The question that pops into my head when I consider the ramifications of FreeNet:
How can I ensure that my machine is not involved in the trafficking of content that I don't support?
I think a lot of people who find FreeNet interesting immediately imagine all the victimless pilfering that can go on. "RIAA can't shut us down!" I'm not talking about free movies. I'm not talking about cracked Win2K warez. I'm not talking about the source code and inflammatory emails that were leaked from MegaCorp's development department the day before the stock price plunged.
Once you are a node, it seems you give up your right to have any control of what's hosted on your own computer. You become a member of the collective. You are a cog in a machine, without any ability to have any context.
John Doe may like kiddie porn, GHB date rape drug recipes, tips on how to spot vulnerable SUVs for car-jacking, Aryan Nation websites, and abortion clinic hit-lists. I don't. Look for it elsewhere.
If you want that sort of information, I don't want to be a party to it. I'm not talking about legalities. I'm not talking about censoring all of FreeNet from that information. I'm talking about my own ethic.
I don't want to have the feeling, that information resides somewhere on the server I've installed with my own time, money and energy, that could kill someone, or exploit someone against their will.
This isn't "cover my ass", this is "sleep well at night."
Those who run windmills or solarcells often stay "on the grid," and the electric company is forced to compensate you for your power. (Forced, at least in most US jurisdictions, your mileage may vary.) If a windmill provides more than your whole house needs, then you'll get paid by the electric company.
However, those solutions work because you don't have to pay for the source of energy: wind or sunlight. You may have to pay maintenance on your mills or replace damaged cells, but that's about it.
If you have to hook a propane tank to a fuel cell, you're probably NOT going to get electricity cheaper than it's sold "on the grid." You'll be more independent, but you won't want to burn an extra tank to turn natural gas into cash.
It will probably depend on whether you can focus your eyes on something that's only an inch or so away. If not, perhaps you'd need to get a corrective lens added to the thing.
Almost nobody can focus on something an inch away from the cornea. Goggles with displays use corrective optics so that the image resolves at a certain virtual distance. Hench, the description "19 inch monitor at 30 inches distance".
Some goggles may have diopter adjustments. Your left and right eyes may focus slightly differently, and a diopter adjustment allows each side of the goggle display to have a different correction to compensate. Otherwise, one eye will be fine, the other eye will give you a terrible headache for not being able to focus at the same virtual distance.
We're not talking about someone with a few dozen, or even a few hundred MP3s, from his personal collection.
The computer they confiscated allegedly had, even in this day, a large amount of storage (40 Gigs of content was shared, more than 100 Gigs installed). You don't buy 100 Gigs just to keep copies of Encarta available.
The student allegedly made regular requests to the users of his system to send any songs that he wasn't already offering. If he were making the request to fill in a few blanks, like "I haven't heard that new Smashing Pumpkins labelless vinyl, send me some," this wouldn't be seen as a piracy enterprise.
Though his school doesn't block Napster, the school does have a duty to check into allegations made about its students actions, if they're potentially legal. If they didn't, the school would be complicitous, or worse, an accomplice, to any actions proven to be illegal.
Remember, the word alleged means that a claim of guilt has been made, but not proven. That's why stuff gets confiscated in the investigation phase of a criminal case, to use as evidence in the case. If charges are pressed, then he'll face the courts, and that evidence is used against him. If he's found guilty, it will be the elected judge (and jury if selected) that sentences him. If he broke the laws, it was laws passed by elected legislators and executives.
Every file you take,
Every scan you make,
Every net you quake,
Every song you play, I'll be watching you.
Every single day,
Every word you say,
Every game you play,
Every night you stay, I'll be watching you.
Oh, can't you see?
Those songs ain't free,
How can poor artists
Give every song you play?
Every scan you make,
Every sound you take,
Every phile you fake,
Every claim you stake, I'll be watching you.
Since you logged, I ping hosts without a trace
I query all night, bootlegged 'threes and WAVs
I look out for warez, hoping to make a case
Don't feel so sold out, a song you can't replace
Don't crack Ess Dee, Emm I, please...
Oh, can't you see?
Those songs ain't free,
How can poor artists
Give every song you play?
