The problem is that this law seems to not just cover camcorders, but most devices capable of recording/transmitting video or images. That may also mean your video-enabled cellphone, or your digital camera.
I tend to carry my digital camera with me everywhere in case something photogenic presents itself. I'm sure as heck not leaving my camera in the car, so it comes with me to theatres etc. Since I'm in Canada and most theatre employees have the brains to tell a camera from video-recorder, no problem, but if such a law was drafted here I could serious repercussions.
The law isn't a bad idea... but it needs to be limited:
a) Devices able to record X-minutes of video (rules out video-enabled cameras)
b) Devices capable of X-resolution at Y-FPS (rules out video-enabled phones)
c) Change the jail-time to a nice fine. I'm sorry but there's absolutely no call to stick somebody in prison with rapists or even car-thieves for supposedly recording a movie.
"Jane and her barn animals" - Illegal whether it has a disclaimer or not
"Jane does six guys" - sexual
"Jane's webcam" - sexual, but does it count if they manage to keep the email content itself down to 'innuendo' status (and the actual crappy pr0n being on a linked page).
"Enlarge your breasts/penis/etc. Viagara alternative, etc etc" - probably the greatest in volume of spam in contrast to the above, but does it qualify as sexual? Female/male enhancement tends to deal with sexual organs/performance but is not actually pornographic in content.
Really, it seems to me that the really nasty stuff is already illegal anyways (animals, underage, etc), and the majority of emails I get to my servers are in the nature of enhancements which may or may not count.
For all those bitching that I should "buy one on ebay," there are reasons I haven't (and not because I'm cheap):
a) This particular LCD would do 16/24bit (I forget which) colour at 800x600 resolution on an 8" screen. Most ebay displays either a lot bigger, or smaller but with a much crappier (or just plain weird) resolution.
b) I'm bored after work. I realize there's a lot of work involved, and if somebody knew a place to get common pinouts and/or other parts required it would be a fun project
c) "I built this myself" is so much more satisfying than "I bought it on ebay" - especially when you know it was hard work.
And you can pull a nice 5/12V off a standard PC power cable. I have a nice little mp3 player that I was gifted from overseas that had a 220V charger. The output was 5V/600ma though, worked nicely off the red lead of my PSU.
I wasn't asking for ideas with which to re-use the parts... as you might guess I've got lots of those. I'm asking for assistance in making them useful. As in, there's a perfectly good TFT LCD on that dead laptop... I'd love to use it for something else... but I'll be damned if I have any idea how to make it function outside of the (dead) laptop, or if that is even possible.
Third party drivers, etc
on
Kernel 2.4.26 Out
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Well... in the case of my servers - I would need up go to dump the debian/stable modutils in favour of the (I believe still debian/unstable) module loader for a 2.6 kernel (can't remember which it is, but I've done it a few times upgrading desktops). This of course requires upgrading a bunch of other dependant crap.
And then there's the 3rd-party drivers. RAID controllers, etc etc. Yes, I know 2.6 is supposed to possibly figure out drivers from older kernels, but do I really want to trust that? Some of these don't have 2.6 drivers. Hell, for some they 2.4 drivers were a recent thing... I had a machine which I called the vendor to specifically get a 2.4.xx driver for a multi-modem system since the box was still running 2.2 before a hardware upgrade.
Being at the latest-and-greatest is good if it provides a noticable benefit vs the drawbacks up grading. In this case, it doesn't.
Not sure if you have linux installed, but you might be able to get away with this on some of the boot-from-CD distros anyhow (boot from CD, mount drive, write files).
I recently disabled the "mikmod" plugin in XMMS in favour of the "modplug" plugin. Very noticable improvement in sound quality! Set up a playlist, turn on disk output, then write those.WAV files to a mounted windows drive and use CDEX or your favorite converter to Mp3 them. I've been looking for an XMMS plugin on a commandline utility that will do the same and/or include straight-to-mp3 writing but no dice so far.
Which actually brings me to a good question: Graphics cards have been improving in fast-3d-rendering performance, but are often not that great at crisp 2d rendering (compare an NVidia card to a Matrox and see what I mean).
