And what about the giant lizard that keeps mutating and attacking Japan...?
Yeah, but as others have already said here, you gotta take the good with the bad. I mean, sure Godzilla has smashed a lot of buildings but he also saved our ass from King Ghidora, Megalon, Gigan, and even SpaceGodzilla! You can't just say that radioactive dinosaurs are "bad". There's some good and bad in everything.
Presumably, companies hire consultants because they need technical expertise.
I'm not sure if I'd make that assumption. A company may hire a consultant because they want an outside opinion. Everyone at the company gets so used to thinking the same way they lose sight of the forest for the trees. If I were a consultant, one of the first things I would make sure I understand is exactly why I'm being hired. It is entirely possible that the company may claim to want an outside opinion but there actions seems to indicate that they do not. In such cases, you may need to remind them periodicially what you were hired to do.
If, for some reason, you don't have this initial discussion with them, I think you still have to assume that they want you to critically examine their decisions. If they finally get fed up with you questioning their every move, I'm sure they'll let you know. At that point you can decide whether you want to continue to work for a company that disregards your opinion.
Hey, at least your mom has the sense to ask how the technology applies to what she wants to do. My mom tries to understand all the details and then gets all confused. I remember when she went to the computer store to buy her first computer. She told me afterwards that a "very nice young (sales)man" helped her understand exactly what she needed in a computer. She told me that she was pretty sure that she wanted to get a computer with a ROM since that was necessary to get the computer to do what she wanted. When I explained to her that she didn't need to understand such details of the computer's inner workings if she just wanted to check her email and surf the web, she would hear none of it. After all, this wonderful salesman told her that she should make sure she knew exactly what she was getting. I wanted to hunt down that slick-talking asshole and strangle him for confusing her like that. When she started worrying aloud if she would have to buy some device drivers to make sure her mouse didn't become obsolete, I damn near screamed.
I think some people are already wearing a variant of this that can kill at a distance. I was down at the local university the other day and I saw this ungodly sexy girl. Man, my heart started being so hard and fast I thought I was gonna have a heart attack! You can laugh, but if you had seen what she was wearing you probably would've dropped to your knees clutching your chest and gasping for breath, too!
It's going to be interesting to see Jackson's interperetation of this. On one hand, I feel like King Kong's been done to death. On the other, I *know* there's no such thing as too much Godzilla. Perhaps Jackson will make it so there's no such thing as too much Kong.
It will be interesting but one has to hope that Jackson has the insight to understand what makes King Kong such an icon. What it boils down to is if Jackson is *really* a Kong fan at heart. The Hollywood Godzilla film was a perfect example of what happens when you put non-fans in charge of "remaking" a classic character. Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin were approached numerous times by TriStar about making a Godzilla film. After persistent bugging (and probably driving a dump truck full of money up to their houses), they decided that perhaps they could make a decent Godzilla flick after all. The problem is that they had no idea whatsoever about what makes Godzilla great. They were giving press releases about how their film was going to be "the way Godzilla *should* have been done" -- implying that solely because of their CGI technology that their film would be superior. There's no clearer sign of contempt for the original idea than comments like that. Sure enough, when the film was released, their creation was so radical a change that no one identified it as Godzilla. They simply slapped a well-known brand name onto their creation in the hopes that it would sell.
I assume Jackson has more intelligence and artistic integrity to completely rework Kong. An upgrade to modern times would be nice. It will all depend on whether Jackson has a good sense for what makes Kong an enduring legend. Some things should change but the core of the character -- and the legend -- should not.
You could be looking at a big settlement if you sue. In addition to the loss of taste and speaking ability, you can claim significant emotional damages if your girlfriend leaves you because you can't *ahem* satisfy her needs anymore. Being a regular slashdot reader will prove -- beyond a shadow of a doubt -- that you need to do everything in your power to hold on to any girlfriend that you might obtain by chance. Thus, the loss of fine motor control of your tongue could banish you to a life of living in your mother's downstairs basement!
