I'll overlook the minor typo here, but I think you're still missing something. If you're not using a digital signal, the signal will be downgraded to 540p or something similar (about 1/2 the bandwidth). First, this is not going into effect until around 2010, so this won't be a problem yet. Second, the signal downgrade, caused by the Image Constraint Token (ICT), is only for analog signals, namely Component, and devices that support digital signals, but not HDCP (namely computer video cards). Both HDMI and DVI support the same protocol, and both support HDCP.
Generally, if your TV has either DVI or HDMI, you should be fine. Furthermore, saying "everything" will be downgraded is just not correct. All of the downgrade crap comes directly from the vicious/senseless copyright restrictions of the new DVD generation (bluray/hddvd). Specifically, it does NOT apply to (a) home movies being played back in HD, (b) any HD signals from your cable company or Over-the-Air HD service, or for that matter, (c) any movies/video files in HD that you may have on your computer.
I appreciate your spite towards DRM and the like, but this downgrading is directed specifically at bluray and hddvd.
Isn't that what SCO's been saying for the last few years? Whatever amazon plans to do with this (I promise you they DO have plans), probably won't be good for anybody. Best case scenerio, they'll charge up the ass for someone that wants to do something useful with the data. More likely, it'll be used for really intrusive and annoying "services", or possibly another horrendous secret government-corporation collaboration to "protect" us from "terrorists". Worst, case... nevermind, I don't want to think about it.
What exactly is the problem with Google Earth? I mean, nude sites, as stupid as it is to block them, at least have some moral backing. Are they just trying to convince everyone that the world is flat or something?
There really is a fundamental flaw in this system.
I am doing something.
You ask what I'm doing.
You say it's illegal.
If I tell you, it will expose secrets.
I don't expose secrets.
You don't know what I am doing.
You can't tell me what I am doing is wrong, because you don't know what I am doing.
I am doing something. Too bad.
How exactly is it that the government can set up a system that is completely impervious to moral question? Keep in mind, this really is the NSA's wrongdoing, but it's more or less impossible to sue the government. Now, the government is saying you can't sue them either!?
What if the NSA was secretly executing suspected terrorists without warrants, due process, etc? Oh hell, let's say they were hiring a private (non-government) corporation to do that for them. It would obviously be illegal, but how would stopping that be any different? Someone would say "you can't just kill people, it's illegal", and the NSA would say "you can't ask that question, it would expose state secrets". And the NSA would continue to kill "terrorists".
Shouldn't this program be immediately halted while the morality (oh hell, legality) of it is in question?
Even Better Solution:
Just opt-out of the "genuine advantage" crap. Seriously, what does this "non-pirated advantage" give you anyway? Crappy updates to WMP10 that you don't want anyway? Security updates are (supposedly, I think) available for every computer. What else... Royale theme? Wow, the colors look a little different.
I've actually be anti-virus free, windows update-free, and "genuine advantage"-free. Haven't gotten a virus or worm in over 2 years. Good alternative to updates, etc:
(a) not being a dumbass regarding email attachments, etc
(b) Peerguardian 2
I'd say it does in terms of the amount.
If you buy a Playboy/Penthouse, they're maybe 100 pages, perhaps 50-70 of actual porn, at most. So there's at least some limit. Even if you buy a handful of magazines, there's no way you're going to get more than, say, 200 pictures.
At least with the magazines, there's the cost of printing the actual paper, so there's at least some limit to how much porn you can get. Online, the cost of bandwidth is negligible, so there's really no unit cost of any sort. You can spend hours and hours viewing porn, and new porn is being loaded onto the internet faster than you can look at it. With all purposes, you can conveniently view an unlimited amount of porn.
And that's where the problem starts.... unlimited.
I used to think this was a rather extremist site at first, but it's actually a lot more down to Earth than I thought.
On a more relevant note, how can one patent cover all "media-rick" content on the internet? Why not just throw in pictures and text in there too?
I think Google is the target here because they're supposedly the good guys. Now, they're censoring stuff, which is bad. Therefore, Google is bad. ....Flawless logic, to say the least, but most people just can't see farther than that. The culprit here is abviously the body that's saying "Censor or your search engine will not work here".
Ironically, I think google is probably on the best (realistic) track to stopping censorship. If they just decided to say "f*ck you we're not censoring", how is that making progress at all. If Chinese citizens have access to only a censored internet, then at least they'll have that. On top of that, there's always the Napster-esque system of making intentional misspellings to break search filters.
