Their page for Napster users asks you to give your email address, Napster name, and full personal details before telling you what they will do for you and if it costs anything.
None of the links from their home page lead anywhere which would clarify matters.
While I was not blocked by them, this policy of "taking names" at the front door sure scared me away from seeing what they propose to do for me.
There is a diference in the "loading gauge", or the width and height of the rolling stock that can run on the British and Continental rail networks. The British loading gauge is smaller, and this restricts the interchange of freight cars, limiting somewhat the utility of the Channel Tunnel.
This diference is even more profound between the Continental and American rail systems. American rail equipment has always been the largest in the world.
This can be mitigated by the use of cargo containers - which is what shippers use now anyway - by transfering containers from rail/trucks to ships and back. A rail link would save one of these transfer steps and cut transit time.
I did a product for the Bally Arcade, circa 1979, that was a Tiny Basic programming cartridge. It used a keypad overlay to convert a 4x6 calculator keypad into an alphanumeric entry device.
It had 1800 bytes of memory, graphics and sound commands, and ran at about 100 instructions a second.
It was a big hit (for an obscure platform). A number of people used it to teach programming and stuff.
I am delighted to see this idea come back. I was even thinking of doing something like this again myself.
Imagine you have a multimedia authoring tool that lets you, at your own screen, adjust some controls and visualize whatever you specify.
Lets say you can tweak the age and appearance of each actor independantly. Also, you can play back "script templates", which tell the virtual actors what to do.
If the scripts include sexual scenarios (which would by far be the biggest market for this!), some states of this dynamic simulation could be illegal.
Are you a criminal if they bust on you when you have a dynamic kiddie-porn image on your screen?
What if its not up on the screen, but the log file shows you had the controls both set to "12" and "Fuck" at some time before?
The point I am driving at here is there is a subtle boundary between your fantasy realized in multimedia and in your own mind.
To me, if no child was actually exploited in the physical world, then there are no grounds for prosecution.
The Executive Branch, working with Congress and the Judiciary, determines the structure and priorities of our legal system.
Our last President is leaving office with enormous personal debts to pay, having fended off numerous legal attacks. Undoubtedly you will be faced with a similar onslaught.
Many observers believe that our legal culture has evolved into an extremely complex, expensive, vicious, unwieldy, and stiffling monster.
What would you do, if elected, to change the processes of government and the administration of justice?
I heard about a Chinese dissident group that collected every email address they could in China, and then sent their newsletter as spam to everyone on it.
It made traffic analysis impossible, although I imagine having the messages on your computer, undeleted, would still be seen as incriminating.
I guess even evil technologies (like spam-automation software) can (possibly) have good uses.
because it is less likely to make people think about "sex the activity". Too bad, as this conflation dilutes a useful distinction between the cultural and the physical.
One story (probably an urban legend) says that the base 16 number system was originally called sexidecimal. This was until IBM got a hold of it and prudishly renamed it hexidecimal.
Does anyone know if MS will act the way Sony, Sega, and Nintendo do, and demand both approval and a hefty cut of the royalty stream from game publishers?
Lets hope not. While one can argue that the production values of games have improved since the Japanese takeover of the console industry - one can only imagine the cool games that would have existed if the barriers to entry were less, and if freedom of expression prevailed.
For a humerous indictment of the corporate game censorship mentality, check out Doug Crockford's story about Maniac Mansion.
a LOT of geeks are transsexuals or cross-dressers - probably about 100X the natural incidence.
I know about 20 TS video game designers I have met or heard about during the past few years. There are plenty of transgender hackers in other genres too.
a death caused by an illegal action, even if unintended and indirect, is regarded as murder. For example, if you mug somebody just to get their wallet, and they are frightened and die from a heart attack, you are liable to prosecution for homicide as well as robbery.
my exposure to aeronautics is (obviously) rusty - although I recall vividly the technique of cross-checking each instrument indication against the others in order to detect a contradiction.
I would hope that flight computers do this now, fusing all known data sources and calling for a missed approach if an anomaly is seen.
While I would not expect mention of anti-terrorism techniques in open sources - I doubt anyone can do what they did in the "Die Hard" sequel - hack an ILS to crash airliners.
It involved a passenger listening to an FM radio while a plane was on an instrument approach in the 1950s. The local oscillator leakage caused a false indication on one of the ILS (Instrument Landing System) instruments (I think it was called the localizer). The VHF aeronatutical band is just below the commercial FM band, by the way.
Anyway, the plane crashed, the NTSB figured it out, and then made the rule about electronic devices.
