A clone would have different fingerprints and retinal patterns (Just like identical twins). Neither of these patterns is coded in the DNA. Rather, they are created randomly by the growth process. For retinal patterns: When some (proto-retinal) cells need more blood, they request that their neighbors turn into blood vessels. In other words, DNA doesn't contain information on where all these blood vessels go. The cells decide for themselves while the body is developing. This results in a more or less unique pattern on the retina.
Anyways, a printed copy of the pattern won't work, because the scanners look for a pulse in the blood vessels. A video recording, on the other hand, should work perfectly. Perhaps low intensity lasers. One that reflects off the pupil, on the reflects off the retina. If it is a real eye, the distances should differ. Of course, that can be faked as well. The only real way would be a second camera to make sure nobody is holding anything up against it. Have two cameras on either side. In a big black strip / one-way mirror, on a rail so they move about. If they don't know where they are, they can't put a faked image against them.
"Mr. Baggins. It seems you've been leading two lives. On the one hand, you lead a simple, pleasant life. You have furry feet. You even help your uncle Bilbo take out the trash. On the other hand, you carry an evil that breaks every law of nature we have. One of these lives has a future, Mr. Baggins. The other does not."
They once made a machine out of FPGA's. It worked by evolution: It would rearange different FPGA's and work out which gave the correct answer the quickest, and learn from there. Basically, it was pretty slow the first time it tried something. But if you let it learn for a while, you got supercomputer performances out of a tower-sized box (On the specific set of tasks it has learned, anyways).
Its good for plenty of fixed-task things: Medical imaging, software-defined DSP, scientific computing, that sort of thing. You can check them out here
Just a little tidbit. The image on your monitor is most definatly NOT private. They put out a fair bit of EM noise, and you can snoop for that noise and reconstruct what the monitor is showing from up to 100 feet away, IIRC. Doesn't work on LCD's though.
Yes. For readibility, it displays the whole thread at once. However, if a thread has more posts than your posts-per-page setting, every single page will ONLY be this one thread.
Because the law says that anybody guilty of unauthorized distribution has to pay a MINIMUM of $750, and a MAXIMUM of $150,000, and/or face a maximum jail term of 5 years. It isn't supposed to apply to each individual item, but that's RIAA math for you. In either case, it is a FINE, it isn't supposed to be making up for losses, it is supposed to be a punishment.
On the other hand, you can't sue using criminal law, so any and all punishments proscribed by criminal law don't matter whatsoever.
"And so, the rich and powerful of the city approached the sage, and said 'Great sage, we have been feeding you the finest foods, and housing you in luxury for years now. Come, what have you divined of the universe in this time?' And the sage replied
'I have determined that the universe is infinitly complex.'
'Yes, and?'
'And that there is a great deal to be said in favour of lazing about in luxury, eating the finest foods available.'
'We already KNEW all of that!'
'Well, then you should be pleased to have your opinions confirmed by one so erudite and wise as myself!'"
Speaking of overly sensitive, my favorite Family Guy quote is
"Why, that's outragous! I've got to do something!"
"There's nothing you CAN do"
"Well, I guess I'll just have to develop a sense of humor, then"
Old vaccines were made by mostly killing a sample, then infecting you. This vaccine is completely gengineered. Normal vaccines normally don't infect you because they are too weak to get a good infection going. This one shouldn't because it doesn't have the required genes to reproduce, period. How do they KNOW it won't reproduce? Because they did a LOT of monkey tests before it got to this stage. It CAN'T hurt you because it can't reproduce or damage your cells.
If you read the articles, this isn't a pharm making it. There is a quote in there, in fact, they the pharms would NEVER touch the stuff because the only people who die from it are Africans, and they don't have enough money.
The new angle won't work any better. The settlement also protects THEM from BSD suing for stolen BSD code. If they attack it, the holders of that copyright can sue SCO right back.
Plus, you can't just void a contract that legally binds you because you don't like it. They are not the original people who entered into it, but it came along with the code they bought. If they don't LIKE that, they should have looked into it more closely before they bought it. It's called due diligance. If they CAN just nullify a contract for no reason, Novel should nullify their rights to the code.
