It's pretty obvious that Terrans, Zerg and Protoss are analagous to Space Marines, Tyranid and Eldar respectively. They barely even filed off the serial numbers.
Fortunately for gamers, Blizzard also removed the melodrama when they filed off the serial numbers. In a parallel universe where Blizzard licensed GW's franchises, I don't think their 40K game would have sold as well as StarCraft has based on that alone. I'm not sure it's even possible to create a fictional world more over-the-top than 40K.
Each of the entangled particles just relies on local information that it carries with it and which was generated at the moment of entanglement.
Please see Bell's Theorem (from over forty years ago) and the experiments based on it for the reasoning as to why this is (at the very least) extremely unlikely.
The term "innovative sampling" has always amazed me. I mean, it's like "military intelligence", "jumbo shrimp", and "journalistic ethics" - the words don't go together, man.
Please listen to some Skinny Puppy from the 80s, the Plunderphonics album, the collective works of Duran Duran Duran*, etc. Sampling in the right hands is a very effective musical element. Sadly that sort of work isn't done very often anymore, because of the legal barriers that have been created.
* not Duran Duran, although I like their music too.
Unless there is some arrangement for life than is fundamentally different from ours, on a molecular level, then oxygen and liquid water will be found anywhere life will be found.
There are a number of other options that have been theorized. I don't know about the alternatives to oxygen (some gaseous form of sulfur, maybe?), but the main ones I remember are substituting silicon for carbon, and ammonia for water. A quick Google search turned up sulfuric acid as another possible solvent. I'm not a chemist - is there a set of two gases based on sulfur that would fill the spots of oxygen and carbon dioxide in a respiration cycle if sulfuric acid were the solvent used by that form of life?
If you know of any ways to capture Hulu streams (either via webpage or their desktop app), I'd love to know.
I don't know of a way to do it via software, but in an absolute worst-case scenario, someone could just wire up a capture device to the output of the chip in an LCD display that drives the individual pixels (as Jellomizer hinted at above). Treat that output like you'd treat the raw output of the CCD/CMOS sensor in a digital camcorder, IE dump it into a RAM buffer as an uncompressed bitmap and then re-encode it using your favourite method. You'd lose some quality that way, but I don't believe it would be any more than with an analogue copy. If someone with a degree in CS and/or math wanted to be very fancy, maybe they could write an algorithm that would make a best guess about the original compressed encoding based on the raw bitmap. That is, try to figure out things like "oh, there are sixteen pixels of the same colour arranged in a perfect square, here's how that would have been encoded in an MPEG4 stream" or whatever. That way even the re-encoding losses would be minimized. It would take a lot of work to build the hardware and raw capture device, but (again, as has been mentioned previously) only one person in the world needs to do it and then as soon as they've got the un-DRM'd digital copy anyone who's interested can have it too.
Culture, information, we should never approve of shackles on these things. We should reject claims of ownership of ideas or data.
How do you propose that the people who spend their lives producing that culture and information be compensated for their work in such a society? Or are you one of those people that thinks "real artists" would keep producing their work even if they were homeless and starving because they're so driven, or some other similar self-delusion?
And I want to run an application that executes in its data area why?
There are two kinds of "DEP" in Windows - hardware DEP, and software "DEP". The software "DEP" is not literally "data execution prevention", it involves blocking the use of exceptions which aren't registered in a global table, or something along those lines. Yes, software that violates it is probably not great, but sometimes an alternative isn't available.
Actually salting does not help against brute-force. It only helps against dictionary attacks.
It also helps against rainbow table attacks, which I believe the GP was referring to. Salting the hashes makes it much less feasible for someone to develop a rainbow table database, unless they are specifically targeting your system as opposed to every Windows instance on the planet.
I'd love to jump on upgrading from my vintage Xbox XBMC, but I'd hate to drop a few hundred on an upgrade only to find out that it plays 99% of videos out there, but chokes on all high bit rate 1080p MKVs with lots of action, or something like that.
