Re:State of the art?
on
Shrek 2 How-To
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Sully's hair in Monsters, Inc. consisted of 2,320,413 computer-animated hairs. I'm not sure what you're criticizing - that they had individual hairs, or that you could see them? It looked pretty convincing to me, but I'm not a 3D animation aficionado.
The last thing I need is for someone else in the car to tell me how to drive, and then demand that I "hand over" control.
Sheesh.
Re:State of the art?
on
Shrek 2 How-To
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I saw Shrek 2 last night and was shocked at the quality of animation. The textures, facial expressions, and especially lighting were all amazing. Certain scenes or shots were a little less impressive, but even in looking at the first five minutes (Shrek2.com} you can see the improvements they've made since the last one. It's also worth noting that there were huge improvements between Toy Story and Toy Story 2.
Your claim, then, is that every single trademarked term should be a word that did not exist previous to the trademark inception?
My opinion differs from the current law, but that does not mean that I have no understanding of trademark law. Maybe you're just trolling, but you've obviously missed my point:
Windows is a industry-specific product of Microsoft. A trademark is designed to prevent companies from taking advantage of the brand value of their competitors. There is no damage in allowing a company to use a common word as its trademark name, provided that the word is not (at the time of trademark inception, anyway) a common term within the industry. That would prevent companies from trademarking words such as "mouse" or "keyboard" - but when the mouse was invented, I see no problem with that company selling it as a "Mouse (TM)"....
The fact that nobody seems to be in an uproar about the word "Apple" (other than The Beatles) says to me that your objections and flamebait is really just anti-Microsoft kneejerking, not objective analysis.
I know what you mean. After thinking about it for a while, I decided that I have to side with Microsoft here. It's true that they used a common word as their name, but Lindows was just riding the success of Windows. It was stupid for Lindows to use that name in the first place...like forming your company and calling it "Microsopht" - you're gonna get blasted and you won't win.
I have no problem with people using common words as their trademark names, as long as the trademarks are only defended within that industry. If you're selling a product such as, oh... an operating system, that's very different from a physical window. If you were to try and sell a physical window under the name "Lindow" then you might have more success. But in the operating system/software world, "Windows" is acceptable (to me). YMMV.
Try using a salt. A hash can't be reversed, but you can create a dictionary/brute list of hashed passwords and compare to that. A salt is a string that you can prepend/append to the password before hashing it. The salt is stored in plaintext in the DB (so you can re-create the hashed value). I use 10 or 12 digit alphanumeric salts - like "HB49BJA93KVD".... that would make your user's password (before hashing) change from "password" to "passwordHB49BJA93KVD"... since every salt is different (and random) you won't be able to easily glean anything from that hash.
Of course, a salt (or even your hash routine in many cases) is worthless if the actual DB is compromised! A hacker could use those salted hash values and still brute force them... or add his own user, or change your user's password, etc. It's only as secure as [your system | your user's passwords | the network | all of the above].
True, but if the attacker knew that your passwords followed a certain template (those two are 8 characters, all caps, and alternate consonant vowel starting with consonants) they become much easier to attack.
My applications rarely force complexity (sometimes they require numbers or other non-alpha characters). The instructions are always there, but users rarely ever follow them.
One of my not-so-critical applications (a web messageboard!) from a while back stored the passwords as plaintext in the DB (I now use hashing, thank you very much). I once looked at the password list just to see how complex people chose their passwords:
~60% had one word passwords of about 5 or 6 letters, no numbers 10% used their username (which has since been prohibited) 10% had complex passwords - stuff that made no sense to me and used numbers, non-alphanumeric characters, etc. The rest (a little more than 20%) had a word + a number, or something around those lines.
I did ask them all about password security, and I got two basic responses: My password is secure, or What does it matter?
Having enough evidence to believe they can convict me and actually convicting me are two different things. If you're not a terrorist, but there's enough evidence to convince the government that you are and try to make a case against you, perhaps they should be looking at you. Technically, you might be a false positive...but there will be enough reason to check you out.
