I purchased NIN - With Teeth. I'm an honest consumer, and I pay for products I find of a good enough quality to deserve my consumer dollars. (I actually own...a RHEL license, for instance, even though I can legally get linux for free.) Now, I immediately made 3 copies of this CD...My copying isn't to give the CD to my friends, but to store my nice new CD away, and use "disposable copies" in the 3 places where I often listen to music... I've only made copies that extend my fair use.
I heartily agree with you on that point. Making copies of CDs I have purchased for use in the home (or car, etc.) should not be locked out by DRM. I think iTunes (FairPlay) actually does a pretty good job of this, considering the draconian demands of the record industry. They have found the proper balance between the rabid finger-pointing of the people licensing them the music, and the rights of the consumers.
However, I would like to make one small point, specifically about your use of the term, "Fair Use." Almost everyone here on Slashdot would agree that using inflated terms like "piracy," "theft," and "stolen" to refer to copyright infringement is incorrect. We should use the proper terms to talk about these issues, or the context will be lost. That stated, your home, non-commercial copying of a CD is not considered infringement, but it's not Fair Use. It's actually covered under the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 (check US Code Title 17 section 10 -- specifically subsection 1008), which, among other things, protects the manufacture of devices which make recordings of copyrighted audio recordings and guarantees that your private, non-commercial copying is a non-infringing use. Fair Use (US 17 sec. 107) is for the protection of uses such as education and criticism. Copying at home is protected, but not by Fair Use.
I would like to extend 17 sec. 1008 to include all forms of media, and the recording/copying thereof, such as video, text, images, etc. (As an example, is ripping a DVD to my homebrew DVR protected under 17 sec. 1008? What if I bought a print of a painting and wanted it in every room of my house? Or if I scanned in a book I purchased, and transfered it to my PDA for reading on an airplane?) Since all media has moved to the digital realm, and it's only a matter of time before movies can be legally downloaded over broadband, perhaps it's time to lobby Congress for a Home Media Recording and Copying Act of 2005, which would replace 17 sec. 10 with more generalized language.
being computer literate means being able to program in exactly the same way that being literate in English means being able to express thoughts in properly constructed words, sentences, paragraphs, etc. Calling someone 'computer literate' because they can use a couple of programs written by someone else would be like calling someone literate in English because they can watch Cribs on MTV.
Wow, that's a stretch. That may have been true back in the day when the only thing you could do on a computer was input some BASIC code, but that's not true anymore. Software on computers today has evolved to the point where it is a black box tool for the majority of people. It's just a means to get work done, not the end result of the work. Plumbers don't build their own wrenches, car owners don't build their own cars, and people who use PowerPoint and Excel at work don't need to know all the C++ classes in the code.
That being said, I am a tinkerer by nature. I write scripts to automate tasks on my computer. I develop applications. I understand how computers work on a fundamental level, and I build my own boxes out of parts ordered seperately, because I enjoy building them. However, there are times when I don't want to mess with all that, just like the majority of the population-- and that's when I turn on the PS2 and blast away.
But the grandparent's post remains valid. We are currently lacking a popular, AFFORDABLE "grandmother system." The Mac Mini was a step in the right direction, but it doesn't have that much support for gaming, and I'm not sure of it's compatibilities with existing and future televisions (in other words, monitors that already exist in the home). I'd love to see a PS3 with a mouse, keyboard, and a web browser. Most of the large ISPs offer webmail anyway, so a mail client is not a huge deal. (Perhaps Sony writes a small mail client to be used by the browser on localhost, in case your ISP doesn't use webmail.) Add a very minimal word processing application, basically Notepad with fonts and margins, and support for a printer, and you've got yourself a $200 machine that does everything Grandma needs it to do. She can even fire up Halo 2 and blast those aliens to pieces, all without calling up her doting geek grandkid to ask about why such-and-such won't install.
seriously though, Perhaps it's fate that today, Arpil the Twenty ninth, we will once again fight for our freedom. Not from tyranny, persecution or oppression. But from assholes that bundle spyware with free screensavers. We're fighting for our right to live, to exist. From this day on, the twenty ninth day of April will no longer be remembered as an American holiday (not that it ever has) but as the day that all of mankind declared we will not go quietly into the night. We will not vanish without a fight. We will live on. We will survive.
Is it bad that I instantly had a vision of Eliot Spitzer uploading a virus from his Powerbook to the Intermix Corporate Headquarters, which he accessed with a stolen Intermix scout ship piloted by a fast-talking African-American costar?
Try creating a table in word > 2 pages long. Try importing said document into another version of word. Now tell me again word is not flawed:-)
Also applies to absolutely any application of automated numbering, be it chapters, figures, equations, etc. (anything but pages). Create a document, populate it with text, autonumbered sections, autonumbered figures and graphs, give it a table of contents, and then open it in another version of Word (even a newer version). Watch all your numbering disintegrate in front of you.
Styles and automatic numbering schemes are really the only thing separating Word from Notepad. Too bad they don't work.
OO.o's autonumbering schemes may not be perfect or quite as flexible, but they don't blow up in a different version, and they tend to work. Regularly.
BTW. I use Firefox almost exclusively, and have watched as websites have slowly gotten around the pop-up blocker
Those websites haven't "gotten around the pop-up blocker", they just use Macromedia Flash to pop up windows. That's not even Firefox's fault, since they are using a third-party plugin to trigger the popups. So until Macromedia joins the real world and includes a popup blocker in their browser plugin prefs, just go get the Flashblock extension.
I've never understood the argument that the more people that user firefox (or linux for that matter), then hackers will begin to target those users, too.... What am I missing here?
You're not missing anything. Security is not a destination, it's a process. The products that are more secure are and always will be the ones who have a developer base which is dedicated to security; in other words, if the developers are right on top of things, releasing updates and patches and fixing security holes as soon as they are able to, and also take an effort to educate the users about how to help with security, then their products will be secure, no matter how many people use them or how prevelant they are in the marketplace. It doesn't even matter if they are commecial or open source.
The Apache Web server is currently running on about 70% of the internet's servers, and is rock solid and very secure, when properly configured. That's certainly a counter-argument to the marketshare = insecurity line of thinking.
Yes, more people will target the popular products. But security is a game of percentages, as well. If the attacker has to invest more into an attack than they will get out of it, then they won't bother. They'll find another place to attack. That's how things like The Club work: perfectly secure? No, of course not. Someone could bring a circular saw with a steel-cutting blade and be through it in several seconds. A pain in the ass for the would-be thief? Definitely. It's all about the percentages.
I've been looking for some clear statement that says I can make a copy of a movie I have on VHS or DVD. I can't find it. "Fair Use" as spelled out on the copyright website doesn't give me any such rights.
That's because it's not spelled out in Fair Use (which are merely a set of guidelines anyway). Check out Title 17, Section 1008 of the U.S. Code. Chapter 10 was added in the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992: the bill's purpose was to a). prohibit the creation of devices whose sole purpose was copyright infringement and provide copyright holders recourse when such a device was created; b). to spell out royalty payment measures for creators of devices that would otherwise infringe on copyrights; and c). assure non-commercial, private copying by citizens is not infringement.