It's been 6-8 months since I last used XBMC, but back then I couldn't even get it to keep the audio and video from an AVI file in sync, it dropped frames when playing DVDs, and functions could only be mapped to a single key, not a key combination (due to the backwards way that the functions were mapped - IIRC the mapping file was by key, not by function). The UI was great for the most part, but it didn't work very well at - you know - playing videos. This was on a P4 system with 2GB of RAM, an Nvidia video chipset, and the Nvidia binary Linux driver, so performance shouldn't have been a concern. I have trouble imagining it working better on a lower-powered system.
I think you misspelled "the fourth one was the most franchise-destroying, poorly-written, poorly-directed, poorly-acted, absolute failure of a film of all time, and McG should have committed ritual suicide in a futile attempt to atone for his sins." It's an easy mistake to make.
The time saved would be more than worth the $30-$40, unless the person asking the question is completely broke.
That seems like the high end of the cost curve to me too. 5-6 months ago I was drowning in free Pentium 3 laptops that I picked up from the junk pile at work, to the point that I had to give most of them away for recycling/resale by the recycling company just because I knew I was never going to make effective use of another eight of them beyond the three I'd already found purposes for (in-car navigation for long drives, portable computer/oscilloscope, and portable audio editor/spare web-browsing system).
it all works perfectly when you live in a huge country
Actually, it doesn't work perfectly even then.
I have a G1. I live in Seattle. A few months ago I drove to Yellowstone. I had only roaming coverage (IE no data use without paying an exorbitant fee) east of Spokane, Washington (so I didn't even make it beyond the borders of my own state). That situation did not change for the rest of my trip. IE T-Mobile has no coverage anywhere that I traveled in Idaho, Montana, or Wyoming. And yes, I know there was literally no coverage because I have the weather widget that updates its display every time it can using the name of the nearest city. It was "Spokane, WA" through all three of those states.
There are a lot of cool things about the G1, but if you ask me it and its software were designed by a bunch of city slickers who never venture more than a few meters beyond their home, the office, and/or their favourite coffee shop.
The caching thing that's allegedly a new feature is a good first step, but I'd much rather just shell out ~$50/year and have all of the map and business data stored in flash memory. For example, on my way back from Yellowstone I stopped in Bozeman. It sure would have been nice if I could have looked up local businesses. I ended up using the Yellow Pages at a gas station.
If I didn't know better, I would have thought they'd been trained in military interrogation techniques.
I'm sure that being a border guard is like any other job that involves dealing with the general public in large numbers (tech support, working at a restaurant/coffee shop, etc.) That is, just due to volume most of them are probably going to have dealt with enough weird situations that they become cynical and assume everyone is going to be doing something dumb.
For example, I'm from the US but I went to university in Canada. While I was there, I worked at the student newspaper. One of the writers there had driven down to the US with some friends and was honestly shocked that the border guards had done a search of their car. The reason was that one of the people in the car was wearing some sort of militant pro-Palestinian shirt - I don't remember the specific wording, but I remember it had a picture of an AK-47 on it. A couple of the rest of us at the paper tried to explain why that wasn't really the greatest idea ever, but it didn't ever sink in.
One time I was taking the train back home, and at the border there was a lady who not only didn't have a visa, but what she had was a letter from the US government explicitly denying her request to obtain one.
Thousands of people travel through the US borders every day, so that sort of thing must be commonplace enough that it's the "caller was using their CD-ROM tray as a cupholder" or "user clicked on the Megan Fox Naked.exe attachment and now their PC isn't working correctly" of the Customs and Immigration world.
What were those people even thinking! Have you seen Chicago? No thanks, Amerikkka.
Chicago is actually pretty cool, other than literally everyone there driving like a meth-addict maniac with a deathwish, and their bizarre Adam Smith-inspired freeways.
Rio is probably nicer overall, though. I haven't been there myself yet.
All the information other party sees is the "purse number" of yours, ie. Z435903486439 or similar.
Does each customer-vendor relationship get a different purse number? IE if I buy something from Amazon.com do they see Z435903486439, but when I buy something from Astrophysics Emporium or wherever do they instead see e.g. Z684987784253? Because otherwise it would be trivial for enough data to be built up eventually to identify you.
Having a unique ID per transaction would be even better.
I can buy lenses that will alter the geometry of image content. Combine them with tasteful reserve plus skillful background/placement and nobody's the wiser.