If they don't find such evidence, and you're innocent anyway, what's the problem? You get removed from the list and marked as a false positive. Future changes to the algorithm will hopefully remove you from the results.
Better safe than sorry? Or better private than safe? Of course, such a statement would assume that this actually makes you "safer" - which continues to be debated.
Personally, I would lean toward having false positives. You can always run the results against other databases and find better/best matches. With some additional fact-checking implementation, I think they could rule out some false positives. It may be horribly inconvenient to be hassled with an investigation, but if people do their jobs (with gov't folks, sometimes that's all you can hope for!) then clearing your name shouldn't be too bad.
My biggest concern with this is that a false positive might be turned into a true positive if they consider certain things to be "terrorist activities" - like innocently providing information to someone who turns out to be a terrorist.
I almost never get telemarketing calls on my cell. I get a wrong number sometimes.
As soon as I get a telemarketer calling my cell phone, I demand their name, number, organization, address, etc. (as the DNC registry stipulates). Then I will inform them that I will be sending a bill to that address to recover the cost of the minutes that their company just used for me.
Once, I got a telemarketer and as soon as I realized who it was I informed them that it was a cell. She apologized profusely and voluntarily put me on their do-not-call list.
I'm in Indiana, so we have a stricter DNC anyway.:)
But people are willing to spend $1000 on a PC every three years that will also let them surf the web, do email, word processing - and play any number of games (often priced cheaper than console games). You don't have to buy two different consoles to play the different games - you just have one computer.
Console and PC gaming fluctuates - consoles drop prices and sales go up a bit. New PC games come out and sales go up. As more users have high speed internet in their homes and computer capabilities plateau, you'll have more people looking at the PC as a viable gaming platform.
Before you argue with the "plateau" comment, consider this: Half-life or Counter-strike can run on a Pentium III 400MHz, an AMD Athlon 1600, or a Pentium 4 3.0GHz. Users that buy a P4 now will have a machine that will likely handle games four or five years from now... with only a video card upgrade and maybe some RAM. Moore's law aside.
Go look at the site and ask yourself if any of the stuff on there is problematic. Do you have a problem with website cookies? Do you have a problem with web site logs? Do you have a problem with government employees getting jobs outside of the government?
These are things that google-watch complains about. Basically, it sounds a lot like desperate attacks on a company that has never disappointed me and has earned its success.
Google-watch is FUD (and not even good FUD, at that). Yet someone always seems to post a link to it, as if to say, "Google's not so great now, huh?"
With new games like Doom 3, Halo 2, Half-life 2, and Duke Nukem Forever, we'll have games to look forward to for at least the next decade.
Seriously, though... handheld gaming consoles suck - they can't compete with normal consoles for games or playability. Nobody wants to sit and play GTA3 for a hundred hours on a Gameboy-sized console.
Consoles can't compete with PCs, either. With a PC, you can upgrade the hardware or buy new games for your existing hardware (and try to get them to run). Playability for Halo on XBox is damn near impossible for someone who's grown up with mouse-look (for keyboard only control!) PC games.
The market will turn, rightfully, to PC games - and the subsequent mod scene (Counter-strike, for example).
So, with better special effects available, more money, and existing material as your base - you think they'll really go back to the 70s quality/style?
I don't expect a remake EVER. We're at least a hundred years away from such a thing, considering Lucas's remaining life and the fact that the copyright will remain active for an additional 70+ years (as someone else already noted).
To make such a remake commercially viable (which is the only way to get the necessary backing) they'd have to implement the ridiculous, effects-laden formula that we saw with Episodes I and II.
Sorry, I've read some of those before and just read a bunch of others. Most of that stuff is desperate/paranoid grasping at straws. I'm a very privacy and security oriented person, and nothing they describe is a problem for me.
