The attitude should surely be, "if you ain't got nothing to hide..." ; it's what they are increasingly coming to expect from the rest of us.
While I can understand that police are probably lairy of being photographed, because it's probably so easy to make mistakes in police procedure that if you were to record their activities, a good lawyer could probably shoot down a large percentage of arrests and whatnot... it does not inspire confidence that a public organisation who allegedly operate inside the law, to uphold the law, should feel it necessary to use their power to conceal the detailed workings of their activities.
Anyone able to point a finger at the legislation that enables them to do this? Or is there none, and they are just overstepping the mark?
As pointed out above, most of the people who were prepared to download this beta software for free probably already have. Now this announcement that a charge will be imposed will have 2 effects.
Before wednesday, there will be a mad scrabble to download it by many people who previously couldn't be bothered. By putting a deadline on the charge, MS have imposed a sense of urgency on the whole thing.
After wednesday, anyone who pays for it to be downloaded is far more likely to give it a proper testing-out, rather than just opening a document or two and verifying that it doesn't crash. We value things more when we pay for them.
There's the aforementioned use of credit card details to build up an interested customer base (and I wouldn't be surprised if there was an accompanying list of people to put through a BSA audit should they not subsequently purchase an upgrade).
I wouldn't be surprised if $1.50 wasn't even enough to cover the cost of implementing a charging infrastructure ; after transaction charges, server costs, implementation, project documentation, etc.
If this is enforced, it makes certain classes of computer use far easier to track, amongst which is the posting of materials deemed politically distasteful ; you can't hide from the government in a library any more.
I'd point out that this makes the USA seem more and more like a police state, but I'd guess that the majority of slashdotters had already noticed.
Starship Titanic was awful, and so was the tie-in novel.
The best writer I am aware of having written outside and inside the media of games is Warren Spector, who did the backplot of Hostile Waters, one of the few games that can actually make me cry. (no, really. Even though the game is a 3rd person RTS/shootemup, a cutscene composed almost entirely of a bunch of national flags burning made me cry, because the dialog was so well executed, by the writer, and by the narrator, the peerless Tom Baker).
It's a "Beacon Bar" not a "Sensor Bar"
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I'd guess this is how it actually works ;
The "sensor bar" sounds more like a "beacon bar". I'm guessing that it has two flashing infrared LEDs, one at each end (or maybe more, they might be lying). Each LED flashes in a different pattern (or is maybe a cluster of LEDs in a different pattern, a "barcode" maybe).
The remote has a megapixel monochrome IR CCD in it. This picks up the position of the LEDs in the "sensor bar". After calibration, the position and inclination of the lights in the image can be used to calculate the vector of your aim.
This is a nice, elegant way of doing it. It's akin to the existing way that TV-aiming devices work (lightguns), except....
A lightgun works by picking up a single pixel of light, and relaying the timing to the base unit. The base unit uses it's knowledge about how far down the TV fram the electron beam is to determine the position of the lightgun.
With a lightgun, the positioning relies heavily on scan-timing on a CRT. Given the modern display market, a consistent method of detecting scan-timings varies from difficult (100MHz flicker-free displays) to impossible (LCD displays).
With a lightgun, you have to have a "flash" to enable the thing to work ; this is why House of the Dead and the like all flash the screen when you shoot - so the lightgun can pick up it's position regardless of whether it's aimed at a dark pixel or not.
This is a serious improvement on lightgun technologies. You can play Zelda without seeing unrealistic muzzle flash when shooting a bow. It should work with ANY display technology, not just scanning-raster, as long as it doesn't get too large (and even then, you should be able to move the "beacon" bar closer to you to enable larger screens with equal angular accuracy). The horizontal accuracy should be much better. And I'll wager it improves the battery life, because the remote doesn't constantly have to emit radiation at the sensor bar, it just has to capture an image.
Bah, tried to do an ascii art of how I think it works, but the lamo-filter won't let it past.
Ok, I have to reply so that the chance of this moron being taken seriously is lower.
i) Your body is not the only component of the circuit, and hence does not provide all the resistance. Some is provided by the battery itself.
ii) The current that a battery can produce varies immensely
iii) The 220V alternating current of a mains electrical socket is not the same as the direct current of a battery.
