FCC Guy 1: Okay, what can we do to piss off the technologically literate population today? FCC Guy 2: Hey, I know, what about a broadcast flag! FCC Guy 1: No, that's too obvious. It'd get struck down in no time. We need something more subtle. FCC Guy 2: Okay... Let's make it so that sites don't get an equal share of bandwidth unless they pay the ISP's money! FCC Guy 1: Yes, that's a good idea, but it still might encounter a lot of resistence at first. We need something... Annoying, and restricting, but not enough to make geeks get out of their chairs and write letters to congress demanding that we stop shutting down their freedoms... FCC Guy 2: I know, let's tax EVERYTHING IN SIGHT! FCC Guy 1: Brilliant! *High five*
Guy 1: meeting adjourned. Adgenda for next meeting includes discussion of mandatory two way screens on HDTVs, to "thwart piracy"!
I'm beginning to get reminded of the rediculous taxes the Brits had on the US when it was still just 13 colonies, like the "Stamp tax" (which required a special stamp to be put on anything printed), the "Tea tax", and various other things
That some hacker will start getting free gas when he uses the techniques used to fool cheap biometric security devices you can get for your PC (like this one)
I'm suprised that this took so long to be implemented, seeing as it is not a very complex setup (heck, I could make one)
The One-time pad has been mathematically proven to be unbreakable, period (of course, only under certain conditions, like you can only use the pad once and the pad has to be truly random)
FTA: "..the staff at the RIAA are thoughtful, good people..."
Sure, like the time the RIAA sued a dead granny who never had a computer even when she was alive. Or the time they turned their lawers on a 13 year old girl who "allegedly downloaded music off a P2P service...". Please. The RIAA just cares about screwing anybody they can in order to get $$$'s.
I for one welcome our new electrician overlords. Just think, to be able to tell wether a wire is live or not, where wires are in a wall without cutting the wall open. This should also open up a whole new slew of tricks magicians can use. Too bad it's not reccomended for the general public.
This guy is nothing more than a Joe Sixpack dressed up in a suit. He knows nothing more about internet than my grandma does. People have been screaming, running around with their heads cut off yelling "The internet's going to explode any day now!". Well, if it does, good. Serves those bastard ISPs right for not giving us what we paid for and what they explicitly promised. If you want to stop this crap, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT! Send an email by way of this page and even better, send a handwritten letter (on real paper) to your senator. We must protect our freedoms, the freedoms that the government (or more correctly, big corperations) are leaching away a little bit at a time.
I'll say this at a risk of sounding like a severe linux fanboy, but... Linux users had this solved a long time ago. Just edit/etc/fstab to not allow normal users to do any mounting (I mean, besides the obvious fact that Linux can't run windows binaries, thus eliminating all the worms and trojans, as well as any other malware you can name). Please, people, just move to linux and your automount/autorun problems will be all solved! No complicated solutions involving proprietary registry editors, just call up vi or emacs, even ed will do the job! If you use OpenBSD, you can even encrypt your swap partitons! (don't know if this exists for other os's too). Old news: window's isn't secure (yet). Having retard employees who pop in anything they find on the street into their computer doesn't help.
Cox cable says that with their shiney 10mbps plan, I can get UP TO 10mbps. Notice it says "up to", that means "you won't ever get more than 10mbps, sucker". They realize that most people don't really need more than around 600kbps for surfing, "doing" email, and getting their 'tunes. So they inflate their claims, and the technically illiterate bite the bait and buy it instead of DSL because it "Gives you the speed you need!" (If you live where I live, you'll recognize that from a tv ad). The only people who notice they aren't getting what they paid for are heavy file sharers, hard-core gamers, and geeks like slashdotters who know the difference between kbps and mbps. These customers only form a fraction of their consumer base, so they just ignore the complaints and carry on cheating and stealing (until one day everything will be downloaded, from movies to books to software. Then people will start realizing that joe with dsl can download episode III just as fast as jeff with cable, even though one promises 4mbps and the other 10mbps)
"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." -- Nazi Reich Marshal Hermann Göring during the Nuremberg Trials (found this about a fifth of the way through on the wikipedia article about 1984)
New government order: in order to prevent cyberterrorism, all citizens are required to buy and install the new government approved monitors and tv sets that will be able to monitor them at any time. Special bonuses will be given to those that install the govenment approved activity watcher on their PCs so Big brot-- I mean, the government can make sure you aren't trying to commit acts of cyberterrorism. (Ha guess who will be the instant criminals, those who don't install the spyware on their PCs)
It looks like I just removed my account from XP and created it again, and got all my documents from the backup disk I create weekly (okay, monthly usually). That takes all the fun out of entering "mf2lro8sw03ufvnsq034jfowr18f3cszc20vmw" into a little dialog box that promises to give me back my docs if I buy stuff from online pharmacies.
