The same things happens today when I try to open a.avi file and find out I need the latest and greatest codec from Windows Media Player in order to view it.
Well, you obviously already realize this, but.avi is a container, not an encoding method. It sounds like you want to tie container and codec together, or at least name the file based on the codec in use rather than the container.
On the down side, just because it says.avi, that doesn't mean your system has the codecs needed to play whatever it is.
On the plus side, it means we're still using.avi, years later -- because it's not tied to any specific codecs that will probably become obsolete over time.
If we ever created a truly sentient robot, it would have to be given rights. That's not debatable. Of course it's debatable! And we as a race would spend years debating it!
And it's not like there isn't precedent for us NOT giving sentient beings rights. Black people are sentient, are they not? And yet not that many years ago, they basically had no rights in this country. And like the other poster suggested, there are other relatively intelligent creatures on this planet such as dolphins and gorillas. I don't hear a big cry to make sure that gorillas and dolphins are provided with `human' rights.
Though perhaps sapience or self-awareness would be better things to look at then sentience? I mean, my dog fits the definition of sentient -- she experiences sensations and feelings.
I'd be surprised if any mobo manufacturer in this day and age required DOS to upgrade the BIOS.
So, you've got *one* motherboard that can update the BIOS without using DOS, and from that you've extrapolated from that you'd be surprised that any motherboard requires DOS to do it?
Well, even if every motherboard in the world can be updated without booting DOS, that doesn't mean that your peripheral cards can. If you've got some spiffy new RAID/SCSI/graphics/whatever card (or spiffy old one!), the odds are it's firmware updating software runs in DOS rather than something else. (And having it run only in Windows is no good -- what if this machine doesn't run Windows? It would be really unfortunate if you had to install Windows just to update some firmware on a PCI card.)
But it's not a problem, as all the x86-64 cpus run DOS just fine. For the server boxes that have Itanium 2s that can only run IA-64 code, I don't know how they update their BIOS, but they must offer something. And if you have any PCI firmware cards that need their firmware updated, you'll probably do it on an IA-32 or x86-64 machine that can run it's likely DOS-based upgrader. (And if the PCI card only works on Itanium boxes, the vendor will probably provide some other method than a DOS based upgrader if the firmware often does need upgrading.)
Indeed -- you can. And often you have to, to upgrade BIOSs and firmwares and such.
I was thinking that maybe the Itanium couldn't run 16 bit code -- but apparently it has no trouble doing it -- it just does it really slowly. The Itanium 2 would seem to have gotten rid of the x86 compatibility in hardware (and moved it to software instead) so I don't see how it could run DOS. But all of the x86_64 cpus out there should have no trouble running DOS programs.
Now for my final paper in the sec class I interviewed a guy who did physical security for a company for years, and he had some nifty stories. So share them! They sound entertaining!
Yow! I remember hacking a fix together for the AIX hole over a decade ago with a little shell script that I threw together.
A similar fix would probably work now if anybody cared, but I imagine Sun will fix the hole properly quickly, probably more quickly than IBM fixed theirs back when, and not many people have telnet enabled on Internet-facing machines anymore anyways, but even so, it's amazing to see basically the same hole over ten years later. Linux has had similar problems too -- I believe the root source was Julianne/John F. Haugh's shadow suite back then, and I wonder if it's still the original source here.
Re:Of course toys of some kinds are coming back
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The Return of Toys
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Personally, I'm surprised that we haven't seen more toys like this recently. In 1979 this sort of thing was quite expensive, but now it should be dirt cheap to make something with much more functionality.
Re:Of course toys of some kinds are coming back
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The Return of Toys
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· Score: 1
Have him switch over to glow fuel powered R/C vehicles. Charge up the batteries for the receivers and he can get a good 45 minutes+ out of them. Right now electric power in R/C is expensive for the high end stuff - batteries are anywhere from $30 to $300+.
The R/C toys they're talking about are not high-end. They're low-end, with little (and therefore relatively cheap) batteries. (Cheap compared to the batteries I buy for my bigger planes, anyways!)
And LiPos really aren't used much in R/C cars, at least not yet -- most of the high end electric R/C cars still use the basic 6 cell subC pack, which can be had for as little as $9 each. (Yes, you can spend a lot more for better batteries, but these are fine for toodling around.)
You have to realise that game companies don't have a lot of money to spend on legal defence, and they're playing it very safe.