The "internal resistance" of traditional alkaline batteries is fairly high, which is why you can "tongue test" a 9V brick and just feel a slightly uncomfortable tingle. The current being run across your tongue is low.
The internal resistance of a 12V lead-acid car battery is much lower, and it can produce a much higher current, because the internal components have a much higher surface area for the electrochemical reactions involved. You didn't think all that extra bulk went into providing an extra 3 volts, right? A car battery can provide you with severe burns, because it can spit enough current to start a car.
The internal surface area in a car battery is NOTHING compared to one of these babies though. The area is the key to how they would work. A nano-cap would be able to discharge itself just as quickly as it charged, which means, say, the discharge from a 1kWh unit would be a similar amount of energy to having 60 cups of boiling water poured on you simultaneously.
The reason a 220V jolt from an AC unit didn't kill you was because AC alternates 60 times a second. Just as soon as the charge has travelled a little distance one way, it wants to travel another. The current is thus basically nil - the major damaging effects from low-voltage AC current (yes, for AC, 220V is low) are more to do with the disruption of neuroelectrical processes.
A van der Graaf generator has huge voltage, but very little current. It is, in effect, another capacitor, but the charge it stores is very low. These are specifically designed for the charge to be high, like batteries, with the added wrinkle of extremely low internal resistance.
or...
No, the power company couldn't possibly throw enough at you. Ignore the "danger of death" signs and go suck a substation.
On the matter of bad packets ; this isn't a broadcast system as such - it's store-and-decrypt. The box is probably a standard DVB-playback hard-disk recorder. There would be plenty of scope for re-grabbing borked segments of the file from later broadcasts of the same stream, or to use a stream format that had greater redundancy built in.
Given the involvement of Disney and their obsession with the perception of perfection, I'd say this was likely.
It's also likely that the phoneline will be required to download new decryption keys to the box on a regular basis. Each movie is probably encrypted with its own key.
Hell, even the protocol is probably going to be encrypted up the wazoo. Man-in-the-middle attacks are likely to be challenging on this.
I can't remember, but I think this version doesn't work properly across horizontally split code windows ; I've got a patched version lurking around somewhere (I got the sourcecode and patched it).
That has to be the worst idea EVER for the suggested use of "fooling around in computers".
The only way those things work is by having a *seriously* powerful magnet in them. A big powerful magnet near my extraordinarily-subtle-interplay-of-magnetic-force s powered data storage device? No thanks.
This is a valid point, particularly if you are older. The sense of hearing diminishes with age, which should mean that older people are more tolerant of loud volumes. If "old" people are finding the concert unpleasantly loud, the chances are that it's actually doing permanent damage to your hearing.
In retrospect, mabe it's so loud because the sound man has been cavalier with his hearing, and needs volume 11 to even hear the sound-check.....
I find the same with movie theatres. Somewhere along the line, someone made it company policy that their wonderful new THX-certified sound sets weren't being used to the full unless the volume slider was jammed up against the stop. Either that, or it's a rather transparent attempt to overwhelm your sensorium during the advert trailers. Or they have adopted it to compensate for the increasingly rude and noisy moviegoers we have these days (damn, I sounded old there).
It's still too loud. waves walking-stick agressively
I can't for the life of me imagine how they are going to enforce this except with Trusted Computing. The only way that they are going to prevent someone
* Imaging the drive
* Installing another OS of their choice
* Using the computer as much as they like
* When the agreement ends, replace the drive image.
Ok, if you sick a lawyer on the poor user, you can sting them for their minimum 800 hours fees. But the only way they could prevent the above is by locking the machine down at the BIOS level with TCPM support.
1) Advertise medical MRIs to people wishing to loose weight 2) Charge them for a full MRI, but just put them through a big polo-mint shaped hole that goes "bang-bang-bang" 3) Show them a pre-shot MRI from a fat person. Talk up the arterial plaque 4) Motivated by imminent death, patient loses weight. Patient is happy. 5) Profit!
Networks will disable various features on the phone at their whim.
In the case of Bluetooth, one of the most common things to disable is the OBEX (object exchange) protocol, which prevents standard computer drivers from exchanging files with the phone, or other profiles like the modem profile, the headset profile, etc.
