Windows may be bloated and slow, but at least it supports all my hardware, Which is more than I can say for Linux and BeOS, among others. Also we need more software support for these alternate OS.. Linux is getting better but still.. As far as software and hardware support, MS has the advantage because they work with and support the hardware and software vendors.
Even if you were buying this thing to use their internet service, which most people probably are, does it seem right to charge the person for internet access the second they order it over the phone, however long before the thing is actually shipped to you?
This reminds be of an old isp that used to charge at the *beginning* of the following use period and required that you cancel your subscription a couple weeks before the beginning of the next payment period, so that when I got cable modem I ended up with a useless dialup account I had to pay for an extra month.
The second that a company gets ahold of your credit card number they love charging you stuff and not telling you.. Like if you give your credit card number to a video store and a couple months later $1.50 'rewinding fees' start popping up on your bill. I'm sorry but no one has the right to use your credit card without asking.
Hello! This is to inform you that Fundimental Laws of Reality Corporation has recently aquired the legal rights to Gravitee! (tm).
Space is a harsh and inhospitible void. We at FLR Corp. believe that Gravitee! (tm) is an exciting and innovative solution to floating away into the deadly vacuum of space.
If individuals wish to continue using Gravitee! (tm) for any reason whatsoever you must pay a small and insignificate licencing fee of.001 cent(s) per newton/day. This includes any possessions owned or indirect or direct use of Gravitee! (tm). For example: breathing air that is held down by Gravitee! (tm). FLR Corp. (tm) reserves the right to revoke licences at any time or increase licening fees. You should be aware that these fees are retroactive since the Big Bang.
There are those individuals that feel that they have the right to use Gravitee! (tm) for free without paying. These people should be aware that they are _breaking the law_ and that continuing to use Gravitee! (tm) without paying is _stealing_ and is no different from mugging small children or old people or the homeless and taking money from them. Since we have a aquired the rights to Gravitee! (tm), including retroactive fees owed, we have lost more than $10000000000000000000000000000000000x10^89 to pirates. Clearly we cannot remain in business hemerageing money at this rate and have taken steps to solve the problem. Individuals unwilling or unable to pay for Gravitee! (tm) will be loaded onto cold-war era retrofitted former ICBMs and rocketed beyond Gravitee! (tm)'s pull.
The future looks bright for FLR Corp. as we are currently securing the patent rights for EhTP! (tm, patent pending) or adenosine triphosphate, which allowed life to evolve on Earth, and SunLite! (tm, patent pending) otherwise know as sunlight, which provides heat and illumination and is the sole source of energy for all life of Earth.
Record companies are going to have to learn that days for milking licences is over. The days of throwing a cd that probably costs 75 cents at us and charging $15 is over. I have a feeling that some industry people think that this whole liquid audio charging over the internet for audio files that expire thing is the next big cash cow but they are wrong because hacking the format is trival.. Others are attempting to increase their stranglehold on the recording artists by incorperating patented 'encryption' into audio dvd which will mean that any artist that wants to release dvd audio will either have to sell their soul to a record company or pay a (probably) what will be a huge licencing fee to release material independantly. All the while it's clear that record companies are seemingly unconcerned about pirating on a practical level.. The easily found liquifier pro demo which uses the AAC encoding and can create transparent copies at 128kb.. (Using the Fraunhofer codec.. the only one that works properly dispite efforts to release a free one based on the ISO code which was sabatoged on purpose, but thats a whole other story).. Even if the (again trivally cracked) time limit is applied to the compressed files it's still seems to be engineered to violate this copyright law. In fact the program even encludes a cd ripper... Why isn't the whoever association sueing the pants off these guys? Because they don't care. They say they care but they don't. I think the reason for this is that there are certain technological hurdles that one must go over before you can really pirate to the extent that it makes any difference to the industry. 90% of people still use regular cd player to play cds and would know how or could be bothered to pirate the music. Second of all, X number of pirated copies does not equal X times the cost of cd in money lost because you can't assume that every time that a person makes a copy that that person would have otherwise gone out and bought the cd.