*Some* game companies do. EA probably has *millions* they could spend on legal offense and defense, if they so chose. (Of course, they generally don't so chose, unless they think it'll make/save them even more money.)
But that's moot -- this FAA action/plan has *nothing* to do with using old planes in games. Perhaps you (and some previous posters) were thinking of the Military Toy Replica Act instead?
I'm not sure I share your conclusion that the uploaded version is a new work, though. Well, that's not really my conclusion.
I don't think it would qualify as a *new* work (unless it was manually edited or retouched, as you suggested) but since the purpose of the Berne convention was to make sure everything was copywrited unless explicitly put into the public domain, I'm inclined to think that by being published (uploaded to youtube), especially by the owner of the item, would cause it (the uploaded version) to be copyrighted, even if the original wasn't before. (But to be sure, adding a `Copyright 1945 Grandma' message would be a good idea.)
However, if the act of scanning the photo automatically makes a new work, then it's under copyright for another 120+ years, beginning 2006.
Clearly it doesn't, not if you merely scan the photo. And even if you do retouch it, then you have a copyright on the retouched version, but the original photo will not have the same copyright. But if you convert an old video (on film!) to a computer file and then upload it, there's probably going to be some editing involved, so it seems pretty clear that the new version should be covered.
This sounds like a job for an intellectual property lawyer! (And I'm not a lawyer at all.) But really, it's easier to just add the copyright notice somewhere rather than to consult a lawyer.
You're right, it's an interesting question, and the answer isn't immediately obvious.
I wonder if by firing off a C&D letter you're committing perjury if you're found to be wrong? That would certainly be a nice interpetation, but so far I know of nobody ever getting prosecuted for this sort of thing.
They must have gotten carried away. Quick guys, copyright your wedding videos and personal amateur porn before they do! To be fair, they're probably already copyrighted. That is, unless 1) you've explicitly released them into the public domain, or 2) created them before 1989. (And I'm not sure exactly what `created' means in this context. Perhaps you filmed it in 1945, but didn't upload it to youtube until 2006? (whoa!, that looks like those old photos of grandma! and what's that goat doing to her? ew!) The uploaded version would clearly be a derivitave work, but I'm guessing that putting it into another tangible form would mean it's automatically copyrighted right then even if it wasn't originally.)
Obviously Viacom merely made a mistake. Expect an apology soon. DMCA being abused? That's hardly news anymore -- it happens every day. This would appear to be one step below that -- a simple mistake.
While this was said in jest, it just might make sense to use a laser system to clean this stuff out of orbit. In theory, if you placed a satellite in a high-ish orbit, then fired on the junk in such a way that part of the side facing away from the planet was vaporized, you could theoretically deorbit it. Also the side facing away from the direction it's moving, because reducing its V is another way to deorbit.
Hitting something with a laser does not signifigantly affect it's momentum, but I think I see what you're getting at -- if you vaporize one side of the object, the vapor expelled will push the object in the other direction. However, merely pushing a satellite `down' will not make it de-orbit unless you can push it all the way down to the atmosphere. Instead, it'll just make it's orbit more eccentric. `Reducing it's V' would be far more effective.
Of course, in order to hit something with a laser so intense that it vaporizes metal would require massive amounts of power (megawatts? gigawatts?) and a really really good tracking system to even let a few percent of the laser hit the satellite. I don't think this is really practical. And really, you'd have to vaporize most of a satellite to make any signifigant change in it's velocity -- you might as well just vaporize it all (and then you've got metal vapor orbiting the Earth, but that's less of a concern.)
Fortunately, if this stuff is in LEO, that means it's hitting bits of our atmosphere all the time, so the good news is that it'll come down eventually, with exactly how long it takes depending how low the orbit is, how eccentric the orbit is and the density and shape of the item itself. Really low stuff will come down in weeks, but stuff that's higher up might take many years, and if you go higher it might take hundreds of years.
I had the pleasure/pain of running a Dell laptop with XP and 128 MB of RAM and a 10 GB hd. It did work, if you didn't mind the fact that you could roast, grind, and brew a cup of coffee whilst it booted. Office XP nearly killed it. In conclusion, one man's "works just fine" is another man's unacceptable.
Except that my wife's doesn't take long to boot at all -- less than a minute. And Office (2000 I think) didn't hurt it at all. Well, she only used Word, so maybe some other Office components were worse.