Two points. One, when they originally announced it, somebody said "They'll probably uuencode and encrypt everything so that you still can't read it, but they can call is XML and trick people into thinking it is open!" This has been taken as fact, when it was, in fact, only a prediction.
Point two is that there CAN be binary data in it. How else would you embed a bitmap, for example? As a file link, perhaps, but people like the option of having a stand alone word file with no dependencies.
My conversation with the anti-everything group at my old highschool on the subject:
"So even if there is something you need, you'll buy it some other time"
"Yeah, we all have to make sacrifices to bring down consumerism"
"So you will do that by waiting until it is no longer on sale, thus giving 'The Man', as it were, a higher profit margain"
"I don't follow you..."
"Say you need more toothpaste and toilet paper and some new jeans and so on. You COULD get all that for $50 or whatever...but you won't. You'll buy them for $60 when they arn't on sale. You just screwed Wal-Mart out of negative $10."
"You obviously don't get it"
As somebody else has said, if spammers actually use this technique, then the patent is void due to that prior art. If spammers DON'T use it, then they couldn't POSSIBLY use it to go after them.
It isn't broken. It is doing exactly what it is meant to do: It was given a file with DRM on it, and it has NOT been authorized to play said file, so it refuses to do so. Apple can't fix it because it is SOMEBODY ELSES drivers that are failing to send the authorization. Complain to the people who made the drivers. In the mean time, the iPod will still play all other files, including any NEW files moved to it from a Mac.
Blaming Apple is like blaming some hardware company because the unofficial, third party Linux drivers keep causing a kernel panic: Sure, it would have been nice of them to provide their own. But they didn't, and they don't have to fix other peoples drivers.
It isn't even broken though. The iPod is fine. It appears to simply be refusing to play DRM'd songs. I'd guess that's because the NON-APPLE, THIRD PARTY, UNSUPPORTED drivers don't support DRM? Not Apple's fault, and not their responsibility to fix it. The box says it works on Macs only.
iTunes files have DRM so you can't spread them around, which they HAVE to or they wouldn't be allowed to do it. Obviously the drivers don't transfer the DRM info properly. The iPod isn't broken or fried. It just doesn't play DRM'd files that it hasn't been told it is allowed to play! Apple should NOT be responsible for third party drivers that don't work properly! When you bought the damn thing, it was quite clear about requiring a Mac.
You are correct that it lies with the UN. There is a treaty that says no nation can own a celestial body, as they belong to everybody. People like this, and the people selling the moon, claim that since the treaty doesn't say anything about private ownership, it grants them the right to claim ownership of whatever they see.
While that is true (Assuming a left-right axis gyro) you could adjust their forward-backward tipping by changing the rotational speed of the gryo. Activly tipping backwards when breaking would prevent the user from being flug forwards.
However, a gryo with this orientation would prevent you from actually turning, which is always a nice thing to be able to do when driving. A secondary up-down axis gryo would allow you to make active heading ajustments, but then you have the problem of the two gyros fighting each others adjustments.
In any event, there are ways around throwing the user off, and hopefully the engineers have thought about the problem
Norton Auto-Protect works fairly well, for some of those problems. I can use it to revert a messed up config-file, or accidental deletion. I can't comment, though. Reverting the system works fairly well...just select everything changed AFTER a given date...oh, except that it would restore the most revent one, not the oldest change...and you can't sort by location AND date, so it would revert everything, not just system files, unless you went though a fair bit of pain to select just the ones you wanted...
But those are problems with the interface, and fairly easy to change, if they felt like it.
My dad uses something better on his Windows machine at work, with proper reversion. I don't recall what it is called, though.
If you have Half-Life, play "The Specialists" and find out. The answer? Bullet time is a powerup, like, say, Quad Damage in Quake. Every kill you get gets you a single second of it, or you can pick up a powerup to get a full 5 seconds. When you activate it, everybody slows down, including you, but you can aim easier than the people who didn't activate it.
