When I sold my company a couple of years back the buyer's lawyers were always yacking on about "source codes". I'm sure they thought that there was some kind of Dr. Evil in a lab somewhere where white-coated scientists were working on some kind of weapon with secret launch codes. And everyone else wore orange jumpsuits with helmets sprayed silver.
What is amazing is that we let these morons run the world. What we should do is round them up, put them in a secret base made out of a hollowed-out extinct volcano and then bomb the bastards. Or zap them with a space-borne laser made from diamonds.
Canon usually use re-usable ink wells rather than junk-the-whole-thing cartridges. The printers cost a bit more (no cross subsidy from cartridge business?) but that's OK.
Why hasn't think got a higher score for being funny? It is funny. 2038 is going to be like Y2K again, except that next time round the politicos will say "we were duped over Y2K: we spent all that money and nothing went wrong!". And we'll spend nothing. And everything will go wrong. And then all the destined-to-live-a-thousand-years people will starve to death.
Rimmer a data analyst? I suppose the anal bit is right. He's a technician, second class. Cleans out the gunk in the chicken soup machine. When he's not trying to commune with a Quagaar warrior.
Don't confuse the concept of patents with the asinine actions of the USPTO. Patents are required to be non-obvious, contain an inventive step, contain full disclosure and actually work. Most of the "dumb patents" cited here on/. don't meet those requirements. Toss in the US legal system to do the job that the USPTO should have done in the first place (but with a capricious jury involved) and you have a recipe for the mess that is the US patent system today.
In the chemical industry patents are recipes. Finding a good way to make a reaction slightly more efficient is worth millions. Why shouldn't that count as an invention?
Kind of shows the AdeT institute up. Linus is very careful about copyright on Minux kernel source, the issue of publishing free vs. not free library source, and solicits people to free up their utility source.
This all WAY before the paranoia on IP, and WAY before Linux emerged as anything other than a hobby.
Yep. That's right. $10000 to join the alliance to get access to the spec. That's going to encourage a lot of little companies to support those little 8-bit micros that go into all the toys, white goods and other products that will make it universal. Pah.
Yeah, great idea to track us all
on
Tin Foil Passports?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
So you're happy with the idea that every place you use your ID will be tracked and stored in a central database?
The UK ID card scheme proposes just this. The Government wants private sector organizations to use the ID card and the database (called the National Identity Register). So everything you do with your ID card gets tracked.
Am I the only one who is a teensy bit troubled by this proposal?
The GPO made it illegal to connect anyone else's equipment to the phone system. Even things that were not electrically connected like acoustic couplers. One company made a robot answering machine that would pick up an actual phone and move it to a tape recorder. The GPO sued and got it banned.
It was awful. When BT was the GPO all you could do was to rent a phone, with a very limited choice. Remember the innovation that was the http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/ilove/years/1977/fashion 3.shtml trimphone? At this time in the US you could get an answerphone in the shape of Mickey Mouse with an RJ11 connector (GPO phones were still hardwired to the wall).
BT as a private monopoly weren't much better in the early days, either. They tried to use their BABT approvals scheme as a tax on equipment from competitors. Fortunately they got a kicking from the regulator, and things these days are much more enlightened than in most of the rest of Europe.
As to the inability to find a web page detailing the GPO's early regulations. Hmmn, would that be because of their infamous resistance to HTML back in the '70s due to the tag?
Krustyburger, IRS, hamburger, ah yes, all these terms require a US passport to understand. Or maybe, just maybe, it's possible to watch The Simpsons on TV in the UK and still understand the jokes.
When BT was the Government, you couldn't buy a modem. An acoustic coupler was illegal. They even regulated what you were supposed to say on your answer machine tape (when, after many years, they bowed to pressure to allow answering machines at all).
No, things are way better than when the Government was running things. Come on guys, you've seen what Krustyburger was like when the IRS took it over ("Please fill in this form. Your burgers will be with you within 6 to 8 weeks.").
If your account is blocked you lose access to all your games. They will block your account for dozens of reasons, including someone else hacking your account and doing something with it, or stealing your CD key and misusing it.
Current form with Valve is not good. They ban people from their forums for being critical (note: not for abuse, or disseminating illegal cracks, but for criticising Valve or Vivendi).
Current form with Valve is not good. They refuse to transfer a CD key to a new account. This means you cannot sell your game to someone else after you've finished playing with it. And before anyone posts a reply yakking about "license to use" not "a product" you should know that the Valve HL2 EULA specifically permits re-sale of the game. Yet they do not provide any means of doing so. You can't even pass on your Steam account with the game because (a) that violates the Steam EULA, and (b) you might have other games attached to the account you didn't want to sell.
