Casinos wiped out card counters ages ago with massive decks that screw up the math. Winning blackjack is still pretty easy with memorization of the tables and techniques Avery Cardoza came up with in his book Winning Casino Blackjack for the Con-Counter." Anyone who wants to come out ahead in blackjack really, really needs to read this book.
Time it takes for FBI warning to scroll by: 12 seconds. Time it takes for legal disclaimer about opinions expressed in special features: 15 seconds. Time it takes for movie company logo: five seconds. Time it takes to watch silly, CG menu that I get stuck seeing every time I see the movie to go by: 10 seconds to one minute. Time to go from play to list of play options in silly CG menu system: Thirty seconds.
This stuff gets old after a while. If nothing else, I want to be able to just access a main menu without being forced to watch a cheesy into because going right to the menu is denied. Someone needs to beat the living shit out of these idiot menu designers who honestly believe that their work is so good I want to view ALL of it every time I watch a damned movie.
How long will it be before executives and investors finally realize that the only people making money off of all these crazy copyright/anti-piracy/region control legitslationing/lawsuits/scheming are the lawyers, modchippers, and Macrovision?
It would be wonderful if all of the out-of-print items could be scanned and ORDed as they are catalogued, and make available to the public that way, perhaps put online at some point.I don't know what Canadian copyright laws are like, but hopefully they haven't been hit with a Mickey-Mouse-Protection act like America's leaders sold us out with.
Also announced was the "Still cheaper than renting your movies" plan, 3.5mbps down and 128kbps up, as well as the "Bored guy in southeast Asia with a big hard disk on an ftp server" plan, 1.5mbps down and 5mbps up.
Surprised that the package was trojaned, or surprised that they actually admitted it?
Story silly, attention good.
on
What, Me Worry?
·
· Score: 2
The upside to the whole asteroid scam is the attention it brings to said asteroids. Asteroids contain a lot of really cool chemicals not found (At least in signifigant quantity.) on earth. As commercial space travel starts becoming more viable in the next few years, the possibility of mining asteroids for the cool stuff they contain could present some very nice opportunities for humanity. By drawing more attention to asteroids now, we help ourselves down the line.
"I think its pretty reasonable, but I doubt that the industries will agree."
Well, I hope these guys have good lawyers, because I doubt that the video game industry is going to just watch this site,and the cops in South Carolina (The apparent home of Jonathan Cooper, the site admin.) aren't among the nation's more liberal police forces. If he's lucky they'll just try piracy charges via some DA unable to comprehend software licensing and such, and not try to sneak in some DMCA violation on top of it.
1- Send money out of the country's economy buying software for students.
2- Rip off foreign software companies, spend more money on the education itself and not the software, allowing a better workforce capable of competing with external firms to develop.
"It goes on to say that they believe the NET server will be a challenge to these competitors."
Microsoft's servers are based on per-site licensing. IBM's aren't, Sun's aren't, HP's aren't. As long as Microsoft plans to beat out the Linux/UNIX vendors in the long run, they need to find a way to give up on overcharging companies that want thousands of simultaneous connections, which means Microsoft has to go into the hardware market, or make Active Directory and Exchange somehow worth the cost and pain.
Wussy pansy crap like this is why I gave up on political action with geeks.
Geeks are wimps. Geeks are happy to complain and bitch online, even writing a paper letter on occasion . But face a geek with some serious attempt to go against the grain, and he collapses.
Pressure from society, government, and employers scares the living shit out of geeks. I was laid off about a year ago, and found a new job immediately, but took a month off. I spent the first two weeks doing nothing but trying to motivate people into some poltical work with UCITA and the DMCA. The most I got out of it was a couple guys agreeing to write letters if I brought pens, paper, and envelopes to a LUG meeting because they couldn't be bothered to do it themselves.
We need an event to motivate geeks. Perens has decided not to be the one who does it, although one person being arrested probably won't do much, the last few times it happened people made phone calls, wrote letters, and the the EFF handled the legal stuff. We need something bigger. We need a room full of geeks, or someone like Linus tossed in jail for a very stupid reason. Until that happens, I'll just keep watching like everyone else.
I find that most computer books written at an "intelligent" level are too dry and boring to read through, although O'Reilly is pretty good about not falling into this category, great examples are the Samba and Python books.
