Thanks for your detailed comment. I certainly will take a closer look at it. I meant expensive because somewhere I saw a 300,000 dollar charge for a company, or a IIRC 1500 price tag. I am not clear on how much better graphics need to be, if the rendering engine is written in C. That is, if you just wanted to rotate an object for example you could build it in Perl or C and the rendering would be the same speed.. as someone showed. However of course Torque is a very comprehensive system built with different goals, it is doubtless superior to Squeak in rendering at least. I am curious about how much it will cost to build high resolution buildings like that shown in the Torque website (the ramshackle house, very pretty, and field of wheat with clocktower..). That is, I new the guys who did Oxygen at Art Technology Group for Chiat Day advertising, where people have their own "room" (kind of a blackboard for posting notes on, with a background of your choice) and people sort of get on a "subway" to get there and chat with you. A less detailed, more schematic view of an office might be cheaper to build. On the other hand if these metaverses get popular there will undoubtedly be GPL content too.. I suppose instead of mailing documents you would place them on someone's desk or tape them to a whiteboard? Curious if this is just throwing all of CSCW out the window and jumping into gaming, or if there has been some thinking already about the kinds of procedures that would be used in business. Game making is an expensive business, and Torque may keep it that way for business too I thought. Perhaps I'm wrong though.. $300K isn't much for a big corp to spend on infrastructure. Thx for the comment. -Matt
Of course it's a trap. Don't need tinfoil, just look at history. They never have and never will do good regarding standards.
But these troglodytes are connected by money and favors to the government you know. They have experience doing modeling, demos, etc. IIRC the U.S. government models foreign policy using a tree of responses to potential situations, all precalculated for maximum results. At least that's how it used to be before the neocons. You know, the military had a plan for everything.
So it stands to reason MS does things similarly. It is all a precalculated decision tree and when something occurs that they didn't guess, they just update the thing. The scary thing is they learn from their mistakes. But MS has a lot of cash, a lot of lawyers, and very few ethics. So they're golden.
Then it is pretty easy to see the sarcasm and smirking going on as they reach this decision point.
Step 2345: ODF is getting popular (40% probability) Step 2346: "Cave in" (lol) and recommend to ANSI or some such. (PR: "We mean business", etc.) Step 2347: Start embrace/extend thread, Start "ODF in everything" team, Buy startups if any. Contribute some dumb thing to ODF and let wind out of their sails. (ha!) Step 2348: Did we win yet? Step 2351: If not start getting mean. Threaten patents (doh). Get Novell's ass moving. Get clients to complain about how glacially changing ODF can't save their important ActiveX apps, etc. Launch "Better ODF than ODF" product. Launch attack PR thread ("Would you leave your future in the hands of these guys", etc. lol!)
Anyway more of the same. Basically nobody would win a Hugo award for writing this story, it's too predictable and the aliens are the good guys.
Finally, a reason to keep buying more powerful processors. Even if much is offloaded to the graphics board, all the intermeshed video, real time gesture and what the heck else will all be good for the bottom line if a metaverse is required for business. They've been salivating about this for years. No more having to fund music startups and whoever else comes up with a product that requires serious processing (had a friend who got investment from them for such a purpose).
Torque sounds neat but extremely expensive. Just how much did IBM spend on liscensing it and how much to upgrade hardware to support it? And is it that good? They could also have invested in becoming the top sponsor of croquet too, though it seems to require significant resources. (in terms of max. people in a room, and also how well it works on different pcs - I've had it crash mainly due to a gl bug I think or fail to run on a number of machines).
I was just at the Import Car Show in Tokyo and they had a Knight Rider style long black convertible with the red led in front. The cockpit was absolutely smattered with blinkelights of all proportions and colors.
Personally I liked messing with IIRC xsetleds though no need for it now. Perhaps you need to implement some calm technology instead... "If computers are everywhere they better stay out of the way, and that means designing them so that the people being shared by the computers remain serene and in control." (a serious technology not a joke)
It seems to me that stating a specific number without listing which patents these are escalates their ordinary FUD in line with Ballmer's announcement of a lawsuit campaign to a restraint on trade. Considering that they are a convicted monopolist this is no laughing matter. How is this even legal?