It's quite effective. How would you do it in a MMORPG? Nearly the same way. Have some limit on how often you can use it. When you activate it, it slows down everybody, but you not as much. Obviously not EVERYBODY on the whole sever...maybe there is some radius of effect? Will that make everbody out of sync? Yes, yes it will. But they don't have watches so it doesn't really matter. If you enter their Bullet-Time sphere part way though, you slow down as soon as you cross the threshold. Or maybe a visibility tree? So that you can ensure that nobody moving bullet time is visible to somebody who is not? Since the setting is urban, visibility ranges won't be too high...unless you are on top of a building...At this point you need to sacrifice some realism for some usability. Make it use a graph, but limit the length of the arcs to the range of whatever weapon the person is using. So what if you are moving normal but can see people moving slow-motion in the distance, so long as you can't interact with them?
If they spend a great deal of time tweaking the exact workings of who is in and out, during the beta, I bet it could work pretty damn well. Of course, then you have the problem of assholes who walk into crowded non-combat areas (Which there HAVE to be if the RPG part of the MMORPG is accurate) and use bullet-time to annoy people. The only way I can see to solve that is to make these areas like the towns in UO: No combat, so no bullet time allowed. Or maybe, you know, crowded place, so some agents notice you and kick your ass?
I've always prefered the notion that Morpheus was simply WRONG about why the Matrix exists...I mean, how would HE know? Because the One told the First that when he freed them, and they passed it on? But the One only knew because the earlier Morpheus told him!
Nerve impulses travel at about 120 m/s. If we assume we are talking about a big person, with 1.0 M from fingertip to brain, we are looking at about 8 ms of delay. Assuming we use some one-way protocol, the delay in using electrons to transmit the signal would be about 0.33 ps (1e-9 seconds) Obviously, the device would have to do some processing before sending the signal, but lets just ignore that. The average human has a reaction time of between 400 ms and 600 ms. Even assuming that gamers have super reaction times of 300 ms, an 8 ms decrease is 2.7%. So it is trivial. On the other hand, it may give an advantage in terms of accuracy. But so what, so does an expensive mouse. I heard that somebody modified Quake to give off audio clues of where everything on screen is, and blind people could kick sighted peoples' asses royally at it.
To put it in computer terms, the human reaction time bottle neck isn't the IO subsystem, but the CPU;)
Something that MAY give an unfair advantage is eye-tracking. Because you don't THINK about looking at something that startles you, you just DO. So if the system can track your eye movements, you will aim WAY faster (Not to mention better) that with a mouse. So how would you fire your gun? Hmmm, Fred Sabberhagen used eye twitches or something in his Berserker novels...the problem with that is, if you are linking the game to your automatic reflexes, you better not be playing a team based game, because you will be shooting before you are even fully aware that you have seen something. (In the Berserker novels, they user lasers that operate on a specific frequency, and wore protective suits that reflect said frequency. So they didn't need to worry about shooting first, identifiying later, since they couldn't hurt one another) I know that have built eye tracking devices that chimps have been able to use to "click" on things like a mouse, by looking at a button and then blinking.
1) I've never seen an 'emergency flashing light at the top [come] on' when an emergency vehicle changes the lights
Then you have never been at an intersection that uses this device. The IR receiver has flashing lights that blink when it is active. If there is no big receiver box dangling down beside the lights that flashes, the lights cannot be changed by emergency vehicles.
2) Who would actually use this while a cop was around? Sure, maybe some people won't pay enough attention, but I'd have to say they pretty much deserve to be caught at that point (though, of course, it's not illegal, so...)
In some places the device itself is illegal. But in ALL places interfering with a traffic control system is illegal
3) They do need to find a better way of doing this, such as using an encrypted signal and an identifier (which should match up to the vehicle) so that at the very least they could track uses of devices to change the lights, and determine whether or not it was being used legally (ie the light changed because vehicle XYZ-234 changed it, but that vehicle was sitting in the garage on the other side of town at the time). Maybe they could actually put some of those traffic cameras to good use, although you're probably picking someone out of a crowd at that point.
