> It's the local government's responsibility to deal with speeding. It's a crime and the car rental company doesn't have any jurisdiction in
handing out citations.
They didn't cite him. They just charged him $150 per occurrence, as per their rental agreement.
Personally, I think the rental company's being more honest than the cops -- most speeding tickets are handed out to enhance city revenues, not enhance motorist safety.
At least the rental department's being honest about it. ("It's got nothing to do with the police, we just want the money")
> As I recall, on the big, nearby Supernova 1987A, a neutrino burst was detected. My question is, did anyone get the timing nailed down
from this event well enough toconfirm that the neutrinos were a little late?
I don't think we really knew when we SN1987A visibly started brightening - IIRC we saw it after the fact.
In any event, given that neutrinos could pass through the shell of the star faster (i.e., almost the speed of light) than the star could tear itself apart (i.e. minutes/hours), I'd expect the neutrino burst to be observed before the light from the supernova.
(That is, the light travels faster than the neutrinos, but the neutrinos get out of the supernova before the shock wave hit the star's surface.)
Come to think of it, if I were running SNO or Super-Kamiokande, and I saw multiple events all within a few seconds of each other, I'd eliminate the possibility of detector error ASAP, and then look at the angle of incidence (all the neutrinos would appear to be coming from a point source) and start phoning every telescope operator on (and off:) the planet to look in that general direction for something going boom.
> What has been found in the experiment is that [the neutrino]
also has a *rest* mass (ie. a mass at zero velocity).
Great, all I need is a piece of lead several light-years thick, and I can then melt it down and extract the at-rest neutrinos to make neutrinonium (as long as I'm fantasizing, I wonder if a lump composed of neutrinos at rest would shimmer or somehow change color as the component neutrinos oscillated between three states;-)
(Seriously, mad props to the SNO guys. I remember hearing about the Solar Neutrino Problem years ago, and hoping that Sudbury would get the funding to actually carry the experiment through to its conclusion.)
> Last time this topic came up, 6 months ago or so, I recall large numbers of heavily anti-Union comments. I wonder if, given
the dramatic change in the jobs market over the last 6 months in the US especially, [... ] whether attitudes today will be more pro-union than they
were?
Perhaps those of us who oppose unions on the (ideological) basis that a free[er] market is a Good Thing, will merely stick to our principles.
That's what principles are about.
I hold to the principle that capitalism, through the mechanism of "creative destruction", is a Good Thing that leads to higher standards of living for large numbers of people over long periods of time.
When (not "if" - when) my skills become obsolete, I will either live off my accumulated savings, acquire new skills that aren't obsolete, or starve. (Possibly all three at once;-)
What I won't be doing is deciding that welfare rates suddenly ought to be doubled, income taxes on anyone making more than me tripled, and wishing that I'd had a union to protect my obsolete hide before I got canned.
I decided a long time ago - as a matter of principle - that I was willing to live by the sword; I must (on pain of logical inconsistency) be willing to die by the sword.
(Well, Adam Smith's invisible hand that wields the sword, at any rate;)
> A union
worker must move any computer equipment that you cannot carry under one arm.
If I worked there, just for spite, I'd case mod my full-tower with a handle, and walk off with it under my arm. Ditto my monitor - maybe a strap from a backpack and some clever use of D-rings.
If they gave me static, I'd disassemble the full-tower and move it, component by component, to the new cube.
Fsck 'em if they can't take a joke.
(Of course, I'd also make sure I had a low vandalism deductible on my car...)
> > Richard Chambers, TVA's inspector general, said: "If you're allowing others to tap into your computer, you have got some additional risk there." >
> This sounds suspiciously like a comment from someone who has no idea what SETI@Home does, and is condemning a random program that
happened to access the Internet.
1) You're right. There's probably a much greater security thread from spyware that comes with things like RealPlayer, and/or users installing stuff like AudioGalaxy or Comet Cursor, etc. on their machines.
2) He's also right. Maybe for the TVA, this is a little paranoid, but a keyword search on "covert channels" provides some insight.
Suppose you were a KGB agent assigned to find out when the TVA was most worried about blackouts. You'd be very interested in knowing when large numbers of TVA employees were working overtime at the head office.
Rather than hax0r the head office's computers (exposing yourself to risk), or have an agent staking out the head office (exposing the agent to risk), you'd just eyeball SETI@Home's publicly-accessible stats.
You could then deduce that something was FUBAR in Tennesee when "Team TVA", which was churning out one unit every 70 minutes from 5:00pm to 9:00am, dropped their stats precipitously - say, damn near nothing getting done until 11:00 pm, one unit every 120 minutes from 11:00 pm to 1:00am, and only going to the "regular" 70 minutes per unit from 1:00 am to 9:00am.
In fact, in the simplified case I've specified above, you could not only make an educated guess as to how many employees were working overtime, and for how long, you could even make an educated guess as to what hardware platform was being used by The Guy Who Stayed Until 1:00 In The Morning.
Like I said, for the TVA, this is probably paranoia. But for other agencies, information leaked by covert channels can be deadly serious.
