Does that percentage account for people who own the songs they are downloading in some other media format?
Does that percetage account for people who tried to download a song but got a RIAA-hijacked song instead?
What a waste of resources. They are playing at a very losing game. Before Napster there was always IRC, usenet, and FTP -- those are still there. After Napster came Morpheus/Grokster, which may/may not be left alive. But already the file sharing community has moved past into DirectConnect hubs, bit torrent, private WASTE networks, etc. Why do they even bother anymore?
Not so fast. My activity light is on all the time, but it's broadcast ARP traffic (likely other Nimda-infected subscribers probing me for security holes).
That's one of the best articles I've seen on this event.
Sponsored by Intel Corporation, I run one of the Grand Challenge teams,
Team Overbot.
We have a vehicle (a modified six wheel drive Polaris Ranger), a shop in Redwood City, funding,
equipment, and people. We're well along; the vehicle has most of its actuators and some of the sensors working, and about a third of the software is running. We're one of the five DARPA-accepted teams.
Many of us are Stanford alumni or students, but this is not a Stanford project.
Our basic technical approach is to build a rugged, reliable vehicle with conservative control strategies. Others may be faster, but we expect they'll get into trouble at high speed. Our top speed is 40MPH. The real problem with the Grand Challenge is not going fast on the easy parts; it's getting through the hard parts.
The 6WD chassis we're using is one of the most bump-tolerant platforms around. It can go over railroad ties at top speed without problems and
without going airborne. The center of gravity is low. The front and mid axles have independent suspension; the rear axle is a swing arm. This simplifies low-level vehicle control. All wheels can be driven, although at higher speeds, we will switch from 6WD to 4WD.
We have five computers on board. Three are small PC/104 machines, and two are Pentium 4 machines.
All run QNX (the OS for when it has to work.) All are industrial-strength ruggedized units. The actuators are all servomotors driven by industrial microcontrollers. All this hardware is off-the-shelf industrial control gear.
Sensors include LIDAR, doppler RADAR, sonars, cameras, INS, GPS, etc. Some of them are used in unusual ways. That's all I'll say about that.
The pathfinding strategy is indeed borrowed from video game technology. It's more structured than Brooks-type behavior based robotics, and it's less structured than Latoumbe-type planning. There are three layers of control; the top one we call the "back seat driver", because it has only advisory authority over the "driver".
We have road map and topo data onboard, but it's used more as a hint than as rigid guidance. We take the waypoints DARPA gives us (on a CD, at 0430 hrs the
morning of the race) and load it in. There's no offline preplanning. Wouldn't help in the real world.
If nobody wins this year, which is quite likely, we'll be back next year with a faster vehicle.
every content provider is looking to incorporate more and more DRM as the quality, cost, and ease of creation of copies improves.
the music industry doesn't care about people copying songs off the radio. it didn't even really get its panties in a bunch when CD-Rs first hit the market. or when mp3s hit the ftp servers. It went ballistic when anyone could download a single application and instantly find a never ending stream of perceptibility loss-less perfect digital copies.
likewise with the MPAA and DVD encryption, likewise with the new Cable Set-top standard.
They want to cut out MythTV, Tivo, splitters, H-cards, and cable descramblers. It's becoming too easy to get at the current data, so they want a change.
with the analog system working (fairly) well as is, why else would they create a new 'standard' for the digital system? It certainly isn't in the interest of the consumer.
Why doesn't Sony support the Blu-Ray with its stock rewritable feature? Why did Disney/Circuit City/et al try to push (the bad) Divx onto the market in the first place?
It isn't because consumers are clamoring for less control or cheaper movies.
The time is coming when content producers are going to have to realize that their profits will no longer come from format-updates (repurchasing 8-tracks as CDs, VHS classics as DVDs, etc), and will -not- come from service-style access to data. Classic TV advertising may even have to give way to pure product-placement campaigns.