To be pedantic, all lenses other than (for a camera designed around the size of 35mm film at least) 50mm (or thereabouts) alter the appearance of the photographed subject, because their effective focal length is different than that of the human eye. This is one of the reasons that in Hollywood films the moon always looks larger than in real life. Of course, with lenses that are deliberately designed to distort the image (like a fisheye lens, or an isometric lens), the results are even further from reality.
While this effect can be more subtle, it's always there. Portraits are usually shot with 80-135mm lenses, etc. If you try shooting a portrait of someone with a wide-angle lens, their nose (or which ever part of their face is closest to the center of the frame) will look huge.
I agree with other people in this discussion that this proposed law is a waste of time, because the message will have to be slapped on everything. Even if photographers switched exclusively to 50mm lenses (or the equivalent), every professionally-produced advertisement-related photo these days is altered via image-editing software. The changes are usually fairly subtle, but they're there nonetheless.
But will it work outside of major metropolitan areas?
I live in Seattle. Last month I drove out to Yellowstone and camped there for three nights. My G1 (T-Mobile service, of course) had only roaming coverage east of Spokane (Washington). That meant no data access* in Idaho, Montana, or Wyoming. None. Good thing I was always planning on using Streets and Trips on my laptop if necessary and not Google Maps, eh?
Three years ago I went on a long loop drive that took me as far east as Ohio. I had a Nextel phone at the time. I had no coverage at all east of Spokane (even in Chicago!). I had a work-provided BlackBerry at the time (AT&T coverage, I think) which was more reliable, but I still had to be in a reasonably populated area to get a signal.
The thing about the US is that in the middle of the continent, populations are *very* spread out. There are many, many areas where there's just no economic incentive to provide cell coverage, because there aren't enough customers to justify it. And that's in regular areas. If you're the National Park Service, are you really going to want telecom companies throwing up cell towers on your land? I was really happy I visited all those places, but it was also a huge eye-opener about how different things are when you get away from the coasts (including the coasts of the Great Lakes).
* I suppose if you're Daddy Warbucks you might be able to use roaming data coverage, but as I'm not I didn't test whether that actually works or not.
nobody's pissing and moaning and calling them evil.
Speakeasy are evil, but the only people who generally know this are the ones who've been bitten by the hidden early-disconnection fee they started charging a few years ago.
ASLR makes executing code on the stack quite a bit more difficult, regardless of what privileges the program being exploited may have. Also makes calling libaray functions and pretty much anything in RAM far more difficult for a hacker. Page protection doesn't protect against these attacks per se.
How is ASLR any more effective than the DRM on offline products like DVDs? The OS and each individual program need to have the "guidebook" to the randomized locations stored somewhere, or they wouldn't work. So all the malicious software needs to do is look in the same place. I mean, if it has access to modify the memory of another process, it should be able to do that, right? Or am I missing something? It seems to me as though this is just adding a tiny little hurdle at the expense of performance.
the HD picture via HDMI connector looks just marginally bit better than Composite.
Did you configure the Xbox to run at higher resolution? You have to do that manually. If you configure everything correctly (and if the TV itself supports high resolutions, as opposed to the old 720p HDTVs), the picture will look worlds better, especially in terms of things like on-screen text. If the HDTV supports x.v. Color, you can also turn that on, which is something that can never be done with composite.
Ignoring the fact that we aren't very good conductors... at 5-6 feet tall, I doubt the human body can effectively absorb a lot of this relatively very-long-wavelength radiation.
In addition to all of that, there's a reason EM radiation of longer wavelengths is called "non-ionizing". Hint: it's because it's incapable of ionizing anything.
Yes, this is a concern for some racing games, the more hardcore fighting games, and the most intense FPSs. But for the vast majority of consumers, for the style of games popular today, it's not relevant.
In other words, for most of the games that require a lot of processing power (IE the games that this service is supposed to make playable on low-end machines) latency is a concern, but for casual games (which are playable on basically any PC), it's not?
Slashdot Mirror
It's pretty obvious that Terrans, Zerg and Protoss are analagous to Space Marines, Tyranid and Eldar respectively. They barely even filed off the serial numbers.
