Actually, since we have a working reference design, a new MSRE-like small reactor (with some fixes for technological improvements) could be online in as little as 2-3 years if we had the will to do so, but that would include some serious concessions by the NRC because they don't allow reprocessing on site due to proliferation fears, even though the fuel could be tainted to make it not only bad for proliferation, but dangerous for weapon makers to handle.
But the problem is nobody is willing to build them and people are unwilling to back a technology they see as faulty, even though technologically it is like comparing a car engine to a gas turbine (basically the same thing in, same thing out, right?). The power companies don't want them because they already have a working design ("why fix something that ain't broke?"), despite safety flaws. The anti-nuclear people (most are liberal Democrats who think it is an environmental threat, even though it is one of the cleanest energy sources) say that it isn't a thorium reactor, it is a uranium reactor (since the thorium is converted to uranium before fission) and therefore creates the same toxic waste as uranium reactor. Ignored is safety, the 3% waste, the fact that 83% of that 3% is non-toxic in 10 years and most of the rest can be recycled, and LFTR and some other thorium reactor designs can actually run as uranium reactors and burn the nuclear waste we already have. To me, something that has built in passive safety, 99% fuel efficiency, can be shut down when the energy isn't needed, and can run on garbage (which is what nuclear waste is, essentially) sounds like a solution, but call me a fool...
Politicians have forgotten about anything other than LWR/PWRs. Why? because in the 1960s, they were concerned with only one thing, breeding nuclear fuel for nuclear weapons, so they killed off designs that did that poorly like MSRE. Our needs have shifted since then, but with the government only seeing accidents with LWR/PWR designs they are scared off when they hear nuclear reactor, despite other designs being massively different and sometimes much safer.
My guess is ARPA continues to use the money on stuff like better batteries, but I agree, this should be $0 until the budget is balanced - in fact, I would take it one step further - is at a surplus to pay back debt and start funding social security and medicare for the future. I personally wish they'd do research on the types of Gen IV reactors that burn nuclear waste instead and turn a storage problem into an energy solution. That said, there are a lot worse things for the federal government to waste money on.
And speaking of balancing the budget, why not close some of the loopholes that people use not to pay taxes? Let's make Senators fly coach instead of first class, stay in hotel rooms not suites, not get lifetime pay for doing a job even after they stop working, etc - I'm sick of footing their bills for luxury living - they can foot their own bump to first class. And even though the wealthiest people pay 70% of taxes, 50% of them don't pay - figure that out. We could use a bit of austerity here, starting with cutting perks to the rich who don't need those perks in the first place and are abusing power to have them. And I completely disagree with taxing the rich more - fix the tax code and collect taxes already. I realize that isn't an overnight process, since the damn thing is a wall of tomes (over 70k pages), but start with some big ones and work your way down.
Actually, Santorum isn't going far enough with rape - if he wants to go all biblical about rape, the rapist and rape victim need to marry - if not they are both adulterers. Adultery requires death by stoning. A man having sex with another woman after taking a girl's virginity and the first woman still being alive (legal marriage or not)? Death by stoning. Sex with another woman who is not a widow and not a virgin and her husband hasn't died in the interim? Death by stoning. Non-widow woman having sex with a man while her husband or ex-husband still lives (divorce is OK, sex while spouse lives is not)? Death by stoning. Divorce and remarriage while the first wife is living? Death by stoning. Apparently a widow can screw all she wants as long as she doesn't get pregnant and doesn't sell her services... I believe prostitution is also death by stoning.
By my accounts, biblically, most of the US has committed adultery and should be stoned to death. Since that includes me, I find it hard to be a good Christian and also not to find it hypocritical, as I have committed several of the most heinous sins in the Bible (I've broken the 10 commandments, and that certainly isn't the only time - my neighbor's grass is perfect... oh dammit, broke #10 again). I have issues with banning abortion for these same reasons (personally I think states should decide) - sure it may be murder, but so is (biblical) adultery and most of us have committed that sin, and just because we haven't committed it in the legal sense doesn't mean we haven't committed it in the biblical sense. We have to have societal norms and have to set a bar where something is or is not a criminal offense rather than a societal stigma, however, so I think there is a vast opinion one way or the other on issues like that.
GoDaddy has a long history of getting its customer servers/accounts hacked and not saying anything about it to its customers
And you didn't see that coming when they announced they were Microsoft only, and that was back in the XP timeframe (pre Windows 2003?), so all its servers were probably being run as admin users?