Yet another realease of the mediocre and slow media player from microsoft, that phones home every couple of days to "update licenses" and make sure you don't have any music that you didn't pay the RIAA for. Why does anyone use WiMP? There are a lot of win32 media players out there, and ironically the one that comes from microsoft is the least functional of them all (ok, maybe i'm exaggerating here). Why don't they "borrow" WinAmp's code so they might actually have a good mp that comes built in to windows?
"The name combines the first human name found in the Bible, Eve, with the 'r' in robot."
Well, unless you meant to say the first *female* name in the bible, you're wrong. Adam is the first human name mentioned in the bible. Not to pick at straws, but just thought you should know.
(Well, I guess since it's a "female" android, it wouldn't make sense to call it "adam". But still!)
"Ever-1 can move its upper body and "express" happiness, anger, sadness and pleasure."
Hmm... Sounds promising;)
"But the robot is still incapable of moving its lower half"
Damn.:( It looks like no $1,000,000 mechanical whores for now.
In other news, bittorrent is still going strong! Experts speculate that reasons are because there are many bittorrent clients out on the market, and that the lack of a centralized structure makes it impossible for the **AA to sue anybody in particular.
The moral of the story - If you're going to file share, don't have a centralized network with windows only spyware laden clients.
... there shouldn't be any anymore: hollywood doesn't care about your rights or any others, except for their "right" to Digital "rights" management and their "right" to royally screw you over:
... But the bill does say that Americans should enjoy the right to share recorded broadcast TV over their home networks, make "short excerpts" available over the Internet, and that news programming generally should not be flagged. Those sections are likely to draw opposition from the Motion Picture Association of America and its allies; one source close to Hollywood told CNET News.com on Monday that "the movie industry has real problems with the broadcast flag language as it appears in the bill."
You mean that hollywood opposes news programming NOT being flagged? What can I record then, infomercials? If I can't make short excerpts available over the internet, what can I make them available over? Or can I not make them available at all? What happened to freedom of speech and information? I guess those science fiction novels weren't too far off: America will be turned into a dictatorship (if we continue to sit on our hands on not do anything about this and other disturbing laws), but not by the government: by corperations.
Maybe I'll move to sweden, i heard they have sane copyright laws there (from thepiratebay.org, though. Don't know if I can trust those guys.)
Some wisdom from spanish proverbs....
on
Abandoned Games
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Interestingly enough, after I read this article I went and read some spanish proverbs on Wikiquotes (I am [trying] to learn spanish). I came across this one:
Agua que no has de beber, déjala correr.
Which roughly translates to "water that you are not going to drink of, let it flow". It seems like game companies (not game developers, though as it would seem by the article) don't get that they're not going to get any money on these games, and insist on suing the pants off anybody who tries to relive the old days by downloading an old adventure game off bittorrent. Some people are saying, "Well, they could be ported to mobile platforms and sold for money!". This sounds like a great idea, if I do say so myself. Heck, I would buy them if some old games got ported to the PSP/DS or cellphone. The problem is, they're not doing it! And even if they were, what if I didn't happen to own the platform which the companies choose to port it to? Would it really hurt their revenue if some people were playing it for free on PCS while some were paying to play it on the DS? No, it probably wouldn't. Because the people who would play these old games on new portable platforms wouldn't be playing at home. They would buy it because it's PORTABLE, first, and it's NOSTALGIC second.