(In business too -- at a small enough company, suppose you saw similar data patterns and you knew what CPU power the CFO's PC had. If the CFO's up all night, every night, on the last week of the quarter, maybe he's desperately trying to make up the numbers. Such information could be worth millions of dollars, and it wouldn't even be insider trading, because you're only making an educated guess based on the working hours of the CFO.)
I hate to side with an ignorant bureaucrat, but in this case, he's right. (Even if, in all likelihood, he hasn't the faintest clue as to why he's right;-)
> I guess mindshare is everything... and MP3 has it. Sorry AOL/MS.
That's the part that still scares me.
If MS really wanted to take over the world, they'd do to MP3 what they did to AVI.
That is, they'd use the same file extension to represent dozens of codecs, many of which were proprietary.
Download an arbitrary.AVI and ask yourself what you really have. It's pretty tough. YUV? IV31, IV41, IV51? 2.63? MPEG4v2? MPEG4v3? DivX;-)
Attempt to play an AVI with even one byte screwed up in Windoze Media Player, and it says "Nope, I won't even show you the video up until the corrupt part." (Sometimes you can get around this with File->Properties->Preview in the 'doze explorer, which just shows how brain-dead WindozeMediaPlayer is).
So WTF does this have to do with MP3? Plenty.
People like to swap files that end in the.MP3 extension. All Bill has to do is pay Thompson enough money, and buy the right to stuff whatever crap he wants into a file ending in.MP3, and stuff whatever brains he wants into Windoze Media Player to say "Ah, the file ends in.MP3, but it's actually a WinMedia or RealVideo file. I'll decode it accordingly".
On the encoding front, it'd be easy for him to do the same thing - MP3Pro (different codec, same file extension, albeit with some backwards compatibility) from Thompson is already doing this. Bill could make his "music recorder" tool record in a proprietary codec, but save the file with the.MP3 extension.
Within a month, clueless luzers would flood the pool of MP3s with these Windoze-only files that happen to end in ".MP3", and we'd be in the.AVI situation - "Damn, this thing won't play, what the hell codec do I need today" all over again.
With.AVI, it was inevitable, as we had CPU speeds going from 16 MHz to 1.6 GHz - a factor of 1000 - and similar growth in hard drive sizes. We really can do better video today that we couldn't have fantasized about when the first.AVI codecs were introduced.
But music? No thanks. MP3 at 320 is indistinguishable (for me and anyone I know) from CD. For most folks, MP3 at 192 is "good enough". For anyone - by definition - a lossless compression of the original.WAV is "perfect". We already have most, if not all, of the technology we're ever likely to need when it comes to "How can I make this compressed bitstream sound like the 2-channel stereo recorded on this CD".
All that's left is to screw it up by embedding it in various DRM schemes. I dunno about you, but I think I'll pass on that.
> I just hope that Microsoft doesn't take control of the online porn industry, it's shady enough as is
He: "Hey, baby, where do you want to go today?"
She: "Ooooh, nice glasses! I love short men! Please fsck me!"
He: "Fsck? No way, baby, haven't you heard, you can get cancer with that stuff? It's defrag.exe or nothin'..."
She: "I suppose I have to register first, huh? Still, that's an Xcellent Penis, I'd pay $30 a month for some of that lovin', hon..."
He: "Yeah baby, you know it's cheaper to get it this way than to buy it outright... 'sides you couldn't afford me without the subscription..."
She: "God I love it when you talk dirty..."
[ fade to black ]
Re:Let's just drag Roddenberry's name thru the mud
on
Andromeda
·
· Score: 2
>"Gene Roddenberry's Napkin Sketching At 2am; Andromeda"
True enough.
But it's on FOX (broadcast TV) where I live. I don't watch enough TV to justify the cost of cable.
Sure, Andromeda is cheezy, but compared to [each month's variant of] "Survivor" and "Millionaire", I hope they drag Gene's name through the mud a few more times.
> I seem to remember a philosopher friend of mine once telling me
that [Nietzche] is quite often misunderstood, and i'm wondering if his philosophies have been bastardized for the
purpose of this "race" in the show...
Utterly so.
But in defence of the scriptwriters, any large socio/political group that misunderstands Nietzche is likely to turn out exactly as the show's Nietzchaens did.
Which is to say, yeah, the Nietzcheans in the show have Nietzche all wrong. But they're pretty much what I'd expect a bunch of Nietzche-misinterpreters to act like, so IMHO the scriptwriters got it right.
(Of course, whether the scriptwriters intended to get it right, is another question entirely. My hunch is that it's just an accident;-)
> All they are doing is passing people through msn.com first before sending them to any other MS web site. If I had a big
organization with 20 different sites, I would do the same thing. It makes sense - you track total usage of your web
properties in one place.
...and if M$ had hired Doubleclick to pass everyone through doubleclick.net first, before sending them to any other MS-owned website, it'd also somehow be a Good Thing?!
What I wanna know: Is there an msid.msn.com cookie set on boot/install these days?
Next time you install W98, boot to raw DOS. Poke around the filesystem with a hex editor and examine the cookies. You'll find one set for whatever username and workgroup you entered at install time, pointing to our old friend http://msid.msn.com.
