> The proposed merger of Comcast and Disney would create a company that can combine a large library of content usually distributed as atoms with a high speed network that can deliver this content as bits.
Y'know, I was just thinking! AOL should buy Time-Warner! They could call the comany "AOL/Time-Warner"! And they could sell Time-Warner's content over AOL's network thingamajig!:-)
> AIUI what you're saying is society is better off with the death penalty not for any moral reasons but because it's cheaper?
Financially cheaper: at present, it isn't, but it could be, and IMO should be. If you kill your prisoners more quickly, you actually lower your political costs. (Witness the ongoing "Free Mumia" thing, or the suspension of the execution scheduled for last night in California.) Even the most skilled agitators tend not to be able to raise sympathy for dead people, because what's done is done.
Politically cheaper: given sufficient ability to digitally alter evidence, the political costs associated with "mistakes" can be minimized.
The death penalty is not merely cheaper, it's more practical, and is a win-win proposition if you're interested in maintaining social order.
> Except they aren't swastikas - they run clockwise not anticlockwise. This is a common symbol for Buddhist temples in Japan (and I presume the rest of Asia). The fact that they were right alongside a common symbol for Shinto shrines makes it pretty obvious really.
And any kid writing an essay on the history of That Symbol, Buddhism, and The Bastards That Misappropriated That Symbol is probably going to get an "F" as soon as his teacher tries to print the essay.
> it took much more... to kill the other security flaw... Windows 9x, that is.
And because 9x doesn't run these services (or any others), it's not vulnerable.
You can secure a 9x box against remote exploits within 5 minutes without even having to put the box on the hostile network. I defy anyone to try it with NT/2K/XP.
> [the death penalty puts the wrongfully convicted] them beyond reach of ANY correction, when technology advances to the point where it can
discover and prove their innocence, winning them release (and millions in restitution for the false imprisonment).
Incorrect.
You can only sue if you're alive. Given the time delay between being convicted and being executed, your elder relatives will be dead before you are, and your spouse/children will be happy to take ownership of your remaining assets without having to spend it all on lawyers in what amounts to a pretty risky gamble to get restitution.
Death penalty wins again. If you kill 'em all - innocent or guilty - you'll likely end up paying less restitution for wrongful convictions than if you let 'em live.
For optimal results, you kill the prisoners before technology advances to the point that innocence can be proven, but after everyone in a position to argue on the prisoner's behalf has given up. The part that requires skill is how you balancing those two conflicting factors against each other on a case-by-case basis to minimize the net overall political cost while still growing your prison budget.
> Dean and Clark may not be exactly charming,
but their straight-up speaking style is a hell of a lot more listenable than Kerry's repertoire of Stupid Politician Tricks.
There's a reason they're called Stupid Politician Tricks.
Sure, they're Stupid. Yeah, they're Tricks. But they work well enough that people who use them most effectively can outstrip the restrictions of the Lawyer class and achieve membership in the Politician class.
> (I should have added to the above: Of course sex and Legos are great geeks gifts. Bundle up a bunch o' Legos in a box and tell him, "These are for the office.")
And you can choose whether to give him the Lego before the sex or after the sex.
If you give a real geek a big pile of Lego, (Mindstorms, or maybe the 3-foot-long Imperial Star Destroyer), you won't be getting sex for a week.
If that's a bug, give him the sex first. If that's a feature, give him the Lego first.
Do not attempt to give both things at once. For instance, you could dress yourself up in a bikini made of Lego hinges, flats, and two radar dishes, but it'd be pretty damn unconfortable for you. And sure, he'd want to take that bikini apart as soon as he laid eyes on you in it... but only because it's got the parts he needs for the movable laser turrets on Page 23 of the assembly booklet. And he's been looking for the missing parts all freakin' morning!
> I'm sure there is a DB that you could cross check a SSN with a name. You would goto this site, enter your SSN and you name, Bday and sex, then you would have a list of candadets that you select. ( you could write the thing in a more secure java or other language) > >Then when another user comes along and enteres the same data it would say that you have voted
already, please contact your local voting office that would be manned with people at the phone.
"We're sorry. Your credit bureau has already voted for the Experian Party as of 08:01:01 local time."