When audio dvds make their appearence the pirating will not slow down regardless of the encryption because if you're hearing it through your speakers then you can rip it. That's just a simple fact. I would assume that they have realized this and that they don't care and that's not the purpose to encryption. The purpose of encryption is the same as with movie dvds: control of the format. We have to realize that the whole pirating fiasco is just a smoke screen to leave the control of distribution of _any_ media in the hands of a few rich corperations.
Re:Boy you people like living dangerously
on
A New DeCSS
·
· Score: 1
Face it danger is not a good thing and I would rather have my pride/honor/respect/and freedom than play DVDs on unsupported OSs.
Are you truely free if someone tells you that you _must_ watch a movie on DVD and that you _must_ use a player under an OS that the MPAA has designated? They claim that encryption is to prevent piracy. I was stunned when a friend bought a DVD player for his computer and he could simply copy the files from the DVD to his HD. What's all this fuss about DVDs being encrypted then? It all has to do with control of the distribution more then prevention of piracy.
The fact of the matter is, is that if you are watching video on your screen, then at some point someone's going to be able to get ahold of the raw data, and there is nothing the MPAA can do to stop you from ripping the movie. I'm sure that they could have come up with a better engineering solution to preventing piracy of DVDs if they were truely interested in doing so, which they obviously were not. But as we should know by now I don't think the encryption is a means to prevent piracy, I think it's a means to control the distribtion of media. Consider this scenario:
Audio DVDs are released with patented encryption. An musician decides to release an album independantly. With plain old cds he goes down to the local cd pressing shop and pays a wad of cash to get his cds pressed. At that point he hops on his bike a distributes the cds by hand to the various record stores. Yey for democracy. Now enter DVD audio cds. At this point the musician attempts to get his cds pressed and discovers that the encryption is patented and whoever owns the patent demands either: You pay us a licencing fee to have your cds pressed, and maybe if we don't like something about your music we just won't let you press them at all, or, sign to a major record label, losing all legal control over your music and getting paid 5 cents on the dollar for what they sell them at.
The horrific possibilities that many of us see for the future of intellectual and artistic freedom have very little to do with just 'playing dvds in an unsupported OS'. It has to do with not having freedom of expression restricted to a handful of large greedy corperations.
I think what we have here is a case of people bitching about cheating. In contrast to actual cheating, which I doubt in the case of the release of the quake 1 code is really widespread problem.
Cheating is a lot less of problem than people think.
Yes, aimbots exist. Yes, hacks of various sorts exist for quakeworld. However, there also exists people with seemingly inhuman skill.
Open forum, in depth bitch-fests about the 'problem' of cheating based on unsubstantiated fluff really just creates more problems then it solves. This is because it creates fodder for accusations and finger pointing when someone feels that the only way said player can beat them is by cheating.
Some people have this mentality that one can not reach a certain skill level without using cheats of various sorts. Anyone who was any good at quake has run into situations of being accused of cheating at various times.
What happens is that as soon as someone discovers that people can cheat the first thought that enters their mind when they are getting beaten is "that person is cheating".
'People cheat' is just a lame excuse. I remember one occasion of being accused of somehow 'cheating' in quake 3. My lightning gun was 'too good'. Basically what that comes down to is ego motivated whining and pouting.
I've come across a number of hacks and bots for quakeworld and for the most part, the map and model hacks don't help a whole lot, and someone using a bot is pretty obvious. There is always resorting to specing someone you think is cheating or asking them for a demo, etc... And this is really moot anyway because everyone should understand that very few people cheat and chances are that if some guy is ass kicking your ass, he's just kicking your ass.
Some of us have been playing FPSs for a long time and derive some sort of satisfaction from actually being good, without any help at all. And considering that really the only reward to playing is self satisfaction I don't think cheating will ever be a huge problem. I can think of one very amusing occasion where a fairly well know player was being beaten badly by someone who was using a bot. But that person was using the bot for the comic value and it _was_ very funny. Other then that bots get boring pretty darn quick. I mean running around pressing a button while the computer aims for you isn't exactly fun, and it only help for some weapons anyway.
