Iran however seems to relish the scenario of massive retaliation and would by the words of the current leader love to be obliterated, because the ideals they are fighting for would live on in the region only without Israel around to bother them any longer.
Yawn.
Got to make sure everyone is scared of the Iranians, so there won't be an outcry when the bombing starts.
First Saddam was the Crazy, Crazy Psychopath of the desert with WMDs, --- oops, he wasn't. Then Kim Jung-Il was the Crazy, Cracy Psychopath of North Korea shooting off WMDs because he's CRAZY -- oops, it was really about the US forcing all international banks to freeze north korean accounts. Now Iran is the Crazy, Crazy Psychopath of the desert with WMDs with suicidal tendencies.
There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again.
I mean, informing people about terrorist attacks is just playing into their hands.
No, but sensationalizing the news reporting is. Did we really need to have regularly programming constantly interrupted during the day because of the recent college shootings? What benefit was there to completely pre-empting much of that day's prime-time programming with 'news' shows pontificating on every little detail of the event?
> Can't we just give the processes weapons and > let them decide which follows?
That is actually the kind of question that my Operations Research professor (who also did a lot of work in CPU simulation and performance estimating) used to throw onto final exams...
Operations Research being closely related to Industrial Engineering, your prof proves the old joke about how IE's are Imaginary Engineers.
Judging by the preachy responses I've heard, it's no wonder people get turned off. Let's compare and contrast:
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with Slashdot's tagline - News for Nerds?
At this site we don't expect to be talking to the "average joe on the street" - we expect to be talking to people for whom "digital restrictions management" is an important issue and where the expected level of technical expertise is such that minor hassles likes finding a free Ogg Vorbis player are insignificant because most of the readership already has one somewhere on their systems.
Caskets? If you believe that should be shown, fuck you - and any who believe what you do. Cover the debacle that is the War on Terra all you want, but show some fucking respect for the dead.
Coward. You have no business trying to hide behind emotional rhetoric. How about you explain just how showing a bunch of boxes with flags draped on them behing unloaded from an airplane is disrespectful to anyone? It isn't like they want to open up each coffin and show shots of the corpse - the box could be empty as far as anyone knows.
You've got one fucked up perspective if you think hiding the deaths of soldiers is *respectful* - didn't they die for American values like freedom of the press, democracy and open government? Since when is downplaying the real costs of a war an American value?
Because that was the premise of my original post. You know, the one you first replied to with a straw-man argument.
if you expect to get something in return for a payment, then the payment is probably not a tax.
Now you are off your rocker. Let me quote from my original post: we have taxes to pay for the public infrastructure and the continuing operation of said infrastructure.
For example, some of the taxes I pay go to pay for other people's education. I get nothing in return.
Ok, I get it. You are one of those short-sighted people who can't see beyond the end of your own nose. When your taxes pay for public education, YOU benefit because society as a whole benefits from having an educated population - reduction of subsistence crime, the assumption of basic literacy, higher-quality workforce, etc.
I don't think I'm working with a straw man here. If you create a self-contained marketplace in the real world and people buy and consume objects within that market place then they can expect to be taxed.
Assertation without explanation is meaningless - WHY should they expect to be taxed? What benefit do they receive in return for paying those taxes?
By your argument, someone could form a market, charge people for entering that market, and claim that the government has no right to tax sales made in that market, after all, its users have already paid the owners for the infrastructure of the market.
If everything that is sold in that market is created and consumed in the market, then where is the problem? Or were you just picking a bad analogy so as to have a strawman to argue against?
I would say that we have taxes to pay for the public infrastructure and the continuing operation of said infrastructure.
In such "virtual worlds" the infrastructure is all provided and operated by the company selling access to the "virtual world." In effect, your usage/subscription fees fill the same role as taxes do in the real world.
To the extent that the company that owns the "virtual world" also exists in the real world and makes use of public infrastructure, they must pay tax on their revenue, just like any other business.
So, if all of the above is true, just why is it inevitable for "virtual worlds" to be taxed by real-world governments?