I think having the search engine in place, with particular filters, is the best way to act for now. Ideally, China should just open up and let google in as is, but don't expect that anytime soon. Until then, at least something is better than nothing. Furthermore, I think this will draw more attention to the filters themselves; what they're filtering. If just everything is blocked, then there's no clear target. On the other hand, removing Tiannemen (Tiananmen?) Square from an otherwise generic pool of results, they're creating more awareness of this issue.
Don't apologize in the least. Personally, I don't even see that as a rant. I think it's a pretty well-structured argument. I agree with many of your ideals (I'm not registered as Republican, but typically vote that way for economic reasons; I hate the 'drivel that oozes up from the left'). Here's my view on all of this:
I also like to grab a shotgun and tromp around...
~Ok, this part is rant
there are objectively right and wrong things a human can do
~This is a sensitive issue, but I do agree with you. I think the trick is defining 'wrong', because ultimately, it is a perspective. Hell, even murder can be considered good. It (a) reduces overpopulation, and (b) decreases the amount of unlikeable people in the world (chances are, if you're murdered, you probably really pissed someone off and deserved it to SOME extent). I think you just have to define 'wrong' as something that a very high percentage (99.999%?) of people would agree is bad, ie, the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. Obviously, the loss of a human life is much worse than (a) and (b), according to more or less everybody. Hence, murder is generally considered 'wrong'.
I believe in the virtue of having freedom from others. That is, I feel everyone in the world should be able to do basically anything they want, such that they are not interfering with others' rights and virtues. Doing so, I feel is 'wrong'.
I think that definition should suffice. I feel it is wrong to impose your own morals on someone else. For example, abortion. I do not approve of the concept, but at the same time, I don't think it's proper to make a law against it, in lieu of people that feel otherwise. Hence, I am pro-choice. Along the same lines, I think it is nothing short of a crime to dictate as a state law that schools should ignore scientific evidence to teach creationism in schools.
Now science and engineering are the keys. I think they're more or less all that's fundamentally gotten better in the last 20, 50, hell, maybe 1000 years. Philosophy hasn't changed much since the days of the Greeks, and there haven't been many major advances in Mathematics since the days of Newton and Euler. One might say movies have gotten better since the 1950s-60s, but even that's mostly due to better special effects and lower costs of cameras, etc, but that's science and engineering. Personally, I don't feel that movies today are fundamentally better than Shakespeare's plays from the 1500s.
So, what has gotten better? I would say certainly computers and similar electronics. WW2 radios used crude, clumsy, and heavy vacuum tubes. Now we have electronics the size of your fingertips and smaller, and anti-noise. Clock speeds in computer processors, and optical storage have increased by thousands in 30 years (Is philosophy 1000x better than it was 30 years ago?). Chemistry, physics, and materials sciences have all gotten better by leaps and bounds, and very few of their basic principles have ever been proven wrong. The ideal gas law was improved upon (think Van der Waal), but hasn't been disproven per se.
Science and Engineering are really all that separate us from what we were 50 years ago. They are the roots of our society, and I think it is blantantly 'wrong' to discredit them in schools in favor of religion.
Are you sure it's explicitly talking about the total of them? It seems like they were saying they found 2000-some viruses that affected EACH off those systems. Comparitively, that would be like saying that GM, Toyota, and Honda had more of the same design flaws that affected all three of them, than the Ford Pinto had alone.
In other words, I think it means that if you took any of UNIX, Linux, BSD, or OS X individually, any one of them would still have had many more flaws than any single version of windows. Of course, the article isn't very clear, so that's more of a speculation than anything.
On another note, I think the real issue here is how old the system is. Microsoft put out Windows XP in 2002 (officially anyway), and they haven't changed it since. There haven't been any features added at all (at least none significant); just bug fixes. Crappy popup blocking for IE, a crappy new firewall that harasses the user and still doesn't work real well.
On the other hand, at (about) the same time IIRC, Mac OS 10.1 came out. How many new vulnerabilities have they found explicitly in 10.1 in 2005? Certainly not that many. While some affected all versions previous to version 10.x, many of them were exclusive to 10.3. On the same note, many new *nix vulnerabilities only affected later versions.
So, to make a truly genuine comparison, you would have to pretend that *nix and Mac didn't put out any new versions since the tiime XP was released, and see just how many of the vulnerabilities applied to the older verisons. My prediction: not many.