Fortunately for gamers, Blizzard also removed the melodrama when they filed off the serial numbers. In a parallel universe where Blizzard licensed GW's franchises, I don't think their 40K game would have sold as well as StarCraft has based on that alone. I'm not sure it's even possible to create a fictional world more over-the-top than 40K.
seconded :D
Thirded. Inkscape does right virtually everything that the GIMP does wrong. It even has a proper name.
Each of the entangled particles just relies on local information that it carries with it and which was generated at the moment of entanglement.
Please see Bell's Theorem (from over forty years ago) and the experiments based on it for the reasoning as to why this is (at the very least) extremely unlikely.
The term "innovative sampling" has always amazed me. I mean, it's like "military intelligence", "jumbo shrimp", and "journalistic ethics" - the words don't go together, man.
Please listen to some Skinny Puppy from the 80s, the Plunderphonics album, the collective works of Duran Duran Duran*, etc. Sampling in the right hands is a very effective musical element. Sadly that sort of work isn't done very often anymore, because of the legal barriers that have been created.
* not Duran Duran, although I like their music too.
How so?
Where do you think the stereotype of the extremely muscular, tank-top-and-leather-wearing tough guy with a mustache came from? There's a funny (and insightful) look at Final Fight from the perspective of a gay male gamer, which is why I know the answer is "Tom of Finland".
Unless there is some arrangement for life than is fundamentally different from ours, on a molecular level, then oxygen and liquid water will be found anywhere life will be found.
There are a number of other options that have been theorized. I don't know about the alternatives to oxygen (some gaseous form of sulfur, maybe?), but the main ones I remember are substituting silicon for carbon, and ammonia for water. A quick Google search turned up sulfuric acid as another possible solvent. I'm not a chemist - is there a set of two gases based on sulfur that would fill the spots of oxygen and carbon dioxide in a respiration cycle if sulfuric acid were the solvent used by that form of life?
If you know of any ways to capture Hulu streams (either via webpage or their desktop app), I'd love to know.
I don't know of a way to do it via software, but in an absolute worst-case scenario, someone could just wire up a capture device to the output of the chip in an LCD display that drives the individual pixels (as Jellomizer hinted at above). Treat that output like you'd treat the raw output of the CCD/CMOS sensor in a digital camcorder, IE dump it into a RAM buffer as an uncompressed bitmap and then re-encode it using your favourite method. You'd lose some quality that way, but I don't believe it would be any more than with an analogue copy. If someone with a degree in CS and/or math wanted to be very fancy, maybe they could write an algorithm that would make a best guess about the original compressed encoding based on the raw bitmap. That is, try to figure out things like "oh, there are sixteen pixels of the same colour arranged in a perfect square, here's how that would have been encoded in an MPEG4 stream" or whatever. That way even the re-encoding losses would be minimized.
It would take a lot of work to build the hardware and raw capture device, but (again, as has been mentioned previously) only one person in the world needs to do it and then as soon as they've got the un-DRM'd digital copy anyone who's interested can have it too.
Culture, information, we should never approve of shackles on these things. We should reject claims of ownership of ideas or data.
How do you propose that the people who spend their lives producing that culture and information be compensated for their work in such a society? Or are you one of those people that thinks "real artists" would keep producing their work even if they were homeless and starving because they're so driven, or some other similar self-delusion?
And I want to run an application that executes in its data area why?
There are two kinds of "DEP" in Windows - hardware DEP, and software "DEP". The software "DEP" is not literally "data execution prevention", it involves blocking the use of exceptions which aren't registered in a global table, or something along those lines. Yes, software that violates it is probably not great, but sometimes an alternative isn't available.
Actually salting does not help against brute-force. It only helps against dictionary attacks.
It also helps against rainbow table attacks, which I believe the GP was referring to. Salting the hashes makes it much less feasible for someone to develop a rainbow table database, unless they are specifically targeting your system as opposed to every Windows instance on the planet.
I'd love to jump on upgrading from my vintage Xbox XBMC, but I'd hate to drop a few hundred on an upgrade only to find out that it plays 99% of videos out there, but chokes on all high bit rate 1080p MKVs with lots of action, or something like that.
