Actually, I believe it's the converse of that. DSS "testers" will routinely get error messages that request that the user call an 800 number to solve the problem. Anyone who calls is busted because only modified recievers will display these errors.
The problem with the method you've mentioned is that there are no signals that legitimate users can't receive as long as they are paying for it. What makes satellite piracy so much more popular is that the communication is truly one way. With cable, the boxes can talk back and they can check to make sure that your box does talk back. This is why one way filters don't work even if you never, ever, take them off the line.
divx is even more lossy than earlier compression schemes. The quality is like VHS, not even SVHS. Also, the resolution is limited by the original NTSC (or PAL) signal which isn't exactly 1080i. If you want quality, you'd better stick with the mpeg2 format from the original DVD (unless you're doing your own film transfer), and even then, televisions can display it as well as a computer monitor. When 1080i HD-DVDs are finally released you will have a point however.
It's normal for prosecution to appeal
So I guess they can keep appealing until they win. How much do you think the industry will pay the jurors for their guilty verdict?
This is also my question. I haven't seen it answered yet in this thread. I can only suppose the hope is that the original binary will have nearly unbreakable encryption. Because once the binary is decrypted on an older non-palladium system, crackers can have at the source with a good hex editor and pull out all the palladium hooks. Then it should run on on non-trusted systems (and trusted ones too I think). Note that this only has to be done once per app. I guess if the encryption is sufficiently good it could be unbreakable with current computers.
How does this prevent someone from decrypting a copy of an application just *once* on their own system and then copying this data to a non-palladium system where they can go in with a hex editor and remove all of the source code hooks that interface with palladium features, so that the app is basically converted into a pre-palladium version, one that doesn't know anything about "trust"? Once the apps are cracked and converted to pre-palladium status, they could even be run on Windows1984 as long as the OS allows non-trusted apps to run. So for crackers, it seems that decrypting the original binary would be the toughest part. While the bios could perhaps verify the integrity of all previous versions of windows, I don't see how it could verify the hash of every single app that might be cracked.
Its called the "compact disk". Perhaps you've heard of it? Phillips invented it
Fast forward to 2010 when CDs are about as common as 8-track tapes. What is invented can be un-invented. Once DRM has proven itself, CDs will be dropped. Only solid state DRM enabled digital media will be supported. And of course all digital content will "time-out" every 30 days if not refreshed by the content provider. Non-DRM hardware will be terrorist machines that don't work with the new content anyway.
Are you sure he's a real electrician? His explanation is wrong. *All* current goes "straight to ground". Where else can it go? The ground and the "neutral"(-) both connect together at the breaker panel. The usage does *not* have to be equal on both legs. I think the point of equal current on the two out of phase legs is so that the current in the shared ground wire will be reduced/eliminated due to phase cancellation. This allows you to have a smaller ground wire than you would otherwise have.
Anyway, the point is that phase cancellation does not allow you to violate the Law of Conservation of Energy. If it did, we could all save a lot on our electric bills just by using a 2nd appliance on the opposite phased leg. Free energy!
The fact of the matter is that the distances were are talking about are VAST. We KNOW faster than light travel is impossible.
The distances are indeed vast, but as this NASA article mentions, the Voyager spacecraft would only take 80,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri. Since, technology has improved at least a little since the Voyager was launched, I think we may be able to double or triple that speed. Let's say we manage to launch a probe 4 times faster than that, so that it would only take 20,000 years.
That seems like a long time, but unless we destroy ourselves before that or there is some other mass exctinction event we potentially have nearly 7 billion more years before the sun balloons into a red giant and burns up the earth. So, as a species, what do we have to do that is more important than exploring our own backyard.
20,000 years is only about 200 generations. In this sense, neither speed nor "interstellar particles" would be the greatest barrier. I think a food, water, and oxygen supply for humans that could last 20,000 years would be a bit difficult especially in deep space where there is no sunlight for plants or solar cells of any kind. But this would not prevent a nuclear powered unmanned probe from making the journey, although 20,000 years is such a long time that the half-life of the nuclear materials may come into question.
The fact that FTL travel is likely to be impossible is not all that important for interstellar travel, although it is rather important for inter-galactic travel. It does seem impossible that we will ever be able to visit other galaxies, which is truly a shame.
Unfortunately fast interstellar travel is also likely to be impossible. Propellant-free space travel (the only kind of practical, human-lifetime, interstellar travel) depends on unknown and probably untrue ideas about the nature of space. The only idea that seems even remotely plausible based on our current knowledge is the Bussard Ramjet theory.
