well, id rather go with radio wireless rather than infra-red, my MSCE instructor uses some sort of radio-based transmission for his laptop, and that way it's less dependant on line-of-sight.
Hmm..thanks for the idea, I'm going to be involved in a new internet cafe (as blase as that sounds, nowadays) here in waterford CT, i should suggest we impliment a wireless hub for our customers with laptops and the appropriate hardware (or we could even loan it to them).
The hardware implimentation is independant of the protocol by way of which the information is transmitted.
Of course, the question of whether or not the method of transmission should be proprietary depends on your point of view. If you're the developer, and you want to force people to purchase your reception solution as a way of either driving down the price of the disposable unit, or just scamming more money out of a bloated industry, then yeah, making it proprietary is a pretty sharp business move. If you're one of the intended users, and you want to find a cost-efficient way of implimenting the technology, it shouldnt be too hard to do.
I know at Uconn and a few other college campuses, some of the restauraunts that do lots of business with the students have implimented forms where you can place your orders online, and receive a call when the food's ready (it caught on really well at Uconn, possibly partially because of the broadband internet connections that are pretty standard in college dorms nowadays). They usually band together and pay a third party to operate and maintain the internet service. All of the experiences i've had with the combination of food service with the internet have been fairly pleasant, it should be interesting to see how a more concrete co-mingling of the services will pan out.
yeah, that sounds pretty lame. Sounds like they're using some sort of proprietary wireless communication protocol, but i haven't researched the actual product.
Rigging one of these things up with one of the readily availible wireless communication protocols (i forget the names of the ones that are "in style" right now) and sending the information to an inexpensive linux box..i mean..how expensive does a computer have to be to connect to a wireless camera?
I bet anyone with the resources to do so could impliment an identical product that would send the images to..well..anything. Pick your platform. Wanna run it on an apple laptop? those things have wireless networking on them, right? so do those new Dell laptops, right? A linux workstation or windows box with wireless networking capability? Does this magical 20-grand computer support some kind of new magical wireless communication that exceeds the capabilities of existing PC wireless networking? Somehow i seriously doubt it.
Of course, its kinda a moot point..i mean..what kind of demeted end user would just pick one up for "shits and giggles" (no pun intended)? It's just obvious that someone's milking a few extra grand (like 18 extra grand at least) per-unit from the health industry.
Thats a source of some debate in the history's industry. The full versions of wolfenstein and doom were pirated heavily, despite the free "teaser" demos.
To take it a step further, Quake and Quake 2 were released just when CD-Keys, authentication, and other anti-piracy measures were beggining to get popular/grow in popularity. These two games had none of these, and were prime candidates for piracy, since they had the best "quality-of-game-to-piracy-prevention" ratio.
Not everyone who pirates media purchases said media legally later on, but (with games anyway) many people do.
The point remains, though, if a company impliments piracy countermeasures to the extent that the product is less useful than it was before, people will stop buying that product. I, for one, have no interest in purchasing CDs that can't be (easily) archived on my computer. For that matter, I have no interest in purchasing any electronic media that goes out of its way to hinder my "fair use" of the product. Only by refusing to purchase such products, and encouraging people less "in the know" to do the same, can we send a clear message to vendors.
A company that makes a -good product-, without encumbering it with easily defeatable piracy countermeasures, will inspire more brand loyalty than a company that purposely makes products that are less useful to the consumer.
Now that they've removed the obstacle of providing the fuel and thrust to muscle through the bottom (denser) half of the earth's atmosphere, they could conceivably use the extra tonnage to carry enough equipment to do just that. Not only would i be optimistic that this sort of civilian undertaking could colonize mars or install an orbital space station, with the benefits of a commercial budget (instead of a tax-funded one), i would imagine they could get the job done more cheaply and efficiently. No red tape, no senile politicians, no guilt about wasting tax dollars, this sounds like the way to go, to me anyway.
as another poster pointed out, it's organized crime duplicating media in the tens of thousands of copies that's damaging revenue, not the small end-user population that distrubutes media en masse through the internet.
Do you remember DOOM? everyone liked DOOM, right? Or better yet, Wolfenstein. How do you think those games got so popular? I mean, sure, they were great games, but they were out of the ordinary, and wouldnt have caught on if not for PIRACY.
