I think the short solution here is to not give guns and ideas to total idiots.
I've played every GTA in the series since i was about 16, i've also done some stupid things in my life but i wouldn't go around randomly shooting at cars what ever age i was! What strikes me so much about reading that article (coming from the UK) is that they never question how a 14 and 16 year old had a gun. For a start the right to bear arms is a totally contradictory law: If theres a civil uprising of course people are bloody well going carry guns - who's going to stop them!? that doesn't mean every idiot and kid should be allowed guns all the time. At my school we had a range, the idea was simple - you are supervised, the gun stays in the range, you shoot at things that are at the other end, where people aren't.
Are the media trying to say "don't blame guns"? because if they are, then why should they blame video games? A gun is something that put in the wrong hands will cause disaster, and by the same standards a video game is also something that put in the wrong hands will cause disaster.
By the "wrong hands" i mean retards, because at 14, if you haven't reached a sense of reality to understand that taking a gun and shooting at cars is going to end up badly then you must really have mental problems. (maybe they were rednecks?) This is probably why video games like this are rated 18 - so they can catch out all the slow learning kids and just hope that by 18, everyone in the country will have reached that point where they can understand simple concepts, maybe this should be higher like your drinking laws? maybe the gun laws should have a higher age too?
Oh come on now, the RIAA are just trolling! If they want warning labels on kazaa then I want warning labels on Outlook warning people that they may be subjected to penis enlargement spam and also visual basic script viruses because of a security hole. I want warning labels on CDs to tell people it might be crippled.
Morse code will always have the ability above every other method to communicate in extreme conditions, its not just another protocal thats outlived its time, its useful as a skill because it works so well, you can send it with lights, mirrors, lasers, through walls, trapped underground, turning a transmitter on and off, blinking with your eyes, etc. you can send use it without talking or making a noise if your being held hostage or cant speak, you can use it if your deaf (blinking light) or blind. How many times have you been watching an action film and someone says "thats morse code" and as a result the day is saved? 120 year old technology is usually all you have left when things go wrong.
Can we start some sort of class action suite against MS for something stupid like "Windows crashes hurt my productivity" or "Poor windows security practices caused virus propogation" - i mean someone managed to sue McDonalds over hot coffee right?! Hm, im not sure if i have any Microsoft Windows licenses that i can send in to collect the money tho:(
Seems it didnt survive the slashdotting, Internet film launch stalled. Oh well, i can always go down to the river and see that guy sitting in a glass box...
They should fix their marketing
on
Java vs .NET
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· Score: 2, Interesting
What??.NET is a programming language?? I had no idea, i tried to read the Microsoft marketing crap but i couldnt figure out what.NET was other than an "enterprise solution" (something we're trying to sell to big companies), a "set of software technologies" (something that comes on a CD) and a "new generation of technology" (upgrade from whatever we sold you last year)
You dont really need biometrics, just some security cameras and alarms, trusted security guards who know whats going on and a call to the bloody company that the technicians claim to be from!
I got ADSL in the UK because it was pretty much the same price as paying for 2 phone lines and a flat-rate dial-up isp. Also the isps here dont quite understand the all-you-can-eat principle - they ristrict the ammount of hours a month you have to such an extent that its not much cheaper than paying the call charges.
P2P file sharing and streaming media are the big broadband killer apps. Hopefully ISPs will understand that and will protect their file sharing customers from copyright lawsuits.
The governments, corporations, RIAA/MPAA etc. are contradicting themselves if they promote broadband but at the same time go against file-sharing.
-- I assume no responsibility for spelling mistakes or damage caused by them.
Nah forget it, they'll just put cameras all over the river now! I want an electric car, they dont have to pay the charge, but why are they all so ugly? More people would buy alternative cars if they wernt all designed by ponces, they look worse than smart cars!
Yes but someone in the government signed that tready to allow America to extradite any citizen without question. And seeing as we're becoming part of america and their crap we're gonna be following their rules sooner or later. Not to mention that everything america does britain copies (we should be sued for that copyright infringement).
I've never bought a music CD in my entire life! Thats right. I have about 2 CDs that came off magazine covers and thats it. (I dont give a shit what you think about stealing). I like to have all my music easily availiable - ie a click away, not a shuffle of disks away. The CD as a medium is going to die once everyone gets hooked on mass-storage mp3 players etc... And while im totally pro raw high quaility uncompressed audio, mp3 is going to win the battle like VHS over Beta & Laser Disk. There are only afew things i would like to listen to uncompressed that i would either copy or maybe buy if i really really wanted to, some music has very noticable compression artifacts and if your gonna be editing or sampling it in any way or using it in a video etc then you want uncompressed but otherwise im starting to live with compression aslong as its good. The record companies have figured this out and some CDs are starting to come with compressed files aswell i think? but this seems to be always windows media format?