It's been 6-8 months since I last used XBMC, but back then I couldn't even get it to keep the audio and video from an AVI file in sync, it dropped frames when playing DVDs, and functions could only be mapped to a single key, not a key combination (due to the backwards way that the functions were mapped - IIRC the mapping file was by key, not by function). The UI was great for the most part, but it didn't work very well at - you know - playing videos. This was on a P4 system with 2GB of RAM, an Nvidia video chipset, and the Nvidia binary Linux driver, so performance shouldn't have been a concern. I have trouble imagining it working better on a lower-powered system.
The fourth wasn't bad.
I think you misspelled "the fourth one was the most franchise-destroying, poorly-written, poorly-directed, poorly-acted, absolute failure of a film of all time, and McG should have committed ritual suicide in a futile attempt to atone for his sins." It's an easy mistake to make.
The time saved would be more than worth the $30-$40, unless the person asking the question is completely broke.
That seems like the high end of the cost curve to me too. 5-6 months ago I was drowning in free Pentium 3 laptops that I picked up from the junk pile at work, to the point that I had to give most of them away for recycling/resale by the recycling company just because I knew I was never going to make effective use of another eight of them beyond the three I'd already found purposes for (in-car navigation for long drives, portable computer/oscilloscope, and portable audio editor/spare web-browsing system).
it all works perfectly when you live in a huge country
Actually, it doesn't work perfectly even then.
I have a G1. I live in Seattle. A few months ago I drove to Yellowstone. I had only roaming coverage (IE no data use without paying an exorbitant fee) east of Spokane, Washington (so I didn't even make it beyond the borders of my own state). That situation did not change for the rest of my trip. IE T-Mobile has no coverage anywhere that I traveled in Idaho, Montana, or Wyoming. And yes, I know there was literally no coverage because I have the weather widget that updates its display every time it can using the name of the nearest city. It was "Spokane, WA" through all three of those states.
There are a lot of cool things about the G1, but if you ask me it and its software were designed by a bunch of city slickers who never venture more than a few meters beyond their home, the office, and/or their favourite coffee shop.
The caching thing that's allegedly a new feature is a good first step, but I'd much rather just shell out ~$50/year and have all of the map and business data stored in flash memory. For example, on my way back from Yellowstone I stopped in Bozeman. It sure would have been nice if I could have looked up local businesses. I ended up using the Yellow Pages at a gas station.
If I didn't know better, I would have thought they'd been trained in military interrogation techniques.
I'm sure that being a border guard is like any other job that involves dealing with the general public in large numbers (tech support, working at a restaurant/coffee shop, etc.) That is, just due to volume most of them are probably going to have dealt with enough weird situations that they become cynical and assume everyone is going to be doing something dumb.
For example, I'm from the US but I went to university in Canada. While I was there, I worked at the student newspaper. One of the writers there had driven down to the US with some friends and was honestly shocked that the border guards had done a search of their car. The reason was that one of the people in the car was wearing some sort of militant pro-Palestinian shirt - I don't remember the specific wording, but I remember it had a picture of an AK-47 on it. A couple of the rest of us at the paper tried to explain why that wasn't really the greatest idea ever, but it didn't ever sink in.
One time I was taking the train back home, and at the border there was a lady who not only didn't have a visa, but what she had was a letter from the US government explicitly denying her request to obtain one.
Thousands of people travel through the US borders every day, so that sort of thing must be commonplace enough that it's the "caller was using their CD-ROM tray as a cupholder" or "user clicked on the Megan Fox Naked.exe attachment and now their PC isn't working correctly" of the Customs and Immigration world.
What were those people even thinking! Have you seen Chicago? No thanks, Amerikkka.
Chicago is actually pretty cool, other than literally everyone there driving like a meth-addict maniac with a deathwish, and their bizarre Adam Smith-inspired freeways.
Rio is probably nicer overall, though. I haven't been there myself yet.
All the information other party sees is the "purse number" of yours, ie. Z435903486439 or similar.
Does each customer-vendor relationship get a different purse number? IE if I buy something from Amazon.com do they see Z435903486439, but when I buy something from Astrophysics Emporium or wherever do they instead see e.g. Z684987784253? Because otherwise it would be trivial for enough data to be built up eventually to identify you.
Having a unique ID per transaction would be even better.
