Back in the day, we'd just find the loser who claimed such things, grab a rope and string him up. People were a lot more polite back then, especially about making wild claims about owning "unownable" things.
Imagine a snooty lawyer trying to tell a texas cattle baron that he owns a patent on branding cattle, and the cattle baron must pay him a royalty for each branded cow. I'm sure the lawyer wouldn't have lived through the day if he pressed his claim. I don't see how this sort of patent abuse is much different, except that we've given the lawyers all the power.
Maybe we need to start hanging crooked lawyers again...
Question: Do any non-industry customers (ie. consumers) actually WANT Palladium or any other DRM technology? As a "feature" that would restrict a user's ability to use and/or manipulate data in certain formats, doesn't this represent a step backwards from the enormous utility of personal computing?
Editorial - I can see people moving in droves back to high-quality analog video and audio editing as a result of DRM technology being forced upon consumers. The whole point of a fast digital computer is to rapidly and conveniently manipulate digital data regardless of the format on a single machine, so any restrictions on doing so is a step back towards single-use analog or simple digital circuits.
Don't they SEE what they're doing in the big picture? The day a personal computer won't compute what you want it to compute is the day you switch to something that will, plain and simple. They're playing with nothing less than the death of the general purpose processor.
Create a little tune and lyrically read your patent submission, any source code, and detailed description of your technology. Then the MPAA's actions will cover you. ROT-13 it and the DMCA will also cover you especially if you also distribute decoder rings with your developer's package (pricing and availability not specified at press time)
Bradley said that this high-end model will have Bluetooth wireless networking built in and use a Texas Instruments OMAP processor, which is based on designs from ARM Holdings. According to rumor, the Tungsten T will use the OMAP1510 processor, which combines into a single chip an ARM-compliant processor with a DSP for multimedia capabilities, and runs at 175 MHz. Sources familiar with this device say it will have 16 MB of RAM.
I think it must be you...
Evolution in action?
on
Skydriving
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
A greyhound with 40 people inside... I can already see the Darwin Award writeup for this one.
The so-called "security" procedures have put me completely off commercial aviation unless there is absolutely no other option available to make the trip.
While Al Gore and other prominent political and social figures have been repeatedly pulled aside for multiple searches, 1 inch long nail clippers and 3 inch plastic doll rifles are confiscated, loaded handguns, fake grenades, and lunatics who have been flagged at EVERY airport they've used in the last year get on planes with no problem.
I fly for a living but I feel more threatened by the knee-jerk reactionary measures put in place than I ever have from enemy fire. No joke.
Write your congressmen and governor and tell them that the random and senseless harassment at the airports needs to stop. Search EVERYONE, and let people keep their pens, plastic knives, toy doll guns, and nail clippers. NOBODY is going to EVER hijack another plane with a knife, the crew and passengers will guarantee that. So lets stop harassing people and stealing harmless items.
There are other harassing techniques going on as well. An airline pilot was required to drink from a small flask in his personal baggage before he was allowed to board. As the liquid was alcohol he was transporting home, his choice was to pour out a harmless drink or drink it and cancel the flight... Are we now afraid the pilots will resort to liquid chemicals to hijack their own planes? The madness needs to stop, and only the voices of the passengers to their political leaders will make the difference.
The meet FAQ specifically states that nobody "runs" the meets. They are instead pure peer-to-peer gatherings.
If someone were to bring a floppy disk or CD with an MP3 file on it, or even a sheet of music with lyrics, wouldn't that technically violate the DMCA resulting in the RIAA attempting to prosecute the whole meet structure? As an organized peer-to-peer structure, it MUST have no other purpose than to violate copyrights, right?
I've got my good buddy Fritz on the line. Maybe he'll funnel some of that good sweet Disney or RIAA Christmas money my way. I'll wash his campaign limo so it's all legal as payment for a service of course... You peer-to-peer criminals have only one thing in mind, and you're the biggest threat to individual expression and creativity the universe has ever seen!
*wakes up in cold sweat, hits "decline" RSVP link*
The CPL holds an annual event with lots of cash and hardware prizes, game tournaments, you name it.
http://www..thecpl.com/
Many hardware or gaming review sites (especially the overclocker and FPS sites) should have links up now as there is a CPL event going on this weekend.