Something i would like to see in shops (they already have similar things) is the ability to very cheaply make your own CD compilation but to be able to choose the format and compression setting (or have it raw). To dumb it down you could have pre-set options with an "advanced" screen on the terminal, and instead of just CD's you could make DVD's aswell. Once you had selected all the songs you wanted you could have them burnt and the (powerful) computer would compress them right then and there (or if thats too much it could just store the mp3s and forget compression options). If they did this right, they could make it worth-while for even people with fast net connections - it can be a hassle choosing the right file on kazaa and checking the quaility etc. with this system you would be guarenteed instant cheap music either raw or compressed at high quality. The question is, should they charge by the MB or per song?
Lol tell me about it. I cant even be bothered to start up a spell check or OpenOffice because it takes so damn long on my crappy system. - Lazy and bad at english!
Instead of resorting to terrorism, maybe the RIAA should leave catching criminals to the police, then we can see how much the local law enforcement agencies actually care that some 19 year-old is downloading music. I think you'll find they dont give a shit.
If not then sometime in the future "The Worlds Wildest Police Videos" will have some kid who has taken to his car because the police smashed his door down at 6am to confiscate his computers and arrest him - not for terrorism, child-porn, or drugs but for mp3's. Then he drives off and ends up causing numerous crashes and deaths as the police tail him before the police flip his car, drag him to the ground and beat him into submission (and smash his ipod). I'll be laughing my ass off as that retired sherif presenter Bunel? says with complete seriousness "This young criminal thought he could listen to music without paying... but after crushing 3 kids to death and causing 1000's of dollars worth of damage and millions of dollars worth of record company loss... he is shown, that music pirates, always end up in jail!" and at that moment, i will know that the US has completely lost the plot.
Its fair enough for universities to be strict on this afterall it is their network/property. Its a shame though. Where i am in a UK university theres allot of filesharing but its in that stage where no-one really stops anything but at any moment it could all change and people could start making a fuss and id loose my mega-fat bandwidth;) Im worried the RIAA or someone similar will start their crap in this country too.
That works quite well for somethings, games consoles with proprietory storage devices like cartridges, but it becomes expensive. PS2's have DVD drives and that works pretty well because a) not as many people have DVD writers and b) it requires modding the hardware. The only reason i have ever bought PS2 games is because its too hard for me to copy or download them but thats only temporary - if i ever got a dvd burner and could easily download full iso's or swap with friends then that would be it for paying. With music its very different. Music is just sound in the end and whatever lock-in hardware system you design, as long as it has an output someone will have an input;) Although they are trying this anyway with their stupid new system i cant remember what the piece of shit is called..
If they are the size of a cigarette lighter then you could for example take an average notebook battery (they can be pretty big) and fit several fuel cells into the same space? Even if the notebook manufacturers wont do it (they'd much rather you paid for a new notebook or atleast a very very expensive adapter kit) you can make your own! And im sure this will spark a new trend of illigal "refills" and people overclocking their batteries by messing with the mixture of chemicals;)
I think the slashdot crowd are going about this all wrong, geeks just cant see past the technical side. Ok, if your a large government wose citizens are worried about a potential repeat of the largest terrorist attack in your history then what are you gonna do? Sure, you could make big solid security changes, but that costs money, and your main objective is to provide peice of mind to your citizens for, well however long you plan to stay elected. Now you know its unlikely there will be a terrorist attack, atleast until your long gone, but you can win votes and confidence by throwing sums of money at various band-wagons. Face recognition is the perfect one - you and i know its next to useless in its current form, but the general public know that they've seen it in sci-fi so its gotta be good right?
A company can develope it (read dilbert to see a good idea of what that company might look like) and they can get monet from the government or the airports or whatever:
1) Invent technology that might solve current problem that everyones facing 2) ? 3) Profit
"If you're a senior executive and you're carrying around your five-year business plan, you probably want to have that information secured so only you can read it," he said.
If you're carrying around very sensitive data the only methods you should be relying on are tried and tested encryption, and physically restricting access
Businesses can lock down such documents now with third-party tools such as encryption software, but embedded rights management tools in the document creation software are much easier and more likely to be used, Gartenberg said.
"The harder you make security to use for the end user, the less people are going to use it," he said.
The safer you make people feel, the more risks they will take - someone said that about anti-lock breaking systems
And DRM itself is not a bad thing. If you think so, perhaps you should execute "chmod -R 777/" as root as quickly as possible.
