Of course Blu-Ray is anti-consumer. It can be played on a Blu-Ray disk player without the need for a licenced copy of Windows-whatever. Same goes for HDDVD, and even for the old-fashioned DVD / VHS / Beta / film reel formats.
Note that there's virtually no copy protection on the older formats, it just costs more to duplicate the media. So, I'm not so sure that copy protection schemas have anything to do with Bill's definition of pro-consumer / anti-consumer. Perhaps the article should have mentioned who's consumers Bill was referring to? As far as the DRM goes, there's nothing like throwing around a good buzzword to "tech-up" what is basically a "fluff" piece.
Winston: I'm worried, Ray. All my readings point to something big on the horizon.
Ray: What do you mean, big?
Winston: Well, let's say this Twinkie represents the normal amount of hard drive space in a New York area desktop. Based on this morning's reading, it would be a Twinkie thirty-five feet long, weighing approximately six hundred pounds.
I believe that his "angle" is that a very large corporation which is directly responsible is releasing a new operating system who's only major advertisable feature is a new media player.
So, it might do Bill some personal economic good to talk about how the future of film / media distribution will not use the DVDs/HDVDs/Blu-Rays but will use hard disks, which will only be enjoyable with a media player. And since this corporation has such market penetration and will be giving away said media player pre-installed, such perceived needs only move to drive the perceived need to adopt this (so-called) new operating system.
Bill Gates can speak out against whatever he wishes. Until he considers who his audience is, it won't do very much.
The distributers of media want a format that is not-alterable. That way, there's not even the discussion of loss of data / corruption of data in transit. The consumers want a format that is not-alterable. If I buy a movie, I don't want to find that it's been "modified" rendering it useless, or worse yet, partially useful.
Sure, there is a market for downloading movies onto a hard drive, but realistically, hard drives fail, and I'll want a backup. DVD's may not be the best technology in the world, but it comes with a built-in feature, it is read-only. I don't want to be saddled with the responsibility for determining the validity of burnt DVDs, because I really can't do that for all of the films I intend to own. Especially when the previous expectation is for the PRODUCER of the content to produce copies of it for my consumption.
Any technology that is read-write could be overwritten, which isn't a pretty thought to consider when you just paid for the CONTENT on the media.
Past disccussions have indicated that this information is programmed into the printer control circuits themselves, no software is required or even aware of the "extra" dots.
If that is true, then no amount of dirver manipulation will help, with the possible exception of a driver that "adds" extra dots to make the message meaningless. In theory, you could add extra dots, but in practice it would be ineffective unless you could gurantee perfect alignment (or the extra dots would be easy to filter out). Since some dots would come from software, and others come from hardware control programs, it's not a simple task to gurantee alignment.
The actual offer required that you not only kill the CEO of "Take This", but named him personally, with the protection of a minor misspelling of his name (2 character difference, if I recall correctly.)
In addition, it required that you also kill that almost-fictional CEO's family...
There are laws against threatening people, and you don't get off the hook for mistyping thier name. "But, your honor, I wasn't threatening you, because I clearly said, 'Your Honr!'".
http://www.penny-arcade.com/news.php?date=2005-10- 12
Gabe was talking to Jack via email, suggesting a charity which would have liked to received the money, which Gabe is active in promoting. It is backed by gamers, but isn't pushing videogames (any more than other toys) upon children.
Jack noted that Gabe's phone number was in his email, and took it upon himself to call Gabe and personally chew him out and threaten Gabe.
As a lawyer, you would think that he KNOWS what a contract is.
As a non-lawyer, I wonder if you can sue to break a contract because your intent wasn't to honor the contract, but to make a satrical point. I doubt it.
If you enter a contract without intent to deliver, there's a host of laws you violate. Good thing that his contract was with the "public" in general, as that's the least likely group to sue for grievences, and the least likely to be defended under these circumstances.
He emailed Penny Arcade looking to vent his spleen against one of thier comics that played apon his request and the issue of video game violence. In the email he included his phone number. Can't remember if it was Tyco, but one of the board members called him to discuss the offer and clarify some of the vague points of his offer. He demanded to know how they received the phone number, threatened to sue them if they called again, and chewed the guy out on the phone.
