> So I decided to have a little fun and fired up the development environment while my partner was running the demo and
made the changes. (Without telling anyone - even my partner.) The first time he went back to those screens he was a
bit nonplussed, but he recovered well...
That reminds me of the coolest party I ever went to. It was some sort of "Cyber/VR ravey thing", but it was 1991, and the 'net hadn't begun to be popular.
Lots of good dance music, and lots of geeks with Amigas and genlocks and what-not, so you could play volleyball on a screen, using your human body (with a bluescreen in the background) to bounce a virtual ball over a virtual net.
Anyways, the cool part was that one of these things blew up in the middle of the party, and the guy who wrote it dropped into the IDE and started coding - right there in the middle of the party - with reams and reams of code on the projection TV, and fixed the bug, surrounded by flashing lights, pumping bass, artificial fog, and everyone watching. Way fscking cool.
>>One of the funnier tests I've seen go wrong was the test launch of an AAMRAM air-to-ground
missile from a Hummer. I'm not sure the point of the test, but it was interesting. > >What I want to know is how they get that Hummer to fly.
Some guy said "Suppose we strap an AAMRAM to a Hummer, you know, like that guy in the urban legend who strapped a JATO unit to his Chevy!"
(Sounds like it worked. I mean, the Hummer ended up just like the Chevy, didn't it?:-)
> The military learned a lot about faking demos from
the Sheridan "tank" and the Sgt York gun air defense system. They don't do that any more. It hurts too much when
they get caught.
Agreed. Not just for the bad PR, but because it also hurts the troops when the weapons don't work.
> What really sucks about this case is that they were open and proactive about admitting what parts of the test were not the same as the proposed operational system, and they're STILL getting beaten up over it.
Amen, brother. Chalk up another "victory" for the media using the public's ignorance in order to further its own agenda.
> the successful destruction of
that missle (plus the decoy avoidence) is impressive - and legit.
Amen again. The test demonstrated that if you have a functioning tracking system, you can pull off kinetic kill. The next step is to build a tracking system while simultaneously refining your kinetic kill capabilities.
(Yeah, if it were me designing the thing, I'd go for "blows up somewhere near the target with sufficient force that 'close enough' is good enough to destroy the missile", as opposed to a pure kinetic kill approach. But it doesn't take away from the fact that the ability to do KK means you've built some fscking impressive tech.)
> Why not a completely dummied up program? It's happened to me. None of the real code was demoed.
You are Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, and the bastards still smacked you down for calling Gates and Co. on to task for it when they did it in court;-)
> Man, I wish I got the goatse.cx channel! >
All prolapsed rectums - ALL THE TIME!
Who are you, and how did you get your hads on the FOX new season lineup? I'll have you know, trading in SirCam-leaked information can still get you sued;-)
> >
what do you do for a living, dare i ask? >I write code
Careful where you say that, dude. There are some countries where they put people in jail for doing that sorta shit...
Hmm... we've already got the lyrics to that DeCSS song deemed a circumvention device, on the grounds that a posessor of a brain might understand it and subsequently write code based on it.
I wonder how far the MPAA is from going all the way - deeming "a brain" as a circumvention device, and criminalize posession thereof.
Besides, there's probably no greater threat to the mainstream media industry than people who prefer learning, coding, or reading books than watching movies and TV.
Only brainholders crack software! Brains are circumvention devices! Write your Congressman and demand that he get on-side and endorse the "Anencephalitics' Declaration of Universal Rights" We must Criminalize Encephaly Now!, if for no other reason than to ensure a bright future for all our beloved actors, actresses, directors, newsmakers, congressmen, senators, direct marketers, and of course, for the children!
> It's petty theft at best. So explain why the penalties are greated than what people who commit rape and 2nd
degree murder get?
Because rape and murder enhance the revenue streams from entertainment companies. Who would pay to see half our movies, three quarters of our news, and damn near all of our "reality-TV shows" be without the possibility of witnessing or hearing lurid descriptions of real or simulated rape and murder?
(Yeah, I'm agreeing with you. I'm just feeling like a supremely cynical motherfucker today;-)
"Sex and vi'lence and rock and roll... this is - serious business"
- John Cougar Mellencamp, Serious Business, 1983.
"We got the bubble-headed bleach-blonde / comes on at five
She can tell you 'bout the plane crash / with a gleam in hear eye
It's interesting when people die -
Give us dirty laundry..."