Sit them down on the couch, push the DVD of Hackers into your player, pour the microwave popcorn into a big bowl and have them enjoy the movie for 90 minutes. Then when the show is over, carefully explain to them that real-life programming is the exact opposite of everything they just saw.
And teaching the kiddies assembly will have the side benefit of scaring them off of a career in programming so they'll be more likely to go where the big bucks are: business.
Sure they'll cry now when make them sit still and trace program flow through the LDA and JMP instructions but when they're making six figures a year just for spewing some business buzzwords at those five-per-day meetings in comfy, fancy chairs they won't be able to stop thanking you enough.
If I had a brick-and-mortar store called "Freddie's Fuzzie Kitties" and people walked in to find a hardcore porn store, it would be closed in 10 minutes, and rightly so.
Maybe I'm a bit naive, but I find it hard to believe that there are laws on the books that would allow police to close down an establishment solely based on the premise that the name is deceptive. Please, someone, tell me this isn't so.
I understand your frustration about children being exposed to smut. And you're probably correct that porn sites that use innocent-sounding names are trying to trick people into looking at their wares. But I really don't want laws on the books telling business people what they can and can't name their stores. That seems way too creepy to me. Perhaps there are some decency laws on the books to prevent someone from naming their porn store "The Fuck Shop" in big neon letters. But the image of police raiding a store because they thought the name was deceptive is way too spooky to me. Besides, who determines whether it's deceptive?
I sure hope they've done to cost calculations correctly. The Santa Barbara desalination plant is an example of jumping before thinking. During the drought years of the late 80s and early 90s, Santa Barbara undertook the expensive proposition of building a desalination plant. A few months after it went online, rainfall boosted water reserves to a high enough level that drought conditions were no longer in effect. Because it's darn expensive to run and maintain a plant like this, Santa Barbara shut down its plant indefinitely. All that money spent and the city doesn't even use it. Click for more details.
Bottom line: make sure you really need something before you go building it. I hope the Tampa Bay people have done their math right.
'Radon provides an easy to use wrapper API that simplifies the process of developing applications with OpenTV's SDK. It includes a debugging framework that makes discovering bugs in your code extremely easy...
The game, which is based on the movie, is coming out the end of 2003, but the movie isn't being released until 2005? Does it really take that long to do those stop animation films?
As the others have pointed out, this is entirely believable. What really gives me pause to think is that Hollywood was actually interested in such a long-term project! Does anyone know how long it takes to make a traditional animated film? A computer-animated film? How about a live action film? I would guess that in these cases it would take less time. So I'm surprised that Hollywood was willing to look at something that takes multiple years to create. The only thing I can think of is that maybe this stop-motion claymation actually costs less money to make because of the low level of technology. I don't know.
Maybe I'm completely out of touch with how Hollywood does business but I'm surprised that they were willing to invest in a film that wouldn't see the light of day until 2005.
Leave it to a firm named "Chi Mei" to give you something big that's fun to look at. Those of you who are familiar with Hong Kong starlet Amy Yip Chi-Mei know that she, too, possess some big things that are fun to look at!
GMD
Random-access reading
on
Imagining Numbers
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Perhaps I (and anyone else who has experienced) would do well to revisit these books using this prescanning approach.
Actually, I've found this approach useful for many books. In fact, one of the secrets that Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics uses to improve reading comprehension at fast reading speeds is to skim the intro and the conclusion before tackling the meat of the chapter. It's also useful to skim a section in your textbook before the lecture on the same material. The idea is that you've at least got a vague notion about what the lecture is supposed to be about. This reduces the possibility that you will get so lost during the lecture that you spend the hour fantasizing about the blond with the nice-smelling hair sitting in front of you.
This approach is also implicit in most briefings that you present or attend when you enter the work world. The first few charts should explain what the purpose of the briefing is and present an outline. This helps the audience see the bigger picture before you get into the nitty-gritty.
I urge you to try the approach of 'prescanning' or 'random-access' reading if you have some technical material to read. Of course, if the book you're reading does not have a 'conclusions' or 'summary' section, then you have to be a bit more inventive. For example, you may want to skim the chapter and jot down the section headings. Then close the book and spend five minutes thinking about what YOU think the summary is going to be.
