They want the net to be "client-server". They're the server. You're the client. How sweet. They can feed us all the propa...er...information we should need.
Of course, the Slashdot attitude towards this is predictable from three fronts. On the one hand, the geeks on Slashdot are more likely to be running a legitimate home server. On another, we wouldn't BE reading news on Slashdot it we didn't think the unwashed masses of monkeys at typewriters couldn't choke up the occasional sonnet.
Of course, the third is that there also are a lot of folk on Slashdot who hate the RIAA, care nothing for copyright, and worry about this principally as the RIAA addressing those who threaten their wallet. However, that doesn't justify the RIAA irritating the rest of who don't want nothing to do with their model, methods, OR music.
In this day and age of books, the internet, and other sources of information. What are people's excuse for still being ignorant?
By rought analogy: It's hard to access a poorly indexed 6 petabyte database over a 128 kilobit per second pipe using a 6 megahertz CPU with only a one kilobit cache and an 8 bit bus.
In other words: the vast amount in information, the inaccessible meta information, and individual human limits on percieving the available input forms, processing them, and storing information from them.
(Yes, humans are amazingly good at image processing. This however is mostly just support for a basic recognition routine that goes something like:
I'm 21. I've had computers since I was 8, regular internet since about 12. I assume most people do.
In your age bracket, probably. In higher age brackets (especially those who graduated college before September Never Ended), this is much less likely. It's also probably correlated to economic bracket. And frankly, a depressingly large lot of college students have trouble with constructing a basic Google keyword search.
Explaining the basics in clear language (including why we need such weird jargon) might help get people started on the right track instead of confusing themselves into a frenzy.
The most essential reason for regular expressions as opposed to fuzzy language ties fairly fundamentally into the Choamsky language heirarchy. I really don't think you want to inflict that on someone who hated algebra in high school. There are similar problems with explaining the need basis for other forms of jargon, and I don't know how much linguistic research has been done to explain why field-specific jargons develop, much less the hackish glee in developing it. Pointing them to Humpty Dumpty might give some insight into the hacker attitude towards words, and if nothing else is "Classic Literature" with entertaining properties.
I've found that people who can tolerate neither algebra nor Lewis Carroll generally make for a waste of time for anyone to try and explain much of anything to; they are generally incapable of either rational or irrational thought, and are of little more use than machines for turning food into feces.
There are at least two problems. First, to be iron-clad ethical (and legal), reverse engineering requires two teams, one who handle and examine the original, the other who build the knockoff. Tridge may not have maintained this clear line of separation, making his RE project much sketchier.
Second, there are potential issues with file corruption. According to the article, corruption has been an issue already when a user tweaked the ChangeSet file. If KnockOff(TM) causes corruption in BitKeeper files (a not unreasonable risk), who are the BitKeeper file owners going to come to for support? One guess. Their lack of enthusiasm is understandable given the article-provided context.
Lucasfilm employees are reportedly under a NDA not to discuss any possible filming of episodes VII-IX; also, Peter Mayhew's contract in episode III has been reliably stated to include an option clause for him reprising his role in 7 and 8.
Lucas may be growing senile, but he still knows to cover his bases.
I think part of the problem is that this trilogy doesn't have the "hero's journey" story line which people just naturally love.
Actually, it's the "Hero's Fall" that we're missing; there haven't been many good tragedies in the theatre for a long while, which is one factor ascribed to the immense success of Titanic. The I-III trillogy had the chance to set up a truly epic tragedy, with the bonus that the IV-VI trillogy thus transforms from a nifty drama to a saga of the redemption of the Skywalker family. Lucas hasn't failed outright in this yet; however, the irritating distraction of JarJar-- a character whose flaws are more comic than tragic-- diverts from the lofty goal of an Aristotelian epic.
True Tragedy is when the disaster arises from a single flaw in an otherwise superior character, or even soley from the virtues of the heroes, rather than their vices. JarJar's unmitigated idiocy makes for a grating note in what was potentially a smooth tragic symphony. We expect him to come to a bad end, and are merely disappointed at who he brings down with him. Alas, it appears that the real tragedy we will be seeing is not the Corruption and Fall of Anakin Skywalker, but the Corruption and Fall of George Lucas.