Cable will realize that a move to pay-per-channel is the way to support content without advertising in our new time-shifted digital reality. Some people -will- pay $1/mo for TLC. Home Depot will still pay for product placements in Trading Spaces. Maybe the Super-station will go away - but the cable companies, and popular channels, need not.
the film industry has already shown that the theatre experience is not losing out to cheap cam copies. they've learned that feature-rich dvds or dirt-cheap dvds are preferred to the customer over hacked-together recompressed copies on filesharing networks.
The record companies will need to realize that to win with digital music requires providing the best quality, with the least hassle. They will need to realize that they must beat file-sharing on features. People will give up hunting around for a good (not mislabeled)256kbps rip of Britney's newest song - if they know they can just hit iTunes or its ilk and cough up $1.
Fair Use needs to win out. These purported 'losses' from file-sharing need to be revealed to be grossly overestimated fabrications. (A PSA from a supposed union set painter claiming that file sharing is killing the movie industry, and threatening his job - airing during it's highest grossing year of all time is particularly tactless)
DRM is the tool of the content dinosaur. If they concentrated on actual content piracy rings - where big money is being made off black-market copies, and abandoned their fruitless DRM research - their profits could be higher than ever.
But such is not the reaction of anti-competitive cabals. Being forced to -compete- is not what they do. Suing, threatening, bullying, bribing - these are the blunt instruments they wield instead of the precise tools of innovation, imagination and competition.
So in the meantime - expect every advance to carry DRM in the fine print.
Season 3 of TNG. Picard and the Enterprise-D must protect the Enterprise-C from three Klingon Bird-of-Prey vessels until it enters a rift to go back in time.
"Let's make sure that history never forgets... the name... Enterprise. Picard out."
There are some differences in the Canadian governmental system than American, and buying off our representatives is a bit harder. Not impossible, mind you.
Our Senate is appointed, not elected, so campaign funding on that front isn't really viable. Although out-and-out bribery could still be a possibility.
The Prime Minister is the leader of the party with the most seats in the House of Commons, not a separately elected individual, and therefore controls how the party votes.
The ethics minister (theoretically) is a watchdog to prevent abuses of power or introducing bills based on the needs of special interest.
Add into this that each MP has limited power, based on the fact that their ridings are relatively small compared to US electoral areas (population-wise, I'm sure many of the geographical areas are quite large), and it would take a very concentrated effort to garner enough support through bribery and financing to make a dent.
Of course, this is all from the deep recesses of my high school social science memories, so I could be a bit off.
That is the alternative, and pollution from traditional power generation plants is killing people every day, and sickening many more.
There is not a single permanent disposal site world-wide. no one can guarantee the safety. the U.S. government even has a website on _just this problem_. Ready-made dirty bombs are driven in trucks all over the country. GREAT IDEA.
If someone wants to kill a lot of civilians, all they need is a garage lab to produce chemical or bio agents. Much more effective, much easier to deal with, even more scary (1 gram of the right bio agent could kill millions). See the recent research on mouse pox for some really scary stuff (did that story make/.?). How 'bout a bio agent that'll only wipe out one ethnic group? The research is just about there. It is always hard to evaluate relative risk, but to me nuke power is way down the list.
BTW, as far as nuke disposal, there's a good reason for a lunar colony... =) Name another major energy source where the pollution could realistically be taken entirely off-planet.
Also BTW, I hope some of the recent solar energy developments lead (finally) to competitive photovoltaic power generation on a distributed basis (that'll tick off the power companies!). One of the more exciting developments is solar fabric, which can be used in curved building designs.
Do you need a library, get its version with
for i in `cat/etc/ld.so.conf`/lib/usr/lib;do ls $i/ libraryName.so*;done 2>/dev/null | grep -v @ | sed 's/.*\.so\.//g' | sed 's/\*//g'
If so, we invite you to join the jihad against Slashdot at www.anti-slash.org. We demand a full
acknowledgment and apology from the editorial staff for their crimes
against the community. Until then, we will take whatever action is
necessary to discredit Slashdot as a reputable geek news site.
Our tools:
Database Tool -
A huge searchable database of old Score:4 and Score:5 posts ready for
reposting. Gain karma at your will. Then, use your mod points and karma
bonus to cause mayhem.