Fortunately, all commercial jetliners now use inertial navigation systems, so this particular failure mode is much less likely. A terrorist would not be able to crash a plane in this way. ILS systems are still in use, however -- and nobody wants to find out about another electromagnetic compatibility problem via an accident investigation.
...which is where you would plug the printer into. (This is implied by the announcement page if you examine it closely).
It is therefore exactly like printing from a WebTV - which is usefull.
There are "video printers" that work directly from an NTSC video signal out there as well. My dentist got one, and now every time I have any dental work done, he insists on sending me home with a couple of photos.
ShockWave (and Director) can be traced back to Bally/Midway, where Marc Canter, Marc Pierce (now a VP at Atari Games), and myself worked in the arcade industry in the early 1980s. We all were laid-off after the "great crash" and started our own company to develop this.
Since it was created by game designers as a way of making game/multimedia design accessible, it is not surprising that it is easy to code games in it. It just took 15 years for the computational bandwidth of computers to rise to level needed to have an interpreter evaluate game logic and do sprite animation as well as dedicated hardware did in the early 1980s.
I am a MAME fan. Many "normals" find it difficult to set up, and find it hard to locate games to play beyond the few that are legal to trade or easy to buy.
I did mean the camera - although I agree that it ain't that bad.
A nice side effect is that you can give somebody a floppy with a picture of them on it as a gift. At long last a use for all those AOL disks we were carpet-bombed with!
Internet Cafes are a great place to make friends with the locals.
Often the workers or owner will be glad to meet you and an offer to help with a vexing local technical problem will be appreciated.
I had a great time helping the proprietor at a cafe in Petra, Jordan rig up an internet phone package so he could lower his long-distance charges. I was treated to a meal and a lot of insight on how the net worked in the Middle East.
which you can find in most capitol cities and major tourist areas. You can rent a system for perhaps a dollar or two an hour. This sure beats carrying a laptop around and they have already solved the "last mile" problem for you.
Offloading the digital camera would be a problem, as the system is unlikely to have a PCMCIA interface. While a Sony Mavica would work everywhere using floppys, they are a bit bulky.
I suppose a RS-232 interface from the camera to the computer could be established on an ad-hoc basis, however those drain batterys rapidly.
Somewhere I heard that all animals, not just cats make variations of these noises.
In cars, it is relatively easy to Growl (with the horn or the bird), and Meow (with turn signals and 'sticking your hand out' to ask for a favor of merging, etc).
Purring is harder to do - sometimes people wave "thank you" or smile, but it is a shorter range gesture where both parties must be looking at each other.
Coming up with a way to purr over a longer range would do a lot to make driving a more positive social experience.
that you can install on your phone line, that notices that the incoming caller is blocking their identifying information, and steers them directly to an answering machine?
I would like then to ask them "if you are not a telemarketer, press 1".
Otherwise the phone does not even ring.
I have been looking for either an answering machine that does this or some sort of caller-ID device with this functionality and they do not apparently exist. I would rather "do the job myself", then pay the phone company another overpriced monthly fee.
Years ago I worked at a Silicon Valley company which did a simple form of "geek profiling". Someone told the HR department that I was acting strangely (I was known at the time for having a large collection of books on homicide and forensic pathology). In the subsequent conversations, this was the explanation of paranoia that was told to me. They even had someone who used to work at the FBI behavioral science lab interview me. This is where I learned about how common this problem is.
Perhaps the most common mental disorder among geeks is paranoia. The term paranoia has several meanings, and is often misused. In this case, I do not mean the irrational fear of an imagined enemy, rather I mean the excited application of the rational mind to ward off unwelcome emotions, through both thought and action.
The ability to marshall enormous mental resources to plan for and avoid imaginable undesirable outcomes is a gift that many geeks have. Unfortunately it can get out of hand. I'm aware of several world-class hardware and software engineers who have been afflicted with this.
I was definitely a geek kid for most of my K-12 education. My experience of violence was entirely on the receiving end. I showed many characteristics of being transgender and the usual response was to try to force me to conform to male gender stereotypes by beating me up.
The point is that many of us were victims, not perpetrators. A system that would reduce the level of violence would benefit many of the children that are like us now. While there are many ways any system of intervention can go wrong, I think it is important to view this problem in the broader context.
I am reminded of the Stanley Kubrick movie "Full Metal Jacket", in which a geeky soldier is severely brutalized by the men in his unit, and then retaliates by fragging the drill sergeant and committing suicide. So much better to stop the violence on the way in, rather than when it comes exploding back out.
So my question for Pinkerton is: what will you do to protect us?
Slashdot Mirror
Their page for Napster users asks you to give your email address, Napster name, and full personal details before telling you what they will do for you and if it costs anything.
None of the links from their home page lead anywhere which would clarify matters.
