The analogy isn't too terrible. It conveys the notion that Internet bandwidth is a shared resource. However, Ted Stevens demonstrated very clearly that he has no idea what he's talking about. He seems to think that when somebody downloads a movie, the entire movie gets put into the 'tube' and all other data gets in line behind it. He thinks an e-mail he got several days after it was sent arrived late because too many movies were coming through the tubes. Not only that, but he referred to the e-mail as "an internet."
He doesn't realize that data is divided into packets, where a limited amount are in transit at one time for each transfer. This fact is very important. It means that bandwidth is shared roughly evenly between all the users of a 'tube' at any given moment, and that e-mails can always be delivered just a quickly as a few packets of a movie would be delivered. His e-mail could only have been delayed by a messed up mailserver, but he didn't know enough about the Internet to realize that.
Hasn't it occurred to you that those "professional publishing houses, with their multi-million-dollar budgets and professional artists, composers, and so forth" would be developing "homebrew" if they could avoid license fees? Sony wouldn't want that.
Wow... Did you even read my post? I challenged someone to at least try to understand the argument for gun regulation, and you come and chime in with a great big "Hey, I don't understand, either!"
It's not because people could kill with guns. It's because people do kill with guns. By your argument, police are useless because they aren't needed when everyone is obeying the law. By my argument, both police and gun control are useful if they can reduce crime. Do you understand that concept?
Seeing something you disagree with is not a violation of your rights. Getting shot is a violation of my rights. You may not agree with it, but can you at least understand the argument that regulating guns would reduce the occurrences of gun violence? Liberals tend to believe this, and prioritize the right to be alive and safe above the right to own a gun.
Orientation of the motion sensor circuit board is irrelevant. There is a constant 'acceleration' due to gravity that can be used as a baseline to zero the accelerometers.
That means you know what direction is down in terms of the accelerometer's axes, but you still don't know the orientation of the controller. That's important information if, for example, you're using the controller as a steering wheel like some Wii games do, and you need to know the 'centered' position.
It's possible that the PS3 controller is calibrated during manufacture. I know that Wiimotes have their axis sensitivity calibrated during manufacture. If the sixaxis is calibrated to know its orientation during manufacture, they only need to make sure their motion sensor is secured in place and doesn't move afterward.
Why? The actual demand wasn't that high. Everything I've read indicates that the majority of consoles bought at retail were bought for resale. Let's look at what would happen if there were no scalpers. Systems would not be bought for resale, and the purchases from scalpers would instead be made at retail. With the same number of end users, I can see why you think there would still be a shortage.
But that's if you ignore two facts. First, the consoles are being hoarded by the scalpers. That is, they are being held during the auction. The systems exist, but buyers don't get them until they win an auction and receive the shipment. This is an artificial shortage, and it increases the market price.
Second, the delay in supply caused by scalpers ensures that any demand met by scalpers could have been met by a recent shipment to stores rather than reducing the availability of an earlier shipment. How is getting the first shipment a week late at inflated price better than getting the second shipment a week after launch at retail price?
But scalping is a good thing in that it makes it possible for people willing to pay more (rather than spend ages line) able to get one without getting line. If there were no scalpers, people would just hire placeholders. I don't think that would make anyone feel any better.
It's pretty clear to me in this case that if there were no scalpers, there never would have been a shortage in the first place. All the scalpers did is make it so people had to either wait more than a month or pay a higher price to get a PS3. How are the scalpers making things better for anyone but themselves?
Yeah, I responded to your comment without considering the broader discussion of whether the remote can do DDR. But don't count it out yet!
The accelerometers should be able to track position accurately in the short run. The only problem with using them is that the error accumulates in the long run and never gets corrected. Therefore, the solution is to supply some kind of correction on a regular basis.
The wiimotes could measure distance every time both points of IR light come into view. If they are strapped to the sides of your legs, facing forward and slightly up, they should see the sensor bar often enough to track absolute position accurately, even if the sensor bar is out of view for much of the time.
If you were really desperate for distance measurement, you could use the wiimote's wireless signal strength. It would be noisy in the short run, but the long-term average signal strength should correlate to the actual long-term average distance of the wiimote. (Assuming RF interference remains constant.)