You didn't read it carefully, or didn't bother to read the test plan at all. The plan is to have an actual rocket motor with a reduced fuel load (1/20th load) on the test vehicle. The catapult will provide enough speed (30 mph over 9 ft travel) for initial stability and the motor will propel it to it's peak altitude.
http://www.rocketguy.com/rocket/032702_status.ht ml
I suggest reading the whole plan before you try to slam someone. The moderators who modded you up ought to do a little research too since their ignorance is leaking out all over the place.
At work they made a policy that ALL computers will be completely shut down at night after a monitor caught fire one night and burned out an office. Normal hardware shouldn't catch fire even when old/crusty but there's NO guarantees when the hardware is defective to start with.
The license at issue has nothing to do with windows media player, except that the license change happened to be distributed with the patch. If you read the actual words of the license, it says that they might alter the core operating system itself, and those changes may disable playback and/or copying of any material they determine you do not have rights to, including disabling any software that attempts to copy the material.
This goes WAY beyond windows media player.
I'm imagining some general at the pentagon trying to email a critical word document and being unable to send out this critical document because some airman accidentally left it read-only-don't-distribute.
At the core of this issue is the idea that a company can at any time alter the conditions under which you may use a product you purchased in the past, without calling it a new product.
Here's a silly what-if example - Imagine if the electric company came out to install a ground-fault circuit in your home with the stated purpose of protecting against short circuits, but then sent out a notice in the mail saying that the new circuits will detect unauthorized devices in your home and disable them if the power company determines that they could be used to violate copyrights, and that further use of their electricity constitutes agreement to their new "service".
Silly? Absolutely, but it's the same thing that microsoft is doing. They've released a series of utilities which people have purchased under one useage agreement, and now they are not only altering that usage agreement while distributing the fix to a product flaw, they also claim the right to disable any other product used in conjunction with their product that violates their new usage agreement.
Now compare this to the hardware DRM solution MS is pushing onto chip and motherboard makers (palladium?), and the picture becomes clearer.
This novel was published in a multi-part format in Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine just a few months ago. It definately kept me waiting for the next issue.
Warning - minor spoiler
One issue dealt with the book was what happens when the all-knowing personal monitoring system is compromised or degraded. The ultimate ramifications were not completely explored by the end of the novel, but the chink in the armor was exposed.
This novel was published in a multi-part format in Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine just a few months ago. It definately kept me waiting for the next issue.
Warning - minor spoiler
One issue dealt with the book was what happens when the all-knowing personal monitoring system is compromised or degraded. The ultimate ramifications were not completely explored by the end of the novel, but the chink in the armor was exposed.
Why limit yourself to the x86 instruction set when the transmeta processor just needs a new instruction set decoder to emulate pretty much ANY processor? It seems like while they'll be able to use lots of existing software out there, they could get even more performance, efficiency, or maybe just easier programming by using whatever instruction set makes sense for the project.
It's all in the pre-processing with the crusoe, x86 is just there for slideways compatibility and doesn't need to be a limiting factor. When you're using a custom computer, whether it's one or a thousand crusoe processors, wouldn't it make sense to try for some compiler efficiency based on the actual hardware instead of the 8086 legacy?
Parallel case or same guy?
on
The Magic Box Hoax
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I was a spectator to a similiar case, where a guy calling himself Paul "Voss" Hinds was trying to get money to start a flight simulator game company. That story has a LOT of parallels.
He claims to be an Air Force Academy Graduate. His AF records cannot be found by ANYONE, and he claims this is because of his involvement in secret projects.
He was out of sight for several months in 1997, and later claimed he was on death's door due to a scorpion sting under a fingernail.
He had a "fall guy" who he claimed ran off with the $10,000 he managed to get from investors.
He submitted as "proof" several SGI generated "screenshots", all of which used clearly typical demo features and openGL artifacts.
He claimed to own a P-51 Mustang and even submitted a doctored photo of a P-51 with his head cut-n-pasted into the cockpit and his name written under the canopy. The font for the canopy matched an Adobe Photoshop default.
He claimed to have shot down several Iraqi fighters in his F-16, yet no records of those shootdowns exist.