...followed by fits of curses from Trans Union and Equifax boardrooms at 08:01:02 and 08:01:03 respectively, and puzzled "WTF?" bubbles over the heads of 100,000,000 voters for the next twelve hours.
> Well, a couple of litres of transformer oil that was recycled as food oil managed to bring down Belgium's food production chain, hurting the economy (Ouch. Don't tell Bush's ex-business partner Osama). So dioxins can be a pain.
If it comes down to starvation and ingesting food fried in 1-ppt Dioxin, the world's population will accept marginally higher cancer and birth defect rates.
P.S. Google fucking rocks. I'd never heard of this incident until your post. 30 seconds later, I have the total casualty rate -- somewhere between 40 and 8000 cancers out of 10 million people.
So in answer to your question, something like that, planetwide, would result in the biggest class-action lawsuit in history, but no threat to the species.
> With Wal-Mart they tend to employ a fraction of the people that a similarly sized retailer would, at a much lower wage. They also tend to drive other local retailers out of business, thus fewer people are employed for less money, lowering the Domestic Product for that community. In the case of a SuperWalmart, they also tend to depress the spending power of SEVERAL communities.
And yet, by offering goods at 5-10% lower than the cost of their competitors, the 95% of the people in the "several communities" with "depressed spending power" who don't work retail have an extra 5-10% of their disposable income available to be spent on other stuff.
So who's really being harmed here? Overall, I'd say having a Wal-Mart is a Good Thing for most people.
Consider that most people are capable of figuring out what's in their own best interests. If a Wal-Mart wasn't a Good Thing for most people, most people wouldn't shop there, and the company would be bankrupt.
> There has been significant development on "alternative codec" to both Real and Quicktime. Google for "Real alternative" or "Quicktime alternative" to find the codecs. They can also be downloaded in a "bundle" of sorts from here : http://www.k-litecodecpack.com/
I, too, use Media Player Classic on my winboxen.
But because MPC merely uses the Real codecs, what if the vulnerability is in the DLL for the codec, not the player?
MPC could be as vulnerable as RP8 or RealOne, at least until we figure out exactly is patched in the "update" Real is offering as a workaround. Did they update the PLAYER, or did they update the DLLs that render the.rm files?
> > > When are people going to learn to build the processors out of wood? It's natural, it's a replenishing resource, and it grows on trees. > > Is that why non-thermal-diode-protected processors burn? B-because they're made of wood? > What else floats on water? > > A Processor!
Now that I think about it, a cut chip die would probably float due to surface tension, and it would definitely qualify as a "very small rock".
> Makes me want to use cash for most of my small purchases. which I tend to do anyhow. > > Plus there is this scenario when it comes to shrinkage: > > "Sorry sir, but our database does not show your claimed purchased of the obviously worn item you are wearing. We'll have to call the police"
Which is probably why using cash will soon be a bad idea.
I use Federal Reserve Notes for most of my purchases, too, so I'm just as doomed. Hopefully the database will be smart enough to realize that 90% of my time is spent at home, at work, or buying groceries locally, and they'll conclude (based on my credit card purchases of hardware) that I'm not a terrorist, merely a geek with no life.
Interesting thought.
For instance, a profile based on only my bank transactions would probably flag me as a druggie terrorist: "Withdraws cash from ATM machines, and we have no idea what he spends it on because he rarely, if ever, uses his credit card. He must have something to hide."
A database of my bank transactions and my whereabouts as tracked 24/7 by the RFID in my shoes, keys, or implant would correctly flag me as the harmless geek I am: "Withdraws cash from ATM machines, but always travels to grocery store within a day or two of the ATM visit, and never travels to high-crime areas, so it's safe to conclude that his cash is being spent lawfully."
Stepped up one more notch, and adding the logs of my network traffic: "Lots of gaming traffic. Downloads the normal amount of b00bies for his demographic. Posts to Slashdot daily. Reads Fark daily. Reads Kuro5hin, but only biweekly. Confirmed non-terrorist, non-druggie, harmless geek."
> Geeks Put the Unsavvy on Alert: Learn or Log Off
A headline eerily reminiscent of the lyrics from the Greatest Geek Song Of All-Time, namely Clock DVA's "The Hacker", likely inspired by Bethlehem, the first widespread PC virus.
