What if you get > $10.00 interest on a bank account over the course of a year? Would unemployed people be better able to collect unemployment benefits if they emptied their bank account right after losing their job?
For instance, Tennessee's laws state that in prosecuting the offense of sexual exploitation of a minor, "the state is not required to prove the actual identity or age of the minor."
How can you prove that the person in a picture is a minor if you can't figure out their age? For a toddler, it's obvious, but what about someone in high school? Summer Glau, 27, played a 15 year old in Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles. Nathalie Portman was 18 when she played a 13 year old in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Sarah Michelle Geller was 21 when she played a 15 year old Buffy Summers in Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. There's a pretty wide margin of error if all you have to go by is a picture.
Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker held that "a ratio of no more than one-to-one between compensatory and punitive damages is generally appropriate in maritime cases". In other words, punitive damages cannot exceed compensatory damages. If this were applied to copyright infringement, it would mean that the most any record label could collect per infringing song would be $2.00. $1.00 since that's how much it could be bought off of iTunes, or something, and another $1.00 for punitive damages.
According to Template:HighDefMediaComparison , HD-DVD's don't have any regions, whereas Blu-Ray's have three. Presumably, Hollywood executives who get off on exercising control really dislike it that HD-DVD gives them less control, thus they prefer Blu-Ray. For that same reason, you'd think consumers would prefer HD-DVD...
Anyway, a common response wikipedians made to his complaints was that he should edit his own article if he felt it was factually inaccurate. If Jimbo Wales is in the wrong for editing his article, then I suppose all the wikipedians who suggested John Seigenthaler edit his own article are in the wrong, too?
i'm a little confussed - how can there not be a collision when there are 256^(as big as your hard drive can hold) possible inputs and only 2^160 (or 2^64?) possible outputs? by the pigeonhole principal, there'd have to be atleast one collision since, at 21+ bytes, there are more possible inputs than there are outputs.
i don't know if Snes9x is truely better than ZSNES, but it's certainly better than most people give it credit for. Things that Snes9x has that ZSNES doesn't have include the ability to make tool assisted speedruns, output to AVI, and better memory mapping for BS-X roms. Also, Snes9x featured SDD-1 emulation (used in, among other games, Star Ocean) about a year before ZSNES did.
UT Austin's wireless network is only available to paying students or faculty members. As such, I'm not really sure how it would contribute, in any way, to Austin, TX, being the "Wi-Fi Capital of the Free (as in beer) Wireless World."
Additionally, and as someone else has pointed out before, UT Austin does not make up 90% of the city. Austin, TX has almost a quarter of a million square miles, according to this site, whereas UT Austin only has 0.5 square miles associated with it, according to this site (you can do the unit conversion from acres to square miles yourself).
Well, better get to work rebuying your entire video collection, again.
i, personally, won't be rebuying my collection. i mean, i bought my collection to *last* me. granted, the media may not last forever nor may the technology to even read them last forever (ie. it may be replaced by something better), but... thanks to DeCSS, the actual content can last forever. i can back it up and transfer it to progressively next generation media for as long as i please, and unlike with analogue copying, these transfers will be the same high quality they were when i purchased them. now, this hd-dvd standard may provide higher quality, but it'll be that much more riddled with copy protection, and blah.
nokia falls for urban legends
on
Flaming Cellphones
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
cellphones causing fires at the gas pumps may be an urban legend (if you click on the Helpful Links page of the TechTV, you can even read the snopes.com entry for it), but the user guide for the Nokia 3520 phone sure wouldn't have you believing that...
to quote from page 12...
Don't use the phone at a refueling point. Don't use near fuel
or chemicals.
Is this the same trailer that was after the credits of Reloaded?
no. there is new footage. specifically...
15 and a half seconds into the quick time trailer, we see the guy who protected the oracle in the matrix reloaded fighting someone.
18 seconds in the quick time trailer, we see an extended scene with agent smith looking weird, and having a creepy smile.
immediatly after that scene, we see neo flying up.
55 seconds into it, we see trinity, morpheus, and the oracle's bodyguard shooting, and then we see the people they're shooting at
immediatly after that, we see trinity doing her token kick, and then an exploding ship, a bunch of people pointing guns at the chinese dude, and a bunch of other stuff that i don't want to enumerate. suffice to say, this trailer *is* different. well, i should also add that in the quick time trailer there is one extra agent smith in the long long of agent smiths, hehe:)
if you don't believe me, you can download the original here, open it up in Virtual Dub, and open the quick time trailer up in EO Video, or TMPGEnc, with a quicktime filter. you can additionally see the original trailer when it comes out on the DVD. it'll be at the end of the 10 minute credits, just like it was at the theatre.
and i am aware of one other trailer out... you can download it, here. i believe, although i'm not 100% sure, that this trailer was at the end of the game, enter the matrix.
