I'm surprised its not mentioned yet (that I've seen) on Slashdot, but don't forget that a huge portion of hacking has always been social engineering, which of course includes asking the right questions in the right way.
I was an anthropology student for a while, and one of the most interesting classes was one called 'Doing Feildwork' which basically taught the techniques, problems and pitfalls of doing an ehtnography (think slightly more academic and analytical documentary). One of our main topics involved when and why you should or shouldn't mention that you're an academic, simply because there are many questions that people will answer if you're polite/friendly that they wont answer if they know you're an academic.
Someone else here already posted the story of an American spy in Paris who was tricked by a friendly, attractive girl. Think about the last time an attractive member of the opposite sex talked to you [this may be hard for some slashdotters, I'm sure]: don't you typically keep talking with them as long as they want, unless they become too annoying?
Its worth noting that $3million over 31 years is only $100,000 a year or so. Thats not a small amount, to be sure, but its not like the man was made rich.
Nothing disgusts me more in normal conversation than this sort of bullshit parading as wit (its similar to 'kill all the lawyers' being invoked as the wisdom of Shakespeare, with everyone forgetting that the line is a description of the first step in installing a tyrant).
Those who can do, do. Those who teach are doing! You think you learned everything you know on your own? Go tell your parents, your teachers, your professors, your bosses, your friends, etc.
Pardon the vulgarity, but grow some fucking common sense.
This reminds me of a concept I read about several years back: putting barcodes or magnetic stripes on the back of business cards. Then, put a small reader on a pda. That way, you keep the card, but just swipe it in. How much data, realistically, do you need on a business card? A small photo, a name, company info, and contact info.
I'm not sure if you're mocking them, but I certainly think that could be a good idea for certain uses.
Specifically, photos on flash mem. If you could browse quickly through photos on a stick, you could save time looking for the right stick to share, for example.
The truth is, we're much better at sorting simultaneous visual stimuli than we are at sorting simultaneous textual stimuli. This is why we have to procedurally read titles of books on a bookshelf, whereas we can almost instantly pick out a particular image on the spine of those picks.
I'm sure the thousands of lawyers in 'intellectual property' classes, not to mention the lawyers who practice in it, would disagree with you.
Someone either broke physically into their building, broke electronically into their servers, or illegally duplicated a legal copy (which is defined by law as theft), so no matter what Valve had something stolen from them.
Next time you want to make a snide comment about the lack of 'intellectual property', you do me a favor and suggest at the same time why any programmers should be paid. Is it for their labor? Then no programmers should ever have 'rights' to their code, right?
Freeman, if anything, is a reference either to slavery or the 'Dune' series. There's no real relationship with the idea of a free game or intellectual property theft.
What might have been ironic is if the game were entitled "Unstealable" or something, but even that would be a stretch at best.
Actually, Kitano (the director) intentionally designed the bloodsplatters in the new version so as to be artistic, as opposed to realistic. He described them, if I remember the quote, as being "blossoms in the air".
No, you don't. You have good reason to be Anti-Bush, , Anti-Iraq-War, etc., but the country is still one of if not the greatest nation on Earth. We still have the most liberal policies on free speech (just look at the fiascos faced in France regarding religious clothing, or England's recent debacle with their tabloids about illegal discussion of the royal family), and some of the best facilities for economic advancement.
Don't blame a great nation for a bad leader: he's dragging our name in the mud already, so you don't need to be doing it to.
You're somewhat incorrect. I'm unaware of anyone doing forward raytracing, but I am aware of quite a few people doing something related, via photon mapping. PM is mathematically seperate from raytracing though, i.e. the techniques to simulate it are extremely different.
What I'm about to write is not an advocation of hacking, voiding of warrantees, etc.
There are certain forums on the web (I wont mention specific names, as per their instructions, but you can find them if you search carefully) that give extremely specific and easy-to-follow (especially if you're a linux user) instructions for hacking Tivos of all types (standalone or DTV) in order to add these features.
Among other things available by hacking, you can extract video [and in a limited degree, put it back on the tivo], schedule via the web, etc.
As I posted earlier, DirecTV is NOT dropping Tivo. All they did was to liquidate their shares, just as they did with their XM shares earlier in the year. DirecTivos are rapidly becoming the most popular option for new DirecTV customers, so I dont think they're going to drop Tivo without having a solidly established replacement.
Might want to be more careful with your variables there, buddy: you just claimed that $x is both the cost of a Tivo subscription and the cost of a rental, which cannot possibly be equal.
1) DirecTivo units have two seperate tuners, so they can record two seperate shows simultaneously, while watching a third previously recorded show. Standalone Tivos have one tuner, so they can only record one show while watching a prerecorded show.