The bottom Line? why are you game companies hoarding water (old games) and not drinking it (selling it)? It's not doing ANYBODY any good, and releasing it as abandonware would improve your image.
I think that linspire fulfils a niche in the market for the people who want:
1. Something that looks like windows and is just as easy to use, but don't want all the viruses, etc. 2. Something that they feel that they can trust (I'll explain in just a bit)
Now, I personally think That ubuntu fills the first requirement for these people, but doesn't fill the second requirement for all these people in that it is a community developed OS. How do you know that it isn't something put together by a bunch of hackers meant to turn your computer into a zombie and delete you windows and all your... erm, pictures? Now, you and I know that that isn't the case, and Ubuntu is one fine linux distrobution, but people who are new to linux don't seem to understand that a shiny shrinkwrapped box doesn't always mean a good operating system. Now, these people's reasoning is that if they buy this thing called "Linux" from a respectable company like Linspire (and what a fine name, too!) that they will be safe. Hey, it even comes with a service that lets you download all sorts of software (even if it comes with a monthly fee). Now, show somebody like this Synaptic (for example), and they would say, "Hey, how could I know that these's things aren't viruses?". Good question. They might also say, "Hey, where's my start button?", "How come I can't watch these flash movies?", "How do I listen to my mp3s?". Linspire aims toward the user that just wants to send emails and play flash games and write up papers and not worry those evil bogeymans called 'viruses' and 'spyware' that he hears about all the time. And it does a fair job of it.
Having said that, I don't agree with a lot of their business practices, like not even bothering to come up with something from scratch but rather just taking Debian and putting a fancy click n' run program in there and a shiney "launch" button that takes up 1/3 the screen. (No really, it does! sort of.) They went through the KDE source code and took out every reference to KDE that they could find and put something more neutral in it's place, like replacing "Konqueror" with "Linspire file and web browser". (Note: i'm not really sure, that's just what it seemed like).
I don't think that any desktop linux will succeed until they can get it installed on OEM machines en masse. The installation is the scariest part about using linux, IMO, and if we can eliminate that part there's just a few things left to deal with, like lack of nice commercial games.
It's like a gigantic infinite loop... all those pages linking to one another... I've been clicking links for about 3 minutes now and still no article...
OMG! Yay! i'm, like, soooo finally insightful !!!;p mod +5 insightful, lol!!1!! like, IM me: this-slashdot-ponies-theme-sucks-big-cajones@aol.c om n dont forget my myspace page, lol: myspace.com/~pleaseadminsitsalreadyreallygettingol dsopleasecutitoutandstartpostinginterestingstories
lmao, lol;) d-_-b
At first sight, I thought this was the first legit article to be posted on april fools day, but my fears were quickly dispelled by http://www.prismdurosport.com/products/. You're getting more believable, but still no cigar. Please, let's have april 1 stories that are not obviously hoaxes!
I personally thought that the lack of a menu bar was fairly annoying, just having a "Tools" buttons wasn't really enough. And when the menu bar was enabled, it was in a fairly awkward position (*below* the address bar? What were they thinking?). Maybe I can convince them to include a menu which is accessed by right-clicking on the address bar. Or, I can just put it in myself. Oh, wait, I can't have the sources to IE. Firefox uses up less screen space and has a menu/tab/nav bar. Plus a bookmarks bar, which I don't see in IE7. Plus, it is fully themeable, open-source, etc. The IE team and the Windows team in general just seems to be 4-5 years behind, taking more time to copy features than the original products that they copied from took to come up with them. Tabbed browsing, web standards, RSS feeds, all were in mozilla/netscape/firefox/opera years before IE. Oh well, I guess I will be forced to use Vista in a few more years as it will be the only OS to run Half Life 3, Halo 4. Or, it might be the perfect opportunity to completely migrate to linux or OS X.