According to Copyright law, it is legal to make one copy of -any- electronic media (games, movies, books, music, etc) for archival purposes. Furthermore, software or hardware technological devices that allow end users to exersize this "fair use" portion of their copyright agreement (read: CD Duplicators and the like) are protected under law....
..Depending on who you are, and who you're pissing off. Although the above is precisely accurate with regards to the copyright law and the DCMA, corporations own enough senators to break as many laws as they like.
that's interesting, but when you take into account section 1201 (see my post further "new-ward" on the top level of this threat and tell me if i'm missing something important), DeCSS and CDFreak's software are perfectly legal. Basically, from all that i've read, creating or proliferating a device or technological measure for use in accordance of fair use laws (read: archival duplication of electronic media) is A-OK by the DMCA
I'm neither a troll (since my post politely pointed out my lack of knowlege on the subject and asked for a clarification), nor have I been living under a rock (my attention has been focused elsewhere).
However, I have been browsing the 57 page document and it's summary, and the actual Act itself seems to -preserve- fair use extremely well, it dosent trample over it at all. The way in which it's being interperated and misused by the large industries that have the money to throw at word-bending lawyers, however, are the culprets responsible for repressing fair use to nickle-and-dime the consumer base.
I was originally going to post this as a response-to-a-response, but i got enough replies with similar content to reply outside the thread.
I think my big problem here is that I don't fully understand what the DMCA actually -says-... so i looked up some key passages, let's read along:
"Contracting parties shall provide adaquate legal protectiona nd effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by authors in connection with the exercise of their rights under this treaty or the Berna convention and that restricts acts, in respect of their works, which are not authorized by the authors concerned or permitted by law."
Now, since the electronic reproduction of digital media for archival purposes is legal, how can the creation of a tool that enables this practice be illegal (i apologize for posting this sentiment twice, but im going somewhere different with it)?
Also an interesting little gem:
[paragraph pointing out that circumventing copyright controls to -accessing- information is illegal, but not copying it. and then...]
"This distinction was employed to assure that the public will have the continued ability to make fair use of copyrighted works. Since copying of a work may be a fair use under appropriate circumstanses, section 1201 does not prohibit the act of circumventing a technological measure that prevents copying. by contrast, since the fair use doctrine is not a defense to the act of gaining unauthorised access to a work, the act of circumventing a technological measure in order to gain access is prohibited."
Sounds pretty clear-cut to me. By those guidelines, the DeCSS boys should have been clean as a whistle, same with the CDFreaks crew.
Oh, and check out the footnote to that page:
"'Copying' is used in this context as a short-hand for the exersise of any of the exclusive rights of an author... a technological measure that prevents unauthorized distribution or public performance of a work would fall into this second category"
Further down is a list of exceptions, section 1201(f), very interesting:
"Reverse engineering. This exception permits circumvention and the development of technological means for such circumvention, by a person who has lawfully obtained a right to use a copy of a computer program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing elements of the program neccessary to achieve interoperability with other programs, to the extend that such acts are permitted under copyright law."
"Encryption research (section 1201(g). An exception for encryption research permits the circumvention of access control measures, and the development of the technological means to do so, in order to identify flaws and vulnerabilities of encryption technologies."
Now, it was mentioned earlier that CDfreaks could still be presented with a civil suit, but lets take a look at "remedies".
"Any person injured by a violation of section 1201 or 1202 may bring a civil action in Federal court..." Since, according to said sections, no injury took place, no civil suit can be brought to court.
Also interesting was the mention that nonprofit orginizations, archives, and educational institutions are excempt from liability.
If you check out the new section in table two, section 512, "System Caching" is also excempt from liability. Since the CDFreaks software caches the audio track into RAM, wouldnt it be excempt?
For all the DMCA bashing that goes on, actually reading it, it looks pretty fair and reasonable.
The only possability then, is that the Powers that Be are all either unintelligent or receiving large bribes from the media industry.
Forgive my ignorance on the subject (i haven't kept up to date on the issue), but where exactly HAS it gotten them? have the creator(s) of DeCSS been sued? arrested? I know 2600 was strongarmed into removing a link to the source (which i think is completely rediculous), but i never really heard of anything happening to the author of the code itself.
