Thank you for the well-reasoned response. Although I feel I must point out that I get my news from many more sources than just slashdot, however in the case of the passport story I admit that thus far the slashdot information currently represents my only data point. I just threw a couple tip-of-the-tongue examples out there and purposely used items that everyone here is aware of so as to not have to cite sources for everything. I especially agree with you that given the jobs the government takes on it is extremely difficult to please a large percentage of the population with respect to any given issue. However, sometimes, on both sides of the pond, it seems as though legislation being put forth more recently serves only to exacerbate the problem. Also, I agree that people with a complaint are more likely to express it than people who feel things are ok, but when the government ignores or acts contemptuosly towards the [non-trivial] complaints then it is no longer doing its job. I'm afraid this has been a hurried response, but hopefully I was clear. Good points all from you. Regards.
Sorry for being pendantic, but the above statement itself is not right. See here. The phrase I assume you're referring to - "There's a sucker born every minute [and two to take em]." is not officially accepted as being creditable to Barnum.
Hah! Good point. Although I was referring to the Neon Genesis Evangelion anime series, wherein all the attacking alien baddies have just one weak spot - a big red nearly indestructible orb thing. One of the main weapons used against them is the 'progressive knife' which is supposedly unbreakable but in fact breaks during one battle. Sorry if you already knew all that.
I would recommend reading the first 4 books only. That is: Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, and God Emperor of Dune. After that things start going downhill fast. But the first 4 books sort of round out the original story arc and give you a good place to stop in the dune universe. As far as the movie[s] goes, the 190 minute version is probably the better version. And I couldn't even stomach the SciFi miniseries that was produced. I think in the first 15 minutes they introduced characters that weren't supposed to show up until 5 years later and i just stopped watching. Pretty, yes, but looked to be an unbearable rewrite of the plot. Maybe I'm wrong and it turned out to be great, but I can't stand when made for TV versions take rediculous liberties with otherwise good storylines.
I don't think any media conspiracy or otherwise is necessary to induce rage and contempt for politicians from the public. Just looking up at any street corner to see the CCTV cameras of the state watching you (what's the ratio these days? something like 1 camera per 7 people* in London?) would be plenty enough to enrage me. Or how about Blair's lapdog-to-Bush style of international relations? The concessions to the US on international plane traveler privacy laws? Forcing a massive upgrade to passports that turns out to be flawed and insecure? I mean, hell, I'm not even a British citizen or even traveled there for that matter and these things have me pissed off!
Let's face it, the internet can be used to help the public suggest changes and work with their representatives to improve the situation. But is it any surprise that the overwhleming volume of comments and the like are nothing but complaints? Maybe when some of the glaring abuses of government and invasions of privacy start to be addressed people will be more willing to calm down and discuss things with a focus on solutions. I agree, suggesting solutions and working to fix things is a better idea than just ranting and making unfeasible demands. But then again maybe if the government had listened to salient points of contention in the first place, or put people's privacy, rights, and well being ahead of politics then it wouldn't be so bad right now.
* I don't claim this figure to be accurate, might be off by an order of magnitude, take it with salt.;)
Robots are defeated by aiming at the bright, red (sometimes yellow) light that is hidden by thick armor which is unpenetrable by any weapon in the world
That's usually when I whip out my progressive knife or the Spear of Adam. Does the trick every time.;)
I do not mind a little security theater but I would like to get the feeling that there is someone out there who is doing some actual security.
That's the problem with security theather, once it looks like you're doing something about the problem, you don't need to try anymore. If enough of the sheeple (even elected leaders and "experts" can fall under this category) think that what is in place is good enough then it becomes near impossible to get true flaws fixed. It becomes compounded when the theater starts making arrests, no matter how asinine, because then the 'actors' point to those arrests to say "See? It works!"