No action may be brought under this title alleging infringement of copyright based on the manufacture, importation, or distribution of a digital audio recording device, a digital audio recording medium, an analog recording device, or an analog recording medium,
or based on the noncommercial use by a consumer of such a device or medium for making digital musical recordings or analog musical recordings.
17 USC Chapter 10 refers specifically to audio recording, of course, but since all the concepts of copyrighted works are the same for video recordings, I imagine that a court would find the parallel. Perhaps we as a community (meaning the Slashdotters who are U.S. citizens) could jump the gun, and petition a senator or two to propose a bill expanding the definitions of 17 USC Chapter 10 to include video recordings, copies of software, and even things like ebooks and reproductions of artwork. I'm sure a good person to start with would be Rep. Bill Thomas (CA-R), who introduced the original Audio Home Recording Act in 1991.
why must all the people on slashdot be out to get microsoft? as a company they are not evil.
Strictly speaking, you're right: Microsoft as a company is not evil. The same sorts of forced-upgrade, vendor lock-in, and competitor crushing/buying out that they do have been done, numerous times, in numerous other industries. Monopolistic tendencies aside, Microsoft has done nothing that other fine upstanding corporations haven't done with their products and their attitude toward their customers. They are, after all, in this for the money.
However, I think the prevailing view on Slashdot (disregarding the sheep-like groupthink that goes on here sometimes) stems from the fact that Microsoft has a literal 90%+ marketshare, and they are still acting like they are just making products. With such a huge market share, they are not making products: they are making an industry. Most of the people on Slashdot believe that Microsoft should be doing more for the computing community as a whole: they should be thinking more long-term than they are. For example, Microsoft was so bent on getting the entire world online easily in the late 1990s that they merely set aside security concerns. Now their products are so full of holes that a large percentage of Windows machines are currently compromised and acting as spam relays or trojan horses, and they are just beginning to create products with security in mind (like XP Service Pack 2).
Microsoft has been creating plain old products for years, and they blame the mess they've created on their success. Microsoft still contends that the reason so many Windows machines are compromised is that there are simply so many Windows machines out there. That, of course, is crap: we only need to look to other ubiquitous programs, such as Apache, for proof that well-designed programs don't have major security flaws, no matter how many people have them installed.
So the major reason why the majority on Slashdot thinks Microsoft is evil is because they are still not thinking big-picture enough. We (the majority) feel that they have a greater responsibility to the computing world in general than they give themselves credit for. When everyone uses your products, the sale is a given; concentrate more on making sure your products work than selling them.
It is obviously made of 5 (reasonably) identical parts, but I wonder if you can (in theory) make a robot of this type as longs as you want just by `tacking' on a new section (of course this ignores drive train problems).
It actually wouldn't be too hard to give each section its own motor and power supply. The connection between each section would include an umbilical capable of transmitting data, and perhaps even extra voltage if one of the power units (batteries) was not providing sufficient power. At that point, operation of the robot becomes a software issue; how do you program each pod with identical software that can all work together as a cohesive whole, in real time? If all of the individual components are identical but work flawlessly together, at almost any length, then theoretically the robot could add more sections or shed damaged ones without compromising functionality. Specialized sections could also be attached to the front and/or rear, for digging, drilling, collecting, clearing, bomb dismantling, carrying, or anything else you can think of.
I noticed in the video that the crew was using a remote to control the robot. (I also noticed the distinct lack of any purposeful log-rolling, contrary to what the editor said--but I digress.) Ideally, of course, such remote operation would not be needed. Crews using the robots--rescue teams, bomb squads, recovery missions--should be able to just tell the robot, "hey, go explore over there. We'll be watching on the monitors, and you tell us if you find anything." The locomotion of the robot would then be completely automated, based on a set of instructions (one of a library of scripts, maybe; use the "find and bring out bomb" script, or the "search for human survivors" script), with the operator just gathering data, and perhaps taking manual control if needed.
Having seen digital projection, the amazingly vibrant colors, consistent sharpness and lack of scratches on-screen makes for a breathtaking viewing experience. Small wonder why sales of rear-projection TV's using DLP, LCD and HD-ILA elements are rising rapidly. =)
Too bad every digital projection of a movie I've ever seen has been total crap.
There are several multiplexes in the area where I live that are quite proud of their digital theaters... even to the point of advertising the fact that the movie is digital on the ticket stub. However, in every case, even though the color was quite nice, I was incredibly distracted throughout the movie with the digital artifacts present in the picture. Scenes with camera motion over complex patterns (such as panning past a complex wallpaper, or following a ship past a distant shore full of colorful buildings) always had some glittering and color motion. I was also able, quite clearly, to see individual pixels on subtitles and other abrubt color lines.
My point is not that digital projection sucks; only that the current digital projection sucks. Digital is an infinitely extensible medium, in that all one has to do is increase the resolution of the frame: the crispness of the picture will increase and artifacts, including visible anti-aliasing, will disappear.
By their nature, projected movies would need to have much higher resolution than digital televisions, simply because the screen is bigger, and artifacts are multiplied. In all the movies I've seen projected digitally, I estimated that the horizontal resolution (based on the individual pixels I was seeing in the subtitles) was no more than 1280. That's unacceptable in my opinion, especially if you are advertising the movie as higher quality than 35mm. Even HDTV is 1920x1080 (2 million pixels per frame), and the HDTV spec is not nearly as crisp as plain old 35mm film, which, in a totally invalid apples-to-oranges comparison with digital, approaches something like 20 million pixels per frame.
Any problems 35mm might have with fading, scratches, or sharpness can be attributed solely to the projectionist. If the focus is off, or the lamp is not bright enough, or the reel is not properly taken care of, which are all extremely common problems in a standard multiplex theater where the projection booth is run by an underpaid teenager, the 35mm film will look pretty bad. But a properly run projecter using 35mm, running side-by-side with the digital equivalent, will win the fight hands-down. Currently.
Now, if the digital projector makers could guarantee that the picture would be a 4K resolution scan (4096 horizontal resolution) and would stay 4K throughout the entire process of capture through projection, then I think digital would look better than 35mm. The sheer rate of dataflow from a satellite makes such a projector economically infeasable however, and is likely many years out. Until then, theater owners will be happy to foist sub-par digital projections on us.
Any word on the progress to fix these [popups]? It's not just Firefox;...
Well, for Firefox and Mozilla, type "about:config" in the address bar, right click in the main window, new integer. Name it "privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins" and set the integer value to 2. It will reduce popups, especially if you have flash.
These hidden preferences for FireFox are fantastic... and one of the Mozilla developers documented them fully. He also created an extension to show them in the GUI.
That could be interesting... a mob of angry San Franciscans with torches and pitchforks.
Is that even possible?
George will find a way.
LUCAS UNLEASHES DIGITAL MOB
San Fransisco-- Filmmaker George Lucas today unveiled his new digital mob, as part of a partnership with LucasFilm and Weta Digital.