I know i've mentioned this ad infanitum elsewhere, but users have a legal right to make one copy of any electronic media for "archival purposes". If using the program is legal, how could creating it be illegal, since it allows a user to exersize his legal right to reproduce media he's paid for. The fact that it allows people to do something illegal, of course, is irrelivant.
I don't know what ever became of the author(s) of DeCSS, but i would be shocked and horrified to see legal repercussions befall them or CDfreaks.
I would imagine the "secure" audio CDs would still conform to the Redbook Standard, since the CDs are only "secure" because the fidelity of the recording is garbled ("corrupts the data", said The Register) in a way that a Hi-Fidelity playback device would be able to deal with, but would cause A CD-ROM drive to error out. Since the redbook standard seems to focus primarily on the physical composition of the compact disc (and the leadin track and "stuff") and not the format of the data on the disk, I would imagine they're still "redbook kosher", they just have intentionally error-riffic data imprinted on them.
CDFreak's software is really neat, from what i've read about it. It reads in the audio track into RAM and mounts it as a volume, and involved creating a custom VXD, sounds pretty innovative.
As for a couple of posts i've read about CDFreak being in danger of legal repercussions, their case is different from Dmitry's in that (please correct me if i'm mistaken) they're giving the software away for free, not selling it to make money, so they're not breaking any laws, even under the DMCA.
why couldn't it, on a large enough scale? I mean, the different ways a sentance can be interperated are determined by the emotional response it is supposed to elict. Can't that be extrapolated from context? I mean, sure, that might be a bit unrealistic in terms of current limitations in databasing and processing power (and heuristics), but if we always limited our speculation to the confines of what is possible -today-, we would still be booting our OS' off of floppy disks and basking in the glow of our new 128 kilobyte RAM upgrade.
I think perhaps i mistakenly implied that such a solution was availible using today's methods, and you're right, that -does- seem a bit far-fetched. We can't be that far off, though.
The other thing to consider is if the text synthesis doesn't need to be "on the fly", the minutea can be recorded in some sorta markup-language after the script has been established. Although this wouldnt be useful in an application where the voice synthesis had to be done on the fly, I would imagine a 200k.DAT file that accomplished the same task as 40 minutes of recorded digital audio would be pretty sexy (not even considering the LACK of a need for any sort of original recording in the first place)
A company may have a different view, since it's resources are the ones being damaged...
But i think i understand your point now better than i did before (assuming this is the same person). I thought for a moment about what would happen if that scenario occured at the corp. I intern at, and what you're saying makes a lot more sense in reality.
I guess the posative effect of this is that it would encourage businesses that have "luddites" (i love that word, by the way) accessing their computers to proliferate basic guidelines (in memos or whatever) to keep their computers safe, and educating users in the process.
Furthermore, the point of my "tripe" was the possible rammifications of technology down the line, not so much ATT's new stock-booster.
You've misunderstood me if you got the impression i thought the technology was inherrantly negative. Every technological advancement that is cleverly utilized to do something destructive simply spurrs on new technological advancement, which I feel is inherrantly positive.
Although i realize your "stoners" comment was meant to be an insult, one would have to reason that attributing forward-thinking speculation to cannabis use was an endorsement rather than an attack.
You missed my point, i should have arranged those sentances more clearly.
Companies that employs people who use computers connected to the internet almost always have a written computer usage policy.
Employees who use company computers are expected to read and understand these guidelines.
Employees who have read and understand those guidelines are responsible for adhering to them.
Ergo, employees who damage company property through their own carelessness are responsible for said damage.
Of course, im sure there are a few companies out there that have a lassez-faire (sp?) attitude towards company computer usage, the point was that it's possible for the company to correctly place the blame where it belongs, not nessisarily that it always will.
We're not talking about a high level of technical ability, we're talking about a principal that is (arguably) common sense. More importantly, It would be hard to imagine that a large company wouldn't release a computer usage policy, including this little tidbit of common sense. Since use of company resources should be contingent upon awareness of and agreement with the company's policy, someone who just blows said policy off and downloads an attachment anyway should be -extremely- liable. These official policies are commonplace, and most people simply don't bother reading them, or lack the faculties to understand what they're reading.
