To run this from a command line (like a login script on all your machines):
regedit.exe/s decrap.reg
Feel free to modify and add the strings of any other extensions you want to auto-kill...
Microsoft has also added to the Firefox prefs.js config file, located at
C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\XXXXXXXX.default, where USERNAME is the user profile and XXXXXXXX is random characters. You will find these entries added to the file:
>>Nice email address btw.
It was when gMail first came out. I tried everything I could think of and after everything was taken (including "allnamestaken") I typed this as a joke. It just forwards to my.me email now, though.
If you had to try everything, it wasn't when gmail first came out. I got my name first try: firstlast.gmail.com.
I'm rather sick of people assuming eeepc's aren't real laptops, they're just as capable as any other laptop, aside from small hard drive space (not that important for linux/OO.o, pretty much all a student would need, I get by with the 4GiB on the 701 nicely)
How'd you get 4GiB of storage? The rest of us only get 4GB!
Why are Macbooks such a popular option at schools/colleges?
Those who cannot do...cripple the minds of others.
Give the students a laptop, a blank hard drive, and an Ubuntu DVD. Lesson 1 - Install. Lesson 2 - compile. Lesson 3 - code. Lesson 4 - learn the Kannada language, so students who want a tech job can move to Bangalore.
Perhaps the cost of all those laptops would be better spent on a scholarship fund gaining interest for 6 years instead of laptop welfare. Instead of 'no idiot left behind' how about 'no brilliant mind unable to reach it's full potential'. Maybe make sure all the students are getting a good breakfast, or buy the library some science books from this decade.
In these big box stores.
"Sure, you can buy that laptop and install Linux on it. In fact, there are drivers for Linux that work much better without stupid drm, there is much better security without a useless 'popup box' all the time, you don't have your computer filled with bloated adware right out of the box, but instead filled with free applications to replace the ones you would need to buy. You still have to buy Vista with the laptop though, no refunds, you have no f**n choice, we're a monopoly beotch!!!"
The 'challenger' should at least spend $5 bucks and swear to a notary public that the drive is as represented to alleviate the above concerns...
I think one other oddity with the challenge is that the challenger wants the file name recovered, not the data in the file. rm filename or del filename by itself will make the file name unrecoverable if the first character is unguessable ('filename' will be renamed '?ilename' in the FAT when the file is deleted.)
If recovering just the filename is this challenge, I have a much more trivial drive preparation, not so confusing, that will still take deep recovery:
buy sealed drive (0's from factory).
Write a single byte to be recovered to the '0' position of the drive.
Write 0x00 to that byte
Now, there are 256 possible values of the byte but you only get one guess.
Recovering a single wipe drive would involve at the minimum tapping into the analog output of the drive head and recording the output with a very precise ADC as the drive reads each byte multiple times, or having a custom board specific to that drive that can do the same. Not going to be done for the now $500 prize. Then there is the physical question that the challenge really asks: if the near-quantum level sub-microscopic magentic domains on a modern perpendicular hard drive can even store more information than a single bit.
FreeBasic is a project that started just a few years ago and it is now more than mature. You can compile win32 programs from the command line (not interpreted or bytecode), use c dll's and the windows api and just about anything you can imagine (you can even program OO techniques if you want). The freebasic compiler is written in freebasic.
Of course its still BASIC, so the program above (minus the line numbers and with the comma gone from the end of the print statement) will compile and run just as well as it did 30 years ago.
In addition, there is not only a lot of example code with the distribution, but a community that is available to share with and learn from.
http://www.freebasic.net/forum/
It's interesting that on page 5 is also the second half of an article on the 'new' Boeing 747 - little did the writers know that this plane would still be in use and be the height of common air travel luxury in 2008. I just want those 15 hostesses that were promised!
Some things today are better than described - the internet, online shopping and bill pay, mobile communications and intarweb - a lot better than drawing on my tv-phone with an infrared pen. The domed city thing was WAAAY off though!
'Broadband' is not synonymous with 'high-speed'. It does not refer to unfettered communication or how 'wide' your connection is. Broadband is a technology describing a type of RF signalling scheme. Wi-Fi is narrowband because it uses a single frequency per connection. Cable TV uses their cable plant to carry a very wide group of frequencies, from channel 2 at 55MHz to cable modem traffic at 0-55MHz and 500-1000MHz, therefore it is broadband. The word has been bastardized by improper canonical use and by ignorance such as the FCC trying to 'define' broadband as data connections above a certain data speed. Show you are clever and don't use broadband to mean high-speed internet.