It sounds like your `unacceptable' and my `works fine' really don't resemble each other very carefully at all.
sounds painful. XP should have at least 256MB of RAM. 128MB works but HURTSBADLYOMFGPLEASEMAKEITSTOP 128 MB isn't so bad.
My wife has a 266 MHz pII Dell laptop that runs XP with 128 MB of ram and a 6 GB hd. It works just fine. It didn't hurt badly at all, well, not any more than using Windows and Office normally does.
It's not a speed demon, but it runs IE and firefox just fine, Office works nicely, etc. In fact, the only thing it really couldn't do fast enough for her was run the Sims (the original and it's umpteen expansion packs.) It actually gave the Sims a nice try, but wasn't quite fast enough and so it would occasionally bog down. But other than that, it worked just fine.
Yes, but that only gets shills where you have another account that you use only for shilling.
That's not the only way shill bids happen -- it's just the most obvious. (Well, the second most obvious. The most obvious would be when the same account that's selling the item is bidding on the item -- but I'm guessing eBay's system prohibits that.)
Ultimately, shill bidding is difficult to detect (and even harder to prove) when done properly. But the evidence is that eBay doesn't really care, even when it's pretty obvious that it's shill bidding, especially when the offender sells a lot on eBay.
One of the best ways is to use a translucent lens cap and a fairly bright light that provides a fairly uniform illumination.
We used to just point the telescope up during the day and take a picture of a nice blue sky -- it worked very well. (Of course, this was 15 years ago, and maybe things have changed somewhat and there are better ways to do it now.)
(short of one-time scratch off keys, biometrics, or synced key generators - none of which are currently appropriate for a social networking site)
Assuming that your `synced key generators' are like what SecureID sells, I'd say they ARE appropriate for a social networking site. They're even relatively cheap -- PayPal is now offering something similar for only $5. (Of course, it might get a bit hairy if you had a different hardware authenticator for each web site, but if myspace really was serious about security, they could offer it to people that felt the need for it and it would be appropriate now.)
The only real success I can think of in the Star Trek gaming world would be the Starfleet Command series. It's only slightly less complex than flying a 747, but it's as close to operating a real starship in combat as anyone will ever get. Agreed -- they were pretty good. The third one toned down the complexity quite a bit (alas, this was not a good thing.)
As for `as close to operating a real starship in combat', well, a starship in the Star Trek universe, maybe. Beyond that, we shall see.
The Elite Forces games were pretty run-of-the-mill FPS games -- not bad, but not great.
Actually, I sort of liked Star Trek Armada -- it was your basic RTS -- in space -- but it was fun.
Bridge Commander was sort of fun. Not great, but not bad.
Ok, it seems I liked a lot of the Star Trek games. I guess that makes my opinions suspect...
Seriously: They should sell adult games the same way they sell adult magazines -- clearly labelled and with a wrapper around them, unless they're in an adults only area.
If by "adult games" you mean hentai games and the like, okay. But if you're talking about GTA, that's ridiculous. We have no problem selling R-rated movies in plain sight, with content just as "bad" as any M-rated game. I don't see the difference. Personally, I don't see why sex is seen as so much more damaging for people to see (or act out, in the case of games) than violence.
As for the few hentai games I've tried, what's really criminal about them is just how bad (i.e. low quality) they are. They think the `sex! boobies!' gimmick is a sutiable replacement for things like gameplay or a coherent story/plot.
Only in the sense of "a rotting zombie shambling onwards" is it "alive". Then I guess I'd better stop reading all the groups I follow, and stop posting to it several times a day!
And all those other people I see posting, they're the legions of the undead, right?
Usenet may not be as busy as it once was, but it's not dead or in danger of dying any time soon. So no film for you at 11.
If the did try to monetize it, they would find that many of their users would disappear.
Personally, I just see Craiglist as a web emulation of Usenet, with a few enhancements like the ability to easily include pictures, edit your posts (cancels haven't worked on Usenet in a long time,) flag offensive posts, a web interface (which makes it easier to use for the non-technically inclined) and management that's all together in one place so things can be changed (for good or bad) a lot quicker and easier than they can on Usenet.
They did a pretty good job with it, and did a really good job with only trying to charge the people who were really willing to pay -- which brought in enough money to pay for things (I assume) but not to alienate their users. If craiglist were to try and require that everybody have accounts and charge for them, most of their users would just leave, and somebody else would probably re-implement craiglist somewhere else.
