You're honestly defending the idea that "I bought product X 20 years ago, and even though it wasn't supposed to last 20 years, I should be entitled to have product X now?"
>/i>
Damn straight. When did it become a company's right to place an arbitrary expiry date on something they sell? Can you point me at the sticker on the box of any Atari 2600 cartridge that says "This game must not be played after April 1, 1990."
I know why they don't want you emulating games - because all the games you're still playing from 1982 leave you less time to play new games you'd have to buy today.
But that's not a moral position - it's a freaking business model.
In case you've been asleep for the past fifty years, business models have changed - EVERYWHERE. Car manufacturers don't make cars they know will last >10 years, because they can sell replacement, proprietary parts at a great profit. Ever tried to cost building a car from scratch, based on the price of all the replacement parts?
It never used to be that way. Things were built to last, because consumers, righty or wrongly, valued durability. We rich people in the Western Hemisphere have more disposable income than we did a century ago. We consider anyone who doesn't have access to a clothes washing machine to be very poor. We've got gobs of cash, achieved through massive increases in technological efficiency, and manufacturers have adapted to make sure they capture at least as much of it as they used to - lest we spend it on things like, say "education", or "research" or "leisure" or "the public good".
I drive a 1963 Ford Anglia 105e. I know it burns more fuel than new cars, but how much energy would have been wasted, if I insist on a new car every couple of years?
Consumption is a choice - not an obligation.
This isn't off-topic, although it might sound that way to begin with.
Lots of posters have waved their arms about with "it's my hardware, I can modify it however I please" - besides being completely beside the point of the article, is plain simplistic.
In most parts of the world, I can't re-arrange petrol (sorry, "gas"), glass bottles, torn rags and a box of matches into makeshift grenades and stack them in my garage, because posession of such weapons is illegal.
I can't even let junk pile up in my garden in case rats infest my place, and threaten my neighbours' comfortable enjoyment of their own property.
If you follow that through, it's easier to explain how I can't alter a Playstation in order to allow me to deprive Sony of money, if that's what I end up doing with it.
It's all about balancing the rights of others with selfish acts (I use the word non-perjoratively). That's why we have laws in the first place!!
Don't mean to rain on your ideology, but you're missing the point. Nobody (who is worth listening to) opposes software engineers who wish to be paid, from getting paid.
Hell, I don't even mind record executives exploiting a market that's skewed by an obscure, ~50 year gap where society's level of technology adoption happens to suit them, as long as they recognise when the party is over, as it clearly is.
All that the BSA does is make sure the software companies are adequately compensated for their particular licenses. They do not have the intention of ripping off the public.
I think it's fair to paraphrase your point as "The BSA et al have their hearts in the right place".
Their operational practices don't support your assertion. The BSA operates within the US (and other) legal system(s) which allow for various dirty tricks, essentially boiling down to "it will cost you more to fight us, even if you're right, than it will to pay what we tell you to pay". This is nothing new, or specific to software, but that doesn't make it morally acceptable.
The point of the article, which you seem happy not to have read or understood - is that the BSA promotes statistics about piracy in ignorance of the truth, in order to further their agenda of legislative reform.
I oppose piracy and I believe piracy is hurting free software rather then helping it. Borland as well as Linux would have greater marketshare if people stopped pirated Visual Studio and Windows.
I'd probably agree with you. But it isn't going to happen because two conditions exist: 1) piracy is possible, and 2) commercial software exists. Meanwhile, the BSA is hurting people, in much greater measures than some people with 98/103 required licences are hurting software company people. Which can be more readily stopped - the BSA bullying me, or commerical software ceasing to exist and piracy being eradicated?
But, is this important? As far as I am concerned, the answer is no, unless someone decides to actually send a mission to the planet to gather hard evidence.
An awful lot of useful data is gained by remote sensing Mars - just like on Earth. You don't have to touch down in order to learn.
Different forms of matter have things called spectal signatures - the particular pattern of all the different wavelengths emitted/reflected. You can use these signatures to work out what sort of stuff rocks are made of, how old they are, what concentrations they're in and in what patterns they lie.
On Earth it's arguably more interesting, since you can tell different types of vegetation and settlement patterns just by measuring, say, the infra-red or ultraviolet you can see.