Even Vinton Cerf, one of the Internet's founding fathers as co-developer of the key communications techniques, said the exercise was 'generally healthy' because the current technology 'does not satisfy all needs.'"
If the internet could get a brand new start from scratch, they would just fuck it up worse than it already is. We would get built in key escrow, built in DRM, built in centralized eavesdropping, built in censoring functions, etc.
And there would be unforeseen side-effects. I don't mean the easily foreseeable abuse-of-power kinds of side-effects, I mean the exploitation of such fascist features by the criminal element who today does things like spam and run bot-nets.
We would end up with a marginal improvement in performance, a huge loss of individual freedoms and equal or worse levels of personal risk and annoyance.
Doesn't matter, because every copy of a movie has the exact same key that encrypts the actual movie (pressing discs relies on having a static image for the majority of the data, obviously small areas can be written individually). Discovering that key allows all HD discs using that key (all discs of a given release of a movie, for instance) to be viewed without DRM, and posting it on the Internet does not allow the MAFIAA to identify which player was used to extract the volume key.
Congratulations. You are at least the second person in this thread to take a quote from my post, and then restate the sentence that came right after the quoted text. Aren't y'all special?
You are right about Tae Guk Gi's budget. In all the hype for "The Host" somebody fibbed about it being the most expensive one so far. I should have known to double-check it myself against some of the other "big name" Korean flicks.
If "Compromise the same way" means instructions which involve taking the cover off, soldering a line onto a JTAG port and running a serial port to it, I really don't think that kind of compromise is going to be used by many people.
Exactly. They hope that attacks against hardware players will be expensive enough that even with a recipe, most people will not want to do it. But if a particular model is hopelessly easy to compromise and it gets a recall or something along those lines, they can revoke the entire production run, its just a set of multiple units instead of a set of a single unit.
What happens when Grandma's HD-DVD player stops working because her device's unique key has been identified by simple, old-fashioned brute force?
It's 128-bit AES. Even with hundreds of thousands of valid keys out there, brute force won't be cracking them any time soon. And as far as anyone knows today, the fact that there are multiple keys does not enable any attacks that are smarter than brute force either.
DVD-A has never taken off in Australia, HDCD the same, and SACD has only received a lukewarm welcome.
FWIW, HDCD is just a normal CD where they claim to have done some fancy math to the least significant bits to enhance fidelity. The math is not public knowledge, so we don't really know how much of a difference it makes, but HDCDs can be played back on normal CD players without any voodoo at all, you may even own some HDCDs and not even realize it.
Also given the nature of this sort of thing, I also figure pretty soon there will be increased interest in hacking a stand alone HD or BD player... as the price comes down I'm sure the allure of forcing revocation of a series of hardware players will attract attention.
It doesn't work like that. Or at least it isn't supposed to work like that.
The AACS scheme has the ability to revoke individual players - not individual models, but actual single units. They use a lot of fancy set theory to do it, but in essence each player is supposed to have a unique set of keys - possibly hundreds of keys out of a total of many thousands (hundreds of thousands perhaps). Each disc has the information on it to allow thousands of different keys to decrypt it. The way it works is that of all the keys on the disc, it is expected that each individual player will have at least one key that matches.
Thus the way they revoke a specific unit is (if they can identify the unit, say the guy was foolish enough to publish the keys he extracted) that they do a bunch of math to figure out what set of keys to put on the new discs such that the compromised player will not have any of his keys on the new discs, but all other players will still be able to find at least one matching key on the new discs.
Remember that this is all in theory, and we have seen evidence that not all of AACS has been implemented yet or is even being used correctly. So it is entirely possible that some of the early units are "simplified" and every unit of a single production run or even every unit of a single model all have the same subset of keys on them. If that's the case, revoking one such player will revoke all such players. But if hardware manufacturers did it "right" then they are supposed to be able to revoke individual players.
You can still make decent movies today for about $10 million or less; it's just that you then need actual solid plotting, scripting, and acting because you don't have $140 million to paper over crap.
Indeed.
Look at Infernal Affairs - the original from which "The Departed" was remade - done in Hong Kong it had a budget of roughly 5M USD at the time. The Departed had a budget of roughly $90M and that does not take into account advertising. That's almost a 20:1 ratio and many people argue that "Infernal Affairs" is still the better movie.
