It's not BitTorrent, but it's similar in terms of providing a distributed download / swarm advantage through the use of unused upstream bandwidth. It's real claim to fame is how easy it is to implement on the server side: just add 'http://dijjer.org/get/' in front of the normal link. There's more on their site, but it's fairly intriguing.
Unfortunately it requires a client download, so unless someone puts some really good content up using it, there's sort of a chicken-and-egg adoption problem.
Check the box of the movie you bought. If it says "Rated R" and really is missing scenes that were in the original release (which was rated R), then you might have a case. But I have a feeling that it probably says "Rated PG" or "PG-13" because it's the broadcast-edited version. In which case you got was exactly what was advertised...you just didn't read the fine print well enough.
It's not hard to check stuff like this. If the rating seems unusually low, then it's probably an edited version. You can easily find the original rating by searching IMDB...which won't help you if you're impulse-purchasing from the bargain bin, but then again if that's what you're doing I have very little sympathy for you. (Alternately you could just check them when you get home before you take the shrink-wrap off, and they're still returnable.)
Usually the 'unrated' or director's cut versions of movies are clearly marked as such, as selling points. You'd have to be fairly unobservant to rent the Director's Cut and not notice it, and then go back and buy the theatrical release.
Neither WalMart nor any other retailer has a responsibility to return a product just because the buyer was dumb and/or unobservant. Check the back of the box if you're not sure -- if you're buying something for the hardcore sex scenes or gratuitous nudity and the box says it's rated R, then you might not be buying what you think you're buying.
I'm not a big fan of WalMart, but what I like even less is the continual trend to push more and more consumer responsibility off onto the retailer, as if shoppers are so stupid, they have to be protected from every bad decision they might possibly make. An honest retailer doesn't have to let you return anything, the fact that they do is a service, not a right. Don't buy something unless you know what you're getting--if you're not sure, wait and do some research.
Uh...slow down there. I don't think anyone actually said that WalMart edits their DVDs, they were just asking whether they do.
Furthermore, the controversy is over censorship in the *selection*, i.e. they don't sell porno movies, not in the content of the films they do sell.
I think it's very unlikely that you'd buy a movie at WalMart and find that it was any different from the exact same movie if you'd rented it at Blockbuster. The only exception might be where two different versions of a DVD were released (Eurotrip or American Pie, for instance, had R-rated theatrical versions and Unrated director's cuts...there I suspect that WalMart probably sells the R-rated version, although maybe not), and even then, you'd be able to tell by looking at the MPAA rating on the back.
I suggested this recently in another forum, because I think the lack of BT support in mainline browsers is what's stopping it from being more widely adopted.
If even one major browser were to build-in BT support, or if someone were to make a plugin for it, then I think you'd see the amount of legitimate content on the web literally explode. As it is now, BT seems mostly dedicated to Linux ISOs, pirated software, movies, television, and porn. (Okay, so I know that reads like Heaven's own file server to some people...but it doesn't help BT's public image much.)
I'd like to see BT gain ground as a legitimate file transferring protocol...right now it's blocked on many academic and corporate LANs/gateways because it's thought of as 'just another file sharing protocol.'
Honestly. Do you really think the people who are working on BitTorrent are doing it at the expense of working on Habitat for Humanity or saving the whales? No.
There are a lot of people--I can't say whether this is true of the BT developers or not, as I don't know them--who are interested and drawn to projects that have a hint of subversion as well as technical challenge to them. Given the popularity and rate of development of such projects, this seems rather obvious.
In a big prison population, I'm not sure that a 1:1 ratio is going to keep people from trying to escape. Maybe 1:5, or 1:1, but only within your cell or something.
Preserving prisoner's rights because they either might not be guilty, or are guilty only in the minds of a limited number of jurors, is a distraction from the real problem: why the system imprisoned them in the first place.
If I was imprisoned as an innocent man, I'd be pretty pissed off regardless of whether they had me wearing a locating transponder or not. In fact, I can't imagine I'd care one whit.
Actually, as a basically non-aggressive person, I'd probably SUPPORT everyone wearing those, on the thought that it might keep Bubba the Butt-Buddy from ass-raping me in the showers.
They're a pretty big deal. With your name and SSN someone can start up bank accounts in your name, and worse yet possibly pose as you and get into bank accounts you already own.
