Is Washington even aware of this? What large organizations are opposing the RIAA and the MPAA? How can we fight this BS past hoping that these cases don't stand up in court?
Several students at UMR were targeted by the MPAA recently. From what I have gathered, one of them was not even aware that they were sharing a camcorder recording of Matrix: Revolutions over a P2P network because it was uploaded to them via Windows file sharing. True or not, since all this evidence is so circumstantial, is it not possible to say "someone hacked into my computer and put it there" or "that was uploaded to me", despite how ridiculous it might seem?
When it comes down to it, no matter how much copy protection is involved, no matter how difficult it is to distribute - if it produces sound or video in the end, it can be copied, even if it requires the extreme of a dark room and microphone. The industry will still make money; people will still buy the media. When will they wake up?
Pragmatically, no. There have been some virii that change their structure randomly to elude virus scans, but they were largely unsucessful.
It is possible that data could be corrupted in transfer and just somehow happen to actually run differently. The possibility of a new virus popping out of nowhere, even out of similiar code, is almost zero.
Anyone here read "Speaker for the Dead". Think Jane - now that's a virus!
You didn't consider that since the majority of end-users use M$ Windows, most of the virii/worms have been Windows-targeted. The number of Mac/Linux virii/worms is considerably lower. If everyone ran Linux, Lindows, or OSX, you would see a strange increase in the number of holes discovered there as well.
On the other hand, M$ has always had a bad reputation when it comes to security. When they begin to lose market share, they will change their practices - this had already happened once with the dropping of Win9X and the adoption of the NT kernel for the home user.
The biggest problem lies in configuration - most of the great virii (blaster is an exception to this rule) have penetrated M$ systems because of relatively new technologies being shipped and enabled by default with new PCs. Seriously - why did XP Pro originally come with IIS enabled?
This problem will also come to head as huge disasters begin to occur. Anybody note that the blackouts corresponded with the release of blaster? Anybody notice how quickly the government rushed out to say it wasn't the worm? Do you actually think they would admit it if it was?
Can you imagine the damage that the 6 Kb LovSan worm could have caused if the author changed its payload to a time-delayed "deltree C:\*.*"?
This single virus keeps suprizing me - from what I've read/experienced (and I've had to clean up a few machines now), the original msblaster.exe worm did not introduce a backdoor into your computer, only spread itself while causing that nasty RPC error. In the past few days the source was released on some vulnerability sites, and now several trojan variants have appeared (watch traffic on port 4444). My guess is that an contact-list based, email-spread variant will also appear. This clean-up worm is yet another twist (perhaps written by tbe author of the original, as the message left in the startup reg key suggested he/she was advocating better windows security instead of internet havoc.
MORE INFO:
http://www.swcp.com/msblaster-info.html
FIX (better late than never):
http://campus.umr.edu/security/patches/2003-08-12- windows-dcom/
The guy had a point. M$ is responsible for writing vulnerable software, as bizzare as this exploit is.
If there is no rental agreement then they are the biggest fools ever, falling prey to reverse engineering (just like the X-Box). Think of how easily damaged digital cameras are. Do you honestly think someone will want to sign an agreement making them liable to a loss of several hundred dollars when little Jimmy sticks the camera into the sandy beaches of Florida? Even if there is a some sort of agreement, there will have to be time-limit established. Otherwise, people will find a way to empty the memory and yet keep the camera unmodified, returning it after many uses.
It is doubtful that they could produce these and generate as much profit per camera as disposible film cameras.
OH MY GOD! I hope you guys have broadband (and Quicktime), because this is well worth it.
http://www.fileplanet.com/files/120000/123983.shtm l
One of the things that made the original Half-Life so much fun was the vast amount of creativity pumped into the game's story, weapons, and characters. After watching this video, it is clear that Valve has accomplished this yet again, except this time they also developed a new game engine that rivals that of Doom III (named "Source", *snicker*).
The clarity of the characters is enormous (for instance, each face has 40 underlying muscles that allow for thousands of different facial expressions) as well as the game effects (some generic cinematic-like styles such as water, flame, etc can be applied to any game object). Perhaps most impressive is game physics - but you'll have to see the gravity-based weaponry for yourself. The thinking gameplay is back too - from what I saw in the video, there is a new gauss-cannon like weapon that grips metal objects and then hurls them at things with very high speed. You can use the objects you grip as a shield. It even looks like they implemented a good FPS-driving system (the one in original HL/CS sucked).
ID and 3dRealms are going to be given a run for their money on this one.
