Well, the scheduled 31. September release was of course way to early. Medium November was far more likely as release date.
Valve is known for not managing to meet the deadlines. All of the Counterstrike versions from 1.3 came 2-6 months later than the official schedule. (dig around at csnation for proof)
So Half-Life 2 with a real release date somewhere between 30. November and 30. March was (IMO) far more likely.
Those groups that know what they are doing are removing/editing/altering the cap codes.
For example a well known group recently (a couple of months ago) released a movie with some blur in on of the corners where the "MPAA-dots" where before. The dots are arranged in a pattern, for example two letters like TI.
This is relatively easy do detect and remove, but if they start to use stenography eg. unique pictures embedded in the movie things could get messy for the sources of the movies.
There is plenty of tricks the movie studios can use to detect "piracy", but then there is the cost/benefit ratio. The whole system of movie theaters relies in cheap disribution to multiple theaters and making exclusive copies could cost more than it's really worth.
The problems with copyright infringement of movies are less urgent with movies than music because of lack of bandwith.
Re:Reminds me of powerlabs cannon
on
Build Your Own Mortar
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Looks like that user limit from Geocities filled up...
Don't worry. Here is high bandwith mirror.
And that cow-shot is really bad-taste but funny as hell.
I'm not sure.
But a quick Google search on "12301. (a) The term "destructive device" gives six.ca links like for example caag.state.ca.us that could indicate that he is talking about a law in California.
This is not as much about free speech as it is about the relationship between employers and employed scientists as consultants.
We will probably see more cases as this as a higher percentage of scientists are funded directly (in companies) or indirectly (sponsored uni/gov-programs) by businesses.
As if anyone did not know about it; sustained publishing of controversial research funded by corporations is almost impossible.
I am curious why the upstreams are capped as they are. I don't understand why the upstreams are limited as they are.
Most companies pay for how much data they inserts/sends/uploads into other networks they connect to.
For example your ISP Charter have to "peer" (read have connections) to other companies as AT&T and MCI and they probably pay for the data they send into these networks. So if you and everyone else at Charter have a 1 mbit uplink and sent data out at full speed 24/7 Charter wiill have to pay AT&T extra. But if you download much AT&T will have to pay Charter. Naturally you can't donload at 1 mbit from most private AT&T customers as they also have caps on their uploads speed.
This is the simplified explanation; the companies don't pay for each byte but for fixed lines. But they put caps on so they don't have to spend more on faster lines.
First i thought that your quote was from a conservative philosopher named Henry George, he ranted a lot about these things in his book Progress and Poverty. But his political wievs were more conservative than this quote.
Abraham Lincoln said something like this and it's probably this quote you are thinking about:
"Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor and could not have existed had not labor first existed. Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher attention."
Sometimes it strikes me that most republicans today gave forgotten the last part in his quote.
Re:It's late at night on slashdot and the nightmar
on
NYT on RFID
·
· Score: 1
we do have a little thing called democracy here, and when these types of laws started getting passed, I'm sure that we'd start to vote out our representatives.
Yeah, just like when the politicans passed the PATRIOT Act, all of those will be voted out in next election... Right.
TIA will become another program that's "downgraded" in other words like the Star Wars program grom the Reagan era.
Star Wars was supposed to end, but lived on in black budget for many years, hiding in the dark and with only small leaks of information leaked out in the ninthies, and then almost 15 years later the program derived into the Ballistic Missile Defense program.
So the program in it's current form is dead, but the research necessarily to complete the program for future use will continue.
The irony is that this company's research division originally consisted of people that came in by a merger. L0pht Heavy Industries an old hacker group from Boston merged with @stake.
L0pht has allways belived in full disclosure of security vulnerabilities; like they stated in this interwiev..
There was also a/. story. about L0pht, "hypocrisy of hackers" and (possible)connections to FBI and NIPC a year ago.
So it turns out that the hacker philosophy went out the backdoor and the corporate standards from @stake prevail.
Of course their relations towards Microsoft is important since they are their largest customer but firing the messenger because his wievs don't reflect the party line, and NOT because he is wrong, will hurt their reputation as consultants more than his wievs do.
Maybe it's naive to think that one buys some independent judgment from consultants and security groups but atleast one should expect that they give the CTO some slack in publishing a paper/report about the consequences of reliance on one company.
I would think that it would have been better for Microsoft to indirectly say "we are working about the security with @stake even if one of them criticized us" rather than "we are working with @stake, and yes they fired the messenger".