For the most part, I just use the Sam's "Teach yourself in 24 hours" series to get started, because they tend to be written by some pretty damned smart people who know the subject matter and present it casually, and then just buy a pile of more "sophisticated" books to read for detailed reference later on. Then again, I practice system-administration-on-the-fly-at-4am, so my style definately will not work for everyone.
"...but you should more or less expect that if you don't write a physical letter then you'll be ignored."
What you stated is a myth, perpetuated by people who would rather that the American public stay left behind when dealing with the government. Using the internet tools available between congress.gov, house.gov, and senate.gov, along with various online news sources, any American can easily get in touch with his elected officials, using offical and verifiable information, at a speed exceeding anything avavailable before. America's corrupt corporate power base that controls the media works to keep Americans from exploiting the excellent resource that is the internet, so that they can use their own connections (Lobbyists.) to outweigh public needs and desires.
Officials do read and consider electronic messages. I regularly communicate with my elected officials via the internet, and have recieved the same courtesy and responses that handwritten, mailed letters get; ranging from form letters, to letters from staff, to individual letters from the officials themselves.
Every time an official recieves an electronic message, the internet gains more political power. Eventually, people using the internet to deal with politicians immediately will be seen as the serious, influential voters, and those who pull out the personal letterhead and sign with MontBlanc pens will be the foolish old guard too unconcerned to actually keep up with politics.
So stop discouraging people. Encourage the use of the internet, and teach America to use online resources to keep our leaders in check.
The problem is the eventuality of these becoming mandatory (As they already are on many General Motors verhicles.). Having it around voluntarily is fine, as long as we make sure to keep it that way. It becomes a problem when a car company like GM puts it into the car with no way to deactive or remove it and keep the car running, or worse, when the government mandates all American cars containing a tattletale device such as this one.
From the DMCA: "(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that--
(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;"
One way or another, knowingly possessing a chipped DVD player means that Perens has broken the law, so while he cannot be arrested for possessing the player, he can be nailed for being involved with its import and/or creation, as well as for having it to use as a "service" if showing this to the public can be construed as a service. Given the "dodgieness" of the DMCA itself, nailing him for this is quite possible.
Bruce Perens is planning to play DVDs from various regions on a modified player. Given that the DMCA covers devices as well as actions, the MPAA could just send in the cops to confiscate the player and arrest Perens for possession before he ever gets onstage.
"How do you argue with this kind of rhetoric, especially when it's being spread directly by government officials to corporate leaders?"
You can't. Most people are idiots, and in the United States, where people are indoctrinated by religious and educational establishments to have unquestioning faith in authority.
Just look at the decades of effort it took for anyone other than white males to be treated as human beings. Homosexuals still don't have the same civil rights as heterosexuals. Do you really think that the computer nerds of America have any real hope of countering the computer-realted bullshit spewed from the mouths of the government,AntiVirus companies, Microsoft, and cable news "experts?"
Your best bet is to do what I did. Realize that getting geeks to do more than write letters is next to impossible, trying to lead them to stand up for their rights, or even for intelligent thought, is hopeless. Your best bet is to just take a different strategy: Get a job working for these assholes, and enjoy the ludicrous salaries sleazy government guys are passing down to the people who build the infrastructure that keeps them in office (At least until some other politician turns the tables.).
"Can telecommunications giants realistically keep up with the public's need for ever-growing bandwidth without going bankrupt?"
They could if the stockholders and the board would get it through their heads that telling executives to raise the stock price as fast as possible is a bad idea. Companies need to make money to survive, and this is why companies like Verizon and AT&T are doing just fine.
That's cool and all, but some of us like the idea of cheap CPUs. Remember how overpriced Intel chips were before the K6-2? And how slowly intel ramped up CPU speeds? Competition in the X86 world was a massive boon to CPU consumers, just like competition by the Dramurai was for RAM buyers. Perhaps if Apple started offering X86 and Motorola options, Motorola would get it the hell in gear and sell faster, cheaper stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Casinos wiped out card counters ages ago with massive decks that screw up the math. Winning blackjack is still pretty easy with memorization of the tables and techniques Avery Cardoza came up with in his book Winning Casino Blackjack for the Con-Counter." Anyone who wants to come out ahead in blackjack really, really needs to read this book.
Does anyone else remember those old "Don't mess with Texas" bumper stickers from the 1980s? I think this is a great example of what that means...