At least he'll have enough money to help drown his sorrows, no matter what happens....
I downloaded Bittorrent when "I, Robot" came out. Not so much because I wanted to see it, but because I wanted to be able to clearly explain why it sucked compared the the unmade Ellison version, without rewarding the makers with any money for their crime against humanity. Bittorrent is good for that. (Also good for pr0n, but I have better things to waste bandwidth on....)
Even with any bad reviews, though, I'll probably drop actual cash on a DVD. After all, the Beeb's TV version wasn't perfect, either.
It is impossible to obtain orbit without the use of solid fuel. Solid fuel is the only fuel with sufficient energy-to-mass ratio to accelerate both itself and a payload to the required altitude and velocity to attain orbit.
Time travel itself should be at the head of the list by a long way. To misquote Varley:
Time travel is so dangerous it makes H-bombs seem like perfectly safe gifts for children and imbeciles. With a bomb, what's the worst that can happen? A few million people die. With time travel, we can wipe out the entire universe.
Oh, and flying cars are covered under the FAA rules, as I recall.
I recall seeing a citation that many firms (especially outside the US) were using the health and materials safety data for graphite for CNTs, since nothing specific for carbon nanotubes existed. I've found at least one CNT data sheet online, but therein the phrase "TO THE BEST OF OUR KNOWLEDGE, THE CHEMICAL, PHYSICAL, AND TOXICOLOGICAL PROPERTIES HAVE NOT BEEN THOROUGHLY INVESTIGATED" raises alarm bells for me at least.
Nanomaterials are weird. Gold metal and even sub-hair thin wires are fairly inert; but nanodivide it, and it becomes highly reactive and much more toxic than lead. And we're putting nanocrystal zinc oxide into sunscreens these days. I'll use it anyway-- with my skin and family history, melanoma is the bigger risk. But nanomaterials exposure is already happening.
I don't see the relevance of your comment to the space shuttle, you're comparing two hugely different pieces of equipment for two vastly different purposes
The difference between the purposes of an airplane and shuttle isn't that vast. They're both intended to fly, and undergo similar sorts of stress and strain; the shuttle just gets bigger loads.
Leaving aside ultra-pure crystals, pretty much everything has cracks, whether nanoscale or macroscale. If you put the material under strain, the cracks grow. The bigger the crack, the faster it grows; linear for small cracks, but exponential (=rapid failure) past a threshold.... but the threshold can be suprisingly large. And, as the grandparent noted, there's been a lot of work put into studying how cracks grow and propogate for this reason. Google quickly turns up some moderately technical material that's still understandable if you've an elementary engineering background.
The short of it is, a crack isn't necessarily a, er, fatal flaw, if well below the critical size, and the engineering calculations needed to try and predict that critical size are expert level. Assuming that the engineers considered the erosive effects of re-entry along with the usual mechanical strain sources of propogation, I wouldn't worry.
Um, have you seen some of the Disney DVDs? Those and some other DVDs put you through 15 minutes of previews/ads before getting to the menu. Most of those won't let you skip them either.
You may not be able to skip them on the original disks, but you can rip that misfeature out if you get a DVD-Burner. There are also rumored to be players that do not implement the UOP restriction portion of the DVD format license, but since I picked up my DVD player (old RCA Div-X unit) 2nd hand for $15 and it works OK otherwise, and since I've got over twice as many DVD-* drives as computers, I'm sticking with "Fair Use" copying as my solution.
Having the FBI/Interpol/&c. legal warnings unskippable is fine in my book. But using user operation control to have the commercials unskippable isn't even vaguely acceptable. If I found more recent Disney releases watchable (enought that I encountered this regularly), then I'd probably be returning the originals as "Broken By Design" to cut out Disney's profit margin.
In the longer picture, I think that this is one more sign of the shortsighted exploitation attitiude that's been running the House of Mouse. Walt ran the shop with a long term outlook--his well preserved film library being the obvious example. He might well have enthusiastically praised having trailers on DVD's, with perhaps (as is not uncommon) every spare space on the disk used to add more in the "coming attractions" section to the DVD menu... but NOT a "watch this or else" section. I can almost hear Walt's ghost now: "There is a difference between subtle and stupid, and it is not subtle, stupid!"
