The worst part of feature-laden phones are the carriers who disable most of them or lock them into their proprietary stores to enforce monopolies on ringtones, wallpapers, and MP3s, claim full rights to all your photos and movies, refuse to let you use the built-in GPS independently, deny you the ability to use their network with your computer locking you into using their tiny browser, and preventing you from otherwise developing your own applications.
Unless Apple became a cell phone service provider, I doubt I'd buy an Apple cell phone, because there are too many other palms to grease to allow whatever Apple's new innovative features would be on every network.
Maybe if I could netstumble with it for Internet telephony and it came with an answering service for when the phone isn't near an access point, alerting me to stored messages when I park near an access point long enough, would I consider it.
Everywhere along the way, Jobs saw ways of adding twists to make it work.
So Jobs is the M. Night Shyamalan of computer electronics?
Also, am I to assume that, even while cell phones are getting photo and video capabilities, the actual "videophone" is not just merely dead, it is really most sincerely dead?
As someone who has done that, I can tell you it isn't that easy to do, mainly because sites with the information seem to want you to sign up for membership to their forums before they'll let you access the instructions. (I just wanted to get the info and go; I don't want to have to subscribe to a forum and bother veteran modders with newbie questions.)
It is also getting harder and harder to find compatible USB thumbdrives with which to perform a softmod. The only drive that I could find that would work completely with the XBOX would cause my PC to hang until it was removed and available instructions to store the image to the drive with a Mac just didn't work. Luckily some newer thumbdrives with acknowledged issues could be used on the PC to put the gamesaves on and copy to the XBOX, but could not be used to transfer data from an XBOX (failed writes).
Many tutorials' links to essential resources now lead to sites that have become ad farms or pointed to the wrong TLD (e.g..com instead of.org). The access requirements to forums make one have to use Google to search for information, so sticky threads don't help. Errors and omissions don't get corrected or filled in.
Older methods which work with MechWarrior provide images to store on the drives, but newer methods that work with SID4 require another application to move bare gamesaves to the device, and further require you to download another program to get thumbdrive make and model code numbers and alter the application to recognize a USB thumbdrive as its proprietary storage device. Even the free version apparently only wants to work with the proprietary devices.
And then, once you get the mod in, you can't find any of the hacks in precompiled form. I have still to find where I can get a cross compiler to build my own binaries for emulators and applications, and still haven't found any public information on where to store them on the box's filesystem. Even with telnet enabled, the only command I can find that works is DIR; no CD command.
BTW, be careful with SID4. It doesn't seem to like it when you use a component video display instead of a composite and if you try hitting buttons blindly you may wipe out your EEPROM and/or drive backups. (I couldn't find SID4.5 or anything newer so I don't know if this issue has been fixed.) SID4 also apparently doesn't support component video (black screen and failure to exploit), so keep your original composite harness handy.
And if you can't get the maps to load in Halo 2, check to make sure your cable is firmly connected to the hub or switch before opting to revert your mod.
Funny, someone apparently wanted to know about both the shows you had wanted to...
Damn. Now I want to see those shows...
You don't know how long I've been racking my brain trying to recall the names of those shows. The images from them are burned into my brain, and bits of the music from them, little folksy tunes:
"But now Queen LaBiblia won't let Miss Reader go / Until she's taught the Queen to make imaginations grow."
For the longest time the only search results I could get on them were my own requests for information, so I'd given up doing searches.
In Star Lore, the alien (blue-wigged) children have no imaginations because they watch TV all day. She doesn't let the librarian go until the kids don't return to the TV at the end of the last episode.
Now that I have the titles and who made them, I have a chance to contact them and volunteer my services to help make DVDs available, as well as get more production and cast information to get IMDb entries made. (BTW, "NE" in my slashdot nick is for Nebraska, not "anyone".)
At the very least, they're going into a TiVo Wishlist in case they ever make it to air again!
Though I find it strains credulity. Am I expected to believe there are soda vending machines out there that vend both Coke and Pepsi products?
/still angry over zero-day reneging on no-price-increase promise in granting campus monopoly to Pepsi and getting 70-cent 16 oz. bottle vending machines exclusively (12 oz. cans were 50 cents), a price point that virtually guaranteed that the machines would run out of nickels, effectively raising the price to 75 cents a bottle.
IGN:... It looks like the character is wearing an orange one-zee, is this guy maybe performing some sort of "community service?"
Excuse me, but when did a "onesie" become a "one-zee"?