You can use https://www.donotcall.gov/ to help block the numbers. If they call after you sign up, report them.
The important thing is that the do not call list isn't for the government - it is for you. You can sue the telemarketer in small claims for every unwanted phone call $500 and win on the basis of this law (you might have to educate the judge of the law and the proper venue first, along with proving you got the call). The tricky part is to figure out who they are and where to serve them papers. To do this it is best to lie to the telemarketer and pretend you want to sign up or get more information. You then sue them in small claims court, most of the time you get a default judgement, and then you garnish their accounts. If enough people sue they might change their practices.
American Scientists would have just made a spectrometer with data capture in a laptop. The Japanese have to go and put it in a frikkin robot!! Any good invention needs to be in a robot! Next, coffee making ROBOT! MP3 playing ROBOT! Sock washing ROBOT!! Imagine the future!
I had no idea that commercial terrestrial radio was still relevant. I haven't turned on an FM tuner and listened more than 5 minutes in the last 10 months.
If all 6.6+ billion people in the world right now reduced their fertility to 2.5 right now, the population would be at about 13 billion by 2050, and continue growing. Human population has doubled since 1965, in just 40 years.
Look at Google Earth and see what percentage of the planet hasn't been warped by humans. Meadows into cities, diverse forests into clear-cut tree farms, rivers into dammed lakes and lakes pumped to turn desert into irrigated crop circles, rain forest turned into cattle farms, wild animal migrations destroyed by fences and roads, mountains into pit quarries, river deltas into industrial sludge sediment muck. Nuclear testing grounds, supersites, and gunnery ranges. Industrial humans have only been in the Western US for 150 years and this we have brought this to this recently unaltered land. We have added 35% more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in the last 150 years. Our current massive population is busy consuming our one-time gift of non-replaceable resources to maintain our current unsustainable industrial way of life.
50,000 western lowland gorillas left, 600 mountain gorillas, 1600 giant pandas, what were 60,000,000 American bison down to 1000 by 1890. 150,000 chimpanzees left worldwide. And 6.6 billion people. Humans have a massive impact on the world, and the main worry is not hunger: starvation is just the only foreseeable equilibrium point for our population, and will come when we have far passed our maximum sustainable population. Hunger comes from poverty, a symptom of overpopulation and inequality, and people in poverty have high infant mortality, poor education, and many children. How can there be less poverty when we have less resources to spread among more people?
If one coffee tree produces about two pounds of coffee a year, how much rain forest has been cut down for your personal supply of coffee trees? Where did the copper wiring, steel, wood, and concrete your house is made of come from? The plastics and metals that surround you right now. The chemicals used to etch the circuits on your CPU, the tantalum, gold, lithium, aluminum in your electronics, steel cars, airplanes and the energy they all use (coal, petroleum, uranium, dammed rivers...)? Can 6.6 billion people have your lifestyle? We are the big experiment I think.
But hey, the odds approach 100% that I'll be dead by 2070, guess I'll just party until then...
Really, it's not the court costs that outweigh the $100 million. It's the losses that they would incur from having to give Creative a slice of all the profits from their iPods, their most profitable product and the thing keeping their stock prices high on Wall St.
More importantly than 'a slice of profits', if Creative went to court and won, they could charge any licensing fee they want for use of the patented technology. If they say a license is $10 per unit, multiply THAT times 50,000,000 iPods already manufactured. Or maybe a company licence is $1,000,000,000 for any company name starting with the letter 'A'. If Apple doesn't want to pay, the court could serve them an injunction against further iPod manufacture, award damages & order seizure of assets, etc (see TiVo vs Echostar)... Although Apple *could* beat the patent in court, they also could lose the suit and face dire consequences; paying to remove uncertainty with a $100 mil. blanket license doesn't seem so unreasonable. There is no requirement that a patent holder even license their technology, Creative could just serve an injunction against future manufacture or sale of infringing devices.
The problem with recent technology patents like this one is the concept of patents being for 'obvious problem' -> 'novel unobvious solution' is being distorted into patents for 'previously unrecognized problem' -> 'completely obvious solution'.
To prevent submarine patents like the above, I would make two changes to the patent law:
Any manufacture, sale, or offer for sale of products by other parties up to the day the patent is issued and published is 100% non-infringing, and
If patent holder does not enforce their patent in a court of law within 1 year of patent issue, or within 1 year of the beginning of 'infringement', all patent claims against the 'infringer' are void.