Why do I keep seeing the word terrorist? Because that's the magic password. People aren't scared stupid (literally it seems) by criminals, but call a criminal a terrorist, even when it doesn't apply, and people will trust anything you say so long as you protect them from the boogeyman terrorist. In the case of this article I would warrant that the security researchers are using the word terrorist because it's something the government can understand. Kind of a fight fire with fire approach. If they say that terrorists can break the passports and gain acess to the info then the government has a much harder time ignoring the issue because of the bad PR.
As claimed by a blogger, you can in fact install the Zune software under Vista RC2. Here is a link to his blog, and the steps are included below to fend off karma whores and help save the guy a little bandwidth. Note, I do not have Vista RC2 or a Zune and have not tested this. Cheers.
1. Don't let the Zune CD autorun - instead right click on it in my computer and choose open
2. On the Zune setup.exe right click and go to properties
3. Click on the compatibility tab, then check "run this program in compatibility mode for:" and select Windows XP SP2
4. Hit apply, then ok and now go back to the opened Zune folder and run the Zunesetup.exe
Along with the other responder to your post, my dentist's nagging to have them removed started before they even finished coming through the gums! They had been xrayed and I asked if they were coming in crooked, were going to ruin the alignment of my other teeth (never needed braces), or if they were already infected - the answer was no,no, and no. I felt like (and to some extent still do) that wisdom teeth represent a fantastic business opportunity for dentists. There's so much potential for them to be an actual problem that even when they aren't a problem the dentist can scare you into an expensive surgery, bit of a conflict of interest there IMHO. I refused having them removed for years, but eventually two of them started to develop cavities in the back side - damn hard to brush that one spot effectively - and it was pretty much a given that eventually they would get need to get filled, then get impacted, then have to be removed and would shatter and become a major surgery. My family has a history of weak enamel so it really was a given that within 10 years they would likely have cavities. So I had them all removed at once to just not have to deal with it, but if it weren't for the real threat of an eventual awful surgery, I would have chosen to keep them, absolutely brilliant for chewing steak!
As it stands now, having heard horror stories from two of my friends about wisdom teeth which were impacted and splintered during removal, I'm quite glad I got them removed before they became an issue, alas they were unlikely to be lifelong teeth for me.:( Plus side was since they were in good shape and came out easy I healed very quickly and was completely back to normal eating habits within a week.
What was also interesting is that morphine doesn't take away your pain, it makes you not care that you're in pain. Very strange experience, difficult to explain. The pain was still there, still as strong, but it didn't really bother me.
I totally understand and agree, it doesn't make sense to people who haven't had the experience. For me it was the oxycodone I was given after having all 4 of my wisdom teeth removed. None of them were impacted and the procedure went rather smoothly as these things go, but all in all having 4 of your larger teeth yanked out of your head with pliers (dentist had to brace himself against my shoulder while pulling!) it tends to hurt afterwards. Anyway, the point is, although the meds did make me fuzzy, I clearly recall being in exactly the same amount of pain, but somehow it just didn't matter.
Excellent points all, and well thought out. I would point out though that adding manufacturing in this case was not something that Sony could do to increase systems, no matter what the cost. The bottleneck in this case was the blue laser diodes required for the Blue-Ray drives. The batch yields ended up being much lower than anticipated, by the time this was discovered there was no way to bring another manufacturer online before the release date, this is a physcial limitation of producing such a high-end technology component. Unfortunately no matter how much money they threw at the problem (regardless of whether that's a good idea since the hardware is sold at a loss anyway) it is very unlikely that another plant could be retooled to produce the lasers in time simply because of the unique procedure, complexity, and precision required from the manufacturing process.
I'd prefer voting machines with a companion paper trail (receipt-style - one for the voter, and one to be secured after review by the voter).
It cannot be said enough - voters must not get a receipt of their vote that they leave with. The machine can print two if you like, one visible through glass and visually verified then fed into the machine's ballot box, and another printed out that the voter can hold and verify, but then that handled paper vote is also deposited in a secure ballot box before they leave. ANY time the voter leaves with some official piece of paper that proves how they voted, you open up the possibility of people buying votes. It doesn't mean that they don't try to now, but if it can't be proven which way you voted then it dissuades a whole host of vote-buying and vote-bullying scenarios. I have never heard a credible argument that demonstrates a voter-held receipt could NOT be used in such a way. At some point we have to trust the process. In the above scenario I outlined we would now have (1) the electronic count, (2) the machine ballet box paper count, and (3) the voter-handled ballet box count. At that point it's about as redundant as you can get without making things overly complicated. Although I admit I am totally open to well thought out ideas that are more secure/verifiable/simpler if they are presented.