The list goes on and on, and this guy finally resurfaced using his handle "voss" in an online simulation, and he verbally attacks anyone who brings the scam up, challenging them to talk to his "astronaut general buddy". Strangely enough, this astronaut guy actually exists although I have not contacted him personally.
The parallels kept hitting me as I read the article, and I wonder if this was the same guy, or if (somehow) Paul Hinds had been set up by this same guy.
Lucas made some fine movies and certainly advanced the state of the art, but everything I've learned about him as a person especially regarding his business practices makes me think that as a person he's a piece of shit.
Yes, it IS too much to ask. The US has become a nation ruled by lawyers and a little verbal bashing is the best they can expect. From patenting hyperlinks through lawsuit "slamming" to frivolous civil suits, the lawyers are the only ones profiting and they continue to push for laws encouraging even more bullshit lawsuits.
The legal system in this country is directly contributing to people learning that they are not responsible for their actions and that if they are careless or stupid, all they have to do to feel better is sue the person or corporation that pointed it out. Not all lawyers are bloodsuckers but a great number of them ARE, and it's about damn time people realize it's OK to call a leech a leech.
Heinlein put "The year they killed the lawyers" into his future history for a good reason. People are a hell of a lot more polite to each other when there aren't any lawyers around egging them into a fight.
If saying that makes them feel bad, I don't give a damn any more than I feel sympathy for a rat on a sinking ship. Too many of them are just along for the ride and don't deserve any consideration at all.
I think a great many people would be satisfied if Microsoft would simply keep their interfaces, configurations, and standards open and reasonably constant. It's the hidden stuff that makes my applets and programs break. It's the secret "upgrades" hidden in dll libraries amounting to only a few bytes code change but which also happen to completely break a competitors program, that irritates people.
Who really CARES about microsoft code? Get the API and hooks out in the open so we can SEE when they're deliberately forcing you to replace that "win95 only" application that still works fine but somehow doesn't run under win98 or XP. That's the "open source" I want.
No, this isn't flamebait. I keep a collection of system files archived because about once a year microsoft releases an "update" that breaks one program or another. I've seen this since MS deliberately broke netscape with a small dll file and Netscape support was forced to redistribute that dll file as a fix. Get the standards in the open and we'll be happier than we'd be with the actual code.
I've been out of "the business" of programming for the last 7 years but this article was the single most practically useful article I've read in that time as far as explaining the whys and hows of web server operation. Kudos to the Ace's Hardware guys for this post.
I had a summer intern style job for 2 years in High School at a smallish company working on a government software system. Every Wednesday we would take an extra hour and head to a local park and play touch football and get lunch. The boss held occasional parties at his house and even a high school junior/senior like myself was invited to hang out with them after work.
Getting outside and doing SOMETHING to relieve stress was the big goal, and I guess that is why the company didn't have any overweight geek types... We all had fun being active outside.
Maybe some enlightened soul who DOES profit financially could put away the money in a trust fund so she could also profit after her dad can't say anything about it.
I'd like to see a movie about the millions of people including armed Japanese civilians, women and children in addition to soldiers on both sides, who would have been needlessly slaughtered if we didn't use the Atomic Bombs. Imagine the families hidden in the mountains and foothills continuing to fight a hopeless fight because their leaders told them to, being killed one by one simply because they couldn't give up. Boy that would make one hell of a gory saga.
Hmmm. It doesn't sound much better than a movie about nuking people either. Maybe we could do better by accurately recording and remembering the past WITHOUT second-guessing the people who were actually there having to make decisions without the benefit of knowing exactly what would happen if they used plan A or plan B.
It seems like the true lesson of course is that the whole messy business of full scale warfare is probably best avoided as much as possible, then finished quickly if it does occur. An accurate portrayal of the Pearl Harbor attack would show this better, but then of course people would actually KNOW the truth and it's much more profitable to make a movie entertaining even if it's not historically accurate.
I read on usenet "It's a one hour battle sequence cleverly hidden within a 3 hour chick flick." That seems to sum it up pretty well, and we would do well to remember that the movie was written for entertainment, not for historical realism. If it was the whole truth, you'd see it on the history channel not in a theater.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the day, we'd just find the loser who claimed such things, grab a rope and string him up. People were a lot more polite back then, especially about making wild claims about owning "unownable" things.