This is because most banks use a combination of your name, birthdate, and SSN as recovery questions if you want to get into an account. I know that when I call mine up on the telephone, those are the first three things they ask me. (Actually they also ask a number of other things also, some of which are less easily discovered, which is why I still do business with them.) Then you can proceed to do things with your account(s).
But anyway, I'm glad you don't have anything like SSNs where you are. Pray it stays that way. But the way it is here, they're sort of the big key someone needs to 'steal' your identity.
Wrong. Where to start: tritium-dioxide 'radioactive water' isn't as dangerous as you're implying. While I certainly wouldn't want to chug it for any significant period of time, it's not going to melt your guts out. The worst thing that might happen would be an increased chance of cancer, or maybe reproductive harm, but for that you'd have to ingest large quantities, for a while.
Tritium isn't particularly radioactive to start off with. As other people have mentioned, the particles it radiates are extremely low-energy. Also the half life isn't particularly long, so even if a battery was buried in a landfill, by the time the water had a chance to percolate down to the aquifer and then get pumped back up, there's a good chance most of the tritium would have decayed anyway.
Your WMD argument is bogus. Tritium is relatively easy to get -- it's used in gunsights, keychains, watch faces, all sorts of stuff. Sure you'd have to go to a lot of work to get enough to make the core for a thermonuclear weapon, but I think anyone who has the resources to build one in the first place is almost certainly able to process it out of glow paint.
Furthermore, you're talking about banning it because it might be used to make an atomic bomb bigger -- which presupposes that terrorists have the fission bomb to start off with. Shouldn't that be the concern in the scenario? I have doubts that many terrorists or rogue states that are willing to use a bomb would want to go to the work and expense of boosting it.
No, I understood this. I can't be sure, but I think he was using the 555 as a part of a timer to count the duration before which the 'rebooter' needs to receive a pulse on the parallel port, or else it cuts power and forces a system restart.
You generally do this by having a 555 or monostable create a clock pulse, which you then feed into a series of counters to divide the frequency. (The slowest you could get on a 555 without using counters is around 10Hz or so, and I don't think you'd want to be pulsing the parallel port that often. I suppose you could though.) My suggestion was merely to replace the 555 with a square wave triggered by the power line, then divide this signal and use it to drive the counter that tells the 'rebooter' to kill power if it hasn't been overridden by a parallel port pulse. It was a reasonably trivial suggestion and does not change the overall working of the circuit that much.
I think the most often you'd want this to happen is every 5-6 seconds, maybe longer. You'd have to test how long it takes the parallel port to come back online after a reboot, and that would be the shortest time you could set the timer to. Obviously you don't want the device forcing a reboot, and then doing it again while the machine's halfway through the boot process, and getting stuck in a loop.
And you'd need a step-down transformer for any of the logic we're talking about. Last I heard, they don't make anything that will run on straight 120VAC. (Or you could tap into the computer's power supply.)
Or for that matter, pick any videogame that's distributed and stored on read-only media. You can't very well patch any Playstation game. And while I'm sure the day is coming when you'll have to load something onto an embedded hard drive that will allow patches via a network (are we there already?), most console games can't be patched.
At least I don't think so. I'm pretty sure my copy of Duck Hunt here is still the "GM" release.
How about when they do it to establish an overwhelming monopoly in those emerging markets, in order to have a firmer stranglehold and better capitalize on their future success?
Obviously, they did it for the warm, fuzzy feeling in their hearts.
Why bother using the 555 timer -- the device by definition has to be connected to the 60-cycle power line, you might as well use that for timing. Just Use the un-rectified (after voltage stepdown, of course) AC into a comparator (I'm thinking LM311, but that might be the quad version) to produce a clocking pulse. It requires less external components and is probably more accurate than using a 555 and an RC circuit.
Maybe I'm imagining this, but I distinctly remember a Macintosh peripheral that did this, way back in the hoary old System 7 days. I think it was some sort of ADB dongle connected to a power strip. If the system stopped pinging the ADB dongle at regular intervals, it would cause the power strip to hard reboot the system.
They had one of these at a place I worked at the time for a WebStar server, and I thought it was the height of cool.
Huh? Both of them can be made as secure as you want to be, with the right encryption applied. Without that, both are as insecure as sending postcards by carrier pigeon.