Research on Mars isn't about Martian life, all of the time. It's not even about terraforming and possible future human settlement - it's about taking science developed and theorised on Earth and applying it in new and challenging locations. By finding evidence of a huge body of water on Mars, we now know that all the theories of Martian geohistory (is that a word?) that rely on a small volume of past surface water are less likely to be true. This sort of stuff might be important in ways we don't know yet.
...it seems to me like people are trying to make worthwhile stories out of trivia.
Sure, plenty of people like to think of the possibilities and implications of teeny lifeforms sprouting up on a nearby planet. Fewer people, but they are out there, are just as fascinated by the basic interactions of huge universal systems and forces - of things on a scale millions of orders of magnitude bigger. Sometimes the news doesn't need to be dramatic, if you've got your eye on a bigger picture anyway:)
Sounds similar to something I dreamt up a while back - linked here.
Why do us slashdotters continually do all the business modelling for these companies for free? Arghgh!!!!
How can the Vivendi/Universal complain of piracy, when it was someone *INSIDE* the company that initially *Pirated* the copy that is now on the internet.
Maybe because that employee him/herself didn't create and distribute the gazillion copies needed to justify Eminem hitting the top of Gracenote??:P
As a result of the leak, the album will now be released on Monday (May 27).
If the problem is defined as "pre-release cheap copies will stop people buying later, full price copies", haven't the advocates for change won a battle here?
I mean, hasn't the record company just realised that artificial marketing delays inherent in the offline distribution process are likely to hurt their sales?
By releasing the album electronically with (1) fast servers, (2) lossless compression and (3) a reasonable price, and simultaneously sending "gimme airplay!" copies to radio stations (etc.) as is done now, they could cut this sort of "I don't want to wait" piracy down. Sure people will still re-rip the album at 128KB/s and make it available through P2P, but they were going to do that anyway. What do the record companies have to lose, by adopting the practice I have described?
Ditto for software. Clearly you're not going to get packaging, cover-art, glossy manuals or whatever, through TCP/IP, but doesn't the prevalence of warez and pirated music blatantly show that a sh1tload of people simply don't care? How hard is it to put a "download PDF manual | snailmail me a hardcopy for $5" option together? Or just make the manuals available in normal bookstores?
The NSA, for example, cannot sit and tinker with windoze's security holes the way they can with OSC (open source code)...
If there really are nasty bugs in Microsoft Code running on millions of US civilian, government and military PCs, what's a quicker way of discovering them than resorting to the courts to open the code?
Hey, I know, employ Howard Scmidt!! I made the point at the time that he's probably in the Whitehouse advising on just this sort of stuff.
I'd guess your government already has a pretty good idea how brittle their national security really is...
They were able to expose the circuit to the light by scraping most of the protective coating from the surface of the microprocessor circuit that is embedded in each smart card.
With more study, the researchers were able to focus the flash on individual transistors within the chip by beaming the flash through a standard laboratory microscope.
"We used duct tape to fix the photoflash lamp on the video port of a Wentworth Labs MP-901 manual probing station," they wrote in their paper.
By sequentially changing the values of the transistors used to store information, they were able to "reverse engineer" the memory address map, allowing them to extract the secret information contained in the smart card.
First Hemos posts a story about how optimised JPGs are good for webpages, now a story announcing that OSS is popular and viable.
Today's the day I can submit "Microsoft might be an evil monopoly" and I'll finally see my nick on the front page!!! Booyah!
I bet you're the guy with a queue forming behind him at the computer store, arguing the fact that your 17" monitor is only 16" when measured diagonally, too:)
The more they do this the more enemies they will get and the less sympathy they will get from the public!!
The more the public that isn't personally being milked like this - see the RIAA winning, the more they'll believe they're justified, and piracy must really be a problem.
The first part of your sentence is shaky, but the last part sadly bears little resemblance to the culture we're in.
Not too much longer. Games such as Doom and Quake that have had their source code released have already been ported to various PDA platforms, and I wouldn't think it's much more of a stretch to operate a wireless tcp/ip dedicated server for these things...
I can't wait to sit on the bus, practicing my circle-strafing with the 2,4,6 and 8 keys! (Or binding my # key to text-message "i OwN j0o!!" to my whole addressbook)
Did everybody read that? You should, it's currently moderated at 5. This is a mindset that everybody should understand, and think critically about.