...afbc.3fa31b.ca329b and the such. it's just hideous, and not as well known how to work with by regular schmuck programmers....
Wow, I didn't know regular schmuck programmers were that bad. Using regular #s to do IPv6, you'd have an IP address as long as your arm. Doesn't hexadecimal make sense? So does IPv6. The American government is notoriously retarded when in comes to anything related to the internet; most of the constructive internet growth after ARPANET was initiated by firms anyway. IPv6 is coming soon, and there is nothing they can do about it.
You want to talk about saving money and time. EVMs and e Voting are the way to go.
Can you ever prove that a mechanical vote/hand count was fair? The machines are handled by humans who could easily throw out votes or modify votes, chad or no chad. With CORRECTLY IMPLEMENTED online voting, you can nearly assure who is voting is who they claim to be. There are no ambiguous votes with a survey and confirm screen. You can also reduce the number of people involved in counting the vote tremendously, and you remove things like the Electoral College (a HUGE source of misrepresentation during presidential elections).
..you can't prove that the binary does what you think it does. What if the compiler is bogus and fraudulent?..
Using that reasoning, the firm in charge of making the voting machines could build a skewing device into them as well. There will always be people in charge of talling votes. We'll know if there is something horribly wrong, just like with standard elections. Certainly the government could employ a team of cracker-jack individuals to write a secure voting system instead of a firm. If all the source the development team writes was subject to internal review, there would not be a problem. Design the software to treat everyone like a potential imposter/meddler, even the people administering the vote. You could always employ EVMs for those who don't have computers at home.
Gokubi made an excellent point - MSN is being hypocritical; they are just playing for market share and promoting their own inferior search technology. Since when did MSN bring something revolutionary to the web? One of the coolest aspects about the team at Google is they are always coming up with new stuff:
http://www.google.com/options/
And this "Google is big on shopping" issue is a false claim. If anything, Google has organized overall searching far more effectively using separate searches (for instance, for those that do want to shop for something, it's hard to beat the BETA of froogle.google.com - the only thing they need now is a way to correlate search results with reviews). Even if searches and research become skewed, it would be more the fault of the Open Directory Project (and the nature of the internet to build itself around capital - meaning MSN and others like it are more at fault for the prostitution of search results than Google or Teoma).
Oh, it was also suggested that Google was dominance in searching (you'll notice that users are not complaining about it; only other searches). This is only partially true - besides big players with lots of money and bad searches (such as MSN), you also have AskJeeves and Teoma, which are quite innovative. I have found that Teoma yields especially good results, sometimes organized better than Google.
You misspelled superior. My personal observances on the subject of intelligence show that people who brandish their "smarts" are frequently all talk. Notice the correct usage of quotes.
As for software piracy and copy protection, protected media can be broken, as proven this classic event some time back: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-274721.html... and events like it. This site demonstrates why there is such a problem with piracy and why it will continue into the future: http://www.toad.com/gnu/whatswrong.html This site shows how everyone is sitting on their hands about the whole issue because nothing can be done: http://archive.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/06/13/020613hnclash.xml
Software piracy has been around strong for over twenty years; it will remain strong for years to come. Ask yourself - is Adobe Photoshop 7, running at $579.99 on Amazon, at priced at a reasonable cost for the consumer? Software producers such as Adobe are getting the vast majority of their income from development companies, not consumers. At costs like these, a $100 drop in the price of the software isn't going to translate into more consumer sales, but it will result in a huge loss of money in software sold to companies. They figure piracy into their pricing equations.
Piracy is nearly impossible to crack down further upon at its present limit. Stopping the mass-distribution on decentralized networks along is nearly impossible, and copy-protection is useless as long as there is information passing along the internet between groups of people interested in breaking it. Think about it; if the media is going to eventually be played, it will eventually generate music, video, etc. This video and sound will always be able to be captured.
I'm a student at the University of Missouri-Rolla, and have several friends who are actively involved in writing software for the DARPA project. Their summer project involves navigating a van across several hundred miles of desert terrain in the American southwest, unmanned. It's fascinating technology, and there is a considerable amount of AI programming involved.
Where does Skynet come in? Laughably, the government is footing a rather large bill for all the research and this technology will be directly applied to military applications. Imagine the cost savings in building armed vehicles when you no longer need a cockpit and all its associated instrumentation. This means that you could build 100 tanks for every 75 your enemy can produce. These tanks could be controlled remotely, but like the unit AI in Dark Reign or Starcraft (or any other RTS), they also can hold their own with a general set of orders, as well as avoid obstacles, etc - without human intervention. These are the wars of the future, and there is nothing that anyone here can do to stop government from producing such intelligent weapons. This is pseudo-AI; these machines are not coming up with new concepts and not having emotions.
