mp3.com contributed to piracy, by changing a.wav file to a.mp3 file. Of course, both can be shared illegaly, but illegal trading is a lot more likely with the mp3 file because of the file size. Umm, ok, I can see that.
But, who was responsible for the first format conversion? It was the record company who turned the sound waves to a digital format. They're just as guilty.
You want a compromise? How about this... we hang the RIAA execs, and then I take my bow and arrow, and shoot them free before the suffocate? (BTW, when my arrow hits the exec instead of the rope, I'll just claim it was an accident!)
A lot of information can be gleaned from the timing of the keystrokes and some (relatively simple) packet decoding.
So, take the time to learn Dvorak. You'll save minutes each day in typing, and you're hands will feel better, and it should effectively screw up any timing-based password sniffers!
Quick dvorak "graphic":
' , . p y f g c r l / = \
a o e u i d h t n s -
; q j k x b m w v z
Re:Finding a specific message not easy
on
Hotmail Hacked
·
· Score: 1
So the hacking danger here is very much limited by the need to guess message numbers, which is slow going. And while there is a handy program for bruting the numbers it's quite slow, trying only about one message page per second in 'fast' mode.
No guessing or brute force machine is necessary if you're on a public PC. Walk into your library, and go through the history of IE. You can easily find the message numbers, because they're in the URL's.
In many countries (eg. Russia), releasing such an album would be against the law. Here, in the U.S., it isn't. However, I, as a Christian, would never let my record company release one of my albums with this scheme, because it is an attempt to take advantage of the customer.
Legal, but not moral by my book. I hope more artists will see it this way too.
If you're not a Christian, move on. Nothing to see here...
According to Macrovision, the return rate is comparable or the same to those without copy protection.
I find that hard to believe. The first thing I do when I get a CD is rip it, so that I can listen to it from my computer without risking scratches to the disk.
Does this make me better than the average consumer? More "tech-inclined"? I don't think so. Probably 60% of you reading this do the same thing. I don't think we're any different than the average consumer.
Since the only CD's with this protection are country, I haven't gotten any yet. But, when I finally do, you can be sure it's going right back to the store. If they try realasing something popular with this protection, they'll find this out in a hurry.
What a load of ----, a bit for bit copy isnt going to give you pops and cracks. If you list the cd off I am sure someone can point out that you did it wrong, ---- I am saying that. A bit for bit copy of any data wont corrupt it. Its why deCss doesnt matter when it comes to piriting (copy the entire disc, encyption and all) and its why this "cd protection" is crap as well.
You're wrong dude.
Of course, a bit-for-bit copy would be the same as the original. But, this is impossible with almost all hardware. Why? Because the ECC (error correcting code) functionality is built into the hardware (your cd-rom). Not all bits read by your CDROM are sent to your software. Not to mention the fact that sometimes there are marks on the cd's "between the lines" that affect the laser.
In short, a "perfect copy" of a cd is impossible, unless you make assumptions about what a "perfect copy" is. For more information, see Andy McFadden's CD-recordable faq at http://www.cdrfaq.org/faq03.html
The problem is the lack of open source salesmen. When you're a school administrator, you don't read newsgroups to decide what to buy. You get a bunch of shiny ads from salesman who say "we can take care of you." And, believe it or not, this impresses people.
What GNU/Linux needs is a way to push their product on schools. If you were to go to your local school (elem, jn high, or high), and ask to
talk to their technology expert, you'd be surprised how receptive they are. They're just looking for excitement about technology. If you present linux as a godsend (and it is), they will buy it. If they only hear about linux through newspaper articles, they'll always think it's too complicated for kids. What a shame.
I wonder why a company hasn't sprung up to do just that. By preparing an "education" package, and selling the computers to go with it, you have a very strong business model. It would be easy
to make a few graphs showing how free software can be a cost savings. And then you say, "I'm just the person to help you take advantage of it."
I know a few "technology chairs" of local schools. My dad is a teacher. I've seen how a
school can be sold on a bunch of high-priced lemons (they
paid to get a IBM thinkpad for every teacher.
The reason they went with the deal? Because IBM
was the only company to contact them!)
