I think this is a case of a dinosaur making last ditch efforts to try to save themself from certain destruction. AFP wants to try to control the flow of news (from them to other newspapers) and defend the natural monopolies involved with physical media since it's hard for customers to compare items for free. Now that AFP isn't listed, customers will just see other sites and flock to them first. This is what happens when you apply the old methods of business to the new world.
Ah, after some more reading, the myth itself that he did it with a circular configuration which they showed to be impossible. I guess they didn't know about parabolic reflections in those days. However, since a parabola is defined as the set of points equidistant between a point (the focus of the death ray) and a line (the infinitely far light of the sun reflecting off an imaginary flat mirror) this means that all the tangents of a parabolic curve (the flat mirrors in this case) will always cause the light source to reflect at a single point. This is why well designed radio dishes and telescopes use parabolic reflectors to concentrate the light. Reflectors also don't have the problem of different frequencies reacting differently like normal lenses.
Given that he was able to set a rag on fire, I'm guessing that the Mythbusters team did something incorrectly regarding the focusing of their mirrors. And your link says they used a circular configuration which is only good in limited cases since the light is focused in a line (which isn't really focus) rather than a point. This was parabolic setup which is why he was able to melt plastic and set a rose on fire.
It's not (primarily) the web designers' fault that they use flashy designs. The people who get design contracts aren't the ones who use well-formed, W3C compliant XHTML that is functional even in text-based browsers. The people who get the contracts are the ones who have a 500KB Flash animation on every page and poorly coded Javascript rollovers because clients and PHBs see these things and go "Ooo! Shiny!"
The whole point of modern XHTML and CSS is so that web designers can seperate the function of the webpage (deliver content via XHTML) from the form (the particular layout using CSS) and let end users choose the CSS that they want. In theory this should have a minimal XHTML with just pure text and all the glitz should be added in via CSS. FF and similar browsers support switching between multiple stylesheets by defaul, but IE requires webdesigners to allow it via a Javascript widget. Thus, the designers just stick with the flash. Maybe IE7 will help change this if it doesn't suck as much as the previous versions or maybe not given the amount of glitz in Longhorn.
In an ideal world, one CSS would have the glitzy flash animation and postneoantimodernismdeco-that-will-win-art-contest s design for when I first visit the page and am sucked in by beauty. Another CSS would have a minimalist UI that allows me to find the information on that site as fast as possible. Then handheld users would just use this latter lowbandwith UI by default instead of the flash hog. The web designers can just show the PHBs both versions so it is their fault that modern websites suck. They're making websites with 5 year old technology and the users are suffering for that.
If you really want to see the power of proper XHTML+CSS, look at the CSS Zen Garden. The entire site uses a single XHTML file but each version of the main page has a different CSS file. If you didn't know this, you would think that each page was individually coded. And the site is still usable if you strip out the CSS and view just the plain XHTML file.
Of those reasons, willful ignorance by the parents and stupid morality are the most evil in my opinion. Particularly when virginity pledges by themselves don't cut down STD infections because the people making the pledges have unprotected oral and anal sex to keep their virginity and they never bothered to learn about condems. News article on the topic
The point of contention in this case isn't the actual censorship of pornsites but rather the sites that get blacklisted just because they give information about sex. I bet that Wikipedia would be blacklisted since it talks about sex and probably has some sexual images on there. The courts have ruled in the past that teens have a right to access medical information about sex including such "deviant" (remember that this is Utah, Morman capital of the world) topics as homosexuality. Some lists would also ban things like nudity in general including classical paintings and sculptures similar to what Ashcroft did.
Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union go further and warn the bill violates the US Constitution's First Amendment on free speech and the Commerce Clause. Six other states have had similar legislation ruled unconstitutional, resulting in huge legal bills for residents, Media Coalition director David Horowitz told the Salt Lake City Tribune.