While I was not blocked by them, this policy of "taking names" at the front door sure scared me away from seeing what they propose to do for me.
There is a diference in the "loading gauge", or the width and height of the rolling stock that can run on the British and Continental rail networks. The British loading gauge is smaller, and this restricts the interchange of freight cars, limiting somewhat the utility of the Channel Tunnel.
This diference is even more profound between the Continental and American rail systems. American rail equipment has always been the largest in the world.
This can be mitigated by the use of cargo containers - which is what shippers use now anyway - by transfering containers from rail/trucks to ships and back. A rail link would save one of these transfer steps and cut transit time.
I did a product for the Bally Arcade, circa 1979, that was a Tiny Basic programming cartridge. It used a keypad overlay to convert a 4x6 calculator keypad into an alphanumeric entry device.
It had 1800 bytes of memory, graphics and sound commands, and ran at about 100 instructions a second.
It was a big hit (for an obscure platform). A number of people used it to teach programming and stuff.
I am delighted to see this idea come back. I was even thinking of doing something like this again myself.
Here is a link to more info about it.
Imagine you have a multimedia authoring tool that lets you, at your own screen, adjust some controls and visualize whatever you specify.
Lets say you can tweak the age and appearance of each actor independantly. Also, you can play back "script templates", which tell the virtual actors what to do.
If the scripts include sexual scenarios (which would by far be the biggest market for this!), some states of this dynamic simulation could be illegal.
Are you a criminal if they bust on you when you have a dynamic kiddie-porn image on your screen?
What if its not up on the screen, but the log file shows you had the controls both set to "12" and "Fuck" at some time before?
The point I am driving at here is there is a subtle boundary between your fantasy realized in multimedia and in your own mind.
To me, if no child was actually exploited in the physical world, then there are no grounds for prosecution.
The Executive Branch, working with Congress and the Judiciary, determines the structure and priorities of our legal system.
Our last President is leaving office with enormous personal debts to pay, having fended off numerous legal attacks. Undoubtedly you will be faced with a similar onslaught.
Many observers believe that our legal culture has evolved into an extremely complex, expensive, vicious, unwieldy, and stiffling monster.
What would you do, if elected, to change the processes of government and the administration of justice?
actually drug dealers have been using this for several years already. I saw a report on it over at the Open Source Solutions website a while
back.
I heard about a Chinese dissident group that collected every email address they could in China, and then sent their newsletter as spam to everyone on it.
It made traffic analysis impossible, although I imagine having the messages on your computer, undeleted, would still be seen as incriminating.
I guess even evil technologies (like spam-automation software) can (possibly) have good uses.
A few of us have done exactly this - I was lucky enough to have two games with a "reverts to me" clause in the contract.
I am interested in "open sourcing" the code, too. However its in ancient Forth dialect from hell...
because it is less likely to make people think about "sex the activity". Too bad, as this conflation dilutes a useful distinction between the cultural and the physical.
One story (probably an urban legend) says that the base 16 number system was originally called sexidecimal. This was until IBM got a hold of it and prudishly renamed it hexidecimal.
Does anyone know if MS will act the way Sony, Sega, and Nintendo do, and demand both approval and a hefty cut of the royalty stream from game publishers?
Lets hope not. While one can argue that the production values of games have improved since the Japanese takeover of the console industry - one can only imagine the cool games that would have existed if the barriers to entry were less, and if freedom of expression prevailed.
For a humerous indictment of the corporate game censorship mentality, check out Doug Crockford's story about Maniac Mansion.
a LOT of geeks are transsexuals or cross-dressers - probably about 100X the natural incidence.
I know about 20 TS video game designers I have met or heard about during the past few years. There are plenty of transgender hackers in other genres too.
a death caused by an illegal action, even if unintended and indirect, is regarded as murder. For example, if you mug somebody just to get their wallet, and they are frightened and die from a heart attack, you are liable to prosecution for homicide as well as robbery.
my exposure to aeronautics is (obviously) rusty - although I recall vividly the technique of cross-checking each instrument indication against the others in order to detect a contradiction.
I would hope that flight computers do this now, fusing all known data sources and calling for a missed approach if an anomaly is seen.
While I would not expect mention of anti-terrorism techniques in open sources - I doubt anyone can do what they did in the "Die Hard" sequel - hack an ILS to crash airliners.
3waygeek is right - I must have been flying upside down!
It involved a passenger listening to an FM radio while a plane was on an instrument approach in the 1950s. The local oscillator leakage caused a false indication on one of the ILS (Instrument Landing System) instruments (I think it was called the localizer). The VHF aeronatutical band is just below the commercial FM band, by the way.