"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." -- Henry VI, Part 2 - Act IV, Scene II
Re:Would you rather it be QuickTime or WMV?!
on
Tree Climbing Robot
·
· Score: 1
Sorry for being offtopic, but Mplayer will play any video codec you will ever find, out of the "box". You can compile it on OS X, Linux, *BSD, and even Cygwin under windows. It plays WMV better than Windows media player plays WMV, as well as encrypted DVDs, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
FCC Guy 1: Okay, what can we do to piss off the technologically literate population today?
FCC Guy 2: Hey, I know, what about a broadcast flag!
FCC Guy 1: No, that's too obvious. It'd get struck down in no time. We need something more subtle.
FCC Guy 2: Okay... Let's make it so that sites don't get an equal share of bandwidth unless they pay the ISP's money!
FCC Guy 1: Yes, that's a good idea, but it still might encounter a lot of resistence at first. We need something... Annoying, and restricting, but not enough to make geeks get out of their chairs and write letters to congress demanding that we stop shutting down their freedoms...
FCC Guy 2: I know, let's tax EVERYTHING IN SIGHT!
FCC Guy 1: Brilliant!
*High five*
Guy 1: meeting adjourned. Adgenda for next meeting includes discussion of mandatory two way screens on HDTVs, to "thwart piracy"!
I'm beginning to get reminded of the rediculous taxes the Brits had on the US when it was still just 13 colonies, like the "Stamp tax" (which required a special stamp to be put on anything printed), the "Tea tax", and various other things
That some hacker will start getting free gas when he uses the techniques used to fool cheap biometric security devices you can get for your PC (like this one)
I'm suprised that this took so long to be implemented, seeing as it is not a very complex setup (heck, I could make one)
The One-time pad has been mathematically proven to be unbreakable, period (of course, only under certain conditions, like you can only use the pad once and the pad has to be truly random)
see Wikipedia's article on one time pads
Any word on whether or not it will make people good actors, or the movies actually interesting?
Google: Slave
Slaves
Looking for slaves and slave related itmes?
Find exactly what you want today!
www.eBay.com
(It seems that googling "slaves" no longer brings up an eBay ad, but you get the point)
FTA: "..the staff at the RIAA are thoughtful, good people ..."
Sure, like the time the RIAA sued a dead granny who never had a computer even when she was alive. Or the time they turned their lawers on a 13 year old girl who "allegedly downloaded music off a P2P service...". Please. The RIAA just cares about screwing anybody they can in order to get $$$'s.
I for one welcome our new electrician overlords. Just think, to be able to tell wether a wire is live or not, where wires are in a wall without cutting the wall open. This should also open up a whole new slew of tricks magicians can use. Too bad it's not reccomended for the general public.
This guy is nothing more than a Joe Sixpack dressed up in a suit. He knows nothing more about internet than my grandma does. People have been screaming, running around with their heads cut off yelling "The internet's going to explode any day now!". Well, if it does, good. Serves those bastard ISPs right for not giving us what we paid for and what they explicitly promised. If you want to stop this crap, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT! Send an email by way of this page and even better, send a handwritten letter (on real paper) to your senator. We must protect our freedoms, the freedoms that the government (or more correctly, big corperations) are leaching away a little bit at a time.
I'll say this at a risk of sounding like a severe linux fanboy, but... Linux users had this solved a long time ago. Just edit /etc/fstab to not allow normal users to do any mounting (I mean, besides the obvious fact that Linux can't run windows binaries, thus eliminating all the worms and trojans, as well as any other malware you can name). Please, people, just move to linux and your automount/autorun problems will be all solved! No complicated solutions involving proprietary registry editors, just call up vi or emacs, even ed will do the job! If you use OpenBSD, you can even encrypt your swap partitons! (don't know if this exists for other os's too). Old news: window's isn't secure (yet). Having retard employees who pop in anything they find on the street into their computer doesn't help.