Jack Thompson lost a child and blames video games. In the above actions, all he would have had to do is describe the pain of losing his child and state that he believed that video games played a role in his circumstance. He would have had a lot of sympathy and support from the people playing games, instead he treated all players a fringe psychopaths, and presented himself as a supreme *sshole. He doesn't know how to court the market, he's treatening to go to war against it.
He never would have donated $10,000. He thought it was a safe bet, because he thought the market was so controlled and fragile that it would have acted with the same rigidity as the *IAA and NEVER ALLOW such a game to be made. If he was going to spend that money, he would have done it a long time ago by sending it to his representative (with a letter wrapped around it, telling of the painful loss of his child and the circumstances under which it happened).
Far be it for me to point out the obvious questions of whether a father who is so quick to explode might have led a destablizing influence on his children. He may have been a model citizen before the incident, but today he's just a foaming at the mouth lunatic who's mad, and probably not to discriminating at who he hurts to received "justice" from the videogame industry.
Quotes the parent poster, "Why on earth would anybody let an MSFT badge keynote a *nix conference is beyond me..."
I imagine it's the Krusty the Klown defense on why one must sell out:
Sobs for a few breaths then exclaims in anguish, "They parked a dumptruck full of cash on my front yard! What else could I do!?!?!?" More emphatic sobbing.
You could be saving a little bit of up front cost to just piss away tens of thousands of dollars a month because you can't justify the cost of labor. Sure if you had the time, I'd warrant that you would have peformed a true cost-benifit analysis of maintianing the machines in-house. But by you're own words "We just don't have time for anything else."
Sad truth is, you probably don't have time to properly account for the the time and money you waste by coordinating with Dell, and I'll wager that your company (by it's size in computer demand) is large enough that it's already utilizing resources just to track and coordinate the problem machines.
Sure, it might only cost you a percent or two of profit, and changing could be the wrong decision (depending on the data you collect), but even a COMPUTER SCIENTIST knows that basic business classes provide ample opportunity for justifying decisions with real resons (cost / savings) than the cop-out, "We just don't have time for anything else."
I made a telemarketer feel silly buy harshly stating that there were not circumstances under which I could ever stoop low enough to buy something from someone who was interrupting my dinner.
My reward was an automated 5 times a day phone call with the simple recorded phrase "Fuck You" and a hangup. It lasted for nearly 3 weeks, and I called the Police to see if I could get something done about it after the first 3 days.
The Police in my area have a policy that phone calls (of such a nature) are threats, so the transfered me to the Homicide Divison (I'm not kidding) where they took down a lot of information about myself and the nature of the phone call. The Homicide Division politely reported that they didn't have the resources to follow up on the caller, but perhaps I could purchase caller id from the phone company and then they might have something to work with. That was after collecting nearly an hour's worth of information which might become useful in determining who the telemarketer was should I suddenly show up dead.
So, even after offering for the Police to tap my phone, and complaining to them, and a national do not call list, and federal laws backing the whole thing up, I was stuck with "Fuck You" being autocalled to my home around 5 times a evening for nearly 3 weeks.
I don't have any sympathy for any telemarketer, even if they were formerly starving before they got thier job. Just like I don't have any sympathy for murders even if they were formerly starving before they got their job. Some things are socially unacceptable, and lack of proper marketing, a decent product, and targeted advertising isn't justificaiton for the tactics used by telemarketing.
When you lie with dogs, you get up with fleas. When you take a telemarketing job, you know you're screwing the public's peace of mind.
Yes, but security assumes a managed environment, and in a managed environment you can disable things if they pose a risk.
I can disable something an attacker knows (change the password). I can disable something an attacker has (invalidate the particular security card, etc.) I cannot disable something a person is.
If an attacker obtains a fingerprint (via a fingerprinting kit and coffee mug) I can't disable the item without locking out authorized personnel. Advances in technology will not be sufficent to deter an attacker, as every system will eventually be fooled by a copy of high enough fidelity.
Biometrics is an interesting field, but it is not useful for security, as identity theft (finger prints, retnia photographs, etc.) prevents the differentiation between an attacker and authorized personnel.