- Don Henley, Dirty Laundry, 1982
The MA show was the first "East Coast" (VCF East 1.0) version of VCF, and if attendance at the San Jose VCF 3.0 and 4.0 (and projected 5.0) is any indication, VCF East has a bright future ahead of it. Just give it a year or two.
> I'm sure that if BMG, Frost, etc were made
aware that their ads through this service were damaging their reputation with existing customers, they might
reconsider sponsoring toptext. No sponsors, no toptext.
Of course, the funny part is that BMG and the other music companies are always whining about "losing money" due to MP3 trading over P2P networks... and yet they pay for the privilege of advertising their bands in P2P apps?
> What if I want to send internal documents to a competitor, or some other outside source. Could I claim immunity if I could "fake" the
virus? Or rather, could I get the virus then purposely send an outsider a document and claim it was due to the virus? Or better yet,
ensure that you get the virus, and that the only thing it can find to send is a series of very specific documents you WANT leaked?
In a previous Slashdot post, I was in a very paranoid mood, and I speculated that this is precisely what the author of SirCam intended.
I'm reserving judgement on whether I was "being too paranoid" or "not being paranoid enough" until we find the author.
> Frankly, I don't see the difference between leaving an unencrypted document on a computer, and leaving an unshredded document in a
trash can, or sending an unencoded message over radio. It up to the author and the intended recipient to keep things secure if they
don't want their secrets to get out.
I think you're right, except I strongly dispute your use of the words "Public Domain" in the Subject: headers
If the document contains "company confidential" information, such as a trade secret like the formula for Coke, you may argue that you obtained it legally, because the sender, umm, sent it to you, even if not knowingly, and you may be free to republish that trade secret. (Interesting aside -- the Berne convention may well protect, by default, all such documents. You may be free to transcribe the trade secret in your own words, but republishing coke_formula.doc would be in violation of Coke, Inc's copyright over the "work" of its employee, even if the "work" was just a company internal memo.)
If it's material nonpublic information ("insider information") on a company, the instant you read it, you become an insider under SEC regulations. Any gains you make while trading based on this information are illegal, and the SEC can (and should) come down on you like a ton of bricks.
If it's classified information (i.e. in the.gov sense of the word, not the corporate sense of the word), you have a legal obligation not to disseminate it, you probably have a legal obligation to stop reading when you discover that it's classified, and you may even have a legal obligation to delete it (and to delete it as securely as you can), once you've stopped reading it.
Which leaves open an interesting question for you.mil and.spooky types out there -- while recipients are clearly "better off" (in the sense of "less risk to themselves from pissing off three-letter agencies by exposing their pointy-haired-bosses as clueless") by just deleting it (albeit securely), do recipients have any obligation to report the leak, and if so, to whom should it be reported? (The Catch-22 is that if you don't have clearance for the information, you probably don't have clearance to know to whom you can report it without further compromising security! Do you just put on your Groucho Marx glasses, run to the nearest U.S. embassy, and frisbee the disc over the wall?:-)
All three SirCam risks ("company confidential", "insider information", and "classified") extend to more than just today's virus/worm, BTW. Just about anyone buying a used computer or laptop runs the risk that the machine was improperly wiped, and that they may come into posession of information they wouldn't (and shouldn't) ordinarily have access to.
> Taking a course in ethics only requires you to know about them (and not even that if you don't care to get particularly good marks.) It
does not require you to actually believe them, much less act according to them.
Obvious T-shirt fodder:
"My Ethics prof was so convinced he was doing a good job, that he didn't monitor the final exam, which made it real easy for me to get an 'A' in the course by cheating!"
> Background: I worked on a project which took LIVE video from at camera at a sporting event, searched
for a "target" in the video, and if found, mapped an advertisement over the target (appropriately scaling,
rotating, etc.) and sent the generated video out to a payperview TV channel.