Browsing Tool -
Browse Slashdot through our special tool to alert other brothers in Jihad
to subversive posts worthy of moderation. Also integrates with the
database tool for quick karma whoring.
Mail Tool - create
fake email accounts for creating new Slashdot accounts for jihad
operations with ease.
Bait and Switch Mirror
Tool - Use this to mirror a Slashdotted site. After a certain amount
of time (to let the mods push it up to Score:5), it switches to displaying
goatse.cx or your favorite disgusting image.
Look at the score breakdowns on some of these stories. There are almost no Score:3 posts -- meaning that no moderation is occuring. Did CmdrTaco break something?
It was pretty clear to everyone that the "Clean Slate" program offered nothing to individuals. If you know the RIAA is coming after people, what's the difference between admitting guilt and just stopping?
Instead, the RIAA is just building a list of "admitted offenders" to do God-knows-what with later.
One thing the RIAA and company seem to have a hard time understanding is that there will always be another way of sharing content. Peer-to-peer file sharing is just a method out of hundred other. To stop filesharing you have to stop ALL traffic on the net and screen every mail delivered in the world.
Since I can burn my files onto a CDR and swap it with a friend instead, stopping P2P sharing through the various online services is not going to accomplish anything. Maybe they will succeed in stopping a promising communications protocol from being able to mature and start being used in other ways like in a distributed OS or other ways not yet used.
The only way to stop filesharing is to gain the trust and liking of the buyers so that they pay out of free will. RIAA has taken the opposite route which already has proven itself futile. One can only watch sadly when they destroy great technology for no good.
Better would be to focus on the slowdown of American broadband. When it was first rolled out there were no caps whatsoever and it was generally allowed to run at the speed that the equipment could handle. So the average DSL user ran over 3mbit in some cases if they had good lines. Uncapped both directions.
Then came the abusers and greed of the communications companies and today you see the extreme chokehold on the broadband today. SBC's base package for DSL is 384/128k dn/up compared to Verizon's 768k-1.544M/128k and the cable companies provide service comparable to Verizon.
New trends are starting to take hold in some areas with Verizon Wireless rolling out EvDO 3G which can run upwards of 2.3M and Verizon Landline (Seperate companies) is testing 2M+ speeds in certain (Lucky) markets with future plans to turn up the dial on broadband.
While those trends are nice to see you still have many who still have dialup due to cost and some worse off areas still cannot get a better connection than 26600kbps!
Interestingly people have pointed out monopolies. There is basically 1 telepone company in South Korea. Korean Telecom and a handfull of offshots after other companies were allowed to spring up but I'd say 90% of that country is serviced by KT and TMK there is only one cable company there. So it's questionable if more competition really is the answer (Korea may regulate, the us de-regulates)
I'm not sure what goes on in Japan but I would suspect nearly the same situation there also but you'll have to understand both countries until very recently had complete conglomerates (Sp?) of many things from electronics to communications systems. Now there is free market competition but not in the manner of how the US Govt mandated AT&T split up those companies were just forced to allow competition to "try" to work their way into a established system. Which probably will work becuase the exec's of those companies realize given choice people will pick the better company that provides them value.
Slashdot Mirror
"90% of files transmitted were copyrighted files."
Does that percentage include traffic to Canadian computers, where such downloads are legal?
Does that percentage account for people who own the songs they are downloading in some other media format?
Does that percetage account for people who tried to download a song but got a RIAA-hijacked song instead?
What a waste of resources. They are playing at a very losing game. Before Napster there was always IRC, usenet, and FTP -- those are still there. After Napster came Morpheus/Grokster, which may/may not be left alive. But already the file sharing community has moved past into DirectConnect hubs, bit torrent, private WASTE networks, etc. Why do they even bother anymore?
If your modem activity light is on all the time.
Not so fast. My activity light is on all the time, but it's broadcast ARP traffic (likely other Nimda-infected subscribers probing me for security holes).
Intel has some thoughts on the topic.
Namely, the usual suspects like non-condensing humidity, temperature levels, and so on are things to consider.
Additionally, you can look at your monitor's specs to see what kind of viewing angles it will support.