It's very like the difference between targeted mass email that you can opt out of, and SPAM that you just can't avoid. It's generally bad for long term planning to annoy your customers, especially customers growing nostalgic for their own childhood just as they start getting sizeable disposable incomes, and start raising their own children... that is to say, the next generation of customers.
I have a Mac G5 with no PS/2 ports, so I have no choice but to use a USB keyboard.
I've been told that USB/PS2 port adapters (such as from Belkin) work under OSX, but I haven't experimentally verified this myself. You have to do a mental keymap (alt=option, WindowsKey=Command) or buy some stickers, but I've used USB PC Keyboards on Macs with no trouble.
There is no way a contactless smart card can be read from the distances they claim because of the power requirements for computation and the inverse square law.
Given Clarke's first law, I don't know if I'd go far as to say absolutely "there is no way...." However, you would be perfectly safe saying that "Massive engineering challenges remain before it could become possible for...."
Well, safe except for the PHB who hears that as "We can build one by Tuesday!"
If they government can read it for legitimate purposes, other people can read it for illegitimate purposes.
...if the chip responds without requiring authentication, as current RFID chips do. If the RFID simply spits out its random Mark One RFID number on initial query, and only provides Mark Two grade information on recieving it's RFID back in a RSA signed query, it might mitigate the problem.
Still, that would leave at least five system weaknesses obvious to even cursory glances:
1) It's still a Mark One RFID initial response; to prevent traffic analysis from making identifying USAssholes (yes, I can say that, I am one) trivial for hostile entities, there need to be a lot more responding Mark One RFIDs chirping away out there.
2) The specific query to the RFID could be played back. This might be solvable by inclusion of a random number component with in the initial response.
3) Every Mark Two RFID query generator needs to have the signature capability; the system is only safe until one is stolen and reverse engineered. Giving each it's own marine guard is liable to increase the expense of the deployment slightly. This might be obviated by an integrity-and-privacy secured uplink connection to a centralized query making server located at Fort Meade.
4) This still implies US passport holders should trust the US government to be able to secretly and silently find out exactly who they are at any time. Survey says...
5) I'm betting the computation for signature checks exceed the RFID remotely powered capabilities; I suspect they don't have much more than needed to play "Marco!".... "Polo!"
Does it still require an activation code of some kind or not ?
First, last I checked none of Microsoft's patches required sending an activation code yet in order to download; so far, they're just asking very nicely (for a corporate behemoth)-- you could still say no and download any of them.
Second, for this service pack Billy Boy doesn't even ask; just go to the URL given in the story, click the button and download. Or, just download directly once someone provides the karma-whoring direct file link for you.
I presume, of course, you're not silly enough to be asking if Win2K3Srv still requires a key to install in the first place....
So how long until the FCC jump or get pushed in to try to regulate the ratio of commercial time to content time on such downloads? And how long until someone tries bending that ruling to apply to ad-infested webpages?
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, the Slashdot attitude towards this is predictable from three fronts. On the one hand, the geeks on Slashdot are more likely to be running a legitimate home server. On another, we wouldn't BE reading news on Slashdot it we didn't think the unwashed masses of monkeys at typewriters couldn't choke up the occasional sonnet.
Of course, the third is that there also are a lot of folk on Slashdot who hate the RIAA, care nothing for copyright, and worry about this principally as the RIAA addressing those who threaten their wallet. However, that doesn't justify the RIAA irritating the rest of who don't want nothing to do with their model, methods, OR music.
I wonder if "conspiracy in restraint of trade" is relevant, here....
Speak for yourself. I seldom miss anything, and when I do, I know to aim more carefully and keep firing.
By rought analogy: It's hard to access a poorly indexed 6 petabyte database over a 128 kilobit per second pipe using a 6 megahertz CPU with only a one kilobit cache and an 8 bit bus.
In other words: the vast amount in information, the inaccessible meta information, and individual human limits on percieving the available input forms, processing them, and storing information from them.
(Yes, humans are amazingly good at image processing. This however is mostly just support for a basic recognition routine that goes something like:
While beyond most computers these days, and running really fast on the human brain, this is not quite what we call "higher thought".)In your age bracket, probably. In higher age brackets (especially those who graduated college before September Never Ended), this is much less likely. It's also probably correlated to economic bracket. And frankly, a depressingly large lot of college students have trouble with constructing a basic Google keyword search.