Cox cable says that with their shiney 10mbps plan, I can get UP TO 10mbps. Notice it says "up to", that means "you won't ever get more than 10mbps, sucker". They realize that most people don't really need more than around 600kbps for surfing, "doing" email, and getting their 'tunes. So they inflate their claims, and the technically illiterate bite the bait and buy it instead of DSL because it "Gives you the speed you need!" (If you live where I live, you'll recognize that from a tv ad). The only people who notice they aren't getting what they paid for are heavy file sharers, hard-core gamers, and geeks like slashdotters who know the difference between kbps and mbps. These customers only form a fraction of their consumer base, so they just ignore the complaints and carry on cheating and stealing (until one day everything will be downloaded, from movies to books to software. Then people will start realizing that joe with dsl can download episode III just as fast as jeff with cable, even though one promises 4mbps and the other 10mbps)
"Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
-- Nazi Reich Marshal Hermann Göring during the Nuremberg Trials
(found this about a fifth of the way through on the wikipedia article about 1984)
New government order: in order to prevent cyberterrorism, all citizens are required to buy and install the new government approved monitors and tv sets that will be able to monitor them at any time. Special bonuses will be given to those that install the govenment approved activity watcher on their PCs so Big brot-- I mean, the government can make sure you aren't trying to commit acts of cyberterrorism. (Ha guess who will be the instant criminals, those who don't install the spyware on their PCs)
It looks like I just removed my account from XP and created it again, and got all my documents from the backup disk I create weekly (okay, monthly usually). That takes all the fun out of entering "mf2lro8sw03ufvnsq034jfowr18f3cszc20vmw" into a little dialog box that promises to give me back my docs if I buy stuff from online pharmacies.
Yet another realease of the mediocre and slow media player from microsoft, that phones home every couple of days to "update licenses" and make sure you don't have any music that you didn't pay the RIAA for. Why does anyone use WiMP? There are a lot of win32 media players out there, and ironically the one that comes from microsoft is the least functional of them all (ok, maybe i'm exaggerating here). Why don't they "borrow" WinAmp's code so they might actually have a good mp that comes built in to windows?
"The name combines the first human name found in the Bible, Eve, with the 'r' in robot."
;)
:( It looks like no $1,000,000 mechanical whores for now.
Well, unless you meant to say the first *female* name in the bible, you're wrong. Adam is the first human name mentioned in the bible. Not to pick at straws, but just thought you should know.
(Well, I guess since it's a "female" android, it wouldn't make sense to call it "adam". But still!)
"Ever-1 can move its upper body and "express" happiness, anger, sadness and pleasure."
Hmm... Sounds promising
"But the robot is still incapable of moving its lower half"
Damn.
In other news, bittorrent is still going strong! Experts speculate that reasons are because there are many bittorrent clients out on the market, and that the lack of a centralized structure makes it impossible for the **AA to sue anybody in particular.
The moral of the story - If you're going to file share, don't have a centralized network with windows only spyware laden clients.
Maybe I'll move to sweden, i heard they have sane copyright laws there (from thepiratebay.org, though. Don't know if I can trust those guys.)
Which roughly translates to "water that you are not going to drink of, let it flow". It seems like game companies (not game developers, though as it would seem by the article) don't get that they're not going to get any money on these games, and insist on suing the pants off anybody who tries to relive the old days by downloading an old adventure game off bittorrent. Some people are saying, "Well, they could be ported to mobile platforms and sold for money!". This sounds like a great idea, if I do say so myself. Heck, I would buy them if some old games got ported to the PSP/DS or cellphone. The problem is, they're not doing it! And even if they were, what if I didn't happen to own the platform which the companies choose to port it to? Would it really hurt their revenue if some people were playing it for free on PCS while some were paying to play it on the DS? No, it probably wouldn't. Because the people who would play these old games on new portable platforms wouldn't be playing at home. They would buy it because it's PORTABLE, first, and it's NOSTALGIC second.
The bottom Line? why are you game companies hoarding water (old games) and not drinking it (selling it)? It's not doing ANYBODY any good, and releasing it as abandonware would improve your image.