Google uses cookies that expire in 30+ years? Why is that a problem? The site describes the cookies, but it assumes that you will have an immediate objection to such cookies. Cookies are not bad - if you think cookies are some inherent risk then you might as well log off permanently. Every web application I build relies on cookies - session values, for example.
Google employs former NSA "spooks." Are they saying that NSA employees shouldn't be able to get jobs elsewhere without fears that they are abusing your information?
I'm surprised that there aren't more people freaking out about this. If Gator (SPYWARE!)... sorry, "Claria" announced this software, we'd all be worried about the privacy issues. Even if Yahoo! offered it, I'd be skeptical. But Google seems to be so trusted and benevolent that the usual skepticism is notably lacking.
Google Toolbar for your browser doesn't appear to offer them any gain (other than bringing people into their search engine, of course). The data they pass back is opt-in.
Since this feature doesn't need an internet connection, I doubt that they would make it require one (by adding in data collection or ad delivery).
I use search on my system several times a week. Most of the time, I can just search the folder(s) I think the file will be in. But several years' worth of files amounts to a huge area to search.
I recently searched several hundred thousand files on my work machine. It took nearly 90 minutes to complete the search. I expect Google will be able to significantly improve upon that. They're one of the few companies that I really trust to do the right thing.
At least PETA won't raise a stink about them - they only care about the animals.
Reasons Why A Lawyer Won't Suffice 1. They're harder to train than rats. 2. They won't actually work, but they'll demand to be paid. 3. If there's a loophole, they'll find it. But they won't find any mines. 4. Lawyers won't die when you blow them up. You have to cauterize the wound, or two heads will grow in its place. 5. They're sure to object.
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Sully's hair in Monsters, Inc. consisted of 2,320,413 computer-animated hairs. I'm not sure what you're criticizing - that they had individual hairs, or that you could see them? It looked pretty convincing to me, but I'm not a 3D animation aficionado.
The last thing I need is for someone else in the car to tell me how to drive, and then demand that I "hand over" control.
Sheesh.
I saw Shrek 2 last night and was shocked at the quality of animation. The textures, facial expressions, and especially lighting were all amazing. Certain scenes or shots were a little less impressive, but even in looking at the first five minutes (Shrek2.com} you can see the improvements they've made since the last one. It's also worth noting that there were huge improvements between Toy Story and Toy Story 2.
Your claim, then, is that every single trademarked term should be a word that did not exist previous to the trademark inception?
My opinion differs from the current law, but that does not mean that I have no understanding of trademark law. Maybe you're just trolling, but you've obviously missed my point:
Windows is a industry-specific product of Microsoft. A trademark is designed to prevent companies from taking advantage of the brand value of their competitors. There is no damage in allowing a company to use a common word as its trademark name, provided that the word is not (at the time of trademark inception, anyway) a common term within the industry. That would prevent companies from trademarking words such as "mouse" or "keyboard" - but when the mouse was invented, I see no problem with that company selling it as a "Mouse (TM)"....
The fact that nobody seems to be in an uproar about the word "Apple" (other than The Beatles) says to me that your objections and flamebait is really just anti-Microsoft kneejerking, not objective analysis.
"I'm not sure who to root for this time"
I know what you mean. After thinking about it for a while, I decided that I have to side with Microsoft here. It's true that they used a common word as their name, but Lindows was just riding the success of Windows. It was stupid for Lindows to use that name in the first place...like forming your company and calling it "Microsopht" - you're gonna get blasted and you won't win.
I have no problem with people using common words as their trademark names, as long as the trademarks are only defended within that industry. If you're selling a product such as, oh... an operating system, that's very different from a physical window. If you were to try and sell a physical window under the name "Lindow" then you might have more success. But in the operating system/software world, "Windows" is acceptable (to me). YMMV.