I live in an allied country of the US, and frankly, praedor's monologue chills me. If I may summarise the key points raised:
Nukes are just weapons.
My interpretation: Nuclear weapons have the same consequences as conventional exposive weapons.
Demonstrably false. Landmines are an evil curse that renders land dangerous, long after conflicts are forgotten. Radiation can be even worse; it is not tied to geographic space. Fallout can and would kill your allies next door, to say nothing of innocents nearby.
It WOULD be appropriate and utterly defensible to use nukes against a country that hit us with chemical or biologicals. Any such country foreits it right to exist.
My interpreation: Civilians who live in countries whose governments attack the US (or its allies - I assume that means "current" allies) deserve to die.
In every recent conflict the US has been involved in, civilian casualties are apparent in excess of US military casualties. Nuclear attack can only increase this ratio. There is no getting around this. A country is a number of people who inhabit a geographical space. People who confuse countries with governments may be understood as racists. Think about it.
don't allow an enemy to get away with something simply because you think there should be some mystical, unpassable wall barring the use of a nuke.
My interpretation: Nuclear warfare is unjustifiably treated as something apart from other forms of warfare.
During the Cold War, the "mystical, unpassable wall" was the fact that it simply wouldn't do you any good to use them, you'd get melted anyway. The question is not whether they are afforded "mystical" status - the question is, are they likely to achieve the result you want? Perhaps they are, if your goal is to assert yourself as the alpha male of the pack, subduing all challengers. A pattern is certainly emerging in US foreign policy that is not lost on anybody - allies or not.
There is no logic nor rationality to your knee-jerk response.
Logic and rationality are exactly what is needed - not the sort of simplification you espouse, where Americans are people and non-Americans are countries, where the "whole" of nuclear weapons is no greater than the sum of the "conventional" parts, where the disempowered world who have no legal or economic power to challenge their exploitation by US interests are crushed like ants because half a dozen polititians/warlords/whatever living near them decide they will sacrifice their armies to make a point (which America entirely misses anyway)?
You sir/madam, are a psychological product of your military. You would not have been allowed anywhere near nuclear arms if you weren't. I don't judge you for that, your thinking has its own internal logic, as does my own. Please understand, however, that people can be convinced of all sorts of things, but convincing someone that another human being's life, present or future, is worth less than an American's, is a specific requirement of people who must perform duties unthinkable to most of the rest of us. Good can come of war. Your job was (is?) to do what you are told. Everyone else's job is to ensure that what you are told to do, is the right thing. Everyone else, therefore, needs to think for themselves.
Is there any hope? I'd like to think so, but only if it becomes the default in hotmail and MS Outlook will it become widespread, and what are the odds of that?
That's the trouble with encryption, and security in general. It takes effort to be secure. You can trust an algorithm with your life, but do you trust the piece of software you installed on the computer you assembled out of parts you bought off the shelf? Sadly, strong encryption built as a default into something like Outlook might cause more trouble than its worth, in misplaced trust.
Most Outlook users wouldn't know how to tell if their private key had been compromised by some email malware. If they're using email for tasks that SHOULD be kept private because they trust that Outlook will make it safe, then where will we be?
1)suscribers get access to a mirror of the links in the story.
I love the idea, but a little thing called copyright makes it dangerous. Pity.
People don't seem to realise that the subscription thing is not an issue at all - it's the fact that ads are increasing. Slashdot need more money - they can get it either through increased ad revenue or increased subscription revenue. If you don't subscribe, they'll still make money from your page impressions.One way or another, you're paying. That's how the real world works.
With all this discussion about carrots for subscribers, why don't people seem to want to suggest improvements that benefit ALL users and lift the standard of the entire site? Given that the subscription thing is essentially a tip jar (because those that want to block ads already can), why not make the site even more worth tipping?
The same research that is shrinking cell phones has a higher purpose: an exhaust-free electric car.
Would somebody please stick a note to that author's forehead - you recharge your exhaust-free car by plugging it into a radioactive and/or hot'n'smoky power station...
The use of this camera technology for video composition is great, but if you bundle a panoramic (360 degree) camera with it, you solve the reason that accurate 3D visual reconstructions are expensive. I'm thinking: export a 3D map of every object in range, then feed that into CAD.
