Here's a short version. Encryption means that the protected content can only be accessed by someone in possession of the decryption key. Thus, person A can send data to person B, and person C cannot access the message, because only A and B know the decryption key.
DRM is what we call it when Person A sends both the data AND the decryption key to Person B, and then hopes that Person B won't be able to access the data -- even though Person A just sent him the key.
In other words, DRM only resembles encryption in the minds of those who have no idea how encryption works -- namely, you and the RIAA/MPAA.
Well, Star Trek is fiction, and doesn't take into account relativity. The very concept of "On another planet this same moment in time" is a contradiction, because the passage of time depends on your frame of reference.
I am not a physicist and don't follow the math, but one of the things that general relativity says is that just because some event A happens before some event B when observed from our frame of reference, doesn't mean those same events happen in that order when observed from another frame of reference. If you are on Earth and I'm on Chiron Beta Prime, and we are looking at two stars going super-nova, and in your frame of reference Star A goes before Star B, I may observe Star B to go nova before A.
It's not just a speed of light thing either, there is simply no absolute frame of reference for time, just as there is no absolute "center" of the universe. The lack of an absolute frame of reference makes it impossible to define a consistent "universal clock."
I've had similar thoughts when I see their commercials, but I don't even think parody with the word "craptastic" is required. As it stands "Comcastic" itself is already a made-up word that seems to be defined as "characteristic or reminiscent of the experience of using Comcast services."
In other words, it is already a synonym for craptastic. No parody required. Hell, I've started using "Comcastic" as a descriptor (with negative connotations obviously) for other things.
I recently had service in a restaurant that was Comcastic.
So I have to agree -- what brain dead marketing jockey thought it would be a great idea to coin a word that so eloquently describes how shitty their service is?
What kind of enclosure would you actually need to keep an enranged and adrenaline fueled tiger in though.
One that is several feet taller than this one was would have done it. Adrenaline isn't magic, and its performance boost is finite. It obeys the laws of physics like everything else.
The fact that the tiger was enraged doesn't mean that no cage could have held her. The sort of unlimited rage bonus your question seems to imply only comes into play if the tiger has been exposed to gamma rays.;)
Because the ability to play a mean game of checkers would become the most important qualification for leading a nation. The primary/caucus system in the U.S. would quickly be replaced by a checkers tournament, and hundreds of lobbyists and media pundits would starve to death.
Now that I think about it. . . why don't we just have the leaders play a game of checkers?
I'd like to amend your number 1 -- I want a scanning mode that doesn't waste my time telling me about all the encrypted or mac-address locked networks, and also doesn't waste my time telling me about the "open" networks that don't actually give me any access until I open a browser, try to load a URL and get redirected to their own little page where I have to log in with a code to show that I've paid for a 24 hour pass or some shit.
I'm not saying nobody should offer such paid public access points, just that I'm sick of having no way to know that they aren't really open without trying them.
That's odd. My dreams are distinctly unrealistic, but FEEL perfectly natural when I'm having them. I routinely fly, teleport, shape-shift, and use telekinesis, and in the dream it seems to me as if I have always been able to do those things and there is nothing unusual about it. It's not even like a super hero fantasy. . . it just feels like everyday life, and in the dream-state, it doesn't even occur to me that those things are impossible. In addition, I frequently dream that I'm hanging out with a friend of mine who died -- and not in the way that I dream she never died, but in that she is merely not dead anymore.
I am definitely not a scramjet engineer, but I doubt it. The reason there is less drag at higher altitude is because there is less air pressure, and a scramjet works by rapidly compressing the air flowing into it. I think lower air pressure would mean less drag, but also less thrust.
Because Antarctica is covered by a giant ice sheet, and the ice sheet moves. As the ice sheet moves, the entire station and the marker pole drift away from the true geographic south pole. They have to stick a new pole into the ice every year, at the spot that is over the geographic south pole at that moment.
So in the pictures, one of the marker poles is probably from a previous year.
All these big "news" publishers deliver is sanitized, oversimplified, dumbed down, biased and superficial stories blended with propaganda and outright lies concocted by private interests who stand to gain by your being misinformed.
