It IS a PDA, technically. You can read e-mail, browse the web, and play Mp3s on it. It's also powerful enough to emulate any console previous to the PSX and N64.
If you'd like to see a surprisingly realistic sci-fi version of this, I suggest you take a look at Bubblegum Crisis 2040, an anime series that most geeks would really enjoy anyway, even if just for the interesting sci-fi ideas and the references to American sci-fi movies like Blade Runner and Alien.
Unfortunately, you touched only briefly on the actual truth of the matter. If some "conservatives" do one thing, but other "conservatives" do the exact opposite, and some "liberals" do one thing, but other "liberals" do the exact opposite, then the truth should be obvious:
The descriptions "conservative" and "liberal" don't mean ANYTHING any more, and that's why people have to constantly explain how they define "conservative" or "liberal" for themselves. They're meaningless nothing words.
Spyware that transmits anything you put into a form (web-based e-mail, credit card information, address information) back to its parent company, as well as the usual tricks of recording every webpage you visit and adding banner ads to webpages you visit bores you?
I would've thought that a program attached to a major P2P program that records your credit card data and sends it to a shady company that no one knows anything about would be sort of important. If it were a group of self-described crackers that did this, it would probably be really big news. But because it's a corporation, just like all the others, it gets passed over?
Every small Microsoft security hole that no one has even exploited yet is big news, but corporations stealing credit card numbers and reading every bit of a person's e-mail apparently does not mean much. It wasn't even mentioned in the/. blurb.
That's exactly how the law would be enforced in a country that doesn't have an explicit policy of making the consumer take it up the ass instead of the company. If you're planning on moving to such a place, we wish you well on your long journey to Never Never Land.;)
This is America. It's supposed to be the country of "Give me liberty or give me death", not "Please take my liberty so I don't do something bad to myself with it". Just because you weren't responsible enough to know what you were drinking doesn't mean that no one else should be allowed to drink it. It means you're a fucking idiot that drank irresponsibly (and yes, drinking something when you aren't sure what it is is definitely "drinking irresponsibly"). Our rights and the freedom to do what we want to ourselves should not be taken away so that the entire country can be padded with rubber so idiots like you won't hurt themselves.
You drank something without knowing what it was and you didn't like what it did to you. The moral isn't that the stuff should be taken away from everyone in case they're stupid. The moral is that you should learn from your mistakes and drink more responsibly next time. If you don't know what it is, don't drink it. Freedom comes with the price of personal responsibility. If you don't want to pay up, you're free to go somewhere else, but don't stay here and try to rob everyone else of the right to do what they want because YOU can't handle freedom.
My understanding of the mathematics of electrical science is... less than it should be. However, the reporter really shouldn't have needed a decent knowledge of science to know that this thing is bullshit. Even a very stupid person should at least raise an eyebrow when they're told, "These four car batteries would normally only power these three normal little lightbulbs for one and a half minutes". That's certainly what raised my eyebrow, even before reading the rest of the Slashdot story and seeing the kilowatt discrepancy brought up.
Science was not required to figure out that this story was bunk. Common sense was.
Errr, I think you missed the point. The point was that a convincted monopolist that has been making the government jump through tons of legal hoops for several years is now being advertised by a different branch of that government.
Not really interesting, and it doesn't say very much, but it IS sort of funny.
Actually, it DOES apply. Professor Felten was asked to break it as part of a competition, but was then prosecuted fo it. Also, Dmitry Sklyarov was not asked to break Adobe's encryption, but a precedent was set when Adobe chose not to prosecute him, but the US government decided to prosecute him in federal court because breaking encryption broke the CRIMINAL LAW aspect of the DMCA.
It is definitely feasible that a college student breaking the encryption on an encrypted message, even when specifically asked by his college to break the encryption on a message given to him by his college, would be at risk for prosecution under the DMCA. It is a very broad piece of legislation, the specific wording of which could easily be held up in court in a variety of cases, regardless of whether or not the defendant was asked to break the encryption and whether or not the person that originally encrypted it had a problem with it.
Why wasn't Penny Arcade featured in that article? The guys that make that comic are actually making so much money through donations that they both quit their jobs and each have a $1500-$2000 monthly salary.