Fscking cool tech. Evil as hell (today it's sports, tomorrow it's the news, see that really is $POLITICIAN in $BAD_PLACE! We have video to prove it!), but I don't blame you for jumping at the chance to work with cool toys;-)
The funniest thing I saw recently was an auto race where the cars kept driving past this billboard. The funny thing was, the billboard appeared only in one camera angle, and cast no shadow. Sometimes, the billboard was blank (probably because I was watching an over-the-air broadcast, not cable.) Translation: somebody goofed. (Either that, or there was a Glitch in The Matrix, and I'm waking up:)
Another cute trick comes from F1 - for several years, advertisers have laid down billboards on the grass surrounding the racetrack. The cute part is that the ads have been stretched/distorted so that they appear "flat" when viewed from the camera that happens to cover that turn. (And really weird when another camera happens to catch a glimpse of them:) Basically, the inverse of what you'd do in GIMP (screw Photoshop;-) to make a billboard that you took a picture of at an oddball angle look like you were viewing it face-on. No computers required. (Though it'd be trivial to digitally-insert new ads on top of these, since the shapes are known in advance to be "nearly-perfect rectangles surrounded by green" to any software fed input from the camera.)
Prediction: Part of the fun of watching live sports and news (they digitally-edited Times Square for New Year's Eve, Y2K) will soon be figuring out how much of what you're seeing is "live", and how much is digitally-generated.
> > I won't even bother tearing most of these apart, I leave that to a
kindergarden class.
What the hell, I just graduated, so here's my shot at it. (Besides, I gotta do something to make up for my shameless "Hi! How Are You?" posts!)
In the spirit of fairness, I'll address these to a Windoze audience. Obviously, going open source is the solution that allows you to avoid BSA harassment and remain legal. But since the BSA lives in a non-Open world, for purposes of this argument, I'll fight their arguments on their turf.
> 9. Proper software management saves time, money and makes employees more productive.
Arguably true. If you have processes in place for this, you've probably got decent process in place elsewhere in your organization. But that's a benefit to process, not to legal software:)
> 8. Illegal software is one of the prime sources of computer viruses that can destroy your
company's valuable data.
ROFLMAO. Those goddamn "Elf Bowling" games are a prime source of viral infection. Warez aren't. Any warez group with sufficiently poor QA that they release warez with viruses will be hax0red into oblivion by their fellow pirates within seconds;-)
> 7. Illegal software is more likely to fail, leaving your company?s computers and their information
useless.
Not. See #8. I pay for my games, and then I apply the cracks/patches. Why? Because they're often more functional when cracked - for instance, I can use my CD-ROM drive to play background music, rather than having the disk in the drive.
(And back to the more likely case -- in what way does installing the OEM version of Windoze from CD onto a freshly-FDISK'ed drive, compared with Joe Sixpack, who gets his installs from D3LL with an extra 100 megabytes of vendor-supplied bloatware, half of which doubles as spyware, decrease the reliability of a system?
Indeed, I've seen far more data loss from "legal" vendor installation practices, such as "recovery CDs" that really mean "reformat and start over". Ghosted drive images (combined with partitioning strategies, such as a 1-2G partition for the OS, and the rest of the drive for data) provide real recovery, licensing be damned.
In this case, being legal (i.e. owning a license for a Windoze install and Norton Ghost, rather than pirating both products), could be every bit as good (from a data loss perspective) as piracy, but the BSA types have chosen that the default way to "be legal" (i.e. "recovery CDs" keyed to BIOS and/or PSNs) is the less-reliable option.
In their infinite wisdom, BSA has encouraged OEMs to make "piracy" (remember the controversy over Ghosting images being a violation of the EULA?) the better option from a reliability/reproducibility point of view. (Or as one sysadmin put it: "Yeah, right, like fuck I'm gonna install the same damn OS from the same fuckin' CD 10 times on 10 identical machines, especially since I just paid for 10 fuckin' OS licenses!!!")
> 6. You can expect no warranties or support for illegal software and won?t have access to
inexpensive upgrades.
Hands up, anyone who's actually gotten support for products like M$Word or Windows.
And to the both of you who raised your hands, keep your hands up if you think you got better support through the vendor than you would have if you'd called the Psychic Friends Hotline.
> A couple of bits of broken mirror, a pair of speakers to drive X-Y deflection, a laser pointer, and the side of a
building...
LaserMAME. Laser projection isn't as simple as it looks, and it's taken about 20 years for the tech to get cheap enough to filter down to the geek level, but it's here.
(For the simpler graphics of SpaceWar, it could probably be done for less than $1000 in used/reconditioned parts, and would make an excellent science project if you've got high-school age sproggen.)
> Has to be said: they're only restrained if someone sues them. There are constant constitutional challenges of
federal and provincial government actions. These people aren't all idiots, they do know when they're doing
something unconstitutional; they just try anyway and see if someone tries to stop them. If not, they win.