Prohibitavly expensive. The old receivers cost a bundle. What you are saying needs a more complicated signal that "On", and requires the device RECORD usage and be able to report back to a central agency. Even fixing potholes is beyond most cities transportation budgets, so I doubt they could even do this: They only have the current devices because they were put in 20 years ago. When I DO see these devices, it is at very busy intersections, particularly if there is a cement barricade that would prevent an emergency vehicle from cutting into the left lane is stopped at a red light
Anyways, the guys selling these things for $300 are saying they will only sell to emergency services who present valid credentials. They say if they find somebody who tricked them, they will sue for fraudulent misrepresentation. They say they are looking into who is putting them up on eBay. Of course, they may also be lying to avoid getting in trouble. Only way to find out is to try and buy one and see what happens;)
Slashdot Mirror
A clone would have different fingerprints and retinal patterns (Just like identical twins). Neither of these patterns is coded in the DNA. Rather, they are created randomly by the growth process. For retinal patterns: When some (proto-retinal) cells need more blood, they request that their neighbors turn into blood vessels. In other words, DNA doesn't contain information on where all these blood vessels go. The cells decide for themselves while the body is developing. This results in a more or less unique pattern on the retina.
Anyways, a printed copy of the pattern won't work, because the scanners look for a pulse in the blood vessels. A video recording, on the other hand, should work perfectly. Perhaps low intensity lasers. One that reflects off the pupil, on the reflects off the retina. If it is a real eye, the distances should differ. Of course, that can be faked as well. The only real way would be a second camera to make sure nobody is holding anything up against it. Have two cameras on either side. In a big black strip / one-way mirror, on a rail so they move about. If they don't know where they are, they can't put a faked image against them.
"Mr. Baggins. It seems you've been leading two lives. On the one hand, you lead a simple, pleasant life. You have furry feet. You even help your uncle Bilbo take out the trash. On the other hand, you carry an evil that breaks every law of nature we have. One of these lives has a future, Mr. Baggins. The other does not."
They once made a machine out of FPGA's. It worked by evolution: It would rearange different FPGA's and work out which gave the correct answer the quickest, and learn from there. Basically, it was pretty slow the first time it tried something. But if you let it learn for a while, you got supercomputer performances out of a tower-sized box (On the specific set of tasks it has learned, anyways).
Its good for plenty of fixed-task things: Medical imaging, software-defined DSP, scientific computing, that sort of thing. You can check them out here
Just a little tidbit. The image on your monitor is most definatly NOT private. They put out a fair bit of EM noise, and you can snoop for that noise and reconstruct what the monitor is showing from up to 100 feet away, IIRC. Doesn't work on LCD's though.
Yes. For readibility, it displays the whole thread at once. However, if a thread has more posts than your posts-per-page setting, every single page will ONLY be this one thread.
Because the law says that anybody guilty of unauthorized distribution has to pay a MINIMUM of $750, and a MAXIMUM of $150,000, and/or face a maximum jail term of 5 years. It isn't supposed to apply to each individual item, but that's RIAA math for you. In either case, it is a FINE, it isn't supposed to be making up for losses, it is supposed to be a punishment.
On the other hand, you can't sue using criminal law, so any and all punishments proscribed by criminal law don't matter whatsoever.
He also said demagnetize CD's. He just mixed the two up (somehow)
"And so, the rich and powerful of the city approached the sage, and said 'Great sage, we have been feeding you the finest foods, and housing you in luxury for years now. Come, what have you divined of the universe in this time?' And the sage replied
'I have determined that the universe is infinitly complex.'
'Yes, and?'
'And that there is a great deal to be said in favour of lazing about in luxury, eating the finest foods available.'
'We already KNEW all of that!'
'Well, then you should be pleased to have your opinions confirmed by one so erudite and wise as myself!'"
Speaking of overly sensitive, my favorite Family Guy quote is
"Why, that's outragous! I've got to do something!"
"There's nothing you CAN do"
"Well, I guess I'll just have to develop a sense of humor, then"
Old vaccines were made by mostly killing a sample, then infecting you. This vaccine is completely gengineered. Normal vaccines normally don't infect you because they are too weak to get a good infection going. This one shouldn't because it doesn't have the required genes to reproduce, period. How do they KNOW it won't reproduce? Because they did a LOT of monkey tests before it got to this stage. It CAN'T hurt you because it can't reproduce or damage your cells.