I think most forms of copy protection are wrong and abuse the consumer, but... can you really brush piracy off as financially inconsequential to businesses, and then post an article just an hour later about Adobe failing in the Asian market due to widespread piracy, without sounding biased and stupid?
Obviously, with how powerfully piracy affects the Asian market, piracy IS a legitimate matter for businesses to worry about financially. The real question isn't whether it affects them, but rather whether or not copy protection abuses the consumer far too much for businesses to be allowed to use it.
"Divining" means to predict, or to tell/guess the future. Since it's a list of assumptions and predictions regarding the future year, "divining" is the correct word. (You might have heard of this from the term "divining rod", a piece of wood used to guess the position of water hidden under the earth via supposedly supernatural power)
Actually, I believe the idea is that they're trying to make the message available to even the most basic of intelligent life forms that may receive it. In other words, they're transmitting messages based on the way they themselves look for them.
The idea for cutting down the noise is so that whatever has a chance of picking up the message won't just ignore as more noise. This message will stand out, and if anyone happens to hear a bit of it, they'll stop and think, "Wait a second... I don't know what that is, but that's definitely SOMETHING". It's like putting their message in large, bold print on a billboard instead of putting it in small, italic print on a flyer. It makes whatever has a chance of seeing it actually notice it, rather than pass it over.
And remember, this is the sort of message that even we can receive. Many people assume that aliens will be energy-based lifeforms millions of years ahead of us in development like the Vorlons or the Taelons, but the reality is that this sort of message could be picked up by aliens that haven't even mastered space travel, and may even be in their own unique technological equivalent to the late 19th or early 20th century. I always wonder why so many people are convinced that whatever we come across could actually be a little bit behind us in development... maybe it's humility, or maybe it's just too much science fiction TV shows.::shrug::
The genre, already succesful on the PC, has yet to be tested on a console audience, but that is exactly what Square are planning with the groundbreaking release of Final Fantasy XI later this year on PS2."
It HAS been tested, and this game ISN'T groundbreaking. The game is called "Phantasy Star Online", and it was wildly popular on the Dreamcast. FFXI is interesting, but it's not the first of its kind, it isn't groundbreaking, and it's not an untested genre with the console audience.
Well, yes - that is sort of the way it works in the real world too. Prostitution is not as bad as killing. So I'm not too sure why you think it is a beautiful irony. Perhaps you've played too many video games....
Just to clarify, I think he meant REAL whores, but DIGITAL pimps, because prostitution is legal in Australia, but GTA3 is not.
I know for some kids, it didn't work out as well, given the rash of school shootings a year or so ago. Can that be bleamed on video games? Maybe not, but it's hard to believe that constant violence in the media didn't have something to do with something.
This law didn't interfere with the creator's write to make a video game, it prevented minors (who are not, and shouldn't be, granted full Constitutional protections) from using that game. There is a difference. While I personally disagree with the ordinance, you have to recognize that this issue, like most, is not so cut-and-dried as most people here like to think.
Actually, you're a little off there. The law said that minors need proof of parental consent in order to play an arcade game. Now, just think about that from the point of view of an arcade. According to statistics, the average time that a person plays an arcade game is about two and a half minutes per quarter, so we'll make that into five minutes because most people use about two or three quarters, some people are good at the game, some peope suck, etc. If the arcade is open from 9AM-10PM, that's 156 people playing the more popular (and usually very violent) games. If there's a second player half the time (a modest estimate), then it's more like 230 people, 90% of which would probably be minors in a given arcade. If you figure that they have a minimum of three of these popular and violent arcade machines in an arcade, that's roughly 621 kids that have to be screened a day. MINIMUM.
Where was all of that math going? Having to get parental permission for over six hundred kids, which is really more like a thousand because of all of the violent, but less used machines in an arcade, is nearly impossible, and certainly not profitable. So while the law says that the arcade operators just need to get parental permission, the real effect of the law is that the arcade operators can either remove the violent games from their arcades or go bankrupt while trying to stay afloat in conditions where they need to try to get parental permission from that many kids, which not only slows down the general flow of the arcade, but also probably necessitates the hiring of specific employees to screen children. Under this law, the financial burden on the operators of violent arcade machines would skyrocket, and any arcade that dared to include violent arcade machines in their arcade would go bankrupt. This is a textbook example of how politicians manipulate the wording of laws so that they can get something that is either unfavorable or unconstitutionable into the law of the land.
