Even if you had a 2.4ghz wireless device powerful enough to actually harm you (and you don't -- your cell phone is orders of magnitude more powerful than your WAP), you'd have to be unconscious for it to do any real damage, simply because you'd feel your body being heated by it, and get the fuck away from it long before it heated you to a point where it could actually hurt you.
So, yeah, if standing in front of your Linksys feels like you're in a 400 degree oven, then you have a problem. Good news is, its power supply couldn't even provide it with 1% of the power it'd need to do that. The fact that the antenna is omni-directional, and you're not in a small, wave reflecting chamber like, say, the inside of a microwave also help.
Now that you mention it, the cut-scenes in Katamari Damacy really are so bad, they're hilarious.
Each one is some weird animation with a poorly-done child voice over saying something bizarre like "Wow. Space is like a giant bowl of chocolate soup that goes on forever..."
5) Google bought assloads of dark fiber and is talking up the prospect of a nationwide WiFi network.
Apple iPod-with-all-of-iPhone's-capabilities-except-actu al-cell-network-connectivity + Google's no-longer-dark-fiber-network-with-WiFi-access-poin ts-everywhere = no more need for a cell phone.
I was with you up to that point. A nationwide 802.11x mesh is neither economically nor technically feasible. 802.11x is good for what it's currently used for, and not much more. In reality, something higher power and longer range is necessary -- like existing cell networks, and/or WiMAX.
Google's proposal to cover SF in a similar fasion is slated to provide only 300 k/sec speeds to free users, and 1 megabit/sec to those paying $22/month; At those prices, DSL is almost certainly a better option. Given the numbers on the page, google expects to use as many as 1500 APs to cover San Francisco, an incredibly compact city with an area of only 47 square miles (which it's probably safe to assume this project would only cover some of)
Even generously assuming that 1,500 802.11g APs can cover all of San Francisco's 47 square miles, that's still 32 APs per square mile. At that rate, covering the city of Los Angeles would take roughly 20,000 APs, and covering Los Angeles County would take 150,000. And while you may deem that somewhat practical, applying the same treatment to the rural US (which, coincidentally, makes up *most* of the country, by area) is far less practical -- covering the state of Wyoming would require 6 APs for every resident!
Covering the country's densest cities in 802.11g APs is just barely practical. Covering the entire nation is laughable.
Be careful what you ask for. If your job can be done remotely from the comfort of your home/a beach/a coffee shop, then it can also be done from third world countries by folks who are willing to work for much less than you are.
That's less true than some wish it were. Wages for capable, experienced programmers in India have shot up dramatically over the last few years (thanks to finite supply and rapidly growing demand), to the point where someone in India with experience, talent, and decent communication skills costs just about as much as someone in a first world country with the same skills.
Bad programmers are cheaper overseas. Good programmers cost the same anywhere you go. Especially once you factor in the cost of the communications overhead inherent in having your workforce in a timezone 12 hours offset from your own.
While I agree that having net access in the places you spend 90% of your time in is almost good enough, the 10% of the time you're not at home or in the office, the web is a really useful thing to have. Every time the wife and I are on the road and want to find something (the closest bank, the closest store, the closest cheap hotel...) we find ourselves really wishing we had web access. A cell phone with internet access like the iPhone/Treo/Sidekick etc. are half way there (although they're slow, sometimes lack features (javascript, flash), or render things wrong), and are vastly superior to alternate methods of finding things while on the road (find a phonebook, call someone who's currently in front of a phonebook, ask a local), but I'd rather just crack open my laptop (which has a fully featured browser, and highly functional keyboard/display), use the company's store locater, and look up directions in google maps.
All the technology you need is available (GPS, web-capable cell service, affordable and reliable mobile processors). The only thing that's lacking is convergence. Ubiquitous, high-bandwidth wireless internet access wouldn't hurt either.
Numerous posters have pointed out the various legal difficulties with the MPAA attempting to pursue anyone using data collected from this site.
This leads me to wonder if they ever intended to actually do so at all, or if this is merely a psychological tactic: "Don't download, you never know which sites are run by the MPAA and which ones aren't!"
They don't necessarily have to sue anyone. They just have to scare a sufficient number of people into thinking they might.
I'm sure if you care to slog through Stroker's blog and/or message board posts, you'll find him specifically claiming copybot was used on his animations.