But why require that the virtual dance pad be locked to an absolute position? It should be possible to implement DDR entirely by recognizing gestures. Small errors won't accumulate because the system will just see each leg as being in one of a few different states. If you know the orientation of each wiimote relative to the leg it's strapped to, and you assume that the player is always facing the TV and always steps onto a button (or the center), you should be able to determine which button a foot moved to if it moved before impacting the ground.
For example, any attempt of the right foot to hit the right arrow involves moving the foot to the right by a significant amount unless it's already there. In fact, think about breaking the movement vector down into x and y components. The only time that a significant change in one of the components doesn't mean the foot went to the corresponding button is when it started at the button on the opposite side of virtual dance pad (in which case the magnitude determines whether the foot went to the center or all the way to the other end). Therefore, even if the system does get out of sync with the player, it should get back in-sync very quickly. Probably within a few dance steps.
The "sensor bar" produces two points of infrared light at a set distance from each other. An infrared camera in the Wiimote measures the position of the points, and the angle and distance between them. This means the absolute distance is known. If Wii software is calibrating off your starting distance, it's doing so purely for the sake of convenience.
It's supply and demand? But what would happen if supply and demand were equal? You'd still be able to pull that scam, raising the price of the product and pocketing the difference. When people buy something just to resell it for profit, that creates an artificial scarcity. It would take excessive supply (read: waste) to stop that from working.
With 1.0 they usurped the use of ctrl-u to clear a line of text, which has been a convention with unix (emacs introduced it afaik) as far back as I can remember.
[...]
Disabling it requires mucking with dotfiles
Hey, why not trade one UNIX tradition for another?
The true challenge is playing Sonic 2 with the paddle. Turning the wheel would cycle between the D-Pad up, neutral, and down positions, and the button could be used to jump or do a spin dash. The only way to go forward was to spin dash, then you had to know the level very well and jump at just the right moments to avoid hitting a wall and stopping. If you did hit a wall, you got stuck because there was no way to turn around or jump over the obstacle. I never got even half way through the first level...
in both case we have political parties or groups formed by political parties designed to get around campain finance laws attemtping to influence public opinion thru deceptive actions. Just like the Gore/Nader vote swap/stuffing scandle back in 2000 and again in 2004.
How does vote trading get around campaign finance laws?
How does vote trading influence public opinion?
How is that influence deceptive?
Do you have evidence that either the Democrats or the Green Party were involved in operating or funding vote-trading websites?
Even though the video was poking fun of Gore in a way that isn't mildly convincing as to the real truth of his cause, the left is afraid it might lead voters like idiot sheep [...]
You missed the point. The concern is over the false impression of public support created by astroturfers. People still forming their opinion on a matter are usually influenced by their impression of public opinion, which they assume is not influenced by corporate or political interests.
People blow their money on ostentatious things all the time -- let them! Must you make the world's purchasing decisions based on 100% rational thinking?
"I admit it, buying a PS3 is an irrational decision due to its extremely high price tag..."
Even the New York Post does a better job of hiding its biases than Zonk does.
"... but to actually SAY so is biased."
There you have it: Conclusions, due the possibility of ruling one thing better than another, are fundamentally biased. Tell me, is there an exception to this rule for conclusions you agree with?
LuciferosX sounds like nothing more than a paid shill sponsored by Sony. Not that I can prove it, but just the way he has to bash Zonk any possible way he can screams "I'm paid by somebody to disgrace my competition." If LuciferosX were smart (no astroturfers are) he'd slow down on the bashing to look a little less biased, a little less likely to be background checked to see where money is coming from. But then again, Sony wouldn't pay him for being civil.
There, see how crazy your paranoia sounds to you, once it is turned against you?
Two questions:
Why is it so hard to believe that someone has a problem with a $600 game console?
How is it biased to call a console expensive, when that console costs as much as the other two consoles combined?
As I said, the SMART setting in the BIOS changes nothing useful. It just reports the current status (good/bad) of the drive while booting, nothing more. And by the time you've used the tool to turn SMART off on the drive, it has already spun up and logged a power-on.