Every scan you make,
Every sound you play,
Every trial you stake,
Every LAME you break,
Every player you fake,
Every song you take,
IANAL (I am not a Legislator), but it seems to me that this 'hack sdmi' challenge may be somehow applicable to RICO (RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS) statutes.
The Hack SDMI effort is potentially an attempt to form a conspiracy to commit a federal offense, i.e., to crack an access control device, according to DMCA.
Further, a "pattern" of racketeering can be shown if two things are proven within ten years.
In Japan, we've heard it said here before, the media is the prime mover in the market. If you buy a music CD, some clerks ask, "Would you like a Sony MiniDisc or two with that?"
The questionaire mentioned above can be found at the http://www.self-gov.org/quiz.html, entitled, "World's Smallest Political Quiz."
As noted by the domain name (self-gov), this is a tool by libertarians. However, it is generally fair, if a bit simplistic. Ten questions: five on economic issues and five on social issues.
The four extents are Left-Liberal (social freedom over economic freedom), Right-Conservative (economic over social), Authoritarians (neither economic nor social individual freedom), and Libertarians (minimal central government).
The middle of the chart is, as you might predict, the Centrists, which represents nearly all elected officials in the US, regardless of their mud-slung labels.
They even break Authoritarians into left-authoritarians (socialists) and right-authoritarians (fascists).
I've made a Palm version of the same quiz, and it was made for the Newton a couple years back. Email me for a PalmOS/PocketC version.
While people exclaim, "RFCs are just ASCII files!" they should also realize that they are annoyingly, frustratingly, carefully formatted files.
Page breaks, page numbers, page references, avoidance of anything outside seven-bit ASCII, requirements for \r\n\r\n instead of \r\n\n, footnotes, bibliography, and so on.
Now it's starting to look like a useful thing to have a few of those references and footnotes automatically renumbered.
Emacs (or vi, or Perl, or whatever) could use a template or reference-manipulator like this to generate conformant output, too. It's just that some people don't use Emacs.
From the spec sheet, 128KB RAM, 512KB ROM, 2MB Flash. 102x64 B&W LCD screen. Infrared and RS232 connections to PCs. An IBM-style nub pointer control, and four buttons. 52 grams and it is water resistant.
A friend of mine has written a few apps for it, the SDK is available.
Of course, since it isn't running Linux, this may not be of interest to some people.
4 MSNBC: Stealing Credit Card Numbers Online is Easy by Roblimo on Sun 16 Jan 05:22PM EST 341
4 Largest Online Credit Card Heist Ever? by Roblimo on Sun 09 Jan 04:59PM EST 359
3 RealNames Customer Data Stolen by emmett on Mon 14 Feb 06:55AM EST 129
4 British Crackers Demand Millions in Inforansom by Roblimo on Sun 16 Jan 11:52AM EST 195
c|net's article has a little more information about the hack.
It was unclear whether the hackers obtained any personal account information. No fraudulent transactions had been reported by late yesterday [...] Only Web site users who conducted online transactions would have been affected. Company officials were using email, letters and phone messages to alert between 10,000 and 20,000 consumers to cancel their credit or debit cards and get new ones.
It's so sad that the FBI isn't satisfied with fair, lawful means of doing their job (which is, mind you, law enforcement, not crime prevention).
Actually, the purpose of the FBI is, as the name indicates, investigation. When there are credible allegations that federal laws have been broken, the FBI serves as the detective.
Ostensibly, they only investigate evidence that has been cleared by a federal judge. Whether Carnivore really can do that is what the review is meant to determine. Whenever there's private material that belongs to multiple parties (such as a hard disk at an ISP), it's important that some attempt is made to distinguish ownership of various different bits of data.
I repeat, we don't know if Carnivore does what the Justice Department and FBI say it does. Congress has adopted the right attitude that they should be worried if the FBI says 'Just trust us.'
However, in Carnivore's defense, if it really does do what it says, i.e., scan From: or To: to weed out all the irrelevant materials that have no bearing on the suspect, isn't that better than having a human scanning the emails?
Surely a human investigator would be less impartial about his or her task than a bit of software?
"I was scanning for Joe's drug trafficking, but here's this email I ran across that discusses DeCSS, boss. Ask the judge for a court order, and we can 'find' this tomorrow."