...I refuse to understand the logic of a perverse culture, religious belief or country.
If you don't understand it, then how do you know it is perverse? How do you make a judgement on something that you don't understand and don't even want to know more about?
Oh, right. Someone told you, and you took their word for it and believed it. I believe that's one very big point for all of the people that have said that Americans are brain-washed by the crap that the media spoon-feeds them, to the very point at which they know longer even WANT to think for themselves.
I know some people might say I'm overreacting, but this honestly scares me. Over the course of this week, we've given full trade access to China, despite the fact that it is a communist nation of the worst kind that openly hunts, tortures, and kills people for belonging to a religion that isn't sanctioned by the government or coming anywhere near defying the government's will, and we've punished Ukraine for abetting piracy.
For Americans, we are now living under a government that cares far more about the profits of groups like the RIAA and MPAA than it does about human lives and our country's base freedoms. This week, it has rewarded one country for cruelty, torture, murder, and oppression, while punishing another for having a potential small effect on industry groups that make large contributions to political campaigns. The DMCA is a stupid and dangerous peace of legislation, and the SSSCA might fully qualify as evil... but these trade decisions belong to a whole new level of sick that nothing else on Slashdot has ever brought up.
The most powerful government in the world openly caring more about profits than about human lives... welcome to the world of several of the dystopian future sci-fi novels you've read.
Dude, it's the Clone War. For the most part, everyone already knows what happens in this movie, because 90% of it is events that were mentioned in the original trilogy. Between Obi-Wan talking about the Clone Wars and Vader's past being slowly pieced together throughout the original trilogy, the fans already know the plot of this movie in specific detail.
Personally, I can only barely tell the difference between a CD and a well-encoded 128kbps encoded MP3. From what I've seen, the real problem for the average listener, who does not have the super hearing of a musician or a total audiophile, isn't the quality of 128kpbs MP3s. It's finding lots of BADLY ENCODED MP3s that suck no matter what bit rate they're at in P2P services. So, does Ogg Vorbis have any kind of "fuckup protection" to get rid of the problems that most badly encoded MP3s have, either before or after the file is fully encoded? That's one thing that would REALLY impress me, in any music format.
But you drug bashers don't seem to understand that alchohol and cigarettes are actually much more destructive and addicting than drugs like marijuana and to a certain degree even cocaine (but not necessarily "crack" cocaine). But despite that, I still think people should have the freedom to do whatever they want to themselves. A law shouldn't prevent me from losing my job, health, and general well-being because of my own choices. That's not what American laws are supposed to be for. They're supposed to advocate freedom, not be a straight-jacket that protects us from ourselves.
Besides, the whole "it's for your protection" thing is a bullshit reason anyway. Do all of the trees in my yard have to be regulation height so I don't jump out of them and hurt myself? Do all businesses have to line their parking lots with foam so I don't scrape my knee on their pavement? Is there any law that says that my kitchen knives can only be as sharp as a butter knife?
Drug laws were born out of the lust for money, that's still what they're about, and that's the reason why they're so inconsistent and illogical.
Dude, we're not angry about AOL, Hotmail, or online stores. These are all good things. The problem, in the eyes of hackers and general Slashdot visitors, is what has been brought with it. The commercialization of the internet has given rise to free web page services that only give you 2MB of space and 300MB of bandwidth per month, cable modem services that will disconnect you if you run anything even remotely resembling a server, and a greater feeling among non-tech-heads that any site that isn't run by a multinational corporation that already owns fourteen newspapers and three TV stations "isn't trustworthy".
Free e-mail is a good thing. Reasonably priced and user friendly internet access is a good thing. Online stores are a good thing. The silencing of the average person for the sake of keeping internet speech under the control of multinational corporations because it is more profitable, however, is a bad thing.
For people chucking information between home and office it would seem much more economical to get broadband service at home and setup a VPN
You're assuming that the target customer knows what a VPN is, which is a doubtful. Honestly, not that many average consumers have a VPN, a LAN, or even extremely common geek things like broadband service at home.
Slashdot Mirror
It IS a PDA, technically. You can read e-mail, browse the web, and play Mp3s on it. It's also powerful enough to emulate any console previous to the PSX and N64.