How well does this one do at 2d rendering? I do play 3d games a lot but that doesn't mean I want my web-browsing and other non-3d activities to be sub-par
You know... I wouldn't mind free advertising on a popular website, but getting one's site on a headline article of slashdot is not always a good thing. I'm thinking these spammers would rather do without such "popularity"
I'm guessing that $1/hr is a lot less than they have to pay out in charges for exceeding bandwidth limits.
I've been looking for something similar, though for different reasons. Basically I want to audit a computer's drive contents+registry before installing a program, then after, and track the changes (registry changes, files added, files removed, files changed).
With that being done, I would then like to compile all the changes into an archive/script which would allow me to duplicate them on a seperate machine. It would be really nice for network-based installs so that when I'm doing 30+ machines I don't have to insert/remove a CD a bazillion times just to upgrade office or whaetever.
With the bazillion different project in Linux that already don't co-operate very well. Getting them all to follow the same standard might be a little difficult.
Not to mention that having some usher come in and call out "is Doctor X here??! Hello??! Doctor X??!" is much more disruptive than having a cellphone on low-vibe. I remember awhile back when movies had an amusing intro about turning off cellphones - you could see people putting their phones on silent mode after that. Really, if you give people a reminder, most reasonable ones will comply. The others can be kicked out - which usually pleases the crowds anyhow.
And what about the doctor, who is always on call, but had his pager/cellphone on "vibrate" to avoid disturbing those around him. Is he not allowed to go in these areas, or perhaps he will just miss the call that a 12-year-old-girl is dying at the hospital while waiting for a transplant.
Yes, cellphones disrupting public events are definately a growing problem, but you know what: the last movie I saw was more interupted by the girls talking/swearing a few rows up than by cellphones. The solution to either problem: kick 'em out.
Disruption is not the solution to disruption... especially if this device were to become to everyone who has a grudge against cellphones.
The problem is, that even in linux a dumb user is still a dumb user. Instead of this:
"Install: Bonzai buddy will be installed to C:\program files\pwned"
You get something like: "Install: Bonzai buddy will be installed to/usr/local/bin/pwned,/etc/pwned"
"Error, you need to run as root to install this program. Please enter your root password:" *****
"Thank you. Installation will now continue"
You don't think it will happen? Just wait. Safety comes in that the user doesn't always get the root password (and is patched against root exploits)... at least in a business environment Vs home (and at home *MY* family members ain't getting the root password).
As linux popularity increases... we can hope for some of the following:
a) Lindows doesn't become the primarily popular distro
b) Users will *not* run as root - see (a)
c) Root SSH disabled (most distros do enable root SSH by default) or no bootup SSH server
Open SSH ports (or NFS for that matter, but it generally needs some more setting up) with root access and easy passwords would be the gold for virus writers. The same for root-level user access. Give the users their sandbox, let them play in it, and let the viruses be restricted to them too.
Yes, virii will happily nuke a user's files, and possibly attempt to email themselves outward (we *can* protect against this in many ways in 'nix) - but at least they won't have the potential to bork an entire system... and if they're restricted to ~/ or other public areas then they should be much easier to clean.
My concern is that to allow installation to be simple enough: applications will become something like "You must be root to install this application. Please enter your root password" - in which case viruses will follow suite and, well, same problem as windows. Maybe the concept of becoming "superuser" would instill enough paranoia to keep users from clicking and becoming root, but I doubt it.
However, that's home users. For businesses - don't give employees root - and suddenly you have a much tighter environment. We're setting up a lot of linux machines here at work. I've made a base image for them, bound the individual machines to DHCP static IPs as well. My primary server has a public key in authorized_keys for all the desktops, so updates/changes are as simple as:
for IP in $LINUX_MACHINES
{
ssh $IP/mnt/nfs/myupdatescript.sh &
}
(in this case I obviously allow root logins via SSH, but none of these machines have a public IP)
Natural atmospheric conditions in the sky can cause lightning, could an unusual atmospheric charge cause something tesla-like naturally at ground level?
How about underground, if there were enough minerals capable of transporting electrical impulses?
