Maybe it only happens in the movies, but I can't imagine the horror of spilling someone's ashes. This seems to me to be a very clean way to avoid that potential problem.
I would imagine that most people would put them in extremely nice display cases, rather than having them put into rings and pendants.
A nice thought, but it would instantly make your house a target for theft. I predict the rebirth of the cat burglar.
And on a only loosely related note, how much would this service cost for a pet?
Jamie Zawinski of mozilla and xscreensaver fame owns a nightclub in San Francisco called DNA Lounge.
He installed IRC, telnet, ssh and web enabled diskless linux kiosks for just this purpose. His code is available, as well as instructions on how he did it. It may give you a good place to start.
Tell me, does anyone here really want a wireless device implanted into their skull? The long term effects of a wireless transmitter sitting on top of your gray matter CAN'T be good. High grade or low grade, it's radiation of one sort or another. At least when you are on the cell phone there is skin in the way. And bone.
I would be extremely curious to know what happens to this device when it passes too near an area with a lot of background energy. Magnetic field. Cell sites. HERF.
Ok, yeah, as everyone has pointed out, of course this is because Linux is a free os. But personally speaking, I've never paid for a copy of windows, and I know very few people who have.
Yes, there is a degree to which you pay for an OEM copy of windows when you buy it pre-installed on a computer, but missing from this whole equation is a metric of how many "free" (as in finding a car stereo in your neighbor's car) windows installations there are compared to those that have been paid for. Consider:
the number of domestic users who never pay for their copy;
the number of businesses who build machines regularly without really paying for the correct number of licenses;
the number of copies sold annually through professional software pirates (singapore street vendors... wow);
Account for these things and revenue to MS could be significantly higher. What _I_ would like to see is a metric of how many unpaid-for windows installations there are vs how many linux installations there are. I think the results would be surprising.
Those dancing Xmas trees, Coke Cans and so on, that react differently to music. Else this tech could be used ro raise massive armies of super-destructive coordinated dancers.
Does anyone expect jack-booted MS employees to come kicking in their doors and arresting them for having a invalid product key?
Let's face it, as much as MS needs to say they will come after people who pirate their software, they aren't going to come after individuals. Unless you are killing a significant portion of their business, they are likely to leave you alone.
They would rather an individual use a pirated copy of their software than someone elses, because it still puts them in your house. They still have a good chance of branding, selling you MS Money, Office or some other product.
Can't say that out loud though. Might loose too much business.
God files suit in Texas court, cites numbers copyright violations on the part of Texas A&M University.
The Almighty God (Yaweh, The Big Guy, Jehovah) filed a suit in a Texas court today, seeking to block further progress on the CopyCat project, a cloning experiment out of Texas A&M University.
"I'm PISSED!" God was quoted as saying. "It took me days, well a day, to come up with the design of the Cat. It's mine Dammnit! My Cat profits are going to plummet!"
A representative from Texas A&M could not be reached for comment.
I wrote a simple script about a year ago that exported a user's MSN registry key and sent it to me. Given that MSN logins, Passport Logins and Hotmail logins all could be gleaned from that key... well you get the idea.
It worked too. Got to log into MSN as the CTO of our company, just to make a point.
As long as scripters can manage things like this, and as long as it is _that_ easy to pull a person's login data from the registry, Passport will _never_ be secure.
I agree. I think it would be much more likely to see some sort of suppliment or preview available only in E-book form.
Which would actually make a lot more sense. It's something that's not currently slated for publication, it would not have to be very meaty (people would jump at the chance to get it because it's HP related) and would go a long way to publicize the E-book format without actually risking anything significant.
A gamble most big online book retailers would take.
The consequences would be threefold and immediate. First, many nice neighborhood bookstores would curl up and die overnight. More than one bookseller has recently confided that in this economy, if it weren't for Harry Potter, their stores would already be vacant commercial real estate by now.
Second, those same nice booksellers would have plenty of company in bankruptcy court. Good candidates for extinction might include many of the publishers who rely on those stores to sell their books, plus such online stores as Amazon...
Yeah, and then global temperatures would drop like stones as the rampant and sudden preservation of millions of trees would offset global warming. The seas would freeze over! Cats and dogs would start living together. MASS HYSTERIA!
Just like happened with the CD industry, right? I mean, CD stores are going out of business right and left. Right? Umm...