Any way you read it, Valve's policies suck. They have had years to work on this yet end up releasing a game with authentication/account flaws that a monkey could spot problems with. That says that they hire marmosets (unlikely) or that they just don't care (more likely).
Vivendi do not want any discussion on this CD issue. I got an angry and abusve email from the forum moderator, who went on to claim that the issue was a "touchy one". He tried to get my Valve forum account shut too.
The message here is don't trust Vivendi or Valve. Return the product to the store for a refund (in the EU the distance selling regulations mandate this for Internet sales). Then wait until the dust settles. In the event that Valve and Vivendi continue to hate customers more than they hate each other then just give up. It's only a game, after all.
K.
Colored lighting of water.. quick, patent that!
on
Screw-in LED Floodlights
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Now that is a smart idea. I can see these in a swanky International hotel where the discerning traveler isn't quite sure what the water is going to do (labels of C and F or V and K?).
People who bought the DVD have been burned. The download is unencumbered by disc copy protection nastiness.
I returned my copy to Amazon yesterday for a refund. I suggest all DVD buyers do the same and then beg/borrow/steal a broadband connection to do a Steam download.
K.
PS. I got banned from the Vivendi HL2 forum for giving the above advice. They're a bit touchy about this! Perhaps it's got something to do with Steam sales going direct to Valve and depriving Vivendi of revenue. And the impending Valve/Vivendi lawsuit. And the fact that the whole mess is of Vivendi's own making. Sore losers if you ask me.
There aren't any "black boxes" in cars (except those that the rental company or the Feds installed..).
There are ECUs (electronic control units) that do the job of making the car work. *Some* of these store interesting information - interesting to the maker of the ECU. The ABS ECU stores a log of the most recent few seconds. Ditto the SRS ECU. The information is mostly there to defend the box maker against lawsuits from Lionel Hutz (with special expert witness Dr. Nick Riviera). This does, of course, mean than in certain cases the information is useful to the police when prosecuting the driver.
It can't be used to track or check driving habits. It's mostly data like "was the brake pedal pressed in the few seconds before the airbag deployed?" or "Were the brake lights lit when the car was braking before the impact?" or "Did the ABS kick in or was the car sliding?" or "Which way was the steering wheel turned when the side impact airbags went off?"
This information is really not that much more than a good forensic analysis of the scene would tell. Only it's a lot cheaper than getting dozens of guys in white coats out. For example, these forensic guys can (if it's really important enough to make them turn up) tell if your turn lights were going before a crash (they can tell from the way in which the filament breaks whether it was hot or cold). But it's easier to ask the ECUs if the information is available. Saves on white coats.
So not to worry about the black helicopters quite yet. Personally, I'd not be worried by the automakers putting this stuff in but by some jerk in Congress legislating to make it mandatory to record all vehicles for a year and to fit GPS tracking, with it being a felony with punishment of a $100,000 fine or ten years in prison for going into an area with GPS coverage. For finding terrorists, of course: all known terrorists have been in a car at some point, don't you know?
I just took delivery of the DVD version. You can't play HL2 without the disc. It contains copy protection garbage that is so sensitive to hardware and disc that it fails to run with many drives.
Worse still, you allocate a CD key to a Steam account then find out the copy protection system isn't working properly. But there's no way of taking back the CD key.
There's only one way out of this mess: take the DVD back to the store to get a refund and buy the download instead (tough if you don't have broadband). But this is where the fun starts: the CD key is now screwed. It can't be revoked. So when you take the DVD back to the store and get a refund, the store must return the DVD to Vivendi. If they try to re-sell the DVD then the poor sucker who buys it ends up with a defunct CD key.
The question I have is why do you need the DVD to play the game? If the DVD is scratched then it won't work. If the drive is "incompatible" (i.e. if the backdoor non-OS non-driver accesses to the drive from the shonkware that is the copy protection system) then it won't work. The download copy doesn't come with this crippleware, so why should the people who bought a real physical thing get crippled?
This is yet another episode in the War on Customers. Vivendi (for it is they who put this copy protection garbage on) seem to think that customers are just suckers who wire them money.
Me? I'm sending my DVD back to Amazon to get a refund. I'll then buy the download version. If the tens of thousands of us who are victims of the DVD scam then it will be a financial catastrophe for Vivendi. Come on brothers! You have nothing to lose but your copy protection chains!
Hmmn. High taxes per liter of gasoline like in the UK.. which also wants to track vehicles via GPS. What a brilliant idea - TWO tax schemes running parallel. And with ID cards too, there's the Government tracking where you live and where you go. Fantastic!