"Well, I saw that the city of San Fransisco was clearly disgusted with the constant rehashes of--and sequels to--my only good movie to date," Lucas said in a press conference. "And I decided that creating an angry mob with analog techniques such as gathering real people, picking up pitchforks, and lighting torches really doesn't give the filmmaker enough control."
The extremely realistic mobbing behavior, complete with shouted obscenities and waving fists, was created completely digitally, using Weta Digital's "Massive" software. The software, developed by the New Zealand-based special effects company Weta Digital, was previously used to create large-scale battle sequences in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, directed by Peter Jackson.
The software, which includes a certain amount of aritifical intelligence (A.I.) in each member of the crowd, believably recreates a realistic crowd of characters on screen, sometimes numbering in the hundreds of thousands.
"I mean, these analog techniques were all that was available back in the 1990's when I first released the Original Trilogy Special Edition," Lucas continued. "The fans had to rely on their neighbors to form mobs against me. Lucky for the fans, the technology has progressed to a point where I can realize the original intent of the San Fransiscan mob. The digital techniques I'm using give me complete control over the reality of the mob, making it grander in scale and more epic in scope than the original mobs created by my former fans. I'm sure moviegoers will be pleased with the result."
Both Peter Jackson and Weta Digital were unavailable for comment.
Technically speaking, yes. You can also bypass the DVD region code system, but the theoretical possibility does not justify the restriction. You don't really expect people to burn their songs to CD every time they want to use them outside iSomething? It is indeed justified to criticize Apple for this.
No, it's not. AAC is an MPEG-4 standard, developed independently of Apple by the same Motion Picture Experts Group that developed standards such as MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and mp3. It is not an Apple-proprietary format. If your portable player of choice does not support the standard, it's not Apple's fault.
If you insist on using a non-DRMed format (and Apple's is the best DRM around, in that it expertly balances both the fair use rights of the user and the draconian demands of the fanatical recording industry), then you are likely a tinkerer by nature, and there are options available. For example, you could "burn" the tracks to an Image Drive, and then "rip" the tracks off the iso image to another format. I'm sure you could even bang up a script to automate the process and transfer the metadata to an ID3 tag. No physical media need be involved.
My point is that Apple is doing things right. The average user has a great deal of freedom with the songs they have purchased. This is a big accomplishment, considering the demands of the recording industry. Don't be so quick to dismiss Apple's efforts.
What entertainment value vs. educational value does a game solicited towards minors which promotes violence against authority figures have?...Would the thoughts of the freedoms we enjoy come back and haunt us? Ever?...What does matter is the simple thought of society training children and students with everything they don't need for a healthy life style.
Ay, there's the rub. How does a society balance the values of freedom of speech/expression with the need to raise a moral generation? The key here is to restrict access to minors, but not to adults. The average age of gamers is now 29, so naturally the entertainment industry is going to create games that appeal to an older audience. These games are clearly labeled with easy-to-understand ratings, just like movies. Grand Theft Auto is rated "M" for mature, and should probably not be played by people under the age of 17, or people with existing violent tendencies. But even if the game IS played by someone in the restricted group, IT'S NOT THE GAME'S FAULT. Don't blame the game, which is perfectly legal and acceptable in this society of free speech, for "creating" violence.
Yes, there is a lot of violence in our society, and in the media/entertainment industries. But whether actual violence spawned violence in entertainment, or vice versa, is up for debate. We can't point our fingers conclusively at the media, and say, "if there were no violent video games, there would be no violence!" That's crap, and everyone knows it's crap since violence has existed, without the presence of video games, movies, MTV, or any of the other popular scapegoats, for many centuries. And we can't point the finger the other way, either, and say, "a peaceful society doesn't have violent images in its entertainment!" Also crap, since violence has always been present in entertainment during peacetime, all the way back to the Roman gladiatorial games.
Let's face it: violence sells, and in the presence of free speech, should not be banned from the general public. That's called fascism. However, I think certain things need to be in place to "protect the children," as cliche as that phrase has become. In this country, it is actually a crime for a movie theater to sell tickets for an "R" rated movie to children under 17. There is no such law on the books for "M" rated videogames, although there are several in the works I know of, in D.C., Illinois, and Califonia. There may be other states talking about it, too. My point is this: don't cripple the video game industry by censoring it, just because one kid predisposed to violence played a video game he probably shouldn't have, and then blew away a couple of cops. My question is this: did his parents know the type of videogame he was playing? Did they notice any warning signs of violent tendencies and seek help for the child? This was not the game's fault; GTA and its sequels have sold 32 million copies worldwide, and only one kid has acted out violently because of what he saw in them. That's hardly a correlation between GTA and violent tendencies. I have played every version of GTA, some for very long periods of time, and I haven't killed a single cop in my life. Nor have I become more violent.
Let's place the blame squarely where it belongs: on the person committing the crime. Freedom and responsibility are mutually inclusive; a society cannot have one without the other.
As a computer programmer instead of a lawyer, I find it frustrating that laws are written using language that is often ambigious. I find myself wanting laws written with supplimentary text describing test cases (law would apply in this case [...], but not this case [...]), and justifications (this law is intended to have the following effect [...]), and the specific events that lead to the creation of the law (Mr. Simth at Megacorp pointed out to Senator Bob that [...] so this law was drafted to prevent [...] ).
In the US, at least, those specific examples are created when the law is challenged and ruled upon by a court. US law is based heavily on precedent, and the previous rulings are often cited in new rulings regarding the same law. For example, the laws for fair use in the US are very vague as written in Title 17. However, several cases have set precedents stating that time-shifting and format-shifting are both legal fair-use rights, as long as the use is private in nature and the work is not distributed to others (check Sony v. Universal, also called the Betamax case, and Diamond Multimedia v. RIAA, the Rio Mp3 player case).
The justifications you mention are usually part of the ruling, with the judges giving reasons for their verdict. The specific events that led to the creation of the law would be nice, but I imagine that they would be really hard to track down and quantify. Usually the environment is such that a law is needed; there isn't always a specific event that sparks the need for a new law.
Obligatory: IANAL, so those with law degrees are welcome to step in and append/correct/confirm.
Not to be pessimistic, but this kind of extendibility is the exact reason that IE is swiss cheese.
It's not the extendability that's insecure, it's the implimentation of that extendability. The difference here is that FireFox extensions are not executable files. They are merely bits of JavaScript and XUL code that the browser itself executes. Thus, by their nature, malicious code cannot get executed unless the browser allows it. MSIE extensions are separate executable files that simply interface with the browser, but run as separate processes on the computer. Therefore, their access to the machine is controlled by the OS, not the browser, and since the program is running on the client, the OS just assumes it's benign. Additionally, since the extension is running on the OS, and not through the browser, it can spawn additional processes, hide itself in the registry, read/write files without the browser's knowledge, and do other nasty things that make some IE toolbars so frustratingly difficult to uninstall.
FireFox's approach to extendability is obviously designed with security in mind. The browser process controls the access that extensions have to the rest of the computer. There is no way to install an extension without the user's knowledge (as there is in IE), and the extensions don't have access to system files or processes. On the other hand, it seems like Microsoft, when they decided to allow IE to be extensable, did not take such security precautions: there are no failsafes in the software architecture. (FireFox has a "safe mode", where it starts the browser without running any extensions; this allows the user to have full control over the extensions s/he installs.)