If something is on your own system (root) sure you can set permissions to whatever you like, and thats a perfectly good idea for a multiuser system. If you want to encrypt a file so that only certain people can view it thats also a good idea. Now if someone can view a file on a remote system then they can stick it on their own system and edit it - how are you gonna stop that? you can control what they can do with the file on your system but no more. If your in an office environment with secure computers you could even stop them printing a file or copying it to disk and theres no way they are gonna get around that, but you cant stop them writing the valuable data down unless you put a guard in the room and ban paper and pens!
Sure, it's not absolute security on the document, but it's another layer. So it might be a good thing to consider to have some sort of open source DRM alternative for OpenOffice.
Yes its another layer but its a pointless obscurity layer which most people will treat as secure. Considering we have people around who have distributed documents and deleted sensitive parts by drawing a black box over them!! you cant expect this not to be abused. The simple truth is that DMCA or not, someone will crack this and programs will be made that make it as simple as possible to circumnavigate the DRM - certainly on files where the user knows the encryption key and maybe even on everything (depending how badly Microsoft designs it). It'll be NetBIOS and RPC all over again, it will be worse than eBook and DVD CSS!
Just an example of what people might use DRM for (and what anyone might be able to read once its cracked): *Private company documents that the boss wrote and stuck on the website with only DRM to protect them. *Private government documents for the same reason *The nuclear codes - because bush typed them out in Word so he could remember *That email attachment that you've been sending around that you absolutely dont want a certain person to read
I think its pretty obvious that Microsofts DRM technology will consist of flags in the file itseld - eg "can_be_copied=0" and the document will be un-encrypted. So now notepad will be a DMCA violating piece of software in the US... oh well, im sure they'll just remove notepad.exe and wordpad.exe and edit.exe for the US version of windows;)
All so the next generation of Macs can be shipped without keyboards?
Is anything actually that wrong with typing a password? Its pretty tried and tested, it just seems that these new methods are just trying to look cool.
Also, wasnt there a pen that contained motion sensors that could varify your real signature while you wrote it? It was pretty similar to this except it could detect more things like pressure and angle.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the short solution here is to not give guns and ideas to total idiots.
I've played every GTA in the series since i was about 16, i've also done some stupid things in my life but i wouldn't go around randomly shooting at cars what ever age i was! What strikes me so much about reading that article (coming from the UK) is that they never question how a 14 and 16 year old had a gun. For a start the right to bear arms is a totally contradictory law: If theres a civil uprising of course people are bloody well going carry guns - who's going to stop them!? that doesn't mean every idiot and kid should be allowed guns all the time. At my school we had a range, the idea was simple - you are supervised, the gun stays in the range, you shoot at things that are at the other end, where people aren't.
Are the media trying to say "don't blame guns"? because if they are, then why should they blame video games? A gun is something that put in the wrong hands will cause disaster, and by the same standards a video game is also something that put in the wrong hands will cause disaster.
By the "wrong hands" i mean retards, because at 14, if you haven't reached a sense of reality to understand that taking a gun and shooting at cars is going to end up badly then you must really have mental problems. (maybe they were rednecks?) This is probably why video games like this are rated 18 - so they can catch out all the slow learning kids and just hope that by 18, everyone in the country will have reached that point where they can understand simple concepts, maybe this should be higher like your drinking laws? maybe the gun laws should have a higher age too?
Oh come on now, the RIAA are just trolling! If they want warning labels on kazaa then I want warning labels on Outlook warning people that they may be subjected to penis enlargement spam and also visual basic script viruses because of a security hole. I want warning labels on CDs to tell people it might be crippled.
And how exactly will you use this to convey a message? :P
"maximum data transfer rate of ~120 bits/s"
;)
About the same as all those links will have in 5 minutes
Morse code will always have the ability above every other method to communicate in extreme conditions, its not just another protocal thats outlived its time, its useful as a skill because it works so well, you can send it with lights, mirrors, lasers, through walls, trapped underground, turning a transmitter on and off, blinking with your eyes, etc. you can send use it without talking or making a noise if your being held hostage or cant speak, you can use it if your deaf (blinking light) or blind. How many times have you been watching an action film and someone says "thats morse code" and as a result the day is saved? 120 year old technology is usually all you have left when things go wrong.
Can we start some sort of class action suite against MS for something stupid like "Windows crashes hurt my productivity" or "Poor windows security practices caused virus propogation" - i mean someone managed to sue McDonalds over hot coffee right?! Hm, im not sure if i have any Microsoft Windows licenses that i can send in to collect the money tho :(
Seems it didnt survive the slashdotting, Internet film launch stalled. Oh well, i can always go down to the river and see that guy sitting in a glass box...
