Yesterday, here in Malaysia a pirated VCD seller was shot in the chest with an automatic handgun by enforcement officers. Not only that, this took place in front of an coffeeshop and the slug that exited the VCD seller hit a guy having a meal.
...could do it with a Sidekick, but damn, not with a regular cell phone.
Exactly! So the solution to this is to make sure kids get the most God aweful phone.
For instance, when I had a Nokia, the SMS input was fantastic and so many ringtones and other funstuff to choose from, as post tones and logos are made for Nokia phones.
Then my phone broke and so happends I got this free BenQ phone from work. (Yes, the makers of cut rate, failure prone PC hardware also makes cellphones.)
The keys were hard and a bitch to press, it had the worlds dumbest SMS input, and nobody in the world makes ringtones and logos for it.
So i found myself not spending a dime on tones and logos, sending maybe 3 SMSs a month and making short phone calls to people instead of SMSing.
I don't know about you Americans but my side of the Pacific, we haven't had LCDs with dead pixels for a while now.
Customers started getting pissed off at dead pixels, and when buying an LCD monitor, they would demand that they be shown the monitor plugged in before they pay for it.
As a result, stores here will have their staff open each box before delivery and test, and reject monitors that come with dead pixels.
So it's been years since i've seen a monitor with a dead pixel in a store for sale.
Heck, you need specially coated discs. A surefire way to clamp down on piracy is to simply give away the software (heck it might even be beneficial to GPL it) and sell the discs.
These 2 burglars planed on robbing the home of a lawyer while he was out, as they had staked out the place and figured that his wife would be home alone during the day time.
So one afternoon, after making sure the lawyer had left, they put their plan into action. Unbeknown to them, the lawyer's son and his buddies from his hockey team were in, fresh from a game.
So these 2 guys walked in with a knife each, to find 6 fuming mad built up guys with hockey sticks + 1 old lady.
One got away, one was handed over to to the cops after being beaten to a pulp while being "aprehended".
Countries should not be making political mountains out of real life ant hills. This is football. You don't see the Queen of England making noise when England, Scotland and Irland are listed as seperate nations.
The diffrence between Iraq and China is that in Iraq, this change in culture is being forced down by the sheer might of the US army in a relatively short time.
In China, things are going slowly and progressively.
The way to fight the radicals in ideology (be it political, religious etc) is not to forcefully replace those in charge, but to slowly influence away their followers.
There is an inertia that needs to be counteracted when changing cultures, and just like physical objects, rapidly counteracting inertia tends to have explosive outcomes.
For example, if tomorrow the US constitution was suddenly amended to explicitly legalise gay marriage and abortion, you can be sure there will be civil unrest.
Just a thought. Google is good at bringing order to vast amount of web data, these comprise not only text, but also images and non web formats like pdf and.doc etc.
SO what if they built a system where a all you need to do is insert tapes and it would rip the video and sound on the tape, run somesort of OCR and speech recognition on it then discard (or encode and save in a low quality preview) the ripped video data but retained the results of the OCR and sound recognition.
The later processing of that 'reverse blueprint' of a tape if you will, could be very useful for search purposes. Not only can you key word search the dialogue, like if rememeber a line and want to know where it came from, but also it could make some intelligent guesses as to what the dialogue and the subject is about.
Google recently released the top 10 most searched terms for its new Digital Video search service. However, this list cannot be printed here as all terms on the list are inappropriate for this family oriented news service...
But how many people here looked at the title and summery went over to NYT, went to the trouble of BugMeNotting the registration, expecting a cool story about the neat things Intel engineers do with leftover parts?
The article doesn't state why it has to be a nuke reactor, only that the thing requires 300 megawatts to produce 2.5KGs of Hydrogen. What if it were 300mW from a hydro dam or some other source, would that work?
Or is it somemehow tied into the hot water system of a nuke powered steam turbine?
You know what would be a fantastic gadget to have? A device that you could connect between a landline wall socket and the phone and you have a nice big button on the device.
When you push that button, it would cut you off until you let go and emit a nice clean ear piercing 20Khz tone as powerfully as possible down the line.
That way when a telemarketer calls, speak softly so they listen up then press.
Slashdot Mirror
Arrested? Thats nothing.
Yesterday, here in Malaysia a pirated VCD seller was shot in the chest with an automatic handgun by enforcement officers. Not only that, this took place in front of an coffeeshop and the slug that exited the VCD seller hit a guy having a meal.
The VCD seller was unarmed.
The MPAA ought to be proud of us.
I'm not trying to troll or anything, but slashdot seriously needs to look into some serious editorial changes.
Maybe theres a night school course the editors can take that will teach them how to run a paper and they can apply it here...
I agree with you on the taking advantage part, but they arn't exactly a monopoly. Telecom NZ operates a mobile network too.
But their pricing structure is almost teh same, so i would think they are in cahoots and it's a oglipoly.
...could do it with a Sidekick, but damn, not with a regular cell phone.
Exactly! So the solution to this is to make sure kids get the most God aweful phone.