Sponsored by Intel Corporation, I run one of the Grand Challenge teams, Team Overbot. We have a vehicle (a modified six wheel drive Polaris Ranger), a shop in Redwood City, funding, equipment, and people. We're well along; the vehicle has most of its actuators and some of the sensors working, and about a third of the software is running. We're one of the five DARPA-accepted teams.
Many of us are Stanford alumni or students, but this is not a Stanford project.
Our basic technical approach is to build a rugged, reliable vehicle with conservative control strategies. Others may be faster, but we expect they'll get into trouble at high speed. Our top speed is 40MPH. The real problem with the Grand Challenge is not going fast on the easy parts; it's getting through the hard parts.
The 6WD chassis we're using is one of the most bump-tolerant platforms around. It can go over railroad ties at top speed without problems and without going airborne. The center of gravity is low. The front and mid axles have independent suspension; the rear axle is a swing arm. This simplifies low-level vehicle control. All wheels can be driven, although at higher speeds, we will switch from 6WD to 4WD.
We have five computers on board. Three are small PC/104 machines, and two are Pentium 4 machines. All run QNX (the OS for when it has to work.) All are industrial-strength ruggedized units. The actuators are all servomotors driven by industrial microcontrollers. All this hardware is off-the-shelf industrial control gear.
Sensors include LIDAR, doppler RADAR, sonars, cameras, INS, GPS, etc. Some of them are used in unusual ways. That's all I'll say about that.
The pathfinding strategy is indeed borrowed from video game technology. It's more structured than Brooks-type behavior based robotics, and it's less structured than Latoumbe-type planning. There are three layers of control; the top one we call the "back seat driver", because it has only advisory authority over the "driver".
We have road map and topo data onboard, but it's used more as a hint than as rigid guidance. We take the waypoints DARPA gives us (on a CD, at 0430 hrs the morning of the race) and load it in. There's no offline preplanning. Wouldn't help in the real world.
If nobody wins this year, which is quite likely, we'll be back next year with a faster vehicle.
Post questions and I'll answer them here.
John Fagogle
Team Fuckbot
Join the jihad today!
every content provider is looking to incorporate more and more DRM as the quality, cost, and ease of creation of copies improves.
the music industry doesn't care about people copying songs off the radio. it didn't even really get its panties in a bunch when CD-Rs first hit the market. or when mp3s hit the ftp servers. It went ballistic when anyone could download a single application and instantly find a never ending stream of perceptibility loss-less perfect digital copies.
likewise with the MPAA and DVD encryption, likewise with the new Cable Set-top standard.
They want to cut out MythTV, Tivo, splitters, H-cards, and cable descramblers. It's becoming too easy to get at the current data, so they want a change.
with the analog system working (fairly) well as is, why else would they create a new 'standard' for the digital system? It certainly isn't in the interest of the consumer.
Why doesn't Sony support the Blu-Ray with its stock rewritable feature?
Why did Disney/Circuit City/et al try to push (the bad) Divx onto the market in the first place?
It isn't because consumers are clamoring for less control or cheaper movies.
The time is coming when content producers are going to have to realize that their profits will no longer come from format-updates (repurchasing 8-tracks as CDs, VHS classics as DVDs, etc), and will -not- come from service-style access to data. Classic TV advertising may even have to give way to pure product-placement campaigns.
Cable will realize that a move to pay-per-channel is the way to support content without advertising in our new time-shifted digital reality. Some people -will- pay $1/mo for TLC. Home Depot will still pay for product placements in Trading Spaces. Maybe the Super-station will go away - but the cable companies, and popular channels, need not.
the film industry has already shown that the theatre experience is not losing out to cheap cam copies. they've learned that feature-rich dvds or dirt-cheap dvds are preferred to the customer over hacked-together recompressed copies on filesharing networks.
The record companies will need to realize that to win with digital music requires providing the best quality, with the least hassle. They will need to realize that they must beat file-sharing on features. People will give up hunting around for a good (not mislabeled)256kbps rip of Britney's newest song - if they know they can just hit iTunes or its ilk and cough up $1.