The fires have even consumed unplugged lamps and an entire apartment
Doesn't quite apply here though it seems, since things that aren't even plugged in are still catching fire. Now, different ground levels could be causing weird EM frequencies in the general environment... but this is still very odd. I wonder what would happen were one to start trailing long cords hooked up to voltmeters to measure ambient electrical current?
You know... I think I've actually seen this movie now that I'm looking at the cover
I guess it had little enough in common with the game(s) that I disassociated it. Just goes to show you how badly done some video-game-to-movie conversions are...
I'm pretty sure that "Linux for dummies" is already taken too. Maybe they could name it by acronym:
LFB: Linux for Beginners
LFWU: Linux for windows users (probably not if "lindows" isn't acceptable).
In reality, Lindows is pretty much a LFWU though... and it breaks some of the things that most linux users follow (security vs usability especially) in order to give Windows users a taste of linux.
Well, we've got a line-up in the past of video-game-based movies that generally suck, though some aren't too bad. The trend seems to be picking up though, and like the Marvel movies, we might see a few "X-men" type movies to match the disaster that was "the Hulk."
So far, we've got a future line-up of:
Metroid
Final Fantasy: Advent Children
FFAC (basically a sequel to FF7) looks like it could actually be very cool, sticking much more to the original theme as opposed to CGI-in-space like FFSW was.
Metroid, in-theme also sounds cool... though it could definately go the way of "stuff blowing up in space, lasers, and boobs."
Can anyone mention any video-game-based movies that were worthwhile? How about games that might make promising movies... so far I can think of a few:
-Zelda
-Pretty much any of the Final Fantasys except X2
-Starcraft/Warcraft
-Space Quest? Most games of this genre, particularly the longer-lasting ones, could make a decent miniseries.
-Diablo: Demons, knights, and undead - oh my! heck why not?
-Wing Commander: Some of these were more-or-less movies anyhow. Could make for a decent SCI-FI miniseries
A lot of the "classic" games I played actually developed somewhat interesting stories. Metroid was actually one that - while more action-focuses - had a decent plotline. There is no reason why these couldn't have the potential to be good movies... except that studios already bastardize books/etc enough and video games tend to take a bad beating as far as plot/action.
Except that a large portion of sex that sells is sick and twisted. It's not individuals enjoying each others' physical company, it's on girl and a gang of guys, or a guy performing back-end penetration and then receiving fellation, or sheizer-fetishism etc etc.
If there is one good result of the raunchy porn, it is that it's made the clean stuff more socially acceptable (Playboy being considered "tame" quite often in comparison).
Not that I support in any way a legal attack against porn - that's no different than (as you mention) going against any other regime that one finds personally offensive.
However, I wouldn't mind seeing some of the more blatant advertising for such sites online relegated to dark-corners, and things such as bestiality (and other already-illegal content) could use a good tromping. Even stuff that seems tame like Hentai (anime) porn often goes overboard as you can get away with much more when real people/bodies aren't involved.
The problem with government intervention is that it's like a landslide. It may help uproot some dead wood but in the end it more-often-that-not blasts the whole hillside and anything underneath. Overzealousy and personal priority just do not belong in the hands of the powers-that-be.
With the concerns over the damage that chemicals, etc in batteries cause to the environment, how do organic batteries fit in? I'd think that, having less/no chemicals they might be more environmentally safe. But I wonder about the weird organics.
Organic=Living, so could the cells in these batteries create weird bacteria or other things that might not be very good for organics. With all the "organic" products out nowadays (OLEDS for example), how do they interact with other organics during a leak scenario - safe or more harmful?
If we could dump the lead/acid batteries for a nice organic one that would sure be a nice thing for our city landfills...
Winamp doesn't play Mp3's as well as modplug... as mentioned in other posts (under this topic) it screws up the portemento and some other effects. It would be nice if there were a modplug-based player or a batch-mp3-encode plugin for ModPlug.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that this law seems to not just cover camcorders, but most devices capable of recording/transmitting video or images. That may also mean your video-enabled cellphone, or your digital camera.
