What we REALLY need is to deregulate public rights of way.
Got any suggestions for how that can be accomplished?
I normally argue that telecoms need to be regulated into only providing connectivity, and not content. But if it were feasible to deregulate the rights of way for the wires, it would probably be a better solution.
The obvious problem with deregulating right of way is that the local governments are suppossed to act as a bargaining collective. If they got out of that business, how would it be feasible for the telecoms to negotiate with each land-owner individually without turning to some other collective bargaining organization that would eventually have the same problems that local governments exhibit today?
I don't believe anyone has broken the lastest DRM from Windows Media.
I have not checked recently, but I believe MS-DRM is cracked. It certainly was cracked and then MS forced an update out to all media-player software to work around that crack. But, a few months back, discussion on doom9.org was that even the last MS-DRM was easily cracked and the tools to extract DRM'd video were getting progressively more user-friendly too.
I think what it boils down to is that most people here just want shit for free, and will say anything to pretend that they have some valid objection with the system and that it warrants theft (or "copyright infringement" for the pedants).
Don't forget for one second that the studios and networks are ALREADY getting shinola for free. They just have the current system of laws to guarantee that they get money for nothing.
Once a show has completed production, any money the studio or network gets for airing or otherwise selling copies is money for nothing. The cost of airing a show or putting it out for download is marginally zero.
They are no better than the dotters that you complain about, except that they've bought the laws to back them up.
You might argue that they somehow deserve to get money for free because they took the risk of funding the production in the first place. That is inherently an anti-american, anti-free market position. Nobody deserves money just because they risked money. If it were otherwise, casinos would be bankrupted.
These guys need to get a new business model that does not depend on getting money for nothing. Until then, they and you, have got no business complaining that dotters want stuff for free when the current entertainment industry is completely built on getting as much cash as they possibly can for doing no work at all.
If our government wanted to make sure this didn't happen, they'd fine the IRS every time there was a security breach. In fact, they'd fine the IRS just for having bad security. And then things would improve.
Why do you think fining the IRS would make a difference? They are not a company, they do not care about profit and loss. Furthermore, the IRS is the government. Fining them would be like punishing your wallet by taking money out and keeping it in your pocket instead.
If you really want to do something to provoke change at the IRS, dock the salary of upper managers and in egregious cases, put them in jail.
And lots of major studios are on record as saying they won't make use of that particular flag.
No. Some major studios are on record saying that they won't use it INITIALLY - they aren't making any promises. Furthermore, some major studioes are strongly in favor of it, notably Paramount, Universal and Time-Warner.
So, to re-iterate the point from my first post, contrary to the original poster's claims - yes there is BIG argument over playing HD at HD resolution. All the players support the flag, so any studio is free to force down-rezzing any time they want to.
(Except in Japan, where it is illegal to down-rez - and since Japan will be in the same "region" as the US, look forward to having to import ridiculously expensive Japanese editions of US films to get them to play in their full resolution. Yeah!)
They do afer all specialize in some pretty high end hardware such as tamperproof encryption modules. If it were any other manufacturer I'm not sure I'd "buy it".
Heh. I know the guys who do the IBM 4758 and PCIXCC cards and they aren't involved with the fingerprint scanner on the notebooks. IBM is a big company.
Although not IBM specific, here's a few links about the falibility of fingerprint scanners, the last one is tragically funny.
They will play HD-DVD's at high res. There's no argument over this.
Oh yeah? Don't be a sucker.
the eight-company consortium behind AACS will require hardware makers to include the capability to "downrez" (limit the resolution) of high-definition signals sent from players to TVs via analog connections -- including component video. Downrezzing wouldn't occur automatically, but would be triggered if the player recognized a "downrez flag" (called an Image Constraint Token) on a high-definition movie disc. --High-def Disc Update: Where things stand with HD DVD and Blu-ray
Also, there is *no doubt at all* to anyone who owns an HDTV of any size that DVD's are significantly inferior to broadcast HD programming. When American Idol has a sharper picture than the newest $20 King Kong DVD, something is wrong.