Under W98/IE4, deleting these files, rebooting, and re-entering Windows, the cookie data was restored automatically, even though this box had never been connected to any network.
Disclaimer: I wasn't able to reproduce this today on a W98SE/IE5 box. I know I did it under 98, because I ranted about it on Slashdot last year when the GUID-leak stories came out.
Can anyone confirm/deny this type of behavior on XP?
A DejaGoogle search revealed tracking through msid.msn.com as far back as 1997.
I think my "cookie kept coming back" had something to do with RegWiz, which created such a cookie before you even registered? (And in my case, even though I hadn't registered:)
So today they generate and use an MSID instead of the HWID. It's still all about tracking.
Speaking for myself, I firewalled msid.msn.com a few years ago and never missed it.
> The Supreme Court decision concerns surveillance of an intrusive nature that gives police access to
information they would not otherwise have been able to gain without physical access. Carnivore has
absolutely nothing to do with such kinds of surveillance. Carnivore is nothing more than a glorified packet
sniffer.
Huh?
It's a packet sniffer. But you have to have physical access to the ISP's datacenter to use it.
The real question (arguably unanswered) is whether or not the part of your TCP/IP connection between your home and the first router away from your ISP constitutes part of your home.
The argument can be made that it does - they could just wiretap you. But they don't, choosing to use the ISP's outbound pipe to wiretap everyone and (so they tell us:) then throw away the data from everyone but you. They do this for the sake of convenience (It's arguably harder to wiretap a cablemodem. Or optical fiber to the home. Or line-of-sight laser to the home...).
That is, Carnivore is just an easy way (using means not available to the general public, like sitting down in an ISP's datacenter) of getting access to your data stream (which is information they would not otherwise be able to gain without having to) wiretap you (which would typically require physical access to your property or the wires/cables/lasers/EM-fields connecting thereto or emanating therefrom).
I don't know how far that'd fly in court, but it sounds like a non-frivolous argument using the recent SCOTUS ruling as precedent. I don't know how they'd rule, but I'd think the Justices would have to think about it for a while before ruling either way.
> Remember the "Communication Decency Act" internet censorship bill? This was foisted on us by liberal
Democrat, former Senator Exon.
The one X'd Exon, he's an ass,
The two X'd Exxon, that's a gas,
But there's one thing you can bet your necks on,
You'll never see a three-XXX'd Exon.
(Ah, fond memories indeed.)
Re:Read the decisioRe:Unreasonable Search etv
on
Carnivore To Die?
·
· Score: 2
> Where, as here, the Government uses a device that is not in gen-eral [sic] public use, to
explore details of a private home that would previ-ously [sic] have been unknowable without
physical intrusion, the surveil-lance [sic] is a Fourth Amendment "search," and is
presumptively unreasonable without a warrant. Pp. 3-13.
So, if the Feebs GPL Carnivore, or assert that packet sniffers are freely available (Linux on a laptop and a promiscuous card!) to the general public...
(Yeah, I think Carnivore, by virtue of its design requirement that it be hooked up to the ISP, doesn't fall into "generally-available", falls under the recent Supreme Court ruling, and should therefore require a warrant before use. But I'm playing Devil's Advocate here...)
>if it's so easy to halve the file size ("An MP3pro recording uses two tracks, one like the old MP3 and
another just for high-frequency sounds"), why don't they halve it now to 32kbs, and again have the
edge over msft?
Shhhh!
You'll let the secret of MP3Pro+ out! That's not slated for release until next year!
I wonder if "near-CD-quality" at 128 is the same "near-CD-quality" at 64? Betcha if I tested on some early synthesizers that are basically square waves and sine waves, I could get "near-CD-quality" at 32. Or if I were to do classical music only, with a few megs of ROM space, I could get "near-CD-quality" with a MIDI file.
At least for marketing purposes.
Sorry, Thompson, but taking a wild-ass guess at the frequences above 10K sounds like a neat idea that might work for some tracks, but it sounds like s recipe for disaster on much of what I listen to. It may not be much worse than MP3 at 128, but I'll be comparing against my CDs and MP3s at 160, 192, and up.
My ears will be the judge. Not your marketroids.
Diskspace is cheap. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 30G drive in a FedEx 747. But sound quality is something that, once lost through overcompression and/or a poor codec, can never be recovered.
> BTW: 13000 some odd fucking years after the Mammoths were extinct the Bison were still roaming, the next day the
europeans killed them all...yeah, you must be right, it was just the guns.
> If you use a natural resource faster than it can replenish itself that natural
resource will decline. If you continue to take more than the area can replenish; eventually the resource will be gone.
This a LAW and no amount of anti-environmentalist rants will change this TRUTH.
But you yourself provide evidence that it's a self-limiting phenomenon:
> All the high school kids expected to follow thier dads into the local mills. But, we
cut the trees faster than the trees would grow. Some companies survived cutting second or third growth. But the scale
had to be incredibly restricted. Most of the kids are doing things other than working in the lumber mills.
"Where are we gonna work now that the trees are gone?
Will the big boss have us wash his car, or maybe mow his lawn?
I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a lumberjack man, but I fear it ain't for long, so tell me
Where are we gonna work when the trees are gone?"