As for security concerns, here in our pseudo-democracy that is America, the citizens had better watch out for their own rights. Surveillance has been around for hundreds of years without the aid of machines, the only thing they add into the mix is not sleeping. If anything, unfocused machine-based surveillance will lead to huge amounts of unprocessed data. It's us that choose what we want to focus on.
"Take the most liberal of your estimates for the number of planets per solar system"
I would like to note that I gave estimates for planets near the sun, and thus the most likely to have life. Arroway said planets, which includes many distant bodies I didn't account for.
Nevertheless, I don't think this corrects the problem with the quote, as we still seem to be at least several hundred thousand off. The reason I used the quote was to express the obvious fact that other intelligent life-forms exist out in the universe (and likely our galaxy) due to the immensity of what we are talking about. In all reality, the true numbers are much far higher (as you have most adequately illustrated).;)
I agree with your calculation, but that was not the interpretation that she meant. Study the wording; a less ambigious statement would be:
If one out of a million STARS had planets, and one out of each million PLANETS had life, and one out of a million of each of PLANETS WITH LIFE had intelligent life, there would be millions of civilizations in this galaxy alone.
The only problem with this statement mathematically is an assumption in an average number of planets per star system that has planets in the galaxy. I have no idea if it was conservative (say, 2 to 3 relatively close to the sun) or liberal (4 to 10 near the sun). I have a feeling that the distance to the sun may not matter as much as is generally accepted by scientists because of recent data that we have gathered here on Earth on extremophiles and how life pushes the limits of its environment. Furthermore, it is probably based upon the assumption that only carbon-based lifeforms can exist; other compounds can form complex chains using atoms such as silicon. The odds of life are astronomically (pardon the pun) high. One could argue that the odds of communication, especially due to signal recognition, are rather dismal.
Oh dear, I hear some criticism of both NASA and the SETI project. Though most space exploration is driven by military-industrial interests (lots of pork; forget projects like "Star Wars" - think space-based offensive nuclear capabilities to ensure a quick-strike), SETI is interested in a more noble pursuit: are we alone?
Absence of evidence is not evidence for absence (to quote Ellie from the movie Contact, "You know, there are 400 billion stars out there, just in our galaxy alone. If only one out of a million of those had planets, all right, and if just one out of a million of those had life, and if just one out of a million of those had intelligent life, there would be literally millions of civilizations out there.."). Think about the dramatic changes that the discovery of intelligent alien life might bring about. Isn't that justification enough? Humanity might even be mature enough to handle the enormous cultural differences that typically lead to conflict whenever societies foreign to each other meet. Maybe.
All of this doesn't even take into account the technological improvements that result from us rising to the complex problem of space exploration. For instance, SETI@home is a model example for distributed data processing if I ever saw one. Money spent here has some positive feedback for the economy, whereas money spent on long-term welfare provides little to none (not to mention sustaining unhealthy behavior on the part of the citizens).
Plus, I want to know if aliens talk and look like the stuffed ones from Toy Story, or breathe methane gas and communicate using olfactory stimulus. Talk about a hard language to decipher.;)
Anyone here surprised? It is difficult to hold Microsoft and hundreds of other M.N.C.'s accountable for their actions as they are having to conform to the rules of individual countries less and less.
Corporations have become world-wide economies in and of themselves; of the 150 largest economies in the world, 97 are multinational corporations! Their influence upon important governments world-wide is steadily growing as they amass tremendous amounts of wealth and influence. Governments fear cracking down on them for fear of economic and political repercussions. In the last 30 years, new supranational authorities have emerged worldwide; big global players that carry tremendous capacity for power. Microsoft, though off to a poor and late start in this arena, is one of them.
A software producer can write whatever it wants into its operating system and it is perfectly legal. Though it sounds dreadful, Microsoft advertising its own services in Windows is a huge mistake on the part of the corporation - it will turn large number of people off. That's part of the reason all the.NET promo died off. Competitors such as OSX, Lindows, and Red Hat will gain ground from such nastiness.
It is easy to criticize Microsoft. Keep in mind that Windows is a standard, something desperately needed in a world with hundreds of different programming languages, operating systems, and a plethora of different types of hardware and (OMG!) media storage out there. Take Sony for instance. Sony uses Stick Media not because it is better, but because it is non-standard and they can charge mucho dinero for it. They could have easily conformed to a standard media with a dozen other companies if it economically beneficial. Granted, everyone is conforming to Microsoftâ(TM)s standards, but itâ(TM)s better than another long-standing war of software standards such as that between IBM-Compatibles and Apple Computers. Even Linux doesnâ(TM)t even conform to a set of unified standards (though United Linux will theoretically change that).