For those of you with an interest in the subject of aging, you may wish to check out some of Scientific American's articles on the subject from the last year:
Good God, what dumbasses. Overpopulation isn't a problem in any western developed country. They're the ones who would use this.
Most environmentalists (the real ones, not the ones that put a "Save the Planet" bumper sticker on their SUVs) and population control advocates are VERY MUCH worried about overpopulation in "western developed countries". The amount of natural resources that a single person in a developed country consumers over their lifetime is significantly greater than the resources that a single person in an undeveloped country uses. Overpopulation in developed countries is an even bigger threat to the environment than overpopulation in undeveloped countries.
Regarding your comment about child limitation, you should probably clarify what you mean. Very few people are going to be in favor of manditory government-imposed child restrictions. However, changing the tax code so that any children over the first two doesn't give you a full dependent deduction might be a way of subtly encouraging people to keep their numbers down.
I don't remember anything in the article about spending guvment money on better ways to generate it. The article did state that there are a few ways to generate it, finding more wasn't the thrust.
The article devotes a few paragraphs under "section 4" to discussing how to obtain pure hydrogen. The problem is that none of these are economically viable currently and suffer from undesirable by-products. In my earlier post when I say "we don't know how to do it yet" I mean that we don't know how to do it ECONOMICALLY yet. Yes we can do it using steam reforming. The author recommends putting $10 billion into research on alternate ways of generating the hydrogren -- he suggests nuclear.
We dont know how to make hydrogen a commercially viable alternative. As soon as it's profitable, it'll take off in a big way.
That's the whole point of his article: we don't know how to do it yet so we'd better start working on these tough problems. One of the first statements he makes is that the problems are technological rather than scientific. He's saying that unless the government starts spending some heavy R&D dollars to figure out a profitable way of creating pure hydrogen, we're never going to get this strategy off the ground.
(Out of curiosity, why is it that questioning environmentalist dogma is only valid coming from Scandinavians?)
The "recycling saves Mother Earth" viewpoint was never really from the environmentalists. I remember back when recycling was first being considered in America -- the environmentalists were the only group opposed to the idea. The reason is simply that they wanted the responsibility for trash to be imposed on the corporations producing the junk rather than relying on the volunteer efforts of consumers. For the politicians, the recycling plan was absolutely brilliant. By passing it, they could convince the masses that they were doing the environment a favor. Passing the bill also kept their corporate campaign contributors very happy. And most of all, people could get a warm, fuzzy feeling inside everytime they went to the recycling center, knowing that they were doing something good, all thanks to Senator Whatshisface.
Recycling was never part of "environmentalist dogma". It was simply a very clever trick cooked up by politicans.
Easily solved. Introduce a heavy incentive for whistleblowers and dramatic fines for individuals caught trying to cover up any breach.
Look, I do understand the point you're making in the parent post, but I think your belief that incentive and fines approach to forcing crack-ees to come forward is a bit naive (no offense intended). If a major online retailer gets cracked and has all its customer information stolen, there are only a very few number of people in the company who are going to be privy to that information: the IT guy/gal and a handful of management. The management will realize that publication of this crack could be very costly to the company so they will want to keep mum about it. As far as the IT person, I'm sure management wouldn't have a problem with applying some very heavy pressure on them to keep quiet: namely telling them that if the company gets fined for losing the data that the fine is going to come out of their salary since security is their job.
The problem is that the only ones who are going to know about the crack are the same ones who are going to be hit financially by any fine. I'm not sure what kind of heavy incentive you're thinking about, but it would have to be pretty big to offset the loss they personally are going to take from the fine.
Also, implementing this kind of fine system would serve as an encouragement to companies to delete their computer records on a fairly regular basis to make sure information about their cracks doesn't stay around for very long.
I've looked at a ton of sites on DVD players, but none of them gave comments from actual users on how well they worked, firmware upgrades, etc.
It would help us to help you if you could list some of these "ton of sites" so that we don't end up suggesting the same places to look. Have you looked at vcdhelp.com? They have a fairly good list of DVD players which also lists what types of burnable media they will play.