Uh, obviously no. But who says he wants the entire CD?
Maybe he's willing to pay $2 to get ONE TRACK from that CD in it's uncompressed form. That's better than paying $12 and getting it, along with a lot of other crap that he might not be interested in.
IMO the most attractive part of iTMS is that it allows you to pick-and-choose, instead of paying for whole albums. I've never bought an entire record from them, it defeats the purpose in my mind. There are only two CDs ever that I can think of where the entire album was worthwhile -- the rest have at least a few waste-of-bits songs on them. If I spend $10 at iTMS, it'll be on ten (or five, if they were full-res) songs that I actually want as individual pieces of music, not one album.
Thanks for the info. I heard that story indirectly a while back... pretty good story, too. I admire his dedication. Favorite line:
At 1:00 a.m., we trekked to an office that had a PowerPC prototype. We looked at each other, took a deep breath, and launched the application. The monitor burst into flames.... The software hadn't caused the fire; the monitor had just chosen that moment to malfunction.
The old original "Graphing Calculator" which started life back in OS9 (or was it 8? I forget) offered multiple-curve graphing as an upgrade to the paid version, as opposed to the freebie that came with the OS which would only do one function at a time.
I went to their website a few months ago and they have a Carbonized version -- looks pretty much the same as it always did. I didn't buy the commercial one, just played around with the free one. But it still exists if you're in the market.
Yes I go to a college with a very similar system, and it seems to work very well. I wouldn't know as I use a Mac and haven't had any personal experience with these 'virus' things...(knocks on wood).
I recently got an email, though, stating that beginning next year they'll be implementing some product by Cisco that includes a small client program that must be downloaded onto the system that wants access, scans it, then reports back to the network that it's clean and can get access. I'd never heard of it before, but if anyone has used it and wants to give us the lowdown, I'd be interested.
That's in all honesty the most interesting thing I've seen out of Microsoft since... since... a very long time ago.
I find their methodology for creating the passwords -- using 10 inkblot images and getting two characters from them a piece for a 20-character password. This might take a lot of getting used to, and be a drag if the passwords needed to be changed often. Although I suppose you could just reorder the graphics and thus change the password, the ideal seems to me to be something with fewer inkblots and more data being derived mentally from each one.
The modifier keys are labeled differently and depending on the keyboard model, placed differently, but I assure you the rest of the keys are all there.
Related: I noticed the last time I went to the bank and was standing in line at the ATM, that you can now have PIN number greater than four digits. I think you'll start to see a lot of people choosing them based on the graphical layout of the standard 10-key number pad, rather than anything to do with the numbers themselves.
I used to have to use a particularly asinine system which forced me to change my password every 90 days also. I thought it was the most insecure policy I've never seen -- users and even some administrators' passwords were written on sticky notes on monitors, and people were constantly forgetting them and having them reset.
Mercifully, although the system did make sure you changed your password at least every 90 days, you were free to do it more often than that, and only the existing password was recorded. People quickly learned the '90 day drill:' change your password to some bogus one and then immediately then back to your regular password, every 90 days. This was about the system's only saving grace. I can't say I was ever so glad to see a feature not implemented properly.
This is actually the concept behind a number of shareware / free "password management" programs that were popular a few years back (and probably still are). Or for that matter, the password-management facilities of Mac OS X, for example, which has an encrypted 'keychain' where you can store other passwords.
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It's not BitTorrent, but it's similar in terms of providing a distributed download / swarm advantage through the use of unused upstream bandwidth. It's real claim to fame is how easy it is to implement on the server side: just add 'http://dijjer.org/get/' in front of the normal link. There's more on their site, but it's fairly intriguing.
Unfortunately it requires a client download, so unless someone puts some really good content up using it, there's sort of a chicken-and-egg adoption problem.
It's not hard to check stuff like this. If the rating seems unusually low, then it's probably an edited version. You can easily find the original rating by searching IMDB...which won't help you if you're impulse-purchasing from the bargain bin, but then again if that's what you're doing I have very little sympathy for you. (Alternately you could just check them when you get home before you take the shrink-wrap off, and they're still returnable.)