I agree. What can this toolbar do that Firefox cannot already do or existing extensions cannot already do?
You're right, there really is no functionality that the Yahoo toolbar adds to Firefox that's not already there (or available as an extension). But that's not why this story is important.
Microsoft's IE has had such a stranglehold on the browser market since the demise, resurrection, and crapification of Netscape that other browsers were not even on people's radar. Companies with formidible online presences only coded for IE, since that would effectively reach something like 99% of their potential audience; the other 1% using a different browser, such as the intrepid folks on Slashdot, probably didn't even want the product the company was offering anyway.
Fortunately for the internet population, Microsoft's strategy of "ease of use is more important than security" backfired, and their browser was eventually poked full of holes, exploited, and overrun with online annoyances. The next time someone came along with a browser that was both easy to use and secure, the public embraced it. Again, as luck would have it, the first people on the scene were open-source advocates: people with a firm grasp of software architecture, security, and standards adherance.
This story is important because it is Firefox's first foray into the mainstream. We geeks have been championing Firefox for some time now, and the fact that companies with worthless products are integrating with FireFox is a Good Thing (tm). It means that we have a sizeable enough market share to warrant some coding time and money.
Make what's an ad very clear before the user has to click more to read it.
Excellent point. The issue here is that RSS feeds are rendered in different ways, depending on the XML parser reading them, and there is currently no standard for setting advertisements apart from content. I think it would be considerate of the RSS publishers, if they are going to include the ads in their feed, to mark them differently, say with an "advert" attribute in the title tag (the W3C should be contacted about standardizing that attribute, of course). That way, RSS parsers can choose their own method of identifying ads, be it by italicizing them, putting the text in a different color, adding the string **ADVERTISEMENT** to the front of the headline, removing them altogether, whatever. This would be very similar to what Google does with its "Sponsored Links" section. They're there, but the reader can easily tell the difference between legitimate headlines and ads. Responsible RSS publishers would know that they are not deceiving their users, and responsible RSS parsers would keep the ads visible but separate, in order to support the publishers.
There would be a certain amount of workarounds and illegitimacy, of course, but that happens anyway and those people tend to be shunned in the Internet community. Advertisements in RSS feeds are going to happen whether we like it or not, so we should set up a viable and moderate model for them now before things start to get out of control (like they did with pop-up windows).
Did Disney buy the models? Are they able to get the wireframe models with all animation handles, etc and just drop em into their modeling program?
Pixar recreated the models of the characters for the sequel, anyway, to provide more flexibility of motion and greater detail. PDI/DreamWorks did the same thing for Shrek 2.
In any case, either the animation will be far lower quality 3D or it will be done with traditional cell animation, a la the Buzz Lightyear Saturday morning abomination Disney cranked out shortly after the release of the first Toy Story film. I'm fairly sure it will also be direct to video, like the string of recent sequels to classics that Disney has placed on Wal*Mart shelves around the country: Cinderella 2, Sleeping Beauty 2, Tarzan 2, etc, etc.
I am currently going to sue HP because I just realized the scanner I bought can be used to make perfect copys of my copywrited artwork. Plus, I'm also going to use sony because their dvd burners can make perfect copys of my copywrighted home movies. Who's with me?
No one's with you until you learn to spell copyright correctly. It's not about Writing Copy, it's your Right to Copy. CopyRight.
However, you make an excellent point, as sarcastic as it may have been. The makers of technology cannot be held responsible for what people do with the technology, as long as the makers did not explicitly INTEND to violate copyright with their technology. I believe this precedent was set in Sony v. Universal (the Betamax case), when the US Supreme Court decided that time-shifting was Fair Use under Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 107 of the US Code, and that manufacturers of such devices cannot be held liable for any copyright infringement done with the devices.
There may be other places where the law or court rulings state it better, but I can't come up with any off the top of my head.
If you're too lazy to read the history, here's a synopsis: in 2001, when the company developing Blender folded, Ton Roosendaal gathered a core of volunteers, collected 100,000 euros in seven weeks, bought the rights to the source of Blender, and released it to the public under the GPL. To this day, Blender is an extremely active, successful 3D animation and rendering program, and it is starting to rival many of its commercial competitors, such as 3DSMax and Maya.
I would suspect that Microsoft could easily come up with some way to monitor an individual corporate license being used during product updates. Maybe they keep a head count of how many licensed copies are out there under a particular company's account. When 2041 licenses are detected for a corporate account of only 1000 licenses, Microsoft will skip going after the pirates and basically take the issue to the company in terms of fines and/or a nice big Microsoft bill.
The only problem with this logic is that most corporations don't install every machine in their company individually. Most of them (and a large percentage of computer labs in education) are set up with an imaging system. The sysadmin sets up one machine with the software needed on all the machines, and then runs NortonGhost or similar to propegate the image out to all the machines. Since the company purchased licenses for all the computers, Microsoft has no problem with this. When updates are available, the sysadmins apply the updates to the master image to test full compatibility with the company's programs, and then re-images all the machines. Microsoft Update is only contacted once during this process... not once for each machine. So unless Microsoft wants to roll out their own image/license management program-which actually wouldn't be too bad of an idea--licensing the corporate versions of Windows is rightfully based on the honesty of the licensees. Just like every other piece of corporate software.
Doesn't it seem a whole lot EASIER to just change our planet screwing habits than it does to attempt to terra-form a dry, red rock-which we would inevitably screw up in our same unlearned fashion?
Hey, then I guess Lewis and Clark were pretty off the mark. After all, the East Coast had cities and civilization and all the comforts of home. Why were they wasting their time traveling into the uncharted forests of America when their time would have been better served getting their act together at home, fixing public corruption, cleaning streets, etc. After all, the American (Mid)West is pretty inhospitible: huge rivers, deserts, dense forests, prairieland, and all those bears and coyotes.
Come to think of it, Columbus should have never left Portugal. There was nothing for him on the other side of the world. His time would be better spent trying to find out where royalty got all that money they financed him with -- seems shady to me.
<sigh>
Anyone without a sense of exploration should shut up and get out of the way. You will never understand. Be content to stay home and gripe about your problems; the rest of us are going exploring.
What if they aimed it so it would miss hitting Mars and go into orbit instead?
Even so, the spacecraft would still have to slow down considerably. As the spacecraft enters Mars' sphere of influence, it is still in orbit around the sun, and therefore, by definition, moving faster than Mars' escape velocity. Without removing some of the orbital energy (i.e., slowing down), the spacecraft would simply swing around Mars on a hyperbolic orbit and continue its merry way around the sun. However, if the spacecraft were to fire a few rockets, perhaps in conjunction with aerobraking, it's orbital energy would drop down to less than Mars' escape velocity, and it would essentially be "captured" by Mars. All of that takes energy in the form of fuel.