Am I the only one who thinks that there should be penalties for the hack-ee when private information is stolen?
I would imagine that under such a system, no organization would ever admit to being cracked since they would be financially liable. And having some third-party prove that the organization was cracked without access to the computer records would be quite a feat.
Not only was that effect used over and over BG, but also in a really awful Z-grade BG-ripoff movie called "Space Mutiny" riffed ever-so-eloquently by Mystery Science Theater 3000.
What was even funnier is that they used the shot of launching fighters as though there were launching MISSILES at the "space pirates" (whose ships bear a striking resemblance to cylon battleships). You can clearly see that those are fighters being launched, yet the plot claims they are missles. The "battle" lasts about 5 seconds (no exaguration here!) after which they quickly jump to some already-seen footage of the bridge crew partying!
Sick individual that I am, I actually rented "Space Mutiny" to watch it in its unmitigated awfulness. Picture a space opera filmed almost entirely in an abandoned factory of some sort, and a couple of drop-ceiling offices with surplus late-80's office computer equipment, with costumes consisting almost entirely of lycra.
Whenever I think of Space Mutiny the words "railing kill" spring to mind! Pretty much every single person who dies in this movie does so by falling off the railings in the factory that is supposed to be the engine room of their ship!
This is one of the best MST3K episodes ever and you can download it off of KaZaA. The commander looks exactly like Santa Claus, a woman gets killed and then is clearly visible in the background of the next scene, the hero demonsrates his courage by setting his disabled opponent on fire, and the climactic chase scene at the end with in those rediculous golfcart buggies must be seen to be believed. Do yourself a favor and download it today! Best. MST3K. Ever.
Slashdot Mirror
And what about the giant lizard that keeps mutating and attacking Japan...?
Yeah, but as others have already said here, you gotta take the good with the bad. I mean, sure Godzilla has smashed a lot of buildings but he also saved our ass from King Ghidora, Megalon, Gigan, and even SpaceGodzilla! You can't just say that radioactive dinosaurs are "bad". There's some good and bad in everything.
GMD
Presumably, companies hire consultants because they need technical expertise.
I'm not sure if I'd make that assumption. A company may hire a consultant because they want an outside opinion. Everyone at the company gets so used to thinking the same way they lose sight of the forest for the trees. If I were a consultant, one of the first things I would make sure I understand is exactly why I'm being hired. It is entirely possible that the company may claim to want an outside opinion but there actions seems to indicate that they do not. In such cases, you may need to remind them periodicially what you were hired to do.
If, for some reason, you don't have this initial discussion with them, I think you still have to assume that they want you to critically examine their decisions. If they finally get fed up with you questioning their every move, I'm sure they'll let you know. At that point you can decide whether you want to continue to work for a company that disregards your opinion.
GMD
The RIAA is horribly misguided. Those networks are used to share movies, not music. Yeesh.
Actually, to be more specific, those networks are used to share porn movies, not music. :)
GMD
Hey, at least your mom has the sense to ask how the technology applies to what she wants to do. My mom tries to understand all the details and then gets all confused. I remember when she went to the computer store to buy her first computer. She told me afterwards that a "very nice young (sales)man" helped her understand exactly what she needed in a computer. She told me that she was pretty sure that she wanted to get a computer with a ROM since that was necessary to get the computer to do what she wanted. When I explained to her that she didn't need to understand such details of the computer's inner workings if she just wanted to check her email and surf the web, she would hear none of it. After all, this wonderful salesman told her that she should make sure she knew exactly what she was getting. I wanted to hunt down that slick-talking asshole and strangle him for confusing her like that. When she started worrying aloud if she would have to buy some device drivers to make sure her mouse didn't become obsolete, I damn near screamed.
GMD
Personally, I'm just waiting for someone to complain to me that they found a bug in my quantum code:
"It wasn't like that when I originally coded it! You must have looked at it or something! So it's really your bug now, isn't it?