To expound, anyone who uses company property and takes on the responsabilities that come with it (and implicitly agree to the usage policy through their continued employment) "should have known better".
If you go to www.thinkgeek.com and look at the new merchendise, they're selling "Free Dmitry" Tee-shirts, 6 dollars from every purchase goes to fund his defence attourney
Although "this thing" may not be THAT good, the technology is progressing, and is limited only by our imaginations. Maybe it's not that good -yet-, but it will be -someday-, and this is just a step in that direction. As computing power doubles and redoubles, we come closer to being able to inexpensively model a unique set of vocal chords and lungs, which would allow someone to accurately reproduce a voiceprint. Im not sure how it's calculated either, but from what i've seen, it just looks like a spectral analysis of the sound. You could conceivably alter one voice to sound like another in post-processing with something like a more powerful version of Cool Wav Edit by editing the sound from the spectral graph level. Of course, this would take a large amount of expertise.
When on-the-fly voice synth reaches that level, though, the ability to do this will be closer to the hands of consumers, instead of just people with access to supercomputers.
::Preventing somebody from fatally injuring me ?::
right, that was the point. Although a gun has a glaringly obvious negative function, it exists because of a more subtle (yet important) positive one. The point i was attempting to communicate was that, although the D-Man's software had an obvious negative use, it also facilitated the legal reproduction of E-Book media for archival purposes, which is legal.
What I didn't realize when i had posted earlier, however, was that it -is- infact illegal to SELL the tools to do this, it's legal to give them away. So, the software tool in question is perfectly legal, he was arrested for selling it.
Get a large enough grammar database (hell, put it online and force people to pay to access it), throw in some heuristics, and a self-updating "lessons learned" database, and blammo, you've got perfect text-to-speech. The only real obstacle (which ATT claims to have beaten) is acoustically simulating realistic human speech.
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well, id rather go with radio wireless rather than infra-red, my MSCE instructor uses some sort of radio-based transmission for his laptop, and that way it's less dependant on line-of-sight.
Hmm..thanks for the idea, I'm going to be involved in a new internet cafe (as blase as that sounds, nowadays) here in waterford CT, i should suggest we impliment a wireless hub for our customers with laptops and the appropriate hardware (or we could even loan it to them).
The hardware implimentation is independant of the protocol by way of which the information is transmitted.
Of course, the question of whether or not the method of transmission should be proprietary depends on your point of view. If you're the developer, and you want to force people to purchase your reception solution as a way of either driving down the price of the disposable unit, or just scamming more money out of a bloated industry, then yeah, making it proprietary is a pretty sharp business move. If you're one of the intended users, and you want to find a cost-efficient way of implimenting the technology, it shouldnt be too hard to do.
I know at Uconn and a few other college campuses, some of the restauraunts that do lots of business with the students have implimented forms where you can place your orders online, and receive a call when the food's ready (it caught on really well at Uconn, possibly partially because of the broadband internet connections that are pretty standard in college dorms nowadays). They usually band together and pay a third party to operate and maintain the internet service. All of the experiences i've had with the combination of food service with the internet have been fairly pleasant, it should be interesting to see how a more concrete co-mingling of the services will pan out.
yeah, that sounds pretty lame. Sounds like they're using some sort of proprietary wireless communication protocol, but i haven't researched the actual product.
Rigging one of these things up with one of the readily availible wireless communication protocols (i forget the names of the ones that are "in style" right now) and sending the information to an inexpensive linux box..i mean..how expensive does a computer have to be to connect to a wireless camera?
I bet anyone with the resources to do so could impliment an identical product that would send the images to..well..anything. Pick your platform. Wanna run it on an apple laptop? those things have wireless networking on them, right? so do those new Dell laptops, right? A linux workstation or windows box with wireless networking capability? Does this magical 20-grand computer support some kind of new magical wireless communication that exceeds the capabilities of existing PC wireless networking? Somehow i seriously doubt it.
Of course, its kinda a moot point..i mean..what kind of demeted end user would just pick one up for "shits and giggles" (no pun intended)? It's just obvious that someone's milking a few extra grand (like 18 extra grand at least) per-unit from the health industry.