Almost every lecture that I have been in which involved a large class was "going to fast".
Let's face it, it's a much easier resting state to learn nothing than to learn something. However, for that 10% that actually has read the material before going to class, I've always heard grumbles of discontent about how the professor is just re-reading the material to them, or how the rest of the class is slowing them down.
The truth is, you can't get a consensus that will appease everyone. Even if you could, such a consensus would just be a collective opinion, subject to all of the misunderstandings of the class. I don't know how many times someone has done the five or ten homework problems and beleived they understood, when in reality, they're misunderstanding critical points of the ideas presented in the material.
Clicking will just promote multiple choice. Multiple choice is just a tool used in classrooms to make the mechanics of grading easier. Unfortunately, there's so many studies of "How to take ANY multiple choice exam." that it is apparent that multiple choice is a flawed system. It's not that someone couldn't fix / avoid these issues in preparing their exams, it's that it takes too much time, effort, and understanding of the weaknesses of multiple choice to expect every (or even most) educators to craft good exams.
So click if it makes you happy, but don't tell me that you will learn more because of it. Such arguements make about as much sense as the eye / finger coordination arguments of video games in the 80's, but I still see people spilling coffee, dropping pens, and generally short of perfect coordination when not playing Quake.
Hurricanes aren't solely destructive because of the wind. A lot of that destructive power comes from the things the wind is carrying. At a minimum you have water, which makes the wind a bit dense. But in reality, you have all sorts of debris. Roof shingles, plants, etc.
Carbon nano-tubes have great strenths, but most things under linear stretching don't require a lot of lateral impact to cause them to break.
I'm not very interested in whether an open source solution can be built, of course it can.
My question is, "Why do we need such a device?"
It would be a much simpler solution to not interrupt the class for some nearly anonymous touchy-feely "feel-good" feedback from the class, when the professor can just ask the class to raise hands, or ask for questions, etc.
After all, learning is not instantaneous, so instantaneous feedback on whether the class "just" go a point amounts to no more than asking if there are any questions. After all, just after the class "clicks" that they don't understand, the professor will STILL have to ask the class questions to find out why the don't understand, or how they mis-understand.
Plus, who is to stop the person clicking what they guy to the left of them clicked?
It's not so much who says it, or what they say, or what anyone believes that's important in Science.
It's the studies that they perform, and how well their arugments stand up to scientific peer review.
Linus Pauling won the Nobel twice, but personally believed (and preached) that Vitamin C plays a vital role in curing / preventing the common cold. He died before he could prove those statements, and never published because he knew that his work was inconclusive and incomplete. His Nobel was for the work he published in other aspects of biology / chemistry.
He might be right about the Vitamin C, (he also might be wrong), but that's just his opinion. Taking someone else's published, defended, and dissected study which survived the rigors of peer review and treating it as if it's equavilent to someone else's opinion is an insult to the lives spent trying to really understand the world.
So don't post "Granddad's" opinions, post his research findings.
The RIAA has much, much more effective means to oppress and control the artists at their disposal, the don't need to resort to lawsuits.
Remember that the RIAA has a close relationship with the recording companies, so all it needs to do is let the appropriate company know. Then that company will come down like a load of bricks on the artist.
Although a few people might like to make the argument that those who listen to thier IPods too loudly are genetically abberant, it is thier ears which are damaged, and not thier DNA.
So basically, unless you get a micro-mechanical fix, it won't matter what your DNA looks like. And to make matters worse, this is one of those sensory systems that is set up once (during early development) and expected to perform over the entire duration of your life. So natural healing is not an option.
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Thanks for the corrections. It's been far too long since I've seen the film, but the twinkie dialogue is burned into my mind, forever. :)
Of course Blu-Ray is anti-consumer. It can be played on a Blu-Ray disk player without the need for a licenced copy of Windows-whatever. Same goes for HDDVD, and even for the old-fashioned DVD / VHS / Beta / film reel formats.
Note that there's virtually no copy protection on the older formats, it just costs more to duplicate the media. So, I'm not so sure that copy protection schemas have anything to do with Bill's definition of pro-consumer / anti-consumer. Perhaps the article should have mentioned who's consumers Bill was referring to? As far as the DRM goes, there's nothing like throwing around a good buzzword to "tech-up" what is basically a "fluff" piece.
