I can't decide if these make you look more like Geordi LaForge from TNG, or a Cylon from the original "Battlestar Galactica". Since video glasses are nothing new (I remember a friend planning to buy a pair for a wearable computing rig in the late '90s), I can only assume that these are newsworthy because they look so ultra-geek.
The problem with your theory is that, by and large, Londoners aren't drooling imbeciles. There are exceptions, sure, but the number of people who are going to feel safer as a result of scannners in tube stations is negligible.
Yeah, but who's going to bomb a rail platform in Bristol?
The MP's put the showy equipment in showy places so it gets coverage on the BBC nationwide. They provide the illusion of action that filters out through TV screens across the nation, and a downmarket housefrau in Middlesex feels good that the government is doing something.
Well, some will say you can't put a price on a human life. Of course, that's in the abstract. Our courts do it regularly in wrongful death lawsuits. I also seem to recall someone doing an invoice for the carbon, water, and other compounds our bodies contain if we were to buy them at a chemistry supply house, but I dcouldn't find it on Google.
Essentially it boils down to this. However you believe a government should spend tax dollars, they're going to get spent in two ways: to benefit campaign supporters and cronies, and to do things that mollify the public just enough to make the re-election fight a little easier. A terrorist incident makes people feel less safe, so politicians spend money on things that make them feel safer. Good, bad, effective, useless... doesn't matter. It just has to be perceived as responsive.
Expensive scanners in tube stations? Brilliant!
Security costs money. Of course, the money gets spent on expensive and showy equipment, not on better training of security personnel (or screening of security personnel - some TSA screeners look like they should have their mittens safety-pinned to their coats). But it's all bread and circuses. It's about the perception of security. And governments are great at spending money to create that.
Best Buy gets to "break street date" by a couple of months on such series as: Battlestar Galactica and Space: Above and Beyond and charge full MSRP too -- why wouldn't they when they don't have to worry about competition for months?
That's not breaking street. Breaking street is when everyone is embargoed from selling before date X, and someone starts selling early in violation of the embargo.
What Best Buy has, according to the links, is an exclusive. They're not in violation of anything... except maybe the trust of the fans, who hopefully realize their dedication to the show is being exploited in a very overt manner and are boycotting the DVD sets to show that this will not be tolerated.
It's "testament" with an A. The first two syllables of Testament and Testicle do sound the same if you say them fast, but they're spelled differently.;-)
So I'll just have my reader connect to a DNS server I manage, which resolves time.gov to a time server I manager, which has it's clock set one year ahead.
Unfortunately, if they really wanted to protect the books, the time server your ebook reader connected to would provide an encrypted response. Before you could implement the scheme above, you'd have to hack the encryption.
OTOH, the scheme, minus the encryption, would be simpler than that. To unDRM the book, you'd probably do so on your PC with the ebook reader connected by USB. You could just hack your hosts file to resolve/reroute the request back to 127.0.0.1 and have a script/server listening on the appropriate port.
So you would have every ebook reader contain an internal atomic clock? Or would you have them connecting to a central server to synchronize their time?
Option 1: The screen wouldn't be the only thing glowing after a while.
Option 2: Not necessarily unhackable, and additionally gives rise to huge privacy concerns. My reading material should not be connecting to government entities for any reason. It shouldn't be connecting to private commercial entities. The connection alone reveals my IP address, and while I'm told no other information is provided when doing the time query, that's expecting me to grant a big chunk of trust to people who are not granting any trust back.
Tell that to the fundamentalists who burn Harry Potter books and try to get them banned from school and public libraries. Witchcraft and wizardry are prohibited by scripture, and the Harry Potter series paints such occult pursuits not only in a positive light, but places people who practice these evil arts in the role of hero and role model.
I'm not saying I agree with that point of view. But in some people's minds, Harry Potter is closer to Satan's Bible than you may realize.
The reason you have release dates is so that ALL dealers have a chance to sell the book. Otherwise the stores with better distribution systems would get it in stock first, while the others would have to wait.
This is also the reason many home video arms of the studios have "street dates" for video releases. Right after college, I temped in various studios in Los Angeles. One interesting job was calling up video stores that had "broken street" (started selling or renting a video before the authorized date), getting the manager on the phone, and then transferring them to a mid-level Disney exec, who would reduce them to jello.
What was interesting, though, was the water cooler talk. If Costco or Walmart broke street, they didn't get the intimidating phone call. While the little guys couldn't afford to lose Disney, Disney couldn't afford to lose Costco and Walmart.
First, regardless of how easy it would be to use e-books with DRM, it would be a tragedy if they went that route. There's a tactile pleasure to a real dead trees paper book: its weight, the texture of its pages, curling up with it. I have never read a novel via the electronic route and doubt I ever will. Technical books, business books, books I want to study... e-books are great there. But I don't want to read entertainment books -- the ones I read 30-pages of before bed, or lay on the couch and read -- off a screen. I want to read them off paper.