Fair Use needs to win out. These purported 'losses' from file-sharing need to be revealed to be grossly overestimated fabrications. (A PSA from a supposed union set painter claiming that file sharing is killing the movie industry, and threatening his job - airing during it's highest grossing year of all time is particularly tactless)
DRM is the tool of the content dinosaur. If they concentrated on actual content piracy rings - where big money is being made off black-market copies, and abandoned their fruitless DRM research - their profits could be higher than ever.
But such is not the reaction of anti-competitive cabals. Being forced to -compete- is not what they do. Suing, threatening, bullying, bribing - these are the blunt instruments they wield instead of the precise tools of innovation, imagination and competition.
So in the meantime - expect every advance to carry DRM in the fine print.
...most widely-used asymmetric cryptosystems these days are based on the hardness of factorising large numbers...
:)
Don't you mean, factoring large PRIME numbers?
I'm surprised no one has mentioned this one yet.
Season 3 of TNG. Picard and the Enterprise-D must protect the Enterprise-C from three Klingon Bird-of-Prey vessels until it enters a rift to go back in time.
"Let's make sure that history never forgets... the name... Enterprise. Picard out."
Readers keep recommending Slashdot mirror sites. But of course, that would mean (a) editors would have to read the site to know what we think,
Of course they read they site. How else would they know whom to bitchslap?
Just a quick correction: the five objects visible include Mercury, not necessarily the moon. See the article for details.
Set up a cron job to do "emerge sync && emerge -uD world" or the equivalent every 24 hours. No attention required.
Until someone roots the Gentoo servers....
Whoever modded that funny won't think it's so funny when they get outsourced.
...systems admin and code-cutting are two IT related roles that can be performed reasonably easily from a remote location.
:(
Yeah, like India.
A link to the original would have been courteous.
Sorry, can't be bothered with such things.
There are some differences in the Canadian governmental system than American, and buying off our representatives is a bit harder. Not impossible, mind you.
Our Senate is appointed, not elected, so campaign funding on that front isn't really viable. Although out-and-out bribery could still be a possibility.
The Prime Minister is the leader of the party with the most seats in the House of Commons, not a separately elected individual, and therefore controls how the party votes.
The ethics minister (theoretically) is a watchdog to prevent abuses of power or introducing bills based on the needs of special interest.
Add into this that each MP has limited power, based on the fact that their ridings are relatively small compared to US electoral areas (population-wise, I'm sure many of the geographical areas are quite large), and it would take a very concentrated effort to garner enough support through bribery and financing to make a dent.
Of course, this is all from the deep recesses of my high school social science memories, so I could be a bit off.
I'm doing something similar and have yet to be bitchslapped or "$rtbl"ed.
Yes, but you presumably weren't spouting off about it (until now, that is. Beware..)
Why would anyone want to crack a Windows box? It'd be completely useless to you.
Except to send spam...
Two words: Lung Cancer.
That is the alternative, and pollution from traditional power generation plants is killing people every day, and sickening many more.
There is not a single permanent disposal site world-wide. no one can guarantee the safety. the U.S. government even has a website on _just this problem_. Ready-made dirty bombs are driven in trucks all over the country. GREAT IDEA.
If someone wants to kill a lot of civilians, all they need is a garage lab to produce chemical or bio agents. Much more effective, much easier to deal with, even more scary (1 gram of the right bio agent could kill millions). See the recent research on mouse pox for some really scary stuff (did that story make /.?). How 'bout a bio agent that'll only wipe out one ethnic group? The research is just about there. It is always hard to evaluate relative risk, but to me nuke power is way down the list.
BTW, as far as nuke disposal, there's a good reason for a lunar colony... =) Name another major energy source where the pollution could realistically be taken entirely off-planet.
Also BTW, I hope some of the recent solar energy developments lead (finally) to competitive photovoltaic power generation on a distributed basis (that'll tick off the power companies!). One of the more exciting developments is solar fabric, which can be used in curved building designs.