Look at "Il Mare (Siworae)" - the original from which the recent Keanu Reeves/Sandra Bullock "The Lake House" was remade - a budget of under 2M USD versus roughly $40M for the remake and if IMDB's ratings are anything to go by, the original was better. Again a 20:1 ratio.
Furthermore, South Korea regularly turns out top caliber movies and yet the most expensive film they've produced, The Host, had a budget of $10M. Most South Korean productions are well under half of that, often closer to $2M, and their quality easily surpasses most of what Hollywood does.
South Korea is one of the few markets in the world where local productions regularly beat out Hollywood for ticket sales (in part because of screen quotas, but that changed recently due to the US State Department doing the MAFIAA's biding and it still didn't put a dent in local cinema). These movies focus on story rather than flash, so there are less special effects. But otherwise the movies look just as good as anything from Hollywood - professionally lit, professional wardrobe, make-up, cinematography, and of course the most important part -- great story telling.
While production costs are cheaper in South Korea and Hong Kong than they are in Hollywood, they are not necessarily less than for a lot of "run aways" where Hollywood outsources various parts of the production to cheaper parts of the world.
So, yes it is easily possible to outdo Hollywood and even produce 'blockbuster quality' (if quality is the right term) movies for far far less than Hollywood does right now.
A rich guy can turn extremists because he sees how poor people he identifies with are.
Not only that, but the recent converts tend to be the most radical - it's a brand new world to them and they haven't got to the point yet where they start to notice all the problems with their new ideology and eventually realize that new boss is just like the old boss.
That's not something unique to terrorism either - you see it with many religious converts of all faiths and on the secular side you see it in things like joining a fraternity or even just spending a lot of money on a car - certain personality types just have to justify their decision by being as gung ho as they possibly can, it keeps them from examining the situation too closely and finding any flaws once they have committed. Like they are trying to avoid "buyer's remorse."
A movie with the potential to do the same would probably be 300.
Don't count on it. The high amount of grain in the film (a stylistic decision by the director) means that it won't benefit as much from the extra resolution of HD over DVD as movies with cleaner prints like Crank do.
Of course 300 has had unprecedented amounts of marketing money spent on it, maybe they will keep up the spending and convince people to buy the HD edition(s) too.
And so is me transfering money to another person. It might however become a legal issue still depending on why I transfered that money, whom I transfered it to, and what they are going to use it for.
Are you trying to misunderstand the nature of what is going on here? Assuming there is no fraud in court, anything of the results that occur there are by definition legal. Giving someone money without any other oversight ain't even in the same ballpark.
Try that one when giving a testimony under oath.
That's called perjury and is already a crime - see my point about furtherance of a crime.
The fact that lying in general isn't illegal is because usually it is too small an issue to deal with it by law
Read what you wrote, then think about it long and hard. The reason lying is not a crime has nothing to do with it being "too small of an issue" it is because we live in a free society where anything not prohibited is permitted. You write from the point of view that anything not permitted is prohibited.
Arguing that lying in itself is not illegal is fine from a technical point of view, but you may want to think about the consequences of allowing lying EXPLICITLY by law.
That is not what is going on here. There is a law being debated that would outlaw specific sorts of lying. It isn't about creating a specific right, it is about taking that right away from all but a select group.
And what is the purpose of these actions ? To obtain money, either directly from the case at hand or by making an example of the poor bastard being accused and therefore helping with the MAFIAA's extortion efforts on out-of-court settlements of innocent people.
All of which are LEGAL activities.
But anyway, it is unquestionably lying, so let's just use that word from now on.
And lying is a perfectly legal activity when it is not done to further a crime.
Trademark law is weird... unlike patents, coming up with it first doesn't matter. And once you have a trademark, you must aggressively defend it in order to keep it.
AOL may have been total dicks in this case, but its not clear that the law gives them a lot of wiggle room in this case. GAIM is a very prominent competing product with a similar name, and so it's quite likely that they could've lost their trademark right without taking this action.