Explaining the basics in clear language (including why we need such weird jargon) might help get people started on the right track instead of confusing themselves into a frenzy.
The most essential reason for regular expressions as opposed to fuzzy language ties fairly fundamentally into the Choamsky language heirarchy. I really don't think you want to inflict that on someone who hated algebra in high school. There are similar problems with explaining the need basis for other forms of jargon, and I don't know how much linguistic research has been done to explain why field-specific jargons develop, much less the hackish glee in developing it. Pointing them to Humpty Dumpty might give some insight into the hacker attitude towards words, and if nothing else is "Classic Literature" with entertaining properties.
I've found that people who can tolerate neither algebra nor Lewis Carroll generally make for a waste of time for anyone to try and explain much of anything to; they are generally incapable of either rational or irrational thought, and are of little more use than machines for turning food into feces.
Second, there are potential issues with file corruption. According to the article, corruption has been an issue already when a user tweaked the ChangeSet file. If KnockOff(TM) causes corruption in BitKeeper files (a not unreasonable risk), who are the BitKeeper file owners going to come to for support? One guess. Their lack of enthusiasm is understandable given the article-provided context.
He could also be using the Mac... and thereby avoiding M$'s reverse engineering (badly) the windowing desktop interface as well.
Lucasfilm employees are reportedly under a NDA not to discuss any possible filming of episodes VII-IX; also, Peter Mayhew's contract in episode III has been reliably stated to include an option clause for him reprising his role in 7 and 8.
Lucas may be growing senile, but he still knows to cover his bases.
Actually, it's the "Hero's Fall" that we're missing; there haven't been many good tragedies in the theatre for a long while, which is one factor ascribed to the immense success of Titanic. The I-III trillogy had the chance to set up a truly epic tragedy, with the bonus that the IV-VI trillogy thus transforms from a nifty drama to a saga of the redemption of the Skywalker family. Lucas hasn't failed outright in this yet; however, the irritating distraction of JarJar-- a character whose flaws are more comic than tragic-- diverts from the lofty goal of an Aristotelian epic.
True Tragedy is when the disaster arises from a single flaw in an otherwise superior character, or even soley from the virtues of the heroes, rather than their vices. JarJar's unmitigated idiocy makes for a grating note in what was potentially a smooth tragic symphony. We expect him to come to a bad end, and are merely disappointed at who he brings down with him. Alas, it appears that the real tragedy we will be seeing is not the Corruption and Fall of Anakin Skywalker, but the Corruption and Fall of George Lucas.
At least he'll have enough money to help drown his sorrows, no matter what happens....
Oh, much like any other high explosives? If you're careful and not unlucky you'll get a great bang?
Even with any bad reviews, though, I'll probably drop actual cash on a DVD. After all, the Beeb's TV version wasn't perfect, either.
Remember: Rockets Are Wrong.
(Wikipedia Link on the gizmos....)
Unconvincing. In much of Arizona you could pitch a tent across the road and not be hit by a car.
Time travel is so dangerous it makes H-bombs seem like perfectly safe gifts for children and imbeciles. With a bomb, what's the worst that can happen? A few million people die. With time travel, we can wipe out the entire universe.
Oh, and flying cars are covered under the FAA rules, as I recall.
Nanomaterials are weird. Gold metal and even sub-hair thin wires are fairly inert; but nanodivide it, and it becomes highly reactive and much more toxic than lead. And we're putting nanocrystal zinc oxide into sunscreens these days. I'll use it anyway-- with my skin and family history, melanoma is the bigger risk. But nanomaterials exposure is already happening.
The difference between the purposes of an airplane and shuttle isn't that vast. They're both intended to fly, and undergo similar sorts of stress and strain; the shuttle just gets bigger loads.
Leaving aside ultra-pure crystals, pretty much everything has cracks, whether nanoscale or macroscale. If you put the material under strain, the cracks grow. The bigger the crack, the faster it grows; linear for small cracks, but exponential (=rapid failure) past a threshold.... but the threshold can be suprisingly large. And, as the grandparent noted, there's been a lot of work put into studying how cracks grow and propogate for this reason. Google quickly turns up some moderately technical material that's still understandable if you've an elementary engineering background.