This ties you into using the provider-supplied software, which is often a crippleware "lite" piece of crap ; surprise, you can upgrade it for *only $39.99*!
So having a Bluetooth transceiver in your phone is not necessarily synonymous with having Bluetooth features, depending on your provider.
Conversely, I found Gentoo to be the most informative of distros for learning Linux.
I do have a certain level of familiarity with computers, having been a developer on Windows for some years, as well as a hobbyist back as far as the Commodore PET.
Because installing Gentoo (especially from Stage 1) requires you to hit the command-line and tinker with things, it's a great way to learn Linux in general. After basing my MythTV box on Gentoo, I'd gone from a n00b to someone who "got" most of the underlying workings of the OS and had even contributed a small patch to the kernel.
we're the only species on the planet with the capability to reduce and possibly reverse the cycle.
I'd reword that as "we are the only species on the planet with the conscious capability..."
Other species regulate the climate. Plants, in particular, could respond to climatic change by growing vigourously in the higher CO2 atmposhere and greater heat, sequestering the carbon and counteracting the greenhouse effect of CO2.
For a simple treatment of the concept of ecological homeostasis, see Daisyworld
This brings the real problem into sharper focus : Human "Free Will" and ingenuity. As Agent Smith says, every other mammal achieves an instinctive balance with its environment. He neglects to mention the mechanism ; typically, the animal will run up against the limitations of its habitat, and population regulation will occur through competition and scarcity of resources. Human intelligence makes our effective habitat the entire globe, and our only comptetition is each other. So unless we manage to develop a more global worldview, we are going to run up against the limitations of the entire globe, probably damaging the ecosystem further in the process, and fighting resource wars along the way.
Some would say that we are already exceeding the limits of the globe, and that it's only a matter of time before the pain really kicks in.
Since humans are the only species that effects the ecosystem with technology, and those effects are uniquely powerful in comparison to biological effects, it follows that the only comparable opposing force is also human technology. Here's hoping that we learn to distinguish the price of intervention from the cost of apathy, before it's too late.
I mean, if the White House, and by extension, Bush, are concealing research that the US public paid for, why can't you just fucking fire him.... he is in effect, lying to you.
Ok, this is not a realistic viewpoint. It's rather naeive. But it's how I would feel if he was running my country.
Slashdot Mirror
The attitude should surely be, "if you ain't got nothing to hide..." ; it's what they are increasingly coming to expect from the rest of us.
While I can understand that police are probably lairy of being photographed, because it's probably so easy to make mistakes in police procedure that if you were to record their activities, a good lawyer could probably shoot down a large percentage of arrests and whatnot... it does not inspire confidence that a public organisation who allegedly operate inside the law, to uphold the law, should feel it necessary to use their power to conceal the detailed workings of their activities.
Anyone able to point a finger at the legislation that enables them to do this? Or is there none, and they are just overstepping the mark?
As pointed out above, most of the people who were prepared to download this beta software for free probably already have. Now this announcement that a charge will be imposed will have 2 effects.
There's the aforementioned use of credit card details to build up an interested customer base (and I wouldn't be surprised if there was an accompanying list of people to put through a BSA audit should they not subsequently purchase an upgrade).
I wouldn't be surprised if $1.50 wasn't even enough to cover the cost of implementing a charging infrastructure ; after transaction charges, server costs, implementation, project documentation, etc.
If this is enforced, it makes certain classes of computer use far easier to track, amongst which is the posting of materials deemed politically distasteful ; you can't hide from the government in a library any more.
I'd point out that this makes the USA seem more and more like a police state, but I'd guess that the majority of slashdotters had already noticed.
Starship Titanic was awful, and so was the tie-in novel.
The best writer I am aware of having written outside and inside the media of games is Warren Spector, who did the backplot of Hostile Waters, one of the few games that can actually make me cry. (no, really. Even though the game is a 3rd person RTS/shootemup, a cutscene composed almost entirely of a bunch of national flags burning made me cry, because the dialog was so well executed, by the writer, and by the narrator, the peerless Tom Baker).
http://barcodebattler.co.uk/faq.php
The "sensor bar" sounds more like a "beacon bar". I'm guessing that it has two flashing infrared LEDs, one at each end (or maybe more, they might be lying). Each LED flashes in a different pattern (or is maybe a cluster of LEDs in a different pattern, a "barcode" maybe).