IANAP, but due to the Inverse Square Law, I think a high power directional radio transmission would travel a lot farther than those random TV and radio signals and thus reach a much greater number of potential alien home planets, not all of which may be benevolent. I think that was his point.
It needs a small 2 cycle engine that runs on some kind of fuel, like gasoline. Brushless DC motors are cool, but we don't yet have a sufficiently advanced battery chemistry to power something like this properly.
OTOH, I guess you could ride across the entire country with one of these things if you bring a solar battery charger and a lot of patience.
Couldn't someone reverse engineer one of these things and sell it for $300?
workers were sent into radioactive sections of the plant without adequate protective clothing or respirators
Amazing what people will do when ordered to by their supervisor. I would have demanded a lead lined space suit with its own SCBA system, and then I'd quit.
Yeah right. Or maybe we can destroy it with antimatter or send it back in time to way past the half-life of the longest decaying materials. Or maybe by then we'll all just leave the planet in our interstellar FTL personal flying cars, cars like in blade runner except traveling faster than light. Or maybe we could just lock in the coordinates on our freight transporter and teleport it directly into the sun. You're thinking 1000 years, not 100. Think of what we have accomplished in the past 100 years and stop being ridiculously optimistic. Where is my HAL9000 PC anyway? It was just here!
The second thing you have to know is that the game stops being fun. By that time though, you're so "addicted" to the game, you don't realize it. The game becomes a source of frustration and anger instead of a source of entertainment and fun. It becomes a chore. It becomes a job. You plod away at the keyboard, obsessed and consumed with getting that new item, or finishing that last quest, and while so consumed you begin to hate the game. Vehemently. It's a game that goes on forever, and one that you can never win.
This is just like life. Did anyone else read this and think: wow, that's so true as a metaphor for life? It was my first thought. Surely I'm not the only one to notice the obvious parallels.
Other uses: -For the ugly geek + super hot chick who want to have a baby but don't want the ugly guy's genes screwing up the life of their future child. Also, if one partner has some disease that is carried genetically.
-To clone that ex-girlfriend you've always wanted to get back by stealing one of her hairs and taking it to a cloning lab.
-One last use is to try for a sort of immortality. Clone yourself and then, after making sure that the clone doesn't make any of the same mistakes you made etc, kill yourself. After all it *is* you right?
I also hope that you didn't mean to imply that the languages in common use in 1990 or even '87 were any lower "level" than those in use today. The OOP style has become vastly more popular (and finally seems to be mostly understood by almost everyone).
The biggest change that I know of is that coders have become even more lazy. Bloated code produced as quickly as possible seems to be the focus, probably because CPUs have become so much faster and memory has become so much cheaper that no one notices inefficient code, but everyone notices a project falling behind schedule. And of course, Microsoft is far from being blameless in this regard. I was thinking recently that Microsoft/Windows did to software, what Steven Spielberg/Star Wars did to film. Or something like that.
But this was just your experience. It may be hard to believe, but the opposite may also be true. It *is* possible for 500 Indians to produce better code than 4 Americans and perhaps much more quickly as well, and perhaps even for the same price as the 4 Americans:).
We need to face facts: people are people. Indians are just as smart in general as Americans. Just because some Indians may sound like they're doing pretty decent impersonations of Ghandi, does not make them any less intelligent. Perhaps those Indians just needed some IQ screening and some decent training.
The country is Cuba, so that should explain some of it (communism). He lives indoors with indoor plumbing, electric (flourescent) lights, some (very limited) access to beaches. He lives with many family members who share the same "apartment". He recently moved, but in his last place his bathroom was a toilet bowl (no tank) behind a thin curtain. He shared a sink and cooking facilities with the entire "building". There were no windows in the entire building and the apartment was a small room with an "attic" where they slept.
The reason that he can manage to live on $10 (or even much less) per month is that he pays virtually no rent or utilities, and I think some members of his family receive some food rations from government stores which doesn't amount to much but surely helps a little. Also, he doesn't eat much.
Most Cubans think they are poor and they are right, but they are rich compared to some African countries.
Obviously in the US and most countries, $10 a month would not exactly pay the rent:). So as soon as he moved to America, he would have to ask for a lot more than $10 a month if he wanted to avoid sleeping outside.
I base it on supply and demand. The exact figure is irrelevant. But there is nothing particularly special about Americans, no particular reason why 3rd worlders cannot do the same job for a thousand times less money.