Does it come from that PBS series with Queen LaBiblia kidnapping Miss Reader to teach her blue-haired alien subjects how to make imaginations grow with Earth children's stories with the help of her ship's computer, 1Z2Z? (Why can't I remember the name of that show, and why isn't it listed on IMDb or anywhere else on the net? That and the other one where a witch kidnaps a librarian and keeps her in a tower to tell her childrens' stories. Doesn't anyone have video torrents or MP3s of the theme songs?)
You want a third source verification? Instead of a thermal printer, use a ribbon-printer. Collect the used ribbons and store those under a separate oversight, e.g. Fed-Ex those to ACLU or PNAC.
Thermal printers are flawed themselves. Not only do they fade out over time, but someone could smuggle a heat source into the booth and turn the whole spool of paper black, destroying the record.
But make sure each unit has enough paper and ribbon to allow every registered voter in the district to vote on one machine. You don't want to have to replace either while voting is ongoing.
And augment it with punched paper tape. Not a single-hole system either, but a matrix of holes that can still be verified even under partial mechanical failure of the punching pins. And some kind of fixant spray to sign the paper chemically and better fuse the ink to the paper to prevent bleaching and reprinting (designed so that application of another chemical spray turns it red for republican, blue for democrat, and green for other, with voids identifying which republican, democrat, or other was voted for). And specially formulated paper like that used for currency (embedded colored threads, security strip, watermarks, etc.) so replacement with another roll with an alternate record isn't feasible.
And the paper tape produced is automatically respooled into a multi-level tamper-evident container. Why multi-level? Because you don't want someone who knows they need to influence the vote in particular districts deliberately breaking the seals to invalidate the record causing all the votes to be thrown out. You can't trust SCOTUS to allow a revote.
(I've only ever voted on scantron forms: blackening ovals with a No.2 pencil.)
Oh, and also support voting for write-in candidates so people can vote "No Confidence".
A perfect analogy is an oxymoron. Not everything needs to be represented such as a method of encrypting electricity or gatewaying power access based on the identity of the appliance.
I can't believe I'm actually going to try to explain the analogy now.
Use of the electricity (the completion of the circuit through a device sharing earth ground) is the bidirectionality of the communication, and the kWh is the measure of data bandwidth consumed. The proximity to the property is not proximity of the access point to the neighbor but rather the configuration that allows unrestricted access.
In all, these analogies attempt to depict an unconfigured access point as a natural force for which the owner must take responsibility for in order to secure it for himself.
Those that are serious about cell phone call security don't rely only on the law against interception to protect them; they encrypt the call so it cannot be easily eavesdropped by someone with common equipment. At least cell phone users can know that such equipment is illegal (for private citizen use anyway), but someone with a wireless access point should know that if he can buy an access card for his laptop and have it Just Work(TM) without any configuration, then so can anyone else. (The law against interception of cell phone conversations is the exception rather than the rule.)
No one can realistically believe they are the only ones capable of possessing the equipment to use the Internet wirelessly and expect no one else can use it without configuring in restrictions. It would require exceptional deception on the part of a gift giver to a gullible ignoramus.
I wonder if someone tried that with the game Doom 3 (ESRB:M) and the movie Doom (MPAA:R) would any lightbulbs go on for the cashier.
And I wonder, if they did notice, would they also make a distinction between a movie and an unrated director's cut of the same movie. The Riddick movie and game might be an interesting test pair too. The movie was edited to a PG-13 after initially getting an R, but the Director's Cut version is Unrated. (The game is M.)
Interesting: the IMDb lists the game but does not appear to include its ESRB rating, nor its rating in other countries' ratings systems, unlike how it does include MPAA and others' ratings for movies.
"One of the most popular games in America teaches a little boy how to have sex with a prostitute..."
Yes, after she gets in the car and you drive somewhere secluded, you both sit absolutely still in the front seat fully clothed staring forward and not touching each other while the car's shocks make it bounce. While all this happens your money magically transforms into health. After this, the woman gets out and walks away.
But in addition to the "war on terrorism" we're involved in closing up the results of an actual war in Iraq and Afghanistan. We're also contemplating the consequences of getting involved in North Korea and Iran, and one of our allies is functionally at war with Lebanon due to their official government's support of another terrorist organization.
"Only an idiot fights a war on two fronts. Only the heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Idiots would fight a war on twelve fronts." -- J. Michael Straczynski
To celebrate this 50th anniversary, they should rebuild this system using modern bit densities. How much data could they fit in two refigerators today? (Did that include the power supply?)