I tend to carry my digital camera with me everywhere in case something photogenic presents itself. I'm sure as heck not leaving my camera in the car, so it comes with me to theatres etc. Since I'm in Canada and most theatre employees have the brains to tell a camera from video-recorder, no problem, but if such a law was drafted here I could serious repercussions.
The law isn't a bad idea... but it needs to be limited:
a) Devices able to record X-minutes of video (rules out video-enabled cameras)
b) Devices capable of X-resolution at Y-FPS (rules out video-enabled phones)
c) Change the jail-time to a nice fine. I'm sorry but there's absolutely no call to stick somebody in prison with rapists or even car-thieves for supposedly recording a movie.
Thinking of some of the spam I've seen:
"Jane and her barn animals" - Illegal whether it has a disclaimer or not
"Jane does six guys" - sexual
"Jane's webcam" - sexual, but does it count if they manage to keep the email content itself down to 'innuendo' status (and the actual crappy pr0n being on a linked page).
"Enlarge your breasts/penis/etc. Viagara alternative, etc etc" - probably the greatest in volume of spam in contrast to the above, but does it qualify as sexual? Female/male enhancement tends to deal with sexual organs/performance but is not actually pornographic in content.
Really, it seems to me that the really nasty stuff is already illegal anyways (animals, underage, etc), and the majority of emails I get to my servers are in the nature of enhancements which may or may not count.
For all those bitching that I should "buy one on ebay," there are reasons I haven't (and not because I'm cheap):
a) This particular LCD would do 16/24bit (I forget which) colour at 800x600 resolution on an 8" screen. Most ebay displays either a lot bigger, or smaller but with a much crappier (or just plain weird) resolution.
b) I'm bored after work. I realize there's a lot of work involved, and if somebody knew a place to get common pinouts and/or other parts required it would be a fun project
c) "I built this myself" is so much more satisfying than "I bought it on ebay" - especially when you know it was hard work.
And you can pull a nice 5/12V off a standard PC power cable. I have a nice little mp3 player that I was gifted from overseas that had a 220V charger. The output was 5V/600ma though, worked nicely off the red lead of my PSU.
I wasn't asking for ideas with which to re-use the parts... as you might guess I've got lots of those. I'm asking for assistance in making them useful. As in, there's a perfectly good TFT LCD on that dead laptop... I'd love to use it for something else ... but I'll be damned if I have any idea how to make it function outside of the (dead) laptop, or if that is even possible.
Well... in the case of my servers - I would need up go to dump the debian/stable modutils in favour of the (I believe still debian/unstable) module loader for a 2.6 kernel (can't remember which it is, but I've done it a few times upgrading desktops). This of course requires upgrading a bunch of other dependant crap.
And then there's the 3rd-party drivers. RAID controllers, etc etc. Yes, I know 2.6 is supposed to possibly figure out drivers from older kernels, but do I really want to trust that? Some of these don't have 2.6 drivers. Hell, for some they 2.4 drivers were a recent thing... I had a machine which I called the vendor to specifically get a 2.4.xx driver for a multi-modem system since the box was still running 2.2 before a hardware upgrade.
Being at the latest-and-greatest is good if it provides a noticable benefit vs the drawbacks up grading. In this case, it doesn't.
Not sure if you have linux installed, but you might be able to get away with this on some of the boot-from-CD distros anyhow (boot from CD, mount drive, write files).
.WAV files to a mounted windows drive and use CDEX or your favorite converter to Mp3 them. I've been looking for an XMMS plugin on a commandline utility that will do the same and/or include straight-to-mp3 writing but no dice so far.
I recently disabled the "mikmod" plugin in XMMS in favour of the "modplug" plugin. Very noticable improvement in sound quality! Set up a playlist, turn on disk output, then write those
Which actually brings me to a good question: Graphics cards have been improving in fast-3d-rendering performance, but are often not that great at crisp 2d rendering (compare an NVidia card to a Matrox and see what I mean).
How well does this one do at 2d rendering? I do play 3d games a lot but that doesn't mean I want my web-browsing and other non-3d activities to be sub-par
Error Diagnostic Information
An error has occurred.