I can buy lenses that will alter the geometry of image content. Combine them with tasteful reserve plus skillful background/placement and nobody's the wiser.
To be pedantic, all lenses other than (for a camera designed around the size of 35mm film at least) 50mm (or thereabouts) alter the appearance of the photographed subject, because their effective focal length is different than that of the human eye. This is one of the reasons that in Hollywood films the moon always looks larger than in real life. Of course, with lenses that are deliberately designed to distort the image (like a fisheye lens, or an isometric lens), the results are even further from reality.
While this effect can be more subtle, it's always there. Portraits are usually shot with 80-135mm lenses, etc. If you try shooting a portrait of someone with a wide-angle lens, their nose (or which ever part of their face is closest to the center of the frame) will look huge.
I agree with other people in this discussion that this proposed law is a waste of time, because the message will have to be slapped on everything. Even if photographers switched exclusively to 50mm lenses (or the equivalent), every professionally-produced advertisement-related photo these days is altered via image-editing software. The changes are usually fairly subtle, but they're there nonetheless.
But will it work outside of major metropolitan areas?
I live in Seattle. Last month I drove out to Yellowstone and camped there for three nights. My G1 (T-Mobile service, of course) had only roaming coverage east of Spokane (Washington). That meant no data access* in Idaho, Montana, or Wyoming. None. Good thing I was always planning on using Streets and Trips on my laptop if necessary and not Google Maps, eh?
Three years ago I went on a long loop drive that took me as far east as Ohio. I had a Nextel phone at the time. I had no coverage at all east of Spokane (even in Chicago!). I had a work-provided BlackBerry at the time (AT&T coverage, I think) which was more reliable, but I still had to be in a reasonably populated area to get a signal.
The thing about the US is that in the middle of the continent, populations are *very* spread out. There are many, many areas where there's just no economic incentive to provide cell coverage, because there aren't enough customers to justify it. And that's in regular areas. If you're the National Park Service, are you really going to want telecom companies throwing up cell towers on your land? I was really happy I visited all those places, but it was also a huge eye-opener about how different things are when you get away from the coasts (including the coasts of the Great Lakes).
* I suppose if you're Daddy Warbucks you might be able to use roaming data coverage, but as I'm not I didn't test whether that actually works or not.
nobody's pissing and moaning and calling them evil.
Speakeasy are evil, but the only people who generally know this are the ones who've been bitten by the hidden early-disconnection fee they started charging a few years ago.
ASLR makes executing code on the stack quite a bit more difficult, regardless of what privileges the program being exploited may have. Also makes calling libaray functions and pretty much anything in RAM far more difficult for a hacker. Page protection doesn't protect against these attacks per se.
How is ASLR any more effective than the DRM on offline products like DVDs? The OS and each individual program need to have the "guidebook" to the randomized locations stored somewhere, or they wouldn't work. So all the malicious software needs to do is look in the same place. I mean, if it has access to modify the memory of another process, it should be able to do that, right? Or am I missing something?
It seems to me as though this is just adding a tiny little hurdle at the expense of performance.
the HD picture via HDMI connector looks just marginally bit better than Composite.
Did you configure the Xbox to run at higher resolution? You have to do that manually. If you configure everything correctly (and if the TV itself supports high resolutions, as opposed to the old 720p HDTVs), the picture will look worlds better, especially in terms of things like on-screen text. If the HDTV supports x.v. Color, you can also turn that on, which is something that can never be done with composite.
Ignoring the fact that we aren't very good conductors... at 5-6 feet tall, I doubt the human body can effectively absorb a lot of this relatively very-long-wavelength radiation.
In addition to all of that, there's a reason EM radiation of longer wavelengths is called "non-ionizing". Hint: it's because it's incapable of ionizing anything.
Yes, this is a concern for some racing games, the more hardcore fighting games, and the most intense FPSs. But for the vast majority of consumers, for the style of games popular today, it's not relevant.
In other words, for most of the games that require a lot of processing power (IE the games that this service is supposed to make playable on low-end machines) latency is a concern, but for casual games (which are playable on basically any PC), it's not?
Really? Plasmons? Are they just making words up now?
It's a quasi-particle, like an electron hole.