If hardware vendors can do it, you know that
software vendors are too.
Thanks mosch. This is why I read slashdot. Occasionaly I come across comments like this that are really useful. Hope you're fortunate enough that a kindhearted moderator will see your useful post.
<ot>Now if I could just get https:// url's to work again. It was in 0.9.1, and is gone in 0.9.2!
</ot>
Threw out my junk post because of "bad character set", or something like that. So I remove the umlat-A (which _was_ needed for the prompt, but oh well), and I get this:
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276231 hours , 40 minutes ago. No need to try again.
No joke. I copied-and-middle-buttoned it myself.
I'd write to CowbowNeal to let him know, but he's probably to busy changing his prompt right now.
This is new news to me. WinXP gives you 30 days
free without registering (submitting innermost details about your prized hardware for piracy check).
<flamebait>
30 days is a long time. I've rarely gone for 30 days without having Windows crash so bad that I needed a full reinstall anyway. How is this going to help them?
</flaimbait>
Re:Not really important
on
Space Blimps
·
· Score: 1
I find it hard to believe that a few million gallons of fuel is more expensive than the resources needed to keep humans alive indefinitely in a sealed environment and send them supplies from Earth as you propose.
That statement makes it seem so simple, but I don't think you have any concept of what it takes to survive on Mars. Here is an article about a research program to study dust devils in Arizona, so they can be prepared for what's on Mars.
Quoth the article:
Mars dust is a major potential threat to both robotic and human exploration of the Red Planet. Enormous martian dust devils - 100 times larger than those on Earth -- churning tons of electrically charged dust particles could cause lightning bolts and discharges that might fry computers and delicate electronics, interfere with radio communications, or rip apart pressurized human habitat.
Earth dust devils can be 10 meters to 20 meters in diameter and 1,000 meters (a kilometer or six-tenths of a mile) high, Smith said. Mars dust devils are typically a kilometer in diameter and 10 kilometers (6 miles) high. Martian dust devils are so big that they dust the planet's atmosphere, giving the atmosphere its reddish-brown hue, and so big that Mars Global Surveyor cameras have photographed them from orbit.
I'm a dvorak user and I don't have any problems.
I'd finish this reply, but I know that 88% of
slashdot readers have already skipped to the next post, and the other 12% are moderating me down.
What do you qwerty-devoted slashdotters have against dvorak? It just takes a month or two
to learn, and your wrists will thank you for the rest of your life!
' , . P Y F G C R L / = \
A O E U I D H T N S -
; Q J K X B M W V Z
Geek can mean a lot of different things. Webster says:
geek: a carnival performer often billed as a wild man whose act usually includes biting the head off a live chicken or snake
The article says:
Or something even geekier, arguably: ur-geeks.
Keepers of the geek flame. For if The Lord of the Rings is not the sine qua non of geek culture, it's hard to think what is.
So, we can blame LOTR for all the decapitated snakes and chickens we see at carnivals.
BTW, The "Americans" have nothing to do with this. Lego is based in Denmark, and the toys haven't even been sold yet in the US. If you haven't figured it out yet, New Zealand citizens aren't generally Americans either.
This brings up a good point. Which country would they sue in? Lego has yet to sell the sets in New Zealand, and may never choose to. What would New Zealand courts care about about what a Danish company sells in Denmark?
For those too lazy to follow links, here's a quick summary of Dvorak:
' , . p y f g c r l / = \
a o e u i d h t n s -
; q j k x b m w v z
<Free propaganda>
The dvorak keyboard is the only significant improvement to touch-typing since the electric typewriter.
I was skeptical when I decided to learn. I planned to try it for one month, and then come back. However, once I used and seen it's potential, I realized I'd never switch back. I doubt you can find anyone who would.
</Free propaganda>
I do too. But sometimes when forwarding the spam to the abuse account I get a 550 bounce message with the text: "Please do NOT spam our customers!" How rude is that?! This happens with abuse@eli.net and abuse@grid.net
Send abuse to abuse@gridnet.com. There is no abuse address for eli.net.