Anyway, DRM based on a "do not read before" timestamp would be hard to effect. It would require that any reader be set with an unhackable internal clock that knows the time zone the reader is in, otherwise people could circumvent the "do not read before" settings rather handily.
I think the argument here is a bit difficult to support.
Interesting point. Peter F. Hamilton's "Reality Dysfunction" series examines this to some extent. A far-reaching space opera, one of the side notes is that the intergalactic governments have outlawed antimatter, both for propulsion and especially for weapons, because of how frighteningly powerful and compact it is.
The problem is that they won't be able to create sufficiently powerful and controllable anti-matter engines until they secure a sufficient supply of dilithium crystals.
But seriously folks...
Many of our upcoming challenges both earthbound and space bound relate to the safe, efficient, portable, and inexpensive generation of HUGE amounts of power. Whether it's antimatter, zero-point energy, fusion, whatever, let's get something off the drawing board and into service.
My laptop is more powerful than a 1975 supercomputer that filled a room, but a D cell battery hasn't changed its size in 30 years and today's best D cell lasts what 2, 3 times as long as one from 1975? We're still running coal-based and oil-based power plants that were built in the '70s. Is everything shooting along while power generation creeps?
So I can take any process that people use in the analog world, do it on a computer, and patent the process? The process is by no means original and has been done by analog methods, but oooooh, I'm doing it on a computer and that means I should be granted a patent?
After our son was born, my parents tried to send flowers to the house. But because we were in a new construction development (including the streets), the florist could not find our house on a map. They called, got the machine, and left a message asking us to call them back so they could get directions to the house. They even left a reference number for the order so we could speed things up when we called.
Looks like they violated Bezos' patent.
This meets the requirement of being non-obvious?????
If you put out a big red button that says "Do Not Push This!!!!!" someone will push it just to see what happens.
But seriously, remember the virus that made you agree to a T&C before it installed itself? In the T&C you agreed to let it wreak havoc on your PC and mail itself to everyone in your address book. And people just blindly clicked "okay" because they're so used to the T&C's and EULA's being these complex documents full of legalese that it's pointless for them to read because they wouldn't understand them anyway.
The rules of spelling and grammer serve multiple purposes. Aside from giving those trained in them an excuse to ridicule others, they help people to communicate effectively.
Another post said: wot? i'm pretty sure even tho not "correct" every1 who reads this will understand wot i'm saying.
Yes, but it will take me 30-50% longer to read that and glean its meaning than it would if you wrote it correctly.
To put it in more "techie" terms: when you use bad grammar and bad spelling, you're asking me to run your shit code on my brain and take the performance hit to correct the errors at runtime.
The guy I quoted above is basically saying: "Sure, my code is crap and runs slow, but it gets the job done, so quit bitching." I don't know about you, but I consider that attitude to be really f'ing arrogant.
From their description: By collaborating and exploiting core integration technology, tool producers can leverage platform reuse and concentrate on core competencies to create new development technology.
Add: "And only then can the proletariat ensure its glorious future" and it sounds like something from a Soviet pamphlet ca. 1923.
Or maybe it sounds like a man from the future describing the Utopia to come in a bad 1950s B movie.
Actually, it's probably just missing some confusing acronyms.:-)
I guess this is really cool stuff for Java coders. But for the rest of us infidels, it's Stonehenge. It's big and impressive, but if you're not a druid, you're not really sure what it does.
AFAIK, and IANAL, the UK does not have the same protections for free speech and a free press that the U.S. has. In fact what freedoms the press has are more a matter of gentlemen's agreement (the king agrees not to shut down our newspapers and we agree not to behead the king) and some common law foundation (relying on prior judicial decisions rather than a constitutional edict). In fact, the Crown's ability to squelch and silence voices of dissent was one of the reasons the right to a free press was amended into the U.S. constitution.
While we may think this is terribly wrong from a moral/ethical standpoint, it may well be completely legal in the U.K.
Remember, I'm not saying this is right, but if you post a comment where you judge its legality by U.S. standards, you may be very wrong.
Considering many blogs use b2evolution, phpBB, or whatever,
phpBB is a forum system, not a blog (though I've hacked it up to work like one in the pase). And trust me, half of the most valuable information I've found on line is in forums about specific topics where someone has asked my same question and received an answer.
Secondly, haven't you ever heard of the Freedom of Speech, as guarenteed to us by the Second Amendement in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the United States of America? By your comment, I'll assume not.
If what you say above were true, I'd be careful where you point that mouth. The safety is off.