Winston: I'm worried, Ray. All my readings point to something big on the horizon.
Ray: What do you mean, big?
Winston: Well, let's say this Twinkie represents the normal amount of hard drive space in a New York area desktop. Based on this morning's reading, it would be a Twinkie thirty-five feet long, weighing approximately six hundred pounds.
Ray: That's a big Twinkie.
I believe that his "angle" is that a very large corporation which is directly responsible is releasing a new operating system who's only major advertisable feature is a new media player.
So, it might do Bill some personal economic good to talk about how the future of film / media distribution will not use the DVDs/HDVDs/Blu-Rays but will use hard disks, which will only be enjoyable with a media player. And since this corporation has such market penetration and will be giving away said media player pre-installed, such perceived needs only move to drive the perceived need to adopt this (so-called) new operating system.
And I didn't even have to add in the DRM angle.
Bill Gates can speak out against whatever he wishes. Until he considers who his audience is, it won't do very much.
The distributers of media want a format that is not-alterable. That way, there's not even the discussion of loss of data / corruption of data in transit. The consumers want a format that is not-alterable. If I buy a movie, I don't want to find that it's been "modified" rendering it useless, or worse yet, partially useful.
Sure, there is a market for downloading movies onto a hard drive, but realistically, hard drives fail, and I'll want a backup. DVD's may not be the best technology in the world, but it comes with a built-in feature, it is read-only. I don't want to be saddled with the responsibility for determining the validity of burnt DVDs, because I really can't do that for all of the films I intend to own. Especially when the previous expectation is for the PRODUCER of the content to produce copies of it for my consumption.
Any technology that is read-write could be overwritten, which isn't a pretty thought to consider when you just paid for the CONTENT on the media.
Packaged spam. Why didn't they think of this before?
Past disccussions have indicated that this information is programmed into the printer control circuits themselves, no software is required or even aware of the "extra" dots.
If that is true, then no amount of dirver manipulation will help, with the possible exception of a driver that "adds" extra dots to make the message meaningless. In theory, you could add extra dots, but in practice it would be ineffective unless you could gurantee perfect alignment (or the extra dots would be easy to filter out). Since some dots would come from software, and others come from hardware control programs, it's not a simple task to gurantee alignment.
The actual offer required that you not only kill the CEO of "Take This", but named him personally, with the protection of a minor misspelling of his name (2 character difference, if I recall correctly.)
In addition, it required that you also kill that almost-fictional CEO's family...
There are laws against threatening people, and you don't get off the hook for mistyping thier name. "But, your honor, I wasn't threatening you, because I clearly said, 'Your Honr!'".
http://www.penny-arcade.com/news.php?date=2005-10- 12
Gabe was talking to Jack via email, suggesting a charity which would have liked to received the money, which Gabe is active in promoting. It is backed by gamers, but isn't pushing videogames (any more than other toys) upon children.
Jack noted that Gabe's phone number was in his email, and took it upon himself to call Gabe and personally chew him out and threaten Gabe.
As a lawyer, you would think that he KNOWS what a contract is.
As a non-lawyer, I wonder if you can sue to break a contract because your intent wasn't to honor the contract, but to make a satrical point. I doubt it.
If you enter a contract without intent to deliver, there's a host of laws you violate. Good thing that his contract was with the "public" in general, as that's the least likely group to sue for grievences, and the least likely to be defended under these circumstances.
I have to agree with you 100%.
He emailed Penny Arcade looking to vent his spleen against one of thier comics that played apon his request and the issue of video game violence. In the email he included his phone number. Can't remember if it was Tyco, but one of the board members called him to discuss the offer and clarify some of the vague points of his offer. He demanded to know how they received the phone number, threatened to sue them if they called again, and chewed the guy out on the phone.
Jack Thompson lost a child and blames video games. In the above actions, all he would have had to do is describe the pain of losing his child and state that he believed that video games played a role in his circumstance. He would have had a lot of sympathy and support from the people playing games, instead he treated all players a fringe psychopaths, and presented himself as a supreme *sshole. He doesn't know how to court the market, he's treatening to go to war against it.