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I purchased NIN - With Teeth. I'm an honest consumer, and I pay for products I find of a good enough quality to deserve my consumer dollars. (I actually own...a RHEL license, for instance, even though I can legally get linux for free.) Now, I immediately made 3 copies of this CD...My copying isn't to give the CD to my friends, but to store my nice new CD away, and use "disposable copies" in the 3 places where I often listen to music... I've only made copies that extend my fair use.
I heartily agree with you on that point. Making copies of CDs I have purchased for use in the home (or car, etc.) should not be locked out by DRM. I think iTunes (FairPlay) actually does a pretty good job of this, considering the draconian demands of the record industry. They have found the proper balance between the rabid finger-pointing of the people licensing them the music, and the rights of the consumers.
However, I would like to make one small point, specifically about your use of the term, "Fair Use." Almost everyone here on Slashdot would agree that using inflated terms like "piracy," "theft," and "stolen" to refer to copyright infringement is incorrect. We should use the proper terms to talk about these issues, or the context will be lost. That stated, your home, non-commercial copying of a CD is not considered infringement, but it's not Fair Use. It's actually covered under the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 (check US Code Title 17 section 10 -- specifically subsection 1008), which, among other things, protects the manufacture of devices which make recordings of copyrighted audio recordings and guarantees that your private, non-commercial copying is a non-infringing use. Fair Use (US 17 sec. 107) is for the protection of uses such as education and criticism. Copying at home is protected, but not by Fair Use.
I would like to extend 17 sec. 1008 to include all forms of media, and the recording/copying thereof, such as video, text, images, etc. (As an example, is ripping a DVD to my homebrew DVR protected under 17 sec. 1008? What if I bought a print of a painting and wanted it in every room of my house? Or if I scanned in a book I purchased, and transfered it to my PDA for reading on an airplane?) Since all media has moved to the digital realm, and it's only a matter of time before movies can be legally downloaded over broadband, perhaps it's time to lobby Congress for a Home Media Recording and Copying Act of 2005, which would replace 17 sec. 10 with more generalized language.
being computer literate means being able to program in exactly the same way that being literate in English means being able to express thoughts in properly constructed words, sentences, paragraphs, etc. Calling someone 'computer literate' because they can use a couple of programs written by someone else would be like calling someone literate in English because they can watch Cribs on MTV.
Wow, that's a stretch. That may have been true back in the day when the only thing you could do on a computer was input some BASIC code, but that's not true anymore. Software on computers today has evolved to the point where it is a black box tool for the majority of people. It's just a means to get work done, not the end result of the work. Plumbers don't build their own wrenches, car owners don't build their own cars, and people who use PowerPoint and Excel at work don't need to know all the C++ classes in the code.
That being said, I am a tinkerer by nature. I write scripts to automate tasks on my computer. I develop applications. I understand how computers work on a fundamental level, and I build my own boxes out of parts ordered seperately, because I enjoy building them. However, there are times when I don't want to mess with all that, just like the majority of the population-- and that's when I turn on the PS2 and blast away.
But the grandparent's post remains valid. We are currently lacking a popular, AFFORDABLE "grandmother system." The Mac Mini was a step in the right direction, but it doesn't have that much support for gaming, and I'm not sure of it's compatibilities with existing and future televisions (in other words, monitors that already exist in the home). I'd love to see a PS3 with a mouse, keyboard, and a web browser. Most of the large ISPs offer webmail anyway, so a mail client is not a huge deal. (Perhaps Sony writes a small mail client to be used by the browser on localhost, in case your ISP doesn't use webmail.) Add a very minimal word processing application, basically Notepad with fonts and margins, and support for a printer, and you've got yourself a $200 machine that does everything Grandma needs it to do. She can even fire up Halo 2 and blast those aliens to pieces, all without calling up her doting geek grandkid to ask about why such-and-such won't install.
seriously though, Perhaps it's fate that today, Arpil the Twenty ninth, we will once again fight for our freedom. Not from tyranny, persecution or oppression. But from assholes that bundle spyware with free screensavers. We're fighting for our right to live, to exist. From this day on, the twenty ninth day of April will no longer be remembered as an American holiday (not that it ever has) but as the day that all of mankind declared we will not go quietly into the night. We will not vanish without a fight. We will live on. We will survive.
Is it bad that I instantly had a vision of Eliot Spitzer uploading a virus from his Powerbook to the Intermix Corporate Headquarters, which he accessed with a stolen Intermix scout ship piloted by a fast-talking African-American costar?
Try creating a table in word > 2 pages long. Try importing said document into another version of word. Now tell me again word is not flawed :-)
Also applies to absolutely any application of automated numbering, be it chapters, figures, equations, etc. (anything but pages). Create a document, populate it with text, autonumbered sections, autonumbered figures and graphs, give it a table of contents, and then open it in another version of Word (even a newer version). Watch all your numbering disintegrate in front of you.
Styles and automatic numbering schemes are really the only thing separating Word from Notepad. Too bad they don't work.
OO.o's autonumbering schemes may not be perfect or quite as flexible, but they don't blow up in a different version, and they tend to work. Regularly.
BTW. I use Firefox almost exclusively, and have watched as websites have slowly gotten around the pop-up blocker
... we HATES them!
Those websites haven't "gotten around the pop-up blocker", they just use Macromedia Flash to pop up windows. That's not even Firefox's fault, since they are using a third-party plugin to trigger the popups. So until Macromedia joins the real world and includes a popup blocker in their browser plugin prefs, just go get the Flashblock extension.
Filthy Macromedia
I've never understood the argument that the more people that user firefox (or linux for that matter), then hackers will begin to target those users, too. ... What am I missing here?
You're not missing anything. Security is not a destination, it's a process. The products that are more secure are and always will be the ones who have a developer base which is dedicated to security; in other words, if the developers are right on top of things, releasing updates and patches and fixing security holes as soon as they are able to, and also take an effort to educate the users about how to help with security, then their products will be secure, no matter how many people use them or how prevelant they are in the marketplace. It doesn't even matter if they are commecial or open source.
The Apache Web server is currently running on about 70% of the internet's servers, and is rock solid and very secure, when properly configured. That's certainly a counter-argument to the marketshare = insecurity line of thinking.
Yes, more people will target the popular products. But security is a game of percentages, as well. If the attacker has to invest more into an attack than they will get out of it, then they won't bother. They'll find another place to attack. That's how things like The Club work: perfectly secure? No, of course not. Someone could bring a circular saw with a steel-cutting blade and be through it in several seconds. A pain in the ass for the would-be thief? Definitely. It's all about the percentages.
That's because it's not spelled out in Fair Use (which are merely a set of guidelines anyway). Check out Title 17, Section 1008 of the U.S. Code. Chapter 10 was added in the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992: the bill's purpose was to a). prohibit the creation of devices whose sole purpose was copyright infringement and provide copyright holders recourse when such a device was created; b). to spell out royalty payment measures for creators of devices that would otherwise infringe on copyrights; and c). assure non-commercial, private copying by citizens is not infringement.