What?? .NET is a programming language?? I had no idea, i tried to read the Microsoft marketing crap but i couldnt figure out what .NET was other than an "enterprise solution" (something we're trying to sell to big companies), a "set of software technologies" (something that comes on a CD) and a "new generation of technology" (upgrade from whatever we sold you last year)
This is a good thing: Remember how much you hated school? well now the kids will think of Microsoft when they think of school!
:P
I wonder if reading slashdot or talking about linux will be banned?
You dont really need biometrics, just some security cameras and alarms, trusted security guards who know whats going on and a call to the bloody company that the technicians claim to be from!
In any other country in the world, an amnesty would mean guns, ammo, explosives, knives etc. But those things are all perfectly legal in the US.
;)
I think its about time you took up this right to bare arms thing and did something useful with it - storm the RIAA HQ and do some serious fragging
I got ADSL in the UK because it was pretty much the same price as paying for 2 phone lines and a flat-rate dial-up isp. Also the isps here dont quite understand the all-you-can-eat principle - they ristrict the ammount of hours a month you have to such an extent that its not much cheaper than paying the call charges.
P2P file sharing and streaming media are the big broadband killer apps. Hopefully ISPs will understand that and will protect their file sharing customers from copyright lawsuits.
The governments, corporations, RIAA/MPAA etc. are contradicting themselves if they promote broadband but at the same time go against file-sharing.
--
I assume no responsibility for spelling mistakes or damage caused by them.
Nah forget it, they'll just put cameras all over the river now! I want an electric car, they dont have to pay the charge, but why are they all so ugly? More people would buy alternative cars if they wernt all designed by ponces, they look worse than smart cars!
Yes but someone in the government signed that tready to allow America to extradite any citizen without question. And seeing as we're becoming part of america and their crap we're gonna be following their rules sooner or later. Not to mention that everything america does britain copies (we should be sued for that copyright infringement).
I've never bought a music CD in my entire life! Thats right. I have about 2 CDs that came off magazine covers and thats it. (I dont give a shit what you think about stealing). I like to have all my music easily availiable - ie a click away, not a shuffle of disks away. The CD as a medium is going to die once everyone gets hooked on mass-storage mp3 players etc... And while im totally pro raw high quaility uncompressed audio, mp3 is going to win the battle like VHS over Beta & Laser Disk. There are only afew things i would like to listen to uncompressed that i would either copy or maybe buy if i really really wanted to, some music has very noticable compression artifacts and if your gonna be editing or sampling it in any way or using it in a video etc then you want uncompressed but otherwise im starting to live with compression aslong as its good. The record companies have figured this out and some CDs are starting to come with compressed files aswell i think? but this seems to be always windows media format?
Something i would like to see in shops (they already have similar things) is the ability to very cheaply make your own CD compilation but to be able to choose the format and compression setting (or have it raw). To dumb it down you could have pre-set options with an "advanced" screen on the terminal, and instead of just CD's you could make DVD's aswell. Once you had selected all the songs you wanted you could have them burnt and the (powerful) computer would compress them right then and there (or if thats too much it could just store the mp3s and forget compression options). If they did this right, they could make it worth-while for even people with fast net connections - it can be a hassle choosing the right file on kazaa and checking the quaility etc. with this system you would be guarenteed instant cheap music either raw or compressed at high quality. The question is, should they charge by the MB or per song?
Lol tell me about it. I cant even be bothered to start up a spell check or OpenOffice because it takes so damn long on my crappy system. - Lazy and bad at english!
Instead of resorting to terrorism, maybe the RIAA should leave catching criminals to the police, then we can see how much the local law enforcement agencies actually care that some 19 year-old is downloading music. I think you'll find they dont give a shit.
If not then sometime in the future "The Worlds Wildest Police Videos" will have some kid who has taken to his car because the police smashed his door down at 6am to confiscate his computers and arrest him - not for terrorism, child-porn, or drugs but for mp3's. Then he drives off and ends up causing numerous crashes and deaths as the police tail him before the police flip his car, drag him to the ground and beat him into submission (and smash his ipod). I'll be laughing my ass off as that retired sherif presenter Bunel? says with complete seriousness "This young criminal thought he could listen to music without paying... but after crushing 3 kids to death and causing 1000's of dollars worth of damage and millions of dollars worth of record company loss... he is shown, that music pirates, always end up in jail!" and at that moment, i will know that the US has completely lost the plot.
Its fair enough for universities to be strict on this afterall it is their network/property. Its a shame though. Where i am in a UK university theres allot of filesharing but its in that stage where no-one really stops anything but at any moment it could all change and people could start making a fuss and id loose my mega-fat bandwidth ;) Im worried the RIAA or someone similar will start their crap in this country too.