In any event, Craiglist gives up a lot of the features of Usenet, but for the most part these are features that the users have decided that they don't need -- or at least they seem to have decided that with their feet, because they're using Craiglist rather than Usenet. (Perhaps they're not even aware of Usenet, or their ISP doesn't offer a news server because it thinks if it does, it has to offer alt.binaries.* But that's another matter entirely...)
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On the down side, just because it says
On the plus side, it means we're still using .avi, years later -- because it's not tied to any specific codecs that will probably become obsolete over time.
And it's not like there isn't precedent for us NOT giving sentient beings rights. Black people are sentient, are they not? And yet not that many years ago, they basically had no rights in this country. And like the other poster suggested, there are other relatively intelligent creatures on this planet such as dolphins and gorillas. I don't hear a big cry to make sure that gorillas and dolphins are provided with `human' rights.
Though perhaps sapience or self-awareness would be better things to look at then sentience? I mean, my dog fits the definition of sentient -- she experiences sensations and feelings.
Well, even if every motherboard in the world can be updated without booting DOS, that doesn't mean that your peripheral cards can. If you've got some spiffy new RAID/SCSI/graphics/whatever card (or spiffy old one!), the odds are it's firmware updating software runs in DOS rather than something else. (And having it run only in Windows is no good -- what if this machine doesn't run Windows? It would be really unfortunate if you had to install Windows just to update some firmware on a PCI card.)
But it's not a problem, as all the x86-64 cpus run DOS just fine. For the server boxes that have Itanium 2s that can only run IA-64 code, I don't know how they update their BIOS, but they must offer something. And if you have any PCI firmware cards that need their firmware updated, you'll probably do it on an IA-32 or x86-64 machine that can run it's likely DOS-based upgrader. (And if the PCI card only works on Itanium boxes, the vendor will probably provide some other method than a DOS based upgrader if the firmware often does need upgrading.)
I was thinking that maybe the Itanium couldn't run 16 bit code -- but apparently it has no trouble doing it -- it just does it really slowly. The Itanium 2 would seem to have gotten rid of the x86 compatibility in hardware (and moved it to software instead) so I don't see how it could run DOS. But all of the x86_64 cpus out there should have no trouble running DOS programs.
A similar fix would probably work now if anybody cared, but I imagine Sun will fix the hole properly quickly, probably more quickly than IBM fixed theirs back when, and not many people have telnet enabled on Internet-facing machines anymore anyways, but even so, it's amazing to see basically the same hole over ten years later. Linux has had similar problems too -- I believe the root source was Julianne/John F. Haugh's shadow suite back then, and I wonder if it's still the original source here.
Personally, I'm surprised that we haven't seen more toys like this recently. In 1979 this sort of thing was quite expensive, but now it should be dirt cheap to make something with much more functionality.
And LiPos really aren't used much in R/C cars, at least not yet -- most of the high end electric R/C cars still use the basic 6 cell subC pack, which can be had for as little as $9 each. (Yes, you can spend a lot more for better batteries, but these are fine for toodling around.)
But that's moot -- this FAA action/plan has *nothing* to do with using old planes in games. Perhaps you (and some previous posters) were thinking of the Military Toy Replica Act instead?
Clearly it doesn't, not if you merely scan the photo. And even if you do retouch it, then you have a copyright on the retouched version, but the original photo will not have the same copyright. But if you convert an old video (on film!) to a computer file and then upload it, there's probably going to be some editing involved, so it seems pretty clear that the new version should be covered.I don't think it would qualify as a *new* work (unless it was manually edited or retouched, as you suggested) but since the purpose of the Berne convention was to make sure everything was copywrited unless explicitly put into the public domain, I'm inclined to think that by being published (uploaded to youtube), especially by the owner of the item, would cause it (the uploaded version) to be copyrighted, even if the original wasn't before. (But to be sure, adding a `Copyright 1945 Grandma' message would be a good idea.)
This sounds like a job for an intellectual property lawyer! (And I'm not a lawyer at all.) But really, it's easier to just add the copyright notice somewhere rather than to consult a lawyer.
You're right, it's an interesting question, and the answer isn't immediately obvious.
Obviously Viacom merely made a mistake. Expect an apology soon. DMCA being abused? That's hardly news anymore -- it happens every day. This would appear to be one step below that -- a simple mistake.