You would think that they would learn not to mess with the free speech rights of adults and children here. The main objection to these kinds of bills is that the block access to sites giving medical or social information about topics like teen sexuality, pregnancy, and homosexuality. This is due to the fact that the blacklist is drawn up by a bunch of conservative idiots rather than people that know the difference between Debbie Does Dallas and Gray's Anatomy. The laws prevent teens who have a right to know this kind of information without the consent of their parents (the ACLU has defended teen medical rights before) which is stupid since most of the problems with teen sex are due to ignorance on the part of teens about sexuality. Since they are taught nothing but abstinence, those who do have sex don't use protection. And because of the lack of communication between parents and teens in this case, the teens won't tell their parents nor will they get medical help which just makes the situation worse. One of these days they'll figure out that teaching children proper morals and letting them deal with the dangers of the world regarding sex is better than just blindfolding them and threaten them with eternal damnation if they have sex before marriage.
Most systems are mathematically sound, but there is always a flaw in the implementation that allows someone who is clever enough to sneak in. For example, SSH as a protocol and encryption system is secure, but some implmentations had a small flaw in them that allowed them to be cracked. All the headlines yelled "SSH broken" when the reality was that an implementation was broken. In this case, the DRM algorithm is secure (AFAIK) but the implementation is broken because the music is sent in the clear to the computer since the client needs to individually encrypt the music file with its own key. The only way to get around this flaw is to have the server encrypt it which would take a lot of CPU power (maybe grid computing of custom FPGA chips would help here) or to have the client run a TCPA system so that a 3rd party can't tweak the client. This sort of flaw is exactly why MS et al are pushing Trusted Computing. However, this still won't stop the analog hole of plugging a wire into the output and input of the soundcard until the media is encrypted all the way to the speaker. At that point, the only way to get past this implementation would by to have a mike set up next to the speaker (or spliced between the analog amp and the magnet) and then filter the signal to try to get rid of the analog noise.
So, don't attack my analogy, tell me why it was OK for him to lie to Apple and say that he WOULD respect their DRM and then turn around and crack it
Maybe he didn't read the click-through agreement? Or maybe he just doesn't like the inability to play the music on his non-iPod mp3 player even though he legally acquired the music and considers this fair-use (like using a VCR to record a movie) as long as doesn't redistribute the music to random people? Or maybe he understands the entire futility of trying to create an audio DRM system when the audio analog hole is currently (and probably forever) unpluggable so he doesn't see anything wrong with a digital hack compared to hooking speaker output into his line-in and pressing record? Or he could just like the challenge of being a hacker in both meanings of the word. Unless he is distributing the cracked music to others, I see no moral crime here even if he is violating laws.
It just wouldn't be the same without them. However, imdb doesn't show them as being part of the cast. Hopefully, this show will help cram some science into kids again, but who wants to take bets as to how long it will be before Creationists or other anti-science conservatives attack the show for claiming that Earth is 4 billion years old, we evolved from rodents, and that the Sun is the center of our solar system? I'm betting it will happen in the first season given the bad state of science today. Maybe this will even prevent the next generation from turing into a bunch of New Age hippies wearing crystal and Kabbalah threads.
They also forgot that the DS has MP3 and movies
on
PSP And DS Duke It Out
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· Score: 3, Informative
You need a $40 3rd party extension, but that's still cheaper than the PSP. And it has good reviews too. This was an SP product that happens to work on the DS due to backwards support. The good thing about this is that it isn't controlled by Sony like their fucking UMD that no one else can use. Anyone with a flash card reader can use the DS for movies. The downside is that it's another item to carry with you which is bad for those without big pockets or bags. Given that the old GBA roms are a known format, I'm guessing that there will be a lot more third party apps for the DS than with the PSP. Particularly when someone figures out how to get the DS to play games over WiFi without a physical disk. This is a known feature of the DS, but it's not a public spec yet.
You need a $40 3rd party cartridge, but you can play divx movies, mp3s and read text on the GBA and DS off a flash card. It's an import called Movie Advance There is a good review on Lik Sang but that site seems to be having troubles so here is a Google cache. Another review is at PlanetGC. The good thing about this is that it isn't controlled by Sony like their fucking UMD that no one else can use. Anyone with a flash card reader can use the DS for movies. The downside is that it's another item to carry with you which is bad for those without big pockets or bags. Given that the old GBA roms are a known format, I'm guessing that there will be a lot more third party apps for the DS than with the PSP. Particularly when someone figures out how to get the DS to play games over WiFi without a physical disk. This is a known feature of the DS, but it's not a public spec yet.