Oh yeah? I've seen plenty of poorly mastered HD where a high-quality up-scaling of the DVD looked at least as good, if not better. Good quality HD will blow away the best quality DVD, but considering what a haphazard job the studios do with DVD releases, I have no reason to expect BLU-HD-RAY-DVD releases to always be good enough to beat DVD.
You might want to do a little research on the efficacy of finger-print identification systems - in short it is pretty much nil. The cheap ones can usually be fooled by simply retrying a bunch of times with the finger at different angles, the more expensive ones can be easily fooled with the equivalent of a jello mold of the valid fingerprint - which can often be lifted directly off the scanner itself via the skin-oil left by the most recent user. So your 2-factor authentication is really more of a 1.1-factor authentication.
The movies where I'm at are $9.00 per ticket (IIRC the theater gets none of that)
They get an increasing percentage the longer the movie plays - something like 20% of the first week's gross, up to around 80% of the gross after 10 weeks or so.
unless you're one of the few users that finds it practical to do anything other than passively soak up multimedia content whilst relaxing on the couch.
Ever since I got a bright, hi-rez projector (Dell 5100MP 1440x1050), my couch is where I do everything except programming. It is great for email, web-browsing, IM, video-phone, games and yes, even the occasional TV show or DVD.
I highly recommend using an 8 foot wide screen with a wireless keyboard - it is amazingly comfortable to sit back in the laz-e-boy and use the entire wall as a monitor.
Re:Jackasses
on
Sun Grid DOS'd
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
That position dovetails with one long held by Sun Chief Executive Scott McNealy. "Absolute anonymity breeds irresponsibility," he said in a 2003 interview. "Audit trails and authentication provide a much more civil society."
They only proved that partial anonymity breeds irresponsibility. Sun and any sort of response they make would have a tough time being anonymous. So, on one hand you have the "bad guys" who have almost complete anonymity to cover their 'extra-legal' activities and on the other hand you have the "good guys" without much anonymity and so are unable to respond in kind.
Adding audit trails and authentication just changes the identities of the "bad guys" from those who are outside the system to those who own the system and thus can erase the audit trails as needed (for example, the brazilian the british coppers shot and killed in the tube last summer - despite being the most surveiled society on the planet the incident was not recorded on camera due to a 'temporary malfunction' -- yeah RIGHT).
Leela: What's wrong Amy? Did you swallow your cell phone again?
You may laugh but I think we're coming up on that being a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Not quiet the same, but it's already happened. Though, from other articles, it sounds like it just might have been justifiable as it was being "overused" at the time.
For humanity it is necessary to recognise the intrinsic nature of capitalism. It is an unfettered force which puts the value of money and profit above life itself.
Huh? Capitalism is no more of an inherent human trait than is socialism.
Perhaps you meant self-interest or maybe greed - both of which are are common human traits, which capitalism seeks to harness. The defining idea being that scarce resources are more optimally utilized for the benefit of all society when controlled by parties that are most interested in maximizing the utility for their own personal benefit.
Most of what is broken with today's so-called capitalist systems arises from the non-capitalist parts of the system - things like corporate welfare, regulatory capture, etc. All ways in which greed and self-interest manifest outside the system of capitalism and seek to subvert it.
Note also that capitalism has only been shown to work well for utilizing scarce resources. There is substantial evidence that it does not produce optimal utilization for non-scarce resources.
GLBA was passed in 1999 to modernize aspects of the banking industry. Title V prevents financial institutions from selling consumer data without consent from the consumer.
Unless things have changed in the meantime, you are glossing over a VERY important caveat.
That caveat is - even without consent, they can still 'share' information with 'business partners' - and the definition of 'business partner' is so vague as to be easily stretched into "anyone who gives us money."
So, while the GLBA sounds nice, it is just another set of meaningless rules that is all bark and no bite. Just like the lobbyists wanted it.