You claim the article states he's only upset about people "stealing his idea", however, the article is more specific than that:
Eros claims the avatar has made unauthorized copies of the device and is selling it for a profit.
This isn't about ideas. This is about scripts written by his company being copied bit by bit via the copybot tool.
Copybot copies animations. The distinction between objects and animations is trivial, at anyrate -- again, if you can see it, there's already a copy of the object/animation/sound/whatever in memory.
He's basically talking about animation files. Now, if people literally copy the bits in his animation files, that would be a copyright violation; he'd have a case. But SL makes it pretty hard to do that, and that doesn't sound like what he is complaining about.
Actually, while the unmodified client makes it difficult to copy objects without permission, there have been various hacks around for years. Now that the client's been open sourced, that cat's permanently out of the bag.
If you can see it, there's *already* a copy of the bits in your computers memory. Creating your own copy is relatively trivial at that point.
This case is really comparable to the "He stole my HTML!" and "He stole my animated GIFs!" complaints of the mid-nineties.
For those of you who haven't figured out why this is dumb yet, consider playing a board game with friends, and having one of your more affluent friends pulling out his wallet and offering other players real money for their monopoly money.
If I was playing an 8 million player, multi-year long game of monopoly, I'd *expect* a certain portion of the players to do just that.
When you've spent thousands of hours of your life playing a single game, throwing an extra $20 bucks at it now and then doesn't seem like that bad of an idea.
Apparently, the existing monitors at WQUXGA (worst. acronym. ever.) resolution run at 41hz, max. These days, top of the line game systems will pump out upwards of 100 frames/sec in some cases. A 41hz refresh rate is essentially caps you at 41 FPS, which is enough to turn off any gamer looking at blowing that much on a gaming rig.
Or, you could take the easy way out, and just open up MSPaint, create an image saying: "this image contains the file 'decss.exe', which you can extract using the steno app available at mysteno.example.com", and embed your file using any one of the dozens of existing stenography apps out there.
Since they allow archives on the site, are people going to use this to upload and share warez? Or does the system scan uploaded archives and rejects non-images based on content?
If you dig around in the tags for a bit, it becomes pretty clear that they extract the images from any compressed archives, and then throw the archive away. That is to say, you can upload an archive, and the images in it will be made available for download. The archive itself is never made available for download.
Wait...So console makers do the whole "morality police" thing regarding what games are released on their consoles? WTF?
Believe it or not, this is a huge improvement over the way things were back in the day of the NES. It used to be far worse. Nintendo wouldn't even publish NES games containing the word "Kill".
These aren't just people who might lie once; they are people whose entire business is built on premeditated and ongoing acceptance of contracts with intent to break them.
Anyone who makes use of their services is violating the exact same contract.
Liars also sometimes tell the truth. Some liars tell the truth almost all the time.
If you can't trust someone who's lied even once, you can't trust anyone. It's ridiculous and useless to attempt to dichotomize the world into "Liars" and "Those who never lie".
It's an interesting notion, but wouldn't an EFFECTIVE scammer start by building reputation until a lot of people bought in?
It's a lot of work. More work than it's worth. An effective scammer is not the scammer that draws in the most marks, but the scammer who makes the most profit while exerting as little effort as possible.
Witness ebay scammers. By your logic, the most effective ebay scammer would spend years building up tens of thousands of positive feedbacks, and one day, stop making good on their sales. Yes, it could happen, and probably even has. But the return on investment is pathetic compared to the myriad of easy alternatives.
Reputation systems are as old as human interaction itself. They work more often than not.
Given that nearly everyone in this industry asks you to agree to some kind of EULA to get access to their servers, you must break promises to be in this business at all.
So why should we trust you? If you're willing to lie to them, how do we know you aren't lying to us, too?
Reputation and testimonials. If I hear from a half dozen people in my guild that they've had succesful transactions with GoldRUs.co.xk, then I'll probably trust them. Similarly, if WeGotGold.co.xk screws people regularly, word will probably get out.
It had atleast 9 major areas of knowledge required. Everything from Java to SQL to Server setup... The job was to work at a porno production company!
Sounds about what you'd expect from a small company with a high-volume website. I'd imagine, for a lot of positions like that, you're a one-man IT department -- you'd be responsible for software development, deployment, database administration, and administering the production servers. When you work for a really small company, you wear a lot of hats.