Does anyone know of links that show the replica helmet, especially its actual dimensions? I looked at Gamestop.com and they have yet to provide any images or dimensions for the helmet. Although either would be a nice addition to a Halo fanatic's collection; there's a big difference between a wearable replica and an e.g. 2/3 scale.;)
They have made it so no virus should be able to get to that low of a level thereby erasing the need for an antivirus application to be that low. Any virii should be in user-space which is where antivirus should be looking..
A) Microsoft and its security track record thus far have in no way demonstrated that they have comprehensively eliminated the ability of a virus to infect the kernel. Why should we trust them when they say "trust us?" Additionally, why does Microsoft's own antivirus offering use the low level kernel functions if there will never be a virus at that level?
B) 'virii' is NOT a word. It is not even an apporopriate use of 'i' to pluralize the word virus, as that is a Latin pluralization and in Latin, viri means 'men'. I point you to the wikipedia explanation for reference.
I suspect that when companies like EA push this far enough, and Tiger actually has to stop at the pro shop and buy a box of golf balls using xbox live points before playing
if you don't want it to be a criminal issue, you should be talking to your politicians and using your vote accordingly. Go organize some marches. Make some noise. If the majority of people truly feel as you feel, you'll get changes--not out of altruism or (necessarily) because the politicians agree with you, but because they want to keep their jobs
I agree with the main portion of your post, but for the above I think the sad fact of the matter is, all of that work will be undone the moment an RIAA lobbyist makes an $X-thousand donation to that senator's campaign.:/ A vocal minority of voters is usually trumped by a politician's need for millions of dollars to win a Federal-level campaign. That's part of the problem, current politics require millions to win, the government is no longer accessible by just anyone, only the well-connected/well-heeled. Short of a *massive* grassroots donation campaign, an entire town's financial commitment can be dwarfed by a single lobby's donations.
I may be incorrect here, but as I understood Canadian law pertaining to file sharing (granted, from/. not exactly a degree-granting institution), Canadians already pay a levy on all recordable media which is then passed on to the Canadian equivalent of the RIAA to reimburse artists. In addition, Canadian copyright law makes unauthorized distribution (uploading) illegal, however downloading is not. If this is true, and I cede that I may have this muddled, then Canadians should be downloading day and night from every source they can find! You're already paying for it, might as well take advantage of the legal loophole while it exists.
we're talking about an OS that will likely suceed the millions of Windows 98, 2000 and XP in the vast majority of homes and businesses
Somehow I doubt the machines still running win98 and 2K are capable of running Vista w/o massive hardware upgrades. Not to mention those users have demonstrated they have little to no interest in upgrading their OS by now anyway if they're still running win98 - and that's speaking as someone who has a box still running win98. Just as a project pc mind you, not on the net, but it does what I need it to do and I have zero reason to spend rediculous sums of money just so MS can further bloat it.
So let me get this straight, they know people on P2P sites downloading music are potential purchasers, and that anything they hear from P2P they may buy. Yet their solution is instead of letting them download the music they are looking for and listen to it, possibly purchase it, they hijack the file with something that may be wholly unrelated? How is that targetted marketing? If someone is searching for favorite band X and they get instead an advertisement clip for band Y, how does that make them more likely to buy Y? Wouldn't they have been looking for Y in the first place then?
This also demonstrates the RIAA's complete misunderstanding of how people use P2P sites. Users know that there are broken songs, seeded fakes, etc, etc, so when they hit play and it's not what they were looking for then they move on to another file and delete the incorrect one. They don't hang around and say "gee, this isn't at all what I was looking for but I'll listen to the whole thing anyway." To quote MC Frontalot (Romantic Cheapskate): "Whatcha wasting my time for? My bandwidth's limited, I don't get, like, free internet."
between robots with limited communication abilities and limited knowledge of the surroundings.