The guys over at http://www.gpgpu.org/ have been doing various math calculations, including 'physics' on GPUs for a while now. One big problem is that the only real API is OpenGL. So not only do you have to be a smart math programmer (which is pretty rare to begin with) but you also have to understand graphics programming too and then figure out how to map traditional math operations onto the graphics operations that OpenGL makes available. It isn't that hard to do simple things like matrix math, but trying to really optimize it for really good performance requires almost wizard-level understanding of OpenGL and the underlying hardware implementation.
The cards' math capabilities would be so much more accessible (and thus used by so many more programmers) if Nvidia (and ATI) would come out with standard math-library interfaces to their cards. Give us something that looks like FFTW and has been tweaked by the card engineers for maximum performance and then we will see everbody and his brother using these video cards for math co-processing.
> >> the company had asked Wal-Mart and other retailers to cancel >> online pre-orders for HD-DVD titles late last week, > > A supplier cannot do that to Wal-Mart without serious suffering.
However, in this case they had to cancel all of 2 orders, and those turned out to be errors by people who really meant to purchase the regular DVD versions. So it wasn't all that big a deal.
I'm sorry to hear that you responded without reading the details in my post. Your reference to ECC and data-loss indicates that you do not understand how a clock signal is used by a DAC.
Because it is a digital signal and not analog, it is therefore either a perfect transmission, or a flawed transmission. There is no middle ground.
I believe that to be false. Although I never really investigated their claims, some people say that the lack of an external clock on sp-dif can cause audible variations in the sound output. The impression I took away from the discussion was that the timing of the DAC on the end of a sp-dif connection is driven by the clocking of the sp-dif signal itself and thus, in real-time you can end up with longer or shorter tones than was intended.
Apparently there are products that buffer and re-clock incoming sp-dif data in order to assure consistent timing from one sample to the next. But, for some reason, most consumer-grade equipment does not make use of that kind of circuitry and just simply drives the DAC's clock from the sp-dif signal directly.
I'm no audiophile, I generally subscribe to the belief that louder==better, but the theory as explained to me (not necessarily as explained by me) sounded plausible.
Slashdot Mirror
Child Porn is the root password to the US Constitution.
And "war on drugs" will at least give you wheel access.
What we REALLY need is to deregulate public rights of way.
Got any suggestions for how that can be accomplished?
I normally argue that telecoms need to be regulated into only providing connectivity, and not content. But if it were feasible to deregulate the rights of way for the wires, it would probably be a better solution.
The obvious problem with deregulating right of way is that the local governments are suppossed to act as a bargaining collective. If they got out of that business, how would it be feasible for the telecoms to negotiate with each land-owner individually without turning to some other collective bargaining organization that would eventually have the same problems that local governments exhibit today?
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid= 89243
I don't believe anyone has broken the lastest DRM from Windows Media.
I have not checked recently, but I believe MS-DRM is cracked. It certainly was cracked and then MS forced an update out to all media-player software to work around that crack. But, a few months back, discussion on doom9.org was that even the last MS-DRM was easily cracked and the tools to extract DRM'd video were getting progressively more user-friendly too.
I think what it boils down to is that most people here just want shit for free, and will say anything to pretend that they have some valid objection with the system and that it warrants theft (or "copyright infringement" for the pedants).
Don't forget for one second that the studios and networks are ALREADY getting shinola for free. They just have the current system of laws to guarantee that they get money for nothing.
Once a show has completed production, any money the studio or network gets for airing or otherwise selling copies is money for nothing. The cost of airing a show or putting it out for download is marginally zero.
They are no better than the dotters that you complain about, except that they've bought the laws to back them up.
You might argue that they somehow deserve to get money for free because they took the risk of funding the production in the first place. That is inherently an anti-american, anti-free market position. Nobody deserves money just because they risked money. If it were otherwise, casinos would be bankrupted.
These guys need to get a new business model that does not depend on getting money for nothing. Until then, they and you, have got no business complaining that dotters want stuff for free when the current entertainment industry is completely built on getting as much cash as they possibly can for doing no work at all.
If our government wanted to make sure this didn't happen, they'd fine the IRS every time there was a security breach. In fact, they'd fine the IRS just for having bad security. And then things would improve.