The basin is catching water that would have missed his lawn.
Consider instead a Van de Graff generator capable of generating a field that can arc into a neighbor's property then. The neighbor has a pole that is within this field and, when properly connected, causes electricity to jump from your generator to his pole for powering devices in his home, sometimes to power a single light bulb, sometimes to run the air conditioning.
If you would just properly tune your generator to not create an electrical potential across your property line, you wouldn't lose kilowatt hours.
Just wait. Soon children not in the home, school, or hospital will have to have their hands bound, their mouths gagged, and ears plugged inside burka-inspired hamsterballs allowing only movement and the ability for them to see where they're going so as to prevent anyone from accessing them physically, visually, or verbally in public, all for their protection.
And, banning Amazon is kinda silly -- so many things on the web link to Amazon for information about books and the like. Why include Amazon in this?
Because people could exchange information through reviews of books, movies, and other products.
Basically they're establishing that minors have no rights (public schools are more and more like prisons) and all others must prove their adultivity before being allowed to exercise their rights. You might as well bar adults from using public terminals, designating them for children only and require adults to buy their own for their home use.
So did I, even though it was really a glorified 30 minutes of video game ads. I was more into the bits that just demoed game play than the canned trailers. I started to tire of it when they reused the music accompanyment to the gameplay demos. The final nail was when they would insert snippets from sex games between them instead of the scrolling list of what they're showing this episode (the latter being TiVo-friendly).
X-Play is pretty much the only show I still watch. Though I like Star Trek, now that I have it on DVD, I don't intend to watch any of it with commercials again, and I don't care for their "Star Trek 2.0".
If they came back with new episodes of Anime Unleashed or Robot Wars I'd watch them.
Icons was watchable, but not something I'd set a Season Pass for.
Slashdot Mirror
The worst part of feature-laden phones are the carriers who disable most of them or lock them into their proprietary stores to enforce monopolies on ringtones, wallpapers, and MP3s, claim full rights to all your photos and movies, refuse to let you use the built-in GPS independently, deny you the ability to use their network with your computer locking you into using their tiny browser, and preventing you from otherwise developing your own applications.
Unless Apple became a cell phone service provider, I doubt I'd buy an Apple cell phone, because there are too many other palms to grease to allow whatever Apple's new innovative features would be on every network.
Maybe if I could netstumble with it for Internet telephony and it came with an answering service for when the phone isn't near an access point, alerting me to stored messages when I park near an access point long enough, would I consider it.
Everywhere along the way, Jobs saw ways of adding twists to make it work.
So Jobs is the M. Night Shyamalan of computer electronics?
Also, am I to assume that, even while cell phones are getting photo and video capabilities, the actual "videophone" is not just merely dead, it is really most sincerely dead?
"the main audio mix is to be protected by the same software that already protects the content on normal DVDs"
...
I was not aware that DVDs where protected... hum
CSS may be a paper tiger, but the real teeth are in the DMCA.
You could have just softmoded your xbox
.com instead of .org). The access requirements to forums make one have to use Google to search for information, so sticky threads don't help. Errors and omissions don't get corrected or filled in.
As someone who has done that, I can tell you it isn't that easy to do, mainly because sites with the information seem to want you to sign up for membership to their forums before they'll let you access the instructions. (I just wanted to get the info and go; I don't want to have to subscribe to a forum and bother veteran modders with newbie questions.)
It is also getting harder and harder to find compatible USB thumbdrives with which to perform a softmod. The only drive that I could find that would work completely with the XBOX would cause my PC to hang until it was removed and available instructions to store the image to the drive with a Mac just didn't work. Luckily some newer thumbdrives with acknowledged issues could be used on the PC to put the gamesaves on and copy to the XBOX, but could not be used to transfer data from an XBOX (failed writes).
Many tutorials' links to essential resources now lead to sites that have become ad farms or pointed to the wrong TLD (e.g.
Older methods which work with MechWarrior provide images to store on the drives, but newer methods that work with SID4 require another application to move bare gamesaves to the device, and further require you to download another program to get thumbdrive make and model code numbers and alter the application to recognize a USB thumbdrive as its proprietary storage device. Even the free version apparently only wants to work with the proprietary devices.
And then, once you get the mod in, you can't find any of the hacks in precompiled form. I have still to find where I can get a cross compiler to build my own binaries for emulators and applications, and still haven't found any public information on where to store them on the box's filesystem. Even with telnet enabled, the only command I can find that works is DIR; no CD command.