Eventually your IRD will stop working. The updates include things like changes to the tiers and encryption, etc. Sadly, you do need the updates but you can probably go a year at least without them.
Everything you say is wrong, please tags your posts as uninformed guesses in the future.
The unique ID of the receiver and the decryption is done on the smartcard. The transponder channel map is constantly changing and being updated in the receivers. The list of channels you are able to receive based on the unique ID of the receiver is constantly being updated from the satellite data stream (including which baseball games to black out based on where you live, which local channels you get and which distant network channels you individually filled out the distant network waiver cards for, etc., whether you subscribed to TV Japan or German TV...) Dish constantly broadcasts a rolling data stream of all receiver IDs and the channels they are allowed to receive, so any receiver will be set to its correct programming package within a few hours in the stream. A 'Hit' can also be sent that will immediately update that unique receiver's programming.
Firmware is what is updated with the 'updates' option. The current firmware for all devices is continuously being broadcast in the stream, so when a new receiver is connected, it won't take long for it to see and download a firmware if it is requested to do so. A Firmware upgrade can make receivers more compatible with newer technology (new satellite dishes or multiswitches, new satellites in new orbits). Firmware can change the appearance of the menu, adds features to the receiver, or change or disable existing features. Firmware (BIOS) is the program the receiver runs, and barring something major (like all your local channels being moved to a newly-launched satellite that needs a special dish/LNB/Multiswich that the receiver can't operate without a firmware update) the receiver will keep on working.
The receiver can and probably does relay your viewing and recording habits back to Echostar when it makes it's daily phone call. The receiver will still work if it doesn't make the phone call, but Echostar also can decide to disable your receiver(s) if it doesn't get any phone calls from it (which it sometimes does, especially when auditing for 'account stacking', when it suspects receivers on one account are being shared by multiple subscribers).
Disabling the updates is fine - if the option to disable updates still exists in the firmware you are currently running. If your receiver also never phones home, Echostar can not know what version of firmware you are using and also cannot ensure compliance with its injunction. Only a massive policy change (such as 'all receivers must call in every day or their programming will be turned off') or a massive programming change (such as all programming being converted to MPEG-4) will hinder the receiver's ability to continue to receive programming.
CBC radio's Quirks and Quarks program had a story on November 19, 2005 on the subject of human exploration vs. robotic probes. It's available at http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/archives/05-06/nov19.html with links to OGG Vorbis and MP3 files of the show. Van Allen was interviewed among others.
Of particular note, the Bush administration's plan to send astronauts back to the moon, the de-maintaining of Hubble, and the cost of a Mars mission (one manned trip to the moon to look at rocks = 700 mars explorer missions). While the show itself takes a non-editorial stance and finds interviewees on both side of the debate, one can clearly see that Van Allen is no looney, a bright mind even in his 90's.
One can quickly make the analogies that:
Looking Glass : Galileo:: Hubble Space Telescope : 21st century scientists
House arrest : Catholic Church:: Fund diversion : evangelical Bush administration
Remote sensing probes & space telescope repair : real science investigating cosmology and origin of universe:: human Moon and Mars mission : money wasting diversion from real science, hoping to extend the suspension of disbelief in religion a little longer, by preventing more erosion of the religious god-created, human-centric universe by empirical scientific evidence.
The development of new plans for human exploration of the Moon and Mars has raised an old argument again. Should we be sending humans into space? Many scientists have argued that robotic probes, rovers and satellites have produced far more science at a far lower cost than human astronauts. Will this still be the case as we look beyond Earth orbit?
Space pioneer Dr. James Van Allen, the Regent professor of physics at the University of Iowa, has worked with space probes like the Explorer, Pioneer and Mariner missions since the earliest days of the U.S. space program. In his view, human astronauts are obsolete.
I do have an interesting story to tell where in my roommate had sort of brokered an agreement with a "gold farmer" to simply buy the farmer's produced materials with in game gold, and would easily sell it for like 5 times as much on the auction house. I guess the fact that these people either don't have the money or time to learn how to play the auction house for more money speaks to something, but I'm not sure what. Perhaps the authortarian nature or the overwhelming poverty combined with slaving demands of their employers, I donno. Maybe it points to corrupt morality of Western society, but on the other hand, when was the morality of your actions an overriding concern within a fucking video game?!
This stems from the way the game farms work. Typically the gold farmers work in 12 hour shifts, and share the character/account with a shift partner and some other fill-in workers also, so the account can be used 24/7. They have a quota of gold that has to be turned in by the end of their shift, and items are useless to them because unless the item sells for gold by the end of their shift, the shift partner who plays the account the next work shift will get the leftover items and auctions. This is why farmers will dump items for cheap near the end of their shift.