I was going to quip that you forgot about ads, but then I realized that even though you didn't use the word, you did use its definition: outright lies concocted by private interests who stand to gain by your being misinformed.
And here's the explanation you offer: it was your personal time, and you didn't want to be bothered. If that explanation isn't good enough, then guess what my friend -- your mobile phone is not the problem, your job is.
I'm not a lawyer either, but I thought that although a work is automatically copyrighted at creation, the copyright is lost if the author chooses to publish the work without registering the copyright.
Right? Wrong? Anybody who IS a lawyer want to clear this up?
That is a great "idea." I have an even better "idea:" Use magic. If we all used magic to create our food, shelter and amenities, nobody would have to work at all, and we could spend our time playing Quiddich.
Your argument doesn't work. While physics is physics no matter where you are, that only sets constraints on what forms of life are possible, not which once will happen to evolve. Evolution and natural selection is driven by probability and statistics. If a trait arises that is beneficial, it will be more likely to be passed on and become commonplace. But which traits chance to arise is a matter of random mutation, and every time a trait evolves and survives, it changes the selection pressures. For example, the evolution of an oxygen based metabolism, a huge winner here on earth, would have been a non-adaptive mutation if it had happened to occur before the evolution of photosynthesis.
By your logic, why would be even HAVE people, horses, fish, and so on? If the most effective beneficial form was the same everywhere in the universe and through all time, it would stand to reason that it would be the same everywhere on earth throughout its history, and all life on EARTH would have evolved into just one form.
Oh. So now not only is it my social responsibility to produce children, but if I choose not to, it's my responsibility to raise YOUR children as well? Land of Liberty indeed.
See that's exactly the sort of crap I was talking about. Parenting is SO important that EVERYONE should be doing it, and if you aren't a parent, well you should learn to be a good one anyway in case you happen to be in the same room with a child someday.
Listen, it does take a village -- teachers, coaches, daycare providers, relatives, all kinds of people. But not a WORLD of people, just a village. There are many, many people who have no part in child rearing whatsoever. And of those that do, only the parents (and to an extent their teachers) are what we would call primary caregivers. I may well interact with children on occasion. I don't need a parenting class for that, because I am not a parent.
Parenting is important. Those who do it should have help, and should be educated. But the suggestion that every individual in the population needs to take a parenting class "just in case" is plain idiotic.
this is the kind of stuff that needs to go into a teenager's mandatory education, so that by the time they're adults they'll know better ways to manage their kids
I see where you're going with this, but I find slightly distasteful the inherent assumption that everyone will grow up to have kids. Not everybody wants to have children, and mandating that people (teenagers, for crying out loud) be taught how to properly raise a child because obviously they'll have one someday just smacks of this subtle discrimination our culture seems to have against non-parents -- that having a child is the most important thing anyone can ever do, and everybody's goal in life is to marry and have kids, and if that's not what you want then there must be something wrong with you.
I'm sure you weren't trying to imply any such thing, so don't think I'm trying to strike an accusatory tone here. I'm just saying that sort of attitude is prevalent, and it's what I think of when I hear a suggestion like mandating parenting classes for everyone.
There are plenty of activities for which participants should be properly trained, and in which irresponsible behavior has dire consequences. Hunting. Aviation. Yachting. But we don't mandate that teens take gun safety or sailing courses. We don't put everyone through medical school in case they decide to become a surgeon. We try to get people to learn how to do those things responsibly when they decide that they are going to do those things.
If you want to make some kind of basic training for parents mandatory (and I think this is unnecessary as the vast majority of parents do a decent enough job of it), make it a legal requirement for people to take it when they become parents.
Slashdot Mirror
You have no idea how encryption works, do you?
Here's a short version. Encryption means that the protected content can only be accessed by someone in possession of the decryption key. Thus, person A can send data to person B, and person C cannot access the message, because only A and B know the decryption key.
DRM is what we call it when Person A sends both the data AND the decryption key to Person B, and then hopes that Person B won't be able to access the data -- even though Person A just sent him the key.
In other words, DRM only resembles encryption in the minds of those who have no idea how encryption works -- namely, you and the RIAA/MPAA.