HTTP/1.0 404 Object Not Found
You know... I wouldn't mind free advertising on a popular website, but getting one's site on a headline article of slashdot is not always a good thing. I'm thinking these spammers would rather do without such "popularity"
I'm guessing that $1/hr is a lot less than they have to pay out in charges for exceeding bandwidth limits.
Make it shaped like a Star-trek badge or communicator device - many geeks would then be happy to answer the phone then:
"Kirk... er I mean John here"
I've been looking for something similar, though for different reasons. Basically I want to audit a computer's drive contents+registry before installing a program, then after, and track the changes (registry changes, files added, files removed, files changed).
With that being done, I would then like to compile all the changes into an archive/script which would allow me to duplicate them on a seperate machine. It would be really nice for network-based installs so that when I'm doing 30+ machines I don't have to insert/remove a CD a bazillion times just to upgrade office or whaetever.
With the bazillion different project in Linux that already don't co-operate very well. Getting them all to follow the same standard might be a little difficult.
Not to mention that having some usher come in and call out "is Doctor X here??! Hello??! Doctor X??!" is much more disruptive than having a cellphone on low-vibe. I remember awhile back when movies had an amusing intro about turning off cellphones - you could see people putting their phones on silent mode after that. Really, if you give people a reminder, most reasonable ones will comply. The others can be kicked out - which usually pleases the crowds anyhow.
And what about the doctor, who is always on call, but had his pager/cellphone on "vibrate" to avoid disturbing those around him. Is he not allowed to go in these areas, or perhaps he will just miss the call that a 12-year-old-girl is dying at the hospital while waiting for a transplant.
Yes, cellphones disrupting public events are definately a growing problem, but you know what: the last movie I saw was more interupted by the girls talking/swearing a few rows up than by cellphones. The solution to either problem: kick 'em out.
Disruption is not the solution to disruption... especially if this device were to become to everyone who has a grudge against cellphones.
I've seen adaptors to allow Playstation pads to work on a PC, and I believe X-box as well. Nice if you like the feel of the real pad...
The problem is, that even in linux a dumb user is still a dumb user. Instead of this:
/usr/local/bin/pwned, /etc/pwned"
"Install: Bonzai buddy will be installed to C:\program files\pwned"
You get something like:
"Install: Bonzai buddy will be installed to
"Error, you need to run as root to install this program. Please enter your root password:"
*****
"Thank you. Installation will now continue"
You don't think it will happen? Just wait. Safety comes in that the user doesn't always get the root password (and is patched against root exploits)... at least in a business environment Vs home (and at home *MY* family members ain't getting the root password).
As linux popularity increases... we can hope for some of the following:
/mnt/nfs/myupdatescript.sh &
a) Lindows doesn't become the primarily popular distro
b) Users will *not* run as root - see (a)
c) Root SSH disabled (most distros do enable root SSH by default) or no bootup SSH server
Open SSH ports (or NFS for that matter, but it generally needs some more setting up) with root access and easy passwords would be the gold for virus writers. The same for root-level user access. Give the users their sandbox, let them play in it, and let the viruses be restricted to them too.
Yes, virii will happily nuke a user's files, and possibly attempt to email themselves outward (we *can* protect against this in many ways in 'nix) - but at least they won't have the potential to bork an entire system... and if they're restricted to ~/ or other public areas then they should be much easier to clean.
My concern is that to allow installation to be simple enough: applications will become something like "You must be root to install this application. Please enter your root password" - in which case viruses will follow suite and, well, same problem as windows. Maybe the concept of becoming "superuser" would instill enough paranoia to keep users from clicking and becoming root, but I doubt it.
However, that's home users. For businesses - don't give employees root - and suddenly you have a much tighter environment. We're setting up a lot of linux machines here at work. I've made a base image for them, bound the individual machines to DHCP static IPs as well. My primary server has a public key in authorized_keys for all the desktops, so updates/changes are as simple as:
for IP in $LINUX_MACHINES
{
ssh $IP
}
(in this case I obviously allow root logins via SSH, but none of these machines have a public IP)
Natural atmospheric conditions in the sky can cause lightning, could an unusual atmospheric charge cause something tesla-like naturally at ground level?