Mind you, the US pioneered the running of parallel tax schemes - Alternative Minimum Tax.
It's important to measure the smoothness of roads because smooth roads mean tires don't grip which means cars don't stop in the wet which means dead people.
They used to measure road quality using a cup of sand which was spread out until the road started to show through. The radius of the circle indicates the smoothness. What a time consuming mess! Now it's done by shining a laser on the road and measuring the back scatter. You can drive the laser at 60mph. A friend of mine worked on building one of the first of these units using a PDP in a rack in the back of a truck and a towed laser unit.
Hey wow! I wrote the code for one of those articles! It was a 6502 assembly language game for the C64. A platforms jumping game thingy.
I wonder if anyone still has the code? I sure don't (I've even lost my PhD thesis, so I'm not going to have a piece of code I wrote when I was 14).Ah, nostalgia.
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What is amazing is that we let these morons run the world. What we should do is round them up, put them in a secret base made out of a hollowed-out extinct volcano and then bomb the bastards. Or zap them with a space-borne laser made from diamonds.
Doesn't work properly. More frustrating and distracting than pressing a button on the steering wheel.
Punish HP where it hurts: cut off their revenue.
Why hasn't think got a higher score for being funny? It is funny. 2038 is going to be like Y2K again, except that next time round the politicos will say "we were duped over Y2K: we spent all that money and nothing went wrong!". And we'll spend nothing. And everything will go wrong. And then all the destined-to-live-a-thousand-years people will starve to death.
Next step: a 1Gb flash disk with Knoppix.
Step after that: teeny tiny 40Gb Freecom FHD XS with any damn Linux distribution you want.
Rimmer a data analyst? I suppose the anal bit is right. He's a technician, second class. Cleans out the gunk in the chicken soup machine. When he's not trying to commune with a Quagaar warrior.
.. like when you plug in a USB keyboard and a USB mouse. Why did they only put 2 USBs on the thing?
Don't confuse the concept of patents with the asinine actions of the USPTO. Patents are required to be non-obvious, contain an inventive step, contain full disclosure and actually work. Most of the "dumb patents" cited here on /. don't meet those requirements. Toss in the US legal system to do the job that the USPTO should have done in the first place (but with a capricious jury involved) and you have a recipe for the mess that is the US patent system today.
In the chemical industry patents are recipes. Finding a good way to make a reaction slightly more efficient is worth millions. Why shouldn't that count as an invention?
This all WAY before the paranoia on IP, and WAY before Linux emerged as anything other than a hobby.
K.
Yep. That's right. $10000 to join the alliance to get access to the spec. That's going to encourage a lot of little companies to support those little 8-bit micros that go into all the toys, white goods and other products that will make it universal. Pah.
The UK ID card scheme proposes just this. The Government wants private sector organizations to use the ID card and the database (called the National Identity Register). So everything you do with your ID card gets tracked.
Am I the only one who is a teensy bit troubled by this proposal?
K.
It was awful. When BT was the GPO all you could do was to rent a phone, with a very limited choice. Remember the innovation that was the http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/ilove/years/1977/fashion 3.shtml trimphone? At this time in the US you could get an answerphone in the shape of Mickey Mouse with an RJ11 connector (GPO phones were still hardwired to the wall).
BT as a private monopoly weren't much better in the early days, either. They tried to use their BABT approvals scheme as a tax on equipment from competitors. Fortunately they got a kicking from the regulator, and things these days are much more enlightened than in most of the rest of Europe.
As to the inability to find a web page detailing the GPO's early regulations. Hmmn, would that be because of their infamous resistance to HTML back in the '70s due to the tag?
Krustyburger, IRS, hamburger, ah yes, all these terms require a US passport to understand. Or maybe, just maybe, it's possible to watch The Simpsons on TV in the UK and still understand the jokes.
K.
No, things are way better than when the Government was running things. Come on guys, you've seen what Krustyburger was like when the IRS took it over ("Please fill in this form. Your burgers will be with you within 6 to 8 weeks.").
K.
Current form with Valve is not good. They ban people from their forums for being critical (note: not for abuse, or disseminating illegal cracks, but for criticising Valve or Vivendi).
Current form with Valve is not good. They refuse to transfer a CD key to a new account. This means you cannot sell your game to someone else after you've finished playing with it. And before anyone posts a reply yakking about "license to use" not "a product" you should know that the Valve HL2 EULA specifically permits re-sale of the game. Yet they do not provide any means of doing so. You can't even pass on your Steam account with the game because (a) that violates the Steam EULA, and (b) you might have other games attached to the account you didn't want to sell.