The concept of a web-space palette has nothing to do with consistency between hardware setups.
The concept of a web-space palette has everything to do with using one general but limited set of colors for all images, when the hardware has only 8bpp in which to render.
If you're using a video card in a 8bpp hardware mode (common in 1994), the hardware must use a palette: a lookup from 8bpp indices to the analog RGB triple. There is only ONE hardware lookup table for all applications that have access to the screen.
In such a scenario, the graphics manager (Windows GDI, the MacOS equivalent, or whatever other system) generally gave the foreground app priority. It could load as many colors into the hardware lookup as it wanted (up to the obvious 256). All other apps had to use a "logical palette", which was a wishlist. The manager would map any spares to the best colors from all background apps' wishlists, and map any other graphics to the nearest equivalent in the definitive lookup.
Changing the hardware lookup meant "palette flashes", most commonly seen when switching between two graphics applications, each of which trying to optimally select colors for its graphics documents. The flash was because the hardware lookup changes took place instantaneously, while the software had to refresh their images at whatever speed the CPU and video memory accesses allowed for.
A web browser, unlike a graphics app, is used to render many images at once. Thus, it must in turn emulate the SAME sort of wishlist strategy for each image, not just each application.
The 216 color "safe" palette was proposed, because this was the most theoretically evenly spaced set of RGB values that filled the whole RGB gamut (6 levels R, 6 levels G, 6 levels B, 6*6*6=216, 216<256).
If the web browser app registered the 216 colors (plus any common shades of gray used by the default OS GUI), then it always had *some* chance of making a reasonable nearest-color compromise in every image it was asked to draw.
There is NO way to make 100% match between different mediums. Two different digital-to-analog chips (DACs) made from the same wafer of silicon will still have different thermal and amp response curves. The best you can do is approximate.
Macs and SGIs have inherently focused more on color reproduction quality, but they still vary a lot. PC cards are more interested in pixel pushing than in DAC quality, but they're better than ever at making good color. The reputations stick: Mac goes for high-saturation color, while PC goes for a flatter gamma.
That's not even getting into RGB vs CMYK color spaces... the monitor, even in "true color" 24bpp modes, can only approximate about half of the actual color space available to the human eye. Print media can also get only about two thirds.
Good logo designers have to consider embroidery, silkscreening on fabric, silkscreening on plastics, diecut metals, print and onscreen uses for that logo. You think the web was a limited environment for color choices!
In short: "Safe palettes" are good for reducing compromised color selections, and a common palette from app to app helps in reducing that hardware palette lookup flashing. If you're in a higher color mode, you don't get any of the latter case, and the 216 colors are irrelevant to the compromises made in the former case.
Looking at the two MP3 units that are for Handspring, here's my thinking:
The price of the abovementioned Good.com SoundsGood module is too high for what it is. I just walked through Best Buy, and there's a lot of 32Mb and 64Mb standalone MP3 players that are competitive on price.
You're paying for the features that may be presented through the Visor's screen interface. There's just not that much indexing you can do with an hour or two's worth of music.
The formfactor of the delayed competitor, InnoGear MiniJam module is way too blobby. It won't let you keep your Visor in a standard case, because it extends behind and above the basic Visor case.
The SoundsGood appears to have the formfactor right. It stays flush within the space allotted in the main case. Even the headphone jack doesn't appear to interfere with the Visor's clip-lid (either open or closed), it is a bit to the left side. My standard case actually uses one of the clip lids to grasp the Visor, so this is good news for the SoundsGood. I could leave my zippered case open a little on the top edge, and jam.
I'm interested to know whether either of these units will draw many CPU cycles, or block the use of the Visor for its main task, which is to keep me organized.
Both the deluxe and cheap versions of the Handspring Visor come with a microphone built into the case. I still have yet to see ONE application that can use it, whether through software or Springboard hardware. Not even a bundled app makes trivial use of it.
An EverQuest emulator is clearly a derived work -- you need the original data files to play the game, and the emulator's game world is still reliant on Origin for new material.
EverQuest is produced by Verant, for Sony. Ultima Online is produced by Origin, a subsidiary of Electronic Arts.