GMD
I think some people are already wearing a variant of this that can kill at a distance. I was down at the local university the other day and I saw this ungodly sexy girl. Man, my heart started being so hard and fast I thought I was gonna have a heart attack! You can laugh, but if you had seen what she was wearing you probably would've dropped to your knees clutching your chest and gasping for breath, too!
GMD
It's going to be interesting to see Jackson's interperetation of this. On one hand, I feel like King Kong's been done to death. On the other, I *know* there's no such thing as too much Godzilla. Perhaps Jackson will make it so there's no such thing as too much Kong.
It will be interesting but one has to hope that Jackson has the insight to understand what makes King Kong such an icon. What it boils down to is if Jackson is *really* a Kong fan at heart. The Hollywood Godzilla film was a perfect example of what happens when you put non-fans in charge of "remaking" a classic character. Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin were approached numerous times by TriStar about making a Godzilla film. After persistent bugging (and probably driving a dump truck full of money up to their houses), they decided that perhaps they could make a decent Godzilla flick after all. The problem is that they had no idea whatsoever about what makes Godzilla great. They were giving press releases about how their film was going to be "the way Godzilla *should* have been done" -- implying that solely because of their CGI technology that their film would be superior. There's no clearer sign of contempt for the original idea than comments like that. Sure enough, when the film was released, their creation was so radical a change that no one identified it as Godzilla. They simply slapped a well-known brand name onto their creation in the hopes that it would sell.
I assume Jackson has more intelligence and artistic integrity to completely rework Kong. An upgrade to modern times would be nice. It will all depend on whether Jackson has a good sense for what makes Kong an enduring legend. Some things should change but the core of the character -- and the legend -- should not.
GMD
You could be looking at a big settlement if you sue. In addition to the loss of taste and speaking ability, you can claim significant emotional damages if your girlfriend leaves you because you can't *ahem* satisfy her needs anymore. Being a regular slashdot reader will prove -- beyond a shadow of a doubt -- that you need to do everything in your power to hold on to any girlfriend that you might obtain by chance. Thus, the loss of fine motor control of your tongue could banish you to a life of living in your mother's downstairs basement!
GMD
Sit them down on the couch, push the DVD of Hackers into your player, pour the microwave popcorn into a big bowl and have them enjoy the movie for 90 minutes. Then when the show is over, carefully explain to them that real-life programming is the exact opposite of everything they just saw.
Hope that helps,
GMD
And teaching the kiddies assembly will have the side benefit of scaring them off of a career in programming so they'll be more likely to go where the big bucks are: business.
Sure they'll cry now when make them sit still and trace program flow through the LDA and JMP instructions but when they're making six figures a year just for spewing some business buzzwords at those five-per-day meetings in comfy, fancy chairs they won't be able to stop thanking you enough.
GMD
If I had a brick-and-mortar store called "Freddie's Fuzzie Kitties" and people walked in to find a hardcore porn store, it would be closed in 10 minutes, and rightly so.
Maybe I'm a bit naive, but I find it hard to believe that there are laws on the books that would allow police to close down an establishment solely based on the premise that the name is deceptive. Please, someone, tell me this isn't so.
I understand your frustration about children being exposed to smut. And you're probably correct that porn sites that use innocent-sounding names are trying to trick people into looking at their wares. But I really don't want laws on the books telling business people what they can and can't name their stores. That seems way too creepy to me. Perhaps there are some decency laws on the books to prevent someone from naming their porn store "The Fuck Shop" in big neon letters. But the image of police raiding a store because they thought the name was deceptive is way too spooky to me. Besides, who determines whether it's deceptive?
GMD
I sure hope they've done to cost calculations correctly. The Santa Barbara desalination plant is an example of jumping before thinking. During the drought years of the late 80s and early 90s, Santa Barbara undertook the expensive proposition of building a desalination plant. A few months after it went online, rainfall boosted water reserves to a high enough level that drought conditions were no longer in effect. Because it's darn expensive to run and maintain a plant like this, Santa Barbara shut down its plant indefinitely. All that money spent and the city doesn't even use it. Click for more details.
Bottom line: make sure you really need something before you go building it. I hope the Tampa Bay people have done their math right.