If you read the articles, this isn't a pharm making it. There is a quote in there, in fact, they the pharms would NEVER touch the stuff because the only people who die from it are Africans, and they don't have enough money.
The new angle won't work any better. The settlement also protects THEM from BSD suing for stolen BSD code. If they attack it, the holders of that copyright can sue SCO right back.
Plus, you can't just void a contract that legally binds you because you don't like it. They are not the original people who entered into it, but it came along with the code they bought. If they don't LIKE that, they should have looked into it more closely before they bought it. It's called due diligance. If they CAN just nullify a contract for no reason, Novel should nullify their rights to the code.
Two points. One, when they originally announced it, somebody said "They'll probably uuencode and encrypt everything so that you still can't read it, but they can call is XML and trick people into thinking it is open!" This has been taken as fact, when it was, in fact, only a prediction.
Point two is that there CAN be binary data in it. How else would you embed a bitmap, for example? As a file link, perhaps, but people like the option of having a stand alone word file with no dependencies.
My conversation with the anti-everything group at my old highschool on the subject:
"So even if there is something you need, you'll buy it some other time"
"Yeah, we all have to make sacrifices to bring down consumerism"
"So you will do that by waiting until it is no longer on sale, thus giving 'The Man', as it were, a higher profit margain"
"I don't follow you..."
"Say you need more toothpaste and toilet paper and some new jeans and so on. You COULD get all that for $50 or whatever...but you won't. You'll buy them for $60 when they arn't on sale. You just screwed Wal-Mart out of negative $10."
"You obviously don't get it"
As somebody else has said, if spammers actually use this technique, then the patent is void due to that prior art. If spammers DON'T use it, then they couldn't POSSIBLY use it to go after them.
It isn't broken. It is doing exactly what it is meant to do: It was given a file with DRM on it, and it has NOT been authorized to play said file, so it refuses to do so. Apple can't fix it because it is SOMEBODY ELSES drivers that are failing to send the authorization. Complain to the people who made the drivers. In the mean time, the iPod will still play all other files, including any NEW files moved to it from a Mac.
Blaming Apple is like blaming some hardware company because the unofficial, third party Linux drivers keep causing a kernel panic: Sure, it would have been nice of them to provide their own. But they didn't, and they don't have to fix other peoples drivers.
It isn't even broken though. The iPod is fine. It appears to simply be refusing to play DRM'd songs. I'd guess that's because the NON-APPLE, THIRD PARTY, UNSUPPORTED drivers don't support DRM? Not Apple's fault, and not their responsibility to fix it. The box says it works on Macs only.
iTunes files have DRM so you can't spread them around, which they HAVE to or they wouldn't be allowed to do it. Obviously the drivers don't transfer the DRM info properly. The iPod isn't broken or fried. It just doesn't play DRM'd files that it hasn't been told it is allowed to play! Apple should NOT be responsible for third party drivers that don't work properly! When you bought the damn thing, it was quite clear about requiring a Mac.
You are correct that it lies with the UN. There is a treaty that says no nation can own a celestial body, as they belong to everybody. People like this, and the people selling the moon, claim that since the treaty doesn't say anything about private ownership, it grants them the right to claim ownership of whatever they see.
While that is true (Assuming a left-right axis gyro) you could adjust their forward-backward tipping by changing the rotational speed of the gryo. Activly tipping backwards when breaking would prevent the user from being flug forwards.
However, a gryo with this orientation would prevent you from actually turning, which is always a nice thing to be able to do when driving. A secondary up-down axis gryo would allow you to make active heading ajustments, but then you have the problem of the two gyros fighting each others adjustments.
In any event, there are ways around throwing the user off, and hopefully the engineers have thought about the problem
Norton Auto-Protect works fairly well, for some of those problems. I can use it to revert a messed up config-file, or accidental deletion. I can't comment, though. Reverting the system works fairly well...just select everything changed AFTER a given date...oh, except that it would restore the most revent one, not the oldest change...and you can't sort by location AND date, so it would revert everything, not just system files, unless you went though a fair bit of pain to select just the ones you wanted...