The first one is a take-home newsletter that students and parents are supposed to fill out together. The letter contains a "Dear Parent" arnt about filesharing from MPAA; with quotes like:
We hope you will use this opportunity to talk with your children about "digital citizenship"
and how they use the Internet. It's important for you to be aware of their behavior online.
"File-swapping," which is just another form of stealing, is morally and ethically wrong. It
causes great economic harm to the creative artist who does not get paid for his or her efforts
and to the thousands of others who depend on these industries for employment. "Fileswapping"
can have very practical ramifications for you as well.
And statements that the students are suposed to answer to like:
6. Stealing is stealing, whether from a store or from the Internet.
The second pdf is a big file with instructions to the teacher, two "introductions"; What's fair? and Patents and Progress. The students are supposed to discuss the material and learn that "file swapping" is wrong, illegal and hurts the economy.
There is a lot of ranting about P2P and copyrights. There is a introduction to why copyrights exist with some mumbling about the founding fathers. And oops they accidentaly forgot to mention that copyrights originaly expired after a time.
The rest of the pdf is devoted to two "classroom activities"; Living in a fishbowl and The starving artist (I'm not joking the rumors are true)
The fishbowl play is a discussion based role play game where the students gets to play actors, singers, directot, carpenters, producer and computer user.
I'm not that paranoid, but I observe that there is a factor of 5 to 1 in the "good guys" vs computer user. And they forgot to include some vital players like "the lawyer", "the executive" and "the stockholder".
The Starving Artist is a discussion based game where students are divided in group and shall produce a CD but then they are ripped off by "file swapping". "how does this makes you feel?"
Quote
Share the following statements with the students to summarize the lesson
with the class. These statements help summarize the lesson and connect the
concepts to the students personally.
- To legally own it, legally buy it.
- If you haven't paid for it, you've stolen it.
- Copying a movie or CD for a friend is illegal.
- If you wouldn't take a movie or CD from the shelves of a store without
paying for it, then why do it online?
Gi figure.
I must say that MPAA got a killer program here.
The smart thing is the "winning of the teacher". Teachers are authority persons to children and getting them to explain why "stealing is wrong" is of course more effective than doing commercials.
There is some old industry saying that says: "get them when they are young" and I think thats the thinking behind this.
The whole project says a lot about MPAA but also about what kind of corporate sponsored projects that are allowed into american schools.
If I had children in USA I would have taken them out of this part of the education whitout hesitation.
Very interesting links you gave as I really don't know that much about subpoenas and requirements for government officials except for what I have read on slashdot, eff.org and Epic. And since there are a lot of paranoid people out there (including me) it's hard to find out whats correct.
About Europe and subphoenas.
I know for sure that companies in Scandinavia don't have to release information until a judge have ordered them to do so. They can give information but very few do so without an approval from a judge.
I'm not so sure about the rest of Europe, but I think the situation is similar in Germany, France, Belgium, Netherland, Switzerland, Austria, Spain and Portugal. Within EU there is a lots of project on hamonisation of laws so its difficault to track each country. But I belive Europe is heading in the right direction on these matters. For example EU has implemented laws that don't allow companies to transfer information to other countries with less privacy.
But since there are both national laws and new EU laws on this subject its hard to get a reasonable overwiev. This page from Privacy International gives an overwiev on EU privacy laws and technology. (looks like some of the links points to a EU server that is down)
But this don't cover the matter of disclosure that is still up to each country.
I'm not aware of any IDE RAID controller that can do that, but I could be wrong.
The 3ware Escalade 7500 series is some of the best IDE RAID controllers out there and they do burst at max 190MB/s streaming (RAID 5) in read and max 70 MB/s sustained.
As I wrote in a comment here he contacted:
1. Local police. No response.
2. FBI. No response. They where suposed to call him back but nothing happened.
Wheter this is the responsibility of the DHS or the FBI I'm not sure about, but Ron Guilmette who runs the now closed monkeys.com actually tried to contact FBI.
From a google groups post here:
I was also on the phone to Ron just a few minutes ago.
More specifically, the law enforcement issue is twofold:
First, he tried talking to his city police. He had to fight them to
even take a written report of the incident. That was to be expected,
of course.
Then, he tried calling the FBI. The receptionist who took the call
apparently didn't understand a word of Ron's explanation of a "denial
of service attack against his Internet servers" and asked him "Is that
illegal?". Ron insisted that he must speak to somebody who is more
capable of understanding the issue. The receptionist transferred the
call to the duty officer, which turned out to be an answering machine.