The combination of date, temp-ccnumber, and amount makes for more digits. These are checked against your original ccnumber when the transaction is sent to the card-issuer, which is more digits.
Simple version:
store submits charge.
if (temp-ccnumber-digit16) XOR (original-ccnumber-digit3) XOR (day-of-week) == 6, you pass the test.
Pass a suite of such tests, charge is authorized.
Don't expect AMEX to tell you the actual checks performed. Only a small portion of possible checks need be "in force" during a given week or hour, too.
A long-standing professor once shared his opinion with me that a college degree didn't mean that you were trained in a certain profession or pursuit, but that you were trainable.
Not sure if I 100% agree with him, but when I look to hire someone, I really can see the difference between somebody who pursued advanced education and someone who didn't. That's not the only criteria of course, but college courses add a good dose of structured learning that high school just doesn't do.
From an AI point of view, it's like comparing a procedural solution to a neural net: the procedural solution has a better chance of reflection, of telling you HOW they got to a certain conclusion.
The artists don't see enough of the profits from a CD. And that's why we've flocked to Napster and Gnutella and the like.
While I agree with the overall tone of the poster, that line is so full of baloney.
People "flocked" to Napster because they could finally used their dormroom ethernet or cablemodem for something other than Porn or MMORPGs. People "flocked" to Napster because they could listen to music and decide if they liked the music without buying the CD [some did buy, some didn't buy].
You don't find ways of spending zero, if you're worried that one of the two selling parties is already getting shafted when you spend non-zero.
Slashdot Mirror
The question that pops into my head when I consider the ramifications of FreeNet:
How can I ensure that my machine is not involved in the trafficking of content that I don't support?
I think a lot of people who find FreeNet interesting immediately imagine all the victimless pilfering that can go on. "RIAA can't shut us down!" I'm not talking about free movies. I'm not talking about cracked Win2K warez. I'm not talking about the source code and inflammatory emails that were leaked from MegaCorp's development department the day before the stock price plunged.
Once you are a node, it seems you give up your right to have any control of what's hosted on your own computer. You become a member of the collective. You are a cog in a machine, without any ability to have any context.
John Doe may like kiddie porn, GHB date rape drug recipes, tips on how to spot vulnerable SUVs for car-jacking, Aryan Nation websites, and abortion clinic hit-lists. I don't. Look for it elsewhere.
If you want that sort of information, I don't want to be a party to it. I'm not talking about legalities. I'm not talking about censoring all of FreeNet from that information. I'm talking about my own ethic.
I don't want to have the feeling, that information resides somewhere on the server I've installed with my own time, money and energy, that could kill someone, or exploit someone against their will.
This isn't "cover my ass", this is "sleep well at night."
Those who run windmills or solarcells often stay "on the grid," and the electric company is forced to compensate you for your power. (Forced, at least in most US jurisdictions, your mileage may vary.) If a windmill provides more than your whole house needs, then you'll get paid by the electric company.
However, those solutions work because you don't have to pay for the source of energy: wind or sunlight. You may have to pay maintenance on your mills or replace damaged cells, but that's about it.
If you have to hook a propane tank to a fuel cell, you're probably NOT going to get electricity cheaper than it's sold "on the grid." You'll be more independent, but you won't want to burn an extra tank to turn natural gas into cash.
It will probably depend on whether you can focus your eyes on something that's only an inch or so away. If not, perhaps you'd need to get a corrective lens added to the thing.
Almost nobody can focus on something an inch away from the cornea. Goggles with displays use corrective optics so that the image resolves at a certain virtual distance. Hench, the description "19 inch monitor at 30 inches distance".
Some goggles may have diopter adjustments. Your left and right eyes may focus slightly differently, and a diopter adjustment allows each side of the goggle display to have a different correction to compensate. Otherwise, one eye will be fine, the other eye will give you a terrible headache for not being able to focus at the same virtual distance.
We're not talking about someone with a few dozen, or even a few hundred MP3s, from his personal collection.
The computer they confiscated allegedly had, even in this day, a large amount of storage (40 Gigs of content was shared, more than 100 Gigs installed). You don't buy 100 Gigs just to keep copies of Encarta available.