Microsoft needs reform. It will be difficult to force it to do so, as it has a tremendous amount of influence. Ideally, a global standard operating system needs to be developed. We need a U.N. resolution.:)
The day I don't have to get a plugin for Gimp to write a simple JPEG or GIF format picture is a day I will enjoy in 2004. For christ's sake - JPEG files are as ubiquitous as the pirated programs that create them, so give it a rest and make the file format public already!
Well, it would help the Trek Universe some, and it's been attempted in Trek video games, and some episodes. I doubt anyone here remembers Star Trek: Klingon, an FPS done in the Unreal engine; I thought the idea was cool, though I might add the gameplay sucked (of course, that was somewhat fixed in ST: Elite Force, but they took that coolness of being a Klingon out of the equation. Despite these flops, attempts at other perspectives in episodes worked well (Starfleet officer X is surgically altered to look like Romulan Y, etc. etc.)
But...:
I think it would turn off many people used to the Federation perspective, not to mention make plot a much more difficult task: let's face it - the Federation has its hand in every proverbial cookie jar in existence as far as intergalactic politics goes; a new show would simply show interactions with the Federation from the bleachers.
It is clear fresh ideas are needed, not weak soap-opera plots and movies with no promotion whatsoever. I can remember taking a bunch of non-Trekkies to Star Trek: First Contact (still my favorite Star Trek movie) and watching them enjoy it; after, they wondered why they had not even heard about it.
Alas, the worst problems with Star Trek: Nemesis were not captured on film. The flick was released into a swarm of awesome movies that engulfed the title, not to mention the fact that the movie before was a complete flop, AND the fact that it was not marketed well to the general public. Why are people suprized when a fan-movie flops when the fan-base is small, and rapidly losing size? Since the end of DS9, Star Trek has been rapidly declining as ST: Next Generation fans moved on to other, far better movies/programs. For instance, I started in on Babaylon 5 until its own decline with a new seris. And excluding First Contact, Star Trek movies, have been depreciating in quality and turnout. I expect to see the demise of Star Trek as an active seris movie/line in the next twenty years.
If you think about it, the technology your using right now is freaking amazing... the ability to to communicate with billions of computers on the internet, process data at lightning fast speed, all with technology that both you and I don't understand.
Plus, humanity is on the verge of taking the big leap into light-based (quantum) processors that are made up of carbon nanotubes. "Magnetic RAM" is only a decade away. Computers may even go biological in our lifetime.
Woah there buddy, that's not true at all... if all the online applications don't work in other standard browsers (Mozilla, Opera, NS6), then all the Linux users are cornered out of using them. So we have just created demand for Microsoft software, in order to use these online applications.
One company controlling the architecture of the web is a very, very dangerous thing. I can only hope that a Global Visual Language Standard is approved worldwide along with an open-source, GVL standard browser... so M$ doesn't corner out a tremendous amount of operating systems, user profiles, etc. etc. And what if you suddenly had to pay a fee to remove ads from the new version of MSIE xx.xx? Microsoft has already used its operating system and web browser to sell a tremendous amount of services and software (can you say MSN 8's fruition?).
I don't agree with your off-topic comment. This isn't abortion rights or energy policy.
Bush and Cheney are not security experts; they need advice. They may not like it, nor heed it, but in order to make weak decisions about internet policy, they need advice. Smart presidents keep knowledgable people in the right places when they don't understand the medium (i.e. Alan Greenspan).
Unfortunately, from what I have heard beforehand and from some comments here on Slashdot, it appears that Richard Clarke was a fair security advisor; this new advisor appears to be a Microsoft proponent, irregardless of his former jobs. I have a feeling he indirectly damage government security due to this, but where real security is needed, it's already employed (do you ever honestly think the government is going to use Windows in Department of Defence Nuclear Weapons Launch Computers?). We'll have to see his performance before we tear him down.
Slashdot Mirror
Is Washington even aware of this? What large organizations are opposing the RIAA and the MPAA? How can we fight this BS past hoping that these cases don't stand up in court?
Several students at UMR were targeted by the MPAA recently. From what I have gathered, one of them was not even aware that they were sharing a camcorder recording of Matrix: Revolutions over a P2P network because it was uploaded to them via Windows file sharing. True or not, since all this evidence is so circumstantial, is it not possible to say "someone hacked into my computer and put it there" or "that was uploaded to me", despite how ridiculous it might seem?