Imagine a snooty lawyer trying to tell a texas cattle baron that he owns a patent on branding cattle, and the cattle baron must pay him a royalty for each branded cow. I'm sure the lawyer wouldn't have lived through the day if he pressed his claim. I don't see how this sort of patent abuse is much different, except that we've given the lawyers all the power.
Maybe we need to start hanging crooked lawyers again...
Question: Do any non-industry customers (ie. consumers) actually WANT Palladium or any other DRM technology? As a "feature" that would restrict a user's ability to use and/or manipulate data in certain formats, doesn't this represent a step backwards from the enormous utility of personal computing?
Editorial - I can see people moving in droves back to high-quality analog video and audio editing as a result of DRM technology being forced upon consumers. The whole point of a fast digital computer is to rapidly and conveniently manipulate digital data regardless of the format on a single machine, so any restrictions on doing so is a step back towards single-use analog or simple digital circuits.
Don't they SEE what they're doing in the big picture? The day a personal computer won't compute what you want it to compute is the day you switch to something that will, plain and simple. They're playing with nothing less than the death of the general purpose processor.
Create a little tune and lyrically read your patent submission, any source code, and detailed description of your technology. Then the MPAA's actions will cover you. ROT-13 it and the DMCA will also cover you especially if you also distribute decoder rings with your developer's package (pricing and availability not specified at press time)
I think it must be you...
A greyhound with 40 people inside... I can already see the Darwin Award writeup for this one.
Can't people recognize and appreciate a joke? For a "story" posted around 1am, there sure is a lot of griping going on.
Read it, laugh, move along. If you can't, then just get over it or go away.
The so-called "security" procedures have put me completely off commercial aviation unless there is absolutely no other option available to make the trip.
While Al Gore and other prominent political and social figures have been repeatedly pulled aside for multiple searches, 1 inch long nail clippers and 3 inch plastic doll rifles are confiscated, loaded handguns, fake grenades, and lunatics who have been flagged at EVERY airport they've used in the last year get on planes with no problem.
I fly for a living but I feel more threatened by the knee-jerk reactionary measures put in place than I ever have from enemy fire. No joke.
Write your congressmen and governor and tell them that the random and senseless harassment at the airports needs to stop. Search EVERYONE, and let people keep their pens, plastic knives, toy doll guns, and nail clippers. NOBODY is going to EVER hijack another plane with a knife, the crew and passengers will guarantee that. So lets stop harassing people and stealing harmless items.
There are other harassing techniques going on as well. An airline pilot was required to drink from a small flask in his personal baggage before he was allowed to board. As the liquid was alcohol he was transporting home, his choice was to pour out a harmless drink or drink it and cancel the flight... Are we now afraid the pilots will resort to liquid chemicals to hijack their own planes? The madness needs to stop, and only the voices of the passengers to their political leaders will make the difference.
The meet FAQ specifically states that nobody "runs" the meets. They are instead pure peer-to-peer gatherings.
If someone were to bring a floppy disk or CD with an MP3 file on it, or even a sheet of music with lyrics, wouldn't that technically violate the DMCA resulting in the RIAA attempting to prosecute the whole meet structure? As an organized peer-to-peer structure, it MUST have no other purpose than to violate copyrights, right?
I've got my good buddy Fritz on the line. Maybe he'll funnel some of that good sweet Disney or RIAA Christmas money my way. I'll wash his campaign limo so it's all legal as payment for a service of course... You peer-to-peer criminals have only one thing in mind, and you're the biggest threat to individual expression and creativity the universe has ever seen!
*wakes up in cold sweat, hits "decline" RSVP link*
The CPL holds an annual event with lots of cash and hardware prizes, game tournaments, you name it.
http://www..thecpl.com/
Many hardware or gaming review sites (especially the overclocker and FPS sites) should have links up now as there is a CPL event going on this weekend.