Try using a salt. A hash can't be reversed, but you can create a dictionary/brute list of hashed passwords and compare to that. A salt is a string that you can prepend/append to the password before hashing it. The salt is stored in plaintext in the DB (so you can re-create the hashed value). I use 10 or 12 digit alphanumeric salts - like "HB49BJA93KVD".... that would make your user's password (before hashing) change from "password" to "passwordHB49BJA93KVD"... since every salt is different (and random) you won't be able to easily glean anything from that hash.
Of course, a salt (or even your hash routine in many cases) is worthless if the actual DB is compromised! A hacker could use those salted hash values and still brute force them... or add his own user, or change your user's password, etc. It's only as secure as [your system | your user's passwords | the network | all of the above].
True, but if the attacker knew that your passwords followed a certain template (those two are 8 characters, all caps, and alternate consonant vowel starting with consonants) they become much easier to attack.
My applications rarely force complexity (sometimes they require numbers or other non-alpha characters). The instructions are always there, but users rarely ever follow them.
One of my not-so-critical applications (a web messageboard!) from a while back stored the passwords as plaintext in the DB (I now use hashing, thank you very much). I once looked at the password list just to see how complex people chose their passwords:
~60% had one word passwords of about 5 or 6 letters, no numbers
10% used their username (which has since been prohibited)
10% had complex passwords - stuff that made no sense to me and used numbers, non-alphanumeric characters, etc.
The rest (a little more than 20%) had a word + a number, or something around those lines.
I did ask them all about password security, and I got two basic responses: My password is secure, or What does it matter?
I read an article the other day about a guy in Bloomington, IN that caught some cicadas, sauteed them in butter and garlic, and got hives.
So don't eat 'em. But burn away!
Having enough evidence to believe they can convict me and actually convicting me are two different things. If you're not a terrorist, but there's enough evidence to convince the government that you are and try to make a case against you, perhaps they should be looking at you. Technically, you might be a false positive...but there will be enough reason to check you out.
If they don't find such evidence, and you're innocent anyway, what's the problem? You get removed from the list and marked as a false positive. Future changes to the algorithm will hopefully remove you from the results.
Investigation != Arrests/detainment.
A lot of the objections to my original comment seem to miss the point - with a simple investigation you could probably clear a lot of false positives.
If they find enough evidence to arrest you, then you're not one of the false positives that we're concerned about.
Better safe than sorry? Or better private than safe? Of course, such a statement would assume that this actually makes you "safer" - which continues to be debated.
Personally, I would lean toward having false positives. You can always run the results against other databases and find better/best matches. With some additional fact-checking implementation, I think they could rule out some false positives. It may be horribly inconvenient to be hassled with an investigation, but if people do their jobs (with gov't folks, sometimes that's all you can hope for!) then clearing your name shouldn't be too bad.
My biggest concern with this is that a false positive might be turned into a true positive if they consider certain things to be "terrorist activities" - like innocently providing information to someone who turns out to be a terrorist.
I almost never get telemarketing calls on my cell. I get a wrong number sometimes.
:)
As soon as I get a telemarketer calling my cell phone, I demand their name, number, organization, address, etc. (as the DNC registry stipulates). Then I will inform them that I will be sending a bill to that address to recover the cost of the minutes that their company just used for me.
Once, I got a telemarketer and as soon as I realized who it was I informed them that it was a cell. She apologized profusely and voluntarily put me on their do-not-call list.
I'm in Indiana, so we have a stricter DNC anyway.
But people are willing to spend $1000 on a PC every three years that will also let them surf the web, do email, word processing - and play any number of games (often priced cheaper than console games). You don't have to buy two different consoles to play the different games - you just have one computer.
Console and PC gaming fluctuates - consoles drop prices and sales go up a bit. New PC games come out and sales go up. As more users have high speed internet in their homes and computer capabilities plateau, you'll have more people looking at the PC as a viable gaming platform.
Before you argue with the "plateau" comment, consider this: Half-life or Counter-strike can run on a Pentium III 400MHz, an AMD Athlon 1600, or a Pentium 4 3.0GHz. Users that buy a P4 now will have a machine that will likely handle games four or five years from now... with only a video card upgrade and maybe some RAM. Moore's law aside.