When it comes down to it, no matter how much copy protection is involved, no matter how difficult it is to distribute - if it produces sound or video in the end, it can be copied, even if it requires the extreme of a dark room and microphone. The industry will still make money; people will still buy the media. When will they wake up?
Remember kids, don't copy that floppy!
Let's hope they don't make it illegal to get songs stuck in our heads. That's about as easy to crack down on.
Pragmatically, no. There have been some virii that change their structure randomly to elude virus scans, but they were largely unsucessful.
It is possible that data could be corrupted in transfer and just somehow happen to actually run differently. The possibility of a new virus popping out of nowhere, even out of similiar code, is almost zero.
Anyone here read "Speaker for the Dead". Think Jane - now that's a virus!
You didn't consider that since the majority of end-users use M$ Windows, most of the virii/worms have been Windows-targeted. The number of Mac/Linux virii/worms is considerably lower. If everyone ran Linux, Lindows, or OSX, you would see a strange increase in the number of holes discovered there as well.
On the other hand, M$ has always had a bad reputation when it comes to security. When they begin to lose market share, they will change their practices - this had already happened once with the dropping of Win9X and the adoption of the NT kernel for the home user.
The biggest problem lies in configuration - most of the great virii (blaster is an exception to this rule) have penetrated M$ systems because of relatively new technologies being shipped and enabled by default with new PCs. Seriously - why did XP Pro originally come with IIS enabled?
This problem will also come to head as huge disasters begin to occur. Anybody note that the blackouts corresponded with the release of blaster? Anybody notice how quickly the government rushed out to say it wasn't the worm? Do you actually think they would admit it if it was?
Can you imagine the damage that the 6 Kb LovSan worm could have caused if the author changed its payload to a time-delayed "deltree C:\*.*"? This single virus keeps suprizing me - from what I've read/experienced (and I've had to clean up a few machines now), the original msblaster.exe worm did not introduce a backdoor into your computer, only spread itself while causing that nasty RPC error. In the past few days the source was released on some vulnerability sites, and now several trojan variants have appeared (watch traffic on port 4444). My guess is that an contact-list based, email-spread variant will also appear. This clean-up worm is yet another twist (perhaps written by tbe author of the original, as the message left in the startup reg key suggested he/she was advocating better windows security instead of internet havoc. MORE INFO: http://www.swcp.com/msblaster-info.html FIX (better late than never): http://campus.umr.edu/security/patches/2003-08-12- windows-dcom/
The guy had a point. M$ is responsible for writing vulnerable software, as bizzare as this exploit is.
If there is no rental agreement then they are the biggest fools ever, falling prey to reverse engineering (just like the X-Box). Think of how easily damaged digital cameras are. Do you honestly think someone will want to sign an agreement making them liable to a loss of several hundred dollars when little Jimmy sticks the camera into the sandy beaches of Florida? Even if there is a some sort of agreement, there will have to be time-limit established. Otherwise, people will find a way to empty the memory and yet keep the camera unmodified, returning it after many uses.
It is doubtful that they could produce these and generate as much profit per camera as disposible film cameras.
OH MY GOD! I hope you guys have broadband (and Quicktime), because this is well worth it.
m l
http://www.fileplanet.com/files/120000/123983.sht
One of the things that made the original Half-Life so much fun was the vast amount of creativity pumped into the game's story, weapons, and characters. After watching this video, it is clear that Valve has accomplished this yet again, except this time they also developed a new game engine that rivals that of Doom III (named "Source", *snicker*).
The clarity of the characters is enormous (for instance, each face has 40 underlying muscles that allow for thousands of different facial expressions) as well as the game effects (some generic cinematic-like styles such as water, flame, etc can be applied to any game object). Perhaps most impressive is game physics - but you'll have to see the gravity-based weaponry for yourself. The thinking gameplay is back too - from what I saw in the video, there is a new gauss-cannon like weapon that grips metal objects and then hurls them at things with very high speed. You can use the objects you grip as a shield. It even looks like they implemented a good FPS-driving system (the one in original HL/CS sucked).
ID and 3dRealms are going to be given a run for their money on this one.
I dunno - rot-13 is a well known encryption algorithm. Would not still have the charges over your head, despite your counter-lawsuit?
Don't expect to be sued anytime soon; the situation for the American government and mp3s is far worse than prohibition.