Thats a source of some debate in the history's industry. The full versions of wolfenstein and doom were pirated heavily, despite the free "teaser" demos.
To take it a step further, Quake and Quake 2 were released just when CD-Keys, authentication, and other anti-piracy measures were beggining to get popular/grow in popularity. These two games had none of these, and were prime candidates for piracy, since they had the best "quality-of-game-to-piracy-prevention" ratio.
Not everyone who pirates media purchases said media legally later on, but (with games anyway) many people do.
The point remains, though, if a company impliments piracy countermeasures to the extent that the product is less useful than it was before, people will stop buying that product. I, for one, have no interest in purchasing CDs that can't be (easily) archived on my computer. For that matter, I have no interest in purchasing any electronic media that goes out of its way to hinder my "fair use" of the product. Only by refusing to purchase such products, and encouraging people less "in the know" to do the same, can we send a clear message to vendors.
A company that makes a -good product-, without encumbering it with easily defeatable piracy countermeasures, will inspire more brand loyalty than a company that purposely makes products that are less useful to the consumer.
Now that they've removed the obstacle of providing the fuel and thrust to muscle through the bottom (denser) half of the earth's atmosphere, they could conceivably use the extra tonnage to carry enough equipment to do just that. Not only would i be optimistic that this sort of civilian undertaking could colonize mars or install an orbital space station, with the benefits of a commercial budget (instead of a tax-funded one), i would imagine they could get the job done more cheaply and efficiently. No red tape, no senile politicians, no guilt about wasting tax dollars, this sounds like the way to go, to me anyway.
as another poster pointed out, it's organized crime duplicating media in the tens of thousands of copies that's damaging revenue, not the small end-user population that distrubutes media en masse through the internet.
Do you remember DOOM? everyone liked DOOM, right? Or better yet, Wolfenstein. How do you think those games got so popular? I mean, sure, they were great games, but they were out of the ordinary, and wouldnt have caught on if not for PIRACY.
According to Copyright law, it is legal to make one copy of -any- electronic media (games, movies, books, music, etc) for archival purposes. Furthermore, software or hardware technological devices that allow end users to exersize this "fair use" portion of their copyright agreement (read: CD Duplicators and the like) are protected under law....
..Depending on who you are, and who you're pissing off. Although the above is precisely accurate with regards to the copyright law and the DCMA, corporations own enough senators to break as many laws as they like.
that's interesting, but when you take into account section 1201 (see my post further "new-ward" on the top level of this threat and tell me if i'm missing something important), DeCSS and CDFreak's software are perfectly legal. Basically, from all that i've read, creating or proliferating a device or technological measure for use in accordance of fair use laws (read: archival duplication of electronic media) is A-OK by the DMCA
I'm neither a troll (since my post politely pointed out my lack of knowlege on the subject and asked for a clarification), nor have I been living under a rock (my attention has been focused elsewhere).
However, I have been browsing the 57 page document and it's summary, and the actual Act itself seems to -preserve- fair use extremely well, it dosent trample over it at all. The way in which it's being interperated and misused by the large industries that have the money to throw at word-bending lawyers, however, are the culprets responsible for repressing fair use to nickle-and-dime the consumer base.
Of course, macrovision could always respond to that by purchasing Xing and having all of it's members eaten alive by wolverines...
I was originally going to post this as a response-to-a-response, but i got enough replies with similar content to reply outside the thread.
... a technological measure that prevents unauthorized distribution or public performance of a work would fall into this second category"
I think my big problem here is that I don't fully understand what the DMCA actually -says-... so i looked up some key passages, let's read along:
"Contracting parties shall provide adaquate legal protectiona nd effective legal remedies against the circumvention of effective technological measures that are used by authors in connection with the exercise of their rights under this treaty or the Berna convention and that restricts acts, in respect of their works, which are not authorized by the authors concerned or permitted by law."
Now, since the electronic reproduction of digital media for archival purposes is legal, how can the creation of a tool that enables this practice be illegal (i apologize for posting this sentiment twice, but im going somewhere different with it)?
Also an interesting little gem:
[paragraph pointing out that circumventing copyright controls to -accessing- information is illegal, but not copying it. and then...]