Digital murder
Programmed by mathematical terrorists
Outside of moral boundaries
Silently hacking
A binary plague
Serving information
This is the time of the hacker
This is the code of the hacker This is the hacker An algebra of fear
Within the language of machines
Uninfringed my human emotions
Within global systems
Silently moving
A digital maze
Cutting information
This is the way of the hacker
This is the extremity - of the hacker
This is the hacker
Protect now - or be erased - forever
A binary virus
Unleashed by subversive programmers
Inside corporate systems
Silently eating
The endemic wave
Erasing information
This is the sign of the hacker
This is the genius - of the hacker
This is the hacker Learn now or be cut down"
- Clock DVA, The Hacker, 1988.
The date is not a typo. Ninteteen Eighty-Eight.
> "There are these MP3's and PDF's and a million other things that you don't even know what
they are," Ms. Tauber said. "I don't feel like I need to figure out computers, because my instinct is there's just no way."
Miriam Tauber, the song doesn't say "Learn Fifteen Years From Now". It says NOW.
> They make the "Baby Wipes" in "Adult" packaging now, so you don't ahve a big, smiling cartoon baby grinning at you when cleaning up.
I always wondered why the fuck there are pictures of babies on toilet paper. Or names likeAngel Soft.
"Hi! Our toilet paper is soft! In fact, it's so soft that we've named it Angel Soft! Because every time you take a dump, we want you feel like you've just ripped a wing off the back of one of God's celestial servants, so that you could smear your shit all over it!"
If we ever need more evidence that marketing executives deserve to go to Hell, that seals it.
> If you're timing events, then your
reaction time is going to come into play and your accuracy will be stopped down. At 500ms, you're getting down to
the limits of human reaction time which is really at best 100ms. Just admit it man, you're a geek.:)
"Geek and proud!" As proof, I offer not merely the fact that I prefer digital watches, but that I set them to 24-hour time.
Actually, that's an interesting point. If it's a foot race of 10 seconds, 500ms accuracy probably isn't enough. If it's a road trip of 2 hours, being accurate to the nearest minute is probably sufficient.
Maybe I'm a left-brained geek, but I always found it easier to parse 02:44 instead of having to eyeball my way from 12-to-almost-3 and again from 12-to-almost-9.
02:44 is unambiguous on a digital watch, even by the light of the CRT. On an analog watch, it's sometimes hard to tell which hand is the bigger one. At 14:44 it's a little easier, at 02:44 it's a little more difficult.
I was going to make a snarky wisecrack about how if you can't tell the difference between 0244 and 1444, you've got bigger problems than any watch can solve.
Then I realized that the same argument applies to 0455 and 1655. If you're at certain latitudes, for several months of the year, those two times can be hard to tell apart on anything but a digital watch. And hey, this is Slashdot, where not knowing which half of the day we're talking about is part of the game.
> If you're wearing an analog watch and someone asks you what time it is, you say: a quarter to 10. > > If you're wearing a digital watch: it's 9:43 and 17 seconds!!! Urk!!!
Funny, that's why I wear a digital watch.
Sometimes I want to know how much time has elapsed between two events to within 500ms. And I don't want to do base-60 arithmetic in my head, because unlike the ancient Babylonians, I was raised in a base-10 world.
> True, and although IANAL, that term does come up a lot in law and is generally interpreted as a "resonable person" standard. Meaning that it is not up to the person making the claim to define resonable, but up to the courts to define what an average person would consider reasonable. > > Your Yugo example would clearly not demonsrate a "reasonable" comparison.
My Yugo example might not. But 90% of automobile advertisements rely on precisely the same tactic.
"Voted best car in its class". "Car of the year in its class". "Safest car in its class". "Most protection against side impact in its class".
These classes have some meaning - in that I'd expect a car in the "SUV" class to be safer in side impact (and more hazardous in rollover) than the "Sport" class. But a lot of the "class" division in the auto world exists so that there are a lot of #1 awards that affiliated organizations can hand out to their advertisers and sponsors.
"SCO! #1 UNIX in its class!" (The class of operating systems from companies that are litigious bastards)
> Actually, that gives me a neat idea. The entire font looks like X's, but there's like a pixel missing or added somewhere in each different letter. You print it out, its all X's, but when you OCR it, it comes up as text. > > I'm sured there's a big flaw somewhere in there but that's just my thought...