Why do you think fining the IRS would make a difference? They are not a company, they do not care about profit and loss. Furthermore, the IRS is the government. Fining them would be like punishing your wallet by taking money out and keeping it in your pocket instead.
If you really want to do something to provoke change at the IRS, dock the salary of upper managers and in egregious cases, put them in jail.
And lots of major studios are on record as saying they won't make use of that particular flag.
No. Some major studios are on record saying that they won't use it INITIALLY - they aren't making any promises. Furthermore, some major studioes are strongly in favor of it, notably Paramount, Universal and Time-Warner.
So, to re-iterate the point from my first post, contrary to the original poster's claims - yes there is BIG argument over playing HD at HD resolution. All the players support the flag, so any studio is free to force down-rezzing any time they want to.
(Except in Japan, where it is illegal to down-rez - and since Japan will be in the same "region" as the US, look forward to having to import ridiculously expensive Japanese editions of US films to get them to play in their full resolution. Yeah!)
Duped one by accident:
a lse_id_suit/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/05/11/identix_f
They do afer all specialize in some pretty high end hardware such as tamperproof encryption modules. If it were any other manufacturer I'm not sure I'd "buy it".
t m
Heh. I know the guys who do the IBM 4758 and PCIXCC cards and they aren't involved with the fingerprint scanner on the notebooks.
IBM is a big company.
Although not IBM specific, here's a few links about the falibility of fingerprint scanners, the last one is tragically funny.
http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0205.html#5
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/22.37.html#subj4.1
http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0205.html#5
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4396831.s
You cast dispersions on families where both parents work.
Aspersions.
Dispersions would probably mean he's trying to make them get divorced and the kids sent off to foster homes.
Oh yeah? Don't be a sucker.
Also, there is *no doubt at all* to anyone who owns an HDTV of any size that DVD's are significantly inferior to broadcast HD programming. When American Idol has a sharper picture than the newest $20 King Kong DVD, something is wrong.
Oh yeah? I've seen plenty of poorly mastered HD where a high-quality up-scaling of the DVD looked at least as good, if not better. Good quality HD will blow away the best quality DVD, but considering what a haphazard job the studios do with DVD releases, I have no reason to expect BLU-HD-RAY-DVD releases to always be good enough to beat DVD.
You might want to do a little research on the efficacy of finger-print identification systems - in short it is pretty much nil. The cheap ones can usually be fooled by simply retrying a bunch of times with the finger at different angles, the more expensive ones can be easily fooled with the equivalent of a jello mold of the valid fingerprint - which can often be lifted directly off the scanner itself via the skin-oil left by the most recent user. So your 2-factor authentication is really more of a 1.1-factor authentication.
The movies where I'm at are $9.00 per ticket (IIRC the theater gets none of that)
They get an increasing percentage the longer the movie plays - something like 20% of the first week's gross, up to around 80% of the gross after 10 weeks or so.
Just don't click on that Goatse link!
Yeah, if you are not careful, you could fall right into into that.
Similar problem with most pr0n too.
unless you're one of the few users that finds it practical to do anything other than passively soak up multimedia content whilst relaxing on the couch.
Ever since I got a bright, hi-rez projector (Dell 5100MP 1440x1050), my couch is where I do everything except programming. It is great for email, web-browsing, IM, video-phone, games and yes, even the occasional TV show or DVD.
I highly recommend using an 8 foot wide screen with a wireless keyboard - it is amazingly comfortable to sit back in the laz-e-boy and use the entire wall as a monitor.
That position dovetails with one long held by Sun Chief Executive Scott McNealy. "Absolute anonymity breeds irresponsibility," he said in a 2003 interview. "Audit trails and authentication provide a much more civil society."
They only proved that partial anonymity breeds irresponsibility. Sun and any sort of response they make would have a tough time being anonymous. So, on one hand you have the "bad guys" who have almost complete anonymity to cover their 'extra-legal' activities and on the other hand you have the "good guys" without much anonymity and so are unable to respond in kind.