A way to help the 'worker' and screw the 'boss' a bit in these Chinese gold farms is to help the worker by re-selling their items for them (where you can get some profit because you don't have a time limit in the auctions) and being a 'bank' for any extra gold over their shift quota they might have acquired. This way the player (the actual worker, not just the character name or account) can get their minimum of quota of gold sent back from you at the beginning of their next shift (you need a password or something to make sure you aren't chatting to their shift partner or boss). They can then actually play the game for fun and goof off for a while, instead of using company bots to repeatedly scrape the most profitable areas for gold.
More interesting notes about how the farms and farmers work, and how you might interact with the farmers can be found can be found here.
The obvious solution to the whole problem is to not pay real world money for virtual items (this is not as futile as 'don't buy drugs'->'no more gang violence'). That shuts down the whole sordid business and the game can be fun again. Besides, the whole point of most games (from MMO.. games like Diablo on, along with others like Need for Speed Underground 2, etc) is to build a better character/car/army/civilization through pressing the feeder bar repeatedly and being rewarded with pellets. Just like a game cheat code that gives you $1000000 and unlimited power ups, etc, if you can plunk down your credit card and buy the level 60 character with all the items you want, there is no more fun to be had by playing the game. The fun is getting there, once you have the '10 star car', or the 'level 60 character', the game is pretty much over and you will end up putting the game back on the shelf.
The rest of the spectrum will be auctioned off to the highest bidders -- probably tech companies. The sale of this valuable, scarce real estate is expected to bring in about $10 billion, maybe more. That will help reduce the federal budget deficit.
Better yet, when the spectrum is sold off, the companies that buy it will use it to develop new technology and services. Cheap, ubiquitous wireless broadband access is one possibility. Mobile TV or music services are others.
I think this is optimistic. TV stations are giving up VHF frequencies 55MHz-211MHz, and getting UHF frequencies closer to 600MHz for their digital stations. If you need a physics refresher, the broadcast frequency is directly proportional to the amount of information that can be carried in a broadcast (ignoring bandwidth), making the UHF frequencies TV stations are getting more valueable than the VHF ones they are giving up. The higher the frequency, the more favorable it is to data transmission. This makes this more a handout to TV stations of the higher frequencies that would be otherwise useful to high tech. Of course a terrestrial version of a service like Sirius satellite radio could still be jammed in the space used for two tv channels.
Other digital data broadcasts also use much higher frequencies: Satellite Radio: 2350MHz, Wireless networking: 2400MHz, 5000MHz. Satellite TV: 12700MHz
As an aside, what if if a broadcast TV network 'bought back' the right to use the frequency for channel 2, for example, nationwide? Doubtless the auctions will be nationwide licenses so that they benefit the biggest corporations and exclude smaller regional bidders. ABC-TV could buy back channel 2 and resume analog TV broadcasting across the country!
The pilot episode was done with construction paper, which took several months. When the pilot was sold and they needed a production setup, they went with computer animation. Over the first several episodes after the pilot, the construction paper appearance made by the computer rendering improved, but the first episode has a great construction paper look that, in my opinion, still hasn't been replicated in the later computer created episodes. It's interesting to think of how much computer CPU power has increased since 1997 when the show first aired (think back to overclocking Celeron 300a's to 450MHz - that was a year or two AFTER they were computer animating South Park!)
The big problem with South Park production is that although the show is digitally animated at 24fps (frames per second), it is then telesync'd to 30fps, and THEN EDITED IN VIDEO (I don't know if this is still true in the lastest episodes, but was documented to be so in 1999 in interviews). It is probable that the original 24fps animation from earlier episodes in digital form is no more.
Editing the episodes after telesync not only destroys what could be a beautiful 24fps progressive film DVD, but the editing they do in video chops up the telesync terribly, messing up the field order with almost every edit. I have even seen edits where only half of an original 2-field film pair is present, making it impossible for software or a progressive scan dvd player to reconstruct a non-interlaced progressive film frame. Also the DVD transfers that they have done are not the best, they have composite video dot crawl and shimmer from leaving the digital domain - the first several DVDs look like they were made from analog tapes.
Even more interesting trivia is that the animators sometimes get the episodes done in less than a week and deliver them to Comedy Central the day they are supposed to air!