What exactly does "EXCEPT AS REQUIRED BY LAW" mean? I'm not trying to troll here, but it looks like this may cause a problem whereever the exception covers. Anybody know where/when this might be?
I agree. I see the same thing very often with "I just found $20 in my wallet". I don't consider myself to be a (rabid) pessimist, but there definitely is no 'light' in getting your own stuff.
"Look on the bright side" is overrated. Don't look at any side, look at the whole goddamn thing.
Don't you kill cops in that game? "Oh yeah, officer, did you ever play Drug Wars? No, I mean the old version, where you actually get automatic weaapons. You can kill the cops and get away with trafficking drugs."
Pepsi Kona was the original idea for this. It was text marketed. The stuff tasted like absolute crap (right up there with Crystal Clear Pepsi). I liked the idea of coffee flavored cola, but I didn't know anyone that could actually drink the stuff. Let's hope Coke does a better job.
What exactly do you mean by "advertisement"?
It doesn't look like an ad to me, it actually looks like a list of features. Being top of the line, they're obviously good. If you seem to think that all these still aren't worth the money, then maybe you should say something like "it's good, but it's overpriced." John Dvorak seemed to 'advertise' the Xbox360, talking about how good it was, and how great of a step that was for Microsoft. I'm sure he was paid off big too, as opposed to something rational, say maybe he actually liked it.
To me, this actually looks like a good card. ATI has Linux support for most of their drivers, and I'm sure you can expect this within the next year or so. On the other hand, I'd be surprised if you used Linux a day in your life.
Maybe instead of say "this card sucks" you should be constructive and say something along the lines of "this card that I have is better, cheaper and has more features". Mod parent down. Nobody needs to hear from him.
Slashdot Mirror
if your not using HDMI
I'll overlook the minor typo here, but I think you're still missing something. If you're not using a digital signal, the signal will be downgraded to 540p or something similar (about 1/2 the bandwidth). First, this is not going into effect until around 2010, so this won't be a problem yet. Second, the signal downgrade, caused by the Image Constraint Token (ICT), is only for analog signals, namely Component, and devices that support digital signals, but not HDCP (namely computer video cards). Both HDMI and DVI support the same protocol, and both support HDCP.
Generally, if your TV has either DVI or HDMI, you should be fine. Furthermore, saying "everything" will be downgraded is just not correct. All of the downgrade crap comes directly from the vicious/senseless copyright restrictions of the new DVD generation (bluray/hddvd). Specifically, it does NOT apply to (a) home movies being played back in HD, (b) any HD signals from your cable company or Over-the-Air HD service, or for that matter, (c) any movies/video files in HD that you may have on your computer.
I appreciate your spite towards DRM and the like, but this downgrading is directed specifically at bluray and hddvd.
"We want to protect our intellectual property."
Isn't that what SCO's been saying for the last few years? Whatever amazon plans to do with this (I promise you they DO have plans), probably won't be good for anybody. Best case scenerio, they'll charge up the ass for someone that wants to do something useful with the data. More likely, it'll be used for really intrusive and annoying "services", or possibly another horrendous secret government-corporation collaboration to "protect" us from "terrorists". Worst, case... nevermind, I don't want to think about it.
What exactly is the problem with Google Earth? I mean, nude sites, as stupid as it is to block them, at least have some moral backing. Are they just trying to convince everyone that the world is flat or something?
And when asked how the new platform differs from previous versions of Office, Microsoft declined to comment.
There really is a fundamental flaw in this system.
I am doing something.
You ask what I'm doing.
You say it's illegal.
If I tell you, it will expose secrets.
I don't expose secrets.
You don't know what I am doing.
You can't tell me what I am doing is wrong, because you don't know what I am doing.
I am doing something. Too bad.
How exactly is it that the government can set up a system that is completely impervious to moral question? Keep in mind, this really is the NSA's wrongdoing, but it's more or less impossible to sue the government. Now, the government is saying you can't sue them either!?
What if the NSA was secretly executing suspected terrorists without warrants, due process, etc? Oh hell, let's say they were hiring a private (non-government) corporation to do that for them. It would obviously be illegal, but how would stopping that be any different? Someone would say "you can't just kill people, it's illegal", and the NSA would say "you can't ask that question, it would expose state secrets". And the NSA would continue to kill "terrorists".
Shouldn't this program be immediately halted while the morality (oh hell, legality) of it is in question?
Using the composite output? I think you're missing the point.