Now take your CAD file, recompile and render with a Quake3 engine, apply sampled textures, and you've got a very cheap, fast, good 3D walkthrough - architects will enjoy this too, as will tourism sites.
It's also going to mean some great first-person-shooter maps:P
Exactly - it's important not to confuse government policy (currently stupid and restrictive) with the ACCC - a government-funded but independent body that never gets listened to, except by the media.
disclaimer: I haven't thought this through at all - it's off-the-top-of-my-head stuff. It might be really evil. It might be insecure. It isn't, however, offtopic, IMHO.
I return approximately 25% of my video store rentals on time. Despite being exactly their target demographic, I don't want to buy more plastic crap to throw away.
Why not work towards using DVDRW in stores? I haven't heard of DVDRW existing yet (maybe it does, I don't follow the news) but bear with me.
Use Case
1. Customer steps into store, picks "The Matrix" off the shelf.
2. Customer walks to counter. Pays money. Hands over the disc they rented last time (maybe yesterday, maybe six months ago)
3. Shop gives customer another DVDRW pre-loaded with "The Matrix", which they burnt a few days before when their cache was low. If customer had picked something obscure, they might need to wait a few minutes for a copy to be made up on the spot from a store master - ordering ahead will avoid this.
4. Customer leaves, views movie, returns disc to store when they want either another rental, or the deposit they paid for the disc back.
Piracy concerns
Sure, it means potentially lots of copies of media floating about, but that's what we have now with video libraries - except the video store pays up front for it. People can still duplicate VHS tapes at home etc. so there's no new piracy introduced.
People still need to bring their "DVD Rental Barn" disc back to rent another movie - or they pay extra deposit on a new disc - ie. not economical if deposit > price of a blank.
Security
Movie distibutors issue special "one rental shop only" master copies of their DVD movies, in some encrypted format. These master copies can be decrypted and duplicated by software that uses a CD Key (Half-Life, Quake3 etc) type of system to identify the video store. The CD-Key is linked server-side with the unique "one rental shop only" algorithm/seed issued to the rental store.
If EITHER the shop's master copies get ripped off physically or duplicated electronically, or if the software/CD-Key is duplicated, then decryption/duplication won't happen because the server-side check will fail.
If the "store master copy" encryption is cracked, then the store's library becomes pirateable. See reason why this doesn't matter above.
If both the "store master copy" entire library AND the CD-Key/software are stolen, the store claims on their insurance policy, then gets a re-issue of its entire catalogue. It is in the interests of a video store not to give media away - and video store employees to keep their jobs.
Privacy concerns
Customer data is not included in the information sent to the authentication server - it sits outside the duplication box altogether, preferably - and stays in the store. Of course, places like Blockbuster might want to offer discounts (laugh!) for opt-in profile tracking, etc. Wary consumers can cash in their old disc for a refunded deposit and sign up for a new one every time, if they're that way inclined, but I don't know anyone who does this with rental libraries now... perhaps priests who rent a bit of pr0n? but I digress.
What's in it for the Movie Industry
Perfect market statistics through the server-client authentication mechanism.
Lower overheads for disc manufacture.
Mega bucks because they can indirectly charge consumers, through billing rental stores based on volume per DVD - right now, they get nothing when you rent "Life of Brian" because the copy was paid for a decade ago by the video store.
How could it happen?
Once the technology is available to make DVDRW cost-effective, it could be piloted in existing stores. If it seems to work, it could expand from there, with perhaps a gradual (five year) shift to the new model, at a pace consumers drive themselves.
It doesn't even require commitment from all the major corporations at once - only for one to trial it, then another, and another, until they all get the idea.
Remember - I'm not trying to fix piracy, only late video rental return fines. This idea is licenced under the "take it, change it, do what you want and become a billionaire" boiling_point_ public licence.
I understand what you're saying (so do the people that have modded you to four already), but I think you might be colouring the text yourself by pitching it as "creationist-bashing". I don't see anything in your two quotes that couldn't be read as rational rhetoric.
If you don't believe me, try replacing evolution/creation with something like, say, Big Bang/Steady State cosmology.