Go look at the site and ask yourself if any of the stuff on there is problematic. Do you have a problem with website cookies? Do you have a problem with web site logs? Do you have a problem with government employees getting jobs outside of the government?
These are things that google-watch complains about. Basically, it sounds a lot like desperate attacks on a company that has never disappointed me and has earned its success.
Google-watch is FUD (and not even good FUD, at that). Yet someone always seems to post a link to it, as if to say, "Google's not so great now, huh?"
With new games like Doom 3, Halo 2, Half-life 2, and Duke Nukem Forever, we'll have games to look forward to for at least the next decade.
Seriously, though... handheld gaming consoles suck - they can't compete with normal consoles for games or playability. Nobody wants to sit and play GTA3 for a hundred hours on a Gameboy-sized console.
Consoles can't compete with PCs, either. With a PC, you can upgrade the hardware or buy new games for your existing hardware (and try to get them to run). Playability for Halo on XBox is damn near impossible for someone who's grown up with mouse-look (for keyboard only control!) PC games.
The market will turn, rightfully, to PC games - and the subsequent mod scene (Counter-strike, for example).
So, with better special effects available, more money, and existing material as your base - you think they'll really go back to the 70s quality/style?
I don't expect a remake EVER. We're at least a hundred years away from such a thing, considering Lucas's remaining life and the fact that the copyright will remain active for an additional 70+ years (as someone else already noted).
To make such a remake commercially viable (which is the only way to get the necessary backing) they'd have to implement the ridiculous, effects-laden formula that we saw with Episodes I and II.
Sorry, I've read some of those before and just read a bunch of others. Most of that stuff is desperate/paranoid grasping at straws. I'm a very privacy and security oriented person, and nothing they describe is a problem for me.
Google uses cookies that expire in 30+ years? Why is that a problem? The site describes the cookies, but it assumes that you will have an immediate objection to such cookies. Cookies are not bad - if you think cookies are some inherent risk then you might as well log off permanently. Every web application I build relies on cookies - session values, for example.
Google employs former NSA "spooks." Are they saying that NSA employees shouldn't be able to get jobs elsewhere without fears that they are abusing your information?
That whole site is FUD. Sorry, I'm not scared.
I'm surprised that there aren't more people freaking out about this. If Gator (SPYWARE!) ... sorry, "Claria" announced this software, we'd all be worried about the privacy issues. Even if Yahoo! offered it, I'd be skeptical. But Google seems to be so trusted and benevolent that the usual skepticism is notably lacking.
Google Toolbar for your browser doesn't appear to offer them any gain (other than bringing people into their search engine, of course). The data they pass back is opt-in.
Since this feature doesn't need an internet connection, I doubt that they would make it require one (by adding in data collection or ad delivery).
I use search on my system several times a week. Most of the time, I can just search the folder(s) I think the file will be in. But several years' worth of files amounts to a huge area to search.
I recently searched several hundred thousand files on my work machine. It took nearly 90 minutes to complete the search. I expect Google will be able to significantly improve upon that. They're one of the few companies that I really trust to do the right thing.
It would be like watching the opening to Star Wars for two hours (edited for content, edited to fit your television, edited for time)...
I used to browse Slashdot on minimum threshold, until I saw a goatse ASCII image... I'm afraid that such an image might make +5 for this story.
A space station? That sure is thrifty!
There's an International Space Station... why can't we all work together?
At least PETA won't raise a stink about them - they only care about the animals.
Reasons Why A Lawyer Won't Suffice
1. They're harder to train than rats.
2. They won't actually work, but they'll demand to be paid.
3. If there's a loophole, they'll find it. But they won't find any mines.
4. Lawyers won't die when you blow them up. You have to cauterize the wound, or two heads will grow in its place.
5. They're sure to object.
I watch too much Law & Order.
First link in the post: Yahoo! article