS, not corporations. If you ask me, Message #2 will upset them the most.
American felons don't get a vote. Spare me the knee-jerk reaction, slashdot, most of the people with felony convictions did not make their mother-in-law shut up with a magnum (tempting!), rob a bank or rape little girls. Most of them were caught with a small bag of grass, committed multiple minor offenses or "cheated" taxes. Why some were thrown into the slammer for writing visual basic scripts :-) or cheating phone companies out of billions of vapor profits. With MPAA/RIAA criminalizing America, with legislation like the DMCA and the Patriot Act, how far do you think your felony conviction is away??
Why you ask, can't felons vote [or even leave the country!!]?? Who do you think someone would vote for that was locked away for smoking some grass and burning a couple of CDs?
Mod me down, I can afford the karma.
It'll be up to the lobbyists and their bribed politicians to decide what is terrorism and what is not. I remember a while ago, Hollywood blamed SMS texting for lost profits at the box office, equating critique of their movies with slander and libel.
This is America, where they want you to watch what you say, watch you when you say it and say when you can watch it.
It would also be commercial terrorism. Never mind that the Utah law on Commercial Terrorism has been struck down thanks to the ACLU, it'll be back, I promise you and it wont matter if most Americans are stupid enough to vote just between either Bush or Kerry, either of the two will make it happen on federal level. Read up on commercial terrorism here, and here