I have a friend (in a 3rd world country) who makes less than $10.00 a month. He manages to survive. But I think he's actually smarter than me. Why should he have to make so little just because of an accident of birth?
He would jump at the chance to make even $5.00 a day. For him it would be an improvement--a very big one. A global minimum wage would just introduce more unemployment into the world (just as it always does to the extent that it's not so low as to be irrelevant). It (any minimum wage) is an absurdly simplistic solution to a complex problem. The results are predictable.
You haven't mentioned how much lower the cost of living is in Montreal. A one bedroom apartment was going for like $250 (usd) last time I checked. They have some of the lowest rents in North America. Edmonton is cheaper, but who wants to live there? The rent for an equivalent apartment in Boston is about $1200. In other American cities it is even more.
I like Montreal, and the girls are prettier there too. So maybe a move to Montreal is not such a bad thing. Maybe the company wanted to try someplace where they didn't have to (indirectly) pay such huge rental/real estate costs:). After all there's a good reason why we Americans *need* to make so much money.
Always good advice, but what world do you live in? You must be a manager or one of the lucky few who has a job with a great company. In my world, just as people don't beat down your door just because you've built a better mousetrap, employeers don't salivate over all of your mental accomplishments and skills, which they have no way of knowing about or verifying unless they also possess the same knowledge and skill set as you.
These skills might allow you to keep a job, assuming that you have some bright, competent managers who can recognize and appreciate your abilities, but it is difficult to imagine a world where it would consistently land you that great job you want.
I'm curious as to why you assume that they don't already know those things. Is it so impossible for you to imagine that there are simply more skilled, competent programmers, than there are jobs? And how do you know who is getting fired? What makes you think that the smartest/best coders and engineers who are too busy actually doing their jobs to lick boots are not the ones getting the axe, and that the stupid/incompetent ones with better social skills and who don't mind puckering up nice and big are the only ones who stay. In this system, the best, natural-born coders and engineers are the ones who flip burgers, while the less competent ones end up being promoted.
I guess you're one of these "glass is half full" types. No one could ever get layed off or have trouble finding a job because the world sucks/is unfair/malevolent etc. It's gotta be because they are not good enough. If they would just work harder and learn more, all the employers would immediately recognize that and hire them for ungodly salaries.
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Actually, I believe it's the converse of that. DSS "testers" will routinely get error messages that request that the user call an 800 number to solve the problem. Anyone who calls is busted because only modified recievers will display these errors.
The problem with the method you've mentioned is that there are no signals that legitimate users can't receive as long as they are paying for it. What makes satellite piracy so much more popular is that the communication is truly one way. With cable, the boxes can talk back and they can check to make sure that your box does talk back. This is why one way filters don't work even if you never, ever, take them off the line.
divx is even more lossy than earlier compression schemes. The quality is like VHS, not even SVHS. Also, the resolution is limited by the original NTSC (or PAL) signal which isn't exactly 1080i. If you want quality, you'd better stick with the mpeg2 format from the original DVD (unless you're doing your own film transfer), and even then, televisions can display it as well as a computer monitor. When 1080i HD-DVDs are finally released you will have a point however.
I thought at least one manufacturer (maybe Apex?) was already making a DVD player with divx support.
It's normal for prosecution to appeal So I guess they can keep appealing until they win. How much do you think the industry will pay the jurors for their guilty verdict?
This is also my question. I haven't seen it answered yet in this thread. I can only suppose the hope is that the original binary will have nearly unbreakable encryption. Because once the binary is decrypted on an older non-palladium system, crackers can have at the source with a good hex editor and pull out all the palladium hooks. Then it should run on on non-trusted systems (and trusted ones too I think). Note that this only has to be done once per app. I guess if the encryption is sufficiently good it could be unbreakable with current computers.
How does this prevent someone from decrypting a copy of an application just *once* on their own system and then copying this data to a non-palladium system where they can go in with a hex editor and remove all of the source code hooks that interface with palladium features, so that the app is basically converted into a pre-palladium version, one that doesn't know anything about "trust"? Once the apps are cracked and converted to pre-palladium status, they could even be run on Windows1984 as long as the OS allows non-trusted apps to run. So for crackers, it seems that decrypting the original binary would be the toughest part. While the bios could perhaps verify the integrity of all previous versions of windows, I don't see how it could verify the hash of every single app that might be cracked.