abandonware, which the article mentions, doesn't just seek to preserve games - it seeks to preserve applications and operating systems, as well...
additionally, abandonware only encompasses old software that has been released into the public domain... old software that hasn't is known as "old warez"...
also, a lot of companies don't release the rights to games because, even though they don't have any plans for the games yet, they may have an idea for something they could do with them, later. however, if they don't defend their copyright in the present, they'll have a *lot* harder time defending it in the future...
personally, i think that copyrights over software should only last five years, and can perhapes be renewable for anohter five years after that. anything longer then that, and the company would have a very hard time trying to demonstrate that piracy of that piece of software has been harming them. well, except in the case of microsoft and windows 3.1, since we all know windows 3.1 to be completly surperior, in every way, to windows 9x and beyond, and since no one would buy an inferior OS when they could instead by a surperior one, hehe:)
anyways, we should take the time to thank all the companies that have made their software public domain...
rockstar studios for grandtheft auto, and recently, Revolution Software for releasing Beneath a Steel Sky and helping Scumm VM emulate it:)
and speaking of Scumm VM, Scumm VM 0.5.1 has been released (the last slashdot article mentioned 0.5.0):
http://scummvm.sourceforge.net/
it seems as if half of the MPAA / RIAA's case against piracy is that everyone is out to rape you. after all, all p2p apps are really trojans designed to steal personal information, and even your own friends are out to get you. that last part is refering to the RIAA holding parents, grandparents, and roommates responsible for piracy committed on their computer, even though they may not have been the source of it.
also, the respectcopyrights.org website was mentioned sometime ago on slashdot:
from mental health hospitals to the NSA, klingon seems to be in demand these days. to quote from TrekToday, "Lawrence Schoen, founder of the Klingon Language Institute, recently gave a presentation to the National Security Agency on the language, as the "government was curious about the potential for al-Qaeda operatives to communicate through Klingon""...
now that said, i'm disappointed by all these people - the NSA and these mental cases... i mean, if you're going to chose a language, why the heck not chose tolkiens elvish!?
i, for one, don't believe VOD is the future. As compression technology has improved, so to as has the quality people demanded. HDTV has a resolution of 1080i, DVD's have a resolution of 480i, and VHS tapes have a resolution of 275i. Higher resolutions use more bandwidth. For example, a DVD with MPEG2 compression might use the same bitrate as HDTV with MPEG4 compression. So... better compression technology doesn't mean that the video people want is going to be any easier to get, anyways.
In fact... while MPEG4 may result in smaller file sizes than MPEG2, there are probably going to be some people who don't like it, anyways. Dolby Digital has better compression than DTS, but... audiophiles insist that they can hear a difference. In fact, enough people prefer DTS to Dolby Digital that many movies are released with both DTS and Dolby Digital tracks! And also, let's not forget SuperBit DVD's... DVD's which sacrifice the special features to give the video a higher bitrate. If these didn't sell well, the company wouldn't *still* be releasing SuberBit DVD's, but they are. So... even if the compression *did* manage to shrink the video down to managable amounts, it still might not be enough to give VOD a "nudge", so to speak.
Further, any VOD system will be riddled with DRM. Some people will no doubt complain that they can actually see this DRM manefist itself in the movies they download, and still others will no doubt have problems with the playback.
I believe the future lies in the HD-DVD. There are a number of proposals for this, including one that uses MPEG2 on a Blu-Ray disc (~50gb, if dual layered) and another that uses MPEG4 on a DVD (~9gb, if dual layered). you can read about them here:
While we're talking about the Two Towers, the extended edition will have 43 extra minutes (compared to the 32 extra in FotR), and have more than 150 cgi scenes (compared to the 35 extra in FotR).
An open source security program would be exceptionally easy to bypass, I'd think, since you'd have direct access to any encryption mechanism used.
actually, an open encryption standard that can withstand public scrutiny is more secure than a closed one, for the most part. closed ones may well be vulnerable to short cuts that the designers had not considered. i mean, despite hundreds of thousands of people trying, the only way you can crack a DES key is too brute force it. the only draw back to DES keys is the length - a short key can be brute forced faster, obviously. also, increasinly so, it is taking less and less time to try each key, so... as long as you keep the keys getting longer and longer you should be ok.
you don't and really can't have this same kind of security with a closed encryption standard.
ReplayTV pissed people off because it had features that let you skip commercials, and it had an ethernet port which meant that you could stream video from your ReplayTV to your PC, or just download it directly, which in the MPAA's eyes, means that it'll be that much easier for everyone to become the pirate that they naturally are.
SunnComm recently struck a deal with Microsoft to work together on a package of copy-protection techniques for labels. The smaller company will protect the ordinary CD audio tracks against copying, while Microsoft will provide tools to put additional copy-protected versions of the songs on the CD that can be copied to a computer hard drive or MP3 player but not traded online.