I got your name from one of your dads blogs. I am CTO of a site called www.redlightcenter.com a new and rapidly growing MMOE. And we are looking for some good web developers to help design our money and inventory systems. Send me a reply and we can talk.
That's probably the first time I've had someone try to personally recruit me while I was already employed. Guess it's hard to find good people when you're in that business.
Slashdot Mirror
What I want to know is, where are they going to find enough manically depressed lions with lithium prescriptions?
Many of the areas of the world these things are going to are generally *less* liberal about sex than we are -- e.g. several are predominantly Muslim.
Even if you had a 2.4ghz wireless device powerful enough to actually harm you (and you don't -- your cell phone is orders of magnitude more powerful than your WAP), you'd have to be unconscious for it to do any real damage, simply because you'd feel your body being heated by it, and get the fuck away from it long before it heated you to a point where it could actually hurt you.
So, yeah, if standing in front of your Linksys feels like you're in a 400 degree oven, then you have a problem. Good news is, its power supply couldn't even provide it with 1% of the power it'd need to do that. The fact that the antenna is omni-directional, and you're not in a small, wave reflecting chamber like, say, the inside of a microwave also help.
Now that you mention it, the cut-scenes in Katamari Damacy really are so bad, they're hilarious.
Each one is some weird animation with a poorly-done child voice over saying something bizarre like "Wow. Space is like a giant bowl of chocolate soup that goes on forever..."
I was with you up to that point. A nationwide 802.11x mesh is neither economically nor technically feasible. 802.11x is good for what it's currently used for, and not much more. In reality, something higher power and longer range is necessary -- like existing cell networks, and/or WiMAX.
It took hundreds of APs for google to cover the town of Mountain View, CA (population: 70,000). Oh, and you're capped at 1 megbit/sec up/down
Google's proposal to cover SF in a similar fasion is slated to provide only 300 k/sec speeds to free users, and 1 megabit/sec to those paying $22/month; At those prices, DSL is almost certainly a better option. Given the numbers on the page, google expects to use as many as 1500 APs to cover San Francisco, an incredibly compact city with an area of only 47 square miles (which it's probably safe to assume this project would only cover some of)
Even generously assuming that 1,500 802.11g APs can cover all of San Francisco's 47 square miles, that's still 32 APs per square mile. At that rate, covering the city of Los Angeles would take roughly 20,000 APs, and covering Los Angeles County would take 150,000. And while you may deem that somewhat practical, applying the same treatment to the rural US (which, coincidentally, makes up *most* of the country, by area) is far less practical -- covering the state of Wyoming would require 6 APs for every resident!
Covering the country's densest cities in 802.11g APs is just barely practical. Covering the entire nation is laughable.
That's less true than some wish it were. Wages for capable, experienced programmers in India have shot up dramatically over the last few years (thanks to finite supply and rapidly growing demand), to the point where someone in India with experience, talent, and decent communication skills costs just about as much as someone in a first world country with the same skills.
Bad programmers are cheaper overseas. Good programmers cost the same anywhere you go. Especially once you factor in the cost of the communications overhead inherent in having your workforce in a timezone 12 hours offset from your own.
While I agree that having net access in the places you spend 90% of your time in is almost good enough, the 10% of the time you're not at home or in the office, the web is a really useful thing to have. Every time the wife and I are on the road and want to find something (the closest bank, the closest store, the closest cheap hotel...) we find ourselves really wishing we had web access. A cell phone with internet access like the iPhone/Treo/Sidekick etc. are half way there (although they're slow, sometimes lack features (javascript, flash), or render things wrong), and are vastly superior to alternate methods of finding things while on the road (find a phonebook, call someone who's currently in front of a phonebook, ask a local), but I'd rather just crack open my laptop (which has a fully featured browser, and highly functional keyboard/display), use the company's store locater, and look up directions in google maps.
All the technology you need is available (GPS, web-capable cell service, affordable and reliable mobile processors). The only thing that's lacking is convergence. Ubiquitous, high-bandwidth wireless internet access wouldn't hurt either.
Numerous posters have pointed out the various legal difficulties with the MPAA attempting to pursue anyone using data collected from this site.
This leads me to wonder if they ever intended to actually do so at all, or if this is merely a psychological tactic: "Don't download, you never know which sites are run by the MPAA and which ones aren't!"