The Second Amendment is our right to guns, not our right to free speech. Free speech is in the First Amendment. So
If you want to go to a public park and preach religion or recite your political manifesto, the First Amendment guarantees your right to. But it's not absolute.
If you want to preach/recite on my front lawn, my property rights prevail and I can physically throw you off my property if you refuse to leave voluntarily. If you want to preach/recite at midnight and you're preaching/reciting too loud, city noise ordinances prevail, and the cops can arrest or ticket you if you refuse to quiet down or move along.
Slashdot is required to allow you a certain amount of leeway in exchange for safe harbor protections covering public forums, but that is a matter of them trying to avoid getting sued over any libelous/defamatory content in your posts, not any First Amendment guarantee they are obligated to provide you. And if you go beyond that leeway, they can ban you from posting and erase your posts.
So if you want to argue in favor of blog spam, find another argument. The First Amendment has nothing to do with whether Google and other blog services should voluntarily clean up their act and put roadblocks/barriers in place to stem the flow of blog spam.
He ain't kidding! The LycorisWelcome coupon works! It's 11:29 a.m. PST, I've purchased Linspire 5 for $0.00 (didn't even have to enter a credit card since the cost was $0.00) and am downloading the ISO now. I've got a testbed box (Celeron 1.7, 512 RAM, 200gb ATA hdd) I'll put it on and try it out.
The video card is crap though, thus so much for trying gaming on it, but after installing Suse 9, Ubuntu Hoary HedgeHog, and CentOS 4 to see what's what, I'll be interested to see what the install and "out of the box" usability are like with Linspire.
Slashdot Mirror
Greg
Yeah, but who's going to bomb a rail platform in Bristol?
The MP's put the showy equipment in showy places so it gets coverage on the BBC nationwide. They provide the illusion of action that filters out through TV screens across the nation, and a downmarket housefrau in Middlesex feels good that the government is doing something.
- Greg
Sorry, the "hot nekkid chicks" guy got first post. At least it wasn't some GNAA d*ckhead.
Essentially it boils down to this. However you believe a government should spend tax dollars, they're going to get spent in two ways: to benefit campaign supporters and cronies, and to do things that mollify the public just enough to make the re-election fight a little easier. A terrorist incident makes people feel less safe, so politicians spend money on things that make them feel safer. Good, bad, effective, useless... doesn't matter. It just has to be perceived as responsive.
Expensive scanners in tube stations? Brilliant!
Security costs money. Of course, the money gets spent on expensive and showy equipment, not on better training of security personnel (or screening of security personnel - some TSA screeners look like they should have their mittens safety-pinned to their coats). But it's all bread and circuses. It's about the perception of security. And governments are great at spending money to create that.
- Greg
That's not breaking street. Breaking street is when everyone is embargoed from selling before date X, and someone starts selling early in violation of the embargo.
What Best Buy has, according to the links, is an exclusive. They're not in violation of anything... except maybe the trust of the fans, who hopefully realize their dedication to the show is being exploited in a very overt manner and are boycotting the DVD sets to show that this will not be tolerated.
- Greg
It's "testament" with an A. The first two syllables of Testament and Testicle do sound the same if you say them fast, but they're spelled differently. ;-)
- Greg
Unfortunately, if they really wanted to protect the books, the time server your ebook reader connected to would provide an encrypted response. Before you could implement the scheme above, you'd have to hack the encryption.
OTOH, the scheme, minus the encryption, would be simpler than that. To unDRM the book, you'd probably do so on your PC with the ebook reader connected by USB. You could just hack your hosts file to resolve/reroute the request back to 127.0.0.1 and have a script/server listening on the appropriate port.
- Greg
So you would have every ebook reader contain an internal atomic clock? Or would you have them connecting to a central server to synchronize their time?
Option 1: The screen wouldn't be the only thing glowing after a while.
Option 2: Not necessarily unhackable, and additionally gives rise to huge privacy concerns. My reading material should not be connecting to government entities for any reason. It shouldn't be connecting to private commercial entities. The connection alone reveals my IP address, and while I'm told no other information is provided when doing the time query, that's expecting me to grant a big chunk of trust to people who are not granting any trust back.
- Greg
Tell that to the fundamentalists who burn Harry Potter books and try to get them banned from school and public libraries. Witchcraft and wizardry are prohibited by scripture, and the Harry Potter series paints such occult pursuits not only in a positive light, but places people who practice these evil arts in the role of hero and role model.
I'm not saying I agree with that point of view. But in some people's minds, Harry Potter is closer to Satan's Bible than you may realize.
- Greg
This is also the reason many home video arms of the studios have "street dates" for video releases. Right after college, I temped in various studios in Los Angeles. One interesting job was calling up video stores that had "broken street" (started selling or renting a video before the authorized date), getting the manager on the phone, and then transferring them to a mid-level Disney exec, who would reduce them to jello.