...afbc.3fa31b.ca329b and the such. it's just hideous, and not as well known how to work with by regular schmuck programmers....
Wow, I didn't know regular schmuck programmers were that bad. Using regular #s to do IPv6, you'd have an IP address as long as your arm. Doesn't hexadecimal make sense? So does IPv6. The American government is notoriously retarded when in comes to anything related to the internet; most of the constructive internet growth after ARPANET was initiated by firms anyway. IPv6 is coming soon, and there is nothing they can do about it.
You want to talk about saving money and time. EVMs and e Voting are the way to go.
..you can't prove that the binary does what you think it does. What if the compiler is bogus and fraudulent?..
Can you ever prove that a mechanical vote/hand count was fair? The machines are handled by humans who could easily throw out votes or modify votes, chad or no chad. With CORRECTLY IMPLEMENTED online voting, you can nearly assure who is voting is who they claim to be. There are no ambiguous votes with a survey and confirm screen. You can also reduce the number of people involved in counting the vote tremendously, and you remove things like the Electoral College (a HUGE source of misrepresentation during presidential elections).
Using that reasoning, the firm in charge of making the voting machines could build a skewing device into them as well. There will always be people in charge of talling votes. We'll know if there is something horribly wrong, just like with standard elections. Certainly the government could employ a team of cracker-jack individuals to write a secure voting system instead of a firm. If all the source the development team writes was subject to internal review, there would not be a problem. Design the software to treat everyone like a potential imposter/meddler, even the people administering the vote. You could always employ EVMs for those who don't have computers at home.
I forgot to mention that in times like this it is important to mention the #1 rule in computing, which holds especially true for searching:
99% of the time, the air is between the keyboard and the seat.
Gokubi made an excellent point - MSN is being hypocritical; they are just playing for market share and promoting their own inferior search technology. Since when did MSN bring something revolutionary to the web? One of the coolest aspects about the team at Google is they are always coming up with new stuff:
http://www.google.com/options/
And this "Google is big on shopping" issue is a false claim. If anything, Google has organized overall searching far more effectively using separate searches (for instance, for those that do want to shop for something, it's hard to beat the BETA of froogle.google.com - the only thing they need now is a way to correlate search results with reviews). Even if searches and research become skewed, it would be more the fault of the Open Directory Project (and the nature of the internet to build itself around capital - meaning MSN and others like it are more at fault for the prostitution of search results than Google or Teoma).
Oh, it was also suggested that Google was dominance in searching (you'll notice that users are not complaining about it; only other searches). This is only partially true - besides big players with lots of money and bad searches (such as MSN), you also have AskJeeves and Teoma, which are quite innovative. I have found that Teoma yields especially good results, sometimes organized better than Google.
You misspelled superior. My personal observances on the subject of intelligence show that people who brandish their "smarts" are frequently all talk. Notice the correct usage of quotes.
... and events like it. This site demonstrates why there is such a problem with piracy and why it will continue into the future: http://www.toad.com/gnu/whatswrong.html This site shows how everyone is sitting on their hands about the whole issue because nothing can be done: http://archive.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/02/06 /13/020613hnclash.xml
As for software piracy and copy protection, protected media can be broken, as proven this classic event some time back: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-274721.html
Software piracy has been around strong for over twenty years; it will remain strong for years to come. Ask yourself - is Adobe Photoshop 7, running at $579.99 on Amazon, at priced at a reasonable cost for the consumer? Software producers such as Adobe are getting the vast majority of their income from development companies, not consumers. At costs like these, a $100 drop in the price of the software isn't going to translate into more consumer sales, but it will result in a huge loss of money in software sold to companies. They figure piracy into their pricing equations.
Piracy is nearly impossible to crack down further upon at its present limit. Stopping the mass-distribution on decentralized networks along is nearly impossible, and copy-protection is useless as long as there is information passing along the internet between groups of people interested in breaking it. Think about it; if the media is going to eventually be played, it will eventually generate music, video, etc. This video and sound will always be able to be captured.