To lookup abuse addresses, go to http://abuse.net/lookup.phtml
To see this, consider that if a file had a nice block of 1024 bytes of zeroes somewhere in it, we could easily write a simple program that wrote the bytes before that block, then 1024 bytes of zeroes, then the bytes after that block.
Pick a large enough length, and you are virtually guaranteed there is a 1024-byte block of zeroes in it somewhere.
You'll never get this to succeed.
You've admitted such a file would be HUGE. That, in fact, is your problem. How many characters should be read beore printing all the zeros? You'll have to have that number in the decompression program, and it will be more than 1024 bytes.
What this guy did was cheating. Instead of putting the position of the "MAGIC_CHAR" in the decompression file, he just broke up the original file into 217 multiple files, and read them in, one after another. It looks like he saved 216 bytes, but he didn't. There was more than 216 bytes of overhead produced in the filesystem structure.
If he would have tarred the 217 files together, the size of the tar would be larger than the sum of the 217 lengths. This is because tar records the length of the 217 files. (Otherwise, they could never be un-tarred).
Basically, he was lucky that the challenger allowed multiple files. This allowed him to hide the "decompression instructions" in the file system. The challenger was dumb, and deserved to lose his money.
Slashdot Mirror
But, who was responsible for the first format conversion? It was the record company who turned the sound waves to a digital format. They're just as guilty.
You want a compromise? How about this... we hang the RIAA execs, and then I take my bow and arrow, and shoot them free before the suffocate? (BTW, when my arrow hits the exec instead of the rope, I'll just claim it was an accident!)
So, take the time to learn Dvorak. You'll save minutes each day in typing, and you're hands will feel better, and it should effectively screw up any timing-based password sniffers!
Quick dvorak "graphic":
' , . p y f g c r l / = \
a o e u i d h t n s -
; q j k x b m w v z
So the hacking danger here is very much limited by the need to guess message numbers, which is slow going. And while there is a handy program for bruting the numbers it's quite slow, trying only about one message page per second in 'fast' mode.
No guessing or brute force machine is necessary if you're on a public PC. Walk into your library, and go through the history of IE. You can easily find the message numbers, because they're in the URL's.
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20010801
They do, occasionaly, let tourists play Quake in the CAVE.
Legal, but not moral by my book. I hope more artists will see it this way too.
If you're not a Christian, move on. Nothing to see here...
I find that hard to believe. The first thing I do when I get a CD is rip it, so that I can listen to it from my computer without risking scratches to the disk.
Does this make me better than the average consumer? More "tech-inclined"? I don't think so. Probably 60% of you reading this do the same thing. I don't think we're any different than the average consumer.
Since the only CD's with this protection are country, I haven't gotten any yet. But, when I finally do, you can be sure it's going right back to the store. If they try realasing something popular with this protection, they'll find this out in a hurry.
Hmm, it would make me suspicious. I'm used to all text files being opened in gvim.
Of course, a bit-for-bit copy would be the same as the original. But, this is impossible with almost all hardware. Why? Because the ECC (error correcting code) functionality is built into the hardware (your cd-rom). Not all bits read by your CDROM are sent to your software. Not to mention the fact that sometimes there are marks on the cd's "between the lines" that affect the laser.
In short, a "perfect copy" of a cd is impossible, unless you make assumptions about what a "perfect copy" is. For more information, see Andy McFadden's CD-recordable faq at http://www.cdrfaq.org/faq03.html
What GNU/Linux needs is a way to push their product on schools. If you were to go to your local school (elem, jn high, or high), and ask to talk to their technology expert, you'd be surprised how receptive they are. They're just looking for excitement about technology. If you present linux as a godsend (and it is), they will buy it. If they only hear about linux through newspaper articles, they'll always think it's too complicated for kids. What a shame.
I wonder why a company hasn't sprung up to do just that. By preparing an "education" package, and selling the computers to go with it, you have a very strong business model. It would be easy to make a few graphs showing how free software can be a cost savings. And then you say, "I'm just the person to help you take advantage of it."