Hey, noticing that you surf porn and/. all day does give them something to work with.
Now they can target-market you for sex toys and geek stuff instead of sports equipment. That must be why we get all those email messages about enlarging your johnson 4-6 inches.
Trend analysis is an old field. And like it or not, generalizations can be made about a person's web surfing habits. They won't always be right, but they frequently will be close. And they may only get you to make one purchase more a year than you would have otherwise. But that is more than nothing.
Worth the expense? Now that is the bigger question. For users like you or I? Prolly not. For average users?
Of course. How do you think these people keep jobs?
In a company that big, certainly someone should have been capable of raising a red flag on this.
And whoever it was that ignored the red flag had to know that people find these things out.
Odds are if ComCast had said, before they did anything, "the information will be stored only temporarily, will be purged automatically every few days and will never be connected to individual subscribers," and had the followed through on that promise, they could have avoided a huge PR hit.
Instead, they went beyond simple caching, and now everyone is asking the same question:
"If you weren't going to tie it back to the users, why were you recording user information in the first place?"
That was pretty much my thought. By the time the states make heads or tails out of whatever fubared version of the XP sourcecode they are handed, MS will be primed to release XP2002 (December 2003). And in the interim, MS has had over a year to ENSURE it can;t be stripped down.
I love Futurama. But let's face it, Fox has blundered into their best business decisions. For every one series or idea Fox gets right, there are 10 to 20 financed from the profits that fail in their first month.
There are no big brains at work at Fox Networks. Sure, they got a couple things right in backing a couple wildly popular shows. But even a blind hog gets an acorn once in a while. Or in this case, a million blind monkeys at work on a million typewriters can produce the entire Fox fall lineup.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe it only happens in the movies, but I can't imagine the horror of spilling someone's ashes. This seems to me to be a very clean way to avoid that potential problem.
I would imagine that most people would put them in extremely nice display cases, rather than having them put into rings and pendants.
A nice thought, but it would instantly make your house a target for theft. I predict the rebirth of the cat burglar.
And on a only loosely related note, how much would this service cost for a pet?
Jamie Zawinski of mozilla and xscreensaver fame owns a nightclub in San Francisco called DNA Lounge.
He installed IRC, telnet, ssh and web enabled diskless linux kiosks for just this purpose. His code is available, as well as instructions on how he did it. It may give you a good place to start.
I would be extremely curious to know what happens to this device when it passes too near an area with a lot of background energy. Magnetic field. Cell sites. HERF.
Ok, yeah, as everyone has pointed out, of course this is because Linux is a free os. But personally speaking, I've never paid for a copy of windows, and I know very few people who have.
Yes, there is a degree to which you pay for an OEM copy of windows when you buy it pre-installed on a computer, but missing from this whole equation is a metric of how many "free" (as in finding a car stereo in your neighbor's car) windows installations there are compared to those that have been paid for. Consider:
Account for these things and revenue to MS could be significantly higher. What _I_ would like to see is a metric of how many unpaid-for windows installations there are vs how many linux installations there are. I think the results would be surprising.
Those dancing Xmas trees, Coke Cans and so on, that react differently to music. Else this tech could be used ro raise massive armies of super-destructive coordinated dancers.
What the heck are you talking about? That would make the name "Stainsless steel".
Stainless, like remorseless. Without remorse. Or clueless, without a clue.
This would make it easy to market to Trailer Parks.
"New, DoubleWide Broadband"
Does anyone expect jack-booted MS employees to come kicking in their doors and arresting them for having a invalid product key?
Let's face it, as much as MS needs to say they will come after people who pirate their software, they aren't going to come after individuals. Unless you are killing a significant portion of their business, they are likely to leave you alone.
They would rather an individual use a pirated copy of their software than someone elses, because it still puts them in your house. They still have a good chance of branding, selling you MS Money, Office or some other product.
Can't say that out loud though. Might loose too much business.
God files suit in Texas court, cites numbers copyright violations on the part of Texas A&M University.
The Almighty God (Yaweh, The Big Guy, Jehovah) filed a suit in a Texas court today, seeking to block further progress on the CopyCat project, a cloning experiment out of Texas A&M University.
"I'm PISSED!" God was quoted as saying. "It took me days, well a day, to come up with the design of the Cat. It's mine Dammnit! My Cat profits are going to plummet!"