You answered your own question right there. It can be extremely difficult to simulate the 'unknowns' present in a real environment. So yes, you can simulate comms degredation and limited sensor range, but what about "unknown unknowns"? Things that fall into that category might be if your comms are short range modulated IR, what is the effect of reflections? Or if it is RF, similarly, what about environmental interference and multipathing issues? These are all things that can be simulated, but only by performing a lot of overhead to calculate them, in fact it would probably take longer to accurately simulate all these things than to build the robots and see what happens! The same goes for unanticipated frictional forces which play heavily on this particular research. It's all well and good to assume constant frictional coefficients across a continuous floor surface, but something as simple as how well the janitor last waxed it could greatly affect localized areas and therefore the realtime actions of the robots.
In theory, theory is the same as practice, but in practice this is rarely so.
Indeed, even with overlapping course requirements I can't believe the university would let them be applied like that. At CMU there were limtis to applying one course to multiple requirements. As it was my major was Electrical and Computer Engineering and I took a minor in Robotics. Despite what would seem like a huge overlap in reqs between major and minor I ended up taking something like 5 extra courses because I couldn't apply some class credits to both my major and minor. The irony is that it would have been less work for me to get a 4 year BS/MS combined in ECE than to get the BS ECE w/Robotics. My salary may suffer slightly from that, but my robots do not regret the decision.:)
Wow, aren't you a prick. Here's reading comprehension for you - these are all from the AC posts in this thread that I assume come from you, the same person in each. Ready?
In the case of robots.txt, these sanctions can very well be court ruling against you
This is especially important with regard to services which mirror webpages. Doing so without the (assumed) consent of the author is a straightforward copyright violation
Even if you don't fear the legal system, disregarding robots.txt can quickly get you in trouble.
If that happened to me twice, I'd have the asshole arrested, and that's exactly what you're going to see online if people don't behave,
In each case you have expressly implied that ignoring robots.txt has some legal consequences, and in your [poor] analogy of a bum soliciting for cash you explicity stated you would have the person arrested, the logical extension through the analogy being that you have some legal reprecussion against violaters of robots.txt. You're also confusing copyright violations with ignoring robots.txt and as other have pointed out, there are plenty of other reasons robots spider sites other than to wholesale copy and redistribute the data, including but not limited to checking a hash of the site to see if it has been updated, or collecting statistical data for commercial or educational purposes. Copyright violations are illegal and can be prosecuted and while they can be facilitated by ignoring robots.txt, they by no means require it or vice-versa. Had you actually read my post you would see that I stated only that there are no LEGAL reprecussions from ignoring robots.txt. That was my whole point. You are trying to make a connection where there is none. Your reading comprehension is clearly lacking since I never disagreed that there aren't other consequences to ignoring robots.txt. Also, read Grumbel's response elsehwere in this thread where he was kind enough to qutoe the relevent [draft] RFC text which state in no uncertain terms that robots.txt is wholly voluntary. To recap, here's the text from the RFC: "Web site administrators must realise this method is voluntary, and is not sufficient to guarantee some robots will not visit restricted parts of the URL space."
"It is not an official standard backed by a standards body, or owned by any commercial organisation. It is not enforced by anybody, and there no guarantee that all current and future robots will use it." and here's your statement: Ignoring robots.txt is not illegal, but the decision is not voluntary either.
Just because there are consequences to actions (other than through force of law) does not mean that those actions are no longer voluntary. And stop posting as AC or at least sign the damn posts with some identifier if you expect to continue a conversation.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for the well-reasoned response. Although I feel I must point out that I get my news from many more sources than just slashdot, however in the case of the passport story I admit that thus far the slashdot information currently represents my only data point. I just threw a couple tip-of-the-tongue examples out there and purposely used items that everyone here is aware of so as to not have to cite sources for everything.