Ron left a message, expecting to be called back, but no call so far.
If this is correct, I have no indication that it should not be, it looks like a total FBI fuck up.
It refers to the practise of putting the email address of a "Joe User" in the email headers.
Next morning when joeuser@company.com he finds 453 emails from angry people flaming him because he "sent" spam.
And within some hours his company's ISP is on some blacklist because the spammers also used jennyuser@samecompany.com and yetanotheruser@samecompany.com. Joe User's ISP then contacts Joe User about the spam and eerything is chaos for a couple of days.
And it takes a lot of resources for the blacklists to clear up the mess.
I would be surprised if there were any common law country where the identify of users of an IP address were NOT subject to subpoena in a civil suit.
In most civilised countries in Europe a judge actually has to decide wheter the company can give out the identity of a user.
DCMA gives an assistant/clerk(?) the authority to allow identification based on a subpoena.
Re:What about supporting hardware?
on
Athlon 64 Debuts
·
· Score: 1
As someone pointed out above; all the large makers have released or plan to release MB's within a month. There are chipsets from Nvida and VIA (coming soon?).
But the coolest feature in the Athlon 64 FX CPU the Cool'n'Quiet specification won't become implemented before December/Januar. (the MB-makers have to implement it within February according to contract).
Cool'n'Quiet is somewhat similar to the PowerNow! and Centrine technology it reduces powerusage when the CPU load is low. Athlon 64 can go as low as 16 Watt with this. Offcourse then the speed of the CPU is lower, but you don't need 2GHz when typing in word. You need silence.
So while Prescott uses ca. 50?(min)-100(max) Watt the Athlon 64 will use from 16(min)-80?(max) Watt.*
*Not very acurate power consuption numbers, but you get the picture.
I think the difference could be that Google collects the data not for the standard "we are keeping the server logs for security" but more as a future business opportunity or in case they can construct some new search options. They can collect enormous amounts of data no one else can collect. Some day they might sell accsess to "trusted partners" that can mine the data.
Don't blame them, after all they can earn huge amounts of money on this, but that does not mean that we should not be worried.
I think this is yet another reason to turn of those cookies and browse through a proxy if you are conserned about privacy. Not exactly bulletproff privacy, but better that nothing.
And the cost of taking some preventive action is not that large compared to the enormous cost that global warming would lead to.
Several studies for example The Economics of Global Warming (3 parts)
edited by Tietenberg based on several studies from a bunch of scientist and economists William Cline is one of them. , points out that preventing global warming would only cost a few percent of global GDP over a long period of time. On the other hand global warming can cause several times that in a 200-300 year perspective.
Fluctations in earth temperatures is normal, but most scientists believe that the strong rise in temeratures can not be explained by this.
Off course such studies will *allways* contain some uncertainities as they are based on expectations and other studies. But as long as the majority of scientist belive that global warming is real and to some extend caused my mankind its pretty stupid not to take some precautions.
First; I'm not defending why the ISP's does this I'm simply telling you why they do it:
1. Traffic shaping is expensive and most ISP would have had to spend *thousands* of dollars to do this. Just check the pricing on routers from Cisco and then you wil see what I'm talking about. Telecom equipment is still priced very high.
2. Even if they could have "traffic shaped" all the out and ingoing traffic they don't whant to do it. Two reasons for this:
A. They want to charge extra for this especially for bussinesses. Many ISP hopes that some day affordable traffic shaping will be available to them so they can provide it as a "service" or extra quality at a higher price.
B. Traffic shaping don't reduce the traffic much its only a priority setup of packets. They could have capped the P2P apps only but for some reasons they don't do this. Most ISP pay for the money they insert into the network of others so capping bandwith makes sence from a MBA perspective.
Slashdot Mirror
Valve is known for not managing to meet the deadlines. All of the Counterstrike versions from 1.3 came 2-6 months later than the official schedule. (dig around at csnation for proof)
So Half-Life 2 with a real release date somewhere between 30. November and 30. March was (IMO) far more likely.
I wonder how far they are willing to go to protect a hacker that finds a rare vulnerability.
For example a well known group recently (a couple of months ago) released a movie with some blur in on of the corners where the "MPAA-dots" where before. The dots are arranged in a pattern, for example two letters like TI.