The ideal hope would be that the bandwith costs involved becomes cheaper at a rate equal to or greater than the bandwith usage. That is, the net cost remains constant or less than the influx of money from public and private sources. Given that bandwith usage by clients will rise as bandwith costs for them drop, this might be too optimistic, but economics is always a hard thing to predict when it is so technologically dependent. They could also try to get people like Google to back this project as part of their new library initative.
Given the problems with getting children that are good enough actors, I'm guessing that there is no way to stay accurate to the book and pull off a good movie. If you stay accurate to the book, the bad acting will weaken it and American audiences (cause no moviehouse cares about anyone else for big movies) will freak out over the use of children. It might be better to wait for Final Fantasy level rendering to jump up a few steps and use that for the children. Then use adults who can play children for the voices. Assuming the rendering is good enough to not be distracting, there is still the question of whether moviehouses will think that Americans will like the plot and themes in the book. If that's the case it might be better to try to pitch it to a Japanese anime company rather than an American one. It would be similar to Now and Then, Here and There which was an anime about children being used for war with some similar themes.
Just so the rest of the world doesn't think that it's a small minority of Americans who are doing this, a set of polls on evolution vs Creationism. The majority of Americans believe that we were created by a god in 6 days 10,000 years ago. The religious right's ability to keep proper science out of the class is starting to bite us in the ass as it will get harder to aprove biotech and other "controversial sciences" for funding. The same scientific ignorance causes Americans to abhorr homosexuality as a sinful path chosen by evil people rather than realizing it's a natural mindset encoded into the brain before birth. My only hope for the science in this country is that someone in the government will realize that we should spend money on education instead of war before the median scientific knowledge of our "first world" country falls below that of "third world" countries.
I actually first heard about the slashdot story about the magic sticker when I was reading one of Randi's weekly commentaries where one of the readers comments about certain Slashdotter's inability to seperate reality from fantasy. BTW, the sticker qualifies for the Million Dollar prize along with evidence of psychics, homeopathic medicine, or other bullshit.
It should be noted that the claim about whether life on Mars exists is not without contrevery. Levin contends that the Viking probes did detect evidence of life on Mars based on biochemical signatures. This past evidence is now supported by the belief that Mars might have an organic methane source. There is also some evidence that Viking detected a circadian rhythm, but like all conclusions draw on such a limited data set, there are a lot of interpretations.
While I understand that Joe Six Pack wants plug and play functionality without configuring, it is really that hard to add in another layer? When the AP is running on factory settings, it can just cause all Web requests to route to the configuration page along with an easy to explain set up about passwords. AP passwords aren't hard as normal passwords since many APs are in a secure building so writing the password on the AP and locking it in the closet would work half decently.
While the user has to take some blame for technical ignorance, the AP makers also have to take some blame here since they have the tech people to implement better security.
We need alternative forms of distribution too. I'm not saying publishers suck, although I do believe that in many cases. [laughter] If the plane went down who would care about the marketing guys? We need another way of getting games out there and in players' hands. If any of you bought Half Life 2 at Wal-Mart, please just leave the room.
This is one of the major gripes that people have about games. Acquiring a publisher just adds another person in the contract which brings about more legal hassle (remember Valve delaying HL2's Steam release to match the hardcopy release?) and more overhead. Given the nature of software, physical copies are completely overrated unless they have interesting bonus material. It would be much nicer if companies who make games that are primarily online (Q3, CS, all MMORPGS) just dropped the whole physical aspect. They could just tack on a BitTorrent client to a lightweight download/install program and just send it out to everyone. Then encourage people to make copies of the data files and distribute it to friends (since this is impossible to stop) and just sell the CD keys online. This would be just as effective for games that already require an Internet connection. They could also just give out the installer on DVD for free in stores and sell the CD key online or sell physical cards in stores that contain a CD key.
One of these days, the companies will catch up with the state of technology.
You can also use a temporary credit card if you're really paranoid. These function as debit cards so you only risk the amount of money you put it. This might be useful if you're ultra paranoid and like to limit the number of people you give your credit card to. You still need a real credit card for WebCertificate but it is an extra layer of protection.
Likewise for me with a Mac Mini. I did have to pay $0.99 for one of the offers, but the key is to sign up for an offer that's actually worth it rather than one of the crazy ones like diet pills.