I especially agree with you that given the jobs the government takes on it is extremely difficult to please a large percentage of the population with respect to any given issue. However, sometimes, on both sides of the pond, it seems as though legislation being put forth more recently serves only to exacerbate the problem. Also, I agree that people with a complaint are more likely to express it than people who feel things are ok, but when the government ignores or acts contemptuosly towards the [non-trivial] complaints then it is no longer doing its job. I'm afraid this has been a hurried response, but hopefully I was clear. Good points all from you. Regards.
Speaking of being pedantic I realized after I hit submit that I spelled it wrong. Whoops!
P.T. Barnum continues to be right...
Sorry for being pendantic, but the above statement itself is not right. See here. The phrase I assume you're referring to - "There's a sucker born every minute [and two to take em]." is not officially accepted as being creditable to Barnum.
Hah! Good point. Although I was referring to the Neon Genesis Evangelion anime series, wherein all the attacking alien baddies have just one weak spot - a big red nearly indestructible orb thing. One of the main weapons used against them is the 'progressive knife' which is supposedly unbreakable but in fact breaks during one battle. Sorry if you already knew all that.
I would recommend reading the first 4 books only. That is: Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, and God Emperor of Dune. After that things start going downhill fast. But the first 4 books sort of round out the original story arc and give you a good place to stop in the dune universe.
As far as the movie[s] goes, the 190 minute version is probably the better version. And I couldn't even stomach the SciFi miniseries that was produced. I think in the first 15 minutes they introduced characters that weren't supposed to show up until 5 years later and i just stopped watching. Pretty, yes, but looked to be an unbearable rewrite of the plot. Maybe I'm wrong and it turned out to be great, but I can't stand when made for TV versions take rediculous liberties with otherwise good storylines.
I don't think any media conspiracy or otherwise is necessary to induce rage and contempt for politicians from the public. Just looking up at any street corner to see the CCTV cameras of the state watching you (what's the ratio these days? something like 1 camera per 7 people* in London?) would be plenty enough to enrage me. Or how about Blair's lapdog-to-Bush style of international relations? The concessions to the US on international plane traveler privacy laws? Forcing a massive upgrade to passports that turns out to be flawed and insecure? I mean, hell, I'm not even a British citizen or even traveled there for that matter and these things have me pissed off!
;)
Let's face it, the internet can be used to help the public suggest changes and work with their representatives to improve the situation. But is it any surprise that the overwhleming volume of comments and the like are nothing but complaints? Maybe when some of the glaring abuses of government and invasions of privacy start to be addressed people will be more willing to calm down and discuss things with a focus on solutions. I agree, suggesting solutions and working to fix things is a better idea than just ranting and making unfeasible demands. But then again maybe if the government had listened to salient points of contention in the first place, or put people's privacy, rights, and well being ahead of politics then it wouldn't be so bad right now.
* I don't claim this figure to be accurate, might be off by an order of magnitude, take it with salt.
Robots are defeated by aiming at the bright, red (sometimes yellow) light that is hidden by thick armor which is unpenetrable by any weapon in the world
;)
That's usually when I whip out my progressive knife or the Spear of Adam. Does the trick every time.
I do not mind a little security theater but I would like to get the feeling that there is someone out there who is doing some actual security.
That's the problem with security theather, once it looks like you're doing something about the problem, you don't need to try anymore. If enough of the sheeple (even elected leaders and "experts" can fall under this category) think that what is in place is good enough then it becomes near impossible to get true flaws fixed. It becomes compounded when the theater starts making arrests, no matter how asinine, because then the 'actors' point to those arrests to say "See? It works!"
Why do I keep seeing the word terrorist?
Because that's the magic password. People aren't scared stupid (literally it seems) by criminals, but call a criminal a terrorist, even when it doesn't apply, and people will trust anything you say so long as you protect them from the boogeyman terrorist. In the case of this article I would warrant that the security researchers are using the word terrorist because it's something the government can understand. Kind of a fight fire with fire approach. If they say that terrorists can break the passports and gain acess to the info then the government has a much harder time ignoring the issue because of the bad PR.