In any case, if the middle echelons of mediocre quakers think that everyone who is good must cheat then the danger is that those people will start cheating under the premise that they believe that they are leveling the playing field. So really what all you people should do stop your lame hypothetical speculation on how it may be possible to cheat when having no proof of particular individuals cheating at all.
The problem I see with the ball bearing idea is that walking on a pad of ball bearings would be akin to walking on ice. The bearings are free to move in any direction.
The 2 ideas that first came to mind when thinking about the problem were the 'visual deception' solution and the 'hamster ball' type solution.
Some type of visual deception I think would be the easiest and cheapest to implement, and provided that you had a large enough area it could probably work.
As for putting someone in a hamster ball two ideas come to mind. The big problems would seem to be the resistence and weight. First would be to have the ball floating in a pool of water with some sort of optical sensor device. Second would be to levitate the ball above the ground with electromagnets. The electromagnets would be controlled by a computer and could provide feedback to the ball as it senses it's rotation reducing the amount of force needed to rotate the ball and would even give the ability to simulate walking up and down hills.
There seems to be some sort of a misunderstanding here. There is only one use and one use _only_ for a hand gun, and that is to kill another person. This is sole purpose behind which these devices are produced and the only function that they serve.
Sorry to sound redundant but some people can not get this simple idea into there heads.
From this concept that hand guns can only be used to kill people stems the possiblity that at some point someone will actually be killed by a handgun. These same people also do not seem to be able to understand this equally easy concept. Now people can make all the arguements they want about responisble use and gun collecting and shooting guns at a shooting range or whatever, this does not change the fact that these guns are designed solely with the intent of killing a person. And with this fact comes the inevitable fact that someone somewhere at some point is going to be killed by one.
Now gun enthusiasts will openly admit that most guns that are used in crimes are obtained and used illegally. Now disregarding the easy of purchasing a handgun in the states, the fact is, is that the handguns are being manufactured under the pretense that they will be used for legal purposes. Of course the manufactures know that this is not the case. They know that many of the guns that manufacture will be used to commit crimes and murder people. And it would seem obvious to me that gun enthusiasts would recognize this fact as well. How then, could any gun enthusiast support the manufacture of hand guns, knowing and admiting that most of those guns will be used to commit crimes and murder people, regardless of any other fact?
I would think that the an innocent person's right to live is more important than _any_ person's right to own a hand gun for any reason. I would think that even one child that is accidentally killed by an improperly stored handgun is more than an acceptable loss and outweighs 1 million other person's rights to own a hand gun for any reason.
I would have to agree with the gun people that gun control in ineffectual. It is ineffectual in many cases in Canada as well as in the states. But the reason for that These guns are being tranported illegally into Canada from the states. In there was no hand guns being manufactured in the states then we wouldn't have a problem with guns at all in Canada. As it stands, we have much less of a problem with guns than in the states. But I think we in Canada really have to hold Americans responisble for the crimes that do occur because all the guns come from the states.
The American constitution is a fine argeument for allowing the general populace to carry guns, but look at other gun free countries such as a the UK where as far as I know the police _still_ don't carry guns. Times change and this is not colonial times any more. Using the constitution as reasoning to justify all the people that are killed by handguns is very weak. When the time comes that a people raises arms and revolts against their government, I'm sure people will find guns somewhere. In the mean time I don't think that all these people should be needlessly killed.
Truthfully I don't think that I trust anyone with a gun. We're not Vulcans, and I don't think that _anyone_ has the ability to not loose their cool from time to time or become irrational in difficult situations. Men have testosterone, and they're all going to loose their temper from time to time and do something stupid. Male chest beating and aggression is just a fact of life and is not going to change. Mix guns with hormones and you get dead people, where as without guns you get a bloody lip. This is disregarding the all out psychopaths, of which there will always be as well. People who support the manufacture and use of handguns just don't seem to understand the causality of a deadly weapon or the inevitability of human nature.
This also applies to misfits and social rejects, like in the recent shootings. These people always have and always will exist. We didn't have mass killings in the past because we didn't have easy access to machine guns in the past. If there were no guns, could these kids have gone of that killing spree? Of course not.