...and this differs from the American system how?;-)
(But yeah, by "limited by the Constitution", I really meant "They can pass any legislation they want, but are obliged to dissolve the government and call an election within five years, because if they don't, the Governor-General will do it for them." Of course, when the opposition parties take 5 years to reorganize themselves after each election defeat, you can get a perpetual mandate by simply calling elections every 3 years and splitting the opposition vote, taking advantage of the first-past-the-post system. This is much better than pronouncing yourself Emperor For Life, because you get all the benefits of absolute power while remaining comfortably within the bounds of the Constitution. Well, better if you're the Emperor, anyways;-)
> An excellent example of a post that is both incredibly funny, and scary as well....
Prediction: SirCam turns into another "All Your Base" phenomenon, and while you're laughing now, in six weeks you, and half of Slashdot, will be hunting me down with intent to terminate with extreme prejudice. The last words I hear will be "Hi! How are you! I send you this bullet to get your advice on how to get the fad to stop!";-)
(Hmm, or maybe not. Maybe the last words the Iceman heard before he got frozen into the glacier were "Ook! Og send you this arrow...")
> It's amazing what playing those old games brings back. If I fire up MAME with any given ROM, chances are I've seen
the game and can tell you exactly what I was doing at that point in my life.
Shameless plug alert: If you're in the Bay Area, you can get the real thing in about six weeks:
CA Extreme, September 15-16, in San Jose. Two days, all the classic arcade machines you can play. There's even a bunch of guys with a laser projector hooked up to vector games... (C'mon, what geek didn't fantasize about being able to play Tempest using a low-lying cloud as a projection screen, FAA regs be damned;-)
And under the same roof at the same time, Vintage Computer Fest 5.0. The name says it all, tons of stuff to dr00l over.
> In the US, one of the main reasons the DMCA seemed to have happened in the form it
did is the ridiculous influence of corporate money over our elected officials. Do politicians in
Canada face a similar environment?
Yes and no.
"No", in that corporate lobbyists - and for that matter, nobody - has any power to see that bad law isn't passed, or that good law is passed - in Canada. If it's brought to the House by the governing party, it passes. If it's brought to the House by an opposing party, it fails. So no, the MPs aren't under any pressure from lobbyists, because...
"Yes", in that, the MPs' votes don't matter. The Canadian system has a tradition of extremely strong party discipline, so that when the government (typically the members of the Cabinet) drafts a law and brings it to the House for a vote, it's guaranteed to become law.
As such, the debating and voting are merely formalities, their results predetermined, because no MP dares to propose meaningful amendments or oppose passage of the legislation. For an MP in the governing party, it's literally a career-ending move - and often comes with expulsion from the party, meaning that one is guaranteed not to win (nor even to be able to run) in the next election. Because of that, for an MP in the opposing party, well, who cares. If the votes of more than 50% of the MPs are known in advance (and they are), the result is known in advance.
So, all the "influence" and lobbying takes place at the Cabinet level, on the 10-12 people whose opinions actually matter, and everything's baked in from that point onward. The "debates" in the House of Commons are irrelevant, as are the opposition parties are irrelevant, and for that matter, so are the MPs.
A majority government (which is where Canada presently has) in a parliamentary democracy has been described, and not too inacurately, as electing a benevolent (i.e. still restrained by the Constitution) dictatorship for five years.
Which is a long way of saying "stick a fork in legal fair use in Canada, 'cuz it's done."
> The Internet is an important cultural phenomenon, but that doesn't excuse its failure to comply with basic economic laws," said Thomas Nolle, a New Jersey telecommunications consultant. "The problem is that it was devised by a bunch of hippie anarchists who didn't have a strong profit motive..."
No, Mr. Nolle, the historical fact that it was devised by a bunch of military strategists (who just happened to design something that was also very useful to hippie anarchists;-) is the reason why it fails to comply with basic economic laws.
(Plus, someone should tell him that the "laws" of economics are wholly unlike the laws of physics, and one of those "laws" says that Shit Happens when you introduce disruptive technologies into a marketplace.)
And finally, the basic economic law of supply and demand doesn't seem to have fallen by the wayside.
Take Napster (out of its misery, please;-). When the price was zero, and the product was freely-copyable MP3 files of every artist under the sun, lots of people "bought" Napster's product. Now that external factors have raised the price, and reduced the value of the product (DRM-encumbered.nap files from a few select artists), there's less demand for Napster.