As claimed by a blogger, you can in fact install the Zune software under Vista RC2. Here is a link to his blog, and the steps are included below to fend off karma whores and help save the guy a little bandwidth. Note, I do not have Vista RC2 or a Zune and have not tested this. Cheers.
.exe right click and go to properties
1. Don't let the Zune CD autorun - instead right click on it in my computer and choose open
2. On the Zune setup
3. Click on the compatibility tab, then check "run this program in compatibility mode for:" and select Windows XP SP2
4. Hit apply, then ok and now go back to the opened Zune folder and run the Zunesetup.exe
Along with the other responder to your post, my dentist's nagging to have them removed started before they even finished coming through the gums! They had been xrayed and I asked if they were coming in crooked, were going to ruin the alignment of my other teeth (never needed braces), or if they were already infected - the answer was no,no, and no. I felt like (and to some extent still do) that wisdom teeth represent a fantastic business opportunity for dentists. There's so much potential for them to be an actual problem that even when they aren't a problem the dentist can scare you into an expensive surgery, bit of a conflict of interest there IMHO. I refused having them removed for years, but eventually two of them started to develop cavities in the back side - damn hard to brush that one spot effectively - and it was pretty much a given that eventually they would get need to get filled, then get impacted, then have to be removed and would shatter and become a major surgery. My family has a history of weak enamel so it really was a given that within 10 years they would likely have cavities. So I had them all removed at once to just not have to deal with it, but if it weren't for the real threat of an eventual awful surgery, I would have chosen to keep them, absolutely brilliant for chewing steak!
:( Plus side was since they were in good shape and came out easy I healed very quickly and was completely back to normal eating habits within a week.
As it stands now, having heard horror stories from two of my friends about wisdom teeth which were impacted and splintered during removal, I'm quite glad I got them removed before they became an issue, alas they were unlikely to be lifelong teeth for me.
What was also interesting is that morphine doesn't take away your pain, it makes you not care that you're in pain. Very strange experience, difficult to explain. The pain was still there, still as strong, but it didn't really bother me.
I totally understand and agree, it doesn't make sense to people who haven't had the experience. For me it was the oxycodone I was given after having all 4 of my wisdom teeth removed. None of them were impacted and the procedure went rather smoothly as these things go, but all in all having 4 of your larger teeth yanked out of your head with pliers (dentist had to brace himself against my shoulder while pulling!) it tends to hurt afterwards. Anyway, the point is, although the meds did make me fuzzy, I clearly recall being in exactly the same amount of pain, but somehow it just didn't matter.
Excellent points all, and well thought out. I would point out though that adding manufacturing in this case was not something that Sony could do to increase systems, no matter what the cost. The bottleneck in this case was the blue laser diodes required for the Blue-Ray drives. The batch yields ended up being much lower than anticipated, by the time this was discovered there was no way to bring another manufacturer online before the release date, this is a physcial limitation of producing such a high-end technology component. Unfortunately no matter how much money they threw at the problem (regardless of whether that's a good idea since the hardware is sold at a loss anyway) it is very unlikely that another plant could be retooled to produce the lasers in time simply because of the unique procedure, complexity, and precision required from the manufacturing process.
Tip #1: Don't take stock advice from Slashdot.
I have no idea what to do with that advice. [scratches head]
Ah, but the author didn't actually die until 1968, thus ending the Occult Wars. So really it won't be in the public domain until 2038.
;)
Sorry, I just watched Hellboy for the first time the other night.
I'd prefer voting machines with a companion paper trail (receipt-style - one for the voter, and one to be secured after review by the voter).