- Mojo Nixon and Jello Biafra
As we run low on fish, fishing becomes a less-viable source of life. Old fishermen find something else to do, or go on welfare, or are supported by their families. Their kids don't become fishermen to begin with. Within 50 years, fishing as a way of life dies out. Eventually, a few large boats keep fish stocks at a constant level, and provides the population with fish.
Natural selection? Here's natural selection for you - In all probability, much of the native population simply starved to death when they ran out of large herbivores to eat, and winter came. But this is what happens when any new predator is introduced to a region - prey numbers decline, predator population grows until there's insufficient prey to support the predator, and then the predator population crashes.
It doesn't matter whether the "new technology" is GPS (Homo Sapiens, 20th century), spears (Homo Sapiens, -250th century), or big claws (Big-assus Saber-tooth-tigerus, 10M BC;-).
I'm not taking sides on the enviro-debate here. I'm just pointing out that we're not "destroying the ecosystem" - we're part of the ecosystem.
The environmentalist argument is usually phrased along the lines that human activity is somehow bad because it's bad for other species. ("Save the Whales! [because they're cute and humans are icky]")
I'd submit there's an equally valid "rational self-interest argument" to be made that certain human activities are bad because they're bad for our food sources, and could lead to a population crash of the human population. ("Save the Plankton, [because if we run out of plankton, the hell with the whales, what are we gonna eat next week?]!")
(Of course, as an American, I'm not terribly concerned. If it happens, a population crash will wipe out the poor/subsistence economies first. There will continue to be plenty of food for the rich industrialized nations for the 20-30 years while the devastated areas recover. And with a post-crash population of 1-2 billion, there'll be tons of food to go around after the crash. Hey, bring it on!:-)
> The W2K source is [only] available for corporations with the funds. There will never come a day when CompSci students can
learn OS design by looking over MS's source.
> I imagine if anyone
provided this service, they would have it chock to the gills with next generation Macrovision style copy protection.
True. Your old PVR probably won't record the video-on-demand your cable company offers.
So you hack the ever-lovin' hell out of it until it will. (Or more likely, you wait until someone else does, preferably in a non-DMCA country, and you download the hack yourself;-)
> And a Tivo is a useless piece of junk compared to a VCR, for archiving. Six of one, half-a-dozen of the other.
Eh? A Tivo will let you get a good-quality MPEG2 stream of whatever video you want, and with recent hacks, the files can be backed up as required.
30 hours of MPEG2 stream = $200 worth of hard drive. Equivalent to 20 DVDs' worth of movies. With DVDs costing ~$15-20, it's price-competitive to just buy a new hard drive every time the old one fills up.
2 years from now, $200 worth of hard drive will archive 60 hours of video. Or more. DVDs, of course, will still cost $15-20 apiece.
10 years from now, $50 will buy a magic cube that'll hold your last 8 years' worth of MPEG video. Another $50 will buy you an identical cube that you can stick in a safety deposit box in case your house burns down and destroys the first one.
15 years from now, you'll be watching copies of those MPEGs from your "Tivo emulated on your headband 23-GHz megaputer and projected directly onto your retina", while the NTSC-quality images on your VHS tapes have silently gone the way of magnetic flux loss, oxide-flaking-off, and all the other afflictions that magnetic tapes suffer from. (Or you'll be watching fourth-generation analog copies of your VHS tapes, which will be just as bad.)
I don't own a Tivo, hell, I barely watch TV anymore. But if I were interested in archiving video, I'd take a Tivo over a VCR any day.
> monitoring harbors resentment >
i bet you don't like being monitored by feds >
guess who the equivalent is to her
Given that by the time she's 18, the feds will be monitoring everything she does anyways, perhaps it's a good idea to get her used to the idea of Big Brother Watching Her now, before she has to. Better she learn how to "act normal" in front of the folks than in front of the Fed.
(And on the flip side - if she's bound and determined to work her way around the logger, and finds an effective way to do so... more power to her.)
My choice of logging tool: Ethernet sniffer, hooked up to OpenBSD box. OpenBSD box is hooked up to an old dot-matrix printer. Every 15 minutes, a URL is printed in hardcopy, at random. The complete log is stored on the hard drive. The sniffer also logs GROUP and ARTICLE commands on port 119, SMTP headers, etc. but to save on diskspace, drops inbound data on the floor. Basically, your own private Carnivore.
<MODE=BOFH> ...and the logfile is encrypted with Dad's public key. Dad doesn't have to read the log entries to know if the OpenBSD box has been compromised and the logs have been tampered with. All Dad has to do is fail to be able to decrypt the logs with his private key.
</MODE>
> If anybody started linking names and anonymous consumer data, yeah, that's bad. But anybody pulling that
gets called on it real quick, and pay a big price in PR damage.
And what part of "individually-addressable" didn't you understand when it came to cable boxen?
Big price in PR damage? Maybe. But that doesn't change the fact that Doubleclick is continuing to amass data, waiting for the day when they can get away with it.
When will the data collectors be able to link profiles to real identities without a big price in PR damage? When the people who...