The achievement is a landmark in [Big Bang cosmology], not only because it shows [the theory supports empirical evidence], but because it effectively answers a major criticism [steady state theorists] had long leveled against [the Big Bang]--the absence of [an explanation for something very unusual].
Remember that the first (perhaps only) rule of science is to keep an open mind to all possibilities. Disclaimer: IANAC (creationist!)
yeah dude, you got robbed. I love the idea of making it to a geosynchronous platform, then loading your maglev podule onto the track on the other side, pressing "GO!" and flinging yourself at Mars! That would ROCK!
Cable modems are already capped at a fraction of their potential because of insufficient capacity at the ISP side.
Easy! We just sell 'em about a dozen of these new Rainmaker chip thingies, and then they can install them in series on their phat pipe! Man that would rock!!
Self-destruct mechanisms as a design feature for all sattelites...
Could you design a sattelite in such a way that it could be destroyed remotely, ie. blown into small chunks that pose no danger to other spacecraft (are "blasted" towards Earth and therefore certain disintegration), while maintaining stability during launch/operation and not adding too much to the total weight?
Devil's advocate:
Who'd enforce it? Corporations won't pay extra for a very unlikely liability problem (until such a time that we're lobbing dozens of big things into space daily)
What circumstances (other than system failure) would cause you to push the button - and if it had failed, who's to say it's pointed the right way and you won't shoot your comsat into the ISS? Sorry - just thinking out loud...IANARS
Slashdot Mirror
Damn straight. When did it become a company's right to place an arbitrary expiry date on something they sell? Can you point me at the sticker on the box of any Atari 2600 cartridge that says "This game must not be played after April 1, 1990." I know why they don't want you emulating games - because all the games you're still playing from 1982 leave you less time to play new games you'd have to buy today.
But that's not a moral position - it's a freaking business model.
In case you've been asleep for the past fifty years, business models have changed - EVERYWHERE. Car manufacturers don't make cars they know will last >10 years, because they can sell replacement, proprietary parts at a great profit. Ever tried to cost building a car from scratch, based on the price of all the replacement parts?
It never used to be that way. Things were built to last, because consumers, righty or wrongly, valued durability. We rich people in the Western Hemisphere have more disposable income than we did a century ago. We consider anyone who doesn't have access to a clothes washing machine to be very poor. We've got gobs of cash, achieved through massive increases in technological efficiency, and manufacturers have adapted to make sure they capture at least as much of it as they used to - lest we spend it on things like, say "education", or "research" or "leisure" or "the public good".
I drive a 1963 Ford Anglia 105e. I know it burns more fuel than new cars, but how much energy would have been wasted, if I insist on a new car every couple of years? Consumption is a choice - not an obligation.
This isn't off-topic, although it might sound that way to begin with.
Lots of posters have waved their arms about with "it's my hardware, I can modify it however I please" - besides being completely beside the point of the article, is plain simplistic.
In most parts of the world, I can't re-arrange petrol (sorry, "gas"), glass bottles, torn rags and a box of matches into makeshift grenades and stack them in my garage, because posession of such weapons is illegal.
I can't even let junk pile up in my garden in case rats infest my place, and threaten my neighbours' comfortable enjoyment of their own property.
If you follow that through, it's easier to explain how I can't alter a Playstation in order to allow me to deprive Sony of money, if that's what I end up doing with it.
It's all about balancing the rights of others with selfish acts (I use the word non-perjoratively). That's why we have laws in the first place!!
disclaimer: Down with Sony, anyway, I say.
Hell, I don't even mind record executives exploiting a market that's skewed by an obscure, ~50 year gap where society's level of technology adoption happens to suit them, as long as they recognise when the party is over, as it clearly is.
I think it's fair to paraphrase your point as "The BSA et al have their hearts in the right place".
Their operational practices don't support your assertion. The BSA operates within the US (and other) legal system(s) which allow for various dirty tricks, essentially boiling down to "it will cost you more to fight us, even if you're right, than it will to pay what we tell you to pay". This is nothing new, or specific to software, but that doesn't make it morally acceptable.
The point of the article, which you seem happy not to have read or understood - is that the BSA promotes statistics about piracy in ignorance of the truth, in order to further their agenda of legislative reform.