Even Better Solution:
Just opt-out of the "genuine advantage" crap. Seriously, what does this "non-pirated advantage" give you anyway? Crappy updates to WMP10 that you don't want anyway? Security updates are (supposedly, I think) available for every computer. What else... Royale theme? Wow, the colors look a little different.
I've actually be anti-virus free, windows update-free, and "genuine advantage"-free. Haven't gotten a virus or worm in over 2 years. Good alternative to updates, etc:
(a) not being a dumbass regarding email attachments, etc
(b) Peerguardian 2
does it matter if it's online or printed?
I'd say it does in terms of the amount. If you buy a Playboy/Penthouse, they're maybe 100 pages, perhaps 50-70 of actual porn, at most. So there's at least some limit. Even if you buy a handful of magazines, there's no way you're going to get more than, say, 200 pictures.
At least with the magazines, there's the cost of printing the actual paper, so there's at least some limit to how much porn you can get. Online, the cost of bandwidth is negligible, so there's really no unit cost of any sort. You can spend hours and hours viewing porn, and new porn is being loaded onto the internet faster than you can look at it. With all purposes, you can conveniently view an unlimited amount of porn.
And that's where the problem starts.... unlimited.
DRM really does prevent casual piracy, and studies have proven this.
What studies? Could you be a little more specific? Are these studies done by the **IA? Do they exist?
No software patents
I used to think this was a rather extremist site at first, but it's actually a lot more down to Earth than I thought.
On a more relevant note, how can one patent cover all "media-rick" content on the internet? Why not just throw in pictures and text in there too?
What is this, China bashing month?
-- yeah, and they deserve it
how about posting about those too?
-- you see all those little columns on the left, like 'Apple', 'Hardware', 'Science'? Knock yourself out.
I'm critical of China
-- does not appear so
I think Google is the target here because they're supposedly the good guys. Now, they're censoring stuff, which is bad. Therefore, Google is bad.
....Flawless logic, to say the least, but most people just can't see farther than that. The culprit here is abviously the body that's saying "Censor or your search engine will not work here".
Ironically, I think google is probably on the best (realistic) track to stopping censorship. If they just decided to say "f*ck you we're not censoring", how is that making progress at all. If Chinese citizens have access to only a censored internet, then at least they'll have that. On top of that, there's always the Napster-esque system of making intentional misspellings to break search filters.
I think having the search engine in place, with particular filters, is the best way to act for now. Ideally, China should just open up and let google in as is, but don't expect that anytime soon. Until then, at least something is better than nothing. Furthermore, I think this will draw more attention to the filters themselves; what they're filtering. If just everything is blocked, then there's no clear target. On the other hand, removing Tiannemen (Tiananmen?) Square from an otherwise generic pool of results, they're creating more awareness of this issue.
Wow, a Monday morning rant. Sorry about that!
Don't apologize in the least. Personally, I don't even see that as a rant. I think it's a pretty well-structured argument. I agree with many of your ideals (I'm not registered as Republican, but typically vote that way for economic reasons; I hate the 'drivel that oozes up from the left'). Here's my view on all of this:
I also like to grab a shotgun and tromp around...
~Ok, this part is rant
there are objectively right and wrong things a human can do
~This is a sensitive issue, but I do agree with you. I think the trick is defining 'wrong', because ultimately, it is a perspective. Hell, even murder can be considered good. It (a) reduces overpopulation, and (b) decreases the amount of unlikeable people in the world (chances are, if you're murdered, you probably really pissed someone off and deserved it to SOME extent). I think you just have to define 'wrong' as something that a very high percentage (99.999%?) of people would agree is bad, ie, the disadvantages outweigh the advantages. Obviously, the loss of a human life is much worse than (a) and (b), according to more or less everybody. Hence, murder is generally considered 'wrong'.
I believe in the virtue of having freedom from others. That is, I feel everyone in the world should be able to do basically anything they want, such that they are not interfering with others' rights and virtues. Doing so, I feel is 'wrong'.
I think that definition should suffice. I feel it is wrong to impose your own morals on someone else. For example, abortion. I do not approve of the concept, but at the same time, I don't think it's proper to make a law against it, in lieu of people that feel otherwise. Hence, I am pro-choice. Along the same lines, I think it is nothing short of a crime to dictate as a state law that schools should ignore scientific evidence to teach creationism in schools.