Now for just a little more the government can hire half the Uruguayan software industry to create fabulous educational software in collaboration with talented teachers and researchers, and since they are the first then they can release for free or even sell it (making money to invest back into educational software development while also being cheaper for another country to buy than make themselves).
It would be fabulous to release that as open source, if only the programmers and others involved in making it can be somehow reimbursed or have their living expenses paid for which might not be a bad idea either. Also, it would be probably very cheap compared to first world rates. I'm thinking computers can be much more useful in education and maybe this will even result in a computer-based, self-paced learning curriculum in many languages.
Maybe a lot of geeks here wish that sort of thing was available when they were in grade school. If it could be released as open source then talented kids could learn in more depth or follow their interests, or even learn in more than one language at once, so instead of the problems that come from skipping grades there could be perhaps ordinary lessons plus self-paced directed or inquiry-based learning. Not just browsing wikipedia but enough for a child to learn from.
A similar thing written at adult level would also be fabulously useful. It appears some of this idea is in the encyclopedia of life that just won funding based on a "wish" speech at TED. The first thing needed is linux hacking for elementary school kids. Maybe before that an auto-restore, auto-backup extra partition?
The people who shoplift are not your target market anyway, have no disposable income, probably are insignificant outside high crime area/high volume retail.
It will cost money to develop the chip which will be passed on to consumers, and boosting the amount of money spent pressing each disk. Shops that do not buy the hardware to detect the chips will be losing money because the same volume of theft will occur but the real value of the otherwise worthless CD has been increased by the chip. The idea that money is actually being lost is an illusion created by the record companies who use flashy printing and threats to assign a huge price to what is really very cheap to produce per unit. There is a constant cost they incurred to make the album and then a continual advertising cost and pressing cost. The pressing cost is extremely low compared to the advertising cost but it is presented as being high. By charging outlets for theft they give outlets a reason to buy antitheft hardware. However the only thing the chips will really be useful for is DRM since once you have the chip on the disc the next step is to add a tag reader into all drives. It is another way to break the spec.
Yes I know. Jeb was only the case that most stuck in my head. It was not my intention to flame an entire state but that following the money is likely to uncover interesting facts, and Florida does not seem to be particularly clean.
There was a prominent story asking why the NRA helped support such a gun law as that one.
And gee, there was a Florida corruption story in today's google news even. I don't know if Florida is more or less corrupt than say New York or L.A., but certainly following the money has worked quite a lot in the past month or so as the following headlines show. Perhaps this is aimed more at the person replying to your post than you yourself. Shooting with a shotgun I suppose this being the web and all.
May 4: "The ongoing investigation into corruption at the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation and in state government produced another conviction yesterday"
May 8: "Geddings gets 4 years in prison.... that the case was not about the corruption that the government claimed but about Geddings'... previously lived in Charlotte, now lives in Florida. Geddings was appointed to the lottery commission... the lottery commission "as a venue for graft and greed." Well I can't tell if this involves Florida really maybe it's really a Carolinas story. He lives in Florida though.
May 7: "Serious weaknesses found in repaired New Orleans levees. Also casting a shadow of doubt over the pumps is the fact that the deal to provide them went to Moving Water Industries, a politically connected Florida firm that's currently the target of a Department of Justice lawsuit over corruption allegations"
April 9: "Violence and corruption still a problem in South Florida....A profound problem that has plagued both the City of Miami and Miami-Dade County police departments are rampant instances of police corruption and abuse of power....A prominent example of this is the 2003 case of eleven City of Miami police officers accused of planting guns at crime scenes, shooting unarmed civilians and giving false statements."
April 25, 2007: Florida's Top Prison Official Goes To Jail "The public official who once headed Florida's Department of Corrections has been sentenced to eight years in prison for taking thousands of dollars in kickbacks from a contractor during his scandal-plagued tenure."
April 30, 2007 From CQ Weekly: Florida Recount Drama -- Part III. "Curtis' campaign Web site says that, while working in 2000 as a computer programmer with Yang Enterprises Inc. of Oveido, Fla., he was told to develop software for Feeney -- then a GOP leader in the state House and also Yang's general counsel -- "that would allow for elections to be invisibly rigged....The Web site says Curtis delivered the program "believing the prototype was to be used in some way to prevent election fraud" until the company's owner told him it was to be used to "control the vote in South Florida." It was this corruption, Curtis says, that prompted him to run against [Republican Tom] Feeney."