This so-called second session, containing files that can be used by computer music aficionados but not widely distributed, has come to be a key goal for the labels.
based on these lines, it looks as if they're going to have two versions of every song? that no doubt means that there will be fewer songs on some CD's... or perhapes will have really low bitrate versions for the computer, to save space... except that these versions will also sound crappy, due to their low bitrate.
and i guess people without constant internet connections are going to be a little screwed, since, afaik, all microsoft's drm techiniques involve some sort of online interaction with a remote server. that kinda alienates half the population right there...
this isn't news... every semi succesful game out there has people who still like it... hell... even unsuccesful games, such as Forgotten Realm's Unlimited Adventures has mailing lists with 200+ fans, and pages with hacks of all kinds.
if slashdot.org is so low on news, that they're willing to advertise sites, and call it news, well then... someone please tell me where to sign up!
Slashdot Mirror
They are providing free wireless for at least one hub - a Continental Airlines hub - Houston Bush.
What if you get > $10.00 interest on a bank account over the course of a year? Would unemployed people be better able to collect unemployment benefits if they emptied their bank account right after losing their job?
FTA:
For instance, Tennessee's laws state that in prosecuting the offense of sexual exploitation of a minor, "the state is not required to prove the actual identity or age of the minor."
How can you prove that the person in a picture is a minor if you can't figure out their age? For a toddler, it's obvious, but what about someone in high school? Summer Glau, 27, played a 15 year old in Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles. Nathalie Portman was 18 when she played a 13 year old in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Sarah Michelle Geller was 21 when she played a 15 year old Buffy Summers in Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. There's a pretty wide margin of error if all you have to go by is a picture.
Exxon Shipping Co. v. Baker held that "a ratio of no more than one-to-one between compensatory and punitive damages is generally appropriate in maritime cases". In other words, punitive damages cannot exceed compensatory damages. If this were applied to copyright infringement, it would mean that the most any record label could collect per infringing song would be $2.00. $1.00 since that's how much it could be bought off of iTunes, or something, and another $1.00 for punitive damages.
According to Template:HighDefMediaComparison , HD-DVD's don't have any regions, whereas Blu-Ray's have three. Presumably, Hollywood executives who get off on exercising control really dislike it that HD-DVD gives them less control, thus they prefer Blu-Ray. For that same reason, you'd think consumers would prefer HD-DVD...
Why not use the embryonic rat stem cells? Or if they don't have them, why do we?
Anyway, a common response wikipedians made to his complaints was that he should edit his own article if he felt it was factually inaccurate. If Jimbo Wales is in the wrong for editing his article, then I suppose all the wikipedians who suggested John Seigenthaler edit his own article are in the wrong, too?
i'm a little confussed - how can there not be a collision when there are 256^(as big as your hard drive can hold) possible inputs and only 2^160 (or 2^64?) possible outputs? by the pigeonhole principal, there'd have to be atleast one collision since, at 21+ bytes, there are more possible inputs than there are outputs.
i don't know if Snes9x is truely better than ZSNES, but it's certainly better than most people give it credit for. Things that Snes9x has that ZSNES doesn't have include the ability to make tool assisted speedruns, output to AVI, and better memory mapping for BS-X roms. Also, Snes9x featured SDD-1 emulation (used in, among other games, Star Ocean) about a year before ZSNES did.
Additionally, and as someone else has pointed out before, UT Austin does not make up 90% of the city. Austin, TX has almost a quarter of a million square miles, according to this site, whereas UT Austin only has 0.5 square miles associated with it, according to this site (you can do the unit conversion from acres to square miles yourself).
according to a gamespot article, Sony is also considering using Blu-Ray drives in the PS3...
i, personally, won't be rebuying my collection. i mean, i bought my collection to *last* me. granted, the media may not last forever nor may the technology to even read them last forever (ie. it may be replaced by something better), but... thanks to DeCSS, the actual content can last forever. i can back it up and transfer it to progressively next generation media for as long as i please, and unlike with analogue copying, these transfers will be the same high quality they were when i purchased them. now, this hd-dvd standard may provide higher quality, but it'll be that much more riddled with copy protection, and blah.
also, for those currious... the name of the discs that the DVD forum approved are advanced optical discs. you can read about it here:
http://www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html#3.13
to quote from page 12...
Don't use the phone at a refueling point. Don't use near fuel or chemicals.
here's a pdf of the user guide:/ 3520.pdf
http://www.nokia.ca/english/products/user_manuals
no. there is new footage. specifically...
15 and a half seconds into the quick time trailer, we see the guy who protected the oracle in the matrix reloaded fighting someone.
18 seconds in the quick time trailer, we see an extended scene with agent smith looking weird, and having a creepy smile.
immediatly after that scene, we see neo flying up.