While this was said in jest, it just might make sense to use a laser system to clean this stuff out of orbit. In theory, if you placed a satellite in a high-ish orbit, then fired on the junk in such a way that part of the side facing away from the planet was vaporized, you could theoretically deorbit it. Also the side facing away from the direction it's moving, because reducing its V is another way to deorbit.
Hitting something with a laser does not signifigantly affect it's momentum, but I think I see what you're getting at -- if you vaporize one side of the object, the vapor expelled will push the object in the other direction. However, merely pushing a satellite `down' will not make it de-orbit unless you can push it all the way down to the atmosphere. Instead, it'll just make it's orbit more eccentric. `Reducing it's V' would be far more effective.Of course, in order to hit something with a laser so intense that it vaporizes metal would require massive amounts of power (megawatts? gigawatts?) and a really really good tracking system to even let a few percent of the laser hit the satellite. I don't think this is really practical. And really, you'd have to vaporize most of a satellite to make any signifigant change in it's velocity -- you might as well just vaporize it all (and then you've got metal vapor orbiting the Earth, but that's less of a concern.)
Fortunately, if this stuff is in LEO, that means it's hitting bits of our atmosphere all the time, so the good news is that it'll come down eventually, with exactly how long it takes depending how low the orbit is, how eccentric the orbit is and the density and shape of the item itself. Really low stuff will come down in weeks, but stuff that's higher up might take many years, and if you go higher it might take hundreds of years.
It sounds like your `unacceptable' and my `works fine' really don't resemble each other very carefully at all.
My wife has a 266 MHz pII Dell laptop that runs XP with 128 MB of ram and a 6 GB hd. It works just fine. It didn't hurt badly at all, well, not any more than using Windows and Office normally does.
It's not a speed demon, but it runs IE and firefox just fine, Office works nicely, etc. In fact, the only thing it really couldn't do fast enough for her was run the Sims (the original and it's umpteen expansion packs.) It actually gave the Sims a nice try, but wasn't quite fast enough and so it would occasionally bog down. But other than that, it worked just fine.
Yes, but that only gets shills where you have another account that you use only for shilling.
That's not the only way shill bids happen -- it's just the most obvious. (Well, the second most obvious. The most obvious would be when the same account that's selling the item is bidding on the item -- but I'm guessing eBay's system prohibits that.)
Ultimately, shill bidding is difficult to detect (and even harder to prove) when done properly. But the evidence is that eBay doesn't really care, even when it's pretty obvious that it's shill bidding, especially when the offender sells a lot on eBay.
As for `as close to operating a real starship in combat', well, a starship in the Star Trek universe, maybe. Beyond that, we shall see.
The Elite Forces games were pretty run-of-the-mill FPS games -- not bad, but not great.
Actually, I sort of liked Star Trek Armada -- it was your basic RTS -- in space -- but it was fun.
Bridge Commander was sort of fun. Not great, but not bad.
Ok, it seems I liked a lot of the Star Trek games. I guess that makes my opinions suspect ...
And all those other people I see posting, they're the legions of the undead, right?
Usenet may not be as busy as it once was, but it's not dead or in danger of dying any time soon. So no film for you at 11.
Personally, I just see Craiglist as a web emulation of Usenet, with a few enhancements like the ability to easily include pictures, edit your posts (cancels haven't worked on Usenet in a long time,) flag offensive posts, a web interface (which makes it easier to use for the non-technically inclined) and management that's all together in one place so things can be changed (for good or bad) a lot quicker and easier than they can on Usenet.
They did a pretty good job with it, and did a really good job with only trying to charge the people who were really willing to pay -- which brought in enough money to pay for things (I assume) but not to alienate their users. If craiglist were to try and require that everybody have accounts and charge for them, most of their users would just leave, and somebody else would probably re-implement craiglist somewhere else.
In any event, Craiglist gives up a lot of the features of Usenet, but for the most part these are features that the users have decided that they don't need -- or at least they seem to have decided that with their feet, because they're using Craiglist rather than Usenet. (Perhaps they're not even aware of Usenet, or their ISP doesn't offer a news server because it thinks if it does, it has to offer alt.binaries.* But that's another matter entirely ...)
(It's currently sitting as a dumb terminal on a headless SGI. MSDOS boots up to ckermit ...)