2) DirecTV broadcasts their content in an Mpeg2 stream (although not a completely standdard mpeg2, since they implemented their format before the mpeg2 standard was complete). The DirecTivo records this stream without recompression, whereas Standalone units re-compress whatever signal they receive. This means that the DirecTivo unit introduces zero loss of quality, so watching a recorded DirecTV show is the same thing as watching it live.
God damn, I hate replying to my own post, but if you look at the gradn-parent (i.e. the parent of my post), they had mentioned that "porn finally comes to tivo". Now, with that post scoring so low as to be below most people's filters, my first post just looks like its out of no where....
This should be 'redundant', since DirecTivo has long had the ability to record the porn from the On Demand channels (PPV), not to mention that Stand-alone Tivos have always been able to record from the cable boxes that have porn channels...
Actually, Tivo wasn't 'dumped' by DirecTV. It was their stock in Tivo that they dropped (they had held 3.4 million shares).
This quote from the ArsTechnica article should elaborate:
"Though confirming the recent sale of TiVo stock for $24 million, DirecTV spokesman Bob Marsocci denied it indicates a change in the companies' relationship. "It's consistent with what we have done earlier this year in liquidating some of our portfolio of investments,'' Marsocci said. DirecTV sold its entire stake in XM Satellite Radio earlier this year."
As Ars mentions, this is certainly a bit of bad news for Tivo (and people like me, who love the extra features in DirecTivo units as compared to normal Tivos, and thus fear a full seperation...) but not as much of a 'drop' as this post implies.
Wow, you missed here on a pretty obvious point, demonstrating that you didn't read the article, nor are you familiar with the device. The p5 is for the PC, and has been out for at least two years or so.
Other peripherals - for example the multitude of light guns for every system, or the DDR pad for home versions - have all sold quite well, despite not coming with a system. Some light-gun games have even sold for $99 or so instead of $50 because they include a gun (i.e. no real savings, you just get a branded gun).
I normally wouldn't bust out the grammar nazi stuff, but it's amusing that someone would put quotation marks around a name, then spell it incorrectly. No big deal, just a little amusing.
Achilles. That is the correct spelling. Carry on.
(Oh, I should note that I do agree with the post however: the battery will be destroyed by the constant read-ahead required for video.)
No, thats not really an appropriate assesment. Suppose a mugger attempts to rob you, and further suppose you're lucky/skillful enough to punch them in the face and disarm them, kocking them to the ground in the profess. In the US, you'd have no problem if you kicked them in the head in order to knock them unconcious while you waited for the police. In the UK, however, you might face serious problems (since some would argue you should have just run like a mutha').
So the question is this: should the system encourage or discourage behavior on the part of the victim that would enable the police to remove a criminal from the streets?
CHEATER! Cite your sources for your jokes, please! If you don't, and NPR sues you, then you'll have to sue Slashdot for not properly explaining the consequences of...oh screw it.
To use your own phrase, "don't be silly". Only a fool would question the idiom 'you get what you pay for', since its not intended in the way you're deliberately misrepresenting it.
'You get what you pay for' simply means this: when a product/service involves any sort of quality, either in materials, labor, skills in construction, etc., you cannot expect an unreasonable amount of quality for a given amount of money. Rather, there is a reasonable exchange, as determined by the market: the conclusion then is that if everyone's selling their 30-40gig portable music device for a few hundred dollars, dont be surprised that the $50 device is a peice of shit.
I think most crackheads/drug addicts/drunks skip #4, and thus ignore #5. So it doesn't really work for a large percentage of the crime-committing population
That may be; I wasn't explicitly endorsing the argument, but rather presenting it as a representation of what the Article Author may be using as his/her base. A relevant question for you might be this: how significant a percentage of crimes (of any sort) are perpetrated by crackheads/drug addicts/drunks? I dont know, offhand, so I cant say how relevant they would be to the overall epidemic.
Its worth noting that the author, I believe, is making an allusion to 'A Modest Proposal' by Jonathan Swift (here: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jlynch/Courses/95c/T exts/modest.html ). In it [a speech to Parliament], Swift proposes the consumption of extra infants of the poor, as a means of simultaneously solving the population and famine problems.
I may be giving him too much credit, however.
Alternately, he/she may be making a reference to the age-old Utilitarian argument that goes something like this:
1-There are more lesser crimes [i.e. viral attacks, robberies] than greater crimes [i.e. murders, rapes].
2-The people who commit lesser crimes believe them to be of lesser severity than greater crimes.
3-The difficulty in disuading someone of a crime is proportional to the perceived severity of that crime.
4-People make a utilitarian calculation when deciding to commit [or not commit] a crime, wherein they weight the costs [possible punishment] against the gains [i.e. fame, economic gain, etc.].
5-Therefor, the easist way to disuade commiters of lesser crimes is to grossly increase the cost [i.e. punishment].
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, you'd be surprised how much you'll say.