Big Flaw: It's basically a substitution cipher. If I know what language you're writing in, I can crack it with pen and paper.
It might be effective (assuming a good enough printer, scanner, and OCR software) to pass visual inspection by humans.
Problem is, if a human noticed something suspicious ("Hey, about 10% of your Xs are malformed the same way... and 5% of your Xs are also malfo--ooooh!"), he'd just ><erox your "secret" memo and send you on your merry way, then crack your cipher in his own sweet time, report you to his superiors for followup investigation, and you'd never know you'd been compromised. You might even think your untimely demise was an accident.
> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated [... ] (emphasis poster's)
So close, and yet so far, from the truth.
RTFWW. Read the fucking Weasel Word.
It says "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated [... ]" (Emphasis mine)
Nowhere does it say the people have any say in defining what's reasonable. The Legislature does the defining. The Executive does the searching. Where it's not clear whether a search was reasonable and a warrant was not issued, the Judicial branch determines if the Executive crossed the line.
If I made an ad that says the Yugo is the fastest car, you'd be able to sue me for false advertising. If I made an ad that says the Yugo is the fastest car in its class.
The fact that the Yugo is a Class I.3c.55.X vehicle - "Imported 4-cylinder sub-sub-sub-compacts, maximum safe speed 55 miles per hour, resale value of less than scrap value" - is a little detail I choose to leave out. Determining how many classes there are, and what class the Yugo is in, is an exercise for the student.
Slashdot Mirror
Y'know, I was just thinking! AOL should buy Time-Warner! They could call the comany "AOL/Time-Warner"! And they could sell Time-Warner's content over AOL's network thingamajig! :-)
Financially cheaper: at present, it isn't, but it could be, and IMO should be. If you kill your prisoners more quickly, you actually lower your political costs. (Witness the ongoing "Free Mumia" thing, or the suspension of the execution scheduled for last night in California.) Even the most skilled agitators tend not to be able to raise sympathy for dead people, because what's done is done.
Politically cheaper: given sufficient ability to digitally alter evidence, the political costs associated with "mistakes" can be minimized.
The death penalty is not merely cheaper, it's more practical, and is a win-win proposition if you're interested in maintaining social order.
And any kid writing an essay on the history of That Symbol, Buddhism, and The Bastards That Misappropriated That Symbol is probably going to get an "F" as soon as his teacher tries to print the essay.
And because 9x doesn't run these services (or any others), it's not vulnerable.
You can secure a 9x box against remote exploits within 5 minutes without even having to put the box on the hostile network. I defy anyone to try it with NT/2K/XP.
Incorrect.
You can only sue if you're alive. Given the time delay between being convicted and being executed, your elder relatives will be dead before you are, and your spouse/children will be happy to take ownership of your remaining assets without having to spend it all on lawyers in what amounts to a pretty risky gamble to get restitution.
Death penalty wins again. If you kill 'em all - innocent or guilty - you'll likely end up paying less restitution for wrongful convictions than if you let 'em live.
For optimal results, you kill the prisoners before technology advances to the point that innocence can be proven, but after everyone in a position to argue on the prisoner's behalf has given up. The part that requires skill is how you balancing those two conflicting factors against each other on a case-by-case basis to minimize the net overall political cost while still growing your prison budget.
That's so verFUCK YOUy true. Thank you, ASSHOLE, for your informative attempt to fiEAT A BOWL OF DICKght prejudice in our community.
There's a reason they're called Stupid Politician Tricks.
Sure, they're Stupid. Yeah, they're Tricks. But they work well enough that people who use them most effectively can outstrip the restrictions of the Lawyer class and achieve membership in the Politician class.
And you can choose whether to give him the Lego before the sex or after the sex.
If you give a real geek a big pile of Lego, (Mindstorms, or maybe the 3-foot-long Imperial Star Destroyer), you won't be getting sex for a week.
If that's a bug, give him the sex first. If that's a feature, give him the Lego first.