Full text of the bill is here: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c102:1:./te
I especially like this bit in section 1008: 17 USC Chapter 10 refers specifically to audio recording, of course, but since all the concepts of copyrighted works are the same for video recordings, I imagine that a court would find the parallel. Perhaps we as a community (meaning the Slashdotters who are U.S. citizens) could jump the gun, and petition a senator or two to propose a bill expanding the definitions of 17 USC Chapter 10 to include video recordings, copies of software, and even things like ebooks and reproductions of artwork. I'm sure a good person to start with would be Rep. Bill Thomas (CA-R), who introduced the original Audio Home Recording Act in 1991.
why must all the people on slashdot be out to get microsoft? as a company they are not evil.
Strictly speaking, you're right: Microsoft as a company is not evil. The same sorts of forced-upgrade, vendor lock-in, and competitor crushing/buying out that they do have been done, numerous times, in numerous other industries. Monopolistic tendencies aside, Microsoft has done nothing that other fine upstanding corporations haven't done with their products and their attitude toward their customers. They are, after all, in this for the money.
However, I think the prevailing view on Slashdot (disregarding the sheep-like groupthink that goes on here sometimes) stems from the fact that Microsoft has a literal 90%+ marketshare, and they are still acting like they are just making products. With such a huge market share, they are not making products: they are making an industry. Most of the people on Slashdot believe that Microsoft should be doing more for the computing community as a whole: they should be thinking more long-term than they are. For example, Microsoft was so bent on getting the entire world online easily in the late 1990s that they merely set aside security concerns. Now their products are so full of holes that a large percentage of Windows machines are currently compromised and acting as spam relays or trojan horses, and they are just beginning to create products with security in mind (like XP Service Pack 2).
Microsoft has been creating plain old products for years, and they blame the mess they've created on their success. Microsoft still contends that the reason so many Windows machines are compromised is that there are simply so many Windows machines out there. That, of course, is crap: we only need to look to other ubiquitous programs, such as Apache, for proof that well-designed programs don't have major security flaws, no matter how many people have them installed.
So the major reason why the majority on Slashdot thinks Microsoft is evil is because they are still not thinking big-picture enough. We (the majority) feel that they have a greater responsibility to the computing world in general than they give themselves credit for. When everyone uses your products, the sale is a given; concentrate more on making sure your products work than selling them.
It is obviously made of 5 (reasonably) identical parts, but I wonder if you can (in theory) make a robot of this type as longs as you want just by `tacking' on a new section (of course this ignores drive train problems).
It actually wouldn't be too hard to give each section its own motor and power supply. The connection between each section would include an umbilical capable of transmitting data, and perhaps even extra voltage if one of the power units (batteries) was not providing sufficient power. At that point, operation of the robot becomes a software issue; how do you program each pod with identical software that can all work together as a cohesive whole, in real time? If all of the individual components are identical but work flawlessly together, at almost any length, then theoretically the robot could add more sections or shed damaged ones without compromising functionality. Specialized sections could also be attached to the front and/or rear, for digging, drilling, collecting, clearing, bomb dismantling, carrying, or anything else you can think of.
I noticed in the video that the crew was using a remote to control the robot. (I also noticed the distinct lack of any purposeful log-rolling, contrary to what the editor said--but I digress.) Ideally, of course, such remote operation would not be needed. Crews using the robots--rescue teams, bomb squads, recovery missions--should be able to just tell the robot, "hey, go explore over there. We'll be watching on the monitors, and you tell us if you find anything." The locomotion of the robot would then be completely automated, based on a set of instructions (one of a library of scripts, maybe; use the "find and bring out bomb" script, or the "search for human survivors" script), with the operator just gathering data, and perhaps taking manual control if needed.
Having seen digital projection, the amazingly vibrant colors, consistent sharpness and lack of scratches on-screen makes for a breathtaking viewing experience. Small wonder why sales of rear-projection TV's using DLP, LCD and HD-ILA elements are rising rapidly. =)
Too bad every digital projection of a movie I've ever seen has been total crap.
There are several multiplexes in the area where I live that are quite proud of their digital theaters... even to the point of advertising the fact that the movie is digital on the ticket stub. However, in every case, even though the color was quite nice, I was incredibly distracted throughout the movie with the digital artifacts present in the picture. Scenes with camera motion over complex patterns (such as panning past a complex wallpaper, or following a ship past a distant shore full of colorful buildings) always had some glittering and color motion. I was also able, quite clearly, to see individual pixels on subtitles and other abrubt color lines.
My point is not that digital projection sucks; only that the current digital projection sucks. Digital is an infinitely extensible medium, in that all one has to do is increase the resolution of the frame: the crispness of the picture will increase and artifacts, including visible anti-aliasing, will disappear.
By their nature, projected movies would need to have much higher resolution than digital televisions, simply because the screen is bigger, and artifacts are multiplied. In all the movies I've seen projected digitally, I estimated that the horizontal resolution (based on the individual pixels I was seeing in the subtitles) was no more than 1280. That's unacceptable in my opinion, especially if you are advertising the movie as higher quality than 35mm. Even HDTV is 1920x1080 (2 million pixels per frame), and the HDTV spec is not nearly as crisp as plain old 35mm film, which, in a totally invalid apples-to-oranges comparison with digital, approaches something like 20 million pixels per frame.
Any problems 35mm might have with fading, scratches, or sharpness can be attributed solely to the projectionist. If the focus is off, or the lamp is not bright enough, or the reel is not properly taken care of, which are all extremely common problems in a standard multiplex theater where the projection booth is run by an underpaid teenager, the 35mm film will look pretty bad. But a properly run projecter using 35mm, running side-by-side with the digital equivalent, will win the fight hands-down. Currently.
Now, if the digital projector makers could guarantee that the picture would be a 4K resolution scan (4096 horizontal resolution) and would stay 4K throughout the entire process of capture through projection, then I think digital would look better than 35mm. The sheer rate of dataflow from a satellite makes such a projector economically infeasable however, and is likely many years out. Until then, theater owners will be happy to foist sub-par digital projections on us.
Any word on the progress to fix these [popups]? It's not just Firefox;...
Well, for Firefox and Mozilla, type "about:config" in the address bar, right click in the main window, new integer. Name it "privacy.popups.disable_from_plugins" and set the integer value to 2. It will reduce popups, especially if you have flash.
These hidden preferences for FireFox are fantastic... and one of the Mozilla developers documented them fully. He also created an extension to show them in the GUI.
You know, they're moving to the Presidio.
That could be interesting... a mob of angry San Franciscans with torches and pitchforks.
Is that even possible?
George will find a way.
LUCAS UNLEASHES DIGITAL MOB
San Fransisco-- Filmmaker George Lucas today unveiled his new digital mob, as part of a partnership with LucasFilm and Weta Digital.
"Well, I saw that the city of San Fransisco was clearly disgusted with the constant rehashes of--and sequels to--my only good movie to date," Lucas said in a press conference. "And I decided that creating an angry mob with analog techniques such as gathering real people, picking up pitchforks, and lighting torches really doesn't give the filmmaker enough control."
The extremely realistic mobbing behavior, complete with shouted obscenities and waving fists, was created completely digitally, using Weta Digital's "Massive" software. The software, developed by the New Zealand-based special effects company Weta Digital, was previously used to create large-scale battle sequences in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, directed by Peter Jackson.