The output system will be the same as normal 3d films since 3d movie tech hasn't evolved that much. I'm guessing a pair of polarized lenses in the standard cheap paper glasses. The interesting part is generating 3d images from 2d data. Since Lucas didn't film all the scenes in 3d, he has to use postproduction tricks to extract 3d info. This is mainly done using parallax shifts which is when the foreground and background images apparently move at different speeds during a pan. Static shots would probably have to be 3d'd (or whatever buzzword) in a semi-manual fashion with people telling the computer which parts are at which distance. This also means that certain objects like a person sitting still at a table with a gun won't have enough information to be 3d'd and will either be done manually or left in 2d. It also means that the final movie won't be full 3d since there probably isn't enough parallax data to extract depth information about a person's face in most cases. So you'll have 2d foreground images moving in 3d in front of 2d background images. I'm not sure how good this would look in a full motion sequence.
I'm guessing the software will be similar to this with some changes due to the limited motions of normal cameras. That's the only intersting part about this whole venture.
The part about sending something faster than light is just bad reporting. Einstein says that no information can travel faster than light. If I point a laser beam at the moon and move it quickly, the dot on the moon will move around faster than light. However, no information is sent so there is no problem. The same applies to this experiment except it involves group and phase velocities of light. The concept is very hard to explain in words so I'll just point you to this Java applet with a moving picture: http://galileo.phys.virginia.edu/classes/109N/more _stuff/Applets/sines/GroupVelocity.html
The part about light moving slower isn't anything special. It has been known for a while that light slows down in a medium (ie anything other than a pure vacuum) at a rate dependent on the type of medium. This includes normal glass.
I can't seem to find any evidence that it's been discredited yet (Google keeps giving me the quack sites rather than trustable responses) but I did find this.
Since it was a news program, it can't be considered too credible. (Though, this might just be an American bias since we've had major news networks show "proof" of faith healing and the Apollo moon hoax) However, it seems to have been conducted by credible scientists along with Randi himself. As expected, it showed no statistical deviation.
Since 4 other studies seemed to support the orginal one, but no mention was made of how many contradicted it, I'm going to guess that all 5 studies supporting it were due to statistical or human error.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is a case of a dinosaur making last ditch efforts to try to save themself from certain destruction. AFP wants to try to control the flow of news (from them to other newspapers) and defend the natural monopolies involved with physical media since it's hard for customers to compare items for free. Now that AFP isn't listed, customers will just see other sites and flock to them first. This is what happens when you apply the old methods of business to the new world.
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Ah, after some more reading, the myth itself that he did it with a circular configuration which they showed to be impossible. I guess they didn't know about parabolic reflections in those days. However, since a parabola is defined as the set of points equidistant between a point (the focus of the death ray) and a line (the infinitely far light of the sun reflecting off an imaginary flat mirror) this means that all the tangents of a parabolic curve (the flat mirrors in this case) will always cause the light source to reflect at a single point. This is why well designed radio dishes and telescopes use parabolic reflectors to concentrate the light. Reflectors also don't have the problem of different frequencies reacting differently like normal lenses.
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Given that he was able to set a rag on fire, I'm guessing that the Mythbusters team did something incorrectly regarding the focusing of their mirrors. And your link says they used a circular configuration which is only good in limited cases since the light is focused in a line (which isn't really focus) rather than a point. This was parabolic setup which is why he was able to melt plastic and set a rose on fire.
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Since the second link is down: http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/dc606edf5dd2111cf fb4c2925123d784/index.html
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It's not (primarily) the web designers' fault that they use flashy designs. The people who get design contracts aren't the ones who use well-formed, W3C compliant XHTML that is functional even in text-based browsers. The people who get the contracts are the ones who have a 500KB Flash animation on every page and poorly coded Javascript rollovers because clients and PHBs see these things and go "Ooo! Shiny!"
t s design for when I first visit the page and am sucked in by beauty. Another CSS would have a minimalist UI that allows me to find the information on that site as fast as possible. Then handheld users would just use this latter lowbandwith UI by default instead of the flash hog. The web designers can just show the PHBs both versions so it is their fault that modern websites suck. They're making websites with 5 year old technology and the users are suffering for that.