Slashdot Mirror
For a fast removal of the .NET Framework Assistant 1.0 from Firefox, save the following text as decrap.reg and run:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Mozilla\Firefox\extensions]
"{20a82645-c095-46ed-80e3-08825760534b}"=-
To run this from a command line (like a login script on all your machines):
regedit.exe /s decrap.reg
Feel free to modify and add the strings of any other extensions you want to auto-kill...
Microsoft has also added to the Firefox prefs.js config file, located at C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\XXXXXXXX.default, where USERNAME is the user profile and XXXXXXXX is random characters. You will find these entries added to the file:
user_pref("general.useragent.extra.microsoftdotnet", "(.NET CLR 3.5.30729)");
user_pref("microsoft.CLR.clickonce.autolaunch"
You can remove these lines manually after closing all Firefox windows.
You can type about:config in the URL bar, and filter for 'microsoft' if you want to see what the slimeballs have been adding to your browser.
(high posting so you can find this...)
>>Nice email address btw. It was when gMail first came out. I tried everything I could think of and after everything was taken (including "allnamestaken") I typed this as a joke. It just forwards to my .me email now, though.
If you had to try everything, it wasn't when gmail first came out. I got my name first try: firstlast.gmail.com.
I'm rather sick of people assuming eeepc's aren't real laptops, they're just as capable as any other laptop, aside from small hard drive space (not that important for linux/OO.o, pretty much all a student would need, I get by with the 4GiB on the 701 nicely)
How'd you get 4GiB of storage? The rest of us only get 4GB!
Running in a warm room sounds like a manufacturing fault. Take it back. (Always get extended warranty).
You fail at basic math. Extended warranties are a gamble that are always in the house's favor.
Why are Macbooks such a popular option at schools/colleges?
Those who cannot do...cripple the minds of others.
Give the students a laptop, a blank hard drive, and an Ubuntu DVD. Lesson 1 - Install. Lesson 2 - compile. Lesson 3 - code. Lesson 4 - learn the Kannada language, so students who want a tech job can move to Bangalore.
Perhaps the cost of all those laptops would be better spent on a scholarship fund gaining interest for 6 years instead of laptop welfare. Instead of 'no idiot left behind' how about 'no brilliant mind unable to reach it's full potential'. Maybe make sure all the students are getting a good breakfast, or buy the library some science books from this decade.
In these big box stores.
"Sure, you can buy that laptop and install Linux on it. In fact, there are drivers for Linux that work much better without stupid drm, there is much better security without a useless 'popup box' all the time, you don't have your computer filled with bloated adware right out of the box, but instead filled with free applications to replace the ones you would need to buy. You still have to buy Vista with the laptop though, no refunds, you have no f**n choice, we're a monopoly beotch!!!"
Don't you know that 85% of all statistics ARE pulled out of someone's ass??
I think one other oddity with the challenge is that the challenger wants the file name recovered, not the data in the file. rm filename or del filename by itself will make the file name unrecoverable if the first character is unguessable ('filename' will be renamed '?ilename' in the FAT when the file is deleted.)
If recovering just the filename is this challenge, I have a much more trivial drive preparation, not so confusing, that will still take deep recovery:
Recovering a single wipe drive would involve at the minimum tapping into the analog output of the drive head and recording the output with a very precise ADC as the drive reads each byte multiple times, or having a custom board specific to that drive that can do the same. Not going to be done for the now $500 prize. Then there is the physical question that the challenge really asks: if the near-quantum level sub-microscopic magentic domains on a modern perpendicular hard drive can even store more information than a single bit.
FreeBasic is a project that started just a few years ago and it is now more than mature. You can compile win32 programs from the command line (not interpreted or bytecode), use c dll's and the windows api and just about anything you can imagine (you can even program OO techniques if you want). The freebasic compiler is written in freebasic.
Of course its still BASIC, so the program above (minus the line numbers and with the comma gone from the end of the print statement) will compile and run just as well as it did 30 years ago.
In addition, there is not only a lot of example code with the distribution, but a community that is available to share with and learn from.
http://www.freebasic.net/forum/
That's brilliant, up to the part where you would have to put the private key in the code to decrypt the files.
... and dammit, we need that fricking intelligence pill more than anything else!
It's interesting that on page 5 is also the second half of an article on the 'new' Boeing 747 - little did the writers know that this plane would still be in use and be the height of common air travel luxury in 2008. I just want those 15 hostesses that were promised!
Some things today are better than described - the internet, online shopping and bill pay, mobile communications and intarweb - a lot better than drawing on my tv-phone with an infrared pen. The domed city thing was WAAAY off though!