The remote has a megapixel monochrome IR CCD in it. This picks up the position of the LEDs in the "sensor bar". After calibration, the position and inclination of the lights in the image can be used to calculate the vector of your aim.
This is a nice, elegant way of doing it. It's akin to the existing way that TV-aiming devices work (lightguns), except....
This is a serious improvement on lightgun technologies. You can play Zelda without seeing unrealistic muzzle flash when shooting a bow. It should work with ANY display technology, not just scanning-raster, as long as it doesn't get too large (and even then, you should be able to move the "beacon" bar closer to you to enable larger screens with equal angular accuracy). The horizontal accuracy should be much better. And I'll wager it improves the battery life, because the remote doesn't constantly have to emit radiation at the sensor bar, it just has to capture an image.
Bah, tried to do an ascii art of how I think it works, but the lamo-filter won't let it past.
LetsBuyIt.com is such an entity.
i) Your body is not the only component of the circuit, and hence does not provide all the resistance. Some is provided by the battery itself. ii) The current that a battery can produce varies immensely iii) The 220V alternating current of a mains electrical socket is not the same as the direct current of a battery.
The "internal resistance" of traditional alkaline batteries is fairly high, which is why you can "tongue test" a 9V brick and just feel a slightly uncomfortable tingle. The current being run across your tongue is low.
The internal resistance of a 12V lead-acid car battery is much lower, and it can produce a much higher current, because the internal components have a much higher surface area for the electrochemical reactions involved. You didn't think all that extra bulk went into providing an extra 3 volts, right? A car battery can provide you with severe burns, because it can spit enough current to start a car.
The internal surface area in a car battery is NOTHING compared to one of these babies though. The area is the key to how they would work. A nano-cap would be able to discharge itself just as quickly as it charged, which means, say, the discharge from a 1kWh unit would be a similar amount of energy to having 60 cups of boiling water poured on you simultaneously.
The reason a 220V jolt from an AC unit didn't kill you was because AC alternates 60 times a second. Just as soon as the charge has travelled a little distance one way, it wants to travel another. The current is thus basically nil - the major damaging effects from low-voltage AC current (yes, for AC, 220V is low) are more to do with the disruption of neuroelectrical processes.
A van der Graaf generator has huge voltage, but very little current. It is, in effect, another capacitor, but the charge it stores is very low. These are specifically designed for the charge to be high, like batteries, with the added wrinkle of extremely low internal resistance.
or...
No, the power company couldn't possibly throw enough at you. Ignore the "danger of death" signs and go suck a substation.
On the matter of bad packets ; this isn't a broadcast system as such - it's store-and-decrypt. The box is probably a standard DVB-playback hard-disk recorder. There would be plenty of scope for re-grabbing borked segments of the file from later broadcasts of the same stream, or to use a stream format that had greater redundancy built in.
Given the involvement of Disney and their obsession with the perception of perfection, I'd say this was likely.
It's also likely that the phoneline will be required to download new decryption keys to the box on a regular basis. Each movie is probably encrypted with its own key.
Hell, even the protocol is probably going to be encrypted up the wazoo. Man-in-the-middle attacks are likely to be challenging on this.
I can't remember, but I think this version doesn't work properly across horizontally split code windows ; I've got a patched version lurking around somewhere (I got the sourcecode and patched it).
Magnatune, allofmp3.com (certainly "legally", don't know about bona-fidé-legit)
In fact, why isn't there a portal page which links to every known source of legitimately purchasable non-DRM digital content?
That has to be the worst idea EVER for the suggested use of "fooling around in computers".
e s powered data storage device? No thanks.
The only way those things work is by having a *seriously* powerful magnet in them. A big powerful magnet near my extraordinarily-subtle-interplay-of-magnetic-forc
This is a valid point, particularly if you are older. The sense of hearing diminishes with age, which should mean that older people are more tolerant of loud volumes. If "old" people are finding the concert unpleasantly loud, the chances are that it's actually doing permanent damage to your hearing.