Its called the "compact disk". Perhaps you've heard of it? Phillips invented it
Fast forward to 2010 when CDs are about as common as 8-track tapes. What is invented can be un-invented. Once DRM has proven itself, CDs will be dropped. Only solid state DRM enabled digital media will be supported. And of course all digital content will "time-out" every 30 days if not refreshed by the content provider. Non-DRM hardware will be terrorist machines that don't work with the new content anyway.
Are you sure he's a real electrician? His explanation is wrong. *All* current goes "straight to ground". Where else can it go? The ground and the "neutral"(-) both connect together at the breaker panel. The usage does *not* have to be equal on both legs. I think the point of equal current on the two out of phase legs is so that the current in the shared ground wire will be reduced/eliminated due to phase cancellation. This allows you to have a smaller ground wire than you would otherwise have.
Anyway, the point is that phase cancellation does not allow you to violate the Law of Conservation of Energy. If it did, we could all save a lot on our electric bills just by using a 2nd appliance on the opposite phased leg. Free energy!
The distances are indeed vast, but as this NASA article mentions, the Voyager spacecraft would only take 80,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri. Since, technology has improved at least a little since the Voyager was launched, I think we may be able to double or triple that speed. Let's say we manage to launch a probe 4 times faster than that, so that it would only take 20,000 years.
That seems like a long time, but unless we destroy ourselves before that or there is some other mass exctinction event we potentially have nearly 7 billion more years before the sun balloons into a red giant and burns up the earth. So, as a species, what do we have to do that is more important than exploring our own backyard.
20,000 years is only about 200 generations. In this sense, neither speed nor "interstellar particles" would be the greatest barrier. I think a food, water, and oxygen supply for humans that could last 20,000 years would be a bit difficult especially in deep space where there is no sunlight for plants or solar cells of any kind. But this would not prevent a nuclear powered unmanned probe from making the journey, although 20,000 years is such a long time that the half-life of the nuclear materials may come into question.
The fact that FTL travel is likely to be impossible is not all that important for interstellar travel, although it is rather important for inter-galactic travel. It does seem impossible that we will ever be able to visit other galaxies, which is truly a shame.
Unfortunately fast interstellar travel is also likely to be impossible. Propellant-free space travel (the only kind of practical, human-lifetime, interstellar travel) depends on unknown and probably untrue ideas about the nature of space. The only idea that seems even remotely plausible based on our current knowledge is the Bussard Ramjet theory.
IANAP, but due to the Inverse Square Law, I think a high power directional radio transmission would travel a lot farther than those random TV and radio signals and thus reach a much greater number of potential alien home planets, not all of which may be benevolent. I think that was his point.
It needs a small 2 cycle engine that runs on some kind of fuel, like gasoline. Brushless DC motors are cool, but we don't yet have a sufficiently advanced battery chemistry to power something like this properly. OTOH, I guess you could ride across the entire country with one of these things if you bring a solar battery charger and a lot of patience. Couldn't someone reverse engineer one of these things and sell it for $300?
Amazing what people will do when ordered to by their supervisor. I would have demanded a lead lined space suit with its own SCBA system, and then I'd quit.
Did you bring your geiger counter and if so, what were the readings? I'm genuinely curious.
Actually, are you sure it didn't look like this even *before* the accident?
Yeah right. Or maybe we can destroy it with antimatter or send it back in time to way past the half-life of the longest decaying materials. Or maybe by then we'll all just leave the planet in our interstellar FTL personal flying cars, cars like in blade runner except traveling faster than light. Or maybe we could just lock in the coordinates on our freight transporter and teleport it directly into the sun. You're thinking 1000 years, not 100. Think of what we have accomplished in the past 100 years and stop being ridiculously optimistic. Where is my HAL9000 PC anyway? It was just here!
This is just like life. Did anyone else read this and think: wow, that's so true as a metaphor for life? It was my first thought. Surely I'm not the only one to notice the obvious parallels.
Also check out this link: Hackers, Cheaters, and Assholes by Keith Cronin at Destination Morrowind
Other uses:
-For the ugly geek + super hot chick who want to have a baby but don't want the ugly guy's genes screwing up the life of their future child. Also, if one partner has some disease that is carried genetically.
-To clone that ex-girlfriend you've always wanted to get back by stealing one of her hairs and taking it to a cloning lab.
-One last use is to try for a sort of immortality. Clone yourself and then, after making sure that the clone doesn't make any of the same mistakes you made etc, kill yourself. After all it *is* you right?