'Broadband' is not synonymous with 'high-speed'. It does not refer to unfettered communication or how 'wide' your connection is. Broadband is a technology describing a type of RF signalling scheme. Wi-Fi is narrowband because it uses a single frequency per connection. Cable TV uses their cable plant to carry a very wide group of frequencies, from channel 2 at 55MHz to cable modem traffic at 0-55MHz and 500-1000MHz, therefore it is broadband. The word has been bastardized by improper canonical use and by ignorance such as the FCC trying to 'define' broadband as data connections above a certain data speed. Show you are clever and don't use broadband to mean high-speed internet.
You can use https://www.donotcall.gov/ to help block the numbers. If they call after you sign up, report them.
The important thing is that the do not call list isn't for the government - it is for you. You can sue the telemarketer in small claims for every unwanted phone call $500 and win on the basis of this law (you might have to educate the judge of the law and the proper venue first, along with proving you got the call). The tricky part is to figure out who they are and where to serve them papers. To do this it is best to lie to the telemarketer and pretend you want to sign up or get more information. You then sue them in small claims court, most of the time you get a default judgement, and then you garnish their accounts. If enough people sue they might change their practices.
MAKING TELEMARKETERS PAY -- IN CASH
How well does it uncompress these two 128 byte files?
(remove all the slashtrash spaces first..) Hint: The MD5 hash of both is 79054025255fb1a26e4bc422aef54eb4.
See http://www.mscs.dal.ca/~selinger/md5collision/
My CRC-8 compression algorithm uses the same technique and beats your compression by a factor of 0x10!
American Scientists would have just made a spectrometer with data capture in a laptop. The Japanese have to go and put it in a frikkin robot!! Any good invention needs to be in a robot! Next, coffee making ROBOT! MP3 playing ROBOT! Sock washing ROBOT!! Imagine the future!
I had no idea that commercial terrestrial radio was still relevant. I haven't turned on an FM tuner and listened more than 5 minutes in the last 10 months.
If all 6.6+ billion people in the world right now reduced their fertility to 2.5 right now, the population would be at about 13 billion by 2050, and continue growing. Human population has doubled since 1965, in just 40 years.
Look at Google Earth and see what percentage of the planet hasn't been warped by humans. Meadows into cities, diverse forests into clear-cut tree farms, rivers into dammed lakes and lakes pumped to turn desert into irrigated crop circles, rain forest turned into cattle farms, wild animal migrations destroyed by fences and roads, mountains into pit quarries, river deltas into industrial sludge sediment muck. Nuclear testing grounds, supersites, and gunnery ranges. Industrial humans have only been in the Western US for 150 years and this we have brought this to this recently unaltered land. We have added 35% more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in the last 150 years. Our current massive population is busy consuming our one-time gift of non-replaceable resources to maintain our current unsustainable industrial way of life.
50,000 western lowland gorillas left, 600 mountain gorillas, 1600 giant pandas, what were 60,000,000 American bison down to 1000 by 1890. 150,000 chimpanzees left worldwide. And 6.6 billion people. Humans have a massive impact on the world, and the main worry is not hunger: starvation is just the only foreseeable equilibrium point for our population, and will come when we have far passed our maximum sustainable population. Hunger comes from poverty, a symptom of overpopulation and inequality, and people in poverty have high infant mortality, poor education, and many children. How can there be less poverty when we have less resources to spread among more people?
If one coffee tree produces about two pounds of coffee a year, how much rain forest has been cut down for your personal supply of coffee trees? Where did the copper wiring, steel, wood, and concrete your house is made of come from? The plastics and metals that surround you right now. The chemicals used to etch the circuits on your CPU, the tantalum, gold, lithium, aluminum in your electronics, steel cars, airplanes and the energy they all use (coal, petroleum, uranium, dammed rivers...)? Can 6.6 billion people have your lifestyle? We are the big experiment I think.
But hey, the odds approach 100% that I'll be dead by 2070, guess I'll just party until then...
*eco-jihad mode off*
More importantly than 'a slice of profits', if Creative went to court and won, they could charge any licensing fee they want for use of the patented technology. If they say a license is $10 per unit, multiply THAT times 50,000,000 iPods already manufactured. Or maybe a company licence is $1,000,000,000 for any company name starting with the letter 'A'. If Apple doesn't want to pay, the court could serve them an injunction against further iPod manufacture, award damages & order seizure of assets, etc (see TiVo vs Echostar)... Although Apple *could* beat the patent in court, they also could lose the suit and face dire consequences; paying to remove uncertainty with a $100 mil. blanket license doesn't seem so unreasonable. There is no requirement that a patent holder even license their technology, Creative could just serve an injunction against future manufacture or sale of infringing devices.