I'm no trademark lawyer, but it sure seems to me that instead of being total dicks, they could have simply granted GAIM a low or zero-cost license to the trademark. Thus "protecting" their trademark and not wasting anyone's time.
But these are the folks that argue for intellectual property. My information could easily fall under "intellectual property".
Not in the USA. Because if it did, we would have already had tens of thousands of successful lawsuits over it. Until there is at least some precedent for it, that argument won't fly.
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Got to make sure everyone is scared of the Iranians, so there won't be an outcry when the bombing starts.
First Saddam was the Crazy, Crazy Psychopath of the desert with WMDs, --- oops, he wasn't. Then Kim Jung-Il was the Crazy, Cracy Psychopath of North Korea shooting off WMDs because he's CRAZY -- oops, it was really about the US forcing all international banks to freeze north korean accounts. Now Iran is the Crazy, Crazy Psychopath of the desert with WMDs with suicidal tendencies.
There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once, shame on -- shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again.
At this site we don't expect to be talking to the "average joe on the street" - we expect to be talking to people for whom "digital restrictions management" is an important issue and where the expected level of technical expertise is such that minor hassles likes finding a free Ogg Vorbis player are insignificant because most of the readership already has one somewhere on their systems.
You've got one fucked up perspective if you think hiding the deaths of soldiers is *respectful* - didn't they die for American values like freedom of the press, democracy and open government? Since when is downplaying the real costs of a war an American value?
Wow, that sounds so ... FAMILIAR!
Assertation without explanation is meaningless - WHY should they expect to be taxed? What benefit do they receive in return for paying those taxes?
If everything that is sold in that market is created and consumed in the market, then where is the problem? Or were you just picking a bad analogy so as to have a strawman to argue against?
Why do we have taxes in the real world?
I would say that we have taxes to pay for the public infrastructure and the continuing operation of said infrastructure.
In such "virtual worlds" the infrastructure is all provided and operated by the company selling access to the "virtual world." In effect, your usage/subscription fees fill the same role as taxes do in the real world.
To the extent that the company that owns the "virtual world" also exists in the real world and makes use of public infrastructure, they must pay tax on their revenue, just like any other business.
So, if all of the above is true, just why is it inevitable for "virtual worlds" to be taxed by real-world governments?
And there would be unforeseen side-effects. I don't mean the easily foreseeable abuse-of-power kinds of side-effects, I mean the exploitation of such fascist features by the criminal element who today does things like spam and run bot-nets.
We would end up with a marginal improvement in performance, a huge loss of individual freedoms and equal or worse levels of personal risk and annoyance.
You are right about Tae Guk Gi's budget. In all the hype for "The Host" somebody fibbed about it being the most expensive one so far. I should have known to double-check it myself against some of the other "big name" Korean flicks.
Exactly. They hope that attacks against hardware players will be expensive enough that even with a recipe, most people will not want to do it. But if a particular model is hopelessly easy to compromise and it gets a recall or something along those lines, they can revoke the entire production run, its just a set of multiple units instead of a set of a single unit.
FWIW, HDCD is just a normal CD where they claim to have done some fancy math to the least significant bits to enhance fidelity. The math is not public knowledge, so we don't really know how much of a difference it makes, but HDCDs can be played back on normal CD players without any voodoo at all, you may even own some HDCDs and not even realize it.
The AACS scheme has the ability to revoke individual players - not individual models, but actual single units. They use a lot of fancy set theory to do it, but in essence each player is supposed to have a unique set of keys - possibly hundreds of keys out of a total of many thousands (hundreds of thousands perhaps). Each disc has the information on it to allow thousands of different keys to decrypt it. The way it works is that of all the keys on the disc, it is expected that each individual player will have at least one key that matches.
Thus the way they revoke a specific unit is (if they can identify the unit, say the guy was foolish enough to publish the keys he extracted) that they do a bunch of math to figure out what set of keys to put on the new discs such that the compromised player will not have any of his keys on the new discs, but all other players will still be able to find at least one matching key on the new discs.