The short of it is, a crack isn't necessarily a, er, fatal flaw, if well below the critical size, and the engineering calculations needed to try and predict that critical size are expert level. Assuming that the engineers considered the erosive effects of re-entry along with the usual mechanical strain sources of propogation, I wouldn't worry.
On the bright side, this is from the BBC, so it's not the US educational system at fault. =)
You should get that NDA in writing... and wear clothes suited for the job. =)
You may not be able to skip them on the original disks, but you can rip that misfeature out if you get a DVD-Burner. There are also rumored to be players that do not implement the UOP restriction portion of the DVD format license, but since I picked up my DVD player (old RCA Div-X unit) 2nd hand for $15 and it works OK otherwise, and since I've got over twice as many DVD-* drives as computers, I'm sticking with "Fair Use" copying as my solution.
Having the FBI/Interpol/&c. legal warnings unskippable is fine in my book. But using user operation control to have the commercials unskippable isn't even vaguely acceptable. If I found more recent Disney releases watchable (enought that I encountered this regularly), then I'd probably be returning the originals as "Broken By Design" to cut out Disney's profit margin.
In the longer picture, I think that this is one more sign of the shortsighted exploitation attitiude that's been running the House of Mouse. Walt ran the shop with a long term outlook--his well preserved film library being the obvious example. He might well have enthusiastically praised having trailers on DVD's, with perhaps (as is not uncommon) every spare space on the disk used to add more in the "coming attractions" section to the DVD menu... but NOT a "watch this or else" section. I can almost hear Walt's ghost now: "There is a difference between subtle and stupid, and it is not subtle, stupid!"
It's very like the difference between targeted mass email that you can opt out of, and SPAM that you just can't avoid. It's generally bad for long term planning to annoy your customers, especially customers growing nostalgic for their own childhood just as they start getting sizeable disposable incomes, and start raising their own children... that is to say, the next generation of customers.
OK, I'll go find my happy pills now....
...I don't think Microsoft will accept payment of the judgement by credit card or PayPal.
I've been told that USB/PS2 port adapters (such as from Belkin) work under OSX, but I haven't experimentally verified this myself. You have to do a mental keymap (alt=option, WindowsKey=Command) or buy some stickers, but I've used USB PC Keyboards on Macs with no trouble.
Given Clarke's first law, I don't know if I'd go far as to say absolutely "there is no way...." However, you would be perfectly safe saying that "Massive engineering challenges remain before it could become possible for...."
Well, safe except for the PHB who hears that as "We can build one by Tuesday!"
Still, that would leave at least five system weaknesses obvious to even cursory glances:
1) It's still a Mark One RFID initial response; to prevent traffic analysis from making identifying USAssholes (yes, I can say that, I am one) trivial for hostile entities, there need to be a lot more responding Mark One RFIDs chirping away out there.
2) The specific query to the RFID could be played back. This might be solvable by inclusion of a random number component with in the initial response.
3) Every Mark Two RFID query generator needs to have the signature capability; the system is only safe until one is stolen and reverse engineered. Giving each it's own marine guard is liable to increase the expense of the deployment slightly. This might be obviated by an integrity-and-privacy secured uplink connection to a centralized query making server located at Fort Meade.
4) This still implies US passport holders should trust the US government to be able to secretly and silently find out exactly who they are at any time. Survey says...
5) I'm betting the computation for signature checks exceed the RFID remotely powered capabilities; I suspect they don't have much more than needed to play "Marco!".... "Polo!"
First, last I checked none of Microsoft's patches required sending an activation code yet in order to download; so far, they're just asking very nicely (for a corporate behemoth)-- you could still say no and download any of them.
Second, for this service pack Billy Boy doesn't even ask; just go to the URL given in the story, click the button and download. Or, just download directly once someone provides the karma-whoring direct file link for you.
I presume, of course, you're not silly enough to be asking if Win2K3Srv still requires a key to install in the first place....
So how long until the FCC jump or get pushed in to try to regulate the ratio of commercial time to content time on such downloads? And how long until someone tries bending that ruling to apply to ad-infested webpages?