The problem with recent technology patents like this one is the concept of patents being for 'obvious problem' -> 'novel unobvious solution' is being distorted into patents for 'previously unrecognized problem' -> 'completely obvious solution'.
To prevent submarine patents like the above, I would make two changes to the patent law:
Eventually your IRD will stop working. The updates include things like changes to the tiers and encryption, etc. Sadly, you do need the updates but you can probably go a year at least without them.
Everything you say is wrong, please tags your posts as uninformed guesses in the future.
The unique ID of the receiver and the decryption is done on the smartcard. The transponder channel map is constantly changing and being updated in the receivers. The list of channels you are able to receive based on the unique ID of the receiver is constantly being updated from the satellite data stream (including which baseball games to black out based on where you live, which local channels you get and which distant network channels you individually filled out the distant network waiver cards for, etc., whether you subscribed to TV Japan or German TV...) Dish constantly broadcasts a rolling data stream of all receiver IDs and the channels they are allowed to receive, so any receiver will be set to its correct programming package within a few hours in the stream. A 'Hit' can also be sent that will immediately update that unique receiver's programming.
Firmware is what is updated with the 'updates' option. The current firmware for all devices is continuously being broadcast in the stream, so when a new receiver is connected, it won't take long for it to see and download a firmware if it is requested to do so. A Firmware upgrade can make receivers more compatible with newer technology (new satellite dishes or multiswitches, new satellites in new orbits). Firmware can change the appearance of the menu, adds features to the receiver, or change or disable existing features. Firmware (BIOS) is the program the receiver runs, and barring something major (like all your local channels being moved to a newly-launched satellite that needs a special dish/LNB/Multiswich that the receiver can't operate without a firmware update) the receiver will keep on working.
The receiver can and probably does relay your viewing and recording habits back to Echostar when it makes it's daily phone call. The receiver will still work if it doesn't make the phone call, but Echostar also can decide to disable your receiver(s) if it doesn't get any phone calls from it (which it sometimes does, especially when auditing for 'account stacking', when it suspects receivers on one account are being shared by multiple subscribers).
Disabling the updates is fine - if the option to disable updates still exists in the firmware you are currently running. If your receiver also never phones home, Echostar can not know what version of firmware you are using and also cannot ensure compliance with its injunction. Only a massive policy change (such as 'all receivers must call in every day or their programming will be turned off') or a massive programming change (such as all programming being converted to MPEG-4) will hinder the receiver's ability to continue to receive programming.
CBC radio's Quirks and Quarks program had a story on November 19, 2005 on the subject of human exploration vs. robotic probes. It's available at http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/archives/05-06/nov19.html with links to OGG Vorbis and MP3 files of the show. Van Allen was interviewed among others.
Of particular note, the Bush administration's plan to send astronauts back to the moon, the de-maintaining of Hubble, and the cost of a Mars mission (one manned trip to the moon to look at rocks = 700 mars explorer missions). While the show itself takes a non-editorial stance and finds interviewees on both side of the debate, one can clearly see that Van Allen is no looney, a bright mind even in his 90's.
One can quickly make the analogies that:
- Looking Glass : Galileo
:: Hubble Space Telescope : 21st century scientists
- House arrest : Catholic Church
:: Fund diversion : evangelical Bush administration
- Remote sensing probes & space telescope repair : real science investigating cosmology and origin of universe
:: human Moon and Mars mission : money wasting diversion from real science, hoping to extend the suspension of disbelief in religion a little longer, by preventing more erosion of the religious god-created, human-centric universe by empirical scientific evidence.
(reference: http://news.com.com/Hawkings+cosmological+riff/21Program Summary
The development of new plans for human exploration of the Moon and Mars has raised an old argument again. Should we be sending humans into space? Many scientists have argued that robotic probes, rovers and satellites have produced far more science at a far lower cost than human astronauts. Will this still be the case as we look beyond Earth orbit?
Space pioneer Dr. James Van Allen, the Regent professor of physics at the University of Iowa, has worked with space probes like the Explorer, Pioneer and Mariner missions since the earliest days of the U.S. space program. In his view, human astronauts are obsolete.