If I were Comcast, I'd be a little more careful, because the government tends to not give a crap what you, as a business, think.
ROTFL, dude. You ever thought about doing stand-up?
Well, Star Trek is fiction, and doesn't take into account relativity. The very concept of "On another planet this same moment in time" is a contradiction, because the passage of time depends on your frame of reference.
I am not a physicist and don't follow the math, but one of the things that general relativity says is that just because some event A happens before some event B when observed from our frame of reference, doesn't mean those same events happen in that order when observed from another frame of reference. If you are on Earth and I'm on Chiron Beta Prime, and we are looking at two stars going super-nova, and in your frame of reference Star A goes before Star B, I may observe Star B to go nova before A.
It's not just a speed of light thing either, there is simply no absolute frame of reference for time, just as there is no absolute "center" of the universe. The lack of an absolute frame of reference makes it impossible to define a consistent "universal clock."
I've had similar thoughts when I see their commercials, but I don't even think parody with the word "craptastic" is required. As it stands "Comcastic" itself is already a made-up word that seems to be defined as "characteristic or reminiscent of the experience of using Comcast services."
In other words, it is already a synonym for craptastic. No parody required. Hell, I've started using "Comcastic" as a descriptor (with negative connotations obviously) for other things.
I recently had service in a restaurant that was Comcastic.
So I have to agree -- what brain dead marketing jockey thought it would be a great idea to coin a word that so eloquently describes how shitty their service is?
I just want to chime in here to give my enthusiastic agreement to everything you just said, so as to create the illusion that I understood it.
What kind of enclosure would you actually need to keep an enranged and adrenaline fueled tiger in though.
;)
One that is several feet taller than this one was would have done it. Adrenaline isn't magic, and its performance boost is finite. It obeys the laws of physics like everything else.
The fact that the tiger was enraged doesn't mean that no cage could have held her. The sort of unlimited rage bonus your question seems to imply only comes into play if the tiger has been exposed to gamma rays.
Because the ability to play a mean game of checkers would become the most important qualification for leading a nation. The primary/caucus system in the U.S. would quickly be replaced by a checkers tournament, and hundreds of lobbyists and media pundits would starve to death.
Now that I think about it. . . why don't we just have the leaders play a game of checkers?
. . . evidence suggests that few on Slashdot will have heard of it.
I'd like to amend your number 1 -- I want a scanning mode that doesn't waste my time telling me about all the encrypted or mac-address locked networks, and also doesn't waste my time telling me about the "open" networks that don't actually give me any access until I open a browser, try to load a URL and get redirected to their own little page where I have to log in with a code to show that I've paid for a 24 hour pass or some shit.
I'm not saying nobody should offer such paid public access points, just that I'm sick of having no way to know that they aren't really open without trying them.
Do these cities have StreetView yet? It could provide a vivid picture of what life was like in ancient times. :)
That's odd. My dreams are distinctly unrealistic, but FEEL perfectly natural when I'm having them. I routinely fly, teleport, shape-shift, and use telekinesis, and in the dream it seems to me as if I have always been able to do those things and there is nothing unusual about it. It's not even like a super hero fantasy. . . it just feels like everyday life, and in the dream-state, it doesn't even occur to me that those things are impossible. In addition, I frequently dream that I'm hanging out with a friend of mine who died -- and not in the way that I dream she never died, but in that she is merely not dead anymore.
It's about as realistic as Marvel Comics.
Mine does. Jailbreaking the iPhone was worth it in my opinion.
I am definitely not a scramjet engineer, but I doubt it. The reason there is less drag at higher altitude is because there is less air pressure, and a scramjet works by rapidly compressing the air flowing into it. I think lower air pressure would mean less drag, but also less thrust.
Because Antarctica is covered by a giant ice sheet, and the ice sheet moves. As the ice sheet moves, the entire station and the marker pole drift away from the true geographic south pole. They have to stick a new pole into the ice every year, at the spot that is over the geographic south pole at that moment.
So in the pictures, one of the marker poles is probably from a previous year.