Were there costs? Sure - bandwidth costs money. But telcos' overbuilding of the backbone (combined with the failure to bring broadband to the home) was the fault of a poor business decision -- the assumption that there'd be consumer demand for the extra bandwidth.
Had there been demand for the bandwidth (incidentally, something like the old Napster would have been a great source of demand!), and had they been able to deliver that bandwidth to the home, the telcos would have made a fortune.
Don't confuse poor business decisions with the end of economics.
Windoze only, 65M playable demo available online. IMHO well worth the download.
It looks like these guys are trying to do for the first-person shooter what "Flight Simulator" did for the first-person-flying-game.
As a civvie, I was impressed. The thing that impressed me the most? The fact that I had to figure out how to achieve the objectives for myself. So I did what I'd imagine most Privates do in such a situation - said "holy shit, everyone's running that-a-way, and so's the Corporal. Better catch up with them or I'm toast out here!". So I followed along with the group, maintaining separation between units (just as the AI was doing), and trying to find cover where I could (again, as the AI was doing), while taking down a bad guy or two ("Holy shit, that guy's shooting at me! Good thing I got him first!"), and not get shot.
15 minutes later, I failed in that third objective, which is probably what you'd expect from a civilian thrown into his first firefight.
But it was one intense 15 minutes. Definitely the closest I ever wanna get to the real thing.
Slashdot Mirror
That reminds me of the coolest party I ever went to. It was some sort of "Cyber/VR ravey thing", but it was 1991, and the 'net hadn't begun to be popular.
Lots of good dance music, and lots of geeks with Amigas and genlocks and what-not, so you could play volleyball on a screen, using your human body (with a bluescreen in the background) to bounce a virtual ball over a virtual net.
Anyways, the cool part was that one of these things blew up in the middle of the party, and the guy who wrote it dropped into the IDE and started coding - right there in the middle of the party - with reams and reams of code on the projection TV, and fixed the bug, surrounded by flashing lights, pumping bass, artificial fog, and everyone watching. Way fscking cool.
>
>What I want to know is how they get that Hummer to fly.
Some guy said "Suppose we strap an AAMRAM to a Hummer, you know, like that guy in the urban legend who strapped a JATO unit to his Chevy!"
(Sounds like it worked. I mean, the Hummer ended up just like the Chevy, didn't it? :-)
Agreed. Not just for the bad PR, but because it also hurts the troops when the weapons don't work.
> What really sucks about this case is that they were open and proactive about admitting what parts of the test were not the same as the proposed operational system, and they're STILL getting beaten up over it.
Amen, brother. Chalk up another "victory" for the media using the public's ignorance in order to further its own agenda.
> the successful destruction of that missle (plus the decoy avoidence) is impressive - and legit.
Amen again. The test demonstrated that if you have a functioning tracking system, you can pull off kinetic kill. The next step is to build a tracking system while simultaneously refining your kinetic kill capabilities.
(Yeah, if it were me designing the thing, I'd go for "blows up somewhere near the target with sufficient force that 'close enough' is good enough to destroy the missile", as opposed to a pure kinetic kill approach. But it doesn't take away from the fact that the ability to do KK means you've built some fscking impressive tech.)
You are Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, and the bastards still smacked you down for calling Gates and Co. on to task for it when they did it in court ;-)
> All prolapsed rectums - ALL THE TIME!
Who are you, and how did you get your hads on the FOX new season lineup? I'll have you know, trading in SirCam-leaked information can still get you sued ;-)
>I write code
Careful where you say that, dude. There are some countries where they put people in jail for doing that sorta shit...
Hmm... we've already got the lyrics to that DeCSS song deemed a circumvention device, on the grounds that a posessor of a brain might understand it and subsequently write code based on it.
I wonder how far the MPAA is from going all the way - deeming "a brain" as a circumvention device, and criminalize posession thereof.
Besides, there's probably no greater threat to the mainstream media industry than people who prefer learning, coding, or reading books than watching movies and TV.
Only brainholders crack software! Brains are circumvention devices! Write your Congressman and demand that he get on-side and endorse the "Anencephalitics' Declaration of Universal Rights" We must Criminalize Encephaly Now!, if for no other reason than to ensure a bright future for all our beloved actors, actresses, directors, newsmakers, congressmen, senators, direct marketers, and of course, for the children!