I'd probably agree with you. But it isn't going to happen because two conditions exist: 1) piracy is possible, and 2) commercial software exists. Meanwhile, the BSA is hurting people, in much greater measures than some people with 98/103 required licences are hurting software company people. Which can be more readily stopped - the BSA bullying me, or commerical software ceasing to exist and piracy being eradicated?
An awful lot of useful data is gained by remote sensing Mars - just like on Earth. You don't have to touch down in order to learn.
Different forms of matter have things called spectal signatures - the particular pattern of all the different wavelengths emitted/reflected. You can use these signatures to work out what sort of stuff rocks are made of, how old they are, what concentrations they're in and in what patterns they lie.
On Earth it's arguably more interesting, since you can tell different types of vegetation and settlement patterns just by measuring, say, the infra-red or ultraviolet you can see.
Research on Mars isn't about Martian life, all of the time. It's not even about terraforming and possible future human settlement - it's about taking science developed and theorised on Earth and applying it in new and challenging locations. By finding evidence of a huge body of water on Mars, we now know that all the theories of Martian geohistory (is that a word?) that rely on a small volume of past surface water are less likely to be true. This sort of stuff might be important in ways we don't know yet.
Sure, plenty of people like to think of the possibilities and implications of teeny lifeforms sprouting up on a nearby planet. Fewer people, but they are out there, are just as fascinated by the basic interactions of huge universal systems and forces - of things on a scale millions of orders of magnitude bigger. Sometimes the news doesn't need to be dramatic, if you've got your eye on a bigger picture anyway :)
Sounds similar to something I dreamt up a while back - linked here. Why do us slashdotters continually do all the business modelling for these companies for free? Arghgh!!!!
Maybe because that employee him/herself didn't create and distribute the gazillion copies needed to justify Eminem hitting the top of Gracenote??
As a result of the leak, the album will now be released on Monday (May 27).
If the problem is defined as "pre-release cheap copies will stop people buying later, full price copies", haven't the advocates for change won a battle here?
I mean, hasn't the record company just realised that artificial marketing delays inherent in the offline distribution process are likely to hurt their sales?
By releasing the album electronically with (1) fast servers, (2) lossless compression and (3) a reasonable price, and simultaneously sending "gimme airplay!" copies to radio stations (etc.) as is done now, they could cut this sort of "I don't want to wait" piracy down. Sure people will still re-rip the album at 128KB/s and make it available through P2P, but they were going to do that anyway. What do the record companies have to lose, by adopting the practice I have described?
Ditto for software. Clearly you're not going to get packaging, cover-art, glossy manuals or whatever, through TCP/IP, but doesn't the prevalence of warez and pirated music blatantly show that a sh1tload of people simply don't care? How hard is it to put a "download PDF manual | snailmail me a hardcopy for $5" option together? Or just make the manuals available in normal bookstores?
The NSA, for example, cannot sit and tinker with windoze's security holes the way they can with OSC (open source code)...
If there really are nasty bugs in Microsoft Code running on millions of US civilian, government and military PCs, what's a quicker way of discovering them than resorting to the courts to open the code?
Hey, I know, employ Howard Scmidt!! I made the point at the time that he's probably in the Whitehouse advising on just this sort of stuff.
I'd guess your government already has a pretty good idea how brittle their national security really is...
It's not prostitution if your karma is 50.
First Hemos posts a story about how optimised JPGs are good for webpages, now a story announcing that OSS is popular and viable. Today's the day I can submit "Microsoft might be an evil monopoly" and I'll finally see my nick on the front page!!! Booyah!
I bet you're the guy with a queue forming behind him at the computer store, arguing the fact that your 17" monitor is only 16" when measured diagonally, too :)
And wait ten seconds for a karma whore to post a link to it?
:)
Hell, I would, if I wasn't at 50
I can't wait to sit on the bus, practicing my circle-strafing with the 2,4,6 and 8 keys! (Or binding my # key to text-message "i OwN j0o!!" to my whole addressbook)
I live in an allied country of the US, and frankly, praedor's monologue chills me. If I may summarise the key points raised:
My interpretation: Nuclear weapons have the same consequences as conventional exposive weapons.
Demonstrably false. Landmines are an evil curse that renders land dangerous, long after conflicts are forgotten. Radiation can be even worse; it is not tied to geographic space. Fallout can and would kill your allies next door, to say nothing of innocents nearby.