The whole point of modern XHTML and CSS is so that web designers can seperate the function of the webpage (deliver content via XHTML) from the form (the particular layout using CSS) and let end users choose the CSS that they want. In theory this should have a minimal XHTML with just pure text and all the glitz should be added in via CSS. FF and similar browsers support switching between multiple stylesheets by defaul, but IE requires webdesigners to allow it via a Javascript widget. Thus, the designers just stick with the flash. Maybe IE7 will help change this if it doesn't suck as much as the previous versions or maybe not given the amount of glitz in Longhorn.
In an ideal world, one CSS would have the glitzy flash animation and postneoantimodernismdeco-that-will-win-art-contes
If you really want to see the power of proper XHTML+CSS, look at the CSS Zen Garden. The entire site uses a single XHTML file but each version of the main page has a different CSS file. If you didn't know this, you would think that each page was individually coded. And the site is still usable if you strip out the CSS and view just the plain XHTML file.
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Of those reasons, willful ignorance by the parents and stupid morality are the most evil in my opinion. Particularly when virginity pledges by themselves don't cut down STD infections because the people making the pledges have unprotected oral and anal sex to keep their virginity and they never bothered to learn about condems. News article on the topic
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The point of contention in this case isn't the actual censorship of pornsites but rather the sites that get blacklisted just because they give information about sex. I bet that Wikipedia would be blacklisted since it talks about sex and probably has some sexual images on there. The courts have ruled in the past that teens have a right to access medical information about sex including such "deviant" (remember that this is Utah, Morman capital of the world) topics as homosexuality. Some lists would also ban things like nudity in general including classical paintings and sculptures similar to what Ashcroft did.
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Groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union go further and warn the bill violates the US Constitution's First Amendment on free speech and the Commerce Clause. Six other states have had similar legislation ruled unconstitutional, resulting in huge legal bills for residents, Media Coalition director David Horowitz told the Salt Lake City Tribune.
You would think that they would learn not to mess with the free speech rights of adults and children here. The main objection to these kinds of bills is that the block access to sites giving medical or social information about topics like teen sexuality, pregnancy, and homosexuality. This is due to the fact that the blacklist is drawn up by a bunch of conservative idiots rather than people that know the difference between Debbie Does Dallas and Gray's Anatomy. The laws prevent teens who have a right to know this kind of information without the consent of their parents (the ACLU has defended teen medical rights before) which is stupid since most of the problems with teen sex are due to ignorance on the part of teens about sexuality. Since they are taught nothing but abstinence, those who do have sex don't use protection. And because of the lack of communication between parents and teens in this case, the teens won't tell their parents nor will they get medical help which just makes the situation worse. One of these days they'll figure out that teaching children proper morals and letting them deal with the dangers of the world regarding sex is better than just blindfolding them and threaten them with eternal damnation if they have sex before marriage.
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Most systems are mathematically sound, but there is always a flaw in the implementation that allows someone who is clever enough to sneak in. For example, SSH as a protocol and encryption system is secure, but some implmentations had a small flaw in them that allowed them to be cracked. All the headlines yelled "SSH broken" when the reality was that an implementation was broken. In this case, the DRM algorithm is secure (AFAIK) but the implementation is broken because the music is sent in the clear to the computer since the client needs to individually encrypt the music file with its own key. The only way to get around this flaw is to have the server encrypt it which would take a lot of CPU power (maybe grid computing of custom FPGA chips would help here) or to have the client run a TCPA system so that a 3rd party can't tweak the client. This sort of flaw is exactly why MS et al are pushing Trusted Computing.
However, this still won't stop the analog hole of plugging a wire into the output and input of the soundcard until the media is encrypted all the way to the speaker. At that point, the only way to get past this implementation would by to have a mike set up next to the speaker (or spliced between the analog amp and the magnet) and then filter the signal to try to get rid of the analog noise.
So, don't attack my analogy, tell me why it was OK for him to lie to Apple and say that he WOULD respect their DRM and then turn around and crack it
Maybe he didn't read the click-through agreement? Or maybe he just doesn't like the inability to play the music on his non-iPod mp3 player even though he legally acquired the music and considers this fair-use (like using a VCR to record a movie) as long as doesn't redistribute the music to random people? Or maybe he understands the entire futility of trying to create an audio DRM system when the audio analog hole is currently (and probably forever) unpluggable so he doesn't see anything wrong with a digital hack compared to hooking speaker output into his line-in and pressing record? Or he could just like the challenge of being a hacker in both meanings of the word. Unless he is distributing the cracked music to others, I see no moral crime here even if he is violating laws.