Do not attempt to give both things at once. For instance, you could dress yourself up in a bikini made of Lego hinges, flats, and two radar dishes, but it'd be pretty damn unconfortable for you. And sure, he'd want to take that bikini apart as soon as he laid eyes on you in it... but only because it's got the parts he needs for the movable laser turrets on Page 23 of the assembly booklet. And he's been looking for the missing parts all freakin' morning!
I'd give my left nut for some mod points right now. Except that CmdrTaco probably has even less use for my left nut than I do.
What that IBM lawyer did is an outrage.
I urge every Slashdotter with an ounce of human decency to donate via paypal to PETCF (People for the Ethical Treatment of Courtroom Floors) today.
No courtroom floor should ever have to be subjected to that sort of filth.
>
>Then when another user comes along and enteres the same data it would say that you have voted already, please contact your local voting office that would be manned with people at the phone.
"We're sorry. Your credit bureau has already voted for the Experian Party as of 08:01:01 local time."
If it comes down to starvation and ingesting food fried in 1-ppt Dioxin, the world's population will accept marginally higher cancer and birth defect rates.
The Belgian PCB and Dioxin Incident of January-June 1999: Exposure Data and Potential Impact on Health
P.S. Google fucking rocks. I'd never heard of this incident until your post. 30 seconds later, I have the total casualty rate -- somewhere between 40 and 8000 cancers out of 10 million people.
So in answer to your question, something like that, planetwide, would result in the biggest class-action lawsuit in history, but no threat to the species.
And yet, by offering goods at 5-10% lower than the cost of their competitors, the 95% of the people in the "several communities" with "depressed spending power" who don't work retail have an extra 5-10% of their disposable income available to be spent on other stuff.
So who's really being harmed here? Overall, I'd say having a Wal-Mart is a Good Thing for most people.
Consider that most people are capable of figuring out what's in their own best interests. If a Wal-Mart wasn't a Good Thing for most people, most people wouldn't shop there, and the company would be bankrupt.
I, too, use Media Player Classic on my winboxen.
But because MPC merely uses the Real codecs, what if the vulnerability is in the DLL for the codec, not the player?
MPC could be as vulnerable as RP8 or RealOne, at least until we figure out exactly is patched in the "update" Real is offering as a workaround. Did they update the PLAYER, or did they update the DLLs that render the .rm files?
> > Is that why non-thermal-diode-protected processors burn? B-because they're made of wood?
> What else floats on water?
>
> A Processor!
Now that I think about it, a cut chip die would probably float due to surface tension, and it would definitely qualify as a "very small rock".
>
> Plus there is this scenario when it comes to shrinkage:
>
> "Sorry sir, but our database does not show your claimed purchased of the obviously worn item you are wearing. We'll have to call the police"
Which is probably why using cash will soon be a bad idea.
I use Federal Reserve Notes for most of my purchases, too, so I'm just as doomed. Hopefully the database will be smart enough to realize that 90% of my time is spent at home, at work, or buying groceries locally, and they'll conclude (based on my credit card purchases of hardware) that I'm not a terrorist, merely a geek with no life.
Interesting thought.
For instance, a profile based on only my bank transactions would probably flag me as a druggie terrorist: "Withdraws cash from ATM machines, and we have no idea what he spends it on because he rarely, if ever, uses his credit card. He must have something to hide."
A database of my bank transactions and my whereabouts as tracked 24/7 by the RFID in my shoes, keys, or implant would correctly flag me as the harmless geek I am: "Withdraws cash from ATM machines, but always travels to grocery store within a day or two of the ATM visit, and never travels to high-crime areas, so it's safe to conclude that his cash is being spent lawfully."
Stepped up one more notch, and adding the logs of my network traffic: "Lots of gaming traffic. Downloads the normal amount of b00bies for his demographic. Posts to Slashdot daily. Reads Fark daily. Reads Kuro5hin, but only biweekly. Confirmed non-terrorist, non-druggie, harmless geek."
Profiling doesn't kill. Incomplete profiles kill.
Is that why non-thermal-diode-protected processors burn? B-because they're made of wood?
D'oh. Severing information, that is.
A headline eerily reminiscent of the lyrics from the Greatest Geek Song Of All-Time, namely Clock DVA's "The Hacker", likely inspired by Bethlehem, the first widespread PC virus.
The date is not a typo. Ninteteen Eighty-Eight.