"This distinction was employed to assure that the public will have the continued ability to make fair use of copyrighted works. Since copying of a work may be a fair use under appropriate circumstanses, section 1201 does not prohibit the act of circumventing a technological measure that prevents copying. by contrast, since the fair use doctrine is not a defense to the act of gaining unauthorised access to a work, the act of circumventing a technological measure in order to gain access is prohibited."
Sounds pretty clear-cut to me. By those guidelines, the DeCSS boys should have been clean as a whistle, same with the CDFreaks crew.
Oh, and check out the footnote to that page:
"'Copying' is used in this context as a short-hand for the exersise of any of the exclusive rights of an author
Further down is a list of exceptions, section 1201(f), very interesting:
"Reverse engineering. This exception permits circumvention and the development of technological means for such circumvention, by a person who has lawfully obtained a right to use a copy of a computer program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing elements of the program neccessary to achieve interoperability with other programs, to the extend that such acts are permitted under copyright law."
"Encryption research (section 1201(g). An exception for encryption research permits the circumvention of access control measures, and the development of the technological means to do so, in order to identify flaws and vulnerabilities of encryption technologies."
Now, it was mentioned earlier that CDfreaks could still be presented with a civil suit, but lets take a look at "remedies".
"Any person injured by a violation of section 1201 or 1202 may bring a civil action in Federal court..." Since, according to said sections, no injury took place, no civil suit can be brought to court.
Also interesting was the mention that nonprofit orginizations, archives, and educational institutions are excempt from liability.
If you check out the new section in table two, section 512, "System Caching" is also excempt from liability. Since the CDFreaks software caches the audio track into RAM, wouldnt it be excempt?
For all the DMCA bashing that goes on, actually reading it, it looks pretty fair and reasonable.
The only possability then, is that the Powers that Be are all either unintelligent or receiving large bribes from the media industry.
Forgive my ignorance on the subject (i haven't kept up to date on the issue), but where exactly HAS it gotten them? have the creator(s) of DeCSS been sued? arrested? I know 2600 was strongarmed into removing a link to the source (which i think is completely rediculous), but i never really heard of anything happening to the author of the code itself.
I know i've mentioned this ad infanitum elsewhere, but users have a legal right to make one copy of any electronic media for "archival purposes". If using the program is legal, how could creating it be illegal, since it allows a user to exersize his legal right to reproduce media he's paid for. The fact that it allows people to do something illegal, of course, is irrelivant.
I don't know what ever became of the author(s) of DeCSS, but i would be shocked and horrified to see legal repercussions befall them or CDfreaks.
I would imagine the "secure" audio CDs would still conform to the Redbook Standard, since the CDs are only "secure" because the fidelity of the recording is garbled ("corrupts the data", said The Register) in a way that a Hi-Fidelity playback device would be able to deal with, but would cause A CD-ROM drive to error out. Since the redbook standard seems to focus primarily on the physical composition of the compact disc (and the leadin track and "stuff") and not the format of the data on the disk, I would imagine they're still "redbook kosher", they just have intentionally error-riffic data imprinted on them.
CDFreak's software is really neat, from what i've read about it. It reads in the audio track into RAM and mounts it as a volume, and involved creating a custom VXD, sounds pretty innovative.
As for a couple of posts i've read about CDFreak being in danger of legal repercussions, their case is different from Dmitry's in that (please correct me if i'm mistaken) they're giving the software away for free, not selling it to make money, so they're not breaking any laws, even under the DMCA.
why couldn't it, on a large enough scale? I mean, the different ways a sentance can be interperated are determined by the emotional response it is supposed to elict. Can't that be extrapolated from context? I mean, sure, that might be a bit unrealistic in terms of current limitations in databasing and processing power (and heuristics), but if we always limited our speculation to the confines of what is possible -today-, we would still be booting our OS' off of floppy disks and basking in the glow of our new 128 kilobyte RAM upgrade.
.DAT file that accomplished the same task as 40 minutes of recorded digital audio would be pretty sexy (not even considering the LACK of a need for any sort of original recording in the first place)
I think perhaps i mistakenly implied that such a solution was availible using today's methods, and you're right, that -does- seem a bit far-fetched. We can't be that far off, though.