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It just wouldn't be the same without them. However, imdb doesn't show them as being part of the cast. Hopefully, this show will help cram some science into kids again, but who wants to take bets as to how long it will be before Creationists or other anti-science conservatives attack the show for claiming that Earth is 4 billion years old, we evolved from rodents, and that the Sun is the center of our solar system? I'm betting it will happen in the first season given the bad state of science today. Maybe this will even prevent the next generation from turing into a bunch of New Age hippies wearing crystal and Kabbalah threads.
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You need a $40 3rd party extension, but that's still cheaper than the PSP. And it has good reviews too. This was an SP product that happens to work on the DS due to backwards support. The good thing about this is that it isn't controlled by Sony like their fucking UMD that no one else can use. Anyone with a flash card reader can use the DS for movies. The downside is that it's another item to carry with you which is bad for those without big pockets or bags. Given that the old GBA roms are a known format, I'm guessing that there will be a lot more third party apps for the DS than with the PSP. Particularly when someone figures out how to get the DS to play games over WiFi without a physical disk. This is a known feature of the DS, but it's not a public spec yet.
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You need a $40 3rd party cartridge, but you can play divx movies, mp3s and read text on the GBA and DS off a flash card. It's an import called Movie Advance There is a good review on Lik Sang but that site seems to be having troubles so here is a Google cache. Another review is at PlanetGC. The good thing about this is that it isn't controlled by Sony like their fucking UMD that no one else can use. Anyone with a flash card reader can use the DS for movies. The downside is that it's another item to carry with you which is bad for those without big pockets or bags. Given that the old GBA roms are a known format, I'm guessing that there will be a lot more third party apps for the DS than with the PSP. Particularly when someone figures out how to get the DS to play games over WiFi without a physical disk. This is a known feature of the DS, but it's not a public spec yet.
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The ideal hope would be that the bandwith costs involved becomes cheaper at a rate equal to or greater than the bandwith usage. That is, the net cost remains constant or less than the influx of money from public and private sources. Given that bandwith usage by clients will rise as bandwith costs for them drop, this might be too optimistic, but economics is always a hard thing to predict when it is so technologically dependent. They could also try to get people like Google to back this project as part of their new library initative.
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Given the problems with getting children that are good enough actors, I'm guessing that there is no way to stay accurate to the book and pull off a good movie. If you stay accurate to the book, the bad acting will weaken it and American audiences (cause no moviehouse cares about anyone else for big movies) will freak out over the use of children. It might be better to wait for Final Fantasy level rendering to jump up a few steps and use that for the children. Then use adults who can play children for the voices. Assuming the rendering is good enough to not be distracting, there is still the question of whether moviehouses will think that Americans will like the plot and themes in the book. If that's the case it might be better to try to pitch it to a Japanese anime company rather than an American one. It would be similar to Now and Then, Here and There which was an anime about children being used for war with some similar themes.
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Just so the rest of the world doesn't think that it's a small minority of Americans who are doing this, a set of polls on evolution vs Creationism. The majority of Americans believe that we were created by a god in 6 days 10,000 years ago. The religious right's ability to keep proper science out of the class is starting to bite us in the ass as it will get harder to aprove biotech and other "controversial sciences" for funding. The same scientific ignorance causes Americans to abhorr homosexuality as a sinful path chosen by evil people rather than realizing it's a natural mindset encoded into the brain before birth. My only hope for the science in this country is that someone in the government will realize that we should spend money on education instead of war before the median scientific knowledge of our "first world" country falls below that of "third world" countries.
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I actually first heard about the slashdot story about the magic sticker when I was reading one of Randi's weekly commentaries where one of the readers comments about certain Slashdotter's inability to seperate reality from fantasy. BTW, the sticker qualifies for the Million Dollar prize along with evidence of psychics, homeopathic medicine, or other bullshit.
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It should be noted that the claim about whether life on Mars exists is not without contrevery. Levin contends that the Viking probes did detect evidence of life on Mars based on biochemical signatures. This past evidence is now supported by the belief that Mars might have an organic methane source. There is also some evidence that Viking detected a circadian rhythm, but like all conclusions draw on such a limited data set, there are a lot of interpretations.