GMD
'Radon provides an easy to use wrapper API that simplifies the process of developing applications with OpenTV's SDK. It includes a debugging framework that makes discovering bugs in your code extremely easy ...
Lemme guess: those bugs are called Mothras?
The game, which is based on the movie, is coming out the end of 2003, but the movie isn't being released until 2005? Does it really take that long to do those stop animation films?
As the others have pointed out, this is entirely believable. What really gives me pause to think is that Hollywood was actually interested in such a long-term project! Does anyone know how long it takes to make a traditional animated film? A computer-animated film? How about a live action film? I would guess that in these cases it would take less time. So I'm surprised that Hollywood was willing to look at something that takes multiple years to create. The only thing I can think of is that maybe this stop-motion claymation actually costs less money to make because of the low level of technology. I don't know.
Maybe I'm completely out of touch with how Hollywood does business but I'm surprised that they were willing to invest in a film that wouldn't see the light of day until 2005.
GMD
Leave it to a firm named "Chi Mei" to give you something big that's fun to look at. Those of you who are familiar with Hong Kong starlet Amy Yip Chi-Mei know that she, too, possess some big things that are fun to look at!
GMD
Perhaps I (and anyone else who has experienced) would do well to revisit these books using this prescanning approach.
Actually, I've found this approach useful for many books. In fact, one of the secrets that Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics uses to improve reading comprehension at fast reading speeds is to skim the intro and the conclusion before tackling the meat of the chapter. It's also useful to skim a section in your textbook before the lecture on the same material. The idea is that you've at least got a vague notion about what the lecture is supposed to be about. This reduces the possibility that you will get so lost during the lecture that you spend the hour fantasizing about the blond with the nice-smelling hair sitting in front of you.
This approach is also implicit in most briefings that you present or attend when you enter the work world. The first few charts should explain what the purpose of the briefing is and present an outline. This helps the audience see the bigger picture before you get into the nitty-gritty.
I urge you to try the approach of 'prescanning' or 'random-access' reading if you have some technical material to read. Of course, if the book you're reading does not have a 'conclusions' or 'summary' section, then you have to be a bit more inventive. For example, you may want to skim the chapter and jot down the section headings. Then close the book and spend five minutes thinking about what YOU think the summary is going to be.
GMD
For those of you with an interest in the subject of aging, you may wish to check out some of Scientific American's articles on the subject from the last year:
The Truth About Human Aging
The Serious Search for an Anti-Aging Pill
GMD
Good God, what dumbasses. Overpopulation isn't a problem in any western developed country. They're the ones who would use this.
Most environmentalists (the real ones, not the ones that put a "Save the Planet" bumper sticker on their SUVs) and population control advocates are VERY MUCH worried about overpopulation in "western developed countries". The amount of natural resources that a single person in a developed country consumers over their lifetime is significantly greater than the resources that a single person in an undeveloped country uses. Overpopulation in developed countries is an even bigger threat to the environment than overpopulation in undeveloped countries.
Regarding your comment about child limitation, you should probably clarify what you mean. Very few people are going to be in favor of manditory government-imposed child restrictions. However, changing the tax code so that any children over the first two doesn't give you a full dependent deduction might be a way of subtly encouraging people to keep their numbers down.
GMD
I don't remember anything in the article about spending guvment money on better ways to generate it. The article did state that there are a few ways to generate it, finding more wasn't the thrust.
The article devotes a few paragraphs under "section 4" to discussing how to obtain pure hydrogen. The problem is that none of these are economically viable currently and suffer from undesirable by-products. In my earlier post when I say "we don't know how to do it yet" I mean that we don't know how to do it ECONOMICALLY yet. Yes we can do it using steam reforming. The author recommends putting $10 billion into research on alternate ways of generating the hydrogren -- he suggests nuclear.
GMD
We dont know how to make hydrogen a commercially viable alternative. As soon as it's profitable, it'll take off in a big way.
That's the whole point of his article: we don't know how to do it yet so we'd better start working on these tough problems. One of the first statements he makes is that the problems are technological rather than scientific. He's saying that unless the government starts spending some heavy R&D dollars to figure out a profitable way of creating pure hydrogen, we're never going to get this strategy off the ground.
