Definitely fair points, the only thing that really makes me uneasy is that Bearshare did not infringe anyone's copyright (the spyware is another matter) yet they still went down in court; why not go after the phone companies for transferring the data next? It's like when they caught a car thief (or whatever random criminal it was) using terrorism legislation - the person wasn't a terrorist, even if they were a criminal, therefore it's a misuse of the legal system.
No, it's more like GM built the roads, the public paid for their use (i.e. paid fees to their ISPs), the car manufacturers paid for access (i.e. paying for pipes out of the datacentres) and then GM decided to build in speedbumps that only their cars could get past properly.
I would like to second that comment - as someone who genuinely intends to become an astronaut I can tell you now that I would happily risk going up in a current model shuttle rather than waiting years for safety revisions that may not happen. I'd choose to risk my life to for the chance to fulfill the greatest dream in my life in a heartbeat. The fact is, if NASA are to be called irresponsible for this launch (which I do not believe they are, but hypothetically speaking) it should be on financial grounds; shuttles are not cheap or easy to replace, if they lose another then it could severly dent their public image having a few more deaths on the cards (despite the fact that, as stated, there are people like me happy to take that risk) making it even more difficult to get equipment or authorisation for further manned missions.
Problem is, what else is out there for the Mac? I'm still using Azureus with pretty much the same problems as you simply because I can't find anything that offers the nice 'traditional P2P' two pane interface with the close-up detail windows for each torrent, nor the ability to pick and choose or prioritise files within a torrent. Anyone out there got any recomendations (OSX compatible)? uTorrent looks like exactly what I need, but it's windows only.
The 'Carver One' (am I the only one who thinks of the Bond villain when I read that?) is linked in the 'related news' section at the bottom of the article. From that I'd be inclined to believe that these cars are not similar but, in fact, the products of the same research group - it does mention other partners in the project, without specifically mentioning Carver.
I don't think UOPs (user operation prohibitions) are prior art, for two important reasons. Having skimmed the patent itself, the major distinctions seem to be that the flags are in the live broadcast (rather than a pre-recorded disc), that they encode themselves as it is recorded and that it prevents channel hopping in a live broadcast (whereas DVD UOPs only disable DVD functions, not TV channel functions).
As another poster said, however, it may be a good thing that this patent is valid - if Philips hold a patent on the technology then it's only their equipment we need to avoid.
Someone's already mentioned this scenario in the comments on the blog, it seems plausible in theory but there's also very little reason for the HDCP chips not to limit handshake attempts to (say) one per second - you're not going to get more attempts than that legitimately anyway. Since the keys are 56 bit numbers and you're adding them together you've got a fair amount of ground to cover - it's going to take a hell of a lot of time going through x1+x2=1; fail; x1+x2=2; fail;... x1+x2=379654; pass; x1+x3=1; fail; and so on. If my calculations are correct (which they are quite possibly not) you're talking anything up to centuries to brute force 40 56-bit keys at that speed.
I believe that the grandparent was talking about doing it the other way around: letting us use a proxy that is behind the great firewall in order for us to see exactly what they're missing out on.
They've got my vote, as the sibling post said all they need is a rinse every 7 to 10 days - if you're talking about the same ones I wear then they're Focus Night & Day made by CIBA Vision. I did wear Bausch & Lomb PureVision in the past but I found that they felt dry much more quickly, sometimes actually worse than daily disposables. One thing I would say is to wash them with normal solution before putting them in when you open a new pack - I don't know what they pack them in but it's not the same as the stuff in the bottles.
You can back up onto standard DV tapes over firewire if you want. It might not have all the shiny features of a 'proper' tape backup system but it does the job. That said, Froogle US does list a few DAT72 drives at ~$300 anyway.
That was my first thought too, but I've never even seen this done with Linux/Windows or even Linux/BSD, and those are OSs that nobody had to put up a reward to get booting on the same box. Are there any pieces of software out there that can be adapted, or are we in new territory here?
Maybe not. I don't know for sure, but it seems plausible that as the material hit each small ridge of the pavement, that small part would harden since it's still an impact, just on a very small area.
And if they won't remove it, we should be able to make it useless. Just a little program that runs constantly and searches for random words (both innocuous and suspicious) at random time intervals (probably less than every minute). It would use little bandwidth and would result in your 'search dossier' being inconveniently large and legitimately deniable.