You didn't read it carefully, or didn't bother to read the test plan at all. The plan is to have an actual rocket motor with a reduced fuel load (1/20th load) on the test vehicle. The catapult will provide enough speed (30 mph over 9 ft travel) for initial stability and the motor will propel it to it's peak altitude.
t ml
http://www.rocketguy.com/rocket/032702_status.h
I suggest reading the whole plan before you try to slam someone. The moderators who modded you up ought to do a little research too since their ignorance is leaking out all over the place.
At work they made a policy that ALL computers will be completely shut down at night after a monitor caught fire one night and burned out an office. Normal hardware shouldn't catch fire even when old/crusty but there's NO guarantees when the hardware is defective to start with.
The license at issue has nothing to do with windows media player, except that the license change happened to be distributed with the patch. If you read the actual words of the license, it says that they might alter the core operating system itself, and those changes may disable playback and/or copying of any material they determine you do not have rights to, including disabling any software that attempts to copy the material.
This goes WAY beyond windows media player.
I'm imagining some general at the pentagon trying to email a critical word document and being unable to send out this critical document because some airman accidentally left it read-only-don't-distribute.
At the core of this issue is the idea that a company can at any time alter the conditions under which you may use a product you purchased in the past, without calling it a new product.
Here's a silly what-if example - Imagine if the electric company came out to install a ground-fault circuit in your home with the stated purpose of protecting against short circuits, but then sent out a notice in the mail saying that the new circuits will detect unauthorized devices in your home and disable them if the power company determines that they could be used to violate copyrights, and that further use of their electricity constitutes agreement to their new "service".
Silly? Absolutely, but it's the same thing that microsoft is doing. They've released a series of utilities which people have purchased under one useage agreement, and now they are not only altering that usage agreement while distributing the fix to a product flaw, they also claim the right to disable any other product used in conjunction with their product that violates their new usage agreement.
Now compare this to the hardware DRM solution MS is pushing onto chip and motherboard makers (palladium?), and the picture becomes clearer.
This novel was published in a multi-part format in Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine just a few months ago. It definately kept me waiting for the next issue.
Warning - minor spoiler
One issue dealt with the book was what happens when the all-knowing personal monitoring system is compromised or degraded. The ultimate ramifications were not completely explored by the end of the novel, but the chink in the armor was exposed.
Recommended.
Of course I somehow posted this in the wrong topic...
This novel was published in a multi-part format in Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine just a few months ago. It definately kept me waiting for the next issue.
Warning - minor spoiler
One issue dealt with the book was what happens when the all-knowing personal monitoring system is compromised or degraded. The ultimate ramifications were not completely explored by the end of the novel, but the chink in the armor was exposed.
Recommended.
Why limit yourself to the x86 instruction set when the transmeta processor just needs a new instruction set decoder to emulate pretty much ANY processor? It seems like while they'll be able to use lots of existing software out there, they could get even more performance, efficiency, or maybe just easier programming by using whatever instruction set makes sense for the project.
It's all in the pre-processing with the crusoe, x86 is just there for slideways compatibility and doesn't need to be a limiting factor. When you're using a custom computer, whether it's one or a thousand crusoe processors, wouldn't it make sense to try for some compiler efficiency based on the actual hardware instead of the 8086 legacy?
I was a spectator to a similiar case, where a guy calling himself Paul "Voss" Hinds was trying to get money to start a flight simulator game company. That story has a LOT of parallels.
He claims to be an Air Force Academy Graduate.
His AF records cannot be found by ANYONE, and he claims this is because of his involvement in secret projects.
He was out of sight for several months in 1997, and later claimed he was on death's door due to a scorpion sting under a fingernail.
He had a "fall guy" who he claimed ran off with the $10,000 he managed to get from investors.
He submitted as "proof" several SGI generated "screenshots", all of which used clearly typical demo features and openGL artifacts.
He claimed to own a P-51 Mustang and even submitted a doctored photo of a P-51 with his head cut-n-pasted into the cockpit and his name written under the canopy. The font for the canopy matched an Adobe Photoshop default.
He claimed to have shot down several Iraqi fighters in his F-16, yet no records of those shootdowns exist.
The list goes on and on, and this guy finally resurfaced using his handle "voss" in an online simulation, and he verbally attacks anyone who brings the scam up, challenging them to talk to his "astronaut general buddy". Strangely enough, this astronaut guy actually exists although I have not contacted him personally.