> just a little to automatically paranoid about data. Kneejerk reaction whenever the topic
comes up...
...become thought of by mainstream America as being, well, automatically paranoid about data, and having a kneejerk reaction whenever the topic comes up.
> Why is everyone so freaked out about collection of consumer data? [... ] Why does everyone see this as
a bad thing?
When only outlaws have privacy, privacy will be outlawed.
> So, while you're away camping for a week, your 16-year old brings his friends over and they watch the playboy
channel. When you come back, how do you get rid of all the 'directed' pornography adds on your TV?
Sounds like a great way to discourage the 16-year-old from watching the Playboy channel.
"Son, I know you can h4x0r around the child-lock, so I'm not gonna bother. But we both know you can't fake out the TV's spyware. And if you can, hell, you've earned the right to watch all the pr0n you want, as long as you tell me how you did it!"
> I must be the last person in the US who found that you can live with only broadcast TV.
Nope, maybe the second-last, but not the last.
I tried it by accident (couldn't be bothered to order cable when I moved into my new place a few years ago) and discovered I didn't miss cable. OK, I miss Babylon 5, but it's all reruns anyways. And I don't miss it to the tune of $40/month.
While travelling on business this year, I wound up in a hotel with full cable for a week, and was amazed to discover that the probability there's something on worth watching was pretty much the same as it was at home, so I grabbed a TV guide from the newsstand and figured that I'd probably watch no more than an hour of "new TV" a week if I went from my current 9-channel universe to the 50-channel cable subscription.
57 channels and nothin' on, indeed.
Of course, I'm in the Bay Area, and can get three PBS stations, which goes a long way during pledge weeks. (Woo-hoo, a few months ago, the entire Season 7 of Red Dwarf in an all-day marathon, and four hours of Dr. Who last weekend!)
Slashdot Mirror
They didn't cite him. They just charged him $150 per occurrence, as per their rental agreement.
Personally, I think the rental company's being more honest than the cops -- most speeding tickets are handed out to enhance city revenues, not enhance motorist safety. At least the rental department's being honest about it. ("It's got nothing to do with the police, we just want the money")
I don't think we really knew when we SN1987A visibly started brightening - IIRC we saw it after the fact.
In any event, given that neutrinos could pass through the shell of the star faster (i.e., almost the speed of light) than the star could tear itself apart (i.e. minutes/hours), I'd expect the neutrino burst to be observed before the light from the supernova.
(That is, the light travels faster than the neutrinos, but the neutrinos get out of the supernova before the shock wave hit the star's surface.)
Come to think of it, if I were running SNO or Super-Kamiokande, and I saw multiple events all within a few seconds of each other, I'd eliminate the possibility of detector error ASAP, and then look at the angle of incidence (all the neutrinos would appear to be coming from a point source) and start phoning every telescope operator on (and off :) the planet to look in that general direction for something going boom.
Great, all I need is a piece of lead several light-years thick, and I can then melt it down and extract the at-rest neutrinos to make neutrinonium (as long as I'm fantasizing, I wonder if a lump composed of neutrinos at rest would shimmer or somehow change color as the component neutrinos oscillated between three states ;-)
(Seriously, mad props to the SNO guys. I remember hearing about the Solar Neutrino Problem years ago, and hoping that Sudbury would get the funding to actually carry the experiment through to its conclusion.)
Perhaps those of us who oppose unions on the (ideological) basis that a free[er] market is a Good Thing, will merely stick to our principles.
That's what principles are about.
I hold to the principle that capitalism, through the mechanism of "creative destruction", is a Good Thing that leads to higher standards of living for large numbers of people over long periods of time.
When (not "if" - when) my skills become obsolete, I will either live off my accumulated savings, acquire new skills that aren't obsolete, or starve. (Possibly all three at once ;-)
What I won't be doing is deciding that welfare rates suddenly ought to be doubled, income taxes on anyone making more than me tripled, and wishing that I'd had a union to protect my obsolete hide before I got canned.
I decided a long time ago - as a matter of principle - that I was willing to live by the sword; I must (on pain of logical inconsistency) be willing to die by the sword.
(Well, Adam Smith's invisible hand that wields the sword, at any rate ;)
If I worked there, just for spite, I'd case mod my full-tower with a handle, and walk off with it under my arm. Ditto my monitor - maybe a strap from a backpack and some clever use of D-rings.
If they gave me static, I'd disassemble the full-tower and move it, component by component, to the new cube.
Fsck 'em if they can't take a joke.
(Of course, I'd also make sure I had a low vandalism deductible on my car...)
I've been looking for an excuse to post a link to the abandoned missile base VR tour all week. Thanks ;-)
> POST LINK
The URL gets posted to Slashdot. There is a moderator here, holding a crack pipe.
> SCORE
Your score is 2 out of a possible 5.
>
> This sounds suspiciously like a comment from someone who has no idea what SETI@Home does, and is condemning a random program that happened to access the Internet.
1) You're right. There's probably a much greater security thread from spyware that comes with things like RealPlayer, and/or users installing stuff like AudioGalaxy or Comet Cursor, etc. on their machines.
2) He's also right. Maybe for the TVA, this is a little paranoid, but a keyword search on "covert channels" provides some insight.