Maybe I'm being optimistic, but I'm with you on the idea the Google does still try to avoid doing evil - I think they still try to be as moral as they can. I also agree that Google is picking their battles and that China is not one they could win right now. That means, however, that they should have walked away. It can be put down to a lapse in judgement; the issue is not as black and white as many make out, but at the end of the day what they did was not, in my opinion, moral. With all that said, I'm going to be keeping a much closer eye on Google's tactics in future - was this just a temporary lapse or is it the beginning of a slippery slope.
I've always been very interested in this whole 'education is getting easier' thing. In the UK at least, the overall exam results seem to be getting higher each year - this leads to the inevitable accusations that the exams are getting easier. It makes sense - why would classes get collectively more intelligent year on year?
In education we accept that people can't just be getting inexplicably smarter, so the exams must be getting easier. In sports though, we happily accept that every year or so records get broken simply because the competitors are getting better. I can't see what it is that causes atheletes to improve persistantly and why that logic can't be applied to education. Obviously better equipment technology has some impact on sport, but then so does the internet on education. Trilingual 8 year olds are impressive, but in parts of continental Europe especially I'm sure they're not considered anything special.
I don't know whether people are getting more or less intelligent, maybe exams are getting easier, maybe not. What can be shown, however, is that humans are progressing in some areas, for one reason or another.
Instead of coding for specfic browsers, write valid code! USE AS FEW FEATURES AS POSSIBLE.
That's hardly an an answer to what the parent was asking. Good general advice, but not an answer. If you write a fairly simple page using valid HTML and CSS, it will almost definitely display correctly in up to date versions of Firefox, Opera and Konqueror/Safari. It should display correctly in IE6 too, but in my experience IE has worse rendering of completely valid code than Firefox overall, so it might need a few tweaks (while still remaining valid). IE5 has its own set of quirks with CSS, meaning more tweaks again. Lynx should be fine as long as you've got your content and your style data properly separated. When you start moving down into Netscape 4 and IE3 you're talking major reworking just to ensure it doesn't render vital bits of text at a location of -3000px or anything equally strange. Writing valid but more advanced CSS just compounds the problem - even Firefox and Opera start showing their differences there. Valid code is a good start, but it doesn't excuse you from the decision of which browsers you want to support.
Maybe so, but the article seems to me to imply that the £200 'digital license' is above and beyond any other kind of licensing: "You don't actually have to DJ using a laptop. You can use vinyl, you can use CD, so we're saying that if it's not worth your while spending £200 then don't do it."
Sounds to me very much like you can play from CDs without this charge but as soon as you rip them you've got to pay. To be honest I'm a more than a little disappointed that the BBC didn't make an effort to point out that side of the argument.
It was wrong to call you a troll, I agree, but posts like your original one do get on my nerves. The obvious implication is that because you don't want a phone with features X, Y and Z, the companies should put all their effort into making a simple phone that works as a phone. The problem with that logic is there are already phones that do what you want, the Nokia 1100 being my personal favourite, and there's very little more that _can_ be done with them, however much effort the companies may put in. Yes, making flashy all in one phones takes focus away from basic phones, but basic phones don't need that focus in the first place - there is, by definition, not much more that can be done with them, so I don't really understand why so many people make posts like yours. New 'feature phones' don't harm old basic phones in any way, why complain?
I'd have to agree that thermal prints are near enough heatproof, certainly they'd withstand anything the shipping companies will put them through (and keep in mind that if you used an inkjet as the OP requested it'd be prone to running in the rain, a much more likely event) but one thing I've learned that they don't like is adhesives. No idea why, but if you put a piece of tape over a thermally printed label to hold it more securely to the package, the bit that the adhesive is touching will go blank in a day or so with decent sunlight, while the rest of the label will still be fine.
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Definitely fair points, the only thing that really makes me uneasy is that Bearshare did not infringe anyone's copyright (the spyware is another matter) yet they still went down in court; why not go after the phone companies for transferring the data next? It's like when they caught a car thief (or whatever random criminal it was) using terrorism legislation - the person wasn't a terrorist, even if they were a criminal, therefore it's a misuse of the legal system.