Neither WalMart nor any other retailer has a responsibility to return a product just because the buyer was dumb and/or unobservant. Check the back of the box if you're not sure -- if you're buying something for the hardcore sex scenes or gratuitous nudity and the box says it's rated R, then you might not be buying what you think you're buying.
I'm not a big fan of WalMart, but what I like even less is the continual trend to push more and more consumer responsibility off onto the retailer, as if shoppers are so stupid, they have to be protected from every bad decision they might possibly make. An honest retailer doesn't have to let you return anything, the fact that they do is a service, not a right. Don't buy something unless you know what you're getting--if you're not sure, wait and do some research.
Furthermore, the controversy is over censorship in the *selection*, i.e. they don't sell porno movies, not in the content of the films they do sell.
I think it's very unlikely that you'd buy a movie at WalMart and find that it was any different from the exact same movie if you'd rented it at Blockbuster. The only exception might be where two different versions of a DVD were released (Eurotrip or American Pie, for instance, had R-rated theatrical versions and Unrated director's cuts...there I suspect that WalMart probably sells the R-rated version, although maybe not), and even then, you'd be able to tell by looking at the MPAA rating on the back.
If even one major browser were to build-in BT support, or if someone were to make a plugin for it, then I think you'd see the amount of legitimate content on the web literally explode. As it is now, BT seems mostly dedicated to Linux ISOs, pirated software, movies, television, and porn. (Okay, so I know that reads like Heaven's own file server to some people...but it doesn't help BT's public image much.)
I'd like to see BT gain ground as a legitimate file transferring protocol...right now it's blocked on many academic and corporate LANs/gateways because it's thought of as 'just another file sharing protocol.'
There are a lot of people--I can't say whether this is true of the BT developers or not, as I don't know them--who are interested and drawn to projects that have a hint of subversion as well as technical challenge to them. Given the popularity and rate of development of such projects, this seems rather obvious.
In a big prison population, I'm not sure that a 1:1 ratio is going to keep people from trying to escape. Maybe 1:5, or 1:1, but only within your cell or something.
Preserving prisoner's rights because they either might not be guilty, or are guilty only in the minds of a limited number of jurors, is a distraction from the real problem: why the system imprisoned them in the first place.
If I was imprisoned as an innocent man, I'd be pretty pissed off regardless of whether they had me wearing a locating transponder or not. In fact, I can't imagine I'd care one whit.
Actually, as a basically non-aggressive person, I'd probably SUPPORT everyone wearing those, on the thought that it might keep Bubba the Butt-Buddy from ass-raping me in the showers.
This is because most banks use a combination of your name, birthdate, and SSN as recovery questions if you want to get into an account. I know that when I call mine up on the telephone, those are the first three things they ask me. (Actually they also ask a number of other things also, some of which are less easily discovered, which is why I still do business with them.) Then you can proceed to do things with your account(s).
But anyway, I'm glad you don't have anything like SSNs where you are. Pray it stays that way. But the way it is here, they're sort of the big key someone needs to 'steal' your identity.
Tritium isn't particularly radioactive to start off with. As other people have mentioned, the particles it radiates are extremely low-energy. Also the half life isn't particularly long, so even if a battery was buried in a landfill, by the time the water had a chance to percolate down to the aquifer and then get pumped back up, there's a good chance most of the tritium would have decayed anyway.
Your WMD argument is bogus. Tritium is relatively easy to get -- it's used in gunsights, keychains, watch faces, all sorts of stuff. Sure you'd have to go to a lot of work to get enough to make the core for a thermonuclear weapon, but I think anyone who has the resources to build one in the first place is almost certainly able to process it out of glow paint.
Furthermore, you're talking about banning it because it might be used to make an atomic bomb bigger -- which presupposes that terrorists have the fission bomb to start off with. Shouldn't that be the concern in the scenario? I have doubts that many terrorists or rogue states that are willing to use a bomb would want to go to the work and expense of boosting it.
You know, on second thought, I'd probably just buy one.
You generally do this by having a 555 or monostable create a clock pulse, which you then feed into a series of counters to divide the frequency. (The slowest you could get on a 555 without using counters is around 10Hz or so, and I don't think you'd want to be pulsing the parallel port that often. I suppose you could though.) My suggestion was merely to replace the 555 with a square wave triggered by the power line, then divide this signal and use it to drive the counter that tells the 'rebooter' to kill power if it hasn't been overridden by a parallel port pulse. It was a reasonably trivial suggestion and does not change the overall working of the circuit that much.