GMD
(Out of curiosity, why is it that questioning environmentalist dogma is only valid coming from Scandinavians?)
The "recycling saves Mother Earth" viewpoint was never really from the environmentalists. I remember back when recycling was first being considered in America -- the environmentalists were the only group opposed to the idea. The reason is simply that they wanted the responsibility for trash to be imposed on the corporations producing the junk rather than relying on the volunteer efforts of consumers. For the politicians, the recycling plan was absolutely brilliant. By passing it, they could convince the masses that they were doing the environment a favor. Passing the bill also kept their corporate campaign contributors very happy. And most of all, people could get a warm, fuzzy feeling inside everytime they went to the recycling center, knowing that they were doing something good, all thanks to Senator Whatshisface.
Recycling was never part of "environmentalist dogma". It was simply a very clever trick cooked up by politicans.
GMD
Easily solved. Introduce a heavy incentive for whistleblowers and dramatic fines for individuals caught trying to cover up any breach.
Look, I do understand the point you're making in the parent post, but I think your belief that incentive and fines approach to forcing crack-ees to come forward is a bit naive (no offense intended). If a major online retailer gets cracked and has all its customer information stolen, there are only a very few number of people in the company who are going to be privy to that information: the IT guy/gal and a handful of management. The management will realize that publication of this crack could be very costly to the company so they will want to keep mum about it. As far as the IT person, I'm sure management wouldn't have a problem with applying some very heavy pressure on them to keep quiet: namely telling them that if the company gets fined for losing the data that the fine is going to come out of their salary since security is their job.
The problem is that the only ones who are going to know about the crack are the same ones who are going to be hit financially by any fine. I'm not sure what kind of heavy incentive you're thinking about, but it would have to be pretty big to offset the loss they personally are going to take from the fine.
Also, implementing this kind of fine system would serve as an encouragement to companies to delete their computer records on a fairly regular basis to make sure information about their cracks doesn't stay around for very long.
GMD
I've looked at a ton of sites on DVD players, but none of them gave comments from actual users on how well they worked, firmware upgrades, etc.
It would help us to help you if you could list some of these "ton of sites" so that we don't end up suggesting the same places to look. Have you looked at vcdhelp.com? They have a fairly good list of DVD players which also lists what types of burnable media they will play.
I hope that helps you,
GMD
Am I the only one who thinks that there should be penalties for the hack-ee when private information is stolen?
I would imagine that under such a system, no organization would ever admit to being cracked since they would be financially liable. And having some third-party prove that the organization was cracked without access to the computer records would be quite a feat.
GMD
Not only was that effect used over and over BG, but also in a really awful Z-grade BG-ripoff movie called "Space Mutiny" riffed ever-so-eloquently by Mystery Science Theater 3000.
What was even funnier is that they used the shot of launching fighters as though there were launching MISSILES at the "space pirates" (whose ships bear a striking resemblance to cylon battleships). You can clearly see that those are fighters being launched, yet the plot claims they are missles. The "battle" lasts about 5 seconds (no exaguration here!) after which they quickly jump to some already-seen footage of the bridge crew partying!
Sick individual that I am, I actually rented "Space Mutiny" to watch it in its unmitigated awfulness. Picture a space opera filmed almost entirely in an abandoned factory of some sort, and a couple of drop-ceiling offices with surplus late-80's office computer equipment, with costumes consisting almost entirely of lycra.
Whenever I think of Space Mutiny the words "railing kill" spring to mind! Pretty much every single person who dies in this movie does so by falling off the railings in the factory that is supposed to be the engine room of their ship!
This is one of the best MST3K episodes ever and you can download it off of KaZaA. The commander looks exactly like Santa Claus, a woman gets killed and then is clearly visible in the background of the next scene, the hero demonsrates his courage by setting his disabled opponent on fire, and the climactic chase scene at the end with in those rediculous golfcart buggies must be seen to be believed. Do yourself a favor and download it today! Best. MST3K. Ever.
GMD