The student allegedly made regular requests to the users of his system to send any songs that he wasn't already offering. If he were making the request to fill in a few blanks, like "I haven't heard that new Smashing Pumpkins labelless vinyl, send me some," this wouldn't be seen as a piracy enterprise.
Though his school doesn't block Napster, the school does have a duty to check into allegations made about its students actions, if they're potentially legal. If they didn't, the school would be complicitous, or worse, an accomplice, to any actions proven to be illegal.
Remember, the word alleged means that a claim of guilt has been made, but not proven. That's why stuff gets confiscated in the investigation phase of a criminal case, to use as evidence in the case. If charges are pressed, then he'll face the courts, and that evidence is used against him. If he's found guilty, it will be the elected judge (and jury if selected) that sentences him. If he broke the laws, it was laws passed by elected legislators and executives.
Every file you take,
Every scan you make,
Every net you quake,
Every song you play, I'll be watching you.
Every single day,
Every word you say,
Every game you play,
Every night you stay, I'll be watching you.
Oh, can't you see?
Those songs ain't free,
How can poor artists
Give every song you play?
Every scan you make,
Every sound you take,
Every phile you fake,
Every claim you stake, I'll be watching you.
Since you logged, I ping hosts without a trace
I query all night, bootlegged 'threes and WAVs
I look out for warez, hoping to make a case
Don't feel so sold out, a song you can't replace
Don't crack Ess Dee, Emm I, please...
Oh, can't you see?
Those songs ain't free,
How can poor artists
Give every song you play?
Every scan you make,
Every sound you play,
Every trial you stake,
Every LAME you break,
Every player you fake,
Every song you take,
I'll be watching you.
--(with apologies to the Police)
IANAL (I am not a Legislator), but it seems to me that this 'hack sdmi' challenge may be somehow applicable to RICO (RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS) statutes.
I found the definitions of RICO on the US House of Representatives' site.
The Hack SDMI effort is potentially an attempt to form a conspiracy to commit a federal offense, i.e., to crack an access control device, according to DMCA.
Further, a "pattern" of racketeering can be shown if two things are proven within ten years.
See empegcar for a slightly more expensive alternative...
Just heard from a friend that he's got one of these 36GB in-dash Linux-running monsters. Gonna have to have a look at it.
In Japan, we've heard it said here before, the media is the prime mover in the market. If you buy a music CD, some clerks ask, "Would you like a Sony MiniDisc or two with that?"
As an anime fan, this is too reminiscent of Vampire Hunter D, a laughably odd vampire-slaying story that features a disembodied, talking hand.
After nearly careening into distracted handheld organizer users, I think the Hang up and Drive! bumper stickers need updating.
Top Ten Rejected Names for this Technology
And chosen? Hands-Free Handspring(tm)
The questionaire mentioned above can be found at the http://www.self-gov.org/quiz.html, entitled, "World's Smallest Political Quiz."
As noted by the domain name (self-gov), this is a tool by libertarians. However, it is generally fair, if a bit simplistic. Ten questions: five on economic issues and five on social issues.
The four extents are Left-Liberal (social freedom over economic freedom), Right-Conservative (economic over social), Authoritarians (neither economic nor social individual freedom), and Libertarians (minimal central government).
The middle of the chart is, as you might predict, the Centrists, which represents nearly all elected officials in the US, regardless of their mud-slung labels.
They even break Authoritarians into left-authoritarians (socialists) and right-authoritarians (fascists).
I've made a Palm version of the same quiz, and it was made for the Newton a couple years back. Email me for a PalmOS/PocketC version.
While people exclaim, "RFCs are just ASCII files!" they should also realize that they are annoyingly, frustratingly, carefully formatted files.
Page breaks, page numbers, page references, avoidance of anything outside seven-bit ASCII, requirements for \r\n\r\n instead of \r\n\n, footnotes, bibliography, and so on.
Now it's starting to look like a useful thing to have a few of those references and footnotes automatically renumbered.
Emacs (or vi, or Perl, or whatever) could use a template or reference-manipulator like this to generate conformant output, too. It's just that some people don't use Emacs.
An alternative that has been out for a while is the Matsucom onHand PC.