He never would have donated $10,000. He thought it was a safe bet, because he thought the market was so controlled and fragile that it would have acted with the same rigidity as the *IAA and NEVER ALLOW such a game to be made. If he was going to spend that money, he would have done it a long time ago by sending it to his representative (with a letter wrapped around it, telling of the painful loss of his child and the circumstances under which it happened).
Far be it for me to point out the obvious questions of whether a father who is so quick to explode might have led a destablizing influence on his children. He may have been a model citizen before the incident, but today he's just a foaming at the mouth lunatic who's mad, and probably not to discriminating at who he hurts to received "justice" from the videogame industry.
Quotes the parent poster, "Why on earth would anybody let an MSFT badge keynote a *nix conference is beyond me..."
I imagine it's the Krusty the Klown defense on why one must sell out:
Sobs for a few breaths then exclaims in anguish, "They parked a dumptruck full of cash on my front yard! What else could I do!?!?!?" More emphatic sobbing.
Wow.
It seems you need to hire an operations manager.
You could be saving a little bit of up front cost to just piss away tens of thousands of dollars a month because you can't justify the cost of labor. Sure if you had the time, I'd warrant that you would have peformed a true cost-benifit analysis of maintianing the machines in-house. But by you're own words "We just don't have time for anything else."
Sad truth is, you probably don't have time to properly account for the the time and money you waste by coordinating with Dell, and I'll wager that your company (by it's size in computer demand) is large enough that it's already utilizing resources just to track and coordinate the problem machines.
Sure, it might only cost you a percent or two of profit, and changing could be the wrong decision (depending on the data you collect), but even a COMPUTER SCIENTIST knows that basic business classes provide ample opportunity for justifying decisions with real resons (cost / savings) than the cop-out, "We just don't have time for anything else."
I made a telemarketer feel silly buy harshly stating that there were not circumstances under which I could ever stoop low enough to buy something from someone who was interrupting my dinner.
My reward was an automated 5 times a day phone call with the simple recorded phrase "Fuck You" and a hangup. It lasted for nearly 3 weeks, and I called the Police to see if I could get something done about it after the first 3 days.
The Police in my area have a policy that phone calls (of such a nature) are threats, so the transfered me to the Homicide Divison (I'm not kidding) where they took down a lot of information about myself and the nature of the phone call. The Homicide Division politely reported that they didn't have the resources to follow up on the caller, but perhaps I could purchase caller id from the phone company and then they might have something to work with. That was after collecting nearly an hour's worth of information which might become useful in determining who the telemarketer was should I suddenly show up dead.
So, even after offering for the Police to tap my phone, and complaining to them, and a national do not call list, and federal laws backing the whole thing up, I was stuck with "Fuck You" being autocalled to my home around 5 times a evening for nearly 3 weeks.
I don't have any sympathy for any telemarketer, even if they were formerly starving before they got thier job. Just like I don't have any sympathy for murders even if they were formerly starving before they got their job. Some things are socially unacceptable, and lack of proper marketing, a decent product, and targeted advertising isn't justificaiton for the tactics used by telemarketing.
When you lie with dogs, you get up with fleas. When you take a telemarketing job, you know you're screwing the public's peace of mind.
Yes, but security assumes a managed environment, and in a managed environment you can disable things if they pose a risk.
I can disable something an attacker knows (change the password).
I can disable something an attacker has (invalidate the particular security card, etc.)
I cannot disable something a person is.
If an attacker obtains a fingerprint (via a fingerprinting kit and coffee mug) I can't disable the item without locking out authorized personnel. Advances in technology will not be sufficent to deter an attacker, as every system will eventually be fooled by a copy of high enough fidelity.
Biometrics is an interesting field, but it is not useful for security, as identity theft (finger prints, retnia photographs, etc.) prevents the differentiation between an attacker and authorized personnel.
Claim you are European. In the U.S. of A. that's enough to make people stop questioning why you have a hand bag.
Informative? This should be rip-roaring halirously FUNNY!
I mean, who else can pronounce "Hand Bag!" with 8 syllables?
And I say this, knowing full well the imporance of being earnest.