They don't necessarily have to sue anyone. They just have to scare a sufficient number of people into thinking they might.
Haikus are easy
But sometimes they don't make sense
Refrigerator
Firstly, copybot copies animations: http://forums.secondcitizen.com/showthread.php?t=
What's more, here's an IRC log of Stroker discussing copybot: http://forums.secondcitizen.com/showpost.php?p=85
I'm sure if you care to slog through Stroker's blog and/or message board posts, you'll find him specifically claiming copybot was used on his animations.
You claim the article states he's only upset about people "stealing his idea", however, the article is more specific than that:
This isn't about ideas. This is about scripts written by his company being copied bit by bit via the copybot tool.
List of things copybot does here:
http://forums.secondcitizen.com/showthread.php?t=
You keep claiming that he's only upset about people stealing his "idea". The article does not support that:
In fact, here's an IRC log of Stroker discussing copybot with a few Lindens:
http://forums.secondcitizen.com/showpost.php?p=85
Stroker has obviously been the victim of copybot.
Actually, while the unmodified client makes it difficult to copy objects without permission, there have been various hacks around for years. Now that the client's been open sourced, that cat's permanently out of the bag.
If you can see it, there's *already* a copy of the bits in your computers memory. Creating your own copy is relatively trivial at that point.
This case is really comparable to the "He stole my HTML!" and "He stole my animated GIFs!" complaints of the mid-nineties.
Those mugs are lame. Especially because the string constant 'coffee.php' is unquoted on the PHP mugs.
If I was playing an 8 million player, multi-year long game of monopoly, I'd *expect* a certain portion of the players to do just that.
When you've spent thousands of hours of your life playing a single game, throwing an extra $20 bucks at it now and then doesn't seem like that bad of an idea.
The linked monitor is 1920x1200@75hz
That's 1/4 of WQUXGA's 3840x2400
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QXGA#WQUXGA
Apparently, the existing monitors at WQUXGA (worst. acronym. ever.) resolution run at 41hz, max. These days, top of the line game systems will pump out upwards of 100 frames/sec in some cases. A 41hz refresh rate is essentially caps you at 41 FPS, which is enough to turn off any gamer looking at blowing that much on a gaming rig.
Or, you could take the easy way out, and just open up MSPaint, create an image saying: "this image contains the file 'decss.exe', which you can extract using the steno app available at mysteno.example.com", and embed your file using any one of the dozens of existing stenography apps out there.
:)
Your way is a hell of a lot cooler though
If you dig around in the tags for a bit, it becomes pretty clear that they extract the images from any compressed archives, and then throw the archive away. That is to say, you can upload an archive, and the images in it will be made available for download. The archive itself is never made available for download.
Believe it or not, this is a huge improvement over the way things were back in the day of the NES. It used to be far worse. Nintendo wouldn't even publish NES games containing the word "Kill".
More here:
http://www.crockford.com/wrrrld/maniac.html
A 10 story building in NYC is still going to be way more expensive than 100 acres out in nowheresville, Kansas, isn't it?
Anyone who makes use of their services is violating the exact same contract.
Liars also sometimes tell the truth. Some liars tell the truth almost all the time.
If you can't trust someone who's lied even once, you can't trust anyone. It's ridiculous and useless to attempt to dichotomize the world into "Liars" and "Those who never lie".
It's a lot of work. More work than it's worth. An effective scammer is not the scammer that draws in the most marks, but the scammer who makes the most profit while exerting as little effort as possible.
Witness ebay scammers. By your logic, the most effective ebay scammer would spend years building up tens of thousands of positive feedbacks, and one day, stop making good on their sales. Yes, it could happen, and probably even has. But the return on investment is pathetic compared to the myriad of easy alternatives.
Reputation systems are as old as human interaction itself. They work more often than not.
Reputation and testimonials. If I hear from a half dozen people in my guild that they've had succesful transactions with GoldRUs.co.xk, then I'll probably trust them. Similarly, if WeGotGold.co.xk screws people regularly, word will probably get out.
Sounds about what you'd expect from a small company with a high-volume website. I'd imagine, for a lot of positions like that, you're a one-man IT department -- you'd be responsible for software development, deployment, database administration, and administering the production servers. When you work for a really small company, you wear a lot of hats.
That's probably the first time I've had someone try to personally recruit me while I was already employed. Guess it's hard to find good people when you're in that business.