If you'd like to see a surprisingly realistic sci-fi version of this, I suggest you take a look at Bubblegum Crisis 2040, an anime series that most geeks would really enjoy anyway, even if just for the interesting sci-fi ideas and the references to American sci-fi movies like Blade Runner and Alien.
Unfortunately, you touched only briefly on the actual truth of the matter. If some "conservatives" do one thing, but other "conservatives" do the exact opposite, and some "liberals" do one thing, but other "liberals" do the exact opposite, then the truth should be obvious:
The descriptions "conservative" and "liberal" don't mean ANYTHING any more, and that's why people have to constantly explain how they define "conservative" or "liberal" for themselves. They're meaningless nothing words.
Spyware that transmits anything you put into a form (web-based e-mail, credit card information, address information) back to its parent company, as well as the usual tricks of recording every webpage you visit and adding banner ads to webpages you visit bores you?
I would've thought that a program attached to a major P2P program that records your credit card data and sends it to a shady company that no one knows anything about would be sort of important. If it were a group of self-described crackers that did this, it would probably be really big news. But because it's a corporation, just like all the others, it gets passed over?
Every small Microsoft security hole that no one has even exploited yet is big news, but corporations stealing credit card numbers and reading every bit of a person's e-mail apparently does not mean much. It wasn't even mentioned in the /. blurb.
That's exactly how the law would be enforced in a country that doesn't have an explicit policy of making the consumer take it up the ass instead of the company. If you're planning on moving to such a place, we wish you well on your long journey to Never Never Land. ;)
This is America. It's supposed to be the country of "Give me liberty or give me death", not "Please take my liberty so I don't do something bad to myself with it". Just because you weren't responsible enough to know what you were drinking doesn't mean that no one else should be allowed to drink it. It means you're a fucking idiot that drank irresponsibly (and yes, drinking something when you aren't sure what it is is definitely "drinking irresponsibly"). Our rights and the freedom to do what we want to ourselves should not be taken away so that the entire country can be padded with rubber so idiots like you won't hurt themselves.
You drank something without knowing what it was and you didn't like what it did to you. The moral isn't that the stuff should be taken away from everyone in case they're stupid. The moral is that you should learn from your mistakes and drink more responsibly next time. If you don't know what it is, don't drink it. Freedom comes with the price of personal responsibility. If you don't want to pay up, you're free to go somewhere else, but don't stay here and try to rob everyone else of the right to do what they want because YOU can't handle freedom.
My understanding of the mathematics of electrical science is... less than it should be. However, the reporter really shouldn't have needed a decent knowledge of science to know that this thing is bullshit. Even a very stupid person should at least raise an eyebrow when they're told, "These four car batteries would normally only power these three normal little lightbulbs for one and a half minutes". That's certainly what raised my eyebrow, even before reading the rest of the Slashdot story and seeing the kilowatt discrepancy brought up.
Science was not required to figure out that this story was bunk. Common sense was.
Errr, I think you missed the point. The point was that a convincted monopolist that has been making the government jump through tons of legal hoops for several years is now being advertised by a different branch of that government.
Not really interesting, and it doesn't say very much, but it IS sort of funny.
Actually, it DOES apply. Professor Felten was asked to break it as part of a competition, but was then prosecuted fo it. Also, Dmitry Sklyarov was not asked to break Adobe's encryption, but a precedent was set when Adobe chose not to prosecute him, but the US government decided to prosecute him in federal court because breaking encryption broke the CRIMINAL LAW aspect of the DMCA.
It is definitely feasible that a college student breaking the encryption on an encrypted message, even when specifically asked by his college to break the encryption on a message given to him by his college, would be at risk for prosecution under the DMCA. It is a very broad piece of legislation, the specific wording of which could easily be held up in court in a variety of cases, regardless of whether or not the defendant was asked to break the encryption and whether or not the person that originally encrypted it had a problem with it.
Why wasn't Penny Arcade featured in that article? The guys that make that comic are actually making so much money through donations that they both quit their jobs and each have a $1500-$2000 monthly salary.
I think most forms of copy protection are wrong and abuse the consumer, but... can you really brush piracy off as financially inconsequential to businesses, and then post an article just an hour later about Adobe failing in the Asian market due to widespread piracy, without sounding biased and stupid?