No, it's more like GM built the roads, the public paid for their use (i.e. paid fees to their ISPs), the car manufacturers paid for access (i.e. paying for pipes out of the datacentres) and then GM decided to build in speedbumps that only their cars could get past properly.
I would like to second that comment - as someone who genuinely intends to become an astronaut I can tell you now that I would happily risk going up in a current model shuttle rather than waiting years for safety revisions that may not happen. I'd choose to risk my life to for the chance to fulfill the greatest dream in my life in a heartbeat. The fact is, if NASA are to be called irresponsible for this launch (which I do not believe they are, but hypothetically speaking) it should be on financial grounds; shuttles are not cheap or easy to replace, if they lose another then it could severly dent their public image having a few more deaths on the cards (despite the fact that, as stated, there are people like me happy to take that risk) making it even more difficult to get equipment or authorisation for further manned missions.
The beginning of the username is the first five digits of the mathematical constant 'e'. 818284 is the next six digits.
Problem is, what else is out there for the Mac? I'm still using Azureus with pretty much the same problems as you simply because I can't find anything that offers the nice 'traditional P2P' two pane interface with the close-up detail windows for each torrent, nor the ability to pick and choose or prioritise files within a torrent. Anyone out there got any recomendations (OSX compatible)? uTorrent looks like exactly what I need, but it's windows only.
The 'Carver One' (am I the only one who thinks of the Bond villain when I read that?) is linked in the 'related news' section at the bottom of the article. From that I'd be inclined to believe that these cars are not similar but, in fact, the products of the same research group - it does mention other partners in the project, without specifically mentioning Carver.
I didn't say it was right, but I think we both know that's how it tends to work. Also I'd be interested in licensing your 'bagel-wich' patent...
I don't think UOPs (user operation prohibitions) are prior art, for two important reasons. Having skimmed the patent itself, the major distinctions seem to be that the flags are in the live broadcast (rather than a pre-recorded disc), that they encode themselves as it is recorded and that it prevents channel hopping in a live broadcast (whereas DVD UOPs only disable DVD functions, not TV channel functions).
As another poster said, however, it may be a good thing that this patent is valid - if Philips hold a patent on the technology then it's only their equipment we need to avoid.
Someone's already mentioned this scenario in the comments on the blog, it seems plausible in theory but there's also very little reason for the HDCP chips not to limit handshake attempts to (say) one per second - you're not going to get more attempts than that legitimately anyway. Since the keys are 56 bit numbers and you're adding them together you've got a fair amount of ground to cover - it's going to take a hell of a lot of time going through x1+x2=1; fail; x1+x2=2; fail; ... x1+x2=379654; pass; x1+x3=1; fail; and so on. If my calculations are correct (which they are quite possibly not) you're talking anything up to centuries to brute force 40 56-bit keys at that speed.
I believe that the grandparent was talking about doing it the other way around: letting us use a proxy that is behind the great firewall in order for us to see exactly what they're missing out on.
They've got my vote, as the sibling post said all they need is a rinse every 7 to 10 days - if you're talking about the same ones I wear then they're Focus Night & Day made by CIBA Vision. I did wear Bausch & Lomb PureVision in the past but I found that they felt dry much more quickly, sometimes actually worse than daily disposables. One thing I would say is to wash them with normal solution before putting them in when you open a new pack - I don't know what they pack them in but it's not the same as the stuff in the bottles.
Myspace is the reason that this lives on my bookmark bar.
You can back up onto standard DV tapes over firewire if you want. It might not have all the shiny features of a 'proper' tape backup system but it does the job. That said, Froogle US does list a few DAT72 drives at ~$300 anyway.
That was my first thought too, but I've never even seen this done with Linux/Windows or even Linux/BSD, and those are OSs that nobody had to put up a reward to get booting on the same box. Are there any pieces of software out there that can be adapted, or are we in new territory here?
That price is including a reasonable TFT. The box itself is a little under $350, less if you already have mouse, keyboard, speakers etc.
It also has PCI-Express when many of the cheapest Dell and HPs I've seen don't have any way to upgrade the graphics.
Maybe not. I don't know for sure, but it seems plausible that as the material hit each small ridge of the pavement, that small part would harden since it's still an impact, just on a very small area.