I'm a student at the University of Missouri-Rolla, and have several friends who are actively involved in writing software for the DARPA project. Their summer project involves navigating a van across several hundred miles of desert terrain in the American southwest, unmanned. It's fascinating technology, and there is a considerable amount of AI programming involved. Where does Skynet come in? Laughably, the government is footing a rather large bill for all the research and this technology will be directly applied to military applications. Imagine the cost savings in building armed vehicles when you no longer need a cockpit and all its associated instrumentation. This means that you could build 100 tanks for every 75 your enemy can produce. These tanks could be controlled remotely, but like the unit AI in Dark Reign or Starcraft (or any other RTS), they also can hold their own with a general set of orders, as well as avoid obstacles, etc - without human intervention. These are the wars of the future, and there is nothing that anyone here can do to stop government from producing such intelligent weapons. This is pseudo-AI; these machines are not coming up with new concepts and not having emotions. As for security concerns, here in our pseudo-democracy that is America, the citizens had better watch out for their own rights. Surveillance has been around for hundreds of years without the aid of machines, the only thing they add into the mix is not sleeping. If anything, unfocused machine-based surveillance will lead to huge amounts of unprocessed data. It's us that choose what we want to focus on.
Why settle for Plexiglass walls? Let's build them out of Platinum.
Who wants a frozen throne anyway? Man, you must have buns of steel.
"All 'da beah'tah tee schlay 'ze Orcs with."
"Take the most liberal of your estimates for the number of planets per solar system" I would like to note that I gave estimates for planets near the sun, and thus the most likely to have life. Arroway said planets, which includes many distant bodies I didn't account for. Nevertheless, I don't think this corrects the problem with the quote, as we still seem to be at least several hundred thousand off. The reason I used the quote was to express the obvious fact that other intelligent life-forms exist out in the universe (and likely our galaxy) due to the immensity of what we are talking about. In all reality, the true numbers are much far higher (as you have most adequately illustrated). ;)
I agree with your calculation, but that was not the interpretation that she meant. Study the wording; a less ambigious statement would be: If one out of a million STARS had planets, and one out of each million PLANETS had life, and one out of a million of each of PLANETS WITH LIFE had intelligent life, there would be millions of civilizations in this galaxy alone. The only problem with this statement mathematically is an assumption in an average number of planets per star system that has planets in the galaxy. I have no idea if it was conservative (say, 2 to 3 relatively close to the sun) or liberal (4 to 10 near the sun). I have a feeling that the distance to the sun may not matter as much as is generally accepted by scientists because of recent data that we have gathered here on Earth on extremophiles and how life pushes the limits of its environment. Furthermore, it is probably based upon the assumption that only carbon-based lifeforms can exist; other compounds can form complex chains using atoms such as silicon. The odds of life are astronomically (pardon the pun) high. One could argue that the odds of communication, especially due to signal recognition, are rather dismal.
Oh dear, I hear some criticism of both NASA and the SETI project. Though most space exploration is driven by military-industrial interests (lots of pork; forget projects like "Star Wars" - think space-based offensive nuclear capabilities to ensure a quick-strike), SETI is interested in a more noble pursuit: are we alone? Absence of evidence is not evidence for absence (to quote Ellie from the movie Contact, "You know, there are 400 billion stars out there, just in our galaxy alone. If only one out of a million of those had planets, all right, and if just one out of a million of those had life, and if just one out of a million of those had intelligent life, there would be literally millions of civilizations out there.."). Think about the dramatic changes that the discovery of intelligent alien life might bring about. Isn't that justification enough? Humanity might even be mature enough to handle the enormous cultural differences that typically lead to conflict whenever societies foreign to each other meet. Maybe. All of this doesn't even take into account the technological improvements that result from us rising to the complex problem of space exploration. For instance, SETI@home is a model example for distributed data processing if I ever saw one. Money spent here has some positive feedback for the economy, whereas money spent on long-term welfare provides little to none (not to mention sustaining unhealthy behavior on the part of the citizens). Plus, I want to know if aliens talk and look like the stuffed ones from Toy Story, or breathe methane gas and communicate using olfactory stimulus. Talk about a hard language to decipher. ;)
Anyone here surprised? It is difficult to hold Microsoft and hundreds of other M.N.C.'s accountable for their actions as they are having to conform to the rules of individual countries less and less.
.NET promo died off. Competitors such as OSX, Lindows, and Red Hat will gain ground from such nastiness.
:)
Corporations have become world-wide economies in and of themselves; of the 150 largest economies in the world, 97 are multinational corporations! Their influence upon important governments world-wide is steadily growing as they amass tremendous amounts of wealth and influence. Governments fear cracking down on them for fear of economic and political repercussions. In the last 30 years, new supranational authorities have emerged worldwide; big global players that carry tremendous capacity for power. Microsoft, though off to a poor and late start in this arena, is one of them.