Suppose you were a KGB agent assigned to find out when the TVA was most worried about blackouts. You'd be very interested in knowing when large numbers of TVA employees were working overtime at the head office.
Rather than hax0r the head office's computers (exposing yourself to risk), or have an agent staking out the head office (exposing the agent to risk), you'd just eyeball SETI@Home's publicly-accessible stats.
You could then deduce that something was FUBAR in Tennesee when "Team TVA", which was churning out one unit every 70 minutes from 5:00pm to 9:00am, dropped their stats precipitously - say, damn near nothing getting done until 11:00 pm, one unit every 120 minutes from 11:00 pm to 1:00am, and only going to the "regular" 70 minutes per unit from 1:00 am to 9:00am.
In fact, in the simplified case I've specified above, you could not only make an educated guess as to how many employees were working overtime, and for how long, you could even make an educated guess as to what hardware platform was being used by The Guy Who Stayed Until 1:00 In The Morning.
Like I said, for the TVA, this is probably paranoia. But for other agencies, information leaked by covert channels can be deadly serious.
(In business too -- at a small enough company, suppose you saw similar data patterns and you knew what CPU power the CFO's PC had. If the CFO's up all night, every night, on the last week of the quarter, maybe he's desperately trying to make up the numbers. Such information could be worth millions of dollars, and it wouldn't even be insider trading, because you're only making an educated guess based on the working hours of the CFO.)
I hate to side with an ignorant bureaucrat, but in this case, he's right. (Even if, in all likelihood, he hasn't the faintest clue as to why he's right ;-)
That's the part that still scares me.
If MS really wanted to take over the world, they'd do to MP3 what they did to AVI.
That is, they'd use the same file extension to represent dozens of codecs, many of which were proprietary.
Download an arbitrary .AVI and ask yourself what you really have. It's pretty tough. YUV? IV31, IV41, IV51? 2.63? MPEG4v2? MPEG4v3? DivX ;-)
Attempt to play an AVI with even one byte screwed up in Windoze Media Player, and it says "Nope, I won't even show you the video up until the corrupt part." (Sometimes you can get around this with File->Properties->Preview in the 'doze explorer, which just shows how brain-dead WindozeMediaPlayer is).
So WTF does this have to do with MP3? Plenty.
People like to swap files that end in the .MP3 extension. All Bill has to do is pay Thompson enough money, and buy the right to stuff whatever crap he wants into a file ending in .MP3, and stuff whatever brains he wants into Windoze Media Player to say "Ah, the file ends in .MP3, but it's actually a WinMedia or RealVideo file. I'll decode it accordingly".
On the encoding front, it'd be easy for him to do the same thing - MP3Pro (different codec, same file extension, albeit with some backwards compatibility) from Thompson is already doing this. Bill could make his "music recorder" tool record in a proprietary codec, but save the file with the .MP3 extension.
Within a month, clueless luzers would flood the pool of MP3s with these Windoze-only files that happen to end in ".MP3", and we'd be in the .AVI situation - "Damn, this thing won't play, what the hell codec do I need today" all over again.
With .AVI, it was inevitable, as we had CPU speeds going from 16 MHz to 1.6 GHz - a factor of 1000 - and similar growth in hard drive sizes. We really can do better video today that we couldn't have fantasized about when the first .AVI codecs were introduced.
But music? No thanks. MP3 at 320 is indistinguishable (for me and anyone I know) from CD. For most folks, MP3 at 192 is "good enough". For anyone - by definition - a lossless compression of the original .WAV is "perfect". We already have most, if not all, of the technology we're ever likely to need when it comes to "How can I make this compressed bitstream sound like the 2-channel stereo recorded on this CD".
All that's left is to screw it up by embedding it in various DRM schemes. I dunno about you, but I think I'll pass on that.
He: "Hey, baby, where do you want to go today?"
She: "Ooooh, nice glasses! I love short men! Please fsck me!"
He: "Fsck? No way, baby, haven't you heard, you can get cancer with that stuff? It's defrag.exe or nothin'..."
She: "I suppose I have to register first, huh? Still, that's an Xcellent Penis, I'd pay $30 a month for some of that lovin', hon..."
He: "Yeah baby, you know it's cheaper to get it this way than to buy it outright... 'sides you couldn't afford me without the subscription..."
She: "God I love it when you talk dirty..." [ fade to black ]
True enough.
But it's on FOX (broadcast TV) where I live. I don't watch enough TV to justify the cost of cable.
Sure, Andromeda is cheezy, but compared to [each month's variant of] "Survivor" and "Millionaire", I hope they drag Gene's name through the mud a few more times.
Better cheezy sci-fi than no sci-fi at all.
Utterly so.
But in defence of the scriptwriters, any large socio/political group that misunderstands Nietzche is likely to turn out exactly as the show's Nietzchaens did.
Which is to say, yeah, the Nietzcheans in the show have Nietzche all wrong. But they're pretty much what I'd expect a bunch of Nietzche-misinterpreters to act like, so IMHO the scriptwriters got it right.