Obviously, with how powerfully piracy affects the Asian market, piracy IS a legitimate matter for businesses to worry about financially. The real question isn't whether it affects them, but rather whether or not copy protection abuses the consumer far too much for businesses to be allowed to use it.
"Divining" means to predict, or to tell/guess the future. Since it's a list of assumptions and predictions regarding the future year, "divining" is the correct word. (You might have heard of this from the term "divining rod", a piece of wood used to guess the position of water hidden under the earth via supposedly supernatural power)
Actually, I believe the idea is that they're trying to make the message available to even the most basic of intelligent life forms that may receive it. In other words, they're transmitting messages based on the way they themselves look for them.
::shrug::
The idea for cutting down the noise is so that whatever has a chance of picking up the message won't just ignore as more noise. This message will stand out, and if anyone happens to hear a bit of it, they'll stop and think, "Wait a second... I don't know what that is, but that's definitely SOMETHING". It's like putting their message in large, bold print on a billboard instead of putting it in small, italic print on a flyer. It makes whatever has a chance of seeing it actually notice it, rather than pass it over.
And remember, this is the sort of message that even we can receive. Many people assume that aliens will be energy-based lifeforms millions of years ahead of us in development like the Vorlons or the Taelons, but the reality is that this sort of message could be picked up by aliens that haven't even mastered space travel, and may even be in their own unique technological equivalent to the late 19th or early 20th century. I always wonder why so many people are convinced that whatever we come across could actually be a little bit behind us in development... maybe it's humility, or maybe it's just too much science fiction TV shows.
The genre, already succesful on the PC, has yet to be tested on a console audience, but that is exactly what Square are planning with the groundbreaking release of Final Fantasy XI later this year on PS2."
It HAS been tested, and this game ISN'T groundbreaking. The game is called "Phantasy Star Online", and it was wildly popular on the Dreamcast. FFXI is interesting, but it's not the first of its kind, it isn't groundbreaking, and it's not an untested genre with the console audience.
Well, yes - that is sort of the way it works in the real world too. Prostitution is not as bad as killing. So I'm not too sure why you think it is a beautiful irony. Perhaps you've played too many video games....
Just to clarify, I think he meant REAL whores, but DIGITAL pimps, because prostitution is legal in Australia, but GTA3 is not.
I know for some kids, it didn't work out as well, given the rash of school shootings a year or so ago. Can that be bleamed on video games? Maybe not, but it's hard to believe that constant violence in the media didn't have something to do with something.
Please read the very relevant links in the Slashdot post before commenting. Thank you.
This law didn't interfere with the creator's write to make a video game, it prevented minors (who are not, and shouldn't be, granted full Constitutional protections) from using that game. There is a difference. While I personally disagree with the ordinance, you have to recognize that this issue, like most, is not so cut-and-dried as most people here like to think.
Actually, you're a little off there. The law said that minors need proof of parental consent in order to play an arcade game. Now, just think about that from the point of view of an arcade. According to statistics, the average time that a person plays an arcade game is about two and a half minutes per quarter, so we'll make that into five minutes because most people use about two or three quarters, some people are good at the game, some peope suck, etc. If the arcade is open from 9AM-10PM, that's 156 people playing the more popular (and usually very violent) games. If there's a second player half the time (a modest estimate), then it's more like 230 people, 90% of which would probably be minors in a given arcade. If you figure that they have a minimum of three of these popular and violent arcade machines in an arcade, that's roughly 621 kids that have to be screened a day. MINIMUM.
Where was all of that math going? Having to get parental permission for over six hundred kids, which is really more like a thousand because of all of the violent, but less used machines in an arcade, is nearly impossible, and certainly not profitable. So while the law says that the arcade operators just need to get parental permission, the real effect of the law is that the arcade operators can either remove the violent games from their arcades or go bankrupt while trying to stay afloat in conditions where they need to try to get parental permission from that many kids, which not only slows down the general flow of the arcade, but also probably necessitates the hiring of specific employees to screen children. Under this law, the financial burden on the operators of violent arcade machines would skyrocket, and any arcade that dared to include violent arcade machines in their arcade would go bankrupt. This is a textbook example of how politicians manipulate the wording of laws so that they can get something that is either unfavorable or unconstitutionable into the law of the land.