Anyway, the plane crashed, the NTSB figured it out, and then made the rule about electronic devices.
Fortunately, all commercial jetliners now use inertial navigation systems, so this particular failure mode is much less likely. A terrorist would not be able to crash a plane in this way. ILS systems are still in use, however -- and nobody wants to find out about another electromagnetic compatibility problem via an accident investigation.
...which is where you would plug the printer into. (This is implied by the announcement page if you examine it closely).
It is therefore exactly like printing from a WebTV - which is usefull.
There are "video printers" that work directly from an NTSC video signal out there as well. My dentist got one, and now every time I have any dental work done, he insists on sending me home with a couple of photos.
ShockWave (and Director) can be traced back to Bally/Midway, where Marc Canter, Marc Pierce (now a VP at Atari Games), and myself worked in the arcade industry in the early 1980s. We all were laid-off after the "great crash" and started our own company to develop this.
Since it was created by game designers as a way of making game/multimedia design accessible, it is not surprising that it is easy to code games in it. It just took 15 years for the computational bandwidth of computers to rise to level needed to have an interpreter evaluate game logic and do sprite animation as well as dedicated hardware did in the early 1980s.
I am a MAME fan. Many "normals" find it difficult to set up, and find it hard to locate games to play beyond the few that are legal to trade or easy to buy.
I did mean the camera - although I agree that it ain't that bad.
A nice side effect is that you can give somebody a floppy with a picture of them on it as a gift. At long last a use for all those AOL disks we were carpet-bombed with!
Internet Cafes are a great place to make friends with the locals.
Often the workers or owner will be glad to meet you and an offer to help with a vexing local technical problem will be appreciated.
I had a great time helping the proprietor at a cafe in Petra, Jordan rig up an internet phone package so he could lower his long-distance charges. I was treated to a meal and a lot of insight on how the net worked in the Middle East.
which you can find in most capitol cities and major tourist areas. You can rent a system for perhaps a dollar or two an hour. This sure beats carrying a laptop around and they have already solved the "last mile" problem for you.
Offloading the digital camera would be a problem, as the system is unlikely to have a PCMCIA interface. While a Sony Mavica would work everywhere using floppys, they are a bit bulky.
I suppose a RS-232 interface from the camera to the computer could be established on an ad-hoc basis, however those drain batterys rapidly.
Somewhere I heard that all animals, not just cats make variations of these noises.
In cars, it is relatively easy to Growl (with the horn or the bird), and Meow (with turn signals and 'sticking your hand out' to ask for a favor of merging, etc).
Purring is harder to do - sometimes people wave "thank you" or smile, but it is a shorter range gesture where both parties must be looking at each other.
Coming up with a way to purr over a longer range would do a lot to make driving a more positive social experience.
that you can install on your phone line, that notices that the incoming caller is blocking their identifying information, and steers them directly to an answering machine?
I would like then to ask them "if you are not a telemarketer, press 1".
Otherwise the phone does not even ring.
I have been looking for either an answering machine that does this or some sort of caller-ID device with this functionality and they do not apparently exist. I would rather "do the job myself", then pay the phone company another overpriced monthly fee.
Years ago I worked at a Silicon Valley company which did a simple form of "geek profiling". Someone told the HR department that I was acting strangely (I was known at the time for having a large collection of books on homicide and forensic pathology). In the subsequent conversations, this was the explanation of paranoia that was told to me. They even had someone who used to work at the FBI behavioral science lab interview me. This is where I learned about how common this problem is.
Perhaps the most common mental disorder among geeks is paranoia. The term paranoia has several meanings, and is often misused. In this case, I do not mean the irrational fear of an imagined enemy, rather I mean the excited application of the rational mind to ward off unwelcome emotions, through both thought and action.
The ability to marshall enormous mental resources to plan for and avoid imaginable undesirable outcomes is a gift that many geeks have. Unfortunately it can get out of hand. I'm aware of several world-class hardware and software engineers who have been afflicted with this.
I was definitely a geek kid for most of my K-12 education. My experience of violence was entirely on the receiving end. I showed many characteristics of being transgender and the usual response was to try to force me to conform to male gender stereotypes by beating me up.
The point is that many of us were victims, not perpetrators. A system that would reduce the level of violence would benefit many of the children that are like us now. While there are many ways any system of intervention can go wrong, I think it is important to view this problem in the broader context.
I am reminded of the Stanley Kubrick movie "Full Metal Jacket", in which a geeky soldier is severely brutalized by the men in his unit, and then retaliates by fragging the drill sergeant and committing suicide. So much better to stop the violence on the way in, rather than when it comes exploding back out.
So my question for Pinkerton is: what will you do to protect us?