But those are problems with the interface, and fairly easy to change, if they felt like it.
My dad uses something better on his Windows machine at work, with proper reversion. I don't recall what it is called, though.
Microsoft astroturfing? Why has every single post along these lines been modded into oblivion as a troll?
If you have Half-Life, play "The Specialists" and find out. The answer? Bullet time is a powerup, like, say, Quad Damage in Quake. Every kill you get gets you a single second of it, or you can pick up a powerup to get a full 5 seconds. When you activate it, everybody slows down, including you, but you can aim easier than the people who didn't activate it.
It's quite effective. How would you do it in a MMORPG? Nearly the same way. Have some limit on how often you can use it. When you activate it, it slows down everybody, but you not as much. Obviously not EVERYBODY on the whole sever...maybe there is some radius of effect? Will that make everbody out of sync? Yes, yes it will. But they don't have watches so it doesn't really matter. If you enter their Bullet-Time sphere part way though, you slow down as soon as you cross the threshold. Or maybe a visibility tree? So that you can ensure that nobody moving bullet time is visible to somebody who is not? Since the setting is urban, visibility ranges won't be too high...unless you are on top of a building...At this point you need to sacrifice some realism for some usability. Make it use a graph, but limit the length of the arcs to the range of whatever weapon the person is using. So what if you are moving normal but can see people moving slow-motion in the distance, so long as you can't interact with them?
If they spend a great deal of time tweaking the exact workings of who is in and out, during the beta, I bet it could work pretty damn well. Of course, then you have the problem of assholes who walk into crowded non-combat areas (Which there HAVE to be if the RPG part of the MMORPG is accurate) and use bullet-time to annoy people. The only way I can see to solve that is to make these areas like the towns in UO: No combat, so no bullet time allowed. Or maybe, you know, crowded place, so some agents notice you and kick your ass?
I've always prefered the notion that Morpheus was simply WRONG about why the Matrix exists...I mean, how would HE know? Because the One told the First that when he freed them, and they passed it on? But the One only knew because the earlier Morpheus told him!
Nerve impulses travel at about 120 m/s. If we assume we are talking about a big person, with 1.0 M from fingertip to brain, we are looking at about 8 ms of delay. Assuming we use some one-way protocol, the delay in using electrons to transmit the signal would be about 0.33 ps (1e-9 seconds) Obviously, the device would have to do some processing before sending the signal, but lets just ignore that. The average human has a reaction time of between 400 ms and 600 ms. Even assuming that gamers have super reaction times of 300 ms, an 8 ms decrease is 2.7%. So it is trivial. On the other hand, it may give an advantage in terms of accuracy. But so what, so does an expensive mouse. I heard that somebody modified Quake to give off audio clues of where everything on screen is, and blind people could kick sighted peoples' asses royally at it.
To put it in computer terms, the human reaction time bottle neck isn't the IO subsystem, but the CPU ;)
Something that MAY give an unfair advantage is eye-tracking. Because you don't THINK about looking at something that startles you, you just DO. So if the system can track your eye movements, you will aim WAY faster (Not to mention better) that with a mouse. So how would you fire your gun? Hmmm, Fred Sabberhagen used eye twitches or something in his Berserker novels...the problem with that is, if you are linking the game to your automatic reflexes, you better not be playing a team based game, because you will be shooting before you are even fully aware that you have seen something. (In the Berserker novels, they user lasers that operate on a specific frequency, and wore protective suits that reflect said frequency. So they didn't need to worry about shooting first, identifiying later, since they couldn't hurt one another) I know that have built eye tracking devices that chimps have been able to use to "click" on things like a mouse, by looking at a button and then blinking.
Anyways, the guys selling these things for $300 are saying they will only sell to emergency services who present valid credentials. They say if they find somebody who tricked them, they will sue for fraudulent misrepresentation. They say they are looking into who is putting them up on eBay. Of course, they may also be lying to avoid getting in trouble. Only way to find out is to try and buy one and see what happens