The software, which includes a certain amount of aritifical intelligence (A.I.) in each member of the crowd, believably recreates a realistic crowd of characters on screen, sometimes numbering in the hundreds of thousands.
"I mean, these analog techniques were all that was available back in the 1990's when I first released the Original Trilogy Special Edition," Lucas continued. "The fans had to rely on their neighbors to form mobs against me. Lucky for the fans, the technology has progressed to a point where I can realize the original intent of the San Fransiscan mob. The digital techniques I'm using give me complete control over the reality of the mob, making it grander in scale and more epic in scope than the original mobs created by my former fans. I'm sure moviegoers will be pleased with the result."
Both Peter Jackson and Weta Digital were unavailable for comment.
Technically speaking, yes. You can also bypass the DVD region code system, but the theoretical possibility does not justify the restriction. You don't really expect people to burn their songs to CD every time they want to use them outside iSomething? It is indeed justified to criticize Apple for this.
No, it's not. AAC is an MPEG-4 standard, developed independently of Apple by the same Motion Picture Experts Group that developed standards such as MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and mp3. It is not an Apple-proprietary format. If your portable player of choice does not support the standard, it's not Apple's fault.
If you insist on using a non-DRMed format (and Apple's is the best DRM around, in that it expertly balances both the fair use rights of the user and the draconian demands of the fanatical recording industry), then you are likely a tinkerer by nature, and there are options available. For example, you could "burn" the tracks to an Image Drive, and then "rip" the tracks off the iso image to another format. I'm sure you could even bang up a script to automate the process and transfer the metadata to an ID3 tag. No physical media need be involved.
My point is that Apple is doing things right. The average user has a great deal of freedom with the songs they have purchased. This is a big accomplishment, considering the demands of the recording industry. Don't be so quick to dismiss Apple's efforts.
What entertainment value vs. educational value does a game solicited towards minors which promotes violence against authority figures have?...Would the thoughts of the freedoms we enjoy come back and haunt us? Ever?...What does matter is the simple thought of society training children and students with everything they don't need for a healthy life style.
Ay, there's the rub. How does a society balance the values of freedom of speech/expression with the need to raise a moral generation? The key here is to restrict access to minors, but not to adults. The average age of gamers is now 29, so naturally the entertainment industry is going to create games that appeal to an older audience. These games are clearly labeled with easy-to-understand ratings, just like movies. Grand Theft Auto is rated "M" for mature, and should probably not be played by people under the age of 17, or people with existing violent tendencies. But even if the game IS played by someone in the restricted group, IT'S NOT THE GAME'S FAULT. Don't blame the game, which is perfectly legal and acceptable in this society of free speech, for "creating" violence.
Yes, there is a lot of violence in our society, and in the media/entertainment industries. But whether actual violence spawned violence in entertainment, or vice versa, is up for debate. We can't point our fingers conclusively at the media, and say, "if there were no violent video games, there would be no violence!" That's crap, and everyone knows it's crap since violence has existed, without the presence of video games, movies, MTV, or any of the other popular scapegoats, for many centuries. And we can't point the finger the other way, either, and say, "a peaceful society doesn't have violent images in its entertainment!" Also crap, since violence has always been present in entertainment during peacetime, all the way back to the Roman gladiatorial games.
Let's face it: violence sells, and in the presence of free speech, should not be banned from the general public. That's called fascism. However, I think certain things need to be in place to "protect the children," as cliche as that phrase has become. In this country, it is actually a crime for a movie theater to sell tickets for an "R" rated movie to children under 17. There is no such law on the books for "M" rated videogames, although there are several in the works I know of, in D.C., Illinois, and Califonia. There may be other states talking about it, too. My point is this: don't cripple the video game industry by censoring it, just because one kid predisposed to violence played a video game he probably shouldn't have, and then blew away a couple of cops. My question is this: did his parents know the type of videogame he was playing? Did they notice any warning signs of violent tendencies and seek help for the child? This was not the game's fault; GTA and its sequels have sold 32 million copies worldwide, and only one kid has acted out violently because of what he saw in them. That's hardly a correlation between GTA and violent tendencies. I have played every version of GTA, some for very long periods of time, and I haven't killed a single cop in my life. Nor have I become more violent.
Let's place the blame squarely where it belongs: on the person committing the crime. Freedom and responsibility are mutually inclusive; a society cannot have one without the other.
As a computer programmer instead of a lawyer, I find it frustrating that laws are written using language that is often ambigious. I find myself wanting laws written with supplimentary text describing test cases (law would apply in this case [...], but not this case [...]), and justifications (this law is intended to have the following effect [...]), and the specific events that lead to the creation of the law (Mr. Simth at Megacorp pointed out to Senator Bob that [...] so this law was drafted to prevent [...] ).
In the US, at least, those specific examples are created when the law is challenged and ruled upon by a court. US law is based heavily on precedent, and the previous rulings are often cited in new rulings regarding the same law. For example, the laws for fair use in the US are very vague as written in Title 17. However, several cases have set precedents stating that time-shifting and format-shifting are both legal fair-use rights, as long as the use is private in nature and the work is not distributed to others (check Sony v. Universal, also called the Betamax case, and Diamond Multimedia v. RIAA, the Rio Mp3 player case).
The justifications you mention are usually part of the ruling, with the judges giving reasons for their verdict. The specific events that led to the creation of the law would be nice, but I imagine that they would be really hard to track down and quantify. Usually the environment is such that a law is needed; there isn't always a specific event that sparks the need for a new law.
Obligatory: IANAL, so those with law degrees are welcome to step in and append/correct/confirm.
Not to be pessimistic, but this kind of extendibility is the exact reason that IE is swiss cheese.
It's not the extendability that's insecure, it's the implimentation of that extendability. The difference here is that FireFox extensions are not executable files. They are merely bits of JavaScript and XUL code that the browser itself executes. Thus, by their nature, malicious code cannot get executed unless the browser allows it. MSIE extensions are separate executable files that simply interface with the browser, but run as separate processes on the computer. Therefore, their access to the machine is controlled by the OS, not the browser, and since the program is running on the client, the OS just assumes it's benign. Additionally, since the extension is running on the OS, and not through the browser, it can spawn additional processes, hide itself in the registry, read/write files without the browser's knowledge, and do other nasty things that make some IE toolbars so frustratingly difficult to uninstall.
FireFox's approach to extendability is obviously designed with security in mind. The browser process controls the access that extensions have to the rest of the computer. There is no way to install an extension without the user's knowledge (as there is in IE), and the extensions don't have access to system files or processes. On the other hand, it seems like Microsoft, when they decided to allow IE to be extensable, did not take such security precautions: there are no failsafes in the software architecture. (FireFox has a "safe mode", where it starts the browser without running any extensions; this allows the user to have full control over the extensions s/he installs.)
Read about writing a FireFox extension here.
I agree. What can this toolbar do that Firefox cannot already do or existing extensions cannot already do?