It's worth the effort to try to account for all power cycles, because unlike checking access times, if you get the expected result here, you have a reasonable guarantee that the data wasn't accessed while the laptop was missing. The amount of effort and expertise required to cover this up is far far greater than what's required to preserve the old access times. Without creating evidence of tampering, you have to either insert new startup/shutdown entries into the Windows event log at believable times from before the laptop was stolen (hard), or you'd have to change the SMART data on the drive (very hard).
The only real problem with power cycle accounting is that it does not give a very conclusive result if the expected and actual cycles don't match, because there might be an authorized power cycle that was unaccounted for. In short, to the question "was this data accessed?" checking the access times will either give you a conclusive "yes" answer, or "undetermined", while power cycle accounting will either give you a reasonably certain "no" or "undetermined." Both forensic tests are worth doing.
Indeed, SMART collects information about the number of powercycles. However, unless the VA employees kept a record of the number of times they powercycled their machines, this information is pretty much useless for forensics.
The system event log in Windows keeps track of every startup/shutdown. If the system is relatively new and has never had its OS reinstalled, you can expect this information to match (or be off by one in a predictable way) unless the hard drive has been started without booting the OS. You'd have to question the owner of the laptop about anything he's done that might start the drive without booting the OS.
And if there's a SMART daemon on the system, you might have a log of those statistics, made on a regular basis. You could then figure out if the hard drive has been started without the SMART statistics being logged by the daemon.
Just do dd if=/dev/hda of=/mnt/nfs/stolen-hard-drive.diskimg Since dd will be reading the raw bytes of the hard drive, it's not going to modify any filesystem data structures.
That's not truly "raw" access to the hard drive. It's the logical data of the disk, not the physical data, and you are still going through the drive's logic. You won't modify the filesystem, but the SMART data will still be updated. And to respond to the GP, it doesn't matter if you disable SMART in the BIOS, because all that setting does is control whether the BIOS checks the SMART status of drives and warns you of a failure before booting. There's a seperate tool to enable/disable SMART on the drive itself, but you'd still bump up the power cycle by the time you've started the system in order to use the tool. And you'd have to turn SMART back on at the end.
When you hear something that sounds wrong to you, do you ever consider the possibility that you don't understand it and need to ask further questions? Or do you always assume that the other person is simply an idiot?
To answer your question, "identity theft" is impersonation, and is a crime of its own. Also, identity theft is usually used as a tool to steal money from the victim. That is theft. Breaking and entering isn't theft, but it's still a crime. And burglary is still theft. The fact that breaking and entering is not theft does not change what burglary is.
"Theft of services" is a breach of the contract where one party will perform a service with the understanding that the other party will pay for it. In this case, there is debt owed that has not been paid.
In both cases, I can show you why they are wrong without equating them to theft.
Slashdot Mirror
The analogy isn't too terrible. It conveys the notion that Internet bandwidth is a shared resource. However, Ted Stevens demonstrated very clearly that he has no idea what he's talking about. He seems to think that when somebody downloads a movie, the entire movie gets put into the 'tube' and all other data gets in line behind it. He thinks an e-mail he got several days after it was sent arrived late because too many movies were coming through the tubes. Not only that, but he referred to the e-mail as "an internet."
He doesn't realize that data is divided into packets, where a limited amount are in transit at one time for each transfer. This fact is very important. It means that bandwidth is shared roughly evenly between all the users of a 'tube' at any given moment, and that e-mails can always be delivered just a quickly as a few packets of a movie would be delivered. His e-mail could only have been delayed by a messed up mailserver, but he didn't know enough about the Internet to realize that.
Hasn't it occurred to you that those "professional publishing houses, with their multi-million-dollar budgets and professional artists, composers, and so forth" would be developing "homebrew" if they could avoid license fees? Sony wouldn't want that.
If only the thing would multitask...
Wow... Did you even read my post? I challenged someone to at least try to understand the argument for gun regulation, and you come and chime in with a great big "Hey, I don't understand, either!"
It's not because people could kill with guns. It's because people do kill with guns. By your argument, police are useless because they aren't needed when everyone is obeying the law. By my argument, both police and gun control are useful if they can reduce crime. Do you understand that concept?