Almost every lecture that I have been in which involved a large class was "going to fast".
Let's face it, it's a much easier resting state to learn nothing than to learn something. However, for that 10% that actually has read the material before going to class, I've always heard grumbles of discontent about how the professor is just re-reading the material to them, or how the rest of the class is slowing them down.
The truth is, you can't get a consensus that will appease everyone. Even if you could, such a consensus would just be a collective opinion, subject to all of the misunderstandings of the class. I don't know how many times someone has done the five or ten homework problems and beleived they understood, when in reality, they're misunderstanding critical points of the ideas presented in the material.
Clicking will just promote multiple choice. Multiple choice is just a tool used in classrooms to make the mechanics of grading easier. Unfortunately, there's so many studies of "How to take ANY multiple choice exam." that it is apparent that multiple choice is a flawed system. It's not that someone couldn't fix / avoid these issues in preparing their exams, it's that it takes too much time, effort, and understanding of the weaknesses of multiple choice to expect every (or even most) educators to craft good exams.
So click if it makes you happy, but don't tell me that you will learn more because of it. Such arguements make about as much sense as the eye / finger coordination arguments of video games in the 80's, but I still see people spilling coffee, dropping pens, and generally short of perfect coordination when not playing Quake.
No, but I'll bet a 2x4 at 90 miles per hour will.
Hurricanes aren't solely destructive because of the wind. A lot of that destructive power comes from the things the wind is carrying. At a minimum you have water, which makes the wind a bit dense. But in reality, you have all sorts of debris. Roof shingles, plants, etc.
Carbon nano-tubes have great strenths, but most things under linear stretching don't require a lot of lateral impact to cause them to break.
With wireless, you'll have to design in anti-interference measures. Not from malicious users, but from the clickers in the other room.
You'll have to put batteries in every one of these units, creating N points of failure (one for each student).
You'll have to design the system to handle N inputs at roughly the same time, since every professor will ask you to click "yes" or "no" now.
We haven't even solved all of these problems perfectly with wires, unless you have a dedicated wire for each of the student's desks.
I'm not very interested in whether an open source solution can be built, of course it can.
My question is, "Why do we need such a device?"
It would be a much simpler solution to not interrupt the class for some nearly anonymous touchy-feely "feel-good" feedback from the class, when the professor can just ask the class to raise hands, or ask for questions, etc.
After all, learning is not instantaneous, so instantaneous feedback on whether the class "just" go a point amounts to no more than asking if there are any questions. After all, just after the class "clicks" that they don't understand, the professor will STILL have to ask the class questions to find out why the don't understand, or how they mis-understand.
Plus, who is to stop the person clicking what they guy to the left of them clicked?
It's not so much who says it, or what they say, or what anyone believes that's important in Science.
It's the studies that they perform, and how well their arugments stand up to scientific peer review.
Linus Pauling won the Nobel twice, but personally believed (and preached) that Vitamin C plays a vital role in curing / preventing the common cold. He died before he could prove those statements, and never published because he knew that his work was inconclusive and incomplete. His Nobel was for the work he published in other aspects of biology / chemistry.
He might be right about the Vitamin C, (he also might be wrong), but that's just his opinion. Taking someone else's published, defended, and dissected study which survived the rigors of peer review and treating it as if it's equavilent to someone else's opinion is an insult to the lives spent trying to really understand the world.
So don't post "Granddad's" opinions, post his research findings.
The RIAA has much, much more effective means to oppress and control the artists at their disposal, the don't need to resort to lawsuits.
Remember that the RIAA has a close relationship with the recording companies, so all it needs to do is let the appropriate company know. Then that company will come down like a load of bricks on the artist.
Although a few people might like to make the argument that those who listen to thier IPods too loudly are genetically abberant, it is thier ears which are damaged, and not thier DNA.
So basically, unless you get a micro-mechanical fix, it won't matter what your DNA looks like. And to make matters worse, this is one of those sensory systems that is set up once (during early development) and expected to perform over the entire duration of your life. So natural healing is not an option.
And it's used to clean your floor.
Really, ammonia isn't more difficult to obtain than acetic acid, and you can do bad things with just about any material you can get your hands on.