(Of course, whether the scriptwriters intended to get it right, is another question entirely. My hunch is that it's just an accident ;-)
What I wanna know: Is there an msid.msn.com cookie set on boot/install these days?
Next time you install W98, boot to raw DOS. Poke around the filesystem with a hex editor and examine the cookies. You'll find one set for whatever username and workgroup you entered at install time, pointing to our old friend http://msid.msn.com.
Under W98/IE4, deleting these files, rebooting, and re-entering Windows, the cookie data was restored automatically, even though this box had never been connected to any network.
Disclaimer: I wasn't able to reproduce this today on a W98SE/IE5 box. I know I did it under 98, because I ranted about it on Slashdot last year when the GUID-leak stories came out.
Can anyone confirm/deny this type of behavior on XP?
They've been doing this shit for a long time.
A DejaGoogle search revealed tracking through msid.msn.com as far back as 1997.
I think my "cookie kept coming back" had something to do with RegWiz, which created such a cookie before you even registered? (And in my case, even though I hadn't registered :)
So today they generate and use an MSID instead of the HWID. It's still all about tracking.
Speaking for myself, I firewalled msid.msn.com a few years ago and never missed it.
Huh?
It's a packet sniffer. But you have to have physical access to the ISP's datacenter to use it.
The real question (arguably unanswered) is whether or not the part of your TCP/IP connection between your home and the first router away from your ISP constitutes part of your home.
The argument can be made that it does - they could just wiretap you. But they don't, choosing to use the ISP's outbound pipe to wiretap everyone and (so they tell us :) then throw away the data from everyone but you. They do this for the sake of convenience (It's arguably harder to wiretap a cablemodem. Or optical fiber to the home. Or line-of-sight laser to the home...).
That is, Carnivore is just an easy way (using means not available to the general public, like sitting down in an ISP's datacenter) of getting access to your data stream (which is information they would not otherwise be able to gain without having to) wiretap you (which would typically require physical access to your property or the wires/cables/lasers/EM-fields connecting thereto or emanating therefrom).
I don't know how far that'd fly in court, but it sounds like a non-frivolous argument using the recent SCOTUS ruling as precedent. I don't know how they'd rule, but I'd think the Justices would have to think about it for a while before ruling either way.
The one X'd Exon, he's an ass,
The two X'd Exxon, that's a gas,
But there's one thing you can bet your necks on,
You'll never see a three-XXX'd Exon.
(Ah, fond memories indeed.)
So, if the Feebs GPL Carnivore, or assert that packet sniffers are freely available (Linux on a laptop and a promiscuous card!) to the general public...
(Yeah, I think Carnivore, by virtue of its design requirement that it be hooked up to the ISP, doesn't fall into "generally-available", falls under the recent Supreme Court ruling, and should therefore require a warrant before use. But I'm playing Devil's Advocate here...)
Shhhh!
You'll let the secret of MP3Pro+ out! That's not slated for release until next year!
I wonder if "near-CD-quality" at 128 is the same "near-CD-quality" at 64? Betcha if I tested on some early synthesizers that are basically square waves and sine waves, I could get "near-CD-quality" at 32. Or if I were to do classical music only, with a few megs of ROM space, I could get "near-CD-quality" with a MIDI file.
At least for marketing purposes.
Sorry, Thompson, but taking a wild-ass guess at the frequences above 10K sounds like a neat idea that might work for some tracks, but it sounds like s recipe for disaster on much of what I listen to. It may not be much worse than MP3 at 128, but I'll be comparing against my CDs and MP3s at 160, 192, and up.
My ears will be the judge. Not your marketroids.
Diskspace is cheap. Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 30G drive in a FedEx 747. But sound quality is something that, once lost through overcompression and/or a poor codec, can never be recovered.
"Guns don't kill bison! Bison kill bison!"
But you yourself provide evidence that it's a self-limiting phenomenon:
> All the high school kids expected to follow thier dads into the local mills. But, we cut the trees faster than the trees would grow. Some companies survived cutting second or third growth. But the scale had to be incredibly restricted. Most of the kids are doing things other than working in the lumber mills.
"Where are we gonna work now that the trees are gone?
Will the big boss have us wash his car, or maybe mow his lawn?
I'm a man, I'm a man, I'm a lumberjack man, but I fear it ain't for long, so tell me
Where are we gonna work when the trees are gone?"
- Mojo Nixon and Jello Biafra
As we run low on fish, fishing becomes a less-viable source of life. Old fishermen find something else to do, or go on welfare, or are supported by their families. Their kids don't become fishermen to begin with. Within 50 years, fishing as a way of life dies out. Eventually, a few large boats keep fish stocks at a constant level, and provides the population with fish.
Natural selection? Here's natural selection for you - In all probability, much of the native population simply starved to death when they ran out of large herbivores to eat, and winter came. But this is what happens when any new predator is introduced to a region - prey numbers decline, predator population grows until there's insufficient prey to support the predator, and then the predator population crashes.
It doesn't matter whether the "new technology" is GPS (Homo Sapiens, 20th century), spears (Homo Sapiens, -250th century), or big claws (Big-assus Saber-tooth-tigerus, 10M BC ;-).