I'm surprised its not mentioned yet (that I've seen) on Slashdot, but don't forget that a huge portion of hacking has always been social engineering, which of course includes asking the right questions in the right way.
I was an anthropology student for a while, and one of the most interesting classes was one called 'Doing Feildwork' which basically taught the techniques, problems and pitfalls of doing an ehtnography (think slightly more academic and analytical documentary). One of our main topics involved when and why you should or shouldn't mention that you're an academic, simply because there are many questions that people will answer if you're polite/friendly that they wont answer if they know you're an academic.
Someone else here already posted the story of an American spy in Paris who was tricked by a friendly, attractive girl. Think about the last time an attractive member of the opposite sex talked to you [this may be hard for some slashdotters, I'm sure]: don't you typically keep talking with them as long as they want, unless they become too annoying?
Its worth noting that $3million over 31 years is only $100,000 a year or so. Thats not a small amount, to be sure, but its not like the man was made rich.
Nothing disgusts me more in normal conversation than this sort of bullshit parading as wit (its similar to 'kill all the lawyers' being invoked as the wisdom of Shakespeare, with everyone forgetting that the line is a description of the first step in installing a tyrant).
Those who can do, do. Those who teach are doing! You think you learned everything you know on your own? Go tell your parents, your teachers, your professors, your bosses, your friends, etc.
Pardon the vulgarity, but grow some fucking common sense.
Yeah, correct tags except for the fact that the cuts are -always- wrong (i.e. they are too late or too early).
This reminds me of a concept I read about several years back: putting barcodes or magnetic stripes on the back of business cards. Then, put a small reader on a pda. That way, you keep the card, but just swipe it in. How much data, realistically, do you need on a business card? A small photo, a name, company info, and contact info.
I'm not sure if you're mocking them, but I certainly think that could be a good idea for certain uses.
Specifically, photos on flash mem. If you could browse quickly through photos on a stick, you could save time looking for the right stick to share, for example.
The truth is, we're much better at sorting simultaneous visual stimuli than we are at sorting simultaneous textual stimuli. This is why we have to procedurally read titles of books on a bookshelf, whereas we can almost instantly pick out a particular image on the spine of those picks.
I'm sure the thousands of lawyers in 'intellectual property' classes, not to mention the lawyers who practice in it, would disagree with you.
Someone either broke physically into their building, broke electronically into their servers, or illegally duplicated a legal copy (which is defined by law as theft), so no matter what Valve had something stolen from them.
Next time you want to make a snide comment about the lack of 'intellectual property', you do me a favor and suggest at the same time why any programmers should be paid. Is it for their labor? Then no programmers should ever have 'rights' to their code, right?
No, its not. Its not even funny.
Freeman, if anything, is a reference either to slavery or the 'Dune' series. There's no real relationship with the idea of a free game or intellectual property theft.
What might have been ironic is if the game were entitled "Unstealable" or something, but even that would be a stretch at best.
Actually, Kitano (the director) intentionally designed the bloodsplatters in the new version so as to be artistic, as opposed to realistic. He described them, if I remember the quote, as being "blossoms in the air".
No, you don't. You have good reason to be Anti-Bush, , Anti-Iraq-War, etc., but the country is still one of if not the greatest nation on Earth. We still have the most liberal policies on free speech (just look at the fiascos faced in France regarding religious clothing, or England's recent debacle with their tabloids about illegal discussion of the royal family), and some of the best facilities for economic advancement.
Don't blame a great nation for a bad leader: he's dragging our name in the mud already, so you don't need to be doing it to.
You're somewhat incorrect. I'm unaware of anyone doing forward raytracing, but I am aware of quite a few people doing something related, via photon mapping. PM is mathematically seperate from raytracing though, i.e. the techniques to simulate it are extremely different.
What I'm about to write is not an advocation of hacking, voiding of warrantees, etc.
There are certain forums on the web (I wont mention specific names, as per their instructions, but you can find them if you search carefully) that give extremely specific and easy-to-follow (especially if you're a linux user) instructions for hacking Tivos of all types (standalone or DTV) in order to add these features.
Among other things available by hacking, you can extract video [and in a limited degree, put it back on the tivo], schedule via the web, etc.
As I posted earlier, DirecTV is NOT dropping Tivo. All they did was to liquidate their shares, just as they did with their XM shares earlier in the year. DirecTivos are rapidly becoming the most popular option for new DirecTV customers, so I dont think they're going to drop Tivo without having a solidly established replacement.
Might want to be more careful with your variables there, buddy: you just claimed that $x is both the cost of a Tivo subscription and the cost of a rental, which cannot possibly be equal.
There are basically two extra features:
1) DirecTivo units have two seperate tuners, so they can record two seperate shows simultaneously, while watching a third previously recorded show. Standalone Tivos have one tuner, so they can only record one show while watching a prerecorded show.