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While I understand that Joe Six Pack wants plug and play functionality without configuring, it is really that hard to add in another layer? When the AP is running on factory settings, it can just cause all Web requests to route to the configuration page along with an easy to explain set up about passwords. AP passwords aren't hard as normal passwords since many APs are in a secure building so writing the password on the AP and locking it in the closet would work half decently.
While the user has to take some blame for technical ignorance, the AP makers also have to take some blame here since they have the tech people to implement better security.
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We need alternative forms of distribution too. I'm not saying publishers suck, although I do believe that in many cases. [laughter] If the plane went down who would care about the marketing guys? We need another way of getting games out there and in players' hands. If any of you bought Half Life 2 at Wal-Mart, please just leave the room.
This is one of the major gripes that people have about games. Acquiring a publisher just adds another person in the contract which brings about more legal hassle (remember Valve delaying HL2's Steam release to match the hardcopy release?) and more overhead. Given the nature of software, physical copies are completely overrated unless they have interesting bonus material. It would be much nicer if companies who make games that are primarily online (Q3, CS, all MMORPGS) just dropped the whole physical aspect. They could just tack on a BitTorrent client to a lightweight download/install program and just send it out to everyone. Then encourage people to make copies of the data files and distribute it to friends (since this is impossible to stop) and just sell the CD keys online. This would be just as effective for games that already require an Internet connection. They could also just give out the installer on DVD for free in stores and sell the CD key online or sell physical cards in stores that contain a CD key.
One of these days, the companies will catch up with the state of technology.
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You can also use a temporary credit card if you're really paranoid. These function as debit cards so you only risk the amount of money you put it. This might be useful if you're ultra paranoid and like to limit the number of people you give your credit card to. You still need a real credit card for WebCertificate but it is an extra layer of protection.
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Likewise for me with a Mac Mini. I did have to pay $0.99 for one of the offers, but the key is to sign up for an offer that's actually worth it rather than one of the crazy ones like diet pills.
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The output system will be the same as normal 3d films since 3d movie tech hasn't evolved that much. I'm guessing a pair of polarized lenses in the standard cheap paper glasses. The interesting part is generating 3d images from 2d data. Since Lucas didn't film all the scenes in 3d, he has to use postproduction tricks to extract 3d info. This is mainly done using parallax shifts which is when the foreground and background images apparently move at different speeds during a pan. Static shots would probably have to be 3d'd (or whatever buzzword) in a semi-manual fashion with people telling the computer which parts are at which distance. This also means that certain objects like a person sitting still at a table with a gun won't have enough information to be 3d'd and will either be done manually or left in 2d. It also means that the final movie won't be full 3d since there probably isn't enough parallax data to extract depth information about a person's face in most cases. So you'll have 2d foreground images moving in 3d in front of 2d background images. I'm not sure how good this would look in a full motion sequence.
I'm guessing the software will be similar to this with some changes due to the limited motions of normal cameras. That's the only intersting part about this whole venture.
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The part about sending something faster than light is just bad reporting. Einstein says that no information can travel faster than light. If I point a laser beam at the moon and move it quickly, the dot on the moon will move around faster than light. However, no information is sent so there is no problem. The same applies to this experiment except it involves group and phase velocities of light. The concept is very hard to explain in words so I'll just point you to this Java applet with a moving picture:e _stuff/Applets/sines/GroupVelocity.html
http://galileo.phys.virginia.edu/classes/109N/mor
The part about light moving slower isn't anything special. It has been known for a while that light slows down in a medium (ie anything other than a pure vacuum) at a rate dependent on the type of medium. This includes normal glass.
I can't seem to find any evidence that it's been discredited yet (Google keeps giving me the quack sites rather than trustable responses) but I did find this.
Since it was a news program, it can't be considered too credible. (Though, this might just be an American bias since we've had major news networks show "proof" of faith healing and the Apollo moon hoax) However, it seems to have been conducted by credible scientists along with Randi himself. As expected, it showed no statistical deviation.
Since 4 other studies seemed to support the orginal one, but no mention was made of how many contradicted it, I'm going to guess that all 5 studies supporting it were due to statistical or human error.
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