BTW, be careful with SID4. It doesn't seem to like it when you use a component video display instead of a composite and if you try hitting buttons blindly you may wipe out your EEPROM and/or drive backups. (I couldn't find SID4.5 or anything newer so I don't know if this issue has been fixed.) SID4 also apparently doesn't support component video (black screen and failure to exploit), so keep your original composite harness handy.
And if you can't get the maps to load in Halo 2, check to make sure your cable is firmly connected to the hub or switch before opting to revert your mod.
the judiciary branch requiring them to cough up phone records
They don't have them already? Apparently these reporters didn't use AT&T.
On /. leaning to the right is definitely not encouraged.
I guess that's from the point of view from behind the screen looking out, not from the front of the screen looking in.
Funny, someone apparently wanted to know about both the shows you had wanted to...
Damn. Now I want to see those shows...
You don't know how long I've been racking my brain trying to recall the names of those shows. The images from them are burned into my brain, and bits of the music from them, little folksy tunes:
"But now Queen LaBiblia won't let Miss Reader go / Until she's taught the Queen to make imaginations grow."
For the longest time the only search results I could get on them were my own requests for information, so I'd given up doing searches.
In Star Lore, the alien (blue-wigged) children have no imaginations because they watch TV all day. She doesn't let the librarian go until the kids don't return to the TV at the end of the last episode.
Now that I have the titles and who made them, I have a chance to contact them and volunteer my services to help make DVDs available, as well as get more production and cast information to get IMDb entries made. (BTW, "NE" in my slashdot nick is for Nebraska, not "anyone".)
At the very least, they're going into a TiVo Wishlist in case they ever make it to air again!
I was able to get to that site just fine.
Though I find it strains credulity. Am I expected to believe there are soda vending machines out there that vend both Coke and Pepsi products?
IGN: ... It looks like the character is wearing an orange one-zee, is this guy maybe performing some sort of "community service?"
Excuse me, but when did a "onesie" become a "one-zee"?
Does it come from that PBS series with Queen LaBiblia kidnapping Miss Reader to teach her blue-haired alien subjects how to make imaginations grow with Earth children's stories with the help of her ship's computer, 1Z2Z? (Why can't I remember the name of that show, and why isn't it listed on IMDb or anywhere else on the net? That and the other one where a witch kidnaps a librarian and keeps her in a tower to tell her childrens' stories. Doesn't anyone have video torrents or MP3s of the theme songs?)
You want a third source verification? Instead of a thermal printer, use a ribbon-printer. Collect the used ribbons and store those under a separate oversight, e.g. Fed-Ex those to ACLU or PNAC.
Thermal printers are flawed themselves. Not only do they fade out over time, but someone could smuggle a heat source into the booth and turn the whole spool of paper black, destroying the record.
But make sure each unit has enough paper and ribbon to allow every registered voter in the district to vote on one machine. You don't want to have to replace either while voting is ongoing.
And augment it with punched paper tape. Not a single-hole system either, but a matrix of holes that can still be verified even under partial mechanical failure of the punching pins. And some kind of fixant spray to sign the paper chemically and better fuse the ink to the paper to prevent bleaching and reprinting (designed so that application of another chemical spray turns it red for republican, blue for democrat, and green for other, with voids identifying which republican, democrat, or other was voted for). And specially formulated paper like that used for currency (embedded colored threads, security strip, watermarks, etc.) so replacement with another roll with an alternate record isn't feasible.
And the paper tape produced is automatically respooled into a multi-level tamper-evident container. Why multi-level? Because you don't want someone who knows they need to influence the vote in particular districts deliberately breaking the seals to invalidate the record causing all the votes to be thrown out. You can't trust SCOTUS to allow a revote.
(I've only ever voted on scantron forms: blackening ovals with a No.2 pencil.)
Oh, and also support voting for write-in candidates so people can vote "No Confidence".
A perfect analogy is an oxymoron. Not everything needs to be represented such as a method of encrypting electricity or gatewaying power access based on the identity of the appliance.
I can't believe I'm actually going to try to explain the analogy now.
Use of the electricity (the completion of the circuit through a device sharing earth ground) is the bidirectionality of the communication, and the kWh is the measure of data bandwidth consumed. The proximity to the property is not proximity of the access point to the neighbor but rather the configuration that allows unrestricted access.
In all, these analogies attempt to depict an unconfigured access point as a natural force for which the owner must take responsibility for in order to secure it for himself.