As both a QA person (professionally) and a developer (OSS mostly, though I do systems engineering and automation scripting for my job), I find the job of programming to make something work. I find the job of QA as do everything I can possibly do to break the code I'm given. It is a bit different mentality - one I follow the happy path, and the other I often follow deep, dark roads. For instance, doing some access control list testing I may have some very convoluted access list with 30+ rules, whereas the developer only has 3-4 rules (and in fact, just did that and it breaks - badly).
As for seeking a job, I'd be curious what methodology is used - I started as a waterfall and was hired as an automation developer, but I got moved to manual testing when those jobs went to India (and got very, very close to being laid off - everyone below me got cut). I worked full time waterfall manual testing for 4 years (with various QA methodologies, most of them forced by ISO and other standardizations) and moved to an Agile testing team, which is much different - often I help developers code in the beginning and they help me test at the end (and we have built in automation).
Copyright in the US is generally life of author + 70 years or 120 years, whichever comes first, but that depends on when it was published. Corporate ownership is life of author + 95 years or 120 years, whichever comes first. There are a lot more complexities depending on when or where it was published, especially if published outside the United States - see http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm
They don't need to own a license, they own the song itself. Even the artist that created the song needs a license to play or listen to the it, called a reciprocal license in contracts. Woe be to the musician that doesn't get a reciprocal license - you'd need to pay money to play your own material...
I've found the stack matters probably more-so than the amp for audio quality in a live setting (I've used a crappy head and it still sounded good with my stack), but I had a great head and a crappy stack for many years because I was too poor to buy a better one and had to use quite a bit of compression to make it sound good.
But while he talked about compression, I think his last statement in that paragraph is more about things like auto tune, which is more about manipulating the sound rather than laying it out stereo-phonically (the part about "processing that audiophiles criticize" - auto-tune is highly criticized by audiophiles).
But the real bane of the pop world IMO is too many songs using I-V-vi-IV or the sensitive singer songwriter variant vi-IV-I-V like every Lady Gaga hit (see Pachelbel rant or Axis of Awesome, but they just scratch the surface).
Only if you owe sales tax on the purchase - If you sold it for a penny, for instance, you wouldn't owe sales tax since the sales tax rounds to 0. Also you aren't required to collect sales tax for states you don't live in - it is the responsibility of the user to pay their use (sales) tax. You are required to keep extensive records, however, and provide them to the other states if requested. I think most states require a license, as well.
Anyhow, I would have been amazed if this was illegal. When you buy music, you are buying a license to listen to the music and (sometimes) the media it is written on, not the music itself, which the recording studio likely owns (sometimes the artist does). This is why ripping to mp3 is legal (you can legally own an archival copy), but file sharing is not (you are not supposed to create copies for your friends - fair use applies more for your friends listening to it rather than making a copy, but if you made a copy for yourself and your friends listen to it, that is OK, so it is a bit of a gray area). In fact, technically you aren't supposed to share a recording with someone in the same room (again, fair use). If you have a ripped mp3 and sold it, you would need to include or destroy the original media if it exists (would be interesting if they buy one song from a CD...).
I think the question being asked is more where are *any* jobs in Open Source, and how do you find such jobs.
From my experience working for a closed source company (though we have open APIs, and people have developed OSS products with our APIs), we have paid for support for Red Hat, SuSE, Apache (I think), and Solr, but getting jobs with those usually mean contributing to them and getting hired.
We have paid support for java, though there is an open source implementation of that as well. However, the way Oracle's been rankling management here, I don't know how long we will support it. Our product requirements force us to bundle it with a specific, tested version, but Oracle's requirements are to use their installer and upgrade it when upgrades come out. I can guarantee the latter isn't going to happen.
American business outsourcing at its best - it cost Americans jobs and moved them overseas.
I am not a pirate and have never used MegaUpload for anything, so I don't really know what kind of content was on it, but I kinda see irony there - stopping copyright infringement is supposed to create jobs here...
You aren't going far enough - it doesn't just require blocking access - it requires websites actually removing content about those sites as well (for sure PIPA had this, didn't read SOPA, but I heard it was in there as well). If that isn't censorship, I'd like to know what is.