If psychopaths and hot tempers are always going to exist, can anyone justify making more guns? If you can, please tell me why.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows may be bloated and slow, but at least it supports all my hardware, Which is more than I can say for Linux and BeOS, among others. Also we need more software support for these alternate OS.. Linux is getting better but still.. As far as software and hardware support, MS has the advantage because they work with and support the hardware and software vendors.
Even if you were buying this thing to use their internet service, which most people probably are, does it seem right to charge the person for internet access the second they order it over the phone, however long before the thing is actually shipped to you?
This reminds be of an old isp that used to charge at the *beginning* of the following use period and required that you cancel your subscription a couple weeks before the beginning of the next payment period, so that when I got cable modem I ended up with a useless dialup account I had to pay for an extra month.
The second that a company gets ahold of your credit card number they love charging you stuff and not telling you.. Like if you give your credit card number to a video store and a couple months later $1.50 'rewinding fees' start popping up on your bill. I'm sorry but no one has the right to use your credit card without asking.
Hello! This is to inform you that Fundimental Laws of Reality Corporation has recently aquired the legal rights to Gravitee! (tm).
.001 cent(s) per newton/day. This includes any possessions owned or indirect or direct use of Gravitee! (tm). For example: breathing air that is held down by Gravitee! (tm). FLR Corp. (tm) reserves the right to revoke licences at any time or increase licening fees. You should be aware that these fees are retroactive since the Big Bang.
Space is a harsh and inhospitible void. We at FLR Corp. believe that Gravitee! (tm) is an exciting and innovative solution to floating away into the deadly vacuum of space.
If individuals wish to continue using Gravitee! (tm) for any reason whatsoever you must pay a small and insignificate licencing fee of
There are those individuals that feel that they have the right to use Gravitee! (tm) for free without paying. These people should be aware that they are _breaking the law_ and that continuing to use Gravitee! (tm) without paying is _stealing_ and is no different from mugging small children or old people or the homeless and taking money from them. Since we have a aquired the rights to Gravitee! (tm), including retroactive fees owed, we have lost more than $10000000000000000000000000000000000x10^89 to pirates. Clearly we cannot remain in business hemerageing money at this rate and have taken steps to solve the problem. Individuals unwilling or unable to pay for Gravitee! (tm) will be loaded onto cold-war era retrofitted former ICBMs and rocketed beyond Gravitee! (tm)'s pull.
The future looks bright for FLR Corp. as we are currently securing the patent rights for EhTP! (tm, patent pending) or adenosine triphosphate, which allowed life to evolve on Earth, and SunLite! (tm, patent pending) otherwise know as sunlight, which provides heat and illumination and is the sole source of energy for all life of Earth.
Thank you for your time and have a nice day.
Sincerly,
Fundimental Laws of Reality Corporation (tm)
Record companies are going to have to learn that days for milking licences is over. The days of throwing a cd that probably costs 75 cents at us and charging $15 is over. I have a feeling that some industry people think that this whole liquid audio charging over the internet for audio files that expire thing is the next big cash cow but they are wrong because hacking the format is trival.. Others are attempting to increase their stranglehold on the recording artists by incorperating patented 'encryption' into audio dvd which will mean that any artist that wants to release dvd audio will either have to sell their soul to a record company or pay a (probably) what will be a huge licencing fee to release material independantly. All the while it's clear that record companies are seemingly unconcerned about pirating on a practical level.. The easily found liquifier pro demo which uses the AAC encoding and can create transparent copies at 128kb.. (Using the Fraunhofer codec.. the only one that works properly dispite efforts to release a free one based on the ISO code which was sabatoged on purpose, but thats a whole other story).. Even if the (again trivally cracked) time limit is applied to the compressed files it's still seems to be engineered to violate this copyright law. In fact the program even encludes a cd ripper... Why isn't the whoever association sueing the pants off these guys? Because they don't care. They say they care but they don't. I think the reason for this is that there are certain technological hurdles that one must go over before you can really pirate to the extent that it makes any difference to the industry. 90% of people still use regular cd player to play cds and would know how or could be bothered to pirate the music. Second of all, X number of pirated copies does not equal X times the cost of cd in money lost because you can't assume that every time that a person makes a copy that that person would have otherwise gone out and bought the cd.