Adding audit trails and authentication just changes the identities of the "bad guys" from those who are outside the system to those who own the system and thus can erase the audit trails as needed (for example, the brazilian the british coppers shot and killed in the tube last summer - despite being the most surveiled society on the planet the incident was not recorded on camera due to a 'temporary malfunction' -- yeah RIGHT).
The part where Boomer was a Pylon suggested by co-producer.
I'd sure like to pylon Boomer too!
Leela: What's wrong Amy? Did you swallow your cell phone again?
You may laugh but I think we're coming up on that being a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Not quiet the same, but it's already happened.
Though, from other articles, it sounds like it just might have been justifiable as it was being "overused" at the time.
Yes it does, been using it myself for months.
For humanity it is necessary to recognise the intrinsic nature of capitalism. It is an unfettered force which puts the value of money and profit above life itself.
Huh? Capitalism is no more of an inherent human trait than is socialism.
Perhaps you meant self-interest or maybe greed - both of which are are common human traits, which capitalism seeks to harness. The defining idea being that scarce resources are more optimally utilized for the benefit of all society when controlled by parties that are most interested in maximizing the utility for their own personal benefit.
Most of what is broken with today's so-called capitalist systems arises from the non-capitalist parts of the system - things like corporate welfare, regulatory capture, etc. All ways in which greed and self-interest manifest outside the system of capitalism and seek to subvert it.
Note also that capitalism has only been shown to work well for utilizing scarce resources. There is substantial evidence that it does not produce optimal utilization for non-scarce resources.
GLBA was passed in 1999 to modernize aspects of the banking industry. Title V prevents financial institutions from selling consumer data without consent from the consumer.
Unless things have changed in the meantime, you are glossing over a VERY important caveat.
That caveat is - even without consent, they can still 'share' information with 'business partners' - and the definition of 'business partner' is so vague as to be easily stretched into "anyone who gives us money."
So, while the GLBA sounds nice, it is just another set of meaningless rules that is all bark and no bite. Just like the lobbyists wanted it.
The guys over at http://www.gpgpu.org/ have been doing various math calculations, including 'physics' on GPUs for a while now. One big problem is that the only real API is OpenGL. So not only do you have to be a smart math programmer (which is pretty rare to begin with) but you also have to understand graphics programming too and then figure out how to map traditional math operations onto the graphics operations that OpenGL makes available. It isn't that hard to do simple things like matrix math, but trying to really optimize it for really good performance requires almost wizard-level understanding of OpenGL and the underlying hardware implementation.
The cards' math capabilities would be so much more accessible (and thus used by so many more programmers) if Nvidia (and ATI) would come out with standard math-library interfaces to their cards. Give us something that looks like FFTW and has been tweaked by the card engineers for maximum performance and then we will see everbody and his brother using these video cards for math co-processing.
>
>> the company had asked Wal-Mart and other retailers to cancel
>> online pre-orders for HD-DVD titles late last week,
>
> A supplier cannot do that to Wal-Mart without serious suffering.
However, in this case they had to cancel all of 2 orders, and those
turned out to be errors by people who really meant to purchase the
regular DVD versions. So it wasn't all that big a deal.
i'm sorry to hear that you bought into the bull.
I'm sorry to hear that you responded without reading the details in my post. Your reference to ECC and data-loss indicates that you do not understand how a clock signal is used by a DAC.
Because it is a digital signal and not analog, it is therefore either a perfect transmission, or a flawed transmission. There is no middle ground.
I believe that to be false. Although I never really investigated their claims, some people say that the lack of an external clock on sp-dif can cause audible variations in the sound output. The impression I took away from the discussion was that the timing of the DAC on the end of a sp-dif connection is driven by the clocking of the sp-dif signal itself and thus, in real-time you can end up with longer or shorter tones than was intended.
Apparently there are products that buffer and re-clock incoming sp-dif data in order to assure consistent timing from one sample to the next. But, for some reason, most consumer-grade equipment does not make use of that kind of circuitry and just simply drives the DAC's clock from the sp-dif signal directly.
I'm no audiophile, I generally subscribe to the belief that louder==better, but the theory as explained to me (not necessarily as explained by me) sounded plausible.