It cannot be said enough - voters must not get a receipt of their vote that they leave with. The machine can print two if you like, one visible through glass and visually verified then fed into the machine's ballot box, and another printed out that the voter can hold and verify, but then that handled paper vote is also deposited in a secure ballot box before they leave. ANY time the voter leaves with some official piece of paper that proves how they voted, you open up the possibility of people buying votes. It doesn't mean that they don't try to now, but if it can't be proven which way you voted then it dissuades a whole host of vote-buying and vote-bullying scenarios. I have never heard a credible argument that demonstrates a voter-held receipt could NOT be used in such a way.
At some point we have to trust the process. In the above scenario I outlined we would now have (1) the electronic count, (2) the machine ballet box paper count, and (3) the voter-handled ballet box count. At that point it's about as redundant as you can get without making things overly complicated. Although I admit I am totally open to well thought out ideas that are more secure/verifiable/simpler if they are presented.
Does anyone know of links that show the replica helmet, especially its actual dimensions? I looked at Gamestop.com and they have yet to provide any images or dimensions for the helmet. Although either would be a nice addition to a Halo fanatic's collection; there's a big difference between a wearable replica and an e.g. 2/3 scale. ;)
They have made it so no virus should be able to get to that low of a level thereby erasing the need for an antivirus application to be that low. Any virii should be in user-space which is where antivirus should be looking..
A) Microsoft and its security track record thus far have in no way demonstrated that they have comprehensively eliminated the ability of a virus to infect the kernel. Why should we trust them when they say "trust us?" Additionally, why does Microsoft's own antivirus offering use the low level kernel functions if there will never be a virus at that level?
B) 'virii' is NOT a word. It is not even an apporopriate use of 'i' to pluralize the word virus, as that is a Latin pluralization and in Latin, viri means 'men'. I point you to the wikipedia explanation for reference.
I suspect that when companies like EA push this far enough, and Tiger actually has to stop at the pro shop and buy a box of golf balls using xbox live points before playing
;)
Oh my god, shutup before EA hears you!
if you don't want it to be a criminal issue, you should be talking to your politicians and using your vote accordingly. Go organize some marches. Make some noise. If the majority of people truly feel as you feel, you'll get changes--not out of altruism or (necessarily) because the politicians agree with you, but because they want to keep their jobs
:/ A vocal minority of voters is usually trumped by a politician's need for millions of dollars to win a Federal-level campaign. That's part of the problem, current politics require millions to win, the government is no longer accessible by just anyone, only the well-connected/well-heeled. Short of a *massive* grassroots donation campaign, an entire town's financial commitment can be dwarfed by a single lobby's donations.
I agree with the main portion of your post, but for the above I think the sad fact of the matter is, all of that work will be undone the moment an RIAA lobbyist makes an $X-thousand donation to that senator's campaign.
I may be incorrect here, but as I understood Canadian law pertaining to file sharing (granted, from /. not exactly a degree-granting institution), Canadians already pay a levy on all recordable media which is then passed on to the Canadian equivalent of the RIAA to reimburse artists. In addition, Canadian copyright law makes unauthorized distribution (uploading) illegal, however downloading is not. If this is true, and I cede that I may have this muddled, then Canadians should be downloading day and night from every source they can find! You're already paying for it, might as well take advantage of the legal loophole while it exists.
we're talking about an OS that will likely suceed the millions of Windows 98, 2000 and XP in the vast majority of homes and businesses
Somehow I doubt the machines still running win98 and 2K are capable of running Vista w/o massive hardware upgrades. Not to mention those users have demonstrated they have little to no interest in upgrading their OS by now anyway if they're still running win98 - and that's speaking as someone who has a box still running win98. Just as a project pc mind you, not on the net, but it does what I need it to do and I have zero reason to spend rediculous sums of money just so MS can further bloat it.
So let me get this straight, they know people on P2P sites downloading music are potential purchasers, and that anything they hear from P2P they may buy. Yet their solution is instead of letting them download the music they are looking for and listen to it, possibly purchase it, they hijack the file with something that may be wholly unrelated? How is that targetted marketing? If someone is searching for favorite band X and they get instead an advertisement clip for band Y, how does that make them more likely to buy Y? Wouldn't they have been looking for Y in the first place then?