Quick, slap another flag sticker on your truck.
I just wanted to tell you that that's the funniest thing I've seen in a long time. That made my day, man, it really did. Heh heh.
If you don't understand it, then how do you know it is perverse? How do you make a judgement on something that you don't understand and don't even want to know more about?
Oh, right. Someone told you, and you took their word for it and believed it. I believe that's one very big point for all of the people that have said that Americans are brain-washed by the crap that the media spoon-feeds them, to the very point at which they know longer even WANT to think for themselves.
I know some people might say I'm overreacting, but this honestly scares me. Over the course of this week, we've given full trade access to China, despite the fact that it is a communist nation of the worst kind that openly hunts, tortures, and kills people for belonging to a religion that isn't sanctioned by the government or coming anywhere near defying the government's will, and we've punished Ukraine for abetting piracy.
For Americans, we are now living under a government that cares far more about the profits of groups like the RIAA and MPAA than it does about human lives and our country's base freedoms. This week, it has rewarded one country for cruelty, torture, murder, and oppression, while punishing another for having a potential small effect on industry groups that make large contributions to political campaigns. The DMCA is a stupid and dangerous peace of legislation, and the SSSCA might fully qualify as evil... but these trade decisions belong to a whole new level of sick that nothing else on Slashdot has ever brought up.
The most powerful government in the world openly caring more about profits than about human lives... welcome to the world of several of the dystopian future sci-fi novels you've read.
Dude, it's the Clone War. For the most part, everyone already knows what happens in this movie, because 90% of it is events that were mentioned in the original trilogy. Between Obi-Wan talking about the Clone Wars and Vader's past being slowly pieced together throughout the original trilogy, the fans already know the plot of this movie in specific detail.
Personally, I can only barely tell the difference between a CD and a well-encoded 128kbps encoded MP3. From what I've seen, the real problem for the average listener, who does not have the super hearing of a musician or a total audiophile, isn't the quality of 128kpbs MP3s. It's finding lots of BADLY ENCODED MP3s that suck no matter what bit rate they're at in P2P services. So, does Ogg Vorbis have any kind of "fuckup protection" to get rid of the problems that most badly encoded MP3s have, either before or after the file is fully encoded? That's one thing that would REALLY impress me, in any music format.
But you drug bashers don't seem to understand that alchohol and cigarettes are actually much more destructive and addicting than drugs like marijuana and to a certain degree even cocaine (but not necessarily "crack" cocaine). But despite that, I still think people should have the freedom to do whatever they want to themselves. A law shouldn't prevent me from losing my job, health, and general well-being because of my own choices. That's not what American laws are supposed to be for. They're supposed to advocate freedom, not be a straight-jacket that protects us from ourselves.
Besides, the whole "it's for your protection" thing is a bullshit reason anyway. Do all of the trees in my yard have to be regulation height so I don't jump out of them and hurt myself? Do all businesses have to line their parking lots with foam so I don't scrape my knee on their pavement? Is there any law that says that my kitchen knives can only be as sharp as a butter knife?
Drug laws were born out of the lust for money, that's still what they're about, and that's the reason why they're so inconsistent and illogical.
Dude, we're not angry about AOL, Hotmail, or online stores. These are all good things. The problem, in the eyes of hackers and general Slashdot visitors, is what has been brought with it. The commercialization of the internet has given rise to free web page services that only give you 2MB of space and 300MB of bandwidth per month, cable modem services that will disconnect you if you run anything even remotely resembling a server, and a greater feeling among non-tech-heads that any site that isn't run by a multinational corporation that already owns fourteen newspapers and three TV stations "isn't trustworthy".
Free e-mail is a good thing. Reasonably priced and user friendly internet access is a good thing. Online stores are a good thing. The silencing of the average person for the sake of keeping internet speech under the control of multinational corporations because it is more profitable, however, is a bad thing.
For people chucking information between home and office it would seem much more economical to get broadband service at home and setup a VPN
You're assuming that the target customer knows what a VPN is, which is a doubtful. Honestly, not that many average consumers have a VPN, a LAN, or even extremely common geek things like broadband service at home.