Remember that this is all in theory, and we have seen evidence that not all of AACS has been implemented yet or is even being used correctly. So it is entirely possible that some of the early units are "simplified" and every unit of a single production run or even every unit of a single model all have the same subset of keys on them. If that's the case, revoking one such player will revoke all such players. But if hardware manufacturers did it "right" then they are supposed to be able to revoke individual players.
You can still make decent movies today for about $10 million or less; it's just that you then need actual solid plotting, scripting, and acting because you don't have $140 million to paper over crap.
Indeed.
Look at Infernal Affairs - the original from which "The Departed" was remade - done in Hong Kong it had a budget of roughly 5M USD at the time. The Departed had a budget of roughly $90M and that does not take into account advertising. That's almost a 20:1 ratio and many people argue that "Infernal Affairs" is still the better movie.
Look at "Il Mare (Siworae)" - the original from which the recent Keanu Reeves/Sandra Bullock "The Lake House" was remade - a budget of under 2M USD versus roughly $40M for the remake and if IMDB's ratings are anything to go by, the original was better. Again a 20:1 ratio.
Furthermore, South Korea regularly turns out top caliber movies and yet the most expensive film they've produced, The Host, had a budget of $10M. Most South Korean productions are well under half of that, often closer to $2M, and their quality easily surpasses most of what Hollywood does.
South Korea is one of the few markets in the world where local productions regularly beat out Hollywood for ticket sales (in part because of screen quotas, but that changed recently due to the US State Department doing the MAFIAA's biding and it still didn't put a dent in local cinema). These movies focus on story rather than flash, so there are less special effects. But otherwise the movies look just as good as anything from Hollywood - professionally lit, professional wardrobe, make-up, cinematography, and of course the most important part -- great story telling.
While production costs are cheaper in South Korea and Hong Kong than they are in Hollywood, they are not necessarily less than for a lot of "run aways" where Hollywood outsources various parts of the production to cheaper parts of the world.
So, yes it is easily possible to outdo Hollywood and even produce 'blockbuster quality' (if quality is the right term) movies for far far less than Hollywood does right now.
So, who will be first to purchase AdWords for "Dan Eastman?"
I just googled him and got no advertisements, so looks like he's even cheaper than the average politician!
That's not something unique to terrorism either - you see it with many religious converts of all faiths and on the secular side you see it in things like joining a fraternity or even just spending a lot of money on a car - certain personality types just have to justify their decision by being as gung ho as they possibly can, it keeps them from examining the situation too closely and finding any flaws once they have committed. Like they are trying to avoid "buyer's remorse."
A movie with the potential to do the same would probably be 300.
Don't count on it. The high amount of grain in the film (a stylistic decision by the director) means that it won't benefit as much from the extra resolution of HD over DVD as movies with cleaner prints like Crank do.
Of course 300 has had unprecedented amounts of marketing money spent on it, maybe they will keep up the spending and convince people to buy the HD edition(s) too.
And so is me transfering money to another person. It might however become a legal issue still depending on why I transfered that money, whom I transfered it to, and what they are going to use it for.
Are you trying to misunderstand the nature of what is going on here? Assuming there is no fraud in court, anything of the results that occur there are by definition legal. Giving someone money without any other oversight ain't even in the same ballpark.
Try that one when giving a testimony under oath.
That's called perjury and is already a crime - see my point about furtherance of a crime.
The fact that lying in general isn't illegal is because usually it is too small an issue to deal with it by law
Read what you wrote, then think about it long and hard. The reason lying is not a crime has nothing to do with it being "too small of an issue" it is because we live in a free society where anything not prohibited is permitted. You write from the point of view that anything not permitted is prohibited.
Arguing that lying in itself is not illegal is fine from a technical point of view, but you may want to think about the consequences of allowing lying EXPLICITLY by law.
That is not what is going on here. There is a law being debated that would outlaw specific sorts of lying. It isn't about creating a specific right, it is about taking that right away from all but a select group.
I'm no trademark lawyer, but it sure seems to me that instead of being total dicks, they could have simply granted GAIM a low or zero-cost license to the trademark. Thus "protecting" their trademark and not wasting anyone's time.
Until there is at least some precedent for it, that argument won't fly.