How about underground, if there were enough minerals capable of transporting electrical impulses?
The fires have even consumed unplugged lamps and an entire apartment
Doesn't quite apply here though it seems, since things that aren't even plugged in are still catching fire. Now, different ground levels could be causing weird EM frequencies in the general environment... but this is still very odd. I wonder what would happen were one to start trailing long cords hooked up to voltmeters to measure ambient electrical current?
You know... I think I've actually seen this movie now that I'm looking at the cover
I guess it had little enough in common with the game(s) that I disassociated it. Just goes to show you how badly done some video-game-to-movie conversions are...
I'm pretty sure that "Linux for dummies" is already taken too. Maybe they could name it by acronym:
LFB: Linux for Beginners
LFWU: Linux for windows users (probably not if "lindows" isn't acceptable).
In reality, Lindows is pretty much a LFWU though... and it breaks some of the things that most linux users follow (security vs usability especially) in order to give Windows users a taste of linux.
Well, we've got a line-up in the past of video-game-based movies that generally suck, though some aren't too bad. The trend seems to be picking up though, and like the Marvel movies, we might see a few "X-men" type movies to match the disaster that was "the Hulk."
So far, we've got a future line-up of: Metroid
Final Fantasy: Advent Children
FFAC (basically a sequel to FF7) looks like it could actually be very cool, sticking much more to the original theme as opposed to CGI-in-space like FFSW was.
Metroid, in-theme also sounds cool... though it could definately go the way of "stuff blowing up in space, lasers, and boobs."
Can anyone mention any video-game-based movies that were worthwhile? How about games that might make promising movies... so far I can think of a few:
-Zelda
-Pretty much any of the Final Fantasys except X2
-Starcraft/Warcraft
-Space Quest? Most games of this genre, particularly the longer-lasting ones, could make a decent miniseries.
-Diablo: Demons, knights, and undead - oh my! heck why not?
-Wing Commander: Some of these were more-or-less movies anyhow. Could make for a decent SCI-FI miniseries
A lot of the "classic" games I played actually developed somewhat interesting stories. Metroid was actually one that - while more action-focuses - had a decent plotline. There is no reason why these couldn't have the potential to be good movies... except that studios already bastardize books/etc enough and video games tend to take a bad beating as far as plot/action.
Except that a large portion of sex that sells is sick and twisted. It's not individuals enjoying each others' physical company, it's on girl and a gang of guys, or a guy performing back-end penetration and then receiving fellation, or sheizer-fetishism etc etc.
If there is one good result of the raunchy porn, it is that it's made the clean stuff more socially acceptable (Playboy being considered "tame" quite often in comparison).
Not that I support in any way a legal attack against porn - that's no different than (as you mention) going against any other regime that one finds personally offensive.
However, I wouldn't mind seeing some of the more blatant advertising for such sites online relegated to dark-corners, and things such as bestiality (and other already-illegal content) could use a good tromping. Even stuff that seems tame like Hentai (anime) porn often goes overboard as you can get away with much more when real people/bodies aren't involved.
The problem with government intervention is that it's like a landslide. It may help uproot some dead wood but in the end it more-often-that-not blasts the whole hillside and anything underneath. Overzealousy and personal priority just do not belong in the hands of the powers-that-be.
With the concerns over the damage that chemicals, etc in batteries cause to the environment, how do organic batteries fit in? I'd think that, having less/no chemicals they might be more environmentally safe. But I wonder about the weird organics.
Organic=Living, so could the cells in these batteries create weird bacteria or other things that might not be very good for organics. With all the "organic" products out nowadays (OLEDS for example), how do they interact with other organics during a leak scenario - safe or more harmful?
If we could dump the lead/acid batteries for a nice organic one that would sure be a nice thing for our city landfills...
Winamp doesn't play Mp3's as well as modplug... as mentioned in other posts (under this topic) it screws up the portemento and some other effects. It would be nice if there were a modplug-based player or a batch-mp3-encode plugin for ModPlug.