In retrospect, mabe it's so loud because the sound man has been cavalier with his hearing, and needs volume 11 to even hear the sound-check.....
I find the same with movie theatres. Somewhere along the line, someone made it company policy that their wonderful new THX-certified sound sets weren't being used to the full unless the volume slider was jammed up against the stop. Either that, or it's a rather transparent attempt to overwhelm your sensorium during the advert trailers. Or they have adopted it to compensate for the increasingly rude and noisy moviegoers we have these days (damn, I sounded old there).
It's still too loud. waves walking-stick agressively
I can't for the life of me imagine how they are going to enforce this except with Trusted Computing. The only way that they are going to prevent someone
* Imaging the drive
* Installing another OS of their choice
* Using the computer as much as they like
* When the agreement ends, replace the drive image.
Ok, if you sick a lawyer on the poor user, you can sting them for their minimum 800 hours fees. But the only way they could prevent the above is by locking the machine down at the BIOS level with TCPM support.
1) Advertise medical MRIs to people wishing to loose weight
2) Charge them for a full MRI, but just put them through a big polo-mint shaped hole that goes "bang-bang-bang"
3) Show them a pre-shot MRI from a fat person. Talk up the arterial plaque
4) Motivated by imminent death, patient loses weight. Patient is happy.
5) Profit!
Networks will disable various features on the phone at their whim.
In the case of Bluetooth, one of the most common things to disable is the OBEX (object exchange) protocol, which prevents standard computer drivers from exchanging files with the phone, or other profiles like the modem profile, the headset profile, etc.
This ties you into using the provider-supplied software, which is often a crippleware "lite" piece of crap ; surprise, you can upgrade it for *only $39.99*!
So having a Bluetooth transceiver in your phone is not necessarily synonymous with having Bluetooth features, depending on your provider.
MythTV now doesn't treat the "buffer" very much different to the "recordings".
It will keep *everything* you watch, given enough disk space, and expire "Live" data faster than the "Recordings" to make room for new material.
You can also promote a live buffer to a recording by pressing record.
Conversely, I found Gentoo to be the most informative of distros for learning Linux.
I do have a certain level of familiarity with computers, having been a developer on Windows for some years, as well as a hobbyist back as far as the Commodore PET.
Because installing Gentoo (especially from Stage 1) requires you to hit the command-line and tinker with things, it's a great way to learn Linux in general. After basing my MythTV box on Gentoo, I'd gone from a n00b to someone who "got" most of the underlying workings of the OS and had even contributed a small patch to the kernel.
I'd reword that as "we are the only species on the planet with the conscious capability..."
Other species regulate the climate. Plants, in particular, could respond to climatic change by growing vigourously in the higher CO2 atmposhere and greater heat, sequestering the carbon and counteracting the greenhouse effect of CO2.
For a simple treatment of the concept of ecological homeostasis, see Daisyworld
This brings the real problem into sharper focus : Human "Free Will" and ingenuity. As Agent Smith says, every other mammal achieves an instinctive balance with its environment. He neglects to mention the mechanism ; typically, the animal will run up against the limitations of its habitat, and population regulation will occur through competition and scarcity of resources. Human intelligence makes our effective habitat the entire globe, and our only comptetition is each other. So unless we manage to develop a more global worldview, we are going to run up against the limitations of the entire globe, probably damaging the ecosystem further in the process, and fighting resource wars along the way.
Some would say that we are already exceeding the limits of the globe, and that it's only a matter of time before the pain really kicks in.
Since humans are the only species that effects the ecosystem with technology, and those effects are uniquely powerful in comparison to biological effects, it follows that the only comparable opposing force is also human technology. Here's hoping that we learn to distinguish the price of intervention from the cost of apathy, before it's too late.
Ouch! Did she use his auxilliary input port? I always thought she looked a bit butch....
another test
test
I mean, if the White House, and by extension, Bush, are concealing research that the US public paid for, why can't you just fucking fire him.... he is in effect, lying to you.
Ok, this is not a realistic viewpoint. It's rather naeive. But it's how I would feel if he was running my country.