This also demonstrates the RIAA's complete misunderstanding of how people use P2P sites. Users know that there are broken songs, seeded fakes, etc, etc, so when they hit play and it's not what they were looking for then they move on to another file and delete the incorrect one. They don't hang around and say "gee, this isn't at all what I was looking for but I'll listen to the whole thing anyway." To quote MC Frontalot (Romantic Cheapskate): "Whatcha wasting my time for? My bandwidth's limited, I don't get, like, free internet."
between robots with limited communication abilities and limited knowledge of the surroundings.
You answered your own question right there. It can be extremely difficult to simulate the 'unknowns' present in a real environment. So yes, you can simulate comms degredation and limited sensor range, but what about "unknown unknowns"? Things that fall into that category might be if your comms are short range modulated IR, what is the effect of reflections? Or if it is RF, similarly, what about environmental interference and multipathing issues? These are all things that can be simulated, but only by performing a lot of overhead to calculate them, in fact it would probably take longer to accurately simulate all these things than to build the robots and see what happens! The same goes for unanticipated frictional forces which play heavily on this particular research. It's all well and good to assume constant frictional coefficients across a continuous floor surface, but something as simple as how well the janitor last waxed it could greatly affect localized areas and therefore the realtime actions of the robots.
In theory, theory is the same as practice, but in practice this is rarely so.
Indeed, even with overlapping course requirements I can't believe the university would let them be applied like that. At CMU there were limtis to applying one course to multiple requirements. As it was my major was Electrical and Computer Engineering and I took a minor in Robotics. Despite what would seem like a huge overlap in reqs between major and minor I ended up taking something like 5 extra courses because I couldn't apply some class credits to both my major and minor. The irony is that it would have been less work for me to get a 4 year BS/MS combined in ECE than to get the BS ECE w/Robotics. My salary may suffer slightly from that, but my robots do not regret the decision. :)
Wow, aren't you a prick. Here's reading comprehension for you - these are all from the AC posts in this thread that I assume come from you, the same person in each. Ready?
In the case of robots.txt, these sanctions can very well be court ruling against you
This is especially important with regard to services which mirror webpages. Doing so without the (assumed) consent of the author is a straightforward copyright violation
Even if you don't fear the legal system, disregarding robots.txt can quickly get you in trouble.
If that happened to me twice, I'd have the asshole arrested, and that's exactly what you're going to see online if people don't behave,
In each case you have expressly implied that ignoring robots.txt has some legal consequences, and in your [poor] analogy of a bum soliciting for cash you explicity stated you would have the person arrested, the logical extension through the analogy being that you have some legal reprecussion against violaters of robots.txt. You're also confusing copyright violations with ignoring robots.txt and as other have pointed out, there are plenty of other reasons robots spider sites other than to wholesale copy and redistribute the data, including but not limited to checking a hash of the site to see if it has been updated, or collecting statistical data for commercial or educational purposes. Copyright violations are illegal and can be prosecuted and while they can be facilitated by ignoring robots.txt, they by no means require it or vice-versa. Had you actually read my post you would see that I stated only that there are no LEGAL reprecussions from ignoring robots.txt. That was my whole point. You are trying to make a connection where there is none. Your reading comprehension is clearly lacking since I never disagreed that there aren't other consequences to ignoring robots.txt. Also, read Grumbel's response elsehwere in this thread where he was kind enough to qutoe the relevent [draft] RFC text which state in no uncertain terms that robots.txt is wholly voluntary. To recap, here's the text from the RFC: "Web site administrators must realise this method is voluntary, and is not sufficient to guarantee some robots will not visit restricted parts of the URL space."
"It is not an official standard backed by a standards body, or owned by any commercial organisation. It is not enforced by anybody, and there no guarantee that all current and future robots will use it." and here's your statement: Ignoring robots.txt is not illegal, but the decision is not voluntary either.
Just because there are consequences to actions (other than through force of law) does not mean that those actions are no longer voluntary. And stop posting as AC or at least sign the damn posts with some identifier if you expect to continue a conversation.