Curious why it would be so much trouble besides difficulty in building it in 2D. There must have been some reason why Heinlein wrote (in description of the far future spaceship Dora, in The Number of the Beast) that they used trinary logic which (I think was implied) was more efficient and a math genius replied "Then you must be using triphase electrical current". For that matter, wouldn't many more than 2 states be even better, if we had some kind of optical transistor?
Considering the amount of money lost, and the recent 1 billion dollar loss this week, the government (secret service or the Fed?) ought to allocate some REAL money to hire some well-known, trusted master programmers to take another look at home computing environment (and perhaps something like Firefox, or perhaps something running at a trusted level) and see what can be done. A pnwed pc could presumably display most kinds of certification seals but something that involves interaction between a trusted third party and you, plus a physical device i.e. a secureid key or even a memory scanning hardware dongle, could provide much higher levels of security. If you realize that only the unsuccessful worms get caught, this might open up ways not only to prevent phishing but also to guarantee system integrity in general.
Oh yeah, also the only CDs I've bought have been ones sold by street musicians and sometimes from movie theaters when sold there if it had some nice music. Presumably if I liked any CD I had I would keep it even if ripped as a master, whereas if I was bored I would want to get rid of it and not keep a ripped version either. I see no good use for this law besides "agressive protection of a trademark" or the like. Not that it is necessary for that even.
P.S. Sorry I also should note that I buy books. And I buy the same ones a number of times from authors I like. I used to rent VHS tapes a lot but these days the net and manga or novels take all my leisure time that used to be spent on TV. It is said that mobile phones eat up so much disposable income that less can be spent on other leisure stuff, I wonder if the change in the makeup of the average budget of an individual is figured into any stated losses by MAFIAA. I think these days you spend more on gadgets and service contracts than before.
Considering that Florida is quite well known at least at the level of nudge, nudge wink, wink to be corrupt at the highest levels, run by the dumb relative of the unpopular draconian president and the front line for ballot manipulation experiments or "malfunctions", the answer should be quite clear.
That plus the note that an equally draconian law on the side of gun purchasers is also in place according to someone else in this thread.
I don't think it requires tin foil. Anyone who is unbiased and unhurried ought to find this enough cause to investigate. Obviously, the RIAA/MPAA paid one or more people very high in the Florida government to pass this law, and the NRA paid similar people to pass the gun law. (I refer to the quote that the police are prohibited from maintaining gun purchase records). While the gun law could be interpreted as valiantly protecting a constitutional right, Florida just doesn't strike me as the place that would do this first. It is much more the sort of place Microsoft would aim to bribe^H^H^H^H^Hlobby strongly.
In fact, it might even be interesting to correlate spending by Microsoft, the RIAA, MPAA, and NRA state by state or legislator by legislator. Follow the money. With the discarding of ethics, rule of law and common sense by sycophants and cows since 911, money is obviously the only thing guiding the U.S. government in individual states or the nation at large. It seems extremely likely that a flow of money has driven this law to be created, in a similar way to the recent unveiling of such a flow of money to the top Canadian in charge of such laws.
Disclaimer: I do not buy CDs used or otherwise, seldom listen to music of my own, do not buy DVDs, and do not live in Florida or own a gun. However I live in Japan which has strong anti-gun laws, which I find more an effect of losing WWII than a natural answer to the gun problem. There are a lot of shops here that sell used CDs/DVDs although manufacturers have fought for some tax on that.
The CG illustration shows a portal in the middle of a road. Stupid because cars would crash into the tunnel.
Also arxiv is I thought where anyone can submit. So TFA saying a major journal is disingenuous because it is popoular but not peer reviewed, unless I missed something.
The tunnel is not nonexistent, cloaking only works at a certain frequency range. Probably it could be found through lower frequency vibration (seismic/sonic) or higher energy perhaps (i.e. X-ray). Right?
So I take it the idea is basically saying (though I have only read part of the paper yet) that you can wear a cloak of invisibility and even open the side of it, and if you flare it open still nobody can see you except head-on.