> "There are these MP3's and PDF's and a million other things that you don't even know what they are," Ms. Tauber said. "I don't feel like I need to figure out computers, because my instinct is there's just no way."
Miriam Tauber, the song doesn't say "Learn Fifteen Years From Now". It says NOW.
I always wondered why the fuck there are pictures of babies on toilet paper. Or names likeAngel Soft.
"Hi! Our toilet paper is soft! In fact, it's so soft that we've named it Angel Soft! Because every time you take a dump, we want you feel like you've just ripped a wing off the back of one of God's celestial servants, so that you could smear your shit all over it!"
If we ever need more evidence that marketing executives deserve to go to Hell, that seals it.
"Geek and proud!" As proof, I offer not merely the fact that I prefer digital watches, but that I set them to 24-hour time.
Actually, that's an interesting point. If it's a foot race of 10 seconds, 500ms accuracy probably isn't enough. If it's a road trip of 2 hours, being accurate to the nearest minute is probably sufficient.
Maybe I'm a left-brained geek, but I always found it easier to parse 02:44 instead of having to eyeball my way from 12-to-almost-3 and again from 12-to-almost-9.
02:44 is unambiguous on a digital watch, even by the light of the CRT. On an analog watch, it's sometimes hard to tell which hand is the bigger one. At 14:44 it's a little easier, at 02:44 it's a little more difficult.
I was going to make a snarky wisecrack about how if you can't tell the difference between 0244 and 1444, you've got bigger problems than any watch can solve.
Then I realized that the same argument applies to 0455 and 1655. If you're at certain latitudes, for several months of the year, those two times can be hard to tell apart on anything but a digital watch. And hey, this is Slashdot, where not knowing which half of the day we're talking about is part of the game.
>
> If you're wearing a digital watch: it's 9:43 and 17 seconds!!! Urk!!!
Funny, that's why I wear a digital watch.
Sometimes I want to know how much time has elapsed between two events to within 500ms. And I don't want to do base-60 arithmetic in my head, because unlike the ancient Babylonians, I was raised in a base-10 world.
>
> Your Yugo example would clearly not demonsrate a "reasonable" comparison.
My Yugo example might not. But 90% of automobile advertisements rely on precisely the same tactic.
"Voted best car in its class". "Car of the year in its class". "Safest car in its class". "Most protection against side impact in its class".
These classes have some meaning - in that I'd expect a car in the "SUV" class to be safer in side impact (and more hazardous in rollover) than the "Sport" class. But a lot of the "class" division in the auto world exists so that there are a lot of #1 awards that affiliated organizations can hand out to their advertisers and sponsors.
"SCO! #1 UNIX in its class!" (The class of operating systems from companies that are litigious bastards)
>
> I'm sured there's a big flaw somewhere in there but that's just my thought...
Big Flaw: It's basically a substitution cipher. If I know what language you're writing in, I can crack it with pen and paper.
It might be effective (assuming a good enough printer, scanner, and OCR software) to pass visual inspection by humans.
Problem is, if a human noticed something suspicious ("Hey, about 10% of your Xs are malformed the same way... and 5% of your Xs are also malfo--ooooh!"), he'd just ><erox your "secret" memo and send you on your merry way, then crack your cipher in his own sweet time, report you to his superiors for followup investigation, and you'd never know you'd been compromised. You might even think your untimely demise was an accident.
So close, and yet so far, from the truth.
RTFWW. Read the fucking Weasel Word.
It says "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated [ ... ]" (Emphasis mine)
Nowhere does it say the people have any say in defining what's reasonable. The Legislature does the defining. The Executive does the searching. Where it's not clear whether a search was reasonable and a warrant was not issued, the Judicial branch determines if the Executive crossed the line.
If I made an ad that says the Yugo is the fastest car, you'd be able to sue me for false advertising. If I made an ad that says the Yugo is the fastest car in its class.
The fact that the Yugo is a Class I.3c.55.X vehicle - "Imported 4-cylinder sub-sub-sub-compacts, maximum safe speed 55 miles per hour, resale value of less than scrap value" - is a little detail I choose to leave out. Determining how many classes there are, and what class the Yugo is in, is an exercise for the student.
Likewise with "unreasonable".