When audio dvds make their appearence the pirating will not slow down regardless of the encryption because if you're hearing it through your speakers then you can rip it. That's just a simple fact. I would assume that they have realized this and that they don't care and that's not the purpose to encryption. The purpose of encryption is the same as with movie dvds: control of the format. We have to realize that the whole pirating fiasco is just a smoke screen to leave the control of distribution of _any_ media in the hands of a few rich corperations.
Are you truely free if someone tells you that you _must_ watch a movie on DVD and that you _must_ use a player under an OS that the MPAA has designated? They claim that encryption is to prevent piracy. I was stunned when a friend bought a DVD player for his computer and he could simply copy the files from the DVD to his HD. What's all this fuss about DVDs being encrypted then? It all has to do with control of the distribution more then prevention of piracy.
The fact of the matter is, is that if you are watching video on your screen, then at some point someone's going to be able to get ahold of the raw data, and there is nothing the MPAA can do to stop you from ripping the movie. I'm sure that they could have come up with a better engineering solution to preventing piracy of DVDs if they were truely interested in doing so, which they obviously were not. But as we should know by now I don't think the encryption is a means to prevent piracy, I think it's a means to control the distribtion of media. Consider this scenario:
Audio DVDs are released with patented encryption. An musician decides to release an album independantly. With plain old cds he goes down to the local cd pressing shop and pays a wad of cash to get his cds pressed. At that point he hops on his bike a distributes the cds by hand to the various record stores. Yey for democracy. Now enter DVD audio cds. At this point the musician attempts to get his cds pressed and discovers that the encryption is patented and whoever owns the patent demands either: You pay us a licencing fee to have your cds pressed, and maybe if we don't like something about your music we just won't let you press them at all, or, sign to a major record label, losing all legal control over your music and getting paid 5 cents on the dollar for what they sell them at.
The horrific possibilities that many of us see for the future of intellectual and artistic freedom have very little to do with just 'playing dvds in an unsupported OS'. It has to do with not having freedom of expression restricted to a handful of large greedy corperations.
I think what we have here is a case of people bitching about cheating. In contrast to actual cheating, which I doubt in the case of the release of the quake 1 code is really widespread problem.
Cheating is a lot less of problem than people think.
Yes, aimbots exist. Yes, hacks of various sorts exist for quakeworld. However, there also exists people with seemingly inhuman skill.
Open forum, in depth bitch-fests about the 'problem' of cheating based on unsubstantiated fluff really just creates more problems then it solves. This is because it creates fodder for accusations and finger pointing when someone feels that the only way said player can beat them is by cheating.
Some people have this mentality that one can not reach a certain skill level without using cheats of various sorts. Anyone who was any good at quake has run into situations of being accused of cheating at various times.
What happens is that as soon as someone discovers that people can cheat the first thought that enters their mind when they are getting beaten is "that person is cheating".
'People cheat' is just a lame excuse. I remember one occasion of being accused of somehow 'cheating' in quake 3. My lightning gun was 'too good'. Basically what that comes down to is ego motivated whining and pouting.
I've come across a number of hacks and bots for quakeworld and for the most part, the map and model hacks don't help a whole lot, and someone using a bot is pretty obvious. There is always resorting to specing someone you think is cheating or asking them for a demo, etc... And this is really moot anyway because everyone should understand that very few people cheat and chances are that if some guy is ass kicking your ass, he's just kicking your ass.
Some of us have been playing FPSs for a long time and derive some sort of satisfaction from actually being good, without any help at all. And considering that really the only reward to playing is self satisfaction I don't think cheating will ever be a huge problem. I can think of one very amusing occasion where a fairly well know player was being beaten badly by someone who was using a bot. But that person was using the bot for the comic value and it _was_ very funny. Other then that bots get boring pretty darn quick. I mean running around pressing a button while the computer aims for you isn't exactly fun, and it only help for some weapons anyway.