There is one neat thing where they say a magnetic field entering one end of the tunnel would look like a magnetic monopole at the other end. Also looks like it might be useful in building telescopes.
I also give points to them for their "The Little Prince" illustration. (the hat shaped object is a snake that swallowed an elephant...) I like these guys!
Last time I read/. at 0 that's for sure. A bunch of people worried about pressing on an LCD not designed for it, and then a bunch of trolls. Guess all stories are like this.
The company's in Korea. Any slashdotters there trying it with linux / trying it out in the store? This could really hurt Anoto, which makes an extremely advanced system of bluetooth/optical recognition pens and special paper using a pattern that is unique for every page.
Anoto, like the Flypen toy based on its tech, has all kinds of applications. For example a checkbox called "Fax" at the bottom of a sheet of paper that when you check it, it gets faxed. Navisis has a portable version for pdas and maybe phones, called the phone pen which looks quite cool, and the mouse version that works on your table top is quite neat too. They do sell protective covering for your lcd as well, anyway I'd like to hear from someone who really uses it, and then hear about if it just looks like a mouse to the system or if it needs a driver.
I doubt MS thought of it, but this could actually be a way for parents to watch what their kids are doing on the net. Maybe buy a wide screen that could be used for wide tv/movies or for two word processing sessions? But you can't past between them.. much better to use a virtual pc type thing and just write a driver to redirect an extra set of mouse/keyboard to one of them..
I've heard of something similar before, a single PC with separate keyboards and mice (and I thought separate screens but don't remember) so that with 1 core PC you can add peripherals for more people to sit around it working. For use in a 3rd world country I thought.. of course unless they are splitting a screen that's got corners it will be quite sweaty over there..
Oh there is one other use. You could have a bunch of dumb terminals running sessions on a split screen and project the screen. Already thought of that kind of thing before though and it wouldn't be enhanced by actually splitting the screen itself. Not that I'd use Vista for it..
"Silverlight for Linux. And if there is no announcement, we should try to get someone drunk enough to get them to do it." There was no announcement of Silverlight for Linux, but I was still kind of joking. But I did get drunk with senior Microsoft employees. One point.
Another piece of software to avoid. Miguel though I don't know you, you seem to be the kind of powerhouse who I wish wasn't working at Novell. Actually sitting in the seat that is responsible for Novell's side of the MS embrace and extend campaign. I even took the time to look a little at Silverlight - no I didn't install it. If it is as nice as you say maybe it would be nice, if all things were equal.
But they aren't. And I don't know if I trust someone who is both indeminified against lawsuits from Microsoft and (as he blogs) gets drunk with senior Microsoft employees. The timing is bad, to say the least, who wants to use crippleware and anything smelling of MS/Novell?
Other people have said but I will add: There is nothing earthshaking about Miguel's desire to extend Mono, his copy of.Net, by copying MS' extension of.Net. There is nothing inevitable about silverlight. In fact, someone of Miguel's talent (at least in project management, I don't know him personally) could do a great deal for open source if he wasn't always copying Microsoft.
I believe his arguments are disingenuous. (Well, fake.) MS is NOT able to easily push new technologies into acceptance. They can spend a lot of money on advertising. The video of siverlight movie editing was cute but huh? It was using a faked Minority Report video, and an attempt to make a Minority Report interface (not as good as Kai's Power Tools about 10 years before this), and a laugh at anyone who really does video editing. This new Novell project is premature, serves to support MS embrace and extend, paints a nice target for threats and guess what if you build a successful company on it MS will own your ass.
Whatever silverlight promises may be nice to have, and some snippets I saw in his blog about Ruby and 3D sounded enticing. But you know what? You don't need anything Microsoft to do cool things. Maybe this will be impetus for open source people who don't work at Novell and carouse with the MS senior execs to get moving on developing something more interesting. I'd rather not intentionally put manacles on my own arms and wait for the other shoe to drop, which is what it seems is required for using Miguel's software. Head in the sand indeed, let's wait until the world depends on silverlight I've got plenty of other things to do. Someone tell me why you want to help son of SCO? Getting drunk with the execs indeed! Fuck off!