Because rape and murder enhance the revenue streams from entertainment companies. Who would pay to see half our movies, three quarters of our news, and damn near all of our "reality-TV shows" be without the possibility of witnessing or hearing lurid descriptions of real or simulated rape and murder?
(Yeah, I'm agreeing with you. I'm just feeling like a supremely cynical motherfucker today ;-)
"Sex and vi'lence and rock and roll... this is - serious business"
- John Cougar Mellencamp, Serious Business, 1983.
"We got the bubble-headed bleach-blonde / comes on at five
She can tell you 'bout the plane crash / with a gleam in hear eye
It's interesting when people die -
Give us dirty laundry..."
- Don Henley, Dirty Laundry, 1982
Really? Where do you keep the infinitely-long paper tape? ;-)
The MA show was the first "East Coast" (VCF East 1.0) version of VCF, and if attendance at the San Jose VCF 3.0 and 4.0 (and projected 5.0) is any indication, VCF East has a bright future ahead of it. Just give it a year or two.
Of course, the funny part is that BMG and the other music companies are always whining about "losing money" due to MP3 trading over P2P networks... and yet they pay for the privilege of advertising their bands in P2P apps?
Singularity. Kettle. Black.
In a previous Slashdot post, I was in a very paranoid mood, and I speculated that this is precisely what the author of SirCam intended.
I'm reserving judgement on whether I was "being too paranoid" or "not being paranoid enough" until we find the author.
I think you're right, except I strongly dispute your use of the words "Public Domain" in the Subject: headers
If the document contains "company confidential" information, such as a trade secret like the formula for Coke, you may argue that you obtained it legally, because the sender, umm, sent it to you, even if not knowingly, and you may be free to republish that trade secret. (Interesting aside -- the Berne convention may well protect, by default, all such documents. You may be free to transcribe the trade secret in your own words, but republishing coke_formula.doc would be in violation of Coke, Inc's copyright over the "work" of its employee, even if the "work" was just a company internal memo.)
If it's material nonpublic information ("insider information") on a company, the instant you read it, you become an insider under SEC regulations. Any gains you make while trading based on this information are illegal, and the SEC can (and should) come down on you like a ton of bricks.
If it's classified information (i.e. in the .gov sense of the word, not the corporate sense of the word), you have a legal obligation not to disseminate it, you probably have a legal obligation to stop reading when you discover that it's classified, and you may even have a legal obligation to delete it (and to delete it as securely as you can), once you've stopped reading it.
Which leaves open an interesting question for you .mil and .spooky types out there -- while recipients are clearly "better off" (in the sense of "less risk to themselves from pissing off three-letter agencies by exposing their pointy-haired-bosses as clueless") by just deleting it (albeit securely), do recipients have any obligation to report the leak, and if so, to whom should it be reported? (The Catch-22 is that if you don't have clearance for the information, you probably don't have clearance to know to whom you can report it without further compromising security! Do you just put on your Groucho Marx glasses, run to the nearest U.S. embassy, and frisbee the disc over the wall? :-)
All three SirCam risks ("company confidential", "insider information", and "classified") extend to more than just today's virus/worm, BTW. Just about anyone buying a used computer or laptop runs the risk that the machine was improperly wiped, and that they may come into posession of information they wouldn't (and shouldn't) ordinarily have access to.
Obvious T-shirt fodder:
"My Ethics prof was so convinced he was doing a good job, that he didn't monitor the final exam, which made it real easy for me to get an 'A' in the course by cheating!"
Fscking cool tech. Evil as hell (today it's sports, tomorrow it's the news, see that really is $POLITICIAN in $BAD_PLACE! We have video to prove it!), but I don't blame you for jumping at the chance to work with cool toys ;-)
The funniest thing I saw recently was an auto race where the cars kept driving past this billboard. The funny thing was, the billboard appeared only in one camera angle, and cast no shadow. Sometimes, the billboard was blank (probably because I was watching an over-the-air broadcast, not cable.) Translation: somebody goofed. (Either that, or there was a Glitch in The Matrix, and I'm waking up :)
Another cute trick comes from F1 - for several years, advertisers have laid down billboards on the grass surrounding the racetrack. The cute part is that the ads have been stretched/distorted so that they appear "flat" when viewed from the camera that happens to cover that turn. (And really weird when another camera happens to catch a glimpse of them :) Basically, the inverse of what you'd do in GIMP (screw Photoshop ;-) to make a billboard that you took a picture of at an oddball angle look like you were viewing it face-on. No computers required. (Though it'd be trivial to digitally-insert new ads on top of these, since the shapes are known in advance to be "nearly-perfect rectangles surrounded by green" to any software fed input from the camera.)