Those that are serious about cell phone call security don't rely only on the law against interception to protect them; they encrypt the call so it cannot be easily eavesdropped by someone with common equipment. At least cell phone users can know that such equipment is illegal (for private citizen use anyway), but someone with a wireless access point should know that if he can buy an access card for his laptop and have it Just Work(TM) without any configuration, then so can anyone else. (The law against interception of cell phone conversations is the exception rather than the rule.)
No one can realistically believe they are the only ones capable of possessing the equipment to use the Internet wirelessly and expect no one else can use it without configuring in restrictions. It would require exceptional deception on the part of a gift giver to a gullible ignoramus.
I wonder if someone tried that with the game Doom 3 (ESRB:M) and the movie Doom (MPAA:R) would any lightbulbs go on for the cashier.
And I wonder, if they did notice, would they also make a distinction between a movie and an unrated director's cut of the same movie. The Riddick movie and game might be an interesting test pair too. The movie was edited to a PG-13 after initially getting an R, but the Director's Cut version is Unrated. (The game is M.)
Interesting: the IMDb lists the game but does not appear to include its ESRB rating, nor its rating in other countries' ratings systems, unlike how it does include MPAA and others' ratings for movies.
"One of the most popular games in America teaches a little boy how to have sex with a prostitute..."
Yes, after she gets in the car and you drive somewhere secluded, you both sit absolutely still in the front seat fully clothed staring forward and not touching each other while the car's shocks make it bounce. While all this happens your money magically transforms into health. After this, the woman gets out and walks away.
And that's how cars have sex.
But in addition to the "war on terrorism" we're involved in closing up the results of an actual war in Iraq and Afghanistan. We're also contemplating the consequences of getting involved in North Korea and Iran, and one of our allies is functionally at war with Lebanon due to their official government's support of another terrorist organization.
"Only an idiot fights a war on two fronts. Only the heir to the throne of the Kingdom of Idiots would fight a war on twelve fronts." -- J. Michael Straczynski
Instead, the items you need are: ;)
1) Mobile rack (as tall as would fit in your new room)
2) Shelves for the said rack
3) Tetris skills
Most Tetris pieces don't have cables attached.
Why can't you people ever spell Gandhi correctly?
Blame Ghana?
To celebrate this 50th anniversary, they should rebuild this system using modern bit densities. How much data could they fit in two refigerators today? (Did that include the power supply?)
The movie Looker came to my mind first.
The basin is catching water that would have missed his lawn.
Consider instead a Van de Graff generator capable of generating a field that can arc into a neighbor's property then. The neighbor has a pole that is within this field and, when properly connected, causes electricity to jump from your generator to his pole for powering devices in his home, sometimes to power a single light bulb, sometimes to run the air conditioning.
If you would just properly tune your generator to not create an electrical potential across your property line, you wouldn't lose kilowatt hours.
Just wait. Soon children not in the home, school, or hospital will have to have their hands bound, their mouths gagged, and ears plugged inside burka-inspired hamsterballs allowing only movement and the ability for them to see where they're going so as to prevent anyone from accessing them physically, visually, or verbally in public, all for their protection.
And, banning Amazon is kinda silly -- so many things on the web link to Amazon for information about books and the like. Why include Amazon in this?
Because people could exchange information through reviews of books, movies, and other products.
Basically they're establishing that minors have no rights (public schools are more and more like prisons) and all others must prove their adultivity before being allowed to exercise their rights. You might as well bar adults from using public terminals, designating them for children only and require adults to buy their own for their home use.
Any insufficiently developed magic is indistinguishable from technology.
faith: the capacity to believe what you know isn't true.
I'll admit that I liked shows like... Cinematech.
So did I, even though it was really a glorified 30 minutes of video game ads. I was more into the bits that just demoed game play than the canned trailers. I started to tire of it when they reused the music accompanyment to the gameplay demos. The final nail was when they would insert snippets from sex games between them instead of the scrolling list of what they're showing this episode (the latter being TiVo-friendly).
X-Play is pretty much the only show I still watch. Though I like Star Trek, now that I have it on DVD, I don't intend to watch any of it with commercials again, and I don't care for their "Star Trek 2.0".
If they came back with new episodes of Anime Unleashed or Robot Wars I'd watch them.
Icons was watchable, but not something I'd set a Season Pass for.
I wonder how many computers you could buy with $2 trillion dollars. Heck, you could buy a PC for everyone in the world with that kind of money.
I think I'd want a PC that can do more than what $333.33 would buy.