Slashdot Mirror
In Chinese foot, you shoot Russia!
Look people they're just dumb. No company is intentionally going to want to shoot their foot off in China.
Thanks for your detailed comment. I certainly will take a closer look at it. I meant expensive because somewhere I saw a 300,000 dollar charge for a company, or a IIRC 1500 price tag. I am not clear on how much better graphics need to be, if the rendering engine is written in C. That is, if you just wanted to rotate an object for example you could build it in Perl or C and the rendering would be the same speed.. as someone showed. However of course Torque is a very comprehensive system built with different goals, it is doubtless superior to Squeak in rendering at least. I am curious about how much it will cost to build high resolution buildings like that shown in the Torque website (the ramshackle house, very pretty, and field of wheat with clocktower..). That is, I new the guys who did Oxygen at Art Technology Group for Chiat Day advertising, where people have their own "room" (kind of a blackboard for posting notes on, with a background of your choice) and people sort of get on a "subway" to get there and chat with you. A less detailed, more schematic view of an office might be cheaper to build. On the other hand if these metaverses get popular there will undoubtedly be GPL content too.. I suppose instead of mailing documents you would place them on someone's desk or tape them to a whiteboard? Curious if this is just throwing all of CSCW out the window and jumping into gaming, or if there has been some thinking already about the kinds of procedures that would be used in business. Game making is an expensive business, and Torque may keep it that way for business too I thought. Perhaps I'm wrong though.. $300K isn't much for a big corp to spend on infrastructure. Thx for the comment. -Matt
Thank you for your comment! I'll check it out.
Of course it's a trap. Don't need tinfoil, just look at history. They never have and never will do good regarding standards.
But these troglodytes are connected by money and favors to the government you know. They have experience doing modeling, demos, etc. IIRC the U.S. government models foreign policy using a tree of responses to potential situations, all precalculated for maximum results. At least that's how it used to be before the neocons. You know, the military had a plan for everything.
So it stands to reason MS does things similarly. It is all a precalculated decision tree and when something occurs that they didn't guess, they just update the thing. The scary thing is they learn from their mistakes. But MS has a lot of cash, a lot of lawyers, and very few ethics. So they're golden.
Then it is pretty easy to see the sarcasm and smirking going on as they reach this decision point.
Step 2345: ODF is getting popular (40% probability)
Step 2346: "Cave in" (lol) and recommend to ANSI or some such. (PR: "We mean business", etc.)
Step 2347: Start embrace/extend thread, Start "ODF in everything" team, Buy startups if any. Contribute some dumb thing to ODF and let wind out of their sails. (ha!)
Step 2348: Did we win yet?
Step 2351: If not start getting mean. Threaten patents (doh). Get Novell's ass moving. Get clients to complain about how glacially changing ODF can't save their important ActiveX apps, etc. Launch "Better ODF than ODF" product. Launch attack PR thread ("Would you leave your future in the hands of these guys", etc. lol!)
Anyway more of the same. Basically nobody would win a Hugo award for writing this story, it's too predictable and the aliens are the good guys.
Torque sounds neat but extremely expensive. Just how much did IBM spend on liscensing it and how much to upgrade hardware to support it? And is it that good? They could also have invested in becoming the top sponsor of croquet too, though it seems to require significant resources. (in terms of max. people in a room, and also how well it works on different pcs - I've had it crash mainly due to a gl bug I think or fail to run on a number of machines).
I was just at the Import Car Show in Tokyo and they had a Knight Rider style long black convertible with the red led in front. The cockpit was absolutely smattered with blinkelights of all proportions and colors.
Personally I liked messing with IIRC xsetleds though no need for it now. Perhaps you need to implement some calm technology instead... "If computers are everywhere they better stay out of the way, and that means designing them so that the people being shared by the computers remain serene and in control." (a serious technology not a joke)
It seems to me that stating a specific number without listing which patents these are escalates their ordinary FUD in line with Ballmer's announcement of a lawsuit campaign to a restraint on trade. Considering that they are a convicted monopolist this is no laughing matter. How is this even legal?
Now for just a little more the government can hire half the Uruguayan software industry to create fabulous educational software in collaboration with talented teachers and researchers, and since they are the first then they can release for free or even sell it (making money to invest back into educational software development while also being cheaper for another country to buy than make themselves).