This is relatively easy do detect and remove, but if they start to use stenography eg. unique pictures embedded in the movie things could get messy for the sources of the movies.
There is plenty of tricks the movie studios can use to detect "piracy", but then there is the cost/benefit ratio. The whole system of movie theaters relies in cheap disribution to multiple theaters and making exclusive copies could cost more than it's really worth. The problems with copyright infringement of movies are less urgent with movies than music because of lack of bandwith.
Don't worry.
Here is high bandwith mirror.
And that cow-shot is really bad-taste but funny as hell.
I'm not sure. .ca links like for example caag.state.ca.us that could indicate that he is talking about a law in California.
But a quick Google search on "12301. (a) The term "destructive device" gives six
We will probably see more cases as this as a higher percentage of scientists are funded directly (in companies) or indirectly (sponsored uni/gov-programs) by businesses.
As if anyone did not know about it; sustained publishing of controversial research funded by corporations is almost impossible.
For example your ISP Charter have to "peer" (read have connections) to other companies as AT&T and MCI and they probably pay for the data they send into these networks. So if you and everyone else at Charter have a 1 mbit uplink and sent data out at full speed 24/7 Charter wiill have to pay AT&T extra. But if you download much AT&T will have to pay Charter. Naturally you can't donload at 1 mbit from most private AT&T customers as they also have caps on their uploads speed.
This is the simplified explanation; the companies don't pay for each byte but for fixed lines. But they put caps on so they don't have to spend more on faster lines.
Abraham Lincoln said something like this and it's probably this quote you are thinking about:
Sometimes it strikes me that most republicans today gave forgotten the last part in his quote.Yeah, just like when the politicans passed the PATRIOT Act, all of those will be voted out in next election... Right.
And you can get you pasword by following the instructions on this page:
http://slashdot.org/faq/accounts.shtml#ac300
Star Wars was supposed to end, but lived on in black budget for many years, hiding in the dark and with only small leaks of information leaked out in the ninthies, and then almost 15 years later the program derived into the Ballistic Missile Defense program.
So the program in it's current form is dead, but the research necessarily to complete the program for future use will continue.
L0pht has allways belived in full disclosure of security vulnerabilities; like they stated in this interwiev..
There was also a /. story. about L0pht, "hypocrisy of hackers" and (possible)connections to FBI and NIPC a year ago.
So it turns out that the hacker philosophy went out the backdoor and the corporate standards from @stake prevail.
Of course their relations towards Microsoft is important since they are their largest customer but firing the messenger because his wievs don't reflect the party line, and NOT because he is wrong, will hurt their reputation as consultants more than his wievs do.
Maybe it's naive to think that one buys some independent judgment from consultants and security groups but atleast one should expect that they give the CTO some slack in publishing a paper/report about the consequences of reliance on one company.
I would think that it would have been better for Microsoft to indirectly say "we are working about the security with @stake even if one of them criticized us" rather than "we are working with @stake, and yes they fired the messenger".
Anyway; just my $0.02
Anyway the program is out in pdf files now; It's two files:
Xcellent Xtreme Challenge Parent Newsletter
and
What's the Diff? A Guide to Digital Citizenship - Activity Guide.
The first one is a take-home newsletter that students and parents are supposed to fill out together. The letter contains a "Dear Parent" arnt about filesharing from MPAA; with quotes like:
And statements that the students are suposed to answer to like:
The second pdf is a big file with instructions to the teacher, two "introductions"; What's fair? and Patents and Progress. The students are supposed to discuss the material and learn that "file swapping" is wrong, illegal and hurts the economy.
There is a lot of ranting about P2P and copyrights. There is a introduction to why copyrights exist with some mumbling about the founding fathers. And oops they accidentaly forgot to mention that copyrights originaly expired after a time.
The rest of the pdf is devoted to two "classroom activities"; Living in a fishbowl and The starving artist (I'm not joking the rumors are true)
The fishbowl play is a discussion based role play game where the students gets to play actors, singers, directot, carpenters, producer and computer user.
I'm not that paranoid, but I observe that there is a factor of 5 to 1 in the "good guys" vs computer user. And they forgot to include some vital players like "the lawyer", "the executive" and "the stockholder".
The Starving Artist is a discussion based game where students are divided in group and shall produce a CD but then they are ripped off by "file swapping". "how does this makes you feel?"
Gi figure.Quote
I must say that MPAA got a killer program here.