Now science and engineering are the keys. I think they're more or less all that's fundamentally gotten better in the last 20, 50, hell, maybe 1000 years. Philosophy hasn't changed much since the days of the Greeks, and there haven't been many major advances in Mathematics since the days of Newton and Euler. One might say movies have gotten better since the 1950s-60s, but even that's mostly due to better special effects and lower costs of cameras, etc, but that's science and engineering. Personally, I don't feel that movies today are fundamentally better than Shakespeare's plays from the 1500s.
So, what has gotten better? I would say certainly computers and similar electronics. WW2 radios used crude, clumsy, and heavy vacuum tubes. Now we have electronics the size of your fingertips and smaller, and anti-noise. Clock speeds in computer processors, and optical storage have increased by thousands in 30 years (Is philosophy 1000x better than it was 30 years ago?). Chemistry, physics, and materials sciences have all gotten better by leaps and bounds, and very few of their basic principles have ever been proven wrong. The ideal gas law was improved upon (think Van der Waal), but hasn't been disproven per se.
Science and Engineering are really all that separate us from what we were 50 years ago. They are the roots of our society, and I think it is blantantly 'wrong' to discredit them in schools in favor of religion.
Mod parent up. That really is a great 'rant'.
"Many top game studios"
Could you be a little more specific?
Are you sure it's explicitly talking about the total of them? It seems like they were saying they found 2000-some viruses that affected EACH off those systems. Comparitively, that would be like saying that GM, Toyota, and Honda had more of the same design flaws that affected all three of them, than the Ford Pinto had alone.
In other words, I think it means that if you took any of UNIX, Linux, BSD, or OS X individually, any one of them would still have had many more flaws than any single version of windows. Of course, the article isn't very clear, so that's more of a speculation than anything.
On another note, I think the real issue here is how old the system is. Microsoft put out Windows XP in 2002 (officially anyway), and they haven't changed it since. There haven't been any features added at all (at least none significant); just bug fixes. Crappy popup blocking for IE, a crappy new firewall that harasses the user and still doesn't work real well.
On the other hand, at (about) the same time IIRC, Mac OS 10.1 came out. How many new vulnerabilities have they found explicitly in 10.1 in 2005? Certainly not that many. While some affected all versions previous to version 10.x, many of them were exclusive to 10.3. On the same note, many new *nix vulnerabilities only affected later versions.
So, to make a truly genuine comparison, you would have to pretend that *nix and Mac didn't put out any new versions since the tiime XP was released, and see just how many of the vulnerabilities applied to the older verisons. My prediction: not many.
What exactly does "EXCEPT AS REQUIRED BY LAW" mean? I'm not trying to troll here, but it looks like this may cause a problem whereever the exception covers. Anybody know where/when this might be?
I agree. I see the same thing very often with "I just found $20 in my wallet". I don't consider myself to be a (rabid) pessimist, but there definitely is no 'light' in getting your own stuff.
"Look on the bright side" is overrated. Don't look at any side, look at the whole goddamn thing.
Yeah, that's right Microsoft. Consumers ashould have the right to choose between .xls and .xlt to save their spreadsheet.
Don't you kill cops in that game? "Oh yeah, officer, did you ever play Drug Wars? No, I mean the old version, where you actually get automatic weaapons. You can kill the cops and get away with trafficking drugs."
Pepsi Kona was the original idea for this. It was text marketed. The stuff tasted like absolute crap (right up there with Crystal Clear Pepsi). I liked the idea of coffee flavored cola, but I didn't know anyone that could actually drink the stuff. Let's hope Coke does a better job.
That'll be great.... until they replace your toner with ink that doesn't dry fast enough.
This would be great... whenever someone's being an asshole to you, just punch in his phone number!
What exactly do you mean by "advertisement"?
It doesn't look like an ad to me, it actually looks like a list of features. Being top of the line, they're obviously good. If you seem to think that all these still aren't worth the money, then maybe you should say something like "it's good, but it's overpriced." John Dvorak seemed to 'advertise' the Xbox360, talking about how good it was, and how great of a step that was for Microsoft. I'm sure he was paid off big too, as opposed to something rational, say maybe he actually liked it.
To me, this actually looks like a good card. ATI has Linux support for most of their drivers, and I'm sure you can expect this within the next year or so. On the other hand, I'd be surprised if you used Linux a day in your life.
Maybe instead of say "this card sucks" you should be constructive and say something along the lines of "this card that I have is better, cheaper and has more features". Mod parent down. Nobody needs to hear from him.
non-sucky music will cost less
Sadly, I don't think anything will cost less than it does now.
I think it's right next to the "No, I'm not writing a fucking letter" button.