It would be fabulous to release that as open source, if only the programmers and others involved in making it can be somehow reimbursed or have their living expenses paid for which might not be a bad idea either. Also, it would be probably very cheap compared to first world rates. I'm thinking computers can be much more useful in education and maybe this will even result in a computer-based, self-paced learning curriculum in many languages.
Maybe a lot of geeks here wish that sort of thing was available when they were in grade school. If it could be released as open source then talented kids could learn in more depth or follow their interests, or even learn in more than one language at once, so instead of the problems that come from skipping grades there could be perhaps ordinary lessons plus self-paced directed or inquiry-based learning. Not just browsing wikipedia but enough for a child to learn from.
A similar thing written at adult level would also be fabulously useful. It appears some of this idea is in the encyclopedia of life that just won funding based on a "wish" speech at TED. The first thing needed is linux hacking for elementary school kids. Maybe before that an auto-restore, auto-backup extra partition?
Bottom line: No, not at all.
The people who shoplift are not your target market anyway, have no disposable income, probably are insignificant outside high crime area/high volume retail.
It will cost money to develop the chip which will be passed on to consumers, and boosting the amount of money spent pressing each disk. Shops that do not buy the hardware to detect the chips will be losing money because the same volume of theft will occur but the real value of the otherwise worthless CD has been increased by the chip. The idea that money is actually being lost is an illusion created by the record companies who use flashy printing and threats to assign a huge price to what is really very cheap to produce per unit. There is a constant cost they incurred to make the album and then a continual advertising cost and pressing cost. The pressing cost is extremely low compared to the advertising cost but it is presented as being high. By charging outlets for theft they give outlets a reason to buy antitheft hardware. However the only thing the chips will really be useful for is DRM since once you have the chip on the disc the next step is to add a tag reader into all drives. It is another way to break the spec.
A use for the Minority Report style interface. Something tells me they aren't using Silverlight though!
Yes I know. Jeb was only the case that most stuck in my head. It was not my intention to flame an entire state but that following the money is likely to uncover interesting facts, and Florida does not seem to be particularly clean.
... that the case was not about the corruption that the government claimed but about Geddings' ... previously lived in Charlotte, now lives in Florida. Geddings was appointed to the lottery commission ... the lottery commission "as a venue for graft and greed." Well I can't tell if this involves Florida really maybe it's really a Carolinas story. He lives in Florida though.
...A profound problem that has plagued both the City of Miami and Miami-Dade County police departments are rampant instances of police corruption and abuse of power. ...A prominent example of this is the 2003 case of eleven City of Miami police officers accused of planting guns at crime scenes, shooting unarmed civilians and giving false statements."
...The Web site says Curtis delivered the program "believing the prototype was to be used in some way to prevent election fraud" until the company's owner told him it was to be used to "control the vote in South Florida." It was this corruption, Curtis says, that prompted him to run against [Republican Tom] Feeney."
There was a prominent story asking why the NRA helped support such a gun law as that one.
And gee, there was a Florida corruption story in today's google news even. I don't know if Florida is more or less corrupt than say New York or L.A., but certainly following the money has worked quite a lot in the past month or so as the following headlines show. Perhaps this is aimed more at the person replying to your post than you yourself. Shooting with a shotgun I suppose this being the web and all.
May 4: "The ongoing investigation into corruption at the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation and in state government produced another conviction yesterday"
May 8: "Geddings gets 4 years in prison.
May 7: "Serious weaknesses found in repaired New Orleans levees. Also casting a shadow of doubt over the pumps is the fact that the deal to provide them went to Moving Water Industries, a politically connected Florida firm that's currently the target of a Department of Justice lawsuit over corruption allegations"
April 9: "Violence and corruption still a problem in South Florida.
April 25, 2007: Florida's Top Prison Official Goes To Jail "The public official who once headed Florida's Department of Corrections has been sentenced to eight years in prison for taking thousands of dollars in kickbacks from a contractor during his scandal-plagued tenure."