What was interesting, though, was the water cooler talk. If Costco or Walmart broke street, they didn't get the intimidating phone call. While the little guys couldn't afford to lose Disney, Disney couldn't afford to lose Costco and Walmart.
- Greg
Anyway, DRM based on a "do not read before" timestamp would be hard to effect. It would require that any reader be set with an unhackable internal clock that knows the time zone the reader is in, otherwise people could circumvent the "do not read before" settings rather handily.
I think the argument here is a bit difficult to support.
- Greg
- Greg
But seriously folks...
Many of our upcoming challenges both earthbound and space bound relate to the safe, efficient, portable, and inexpensive generation of HUGE amounts of power. Whether it's antimatter, zero-point energy, fusion, whatever, let's get something off the drawing board and into service.
My laptop is more powerful than a 1975 supercomputer that filled a room, but a D cell battery hasn't changed its size in 30 years and today's best D cell lasts what 2, 3 times as long as one from 1975? We're still running coal-based and oil-based power plants that were built in the '70s. Is everything shooting along while power generation creeps?
As I said... F*** me.
Looks like they violated Bezos' patent.
This meets the requirement of being non-obvious?????
F*** me.
- Greg
Sigh.
- Greg
But seriously, remember the virus that made you agree to a T&C before it installed itself? In the T&C you agreed to let it wreak havoc on your PC and mail itself to everyone in your address book. And people just blindly clicked "okay" because they're so used to the T&C's and EULA's being these complex documents full of legalese that it's pointless for them to read because they wouldn't understand them anyway.
- Greg
Another post said:
wot? i'm pretty sure even tho not "correct" every1 who reads this will understand wot i'm saying.
Yes, but it will take me 30-50% longer to read that and glean its meaning than it would if you wrote it correctly.
To put it in more "techie" terms: when you use bad grammar and bad spelling, you're asking me to run your shit code on my brain and take the performance hit to correct the errors at runtime.
The guy I quoted above is basically saying: "Sure, my code is crap and runs slow, but it gets the job done, so quit bitching." I don't know about you, but I consider that attitude to be really f'ing arrogant.
- Greg
Stonehenge is the only surviving member of the famous druidic henges after Hayhenge and Stickhenge were blown down by a wolf.
Spamhenge is under construction.
- Greg
Add: "And only then can the proletariat ensure its glorious future" and it sounds like something from a Soviet pamphlet ca. 1923.
Or maybe it sounds like a man from the future describing the Utopia to come in a bad 1950s B movie.
Actually, it's probably just missing some confusing acronyms. :-)
I guess this is really cool stuff for Java coders. But for the rest of us infidels, it's Stonehenge. It's big and impressive, but if you're not a druid, you're not really sure what it does.
- Greg
While we may think this is terribly wrong from a moral/ethical standpoint, it may well be completely legal in the U.K.
Remember, I'm not saying this is right, but if you post a comment where you judge its legality by U.S. standards, you may be very wrong.
Greg
phpBB is a forum system, not a blog (though I've hacked it up to work like one in the pase). And trust me, half of the most valuable information I've found on line is in forums about specific topics where someone has asked my same question and received an answer.
- Greg
If what you say above were true, I'd be careful where you point that mouth. The safety is off.
The Second Amendment is our right to guns, not our right to free speech. Free speech is in the First Amendment. So
And be very careful. All the First Amendment guarantees is " Congress shall make no law..." abridging freedom of speech.
If you want to go to a public park and preach religion or recite your political manifesto, the First Amendment guarantees your right to. But it's not absolute.
If you want to preach/recite on my front lawn, my property rights prevail and I can physically throw you off my property if you refuse to leave voluntarily. If you want to preach/recite at midnight and you're preaching/reciting too loud, city noise ordinances prevail, and the cops can arrest or ticket you if you refuse to quiet down or move along.
Slashdot is required to allow you a certain amount of leeway in exchange for safe harbor protections covering public forums, but that is a matter of them trying to avoid getting sued over any libelous/defamatory content in your posts, not any First Amendment guarantee they are obligated to provide you. And if you go beyond that leeway, they can ban you from posting and erase your posts.
So if you want to argue in favor of blog spam, find another argument. The First Amendment has nothing to do with whether Google and other blog services should voluntarily clean up their act and put roadblocks/barriers in place to stem the flow of blog spam.
- Greg
The video card is crap though, thus so much for trying gaming on it, but after installing Suse 9, Ubuntu Hoary HedgeHog, and CentOS 4 to see what's what, I'll be interested to see what the install and "out of the box" usability are like with Linspire.
- Greg