Do you need a library, get its version with for i in `cat /etc/ld.so.conf` /lib /usr/lib;do ls $i/ libraryName .so*;done 2>/dev/null | grep -v @ | sed 's/.*\.so\.//g' | sed 's/\*//g'
Yes folks, it's that easy!
He's on his honeymoon. (Taco said).
Bored with mindless groupthink?
Had enough with Slashdot's unethical support for advertisers?
If so, we invite you to join the jihad against Slashdot at www.anti-slash.org. We demand a full acknowledgment and apology from the editorial staff for their crimes against the community. Until then, we will take whatever action is necessary to discredit Slashdot as a reputable geek news site.
Our tools:
- Database Tool -
A huge searchable database of old Score:4 and Score:5 posts ready for
reposting. Gain karma at your will. Then, use your mod points and karma
bonus to cause mayhem.
- Browsing Tool -
Browse Slashdot through our special tool to alert other brothers in Jihad
to subversive posts worthy of moderation. Also integrates with the
database tool for quick karma whoring.
- Mail Tool - create
fake email accounts for creating new Slashdot accounts for jihad
operations with ease.
- Bait and Switch Mirror
Tool - Use this to mirror a Slashdotted site. After a certain amount
of time (to let the mods push it up to Score:5), it switches to displaying
goatse.cx or your favorite disgusting image.
Join the jihad today!Just yesterday I was cleaning out my collection of user donated/upgraded software and found an old copy of MS Bob - That's right, Bob!
Is there any way you can send that to me? I desperately need it. Can you email me?
Look at the score breakdowns on some of these stories. There are almost no Score:3 posts -- meaning that no moderation is occuring. Did CmdrTaco break something?
It was pretty clear to everyone that the "Clean Slate" program offered nothing to individuals. If you know the RIAA is coming after people, what's the difference between admitting guilt and just stopping?
Instead, the RIAA is just building a list of "admitted offenders" to do God-knows-what with later.
One thing the RIAA and company seem to have a hard time understanding is that there will always be another way of sharing content. Peer-to-peer file sharing is just a method out of hundred other. To stop filesharing you have to stop ALL traffic on the net and screen every mail delivered in the world.
Since I can burn my files onto a CDR and swap it with a friend instead, stopping P2P sharing through the various online services is not going to accomplish anything. Maybe they will succeed in stopping a promising communications protocol from being able to mature and start being used in other ways like in a distributed OS or other ways not yet used.
The only way to stop filesharing is to gain the trust and liking of the buyers so that they pay out of free will. RIAA has taken the opposite route which already has proven itself futile. One can only watch sadly when they destroy great technology for no good.
Better would be to focus on the slowdown of American broadband. When it was first rolled out there were no caps whatsoever and it was generally allowed to run at the speed that the equipment could handle. So the average DSL user ran over 3mbit in some cases if they had good lines. Uncapped both directions.
Then came the abusers and greed of the communications companies and today you see the extreme chokehold on the broadband today. SBC's base package for DSL is 384/128k dn/up compared to Verizon's 768k-1.544M/128k and the cable companies provide service comparable to Verizon.
New trends are starting to take hold in some areas with Verizon Wireless rolling out EvDO 3G which can run upwards of 2.3M and Verizon Landline (Seperate companies) is testing 2M+ speeds in certain (Lucky) markets with future plans to turn up the dial on broadband.
While those trends are nice to see you still have many who still have dialup due to cost and some worse off areas still cannot get a better connection than 26600kbps!
Interestingly people have pointed out monopolies. There is basically 1 telepone company in South Korea. Korean Telecom and a handfull of offshots after other companies were allowed to spring up but I'd say 90% of that country is serviced by KT and TMK there is only one cable company there. So it's questionable if more competition really is the answer (Korea may regulate, the us de-regulates)
I'm not sure what goes on in Japan but I would suspect nearly the same situation there also but you'll have to understand both countries until very recently had complete conglomerates (Sp?) of many things from electronics to communications systems. Now there is free market competition but not in the manner of how the US Govt mandated AT&T split up those companies were just forced to allow competition to "try" to work their way into a established system. Which probably will work becuase the exec's of those companies realize given choice people will pick the better company that provides them value.