April 30, 2007 From CQ Weekly: Florida Recount Drama -- Part III. "Curtis' campaign Web site says that, while working in 2000 as a computer programmer with Yang Enterprises Inc. of Oveido, Fla., he was told to develop software for Feeney -- then a GOP leader in the state House and also Yang's general counsel -- "that would allow for elections to be invisibly rigged.
Curious why it would be so much trouble besides difficulty in building it in 2D. There must have been some reason why Heinlein wrote (in description of the far future spaceship Dora, in The Number of the Beast) that they used trinary logic which (I think was implied) was more efficient and a math genius replied "Then you must be using triphase electrical current". For that matter, wouldn't many more than 2 states be even better, if we had some kind of optical transistor?
Considering the amount of money lost, and the recent 1 billion dollar loss this week, the government (secret service or the Fed?) ought to allocate some REAL money to hire some well-known, trusted master programmers to take another look at home computing environment (and perhaps something like Firefox, or perhaps something running at a trusted level) and see what can be done. A pnwed pc could presumably display most kinds of certification seals but something that involves interaction between a trusted third party and you, plus a physical device i.e. a secureid key or even a memory scanning hardware dongle, could provide much higher levels of security. If you realize that only the unsuccessful worms get caught, this might open up ways not only to prevent phishing but also to guarantee system integrity in general.
Oh yeah, also the only CDs I've bought have been ones sold by street musicians and sometimes from movie theaters when sold there if it had some nice music. Presumably if I liked any CD I had I would keep it even if ripped as a master, whereas if I was bored I would want to get rid of it and not keep a ripped version either. I see no good use for this law besides "agressive protection of a trademark" or the like. Not that it is necessary for that even.
P.S. Sorry I also should note that I buy books. And I buy the same ones a number of times from authors I like. I used to rent VHS tapes a lot but these days the net and manga or novels take all my leisure time that used to be spent on TV. It is said that mobile phones eat up so much disposable income that less can be spent on other leisure stuff, I wonder if the change in the makeup of the average budget of an individual is figured into any stated losses by MAFIAA. I think these days you spend more on gadgets and service contracts than before.
Considering that Florida is quite well known at least at the level of nudge, nudge wink, wink to be corrupt at the highest levels, run by the dumb relative of the unpopular draconian president and the front line for ballot manipulation experiments or "malfunctions", the answer should be quite clear.
That plus the note that an equally draconian law on the side of gun purchasers is also in place according to someone else in this thread.
I don't think it requires tin foil. Anyone who is unbiased and unhurried ought to find this enough cause to investigate. Obviously, the RIAA/MPAA paid one or more people very high in the Florida government to pass this law, and the NRA paid similar people to pass the gun law. (I refer to the quote that the police are prohibited from maintaining gun purchase records). While the gun law could be interpreted as valiantly protecting a constitutional right, Florida just doesn't strike me as the place that would do this first. It is much more the sort of place Microsoft would aim to bribe^H^H^H^H^Hlobby strongly.
In fact, it might even be interesting to correlate spending by Microsoft, the RIAA, MPAA, and NRA state by state or legislator by legislator. Follow the money. With the discarding of ethics, rule of law and common sense by sycophants and cows since 911, money is obviously the only thing guiding the U.S. government in individual states or the nation at large. It seems extremely likely that a flow of money has driven this law to be created, in a similar way to the recent unveiling of such a flow of money to the top Canadian in charge of such laws.
Disclaimer: I do not buy CDs used or otherwise, seldom listen to music of my own, do not buy DVDs, and do not live in Florida or own a gun. However I live in Japan which has strong anti-gun laws, which I find more an effect of losing WWII than a natural answer to the gun problem. There are a lot of shops here that sell used CDs/DVDs although manufacturers have fought for some tax on that.
Sorry you are correct of course. I meant it could be detected, through non-EM means.
The CG illustration shows a portal in the middle of a road. Stupid because cars would crash into the tunnel.
Also arxiv is I thought where anyone can submit. So TFA saying a major journal is disingenuous because it is popoular but not peer reviewed, unless I missed something.
The tunnel is not nonexistent, cloaking only works at a certain frequency range. Probably it could be found through lower frequency vibration (seismic/sonic) or higher energy perhaps (i.e. X-ray). Right?