From the spec sheet, 128KB RAM, 512KB ROM, 2MB Flash. 102x64 B&W LCD screen. Infrared and RS232 connections to PCs. An IBM-style nub pointer control, and four buttons. 52 grams and it is water resistant.
A friend of mine has written a few apps for it, the SDK is available.
Of course, since it isn't running Linux, this may not be of interest to some people.
CmdrTaco, define 'we'?
4 MSNBC: Stealing Credit Card Numbers Online is Easy by Roblimo on Sun 16 Jan 05:22PM EST 341
4 Largest Online Credit Card Heist Ever? by Roblimo on Sun 09 Jan 04:59PM EST 359
3 RealNames Customer Data Stolen by emmett on Mon 14 Feb 06:55AM EST 129
4 British Crackers Demand Millions in Inforansom by Roblimo on Sun 16 Jan 11:52AM EST 195
c|net's article has a little more information about the hack.
It was unclear whether the hackers obtained any personal account information. No fraudulent transactions had been reported by late yesterday [...] Only Web site users who conducted online transactions would have been affected. Company officials were using email, letters and phone messages to alert between 10,000 and 20,000 consumers to cancel their credit or debit cards and get new ones.
It's so sad that the FBI isn't satisfied with fair, lawful means of doing their job (which is, mind you, law enforcement, not crime prevention).
Actually, the purpose of the FBI is, as the name indicates, investigation. When there are credible allegations that federal laws have been broken, the FBI serves as the detective.
Ostensibly, they only investigate evidence that has been cleared by a federal judge. Whether Carnivore really can do that is what the review is meant to determine. Whenever there's private material that belongs to multiple parties (such as a hard disk at an ISP), it's important that some attempt is made to distinguish ownership of various different bits of data.
I repeat, we don't know if Carnivore does what the Justice Department and FBI say it does. Congress has adopted the right attitude that they should be worried if the FBI says 'Just trust us.'
However, in Carnivore's defense, if it really does do what it says, i.e., scan From: or To: to weed out all the irrelevant materials that have no bearing on the suspect, isn't that better than having a human scanning the emails?
Surely a human investigator would be less impartial about his or her task than a bit of software?
"I was scanning for Joe's drug trafficking, but here's this email I ran across that discusses DeCSS, boss. Ask the judge for a court order, and we can 'find' this tomorrow."
The concept of a web-space palette has nothing to do with consistency between hardware setups.
The concept of a web-space palette has everything to do with using one general but limited set of colors for all images, when the hardware has only 8bpp in which to render.
If you're using a video card in a 8bpp hardware mode (common in 1994), the hardware must use a palette: a lookup from 8bpp indices to the analog RGB triple. There is only ONE hardware lookup table for all applications that have access to the screen.
In such a scenario, the graphics manager (Windows GDI, the MacOS equivalent, or whatever other system) generally gave the foreground app priority. It could load as many colors into the hardware lookup as it wanted (up to the obvious 256). All other apps had to use a "logical palette", which was a wishlist. The manager would map any spares to the best colors from all background apps' wishlists, and map any other graphics to the nearest equivalent in the definitive lookup.
Changing the hardware lookup meant "palette flashes", most commonly seen when switching between two graphics applications, each of which trying to optimally select colors for its graphics documents. The flash was because the hardware lookup changes took place instantaneously, while the software had to refresh their images at whatever speed the CPU and video memory accesses allowed for.
A web browser, unlike a graphics app, is used to render many images at once. Thus, it must in turn emulate the SAME sort of wishlist strategy for each image, not just each application.
The 216 color "safe" palette was proposed, because this was the most theoretically evenly spaced set of RGB values that filled the whole RGB gamut (6 levels R, 6 levels G, 6 levels B, 6*6*6=216, 216<256).
If the web browser app registered the 216 colors (plus any common shades of gray used by the default OS GUI), then it always had *some* chance of making a reasonable nearest-color compromise in every image it was asked to draw.
There is NO way to make 100% match between different mediums. Two different digital-to-analog chips (DACs) made from the same wafer of silicon will still have different thermal and amp response curves. The best you can do is approximate.