My interpreation: Civilians who live in countries whose governments attack the US (or its allies - I assume that means "current" allies) deserve to die.
In every recent conflict the US has been involved in, civilian casualties are apparent in excess of US military casualties. Nuclear attack can only increase this ratio. There is no getting around this. A country is a number of people who inhabit a geographical space. People who confuse countries with governments may be understood as racists. Think about it.
My interpretation: Nuclear warfare is unjustifiably treated as something apart from other forms of warfare.
During the Cold War, the "mystical, unpassable wall" was the fact that it simply wouldn't do you any good to use them, you'd get melted anyway. The question is not whether they are afforded "mystical" status - the question is, are they likely to achieve the result you want? Perhaps they are, if your goal is to assert yourself as the alpha male of the pack, subduing all challengers. A pattern is certainly emerging in US foreign policy that is not lost on anybody - allies or not.
Logic and rationality are exactly what is needed - not the sort of simplification you espouse, where Americans are people and non-Americans are countries, where the "whole" of nuclear weapons is no greater than the sum of the "conventional" parts, where the disempowered world who have no legal or economic power to challenge their exploitation by US interests are crushed like ants because half a dozen polititians/warlords/whatever living near them decide they will sacrifice their armies to make a point (which America entirely misses anyway)?
You sir/madam, are a psychological product of your military. You would not have been allowed anywhere near nuclear arms if you weren't. I don't judge you for that, your thinking has its own internal logic, as does my own. Please understand, however, that people can be convinced of all sorts of things, but convincing someone that another human being's life, present or future, is worth less than an American's, is a specific requirement of people who must perform duties unthinkable to most of the rest of us. Good can come of war. Your job was (is?) to do what you are told. Everyone else's job is to ensure that what you are told to do, is the right thing. Everyone else, therefore, needs to think for themselves.
That's the trouble with encryption, and security in general. It takes effort to be secure. You can trust an algorithm with your life, but do you trust the piece of software you installed on the computer you assembled out of parts you bought off the shelf? Sadly, strong encryption built as a default into something like Outlook might cause more trouble than its worth, in misplaced trust.
Most Outlook users wouldn't know how to tell if their private key had been compromised by some email malware. If they're using email for tasks that SHOULD be kept private because they trust that Outlook will make it safe, then where will we be?
I love the idea, but a little thing called copyright makes it dangerous. Pity.
People don't seem to realise that the subscription thing is not an issue at all - it's the fact that ads are increasing. Slashdot need more money - they can get it either through increased ad revenue or increased subscription revenue. If you don't subscribe, they'll still make money from your page impressions.One way or another, you're paying. That's how the real world works.
With all this discussion about carrots for subscribers, why don't people seem to want to suggest improvements that benefit ALL users and lift the standard of the entire site? Given that the subscription thing is essentially a tip jar (because those that want to block ads already can), why not make the site even more worth tipping?
The same research that is shrinking cell phones has a higher purpose: an exhaust-free electric car.
Would somebody please stick a note to that author's forehead - you recharge your exhaust-free car by plugging it into a radioactive and/or hot'n'smoky power station...
I'm still hanging out for that orbiting solar collector/microwave beam thingie!!
The use of this camera technology for video composition is great, but if you bundle a panoramic (360 degree) camera with it, you solve the reason that accurate 3D visual reconstructions are expensive. I'm thinking: export a 3D map of every object in range, then feed that into CAD.
:P
Now take your CAD file, recompile and render with a Quake3 engine, apply sampled textures, and you've got a very cheap, fast, good 3D walkthrough - architects will enjoy this too, as will tourism sites.
It's also going to mean some great first-person-shooter maps
Exactly - it's important not to confuse government policy (currently stupid and restrictive) with the ACCC - a government-funded but independent body that never gets listened to, except by the media.
I return approximately 25% of my video store rentals on time. Despite being exactly their target demographic, I don't want to buy more plastic crap to throw away.
Why not work towards using DVDRW in stores? I haven't heard of DVDRW existing yet (maybe it does, I don't follow the news) but bear with me.