A software producer can write whatever it wants into its operating system and it is perfectly legal. Though it sounds dreadful, Microsoft advertising its own services in Windows is a huge mistake on the part of the corporation - it will turn large number of people off. That's part of the reason all the
It is easy to criticize Microsoft. Keep in mind that Windows is a standard, something desperately needed in a world with hundreds of different programming languages, operating systems, and a plethora of different types of hardware and (OMG!) media storage out there. Take Sony for instance. Sony uses Stick Media not because it is better, but because it is non-standard and they can charge mucho dinero for it. They could have easily conformed to a standard media with a dozen other companies if it economically beneficial. Granted, everyone is conforming to Microsoftâ(TM)s standards, but itâ(TM)s better than another long-standing war of software standards such as that between IBM-Compatibles and Apple Computers. Even Linux doesnâ(TM)t even conform to a set of unified standards (though United Linux will theoretically change that).
Microsoft needs reform. It will be difficult to force it to do so, as it has a tremendous amount of influence. Ideally, a global standard operating system needs to be developed. We need a U.N. resolution.
The day I don't have to get a plugin for Gimp to write a simple JPEG or GIF format picture is a day I will enjoy in 2004. For christ's sake - JPEG files are as ubiquitous as the pirated programs that create them, so give it a rest and make the file format public already!
Kudos:
Well, it would help the Trek Universe some, and it's been attempted in Trek video games, and some episodes. I doubt anyone here remembers Star Trek: Klingon, an FPS done in the Unreal engine; I thought the idea was cool, though I might add the gameplay sucked (of course, that was somewhat fixed in ST: Elite Force, but they took that coolness of being a Klingon out of the equation. Despite these flops, attempts at other perspectives in episodes worked well (Starfleet officer X is surgically altered to look like Romulan Y, etc. etc.)
But...:
I think it would turn off many people used to the Federation perspective, not to mention make plot a much more difficult task: let's face it - the Federation has its hand in every proverbial cookie jar in existence as far as intergalactic politics goes; a new show would simply show interactions with the Federation from the bleachers.
It is clear fresh ideas are needed, not weak soap-opera plots and movies with no promotion whatsoever. I can remember taking a bunch of non-Trekkies to Star Trek: First Contact (still my favorite Star Trek movie) and watching them enjoy it; after, they wondered why they had not even heard about it.
Alas, the worst problems with Star Trek: Nemesis were not captured on film. The flick was released into a swarm of awesome movies that engulfed the title, not to mention the fact that the movie before was a complete flop, AND the fact that it was not marketed well to the general public. Why are people suprized when a fan-movie flops when the fan-base is small, and rapidly losing size? Since the end of DS9, Star Trek has been rapidly declining as ST: Next Generation fans moved on to other, far better movies/programs. For instance, I started in on Babaylon 5 until its own decline with a new seris. And excluding First Contact, Star Trek movies, have been depreciating in quality and turnout. I expect to see the demise of Star Trek as an active seris movie/line in the next twenty years.
If you think about it, the technology your using right now is freaking amazing... the ability to to communicate with billions of computers on the internet, process data at lightning fast speed, all with technology that both you and I don't understand. Plus, humanity is on the verge of taking the big leap into light-based (quantum) processors that are made up of carbon nanotubes. "Magnetic RAM" is only a decade away. Computers may even go biological in our lifetime.
Woah there buddy, that's not true at all ... if all the online applications don't work in other standard browsers (Mozilla, Opera, NS6), then all the Linux users are cornered out of using them. So we have just created demand for Microsoft software, in order to use these online applications.
One company controlling the architecture of the web is a very, very dangerous thing. I can only hope that a Global Visual Language Standard is approved worldwide along with an open-source, GVL standard browser... so M$ doesn't corner out a tremendous amount of operating systems, user profiles, etc. etc. And what if you suddenly had to pay a fee to remove ads from the new version of MSIE xx.xx? Microsoft has already used its operating system and web browser to sell a tremendous amount of services and software (can you say MSN 8's fruition?).
I don't agree with your off-topic comment. This isn't abortion rights or energy policy. Bush and Cheney are not security experts; they need advice. They may not like it, nor heed it, but in order to make weak decisions about internet policy, they need advice. Smart presidents keep knowledgable people in the right places when they don't understand the medium (i.e. Alan Greenspan). Unfortunately, from what I have heard beforehand and from some comments here on Slashdot, it appears that Richard Clarke was a fair security advisor; this new advisor appears to be a Microsoft proponent, irregardless of his former jobs. I have a feeling he indirectly damage government security due to this, but where real security is needed, it's already employed (do you ever honestly think the government is going to use Windows in Department of Defence Nuclear Weapons Launch Computers?). We'll have to see his performance before we tear him down.