2) DirecTV broadcasts their content in an Mpeg2 stream (although not a completely standdard mpeg2, since they implemented their format before the mpeg2 standard was complete). The DirecTivo records this stream without recompression, whereas Standalone units re-compress whatever signal they receive. This means that the DirecTivo unit introduces zero loss of quality, so watching a recorded DirecTV show is the same thing as watching it live.
God damn, I hate replying to my own post, but if you look at the gradn-parent (i.e. the parent of my post), they had mentioned that "porn finally comes to tivo". Now, with that post scoring so low as to be below most people's filters, my first post just looks like its out of no where....
This should be 'redundant', since DirecTivo has long had the ability to record the porn from the On Demand channels (PPV), not to mention that Stand-alone Tivos have always been able to record from the cable boxes that have porn channels...
Actually, Tivo wasn't 'dumped' by DirecTV. It was their stock in Tivo that they dropped (they had held 3.4 million shares).
This quote from the ArsTechnica article should elaborate:
"Though confirming the recent sale of TiVo stock for $24 million, DirecTV spokesman Bob Marsocci denied it indicates a change in the companies' relationship. "It's consistent with what we have done earlier this year in liquidating some of our portfolio of investments,'' Marsocci said. DirecTV sold its entire stake in XM Satellite Radio earlier this year."
As Ars mentions, this is certainly a bit of bad news for Tivo (and people like me, who love the extra features in DirecTivo units as compared to normal Tivos, and thus fear a full seperation...) but not as much of a 'drop' as this post implies.
Wow, you missed here on a pretty obvious point, demonstrating that you didn't read the article, nor are you familiar with the device. The p5 is for the PC, and has been out for at least two years or so.
Other peripherals - for example the multitude of light guns for every system, or the DDR pad for home versions - have all sold quite well, despite not coming with a system. Some light-gun games have even sold for $99 or so instead of $50 because they include a gun (i.e. no real savings, you just get a branded gun).
I normally wouldn't bust out the grammar nazi stuff, but it's amusing that someone would put quotation marks around a name, then spell it incorrectly. No big deal, just a little amusing.
Achilles. That is the correct spelling. Carry on.
(Oh, I should note that I do agree with the post however: the battery will be destroyed by the constant read-ahead required for video.)
No, thats not really an appropriate assesment. Suppose a mugger attempts to rob you, and further suppose you're lucky/skillful enough to punch them in the face and disarm them, kocking them to the ground in the profess. In the US, you'd have no problem if you kicked them in the head in order to knock them unconcious while you waited for the police. In the UK, however, you might face serious problems (since some would argue you should have just run like a mutha').
So the question is this: should the system encourage or discourage behavior on the part of the victim that would enable the police to remove a criminal from the streets?
CHEATER! Cite your sources for your jokes, please! If you don't, and NPR sues you, then you'll have to sue Slashdot for not properly explaining the consequences of...oh screw it.
To use your own phrase, "don't be silly". Only a fool would question the idiom 'you get what you pay for', since its not intended in the way you're deliberately misrepresenting it.
'You get what you pay for' simply means this: when a product/service involves any sort of quality, either in materials, labor, skills in construction, etc., you cannot expect an unreasonable amount of quality for a given amount of money. Rather, there is a reasonable exchange, as determined by the market: the conclusion then is that if everyone's selling their 30-40gig portable music device for a few hundred dollars, dont be surprised that the $50 device is a peice of shit.
I think most crackheads/drug addicts/drunks skip #4, and thus ignore #5. So it doesn't really work for a large percentage of the crime-committing population
That may be; I wasn't explicitly endorsing the argument, but rather presenting it as a representation of what the Article Author may be using as his/her base. A relevant question for you might be this: how significant a percentage of crimes (of any sort) are perpetrated by crackheads/drug addicts/drunks? I dont know, offhand, so I cant say how relevant they would be to the overall epidemic.
Its worth noting that the author, I believe, is making an allusion to 'A Modest Proposal' by Jonathan Swift (here: http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jlynch/Courses/95c/T exts/modest.html ). In it [a speech to Parliament], Swift proposes the consumption of extra infants of the poor, as a means of simultaneously solving the population and famine problems.
I may be giving him too much credit, however.
Alternately, he/she may be making a reference to the age-old Utilitarian argument that goes something like this:
1-There are more lesser crimes [i.e. viral attacks, robberies] than greater crimes [i.e. murders, rapes].
2-The people who commit lesser crimes believe them to be of lesser severity than greater crimes.
3-The difficulty in disuading someone of a crime is proportional to the perceived severity of that crime.
4-People make a utilitarian calculation when deciding to commit [or not commit] a crime, wherein they weight the costs [possible punishment] against the gains [i.e. fame, economic gain, etc.].
5-Therefor, the easist way to disuade commiters of lesser crimes is to grossly increase the cost [i.e. punishment].