I think the most often you'd want this to happen is every 5-6 seconds, maybe longer. You'd have to test how long it takes the parallel port to come back online after a reboot, and that would be the shortest time you could set the timer to. Obviously you don't want the device forcing a reboot, and then doing it again while the machine's halfway through the boot process, and getting stuck in a loop.
And you'd need a step-down transformer for any of the logic we're talking about. Last I heard, they don't make anything that will run on straight 120VAC. (Or you could tap into the computer's power supply.)
At least I don't think so. I'm pretty sure my copy of Duck Hunt here is still the "GM" release.
Obviously, they did it for the warm, fuzzy feeling in their hearts.
Why bother using the 555 timer -- the device by definition has to be connected to the 60-cycle power line, you might as well use that for timing. Just Use the un-rectified (after voltage stepdown, of course) AC into a comparator (I'm thinking LM311, but that might be the quad version) to produce a clocking pulse. It requires less external components and is probably more accurate than using a 555 and an RC circuit.
They had one of these at a place I worked at the time for a WebStar server, and I thought it was the height of cool.
Huh? Both of them can be made as secure as you want to be, with the right encryption applied. Without that, both are as insecure as sending postcards by carrier pigeon.
Maybe he's willing to pay $2 to get ONE TRACK from that CD in it's uncompressed form. That's better than paying $12 and getting it, along with a lot of other crap that he might not be interested in.
IMO the most attractive part of iTMS is that it allows you to pick-and-choose, instead of paying for whole albums. I've never bought an entire record from them, it defeats the purpose in my mind. There are only two CDs ever that I can think of where the entire album was worthwhile -- the rest have at least a few waste-of-bits songs on them. If I spend $10 at iTMS, it'll be on ten (or five, if they were full-res) songs that I actually want as individual pieces of music, not one album.
Man, that was 1994? Makes me feel old.
The old original "Graphing Calculator" which started life back in OS9 (or was it 8? I forget) offered multiple-curve graphing as an upgrade to the paid version, as opposed to the freebie that came with the OS which would only do one function at a time.
I went to their website a few months ago and they have a Carbonized version -- looks pretty much the same as it always did. I didn't buy the commercial one, just played around with the free one. But it still exists if you're in the market.
I recently got an email, though, stating that beginning next year they'll be implementing some product by Cisco that includes a small client program that must be downloaded onto the system that wants access, scans it, then reports back to the network that it's clean and can get access. I'd never heard of it before, but if anyone has used it and wants to give us the lowdown, I'd be interested.
That's in all honesty the most interesting thing I've seen out of Microsoft since ... since ... a very long time ago.
I find their methodology for creating the passwords -- using 10 inkblot images and getting two characters from them a piece for a 20-character password. This might take a lot of getting used to, and be a drag if the passwords needed to be changed often. Although I suppose you could just reorder the graphics and thus change the password, the ideal seems to me to be something with fewer inkblots and more data being derived mentally from each one.
Huh? Macs use standard Qwerty keyboards.
The modifier keys are labeled differently and depending on the keyboard model, placed differently, but I assure you the rest of the keys are all there.
Related: I noticed the last time I went to the bank and was standing in line at the ATM, that you can now have PIN number greater than four digits. I think you'll start to see a lot of people choosing them based on the graphical layout of the standard 10-key number pad, rather than anything to do with the numbers themselves.
I used to have to use a particularly asinine system which forced me to change my password every 90 days also. I thought it was the most insecure policy I've never seen -- users and even some administrators' passwords were written on sticky notes on monitors, and people were constantly forgetting them and having them reset.
Mercifully, although the system did make sure you changed your password at least every 90 days, you were free to do it more often than that, and only the existing password was recorded. People quickly learned the '90 day drill:' change your password to some bogus one and then immediately then back to your regular password, every 90 days. This was about the system's only saving grace. I can't say I was ever so glad to see a feature not implemented properly.
This is actually the concept behind a number of shareware / free "password management" programs that were popular a few years back (and probably still are). Or for that matter, the password-management facilities of Mac OS X, for example, which has an encrypted 'keychain' where you can store other passwords.