Use Case
1. Customer steps into store, picks "The Matrix" off the shelf.
2. Customer walks to counter. Pays money. Hands over the disc they rented last time (maybe yesterday, maybe six months ago)
3. Shop gives customer another DVDRW pre-loaded with "The Matrix", which they burnt a few days before when their cache was low. If customer had picked something obscure, they might need to wait a few minutes for a copy to be made up on the spot from a store master - ordering ahead will avoid this.
4. Customer leaves, views movie, returns disc to store when they want either another rental, or the deposit they paid for the disc back.
Piracy concerns
Sure, it means potentially lots of copies of media floating about, but that's what we have now with video libraries - except the video store pays up front for it. People can still duplicate VHS tapes at home etc. so there's no new piracy introduced.
People still need to bring their "DVD Rental Barn" disc back to rent another movie - or they pay extra deposit on a new disc - ie. not economical if deposit > price of a blank.
Security
Movie distibutors issue special "one rental shop only" master copies of their DVD movies, in some encrypted format. These master copies can be decrypted and duplicated by software that uses a CD Key (Half-Life, Quake3 etc) type of system to identify the video store. The CD-Key is linked server-side with the unique "one rental shop only" algorithm/seed issued to the rental store.
If EITHER the shop's master copies get ripped off physically or duplicated electronically, or if the software/CD-Key is duplicated, then decryption/duplication won't happen because the server-side check will fail.
If the "store master copy" encryption is cracked, then the store's library becomes pirateable. See reason why this doesn't matter above.
If both the "store master copy" entire library AND the CD-Key/software are stolen, the store claims on their insurance policy, then gets a re-issue of its entire catalogue. It is in the interests of a video store not to give media away - and video store employees to keep their jobs.
Privacy concerns
Customer data is not included in the information sent to the authentication server - it sits outside the duplication box altogether, preferably - and stays in the store. Of course, places like Blockbuster might want to offer discounts (laugh!) for opt-in profile tracking, etc. Wary consumers can cash in their old disc for a refunded deposit and sign up for a new one every time, if they're that way inclined, but I don't know anyone who does this with rental libraries now... perhaps priests who rent a bit of pr0n? but I digress.
What's in it for the Movie Industry
Perfect market statistics through the server-client authentication mechanism.
Lower overheads for disc manufacture.
Mega bucks because they can indirectly charge consumers, through billing rental stores based on volume per DVD - right now, they get nothing when you rent "Life of Brian" because the copy was paid for a decade ago by the video store.
How could it happen?
Once the technology is available to make DVDRW cost-effective, it could be piloted in existing stores. If it seems to work, it could expand from there, with perhaps a gradual (five year) shift to the new model, at a pace consumers drive themselves.
It doesn't even require commitment from all the major corporations at once - only for one to trial it, then another, and another, until they all get the idea.
Remember - I'm not trying to fix piracy, only late video rental return fines. This idea is licenced under the "take it, change it, do what you want and become a billionaire" boiling_point_ public licence.
If you don't believe me, try replacing evolution/creation with something like, say, Big Bang/Steady State cosmology.
The achievement is a landmark in [Big Bang cosmology], not only because it shows [the theory supports empirical evidence], but because it effectively answers a major criticism [steady state theorists] had long leveled against [the Big Bang]--the absence of [an explanation for something very unusual].
Remember that the first (perhaps only) rule of science is to keep an open mind to all possibilities. Disclaimer: IANAC (creationist!)
yeah dude, you got robbed. I love the idea of making it to a geosynchronous platform, then loading your maglev podule onto the track on the other side, pressing "GO!" and flinging yourself at Mars! That would ROCK!
Easy! We just sell 'em about a dozen of these new Rainmaker chip thingies, and then they can install them in series on their phat pipe! Man that would rock!!
Could you design a sattelite in such a way that it could be destroyed remotely, ie. blown into small chunks that pose no danger to other spacecraft (are "blasted" towards Earth and therefore certain disintegration), while maintaining stability during launch/operation and not adding too much to the total weight?
Devil's advocate:
Who'd enforce it? Corporations won't pay extra for a very unlikely liability problem (until such a time that we're lobbing dozens of big things into space daily)
What circumstances (other than system failure) would cause you to push the button - and if it had failed, who's to say it's pointed the right way and you won't shoot your comsat into the ISS?
Sorry - just thinking out loud...IANARS