I also hope that you didn't mean to imply that the languages in common use in 1990 or even '87 were any lower "level" than those in use today. The OOP style has become vastly more popular (and finally seems to be mostly understood by almost everyone).
The biggest change that I know of is that coders have become even more lazy. Bloated code produced as quickly as possible seems to be the focus, probably because CPUs have become so much faster and memory has become so much cheaper that no one notices inefficient code, but everyone notices a project falling behind schedule. And of course, Microsoft is far from being blameless in this regard. I was thinking recently that Microsoft/Windows did to software, what Steven Spielberg/Star Wars did to film. Or something like that.
I don't mean to be a spelling nazi, but surely you meant "he" and not "(s)he".
But this was just your experience. It may be hard to believe, but the opposite may also be true. It *is* possible for 500 Indians to produce better code than 4 Americans and perhaps much more quickly as well, and perhaps even for the same price as the 4 Americans :).
We need to face facts: people are people. Indians are just as smart in general as Americans. Just because some Indians may sound like they're doing pretty decent impersonations of Ghandi, does not make them any less intelligent. Perhaps those Indians just needed some IQ screening and some decent training.
The country is Cuba, so that should explain some of it (communism). He lives indoors with indoor plumbing, electric (flourescent) lights, some (very limited) access to beaches. He lives with many family members who share the same "apartment". He recently moved, but in his last place his bathroom was a toilet bowl (no tank) behind a thin curtain. He shared a sink and cooking facilities with the entire "building". There were no windows in the entire building and the apartment was a small room with an "attic" where they slept.
:). So as soon as he moved to America, he would have to ask for a lot more than $10 a month if he wanted to avoid sleeping outside.
The reason that he can manage to live on $10 (or even much less) per month is that he pays virtually no rent or utilities, and I think some members of his family receive some food rations from government stores which doesn't amount to much but surely helps a little. Also, he doesn't eat much.
Most Cubans think they are poor and they are right, but they are rich compared to some African countries.
Obviously in the US and most countries, $10 a month would not exactly pay the rent
I base it on supply and demand. The exact figure is irrelevant. But there is nothing particularly special about Americans, no particular reason why 3rd worlders cannot do the same job for a thousand times less money.
I have a friend (in a 3rd world country) who makes less than $10.00 a month. He manages to survive. But I think he's actually smarter than me. Why should he have to make so little just because of an accident of birth?
He would jump at the chance to make even $5.00 a day. For him it would be an improvement--a very big one. A global minimum wage would just introduce more unemployment into the world (just as it always does to the extent that it's not so low as to be irrelevant). It (any minimum wage) is an absurdly simplistic solution to a complex problem. The results are predictable.
You haven't mentioned how much lower the cost of living is in Montreal. A one bedroom apartment was going for like $250 (usd) last time I checked. They have some of the lowest rents in North America. Edmonton is cheaper, but who wants to live there? The rent for an equivalent apartment in Boston is about $1200. In other American cities it is even more.
:). After all there's a good reason why we Americans *need* to make so much money.
I like Montreal, and the girls are prettier there too. So maybe a move to Montreal is not such a bad thing. Maybe the company wanted to try someplace where they didn't have to (indirectly) pay such huge rental/real estate costs
Always good advice, but what world do you live in? You must be a manager or one of the lucky few who has a job with a great company. In my world, just as people don't beat down your door just because you've built a better mousetrap, employeers don't salivate over all of your mental accomplishments and skills, which they have no way of knowing about or verifying unless they also possess the same knowledge and skill set as you.
These skills might allow you to keep a job, assuming that you have some bright, competent managers who can recognize and appreciate your abilities, but it is difficult to imagine a world where it would consistently land you that great job you want.
I'm curious as to why you assume that they don't already know those things. Is it so impossible for you to imagine that there are simply more skilled, competent programmers, than there are jobs? And how do you know who is getting fired? What makes you think that the smartest/best coders and engineers who are too busy actually doing their jobs to lick boots are not the ones getting the axe, and that the stupid/incompetent ones with better social skills and who don't mind puckering up nice and big are the only ones who stay. In this system, the best, natural-born coders and engineers are the ones who flip burgers, while the less competent ones end up being promoted.
I guess you're one of these "glass is half full" types. No one could ever get layed off or have trouble finding a job because the world sucks/is unfair/malevolent etc. It's gotta be because they are not good enough. If they would just work harder and learn more, all the employers would immediately recognize that and hire them for ungodly salaries.