Any way you read it, Valve's policies suck. They have had years to work on this yet end up releasing a game with authentication/account flaws that a monkey could spot problems with. That says that they hire marmosets (unlikely) or that they just don't care (more likely).
K.
The message here is don't trust Vivendi or Valve. Return the product to the store for a refund (in the EU the distance selling regulations mandate this for Internet sales). Then wait until the dust settles. In the event that Valve and Vivendi continue to hate customers more than they hate each other then just give up. It's only a game, after all.
K.
K.
I returned my copy to Amazon yesterday for a refund. I suggest all DVD buyers do the same and then beg/borrow/steal a broadband connection to do a Steam download.
K.
PS. I got banned from the Vivendi HL2 forum for giving the above advice. They're a bit touchy about this! Perhaps it's got something to do with Steam sales going direct to Valve and depriving Vivendi of revenue. And the impending Valve/Vivendi lawsuit. And the fact that the whole mess is of Vivendi's own making. Sore losers if you ask me.
K.
There aren't any "black boxes" in cars (except those that the rental company or the Feds installed..). There are ECUs (electronic control units) that do the job of making the car work. *Some* of these store interesting information - interesting to the maker of the ECU. The ABS ECU stores a log of the most recent few seconds. Ditto the SRS ECU. The information is mostly there to defend the box maker against lawsuits from Lionel Hutz (with special expert witness Dr. Nick Riviera). This does, of course, mean than in certain cases the information is useful to the police when prosecuting the driver. It can't be used to track or check driving habits. It's mostly data like "was the brake pedal pressed in the few seconds before the airbag deployed?" or "Were the brake lights lit when the car was braking before the impact?" or "Did the ABS kick in or was the car sliding?" or "Which way was the steering wheel turned when the side impact airbags went off?" This information is really not that much more than a good forensic analysis of the scene would tell. Only it's a lot cheaper than getting dozens of guys in white coats out. For example, these forensic guys can (if it's really important enough to make them turn up) tell if your turn lights were going before a crash (they can tell from the way in which the filament breaks whether it was hot or cold). But it's easier to ask the ECUs if the information is available. Saves on white coats. So not to worry about the black helicopters quite yet. Personally, I'd not be worried by the automakers putting this stuff in but by some jerk in Congress legislating to make it mandatory to record all vehicles for a year and to fit GPS tracking, with it being a felony with punishment of a $100,000 fine or ten years in prison for going into an area with GPS coverage. For finding terrorists, of course: all known terrorists have been in a car at some point, don't you know?
Worse still, you allocate a CD key to a Steam account then find out the copy protection system isn't working properly. But there's no way of taking back the CD key.
There's only one way out of this mess: take the DVD back to the store to get a refund and buy the download instead (tough if you don't have broadband). But this is where the fun starts: the CD key is now screwed. It can't be revoked. So when you take the DVD back to the store and get a refund, the store must return the DVD to Vivendi. If they try to re-sell the DVD then the poor sucker who buys it ends up with a defunct CD key.
The question I have is why do you need the DVD to play the game? If the DVD is scratched then it won't work. If the drive is "incompatible" (i.e. if the backdoor non-OS non-driver accesses to the drive from the shonkware that is the copy protection system) then it won't work. The download copy doesn't come with this crippleware, so why should the people who bought a real physical thing get crippled?
This is yet another episode in the War on Customers. Vivendi (for it is they who put this copy protection garbage on) seem to think that customers are just suckers who wire them money.
Me? I'm sending my DVD back to Amazon to get a refund. I'll then buy the download version. If the tens of thousands of us who are victims of the DVD scam then it will be a financial catastrophe for Vivendi. Come on brothers! You have nothing to lose but your copy protection chains!
K.
Hmmn. High taxes per liter of gasoline like in the UK.. which also wants to track vehicles via GPS. What a brilliant idea - TWO tax schemes running parallel. And with ID cards too, there's the Government tracking where you live and where you go. Fantastic! Mind you, the US pioneered the running of parallel tax schemes - Alternative Minimum Tax.
It's important to measure the smoothness of roads because smooth roads mean tires don't grip which means cars don't stop in the wet which means dead people.
They used to measure road quality using a cup of sand which was spread out until the road started to show through. The radius of the circle indicates the smoothness. What a time consuming mess! Now it's done by shining a laser on the road and measuring the back scatter. You can drive the laser at 60mph. A friend of mine worked on building one of the first of these units using a PDP in a rack in the back of a truck and a towed laser unit.
Ach. I've become a pavement wonk.
I wonder if anyone still has the code? I sure don't (I've even lost my PhD thesis, so I'm not going to have a piece of code I wrote when I was 14).Ah, nostalgia.