Seeing something you disagree with is not a violation of your rights. Getting shot is a violation of my rights. You may not agree with it, but can you at least understand the argument that regulating guns would reduce the occurrences of gun violence? Liberals tend to believe this, and prioritize the right to be alive and safe above the right to own a gun.
That means you know what direction is down in terms of the accelerometer's axes, but you still don't know the orientation of the controller. That's important information if, for example, you're using the controller as a steering wheel like some Wii games do, and you need to know the 'centered' position.
It's possible that the PS3 controller is calibrated during manufacture. I know that Wiimotes have their axis sensitivity calibrated during manufacture. If the sixaxis is calibrated to know its orientation during manufacture, they only need to make sure their motion sensor is secured in place and doesn't move afterward.
Why? The actual demand wasn't that high. Everything I've read indicates that the majority of consoles bought at retail were bought for resale. Let's look at what would happen if there were no scalpers. Systems would not be bought for resale, and the purchases from scalpers would instead be made at retail. With the same number of end users, I can see why you think there would still be a shortage.
But that's if you ignore two facts. First, the consoles are being hoarded by the scalpers. That is, they are being held during the auction. The systems exist, but buyers don't get them until they win an auction and receive the shipment. This is an artificial shortage, and it increases the market price.
Second, the delay in supply caused by scalpers ensures that any demand met by scalpers could have been met by a recent shipment to stores rather than reducing the availability of an earlier shipment. How is getting the first shipment a week late at inflated price better than getting the second shipment a week after launch at retail price?
It's pretty clear to me in this case that if there were no scalpers, there never would have been a shortage in the first place. All the scalpers did is make it so people had to either wait more than a month or pay a higher price to get a PS3. How are the scalpers making things better for anyone but themselves?
Yeah, I responded to your comment without considering the broader discussion of whether the remote can do DDR. But don't count it out yet!
The accelerometers should be able to track position accurately in the short run. The only problem with using them is that the error accumulates in the long run and never gets corrected. Therefore, the solution is to supply some kind of correction on a regular basis.
The wiimotes could measure distance every time both points of IR light come into view. If they are strapped to the sides of your legs, facing forward and slightly up, they should see the sensor bar often enough to track absolute position accurately, even if the sensor bar is out of view for much of the time.
If you were really desperate for distance measurement, you could use the wiimote's wireless signal strength. It would be noisy in the short run, but the long-term average signal strength should correlate to the actual long-term average distance of the wiimote. (Assuming RF interference remains constant.)
But why require that the virtual dance pad be locked to an absolute position? It should be possible to implement DDR entirely by recognizing gestures. Small errors won't accumulate because the system will just see each leg as being in one of a few different states. If you know the orientation of each wiimote relative to the leg it's strapped to, and you assume that the player is always facing the TV and always steps onto a button (or the center), you should be able to determine which button a foot moved to if it moved before impacting the ground.
For example, any attempt of the right foot to hit the right arrow involves moving the foot to the right by a significant amount unless it's already there. In fact, think about breaking the movement vector down into x and y components. The only time that a significant change in one of the components doesn't mean the foot went to the corresponding button is when it started at the button on the opposite side of virtual dance pad (in which case the magnitude determines whether the foot went to the center or all the way to the other end). Therefore, even if the system does get out of sync with the player, it should get back in-sync very quickly. Probably within a few dance steps.
The "sensor bar" produces two points of infrared light at a set distance from each other. An infrared camera in the Wiimote measures the position of the points, and the angle and distance between them. This means the absolute distance is known. If Wii software is calibrating off your starting distance, it's doing so purely for the sake of convenience.
It's supply and demand? But what would happen if supply and demand were equal? You'd still be able to pull that scam, raising the price of the product and pocketing the difference. When people buy something just to resell it for profit, that creates an artificial scarcity. It would take excessive supply (read: waste) to stop that from working.
Sure it does. The controller is returning a point in six-dimensional space, so there are six axes.
Yes, Blu-Ray is used for games... But it's not used for gameplay.