The parallels kept hitting me as I read the article, and I wonder if this was the same guy, or if (somehow) Paul Hinds had been set up by this same guy.
Lucas made some fine movies and certainly advanced the state of the art, but everything I've learned about him as a person especially regarding his business practices makes me think that as a person he's a piece of shit.
Yes, it IS too much to ask. The US has become a nation ruled by lawyers and a little verbal bashing is the best they can expect. From patenting hyperlinks through lawsuit "slamming" to frivolous civil suits, the lawyers are the only ones profiting and they continue to push for laws encouraging even more bullshit lawsuits.
The legal system in this country is directly contributing to people learning that they are not responsible for their actions and that if they are careless or stupid, all they have to do to feel better is sue the person or corporation that pointed it out. Not all lawyers are bloodsuckers but a great number of them ARE, and it's about damn time people realize it's OK to call a leech a leech.
Heinlein put "The year they killed the lawyers" into his future history for a good reason. People are a hell of a lot more polite to each other when there aren't any lawyers around egging them into a fight.
If saying that makes them feel bad, I don't give a damn any more than I feel sympathy for a rat on a sinking ship. Too many of them are just along for the ride and don't deserve any consideration at all.
I think a great many people would be satisfied if Microsoft would simply keep their interfaces, configurations, and standards open and reasonably constant. It's the hidden stuff that makes my applets and programs break. It's the secret "upgrades" hidden in dll libraries amounting to only a few bytes code change but which also happen to completely break a competitors program, that irritates people.
Who really CARES about microsoft code? Get the API and hooks out in the open so we can SEE when they're deliberately forcing you to replace that "win95 only" application that still works fine but somehow doesn't run under win98 or XP. That's the "open source" I want.
No, this isn't flamebait. I keep a collection of system files archived because about once a year microsoft releases an "update" that breaks one program or another. I've seen this since MS deliberately broke netscape with a small dll file and Netscape support was forced to redistribute that dll file as a fix. Get the standards in the open and we'll be happier than we'd be with the actual code.
First go to the home page, then click on the link. Don't try to go directly to the page from here.
Dunno why it matters, but I got the page on the first try by first hitting the web site homepage then clicking on the link.
Score this -1 redundant, but...
I've been out of "the business" of programming for the last 7 years but this article was the single most practically useful article I've read in that time as far as explaining the whys and hows of web server operation. Kudos to the Ace's Hardware guys for this post.
Gushing praise and all that...
I had a summer intern style job for 2 years in High School at a smallish company working on a government software system. Every Wednesday we would take an extra hour and head to a local park and play touch football and get lunch. The boss held occasional parties at his house and even a high school junior/senior like myself was invited to hang out with them after work.
Getting outside and doing SOMETHING to relieve stress was the big goal, and I guess that is why the company didn't have any overweight geek types... We all had fun being active outside.
Maybe some enlightened soul who DOES profit financially could put away the money in a trust fund so she could also profit after her dad can't say anything about it.
I'd like to see a movie about the millions of people including armed Japanese civilians, women and children in addition to soldiers on both sides, who would have been needlessly slaughtered if we didn't use the Atomic Bombs. Imagine the families hidden in the mountains and foothills continuing to fight a hopeless fight because their leaders told them to, being killed one by one simply because they couldn't give up. Boy that would make one hell of a gory saga.
Hmmm. It doesn't sound much better than a movie about nuking people either. Maybe we could do better by accurately recording and remembering the past WITHOUT second-guessing the people who were actually there having to make decisions without the benefit of knowing exactly what would happen if they used plan A or plan B.
It seems like the true lesson of course is that the whole messy business of full scale warfare is probably best avoided as much as possible, then finished quickly if it does occur. An accurate portrayal of the Pearl Harbor attack would show this better, but then of course people would actually KNOW the truth and it's much more profitable to make a movie entertaining even if it's not historically accurate.
I read on usenet "It's a one hour battle sequence cleverly hidden within a 3 hour chick flick." That seems to sum it up pretty well, and we would do well to remember that the movie was written for entertainment, not for historical realism. If it was the whole truth, you'd see it on the history channel not in a theater.