This stems from the way the game farms work. Typically the gold farmers work in 12 hour shifts, and share the character/account with a shift partner and some other fill-in workers also, so the account can be used 24/7. They have a quota of gold that has to be turned in by the end of their shift, and items are useless to them because unless the item sells for gold by the end of their shift, the shift partner who plays the account the next work shift will get the leftover items and auctions. This is why farmers will dump items for cheap near the end of their shift.
A way to help the 'worker' and screw the 'boss' a bit in these Chinese gold farms is to help the worker by re-selling their items for them (where you can get some profit because you don't have a time limit in the auctions) and being a 'bank' for any extra gold over their shift quota they might have acquired. This way the player (the actual worker, not just the character name or account) can get their minimum of quota of gold sent back from you at the beginning of their next shift (you need a password or something to make sure you aren't chatting to their shift partner or boss). They can then actually play the game for fun and goof off for a while, instead of using company bots to repeatedly scrape the most profitable areas for gold.
More interesting notes about how the farms and farmers work, and how you might interact with the farmers can be found can be found here.
The obvious solution to the whole problem is to not pay real world money for virtual items (this is not as futile as 'don't buy drugs'->'no more gang violence'). That shuts down the whole sordid business and the game can be fun again. Besides, the whole point of most games (from MMO.. games like Diablo on, along with others like Need for Speed Underground 2, etc) is to build a better character/car/army/civilization through pressing the feeder bar repeatedly and being rewarded with pellets. Just like a game cheat code that gives you $1000000 and unlimited power ups, etc, if you can plunk down your credit card and buy the level 60 character with all the items you want, there is no more fun to be had by playing the game. The fun is getting there, once you have the '10 star car', or the 'level 60 character', the game is pretty much over and you will end up putting the game back on the shelf.
The rest of the spectrum will be auctioned off to the highest bidders -- probably tech companies. The sale of this valuable, scarce real estate is expected to bring in about $10 billion, maybe more. That will help reduce the federal budget deficit.
Better yet, when the spectrum is sold off, the companies that buy it will use it to develop new technology and services. Cheap, ubiquitous wireless broadband access is one possibility. Mobile TV or music services are others.
I think this is optimistic. TV stations are giving up VHF frequencies 55MHz-211MHz, and getting UHF frequencies closer to 600MHz for their digital stations. If you need a physics refresher, the broadcast frequency is directly proportional to the amount of information that can be carried in a broadcast (ignoring bandwidth), making the UHF frequencies TV stations are getting more valueable than the VHF ones they are giving up. The higher the frequency, the more favorable it is to data transmission. This makes this more a handout to TV stations of the higher frequencies that would be otherwise useful to high tech. Of course a terrestrial version of a service like Sirius satellite radio could still be jammed in the space used for two tv channels.
Other digital data broadcasts also use much higher frequencies: Satellite Radio: 2350MHz, Wireless networking: 2400MHz, 5000MHz. Satellite TV: 12700MHz
As an aside, what if if a broadcast TV network 'bought back' the right to use the frequency for channel 2, for example, nationwide? Doubtless the auctions will be nationwide licenses so that they benefit the biggest corporations and exclude smaller regional bidders. ABC-TV could buy back channel 2 and resume analog TV broadcasting across the country!
The pilot episode was done with construction paper, which took several months. When the pilot was sold and they needed a production setup, they went with computer animation. Over the first several episodes after the pilot, the construction paper appearance made by the computer rendering improved, but the first episode has a great construction paper look that, in my opinion, still hasn't been replicated in the later computer created episodes. It's interesting to think of how much computer CPU power has increased since 1997 when the show first aired (think back to overclocking Celeron 300a's to 450MHz - that was a year or two AFTER they were computer animating South Park!)
The big problem with South Park production is that although the show is digitally animated at 24fps (frames per second), it is then telesync'd to 30fps, and THEN EDITED IN VIDEO (I don't know if this is still true in the lastest episodes, but was documented to be so in 1999 in interviews). It is probable that the original 24fps animation from earlier episodes in digital form is no more.
Editing the episodes after telesync not only destroys what could be a beautiful 24fps progressive film DVD, but the editing they do in video chops up the telesync terribly, messing up the field order with almost every edit. I have even seen edits where only half of an original 2-field film pair is present, making it impossible for software or a progressive scan dvd player to reconstruct a non-interlaced progressive film frame. Also the DVD transfers that they have done are not the best, they have composite video dot crawl and shimmer from leaving the digital domain - the first several DVDs look like they were made from analog tapes.
Even more interesting trivia is that the animators sometimes get the episodes done in less than a week and deliver them to Comedy Central the day they are supposed to air!
Methinks someone at Google reads Slashdot...