I'm not taking sides on the enviro-debate here. I'm just pointing out that we're not "destroying the ecosystem" - we're part of the ecosystem.
The environmentalist argument is usually phrased along the lines that human activity is somehow bad because it's bad for other species. ("Save the Whales! [because they're cute and humans are icky]")
I'd submit there's an equally valid "rational self-interest argument" to be made that certain human activities are bad because they're bad for our food sources, and could lead to a population crash of the human population. ("Save the Plankton, [because if we run out of plankton, the hell with the whales, what are we gonna eat next week?]!")
(Of course, as an American, I'm not terribly concerned. If it happens, a population crash will wipe out the poor/subsistence economies first. There will continue to be plenty of food for the rich industrialized nations for the 20-30 years while the devastated areas recover. And with a post-crash population of 1-2 billion, there'll be tons of food to go around after the crash. Hey, bring it on! :-)
Thank God for that.
True. Your old PVR probably won't record the video-on-demand your cable company offers.
So you hack the ever-lovin' hell out of it until it will. (Or more likely, you wait until someone else does, preferably in a non-DMCA country, and you download the hack yourself ;-)
Eh? A Tivo will let you get a good-quality MPEG2 stream of whatever video you want, and with recent hacks, the files can be backed up as required.
30 hours of MPEG2 stream = $200 worth of hard drive. Equivalent to 20 DVDs' worth of movies. With DVDs costing ~$15-20, it's price-competitive to just buy a new hard drive every time the old one fills up.
2 years from now, $200 worth of hard drive will archive 60 hours of video. Or more. DVDs, of course, will still cost $15-20 apiece.
10 years from now, $50 will buy a magic cube that'll hold your last 8 years' worth of MPEG video. Another $50 will buy you an identical cube that you can stick in a safety deposit box in case your house burns down and destroys the first one.
15 years from now, you'll be watching copies of those MPEGs from your "Tivo emulated on your headband 23-GHz megaputer and projected directly onto your retina", while the NTSC-quality images on your VHS tapes have silently gone the way of magnetic flux loss, oxide-flaking-off, and all the other afflictions that magnetic tapes suffer from. (Or you'll be watching fourth-generation analog copies of your VHS tapes, which will be just as bad.)
I don't own a Tivo, hell, I barely watch TV anymore. But if I were interested in archiving video, I'd take a Tivo over a VCR any day.
> i bet you don't like being monitored by feds
> guess who the equivalent is to her
Given that by the time she's 18, the feds will be monitoring everything she does anyways, perhaps it's a good idea to get her used to the idea of Big Brother Watching Her now, before she has to. Better she learn how to "act normal" in front of the folks than in front of the Fed.
(And on the flip side - if she's bound and determined to work her way around the logger, and finds an effective way to do so... more power to her.)
My choice of logging tool: Ethernet sniffer, hooked up to OpenBSD box. OpenBSD box is hooked up to an old dot-matrix printer. Every 15 minutes, a URL is printed in hardcopy, at random. The complete log is stored on the hard drive. The sniffer also logs GROUP and ARTICLE commands on port 119, SMTP headers, etc. but to save on diskspace, drops inbound data on the floor. Basically, your own private Carnivore.
<MODE=BOFH>
...and the logfile is encrypted with Dad's public key. Dad doesn't have to read the log entries to know if the OpenBSD box has been compromised and the logs have been tampered with. All Dad has to do is fail to be able to decrypt the logs with his private key.
</MODE>
And what part of "individually-addressable" didn't you understand when it came to cable boxen?
Big price in PR damage? Maybe. But that doesn't change the fact that Doubleclick is continuing to amass data, waiting for the day when they can get away with it.
When will the data collectors be able to link profiles to real identities without a big price in PR damage? When the people who...
> just a little to automatically paranoid about data. Kneejerk reaction whenever the topic comes up...
> Why is everyone so freaked out about collection of consumer data? [ ... ] Why does everyone see this as
a bad thing?
When only outlaws have privacy, privacy will be outlawed.
Sounds like a great way to discourage the 16-year-old from watching the Playboy channel.
"Son, I know you can h4x0r around the child-lock, so I'm not gonna bother. But we both know you can't fake out the TV's spyware. And if you can, hell, you've earned the right to watch all the pr0n you want, as long as you tell me how you did it!"
Nope, maybe the second-last, but not the last.
I tried it by accident (couldn't be bothered to order cable when I moved into my new place a few years ago) and discovered I didn't miss cable. OK, I miss Babylon 5, but it's all reruns anyways. And I don't miss it to the tune of $40/month.
While travelling on business this year, I wound up in a hotel with full cable for a week, and was amazed to discover that the probability there's something on worth watching was pretty much the same as it was at home, so I grabbed a TV guide from the newsstand and figured that I'd probably watch no more than an hour of "new TV" a week if I went from my current 9-channel universe to the 50-channel cable subscription.
57 channels and nothin' on, indeed.
Of course, I'm in the Bay Area, and can get three PBS stations, which goes a long way during pledge weeks. (Woo-hoo, a few months ago, the entire Season 7 of Red Dwarf in an all-day marathon, and four hours of Dr. Who last weekend!)