Macs and SGIs have inherently focused more on color reproduction quality, but they still vary a lot. PC cards are more interested in pixel pushing than in DAC quality, but they're better than ever at making good color. The reputations stick: Mac goes for high-saturation color, while PC goes for a flatter gamma.
That's not even getting into RGB vs CMYK color spaces... the monitor, even in "true color" 24bpp modes, can only approximate about half of the actual color space available to the human eye. Print media can also get only about two thirds.
Good logo designers have to consider embroidery, silkscreening on fabric, silkscreening on plastics, diecut metals, print and onscreen uses for that logo. You think the web was a limited environment for color choices!
In short: "Safe palettes" are good for reducing compromised color selections, and a common palette from app to app helps in reducing that hardware palette lookup flashing. If you're in a higher color mode, you don't get any of the latter case, and the 216 colors are irrelevant to the compromises made in the former case.
But you STILL won't look like your neighbor.
Why was the link made to EETimes, and not to the actual product page on good.com?
I smell an advertising hit ploy.
Looking at the two MP3 units that are for Handspring, here's my thinking:
The price of the abovementioned Good.com SoundsGood module is too high for what it is. I just walked through Best Buy, and there's a lot of 32Mb and 64Mb standalone MP3 players that are competitive on price.
You're paying for the features that may be presented through the Visor's screen interface. There's just not that much indexing you can do with an hour or two's worth of music.
The formfactor of the delayed competitor, InnoGear MiniJam module is way too blobby. It won't let you keep your Visor in a standard case, because it extends behind and above the basic Visor case.
The SoundsGood appears to have the formfactor right. It stays flush within the space allotted in the main case. Even the headphone jack doesn't appear to interfere with the Visor's clip-lid (either open or closed), it is a bit to the left side. My standard case actually uses one of the clip lids to grasp the Visor, so this is good news for the SoundsGood. I could leave my zippered case open a little on the top edge, and jam.
I'm interested to know whether either of these units will draw many CPU cycles, or block the use of the Visor for its main task, which is to keep me organized.
Both the deluxe and cheap versions of the Handspring Visor come with a microphone built into the case. I still have yet to see ONE application that can use it, whether through software or Springboard hardware. Not even a bundled app makes trivial use of it.
An EverQuest emulator is clearly a derived work -- you need the original data files to play the game, and the emulator's game world is still reliant on Origin for new material.
EverQuest is produced by Verant, for Sony. Ultima Online is produced by Origin, a subsidiary of Electronic Arts.
The combination of date, temp-ccnumber, and amount makes for more digits. These are checked against your original ccnumber when the transaction is sent to the card-issuer, which is more digits.
Simple version:
store submits charge.
if (temp-ccnumber-digit16) XOR (original-ccnumber-digit3) XOR (day-of-week) == 6, you pass the test.
Pass a suite of such tests, charge is authorized.
Don't expect AMEX to tell you the actual checks performed. Only a small portion of possible checks need be "in force" during a given week or hour, too.
A long-standing professor once shared his opinion with me that a college degree didn't mean that you were trained in a certain profession or pursuit, but that you were trainable.
Not sure if I 100% agree with him, but when I look to hire someone, I really can see the difference between somebody who pursued advanced education and someone who didn't. That's not the only criteria of course, but college courses add a good dose of structured learning that high school just doesn't do.
From an AI point of view, it's like comparing a procedural solution to a neural net: the procedural solution has a better chance of reflection, of telling you HOW they got to a certain conclusion.
Formats go like this: McDonalds--Coke/Big Mac. Burger King--Pepsi/Whopper. My years in the business have led me to this brilliant insight.
Actually, Burger King is an all-Coke business. Just like McDonald's.
Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut. That's the Pepsi trio of fast food companies, now spun off into their own collector's edition!
The artists don't see enough of the profits from a CD. And that's why we've flocked to Napster and Gnutella and the like.
While I agree with the overall tone of the poster, that line is so full of baloney.
People "flocked" to Napster because they could finally used their dormroom ethernet or cablemodem for something other than Porn or MMORPGs. People "flocked" to Napster because they could listen to music and decide if they liked the music without buying the CD [some did buy, some didn't buy].
You don't find ways of spending zero, if you're worried that one of the two selling parties is already getting shafted when you spend non-zero.