Prediction: Part of the fun of watching live sports and news (they digitally-edited Times Square for New Year's Eve, Y2K) will soon be figuring out how much of what you're seeing is "live", and how much is digitally-generated.
What the hell, I just graduated, so here's my shot at it. (Besides, I gotta do something to make up for my shameless "Hi! How Are You?" posts!)
In the spirit of fairness, I'll address these to a Windoze audience. Obviously, going open source is the solution that allows you to avoid BSA harassment and remain legal. But since the BSA lives in a non-Open world, for purposes of this argument, I'll fight their arguments on their turf.
> 9. Proper software management saves time, money and makes employees more productive.
Arguably true. If you have processes in place for this, you've probably got decent process in place elsewhere in your organization. But that's a benefit to process, not to legal software :)
> 8. Illegal software is one of the prime sources of computer viruses that can destroy your company's valuable data.
ROFLMAO. Those goddamn "Elf Bowling" games are a prime source of viral infection. Warez aren't. Any warez group with sufficiently poor QA that they release warez with viruses will be hax0red into oblivion by their fellow pirates within seconds ;-)
> 7. Illegal software is more likely to fail, leaving your company?s computers and their information useless.
Not. See #8. I pay for my games, and then I apply the cracks/patches. Why? Because they're often more functional when cracked - for instance, I can use my CD-ROM drive to play background music, rather than having the disk in the drive.
(And back to the more likely case -- in what way does installing the OEM version of Windoze from CD onto a freshly-FDISK'ed drive, compared with Joe Sixpack, who gets his installs from D3LL with an extra 100 megabytes of vendor-supplied bloatware, half of which doubles as spyware, decrease the reliability of a system?
Indeed, I've seen far more data loss from "legal" vendor installation practices, such as "recovery CDs" that really mean "reformat and start over". Ghosted drive images (combined with partitioning strategies, such as a 1-2G partition for the OS, and the rest of the drive for data) provide real recovery, licensing be damned.
In this case, being legal (i.e. owning a license for a Windoze install and Norton Ghost, rather than pirating both products), could be every bit as good (from a data loss perspective) as piracy, but the BSA types have chosen that the default way to "be legal" (i.e. "recovery CDs" keyed to BIOS and/or PSNs) is the less-reliable option.
In their infinite wisdom, BSA has encouraged OEMs to make "piracy" (remember the controversy over Ghosting images being a violation of the EULA?) the better option from a reliability/reproducibility point of view. (Or as one sysadmin put it: "Yeah, right, like fuck I'm gonna install the same damn OS from the same fuckin' CD 10 times on 10 identical machines, especially since I just paid for 10 fuckin' OS licenses!!!")
> 6. You can expect no warranties or support for illegal software and won?t have access to inexpensive upgrades.
Hands up, anyone who's actually gotten support for products like M$Word or Windows.
And to the both of you who raised your hands, keep your hands up if you think you got better support through the vendor than you would have if you'd called the Psychic Friends Hotline.
(Someone send me this box of rattlesnakes to get the fad to stop!)
I send you this letter in order to have your revenues!
LaserMAME. Laser projection isn't as simple as it looks, and it's taken about 20 years for the tech to get cheap enough to filter down to the geek level, but it's here.
(For the simpler graphics of SpaceWar, it could probably be done for less than $1000 in used/reconditioned parts, and would make an excellent science project if you've got high-school age sproggen.)
(But yeah, by "limited by the Constitution", I really meant "They can pass any legislation they want, but are obliged to dissolve the government and call an election within five years, because if they don't, the Governor-General will do it for them." Of course, when the opposition parties take 5 years to reorganize themselves after each election defeat, you can get a perpetual mandate by simply calling elections every 3 years and splitting the opposition vote, taking advantage of the first-past-the-post system. This is much better than pronouncing yourself Emperor For Life, because you get all the benefits of absolute power while remaining comfortably within the bounds of the Constitution. Well, better if you're the Emperor, anyways ;-)
Prediction: SirCam turns into another "All Your Base" phenomenon, and while you're laughing now, in six weeks you, and half of Slashdot, will be hunting me down with intent to terminate with extreme prejudice. The last words I hear will be "Hi! How are you! I send you this bullet to get your advice on how to get the fad to stop!" ;-)
(Hmm, or maybe not. Maybe the last words the Iceman heard before he got frozen into the glacier were "Ook! Og send you this arrow...")