In any case, if the middle echelons of mediocre quakers think that everyone who is good must cheat then the danger is that those people will start cheating under the premise that they believe that they are leveling the playing field. So really what all you people should do stop your lame hypothetical speculation on how it may be possible to cheat when having no proof of particular individuals cheating at all.
The problem I see with the ball bearing idea is that walking on a pad of ball bearings would be akin to walking on ice. The bearings are free to move in any direction.
The 2 ideas that first came to mind when thinking about the problem were the 'visual deception' solution and the 'hamster ball' type solution.
Some type of visual deception I think would be the easiest and cheapest to implement, and provided that you had a large enough area it could probably work.
As for putting someone in a hamster ball two ideas come to mind. The big problems would seem to be the resistence and weight. First would be to have the ball floating in a pool of water with some sort of optical sensor device. Second would be to levitate the ball above the ground with electromagnets. The electromagnets would be controlled by a computer and could provide feedback to the ball as it senses it's rotation reducing the amount of force needed to rotate the ball and would even give the ability to simulate walking up and down hills.
There seems to be some sort of a misunderstanding here. There is only one use and one use _only_ for a hand gun, and that is to kill another person. This is sole purpose behind which these devices are produced and the only function that they serve.
Sorry to sound redundant but some people can not get this simple idea into there heads.
From this concept that hand guns can only be used to kill people stems the possiblity that at some point someone will actually be killed by a handgun. These same people also do not seem to be able to understand this equally easy concept. Now people can make all the arguements they want about responisble use and gun collecting and shooting guns at a shooting range or whatever, this does not change the fact that these guns are designed solely with the intent of killing a person. And with this fact comes the inevitable fact that someone somewhere at some point is going to be killed by one.
Now gun enthusiasts will openly admit that most guns that are used in crimes are obtained and used illegally. Now disregarding the easy of purchasing a handgun in the states, the fact is, is that the handguns are being manufactured under the pretense that they will be used for legal purposes. Of course the manufactures know that this is not the case. They know that many of the guns that manufacture will be used to commit crimes and murder people. And it would seem obvious to me that gun enthusiasts would recognize this fact as well. How then, could any gun enthusiast support the manufacture of hand guns, knowing and admiting that most of those guns will be used to commit crimes and murder people, regardless of any other fact?
I would think that the an innocent person's right to live is more important than _any_ person's right to own a hand gun for any reason. I would think that even one child that is accidentally killed by an improperly stored handgun is more than an acceptable loss and outweighs 1 million other person's rights to own a hand gun for any reason.
I would have to agree with the gun people that gun control in ineffectual. It is ineffectual in many cases in Canada as well as in the states. But the reason for that These guns are being tranported illegally into Canada from the states. In there was no hand guns being manufactured in the states then we wouldn't have a problem with guns at all in Canada. As it stands, we have much less of a problem with guns than in the states. But I think we in Canada really have to hold Americans responisble for the crimes that do occur because all the guns come from the states.
The American constitution is a fine argeument for allowing the general populace to carry guns, but look at other gun free countries such as a the UK where as far as I know the police _still_ don't carry guns. Times change and this is not colonial times any more. Using the constitution as reasoning to justify all the people that are killed by handguns is very weak. When the time comes that a people raises arms and revolts against their government, I'm sure people will find guns somewhere. In the mean time I don't think that all these people should be needlessly killed.
Truthfully I don't think that I trust anyone with a gun. We're not Vulcans, and I don't think that _anyone_ has the ability to not loose their cool from time to time or become irrational in difficult situations. Men have testosterone, and they're all going to loose their temper from time to time and do something stupid. Male chest beating and aggression is just a fact of life and is not going to change. Mix guns with hormones and you get dead people, where as without guns you get a bloody lip. This is disregarding the all out psychopaths, of which there will always be as well. People who support the manufacture and use of handguns just don't seem to understand the causality of a deadly weapon or the inevitability of human nature.
This also applies to misfits and social rejects, like in the recent shootings. These people always have and always will exist. We didn't have mass killings in the past because we didn't have easy access to machine guns in the past. If there were no guns, could these kids have gone of that killing spree? Of course not.
If psychopaths and hot tempers are always going to exist, can anyone justify making more guns? If you can, please tell me why.