You're right, there really is no functionality that the Yahoo toolbar adds to Firefox that's not already there (or available as an extension). But that's not why this story is important.
Microsoft's IE has had such a stranglehold on the browser market since the demise, resurrection, and crapification of Netscape that other browsers were not even on people's radar. Companies with formidible online presences only coded for IE, since that would effectively reach something like 99% of their potential audience; the other 1% using a different browser, such as the intrepid folks on Slashdot, probably didn't even want the product the company was offering anyway.
Fortunately for the internet population, Microsoft's strategy of "ease of use is more important than security" backfired, and their browser was eventually poked full of holes, exploited, and overrun with online annoyances. The next time someone came along with a browser that was both easy to use and secure, the public embraced it. Again, as luck would have it, the first people on the scene were open-source advocates: people with a firm grasp of software architecture, security, and standards adherance.
This story is important because it is Firefox's first foray into the mainstream. We geeks have been championing Firefox for some time now, and the fact that companies with worthless products are integrating with FireFox is a Good Thing (tm). It means that we have a sizeable enough market share to warrant some coding time and money.
Make what's an ad very clear before the user has to click more to read it.
Excellent point. The issue here is that RSS feeds are rendered in different ways, depending on the XML parser reading them, and there is currently no standard for setting advertisements apart from content. I think it would be considerate of the RSS publishers, if they are going to include the ads in their feed, to mark them differently, say with an "advert" attribute in the title tag (the W3C should be contacted about standardizing that attribute, of course). That way, RSS parsers can choose their own method of identifying ads, be it by italicizing them, putting the text in a different color, adding the string **ADVERTISEMENT** to the front of the headline, removing them altogether, whatever. This would be very similar to what Google does with its "Sponsored Links" section. They're there, but the reader can easily tell the difference between legitimate headlines and ads. Responsible RSS publishers would know that they are not deceiving their users, and responsible RSS parsers would keep the ads visible but separate, in order to support the publishers.
There would be a certain amount of workarounds and illegitimacy, of course, but that happens anyway and those people tend to be shunned in the Internet community. Advertisements in RSS feeds are going to happen whether we like it or not, so we should set up a viable and moderate model for them now before things start to get out of control (like they did with pop-up windows).
Did Disney buy the models?
Are they able to get the wireframe models with all animation handles, etc and just drop em into their modeling program?
Pixar recreated the models of the characters for the sequel, anyway, to provide more flexibility of motion and greater detail. PDI/DreamWorks did the same thing for Shrek 2.
In any case, either the animation will be far lower quality 3D or it will be done with traditional cell animation, a la the Buzz Lightyear Saturday morning abomination Disney cranked out shortly after the release of the first Toy Story film. I'm fairly sure it will also be direct to video, like the string of recent sequels to classics that Disney has placed on Wal*Mart shelves around the country: Cinderella 2, Sleeping Beauty 2, Tarzan 2, etc, etc.
I am currently going to sue HP because I just realized the scanner I bought can be used to make perfect copys of my copywrited artwork. Plus, I'm also going to use sony because their dvd burners can make perfect copys of my copywrighted home movies. Who's with me?
No one's with you until you learn to spell copyright correctly. It's not about Writing Copy, it's your Right to Copy. CopyRight.
However, you make an excellent point, as sarcastic as it may have been. The makers of technology cannot be held responsible for what people do with the technology, as long as the makers did not explicitly INTEND to violate copyright with their technology. I believe this precedent was set in Sony v. Universal (the Betamax case), when the US Supreme Court decided that time-shifting was Fair Use under Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 107 of the US Code, and that manufacturers of such devices cannot be held liable for any copyright infringement done with the devices.
There may be other places where the law or court rulings state it better, but I can't come up with any off the top of my head.
Anybody out there in Slashdot land think we might be able to put together an initiative, gather donations for funds, and buy the source from AOL?
I think it's quite feasible, depending on how much AOL is asking for the source. How much can we realistically raise? $10,000? $100,000? $1,000,000?
It would be worth looking into. I, for one, would welcome our new volunteer overlo-- I mean, uh, I'd love to help out.
When has anything like that ever worked?
It has worked before. For reference, please see the History of the Blender Foundation.
If you're too lazy to read the history, here's a synopsis: in 2001, when the company developing Blender folded, Ton Roosendaal gathered a core of volunteers, collected 100,000 euros in seven weeks, bought the rights to the source of Blender, and released it to the public under the GPL. To this day, Blender is an extremely active, successful 3D animation and rendering program, and it is starting to rival many of its commercial competitors, such as 3DSMax and Maya.
I would suspect that Microsoft could easily come up with some way to monitor an individual corporate license being used during product updates. Maybe they keep a head count of how many licensed copies are out there under a particular company's account. When 2041 licenses are detected for a corporate account of only 1000 licenses, Microsoft will skip going after the pirates and basically take the issue to the company in terms of fines and/or a nice big Microsoft bill.
The only problem with this logic is that most corporations don't install every machine in their company individually. Most of them (and a large percentage of computer labs in education) are set up with an imaging system. The sysadmin sets up one machine with the software needed on all the machines, and then runs NortonGhost or similar to propegate the image out to all the machines. Since the company purchased licenses for all the computers, Microsoft has no problem with this. When updates are available, the sysadmins apply the updates to the master image to test full compatibility with the company's programs, and then re-images all the machines. Microsoft Update is only contacted once during this process... not once for each machine. So unless Microsoft wants to roll out their own image/license management program-which actually wouldn't be too bad of an idea--licensing the corporate versions of Windows is rightfully based on the honesty of the licensees. Just like every other piece of corporate software.
Doesn't it seem a whole lot EASIER to just change our planet screwing habits than it does to attempt to terra-form a dry, red rock-which we would inevitably screw up in our same unlearned fashion?
Hey, then I guess Lewis and Clark were pretty off the mark. After all, the East Coast had cities and civilization and all the comforts of home. Why were they wasting their time traveling into the uncharted forests of America when their time would have been better served getting their act together at home, fixing public corruption, cleaning streets, etc. After all, the American (Mid)West is pretty inhospitible: huge rivers, deserts, dense forests, prairieland, and all those bears and coyotes.
Come to think of it, Columbus should have never left Portugal. There was nothing for him on the other side of the world. His time would be better spent trying to find out where royalty got all that money they financed him with -- seems shady to me.
<sigh>
Anyone without a sense of exploration should shut up and get out of the way. You will never understand. Be content to stay home and gripe about your problems; the rest of us are going exploring.
What if they aimed it so it would miss hitting Mars and go into orbit instead?
Even so, the spacecraft would still have to slow down considerably. As the spacecraft enters Mars' sphere of influence, it is still in orbit around the sun, and therefore, by definition, moving faster than Mars' escape velocity. Without removing some of the orbital energy (i.e., slowing down), the spacecraft would simply swing around Mars on a hyperbolic orbit and continue its merry way around the sun. However, if the spacecraft were to fire a few rockets, perhaps in conjunction with aerobraking, it's orbital energy would drop down to less than Mars' escape velocity, and it would essentially be "captured" by Mars. All of that takes energy in the form of fuel.