Shameless plug alert: If you're in the Bay Area, you can get the real thing in about six weeks:
CA Extreme, September 15-16, in San Jose. Two days, all the classic arcade machines you can play. There's even a bunch of guys with a laser projector hooked up to vector games... (C'mon, what geek didn't fantasize about being able to play Tempest using a low-lying cloud as a projection screen, FAA regs be damned ;-)
And under the same roof at the same time, Vintage Computer Fest 5.0. The name says it all, tons of stuff to dr00l over.
Yes and no.
"No", in that corporate lobbyists - and for that matter, nobody - has any power to see that bad law isn't passed, or that good law is passed - in Canada. If it's brought to the House by the governing party, it passes. If it's brought to the House by an opposing party, it fails. So no, the MPs aren't under any pressure from lobbyists, because...
"Yes", in that, the MPs' votes don't matter. The Canadian system has a tradition of extremely strong party discipline, so that when the government (typically the members of the Cabinet) drafts a law and brings it to the House for a vote, it's guaranteed to become law.
As such, the debating and voting are merely formalities, their results predetermined, because no MP dares to propose meaningful amendments or oppose passage of the legislation. For an MP in the governing party, it's literally a career-ending move - and often comes with expulsion from the party, meaning that one is guaranteed not to win (nor even to be able to run) in the next election. Because of that, for an MP in the opposing party, well, who cares. If the votes of more than 50% of the MPs are known in advance (and they are), the result is known in advance.
So, all the "influence" and lobbying takes place at the Cabinet level, on the 10-12 people whose opinions actually matter, and everything's baked in from that point onward. The "debates" in the House of Commons are irrelevant, as are the opposition parties are irrelevant, and for that matter, so are the MPs.
A majority government (which is where Canada presently has) in a parliamentary democracy has been described, and not too inacurately, as electing a benevolent (i.e. still restrained by the Constitution) dictatorship for five years.
Which is a long way of saying "stick a fork in legal fair use in Canada, 'cuz it's done."
I send you this nanotube in order to have your advice!
No, Mr. Nolle, the historical fact that it was devised by a bunch of military strategists (who just happened to design something that was also very useful to hippie anarchists ;-) is the reason why it fails to comply with basic economic laws.
(Plus, someone should tell him that the "laws" of economics are wholly unlike the laws of physics, and one of those "laws" says that Shit Happens when you introduce disruptive technologies into a marketplace.)
And finally, the basic economic law of supply and demand doesn't seem to have fallen by the wayside.
Take Napster (out of its misery, please ;-). When the price was zero, and the product was freely-copyable MP3 files of every artist under the sun, lots of people "bought" Napster's product. Now that external factors have raised the price, and reduced the value of the product (DRM-encumbered .nap files from a few select artists), there's less demand for Napster.
Were there costs? Sure - bandwidth costs money. But telcos' overbuilding of the backbone (combined with the failure to bring broadband to the home) was the fault of a poor business decision -- the assumption that there'd be consumer demand for the extra bandwidth.
Had there been demand for the bandwidth (incidentally, something like the old Napster would have been a great source of demand!), and had they been able to deliver that bandwidth to the home, the telcos would have made a fortune.
Don't confuse poor business decisions with the end of economics.
Insert plug for a game called Operation Flashpoint.
Windoze only, 65M playable demo available online. IMHO well worth the download.
It looks like these guys are trying to do for the first-person shooter what "Flight Simulator" did for the first-person-flying-game.
As a civvie, I was impressed. The thing that impressed me the most? The fact that I had to figure out how to achieve the objectives for myself. So I did what I'd imagine most Privates do in such a situation - said "holy shit, everyone's running that-a-way, and so's the Corporal. Better catch up with them or I'm toast out here!". So I followed along with the group, maintaining separation between units (just as the AI was doing), and trying to find cover where I could (again, as the AI was doing), while taking down a bad guy or two ("Holy shit, that guy's shooting at me! Good thing I got him first!"), and not get shot. 15 minutes later, I failed in that third objective, which is probably what you'd expect from a civilian thrown into his first firefight.
But it was one intense 15 minutes. Definitely the closest I ever wanna get to the real thing.