And I think it's YOUR responsibility to buy me a sandwich for lunch. You have the resources and revenue to provide it.
All these big "news" publishers deliver is sanitized, oversimplified, dumbed down, biased and superficial stories blended with propaganda and outright lies concocted by private interests who stand to gain by your being misinformed.
I was going to quip that you forgot about ads, but then I realized that even though you didn't use the word, you did use its definition: outright lies concocted by private interests who stand to gain by your being misinformed.
So. . . my bad.
And here's the explanation you offer: it was your personal time, and you didn't want to be bothered. If that explanation isn't good enough, then guess what my friend -- your mobile phone is not the problem, your job is.
I'm not a lawyer either, but I thought that although a work is automatically copyrighted at creation, the copyright is lost if the author chooses to publish the work without registering the copyright.
Right? Wrong? Anybody who IS a lawyer want to clear this up?
It would make perfect sense if you would just spend a few parsecs thinking about it.
That is a great "idea." I have an even better "idea:" Use magic. If we all used magic to create our food, shelter and amenities, nobody would have to work at all, and we could spend our time playing Quiddich.
Your argument doesn't work. While physics is physics no matter where you are, that only sets constraints on what forms of life are possible, not which once will happen to evolve. Evolution and natural selection is driven by probability and statistics. If a trait arises that is beneficial, it will be more likely to be passed on and become commonplace. But which traits chance to arise is a matter of random mutation, and every time a trait evolves and survives, it changes the selection pressures. For example, the evolution of an oxygen based metabolism, a huge winner here on earth, would have been a non-adaptive mutation if it had happened to occur before the evolution of photosynthesis.
By your logic, why would be even HAVE people, horses, fish, and so on? If the most effective beneficial form was the same everywhere in the universe and through all time, it would stand to reason that it would be the same everywhere on earth throughout its history, and all life on EARTH would have evolved into just one form.
And make sure it's caffeinated bacon, to enjoy with a nice cup of baconated coffee.
Oh. So now not only is it my social responsibility to produce children, but if I choose not to, it's my responsibility to raise YOUR children as well? Land of Liberty indeed.
See that's exactly the sort of crap I was talking about. Parenting is SO important that EVERYONE should be doing it, and if you aren't a parent, well you should learn to be a good one anyway in case you happen to be in the same room with a child someday.
Listen, it does take a village -- teachers, coaches, daycare providers, relatives, all kinds of people. But not a WORLD of people, just a village. There are many, many people who have no part in child rearing whatsoever. And of those that do, only the parents (and to an extent their teachers) are what we would call primary caregivers. I may well interact with children on occasion. I don't need a parenting class for that, because I am not a parent.
Parenting is important. Those who do it should have help, and should be educated. But the suggestion that every individual in the population needs to take a parenting class "just in case" is plain idiotic.
this is the kind of stuff that needs to go into a teenager's mandatory education, so that by the time they're adults they'll know better ways to manage their kids
I see where you're going with this, but I find slightly distasteful the inherent assumption that everyone will grow up to have kids. Not everybody wants to have children, and mandating that people (teenagers, for crying out loud) be taught how to properly raise a child because obviously they'll have one someday just smacks of this subtle discrimination our culture seems to have against non-parents -- that having a child is the most important thing anyone can ever do, and everybody's goal in life is to marry and have kids, and if that's not what you want then there must be something wrong with you.
I'm sure you weren't trying to imply any such thing, so don't think I'm trying to strike an accusatory tone here. I'm just saying that sort of attitude is prevalent, and it's what I think of when I hear a suggestion like mandating parenting classes for everyone.
There are plenty of activities for which participants should be properly trained, and in which irresponsible behavior has dire consequences. Hunting. Aviation. Yachting. But we don't mandate that teens take gun safety or sailing courses. We don't put everyone through medical school in case they decide to become a surgeon. We try to get people to learn how to do those things responsibly when they decide that they are going to do those things.
If you want to make some kind of basic training for parents mandatory (and I think this is unnecessary as the vast majority of parents do a decent enough job of it), make it a legal requirement for people to take it when they become parents.
Agreed. The should have called it the Crush Comcast Coalition.