55 seconds into it, we see trinity, morpheus, and the oracle's bodyguard shooting, and then we see the people they're shooting at
immediatly after that, we see trinity doing her token kick, and then an exploding ship, a bunch of people pointing guns at the chinese dude, and a bunch of other stuff that i don't want to enumerate. suffice to say, this trailer *is* different. well, i should also add that in the quick time trailer there is one extra agent smith in the long long of agent smiths, hehe :)
if you don't believe me, you can download the original here, open it up in Virtual Dub, and open the quick time trailer up in EO Video, or TMPGEnc, with a quicktime filter. you can additionally see the original trailer when it comes out on the DVD. it'll be at the end of the 10 minute credits, just like it was at the theatre.
and i am aware of one other trailer out... you can download it, here. i believe, although i'm not 100% sure, that this trailer was at the end of the game, enter the matrix.
additionally, abandonware only encompasses old software that has been released into the public domain... old software that hasn't is known as "old warez"...
also, a lot of companies don't release the rights to games because, even though they don't have any plans for the games yet, they may have an idea for something they could do with them, later. however, if they don't defend their copyright in the present, they'll have a *lot* harder time defending it in the future...
personally, i think that copyrights over software should only last five years, and can perhapes be renewable for anohter five years after that. anything longer then that, and the company would have a very hard time trying to demonstrate that piracy of that piece of software has been harming them. well, except in the case of microsoft and windows 3.1, since we all know windows 3.1 to be completly surperior, in every way, to windows 9x and beyond, and since no one would buy an inferior OS when they could instead by a surperior one, hehe :)
anyways, we should take the time to thank all the companies that have made their software public domain... rockstar studios for grandtheft auto, and recently, Revolution Software for releasing Beneath a Steel Sky and helping Scumm VM emulate it :)
and speaking of Scumm VM, Scumm VM 0.5.1 has been released (the last slashdot article mentioned 0.5.0): http://scummvm.sourceforge.net/
also, the respectcopyrights.org website was mentioned sometime ago on slashdot:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=72066&cid=6504 160
now that said, i'm disappointed by all these people - the NSA and these mental cases... i mean, if you're going to chose a language, why the heck not chose tolkiens elvish!?
In fact... while MPEG4 may result in smaller file sizes than MPEG2, there are probably going to be some people who don't like it, anyways. Dolby Digital has better compression than DTS, but... audiophiles insist that they can hear a difference. In fact, enough people prefer DTS to Dolby Digital that many movies are released with both DTS and Dolby Digital tracks! And also, let's not forget SuperBit DVD's... DVD's which sacrifice the special features to give the video a higher bitrate. If these didn't sell well, the company wouldn't *still* be releasing SuberBit DVD's, but they are. So... even if the compression *did* manage to shrink the video down to managable amounts, it still might not be enough to give VOD a "nudge", so to speak.
Further, any VOD system will be riddled with DRM. Some people will no doubt complain that they can actually see this DRM manefist itself in the movies they download, and still others will no doubt have problems with the playback.
I believe the future lies in the HD-DVD. There are a number of proposals for this, including one that uses MPEG2 on a Blu-Ray disc (~50gb, if dual layered) and another that uses MPEG4 on a DVD (~9gb, if dual layered). you can read about them here:
http://www.dvdsite.org/
Sources:6 13
http://www.theonering.net/perl/newsview/8/1050390
http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=14590
with the money NASA can get off the patents for these, the space program may indeed have a future! :)
actually, an open encryption standard that can withstand public scrutiny is more secure than a closed one, for the most part. closed ones may well be vulnerable to short cuts that the designers had not considered. i mean, despite hundreds of thousands of people trying, the only way you can crack a DES key is too brute force it. the only draw back to DES keys is the length - a short key can be brute forced faster, obviously. also, increasinly so, it is taking less and less time to try each key, so... as long as you keep the keys getting longer and longer you should be ok.
you don't and really can't have this same kind of security with a closed encryption standard.
ReplayTV pissed people off because it had features that let you skip commercials, and it had an ethernet port which meant that you could stream video from your ReplayTV to your PC, or just download it directly, which in the MPAA's eyes, means that it'll be that much easier for everyone to become the pirate that they naturally are.
here
This so-called second session, containing files that can be used by computer music aficionados but not widely distributed, has come to be a key goal for the labels.
based on these lines, it looks as if they're going to have two versions of every song? that no doubt means that there will be fewer songs on some CD's... or perhapes will have really low bitrate versions for the computer, to save space... except that these versions will also sound crappy, due to their low bitrate.
and i guess people without constant internet connections are going to be a little screwed, since, afaik, all microsoft's drm techiniques involve some sort of online interaction with a remote server. that kinda alienates half the population right there...
if slashdot.org is so low on news, that they're willing to advertise sites, and call it news, well then... someone please tell me where to sign up!