So I take it the idea is basically saying (though I have only read part of the paper yet) that you can wear a cloak of invisibility and even open the side of it, and if you flare it open still nobody can see you except head-on.
There is one neat thing where they say a magnetic field entering one end of the tunnel would look like a magnetic monopole at the other end. Also looks like it might be useful in building telescopes.
I also give points to them for their "The Little Prince" illustration. (the hat shaped object is a snake that swallowed an elephant...) I like these guys!
Last time I read /. at 0 that's for sure. A bunch of people worried about pressing on an LCD not designed for it, and then a bunch of trolls. Guess all stories are like this.
The company's in Korea. Any slashdotters there trying it with linux / trying it out in the store?
This could really hurt Anoto, which makes an extremely advanced system of bluetooth/optical recognition pens and special paper using a pattern that is unique for every page.
Anoto, like the Flypen toy based on its tech, has all kinds of applications. For example a checkbox called "Fax" at the bottom of a sheet of paper that when you check it, it gets faxed. Navisis has a portable version for pdas and maybe phones, called the phone pen which looks quite cool, and the mouse version that works on your table top is quite neat too. They do sell protective covering for your lcd as well, anyway I'd like to hear from someone who really uses it, and then hear about if it just looks like a mouse to the system or if it needs a driver.
I doubt MS thought of it, but this could actually be a way for parents to watch what their kids are doing on the net. Maybe buy a wide screen that could be used for wide tv/movies or for two word processing sessions? But you can't past between them.. much better to use a virtual pc type thing and just write a driver to redirect an extra set of mouse/keyboard to one of them..
I've heard of something similar before, a single PC with separate keyboards and mice (and I thought separate screens but don't remember) so that with 1 core PC you can add peripherals for more people to sit around it working. For use in a 3rd world country I thought.. of course unless they are splitting a screen that's got corners it will be quite sweaty over there..
Oh there is one other use. You could have a bunch of dumb terminals running sessions on a split screen and project the screen. Already thought of that kind of thing before though and it wouldn't be enhanced by actually splitting the screen itself. Not that I'd use Vista for it..
is how the spaghetti loops interact with the magnetic fields and is electricity stored in the meatballs or WHAT?!?!?!!?!!!!?!???!
Another piece of software to avoid. Miguel though I don't know you, you seem to be the kind of powerhouse who I wish wasn't working at Novell. Actually sitting in the seat that is responsible for Novell's side of the MS embrace and extend campaign. I even took the time to look a little at Silverlight - no I didn't install it. If it is as nice as you say maybe it would be nice, if all things were equal.
.Net, by copying MS' extension of .Net. There is nothing inevitable about silverlight. In fact, someone of Miguel's talent (at least in project management, I don't know him personally) could do a great deal for open source if he wasn't always copying Microsoft.
But they aren't. And I don't know if I trust someone who is both indeminified against lawsuits from Microsoft and (as he blogs) gets drunk with senior Microsoft employees. The timing is bad, to say the least, who wants to use crippleware and anything smelling of MS/Novell?
Other people have said but I will add: There is nothing earthshaking about Miguel's desire to extend Mono, his copy of
I believe his arguments are disingenuous. (Well, fake.) MS is NOT able to easily push new technologies into acceptance. They can spend a lot of money on advertising. The video of siverlight movie editing was cute but huh? It was using a faked Minority Report video, and an attempt to make a Minority Report interface (not as good as Kai's Power Tools about 10 years before this), and a laugh at anyone who really does video editing. This new Novell project is premature, serves to support MS embrace and extend, paints a nice target for threats and guess what if you build a successful company on it MS will own your ass.
Whatever silverlight promises may be nice to have, and some snippets I saw in his blog about Ruby and 3D sounded enticing. But you know what? You don't need anything Microsoft to do cool things. Maybe this will be impetus for open source people who don't work at Novell and carouse with the MS senior execs to get moving on developing something more interesting. I'd rather not intentionally put manacles on my own arms and wait for the other shoe to drop, which is what it seems is required for using Miguel's software. Head in the sand indeed, let's wait until the world depends on silverlight I've got plenty of other things to do. Someone tell me why you want to help son of SCO? Getting drunk with the execs indeed! Fuck off!