Time it takes for FBI warning to scroll by: 12 seconds.
Time it takes for legal disclaimer about opinions expressed in special features: 15 seconds.
Time it takes for movie company logo: five seconds.
Time it takes to watch silly, CG menu that I get stuck seeing every time I see the movie to go by: 10 seconds to one minute.
Time to go from play to list of play options in silly CG menu system: Thirty seconds.
This stuff gets old after a while. If nothing else, I want to be able to just access a main menu without being forced to watch a cheesy into because going right to the menu is denied. Someone needs to beat the living shit out of these idiot menu designers who honestly believe that their work is so good I want to view ALL of it every time I watch a damned movie.
How long will it be before executives and investors finally realize that the only people making money off of all these crazy copyright/anti-piracy/region control legitslationing/lawsuits/scheming are the lawyers, modchippers, and Macrovision?
Hello, McFly?
It would be wonderful if all of the out-of-print items could be scanned and ORDed as they are catalogued, and make available to the public that way, perhaps put online at some point.I don't know what Canadian copyright laws are like, but hopefully they haven't been hit with a Mickey-Mouse-Protection act like America's leaders sold us out with.
Also announced was the "Still cheaper than renting your movies" plan, 3.5mbps down and 128kbps up, as well as the "Bored guy in southeast Asia with a big hard disk on an ftp server" plan, 1.5mbps down and 5mbps up.
"...that this doesn't happen more often."
Surprised that the package was trojaned, or surprised that they actually admitted it?
The upside to the whole asteroid scam is the attention it brings to said asteroids. Asteroids contain a lot of really cool chemicals not found (At least in signifigant quantity.) on earth. As commercial space travel starts becoming more viable in the next few years, the possibility of mining asteroids for the cool stuff they contain could present some very nice opportunities for humanity. By drawing more attention to asteroids now, we help ourselves down the line.
You know what? A legal page isn't worth a damned thing when ten Nintendo lawyers show up for a conference to pressure the local DA.
"I think its pretty reasonable, but I doubt that the industries will agree."
Well, I hope these guys have good lawyers, because I doubt that the video game industry is going to just watch this site,and the cops in South Carolina (The apparent home of Jonathan Cooper, the site admin.) aren't among the nation's more liberal police forces. If he's lucky they'll just try piracy charges via some DA unable to comprehend software licensing and such, and not try to sneak in some DMCA violation on top of it.
Don't drop the soap, John.
in my head tell me to quench my thirst with Sprite!
1- Send money out of the country's economy buying software for students.
2- Rip off foreign software companies, spend more money on the education itself and not the software, allowing a better workforce capable of competing with external firms to develop.
Yeah, that decision is really a hard one.
"Does that make us the second most powerful now? :)"
No, it just validates Microsoft's FUD that Linux is a bad choice for a desktop OS because of poor hardware support.
"It goes on to say that they believe the NET server will be a challenge to these competitors."
Microsoft's servers are based on per-site licensing. IBM's aren't, Sun's aren't, HP's aren't. As long as Microsoft plans to beat out the Linux/UNIX vendors in the long run, they need to find a way to give up on overcharging companies that want thousands of simultaneous connections, which means Microsoft has to go into the hardware market, or make Active Directory and Exchange somehow worth the cost and pain.
Wussy pansy crap like this is why I gave up on political action with geeks.
Geeks are wimps. Geeks are happy to complain and bitch online, even writing a paper letter on occasion . But face a geek with some serious attempt to go against the grain, and he collapses.
Pressure from society, government, and employers scares the living shit out of geeks. I was laid off about a year ago, and found a new job immediately, but took a month off. I spent the first two weeks doing nothing but trying to motivate people into some poltical work with UCITA and the DMCA. The most I got out of it was a couple guys agreeing to write letters if I brought pens, paper, and envelopes to a LUG meeting because they couldn't be bothered to do it themselves.
We need an event to motivate geeks. Perens has decided not to be the one who does it, although one person being arrested probably won't do much, the last few times it happened people made phone calls, wrote letters, and the the EFF handled the legal stuff. We need something bigger. We need a room full of geeks, or someone like Linus tossed in jail for a very stupid reason. Until that happens, I'll just keep watching like everyone else.
I find that most computer books written at an "intelligent" level are too dry and boring to read through, although O'Reilly is pretty good about not falling into this category, great examples are the Samba and Python books.