A representative from Texas A&M could not be reached for comment.
"It looks like you're trying to frag someone."
Running Mandrake 8.1, and it's not shown instability yet. Smooth as silk. I've not really pushed it too hard yet tho.
Been running it a couple weeks at least. Does that make this old news?
I wrote a simple script about a year ago that exported a user's MSN registry key and sent it to me. Given that MSN logins, Passport Logins and Hotmail logins all could be gleaned from that key... well you get the idea.
It worked too. Got to log into MSN as the CTO of our company, just to make a point.
As long as scripters can manage things like this, and as long as it is _that_ easy to pull a person's login data from the registry, Passport will _never_ be secure.
I agree. I think it would be much more likely to see some sort of suppliment or preview available only in E-book form.
Which would actually make a lot more sense. It's something that's not currently slated for publication, it would not have to be very meaty (people would jump at the chance to get it because it's HP related) and would go a long way to publicize the E-book format without actually risking anything significant.
A gamble most big online book retailers would take.
Even better. Couple it with a device that has voice recognition. It could read itself to itself. That removes us from the equation completely.
From the article:
The consequences would be threefold and immediate. First, many nice neighborhood bookstores would curl up and die overnight. More than one bookseller has recently confided that in this economy, if it weren't for Harry Potter, their stores would already be vacant commercial real estate by now.
Second, those same nice booksellers would have plenty of company in bankruptcy court. Good candidates for extinction might include many of the publishers who rely on those stores to sell their books, plus such online stores as Amazon...
Yeah, and then global temperatures would drop like stones as the rampant and sudden preservation of millions of trees would offset global warming. The seas would freeze over! Cats and dogs would start living together. MASS HYSTERIA!
Just like happened with the CD industry, right? I mean, CD stores are going out of business right and left. Right? Umm...
Absolutely not. Not until the threat was real. When have either of those two factors ever motovated MS?
Once a judge delivers an ultimatum, they would comply. But history shows they would push the envelope as far as they could for as long as they could.
Hey, noticing that you surf porn and /. all day does give them something to work with.
Now they can target-market you for sex toys and geek stuff instead of sports equipment. That must be why we get all those email messages about enlarging your johnson 4-6 inches.
Trend analysis is an old field. And like it or not, generalizations can be made about a person's web surfing habits. They won't always be right, but they frequently will be close. And they may only get you to make one purchase more a year than you would have otherwise. But that is more than nothing.
Worth the expense? Now that is the bigger question. For users like you or I? Prolly not. For average users?
Of course. How do you think these people keep jobs?
Corporate sutpidity amazes me.
In a company that big, certainly someone should have been capable of raising a red flag on this.
And whoever it was that ignored the red flag had to know that people find these things out.
Odds are if ComCast had said, before they did anything, "the information will be stored only temporarily, will be purged automatically every few days and will never be connected to individual subscribers," and had the followed through on that promise, they could have avoided a huge PR hit.
Instead, they went beyond simple caching, and now everyone is asking the same question:
"If you weren't going to tie it back to the users, why were you recording user information in the first place?"
Alan Thicke died to bring us KDE3.0beta2?
"Ok, here is the source code you requested."
"Thank you for complying." *scan* "Where are the whitespace and comments."
"Oh, this is our stripped down version." *two weeks later*
"This will not compile. You must have messed it up when you stripped it down."
"Oh, I must have forgotten to give you this header file. Yah, you need this one."
"Ok, thank you for complying." *two weeks later*
"No, it still won't compile. Are you sure you gave us everything this time?" *two months later, 7 "missed" files later*
"I'm afraid this really is outside the scope of our license. If you need help compiling, please call our technical support center."
That was pretty much my thought. By the time the states make heads or tails out of whatever fubared version of the XP sourcecode they are handed, MS will be primed to release XP2002 (December 2003). And in the interim, MS has had over a year to ENSURE it can;t be stripped down.
I love Futurama. But let's face it, Fox has blundered into their best business decisions. For every one series or idea Fox gets right, there are 10 to 20 financed from the profits that fail in their first month. There are no big brains at work at Fox Networks. Sure, they got a couple things right in backing a couple wildly popular shows. But even a blind hog gets an acorn once in a while. Or in this case, a million blind monkeys at work on a million typewriters can produce the entire Fox fall lineup.