That works quite well for somethings, games consoles with proprietory storage devices like cartridges, but it becomes expensive. PS2's have DVD drives and that works pretty well because a) not as many people have DVD writers and b) it requires modding the hardware. The only reason i have ever bought PS2 games is because its too hard for me to copy or download them but thats only temporary - if i ever got a dvd burner and could easily download full iso's or swap with friends then that would be it for paying. With music its very different. Music is just sound in the end and whatever lock-in hardware system you design, as long as it has an output someone will have an input ;) Although they are trying this anyway with their stupid new system i cant remember what the piece of shit is called..
If they are the size of a cigarette lighter then you could for example take an average notebook battery (they can be pretty big) and fit several fuel cells into the same space? Even if the notebook manufacturers wont do it (they'd much rather you paid for a new notebook or atleast a very very expensive adapter kit) you can make your own! And im sure this will spark a new trend of illigal "refills" and people overclocking their batteries by messing with the mixture of chemicals ;)
I think the slashdot crowd are going about this all wrong, geeks just cant see past the technical side. Ok, if your a large government wose citizens are worried about a potential repeat of the largest terrorist attack in your history then what are you gonna do? Sure, you could make big solid security changes, but that costs money, and your main objective is to provide peice of mind to your citizens for, well however long you plan to stay elected. Now you know its unlikely there will be a terrorist attack, atleast until your long gone, but you can win votes and confidence by throwing sums of money at various band-wagons. Face recognition is the perfect one - you and i know its next to useless in its current form, but the general public know that they've seen it in sci-fi so its gotta be good right?
A company can develope it (read dilbert to see a good idea of what that company might look like) and they can get monet from the government or the airports or whatever:
1) Invent technology that might solve current problem that everyones facing
2) ?
3) Profit
"If you're a senior executive and you're carrying around your five-year business plan, you probably want to have that information secured so only you can read it," he said.
If you're carrying around very sensitive data the only methods you should be relying on are tried and tested encryption, and physically restricting access
Businesses can lock down such documents now with third-party tools such as encryption software, but embedded rights management tools in the document creation software are much easier and more likely to be used, Gartenberg said.
"The harder you make security to use for the end user, the less people are going to use it," he said.
The safer you make people feel, the more risks they will take - someone said that about anti-lock breaking systems
And DRM itself is not a bad thing. If you think so, perhaps you should execute "chmod -R 777 /" as root as quickly as possible.
If something is on your own system (root) sure you can set permissions to whatever you like, and thats a perfectly good idea for a multiuser system. If you want to encrypt a file so that only certain people can view it thats also a good idea. Now if someone can view a file on a remote system then they can stick it on their own system and edit it - how are you gonna stop that? you can control what they can do with the file on your system but no more. If your in an office environment with secure computers you could even stop them printing a file or copying it to disk and theres no way they are gonna get around that, but you cant stop them writing the valuable data down unless you put a guard in the room and ban paper and pens!
Sure, it's not absolute security on the document, but it's another layer. So it might be a good thing to consider to have some sort of open source DRM alternative for OpenOffice.
Yes its another layer but its a pointless obscurity layer which most people will treat as secure. Considering we have people around who have distributed documents and deleted sensitive parts by drawing a black box over them!! you cant expect this not to be abused. The simple truth is that DMCA or not, someone will crack this and programs will be made that make it as simple as possible to circumnavigate the DRM - certainly on files where the user knows the encryption key and maybe even on everything (depending how badly Microsoft designs it). It'll be NetBIOS and RPC all over again, it will be worse than eBook and DVD CSS!
Just an example of what people might use DRM for (and what anyone might be able to read once its cracked):
*Private company documents that the boss wrote and stuck on the website with only DRM to protect them.
*Private government documents for the same reason
*The nuclear codes - because bush typed them out in Word so he could remember
*That email attachment that you've been sending around that you absolutely dont want a certain person to read
I think its pretty obvious that Microsofts DRM technology will consist of flags in the file itseld - eg "can_be_copied=0" and the document will be un-encrypted. So now notepad will be a DMCA violating piece of software in the US... oh well, im sure they'll just remove notepad.exe and wordpad.exe and edit.exe for the US version of windows ;)
All so the next generation of Macs can be shipped without keyboards?
Is anything actually that wrong with typing a password? Its pretty tried and tested, it just seems that these new methods are just trying to look cool.
Also, wasnt there a pen that contained motion sensors that could varify your real signature while you wrote it? It was pretty similar to this except it could detect more things like pressure and angle.