The true challenge is playing Sonic 2 with the paddle. Turning the wheel would cycle between the D-Pad up, neutral, and down positions, and the button could be used to jump or do a spin dash. The only way to go forward was to spin dash, then you had to know the level very well and jump at just the right moments to avoid hitting a wall and stopping. If you did hit a wall, you got stuck because there was no way to turn around or jump over the obstacle. I never got even half way through the first level...
I think the 5 digit user id speaks for itself.
You missed the point. The concern is over the false impression of public support created by astroturfers. People still forming their opinion on a matter are usually influenced by their impression of public opinion, which they assume is not influenced by corporate or political interests.
So you decide to advocate obfuscated-majority rule instead. Great.
Grand Theft Lightsaber?
"I admit it, buying a PS3 is an irrational decision due to its extremely high price tag..."
"... but to actually SAY so is biased."
There you have it: Conclusions, due the possibility of ruling one thing better than another, are fundamentally biased. Tell me, is there an exception to this rule for conclusions you agree with?
LuciferosX sounds like nothing more than a paid shill sponsored by Sony. Not that I can prove it, but just the way he has to bash Zonk any possible way he can screams "I'm paid by somebody to disgrace my competition." If LuciferosX were smart (no astroturfers are) he'd slow down on the bashing to look a little less biased, a little less likely to be background checked to see where money is coming from. But then again, Sony wouldn't pay him for being civil.
There, see how crazy your paranoia sounds to you, once it is turned against you?
Two questions:
As I said, the SMART setting in the BIOS changes nothing useful. It just reports the current status (good/bad) of the drive while booting, nothing more. And by the time you've used the tool to turn SMART off on the drive, it has already spun up and logged a power-on.
It's worth the effort to try to account for all power cycles, because unlike checking access times, if you get the expected result here, you have a reasonable guarantee that the data wasn't accessed while the laptop was missing. The amount of effort and expertise required to cover this up is far far greater than what's required to preserve the old access times. Without creating evidence of tampering, you have to either insert new startup/shutdown entries into the Windows event log at believable times from before the laptop was stolen (hard), or you'd have to change the SMART data on the drive (very hard).
The only real problem with power cycle accounting is that it does not give a very conclusive result if the expected and actual cycles don't match, because there might be an authorized power cycle that was unaccounted for. In short, to the question "was this data accessed?" checking the access times will either give you a conclusive "yes" answer, or "undetermined", while power cycle accounting will either give you a reasonably certain "no" or "undetermined." Both forensic tests are worth doing.
The system event log in Windows keeps track of every startup/shutdown. If the system is relatively new and has never had its OS reinstalled, you can expect this information to match (or be off by one in a predictable way) unless the hard drive has been started without booting the OS. You'd have to question the owner of the laptop about anything he's done that might start the drive without booting the OS.
And if there's a SMART daemon on the system, you might have a log of those statistics, made on a regular basis. You could then figure out if the hard drive has been started without the SMART statistics being logged by the daemon.
That's not truly "raw" access to the hard drive. It's the logical data of the disk, not the physical data, and you are still going through the drive's logic. You won't modify the filesystem, but the SMART data will still be updated. And to respond to the GP, it doesn't matter if you disable SMART in the BIOS, because all that setting does is control whether the BIOS checks the SMART status of drives and warns you of a failure before booting. There's a seperate tool to enable/disable SMART on the drive itself, but you'd still bump up the power cycle by the time you've started the system in order to use the tool. And you'd have to turn SMART back on at the end.
When you hear something that sounds wrong to you, do you ever consider the possibility that you don't understand it and need to ask further questions? Or do you always assume that the other person is simply an idiot?
To answer your question, "identity theft" is impersonation, and is a crime of its own. Also, identity theft is usually used as a tool to steal money from the victim. That is theft. Breaking and entering isn't theft, but it's still a crime. And burglary is still theft. The fact that breaking and entering is not theft does not change what burglary is.
"Theft of services" is a breach of the contract where one party will perform a service with the understanding that the other party will pay for it. In this case, there is debt owed that has not been paid.
In both cases, I can show you why they are wrong without equating them to theft.
Theft is the unauthorized removal of property from someone's possession.