For instance, when I had a Nokia, the SMS input was fantastic and so many ringtones and other funstuff to choose from, as post tones and logos are made for Nokia phones.
Then my phone broke and so happends I got this free BenQ phone from work. (Yes, the makers of cut rate, failure prone PC hardware also makes cellphones.)
The keys were hard and a bitch to press, it had the worlds dumbest SMS input, and nobody in the world makes ringtones and logos for it.
So i found myself not spending a dime on tones and logos, sending maybe 3 SMSs a month and making short phone calls to people instead of SMSing.
Yea but last time i was in Auckland, prepaid calls cost NZ$1.49 a minute.
Thats grossly overpriced by any measure.
Judging by the news on it, shouldn't Tivo be in the loosers and not winners list?
Don't worry. We here in the rest of the world (i.e non USA)will keep making DVDs that will play in your old player for years to come.
You are there to get a nice fast German car/ Bike and go nuts around the Nurburgring.
this must be the first time i've seen the phrase "my husband" used on slashdot.. ever....
I don't know about you Americans but my side of the Pacific, we haven't had LCDs with dead pixels for a while now.
Customers started getting pissed off at dead pixels, and when buying an LCD monitor, they would demand that they be shown the monitor plugged in before they pay for it.
As a result, stores here will have their staff open each box before delivery and test, and reject monitors that come with dead pixels.
So it's been years since i've seen a monitor with a dead pixel in a store for sale.
No YOU miss the point. RDIF tags are easy to destroy. All you need is a not very powerful RF transmitter or magnetic field.
I'll bet that the day RDIF becomes widespread, there will be little keychain 'RDIF Destroyers' and related products.
Heck, i'm pretty sure already avalable degaussing wands will do the job nicely.
Heck, you need specially coated discs. A surefire way to clamp down on piracy is to simply give away the software (heck it might even be beneficial to GPL it) and sell the discs.
reminds me of a story i read in the local paper.
These 2 burglars planed on robbing the home of a lawyer while he was out, as they had staked out the place and figured that his wife would be home alone during the day time.
So one afternoon, after making sure the lawyer had left, they put their plan into action. Unbeknown to them, the lawyer's son and his buddies from his hockey team were in, fresh from a game.
So these 2 guys walked in with a knife each, to find 6 fuming mad built up guys with hockey sticks + 1 old lady.
One got away, one was handed over to to the cops after being beaten to a pulp while being "aprehended".
ok... what am i missing?
Countries should not be making political mountains out of real life ant hills. This is football. You don't see the Queen of England making noise when England, Scotland and Irland are listed as seperate nations.
As Shakespeare would say:
"A crappy PC maker by any other name is still as crappy"
I would think that IBM would only sell it's PC business assets but not it's name.
So LEgand gets a few factories, supply lines, existing customers and thats it.
I'd rather think of it as controlled burning of deadwood to stop a forest fire.
The diffrence between Iraq and China is that in Iraq, this change in culture is being forced down by the sheer might of the US army in a relatively short time.
In China, things are going slowly and progressively.
The way to fight the radicals in ideology (be it political, religious etc) is not to forcefully replace those in charge, but to slowly influence away their followers.
There is an inertia that needs to be counteracted when changing cultures, and just like physical objects, rapidly counteracting inertia tends to have explosive outcomes.
For example, if tomorrow the US constitution was suddenly amended to explicitly legalise gay marriage and abortion, you can be sure there will be civil unrest.
Just a thought. Google is good at bringing order to vast amount of web data, these comprise not only text, but also images and non web formats like pdf and .doc etc.
SO what if they built a system where a all you need to do is insert tapes and it would rip the video and sound on the tape, run somesort of OCR and speech recognition on it then discard (or encode and save in a low quality preview) the ripped video data but retained the results of the OCR and sound recognition.
The later processing of that 'reverse blueprint' of a tape if you will, could be very useful for search purposes. Not only can you key word search the dialogue, like if rememeber a line and want to know where it came from, but also it could make some intelligent guesses as to what the dialogue and the subject is about.
Google recently released the top 10 most searched terms for its new Digital Video search service. However, this list cannot be printed here as all terms on the list are inappropriate for this family oriented news service...
... and then, the battery died.
But how many people here looked at the title and summery went over to NYT, went to the trouble of BugMeNotting the registration, expecting a cool story about the neat things Intel engineers do with leftover parts?
That was disappointing.
The article doesn't state why it has to be a nuke reactor, only that the thing requires 300 megawatts to produce 2.5KGs of Hydrogen. What if it were 300mW from a hydro dam or some other source, would that work?
Or is it somemehow tied into the hot water system of a nuke powered steam turbine?
You know what would be a fantastic gadget to have? A device that you could connect between a landline wall socket and the phone and you have a nice big button on the device.
When you push that button, it would cut you off until you let go and emit a nice clean ear piercing 20Khz tone as powerfully as possible down the line.
That way when a telemarketer calls, speak softly so they listen up then press.