The smart thing is the "winning of the teacher". Teachers are authority persons to children and getting them to explain why "stealing is wrong" is of course more effective than doing commercials.
There is some old industry saying that says: "get them when they are young" and I think thats the thinking behind this.
The whole project says a lot about MPAA but also about what kind of corporate sponsored projects that are allowed into american schools.
If I had children in USA I would have taken them out of this part of the education whitout hesitation.
About Europe and subphoenas.
I know for sure that companies in Scandinavia don't have to release information until a judge have ordered them to do so. They can give information but very few do so without an approval from a judge.
I'm not so sure about the rest of Europe, but I think the situation is similar in Germany, France, Belgium, Netherland, Switzerland, Austria, Spain and Portugal. Within EU there is a lots of project on hamonisation of laws so its difficault to track each country. But I belive Europe is heading in the right direction on these matters. For example EU has implemented laws that don't allow companies to transfer information to other countries with less privacy.
But since there are both national laws and new EU laws on this subject its hard to get a reasonable overwiev.
This page from Privacy International gives an overwiev on EU privacy laws and technology. (looks like some of the links points to a EU server that is down)
But this don't cover the matter of disclosure that is still up to each country.
I'm not aware of any IDE RAID controller that can do that, but I could be wrong.
The 3ware Escalade 7500 series is some of the best IDE RAID controllers out there and they do burst at max 190MB/s streaming (RAID 5) in read and max 70 MB/s sustained.
As I wrote in a comment here he contacted:
1. Local police. No response.
2. FBI. No response. They where suposed to call him back but nothing happened.
From a google groups post here:
If this is correct, I have no indication that it should not be, it looks like a total FBI fuck up.
(more info here)
Next morning when joeuser@company.com he finds 453 emails from angry people flaming him because he "sent" spam.
And within some hours his company's ISP is on some blacklist because the spammers also used jennyuser@samecompany.com and yetanotheruser@samecompany.com. Joe User's ISP then contacts Joe User about the spam and eerything is chaos for a couple of days.
And it takes a lot of resources for the blacklists to clear up the mess.
DCMA gives an assistant/clerk(?) the authority to allow identification based on a subpoena.
But the coolest feature in the Athlon 64 FX CPU the Cool'n'Quiet specification won't become implemented before December/Januar. (the MB-makers have to implement it within February according to contract).
Cool'n'Quiet is somewhat similar to the PowerNow! and Centrine technology it reduces powerusage when the CPU load is low. Athlon 64 can go as low as 16 Watt with this. Offcourse then the speed of the CPU is lower, but you don't need 2GHz when typing in word. You need silence.
So while Prescott uses ca. 50?(min)-100(max) Watt the Athlon 64 will use from 16(min)-80?(max) Watt.*
*Not very acurate power consuption numbers, but you get the picture.
Don't blame them, after all they can earn huge amounts of money on this, but that does not mean that we should not be worried.
I think this is yet another reason to turn of those cookies and browse through a proxy if you are conserned about privacy. Not exactly bulletproff privacy, but better that nothing.
Google is US-centric!
Ok serious: This is a beta thing, and second they probably want to roll it out in a area where its easier to sell ads based on location.
Several studies for example The Economics of Global Warming (3 parts) edited by Tietenberg based on several studies from a bunch of scientist and economists William Cline is one of them. , points out that preventing global warming would only cost a few percent of global GDP over a long period of time. On the other hand global warming can cause several times that in a 200-300 year perspective.
Fluctations in earth temperatures is normal, but most scientists believe that the strong rise in temeratures can not be explained by this.
Off course such studies will *allways* contain some uncertainities as they are based on expectations and other studies. But as long as the majority of scientist belive that global warming is real and to some extend caused my mankind its pretty stupid not to take some precautions.
1. Traffic shaping is expensive and most ISP would have had to spend *thousands* of dollars to do this. Just check the pricing on routers from Cisco and then you wil see what I'm talking about. Telecom equipment is still priced very high.
2. Even if they could have "traffic shaped" all the out and ingoing traffic they don't whant to do it. Two reasons for this:
A. They want to charge extra for this especially for bussinesses. Many ISP hopes that some day affordable traffic shaping will be available to them so they can provide it as a "service" or extra quality at a higher price.
B. Traffic shaping don't reduce the traffic much its only a priority setup of packets. They could have capped the P2P apps only but for some reasons they don't do this. Most ISP pay for the money they insert into the network of others so capping bandwith makes sence from a MBA perspective.