The other thing to consider is if the text synthesis doesn't need to be "on the fly", the minutea can be recorded in some sorta markup-language after the script has been established. Although this wouldnt be useful in an application where the voice synthesis had to be done on the fly, I would imagine a 200k
A company may have a different view, since it's resources are the ones being damaged...
But i think i understand your point now better than i did before (assuming this is the same person). I thought for a moment about what would happen if that scenario occured at the corp. I intern at, and what you're saying makes a lot more sense in reality.
I guess the posative effect of this is that it would encourage businesses that have "luddites" (i love that word, by the way) accessing their computers to proliferate basic guidelines (in memos or whatever) to keep their computers safe, and educating users in the process.
I did not, of course, check the technology demo.
I am, however, gainfully employed.
Furthermore, the point of my "tripe" was the possible rammifications of technology down the line, not so much ATT's new stock-booster.
You've misunderstood me if you got the impression i thought the technology was inherrantly negative. Every technological advancement that is cleverly utilized to do something destructive simply spurrs on new technological advancement, which I feel is inherrantly positive.
Although i realize your "stoners" comment was meant to be an insult, one would have to reason that attributing forward-thinking speculation to cannabis use was an endorsement rather than an attack.
You missed my point, i should have arranged those sentances more clearly.
Companies that employs people who use computers connected to the internet almost always have a written computer usage policy.
Employees who use company computers are expected to read and understand these guidelines.
Employees who have read and understand those guidelines are responsible for adhering to them.
Ergo, employees who damage company property through their own carelessness are responsible for said damage.
Of course, im sure there are a few companies out there that have a lassez-faire (sp?) attitude towards company computer usage, the point was that it's possible for the company to correctly place the blame where it belongs, not nessisarily that it always will.
We're not talking about a high level of technical ability, we're talking about a principal that is (arguably) common sense. More importantly, It would be hard to imagine that a large company wouldn't release a computer usage policy, including this little tidbit of common sense. Since use of company resources should be contingent upon awareness of and agreement with the company's policy, someone who just blows said policy off and downloads an attachment anyway should be -extremely- liable. These official policies are commonplace, and most people simply don't bother reading them, or lack the faculties to understand what they're reading.
To expound, anyone who uses company property and takes on the responsabilities that come with it (and implicitly agree to the usage policy through their continued employment) "should have known better".
If you go to www.thinkgeek.com and look at the new merchendise, they're selling "Free Dmitry" Tee-shirts, 6 dollars from every purchase goes to fund his defence attourney
Although "this thing" may not be THAT good, the technology is progressing, and is limited only by our imaginations. Maybe it's not that good -yet-, but it will be -someday-, and this is just a step in that direction. As computing power doubles and redoubles, we come closer to being able to inexpensively model a unique set of vocal chords and lungs, which would allow someone to accurately reproduce a voiceprint. Im not sure how it's calculated either, but from what i've seen, it just looks like a spectral analysis of the sound. You could conceivably alter one voice to sound like another in post-processing with something like a more powerful version of Cool Wav Edit by editing the sound from the spectral graph level. Of course, this would take a large amount of expertise.
When on-the-fly voice synth reaches that level, though, the ability to do this will be closer to the hands of consumers, instead of just people with access to supercomputers.
::Preventing somebody from fatally injuring me ?::
right, that was the point. Although a gun has a glaringly obvious negative function, it exists because of a more subtle (yet important) positive one. The point i was attempting to communicate was that, although the D-Man's software had an obvious negative use, it also facilitated the legal reproduction of E-Book media for archival purposes, which is legal.
What I didn't realize when i had posted earlier, however, was that it -is- infact illegal to SELL the tools to do this, it's legal to give them away. So, the software tool in question is perfectly legal, he was arrested for selling it.
PDA's wont really seem worth the bother to me until the adoption of Flourescent Multilayer optical media.
Get a large enough grammar database (hell, put it online and force people to pay to access it), throw in some heuristics, and a self-updating "lessons learned" database, and blammo, you've got perfect text-to-speech. The only real obstacle (which ATT claims to have beaten) is acoustically simulating realistic human speech.