I know a few "technology chairs" of local schools. My dad is a teacher. I've seen how a school can be sold on a bunch of high-priced lemons (they paid to get a IBM thinkpad for every teacher. The reason they went with the deal? Because IBM was the only company to contact them!) If hardware vendors can do it, you know that software vendors are too.
user_pref("capability.policy.default.Window.open", "noAccess");
Thanks mosch. This is why I read slashdot. Occasionaly I come across comments like this that are really useful. Hope you're fortunate enough that a kindhearted moderator will see your useful post.
<ot>Now if I could just get https:// url's to work again. It was in 0.9.1, and is gone in 0.9.2! </ot>
I'd write to CowbowNeal to let him know, but he's probably to busy changing his prompt right now.
export PS1="${PWD}# "
will work fine. I like color, so I use:L OW}]^[[0m# '
typeset -x BLACK='^[[30m'
typeset -x RED='^[[31m'
typeset -x GREEN='^[[32m'
typeset -x YELLOW='^[[33m'
typeset -x BLUE='^[[34m'
typeset -x MAGENTA='^[[35m'
typeset -x CYAN='^[[36m'
typeset -x WHITE='^[[37m'
typeset -x BOLD='^[[1m'
typeset PS1='${RED}${BOLD}${PWD}
${BOLD}${YELLOW}[${CYAN}$?${YELLOW}:${CYAN}!${YEL
(of course ^[ is an escape. Press "<cntr-v><esc>" in vi to enter an escape.)
<flamebait>
30 days is a long time. I've rarely gone for 30 days without having Windows crash so bad that I needed a full reinstall anyway. How is this going to help them?
</flaimbait>
I vote for Kill-A-Dough-Bee.
That statement makes it seem so simple, but I don't think you have any concept of what it takes to survive on Mars. Here is an article about a research program to study dust devils in Arizona, so they can be prepared for what's on Mars.
Quoth the article:
What do you qwerty-devoted slashdotters have against dvorak? It just takes a month or two to learn, and your wrists will thank you for the rest of your life!
' , . P Y F G C R L / = \
A O E U I D H T N S -
; Q J K X B M W V Z
Reference: Webster online http://www.webster.com
The Pro-M$ side is winning a debate on slashdot? Time to visit the eye doctor again.
Unless they can figure out how to ship me the kick-butt $3.99 buffet they have.
cnn -> aol
terraserver -> ms
hotmail -> ms
ussearch -> yahoo
infospace -> ms
four11 -> yahoo
mapquest -> yahoo?
egroups -> yahoo
netscape -> aol?
I'm sure there are many more. These are just the ones I've used.
Instead of learning to adapt, they just assimilate.
This brings up a good point. Which country would they sue in? Lego has yet to sell the sets in New Zealand, and may never choose to. What would New Zealand courts care about about what a Danish company sells in Denmark?
The dvorak keyboard is the only significant improvement to touch-typing since the electric typewriter.
I was skeptical when I decided to learn. I planned to try it for one month, and then come back. However, once I used and seen it's potential, I realized I'd never switch back. I doubt you can find anyone who would.
</Free propaganda>
Send abuse to abuse@gridnet.com. There is no abuse address for eli.net.
To lookup abuse addresses, go to http://abuse.net/lookup.phtml
Pick a large enough length, and you are virtually guaranteed there is a 1024-byte block of zeroes in it somewhere.
You'll never get this to succeed.
You've admitted such a file would be HUGE. That, in fact, is your problem. How many characters should be read beore printing all the zeros? You'll have to have that number in the decompression program, and it will be more than 1024 bytes.
What this guy did was cheating. Instead of putting the position of the "MAGIC_CHAR" in the decompression file, he just broke up the original file into 217 multiple files, and read them in, one after another. It looks like he saved 216 bytes, but he didn't. There was more than 216 bytes of overhead produced in the filesystem structure.
If he would have tarred the 217 files together, the size of the tar would be larger than the sum of the 217 lengths. This is because tar records the length of the 217 files. (Otherwise, they could never be un-tarred).
Basically, he was lucky that the challenger allowed multiple files. This allowed him to hide the "decompression instructions" in the file system. The challenger was dumb, and deserved to lose his money.