I think that linspire fulfils a niche in the market for the people who want:
1. Something that looks like windows and is just as easy to use, but don't want all the viruses, etc.
2. Something that they feel that they can trust (I'll explain in just a bit)
Now, I personally think That ubuntu fills the first requirement for these people, but doesn't fill the second requirement for all these people in that it is a community developed OS. How do you know that it isn't something put together by a bunch of hackers meant to turn your computer into a zombie and delete you windows and all your... erm, pictures? Now, you and I know that that isn't the case, and Ubuntu is one fine linux distrobution, but people who are new to linux don't seem to understand that a shiny shrinkwrapped box doesn't always mean a good operating system. Now, these people's reasoning is that if they buy this thing called "Linux" from a respectable company like Linspire (and what a fine name, too!) that they will be safe. Hey, it even comes with a service that lets you download all sorts of software (even if it comes with a monthly fee). Now, show somebody like this Synaptic (for example), and they would say, "Hey, how could I know that these's things aren't viruses?". Good question. They might also say, "Hey, where's my start button?", "How come I can't watch these flash movies?", "How do I listen to my mp3s?". Linspire aims toward the user that just wants to send emails and play flash games and write up papers and not worry those evil bogeymans called 'viruses' and 'spyware' that he hears about all the time. And it does a fair job of it.
Having said that, I don't agree with a lot of their business practices, like not even bothering to come up with something from scratch but rather just taking Debian and putting a fancy click n' run program in there and a shiney "launch" button that takes up 1/3 the screen. (No really, it does! sort of.) They went through the KDE source code and took out every reference to KDE that they could find and put something more neutral in it's place, like replacing "Konqueror" with "Linspire file and web browser". (Note: i'm not really sure, that's just what it seemed like).
I don't think that any desktop linux will succeed until they can get it installed on OEM machines en masse. The installation is the scariest part about using linux, IMO, and if we can eliminate that part there's just a few things left to deal with, like lack of nice commercial games.
Linux, onward march to domination!
I think that "pink ponies" is perhaps the most annoying april fool's joke I have seen on the net so far...
And by the way, I posted this already
On april 1, yes.
List of 2006/april/1 pranks on sites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_1%2C_2006
;p mod +5 insightful, lol!!1!! like, IM me: this-slashdot-ponies-theme-sucks-big-cajones@aol.c om n dont forget my myspace page, lol: myspace.com/~pleaseadminsitsalreadyreallygettingol dsopleasecutitoutandstartpostinginterestingstories
lmao, lol ;) d-_-b
It's like a gigantic infinite loop... all those pages linking to one another... I've been clicking links for about 3 minutes now and still no article...
OMG! Yay! i'm, like, soooo finally insightful !!!
At first sight, I thought this was the first legit article to be posted on april fools day, but my fears were quickly dispelled by http://www.prismdurosport.com/products/. You're getting more believable, but still no cigar. Please, let's have april 1 stories that are not obviously hoaxes!
Not sure if I understood you right, but the IE 7 Beta is available for free download at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/ie7/default.ms px
I personally thought that the lack of a menu bar was fairly annoying, just having a "Tools" buttons wasn't really enough. And when the menu bar was enabled, it was in a fairly awkward position (*below* the address bar? What were they thinking?). Maybe I can convince them to include a menu which is accessed by right-clicking on the address bar. Or, I can just put it in myself. Oh, wait, I can't have the sources to IE. Firefox uses up less screen space and has a menu/tab/nav bar. Plus a bookmarks bar, which I don't see in IE7. Plus, it is fully themeable, open-source, etc. The IE team and the Windows team in general just seems to be 4-5 years behind, taking more time to copy features than the original products that they copied from took to come up with them. Tabbed browsing, web standards, RSS feeds, all were in mozilla/netscape/firefox/opera years before IE. Oh well, I guess I will be forced to use Vista in a few more years as it will be the only OS to run Half Life 3, Halo 4. Or, it might be the perfect opportunity to completely migrate to linux or OS X.
"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."
-- Henry VI, Part 2 - Act IV, Scene II
Sorry for being offtopic, but Mplayer will play any video codec you will ever find, out of the "box". You can compile it on OS X, Linux, *BSD, and even Cygwin under windows. It plays WMV better than Windows media player plays WMV, as well as encrypted DVDs, etc.