For the most part, I just use the Sam's "Teach yourself in 24 hours" series to get started, because they tend to be written by some pretty damned smart people who know the subject matter and present it casually, and then just buy a pile of more "sophisticated" books to read for detailed reference later on. Then again, I practice system-administration-on-the-fly-at-4am, so my style definately will not work for everyone.
"...but you should more or less expect that if you don't write a physical letter then you'll be ignored."
What you stated is a myth, perpetuated by people who would rather that the American public stay left behind when dealing with the government. Using the internet tools available between congress.gov, house.gov, and senate.gov, along with various online news sources, any American can easily get in touch with his elected officials, using offical and verifiable information, at a speed exceeding anything avavailable before. America's corrupt corporate power base that controls the media works to keep Americans from exploiting the excellent resource that is the internet, so that they can use their own connections (Lobbyists.) to outweigh public needs and desires.
Officials do read and consider electronic messages. I regularly communicate with my elected officials via the internet, and have recieved the same courtesy and responses that handwritten, mailed letters get; ranging from form letters, to letters from staff, to individual letters from the officials themselves.
Every time an official recieves an electronic message, the internet gains more political power. Eventually, people using the internet to deal with politicians immediately will be seen as the serious, influential voters, and those who pull out the personal letterhead and sign with MontBlanc pens will be the foolish old guard too unconcerned to actually keep up with politics.
So stop discouraging people. Encourage the use of the internet, and teach America to use online resources to keep our leaders in check.
The problem is the eventuality of these becoming mandatory (As they already are on many General Motors verhicles.). Having it around voluntarily is fine, as long as we make sure to keep it that way. It becomes a problem when a car company like GM puts it into the car with no way to deactive or remove it and keep the car running, or worse, when the government mandates all American cars containing a tattletale device such as this one.
From the DMCA:
"(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that--
(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;"
One way or another, knowingly possessing a chipped DVD player means that Perens has broken the law, so while he cannot be arrested for possessing the player, he can be nailed for being involved with its import and/or creation, as well as for having it to use as a "service" if showing this to the public can be construed as a service. Given the "dodgieness" of the DMCA itself, nailing him for this is quite possible.
Bruce Perens is planning to play DVDs from various regions on a modified player. Given that the DMCA covers devices as well as actions, the MPAA could just send in the cops to confiscate the player and arrest Perens for possession before he ever gets onstage.
Just a thought.
"UK Government will seek to avoid lock-in to proprietary IT products and services"
At the moment this sentence hit the web, Microsoft began accepting resumes for fifty lobbyists with bad teeth and old-world accents.
"How do you argue with this kind of rhetoric, especially when it's being spread directly by government officials to corporate leaders?"
You can't. Most people are idiots, and in the United States, where people are indoctrinated by religious and educational establishments to have unquestioning faith in authority.
Just look at the decades of effort it took for anyone other than white males to be treated as human beings. Homosexuals still don't have the same civil rights as heterosexuals. Do you really think that the computer nerds of America have any real hope of countering the computer-realted bullshit spewed from the mouths of the government,AntiVirus companies, Microsoft, and cable news "experts?"
Your best bet is to do what I did. Realize that getting geeks to do more than write letters is next to impossible, trying to lead them to stand up for their rights, or even for intelligent thought, is hopeless. Your best bet is to just take a different strategy: Get a job working for these assholes, and enjoy the ludicrous salaries sleazy government guys are passing down to the people who build the infrastructure that keeps them in office (At least until some other politician turns the tables.).
"Can telecommunications giants realistically keep up with the public's need for ever-growing bandwidth without going bankrupt?"
They could if the stockholders and the board would get it through their heads that telling executives to raise the stock price as fast as possible is a bad idea. Companies need to make money to survive, and this is why companies like Verizon and AT&T are doing just fine.
If anyone out there has had a hard time accepting that communism is a flawed, backward economic model, now you have proof...
That's cool and all, but some of us like the idea of cheap CPUs. Remember how overpriced Intel chips were before the K6-2? And how slowly intel ramped up CPU speeds? Competition in the X86 world was a massive boon to CPU consumers, just like competition by the Dramurai was for RAM buyers. Perhaps if Apple started offering X86 and Motorola options, Motorola would get it the hell in gear and sell faster, cheaper stuff.