And if they won't remove it, we should be able to make it useless. Just a little program that runs constantly and searches for random words (both innocuous and suspicious) at random time intervals (probably less than every minute). It would use little bandwidth and would result in your 'search dossier' being inconveniently large and legitimately deniable.
Maybe I'm being optimistic, but I'm with you on the idea the Google does still try to avoid doing evil - I think they still try to be as moral as they can. I also agree that Google is picking their battles and that China is not one they could win right now. That means, however, that they should have walked away. It can be put down to a lapse in judgement; the issue is not as black and white as many make out, but at the end of the day what they did was not, in my opinion, moral. With all that said, I'm going to be keeping a much closer eye on Google's tactics in future - was this just a temporary lapse or is it the beginning of a slippery slope.
I've always been very interested in this whole 'education is getting easier' thing. In the UK at least, the overall exam results seem to be getting higher each year - this leads to the inevitable accusations that the exams are getting easier. It makes sense - why would classes get collectively more intelligent year on year?
In education we accept that people can't just be getting inexplicably smarter, so the exams must be getting easier. In sports though, we happily accept that every year or so records get broken simply because the competitors are getting better. I can't see what it is that causes atheletes to improve persistantly and why that logic can't be applied to education. Obviously better equipment technology has some impact on sport, but then so does the internet on education. Trilingual 8 year olds are impressive, but in parts of continental Europe especially I'm sure they're not considered anything special.
I don't know whether people are getting more or less intelligent, maybe exams are getting easier, maybe not. What can be shown, however, is that humans are progressing in some areas, for one reason or another.
Instead of coding for specfic browsers, write valid code!
USE AS FEW FEATURES AS POSSIBLE.
That's hardly an an answer to what the parent was asking. Good general advice, but not an answer. If you write a fairly simple page using valid HTML and CSS, it will almost definitely display correctly in up to date versions of Firefox, Opera and Konqueror/Safari. It should display correctly in IE6 too, but in my experience IE has worse rendering of completely valid code than Firefox overall, so it might need a few tweaks (while still remaining valid). IE5 has its own set of quirks with CSS, meaning more tweaks again. Lynx should be fine as long as you've got your content and your style data properly separated. When you start moving down into Netscape 4 and IE3 you're talking major reworking just to ensure it doesn't render vital bits of text at a location of -3000px or anything equally strange. Writing valid but more advanced CSS just compounds the problem - even Firefox and Opera start showing their differences there. Valid code is a good start, but it doesn't excuse you from the decision of which browsers you want to support.
Who exactly is plausibly going to attack Europe if we didn't have the US to 'shield' us?
The article estimates $25, but that's probably Aussie dollars which converts to ~£10 or ~US$18.
Maybe so, but the article seems to me to imply that the £200 'digital license' is above and beyond any other kind of licensing: "You don't actually have to DJ using a laptop. You can use vinyl, you can use CD, so we're saying that if it's not worth your while spending £200 then don't do it."
Sounds to me very much like you can play from CDs without this charge but as soon as you rip them you've got to pay. To be honest I'm a more than a little disappointed that the BBC didn't make an effort to point out that side of the argument.
It was wrong to call you a troll, I agree, but posts like your original one do get on my nerves. The obvious implication is that because you don't want a phone with features X, Y and Z, the companies should put all their effort into making a simple phone that works as a phone. The problem with that logic is there are already phones that do what you want, the Nokia 1100 being my personal favourite, and there's very little more that _can_ be done with them, however much effort the companies may put in. Yes, making flashy all in one phones takes focus away from basic phones, but basic phones don't need that focus in the first place - there is, by definition, not much more that can be done with them, so I don't really understand why so many people make posts like yours. New 'feature phones' don't harm old basic phones in any way, why complain?
I'd have to agree that thermal prints are near enough heatproof, certainly they'd withstand anything the shipping companies will put them through (and keep in mind that if you used an inkjet as the OP requested it'd be prone to running in the rain, a much more likely event) but one thing I've learned that they don't like is adhesives. No idea why, but if you put a piece of tape over a thermally printed label to hold it more securely to the package, the bit that the adhesive is touching will go blank in a day or so with decent sunlight, while the rest of the label will still be fine.