Kinda funny that a country where it is legal to write up how to build and connect a car bomb, make fertilizer explosives, gunpowder, etc. due to freedom of speech is trying to make it illegal to talk about things like removing copyright protection on something they legally own a license to, and are allowed to make an archival backup copy of by law (that is already illegal by DMCA, I believe, but links aren't).
Anyhow, any time the RIAA or a studio is feeling pain I feel good. Schadenfreude for when I worked with those people and they ripped me off at every opportunity.
Well Cary H. Sherman's opinion is biased the other way, so it all balances out in the end, right?
In any case, he is wrong, particularly because American copyright law doesn't apply anywhere except to America, not to mention that piracy and counterfeiting are already illegal and the methods they were proposing would have little impact because they don't understand the technology, unlike most slashdotters.
He wants solutions? How about an international copyright accord, where works copyrighted inside the US fall under the international accord for other countries? We could keep our own copyright for inside the US, but not blacklist public domain sites outside the US, as this law was going to do (and that alone would impact thousands of wikipedia articles), by excluding sites that are foreign but abide by the international copyright accord.
That is the feel good part, but unfortunately there is only one way for enforcement - a firewall at every border that only allows encrypted or encoded packets through if they were encoded with the federal copyright protection encoder. The firewall needs to do deep packet inspection, as well. All digital copyrighted works will require a unique tag with a legal license embedded and be registered with the federal copyright database, and all players and readers need to deny access if that tag doesn't exist and check if the license is in use (requiring internet to be on at all times). Make it illegal to use proxy servers outside of the United States and make the punishment for using an external proxy server death (hey, why not - if we're going to be draconian, we may as well use Draco's law, which was death for any crime).
The Jehovah's Witnesses I met said any object allegedly over 6000(ish) years is a trick of Lucifer's to lead you from faith.
I laughed at them then (also their maths - a generation is exactly 20 years?!), and then again a few years later when the world didn't unexpectedly end like they predicted on the day they predicted. I've never quite figured out why Satan is so enamored with this world, since all the angels were granted God's power (and if Satan thinks it is too difficult to make his own world, faking rocks and plants and stuff would be a bit too much work, too). My current theory is God and Satan have a bet going.
That is just the music, and mostly affected TV shows in the earlier days of DVDs - the studios had only licensed it for the broadcast and had to get a new license to include them in DVD releases. Some studios paid low rates originally (sometimes free even, for promotion) to use the song in the original broadcast and then were asked practically extortion level rates (often per song) to include them in the DVD, even if the artist was basically unheard of other than in that broadcast. The broadcast/movie industry called them on it and switched the songs rather than pay the fees and the music industry eventually backed off on their high prices (probably because major music studios were losing revenue when the songs were switched) so I haven't really heard of this as a problem lately.
should be fair use case - you can make a backup of things you own to another format for archival purposes*
Note that some VHS tapes can't be copied - they are designed to show streaks and discontinuity if they are. I remember this was one of the controversial features of Basic Instinct on VHS.
* as long as they aren't encrypted, because that breaks decryption laws like the DMCA.
naive or sarcasm... not sure - going with the former
1337 is leetspeak (internet slang that actually predates the internet, but that is quibbling) for leet, which is slang for elite, so it means elite hacker.
The math makes sense, but the way they group it with "other costs" it is deceiving - the keywords are actually salaries and consulting expenses, not other costs. They obviously had to hire and/or contract some computer security professionals to fix their broken security and make sure it doesn't happen again and they're blaming part of the expense as having to hire these professionals. To put this in perspective, it is a lot like saying "we had to hire desk guards because people were just taking the keys to sleep in the rooms without paying for them and that is costing us an additional $400,000 in salaries."
And for the first time the national debt skyrocketed in peacetime. Reaganomics was badly broken, despite what conservatives say.
Don't mistake this for supporting Dems - to me Democrats and Republicans are the same low hanging fruit with just a slightly different flavor. I mean, for f*@ks sake, SOPA had Lamar Smith and Al Franken backing it, and if the conservative Republican and crazy liberal see eye-to-eye and fail to see how it will cause mass censorship to legitimate sites we have a problem. SOPA's potential impact on foreign public domain servers scared me most, since some of these have copyrighted content in the US (and say it is!) even though it is public domain in their country. Now imagine wikipedia and google having to delist any of those a US copyright holder wanted blocked. It isn't fair to users in that country since they can't use US based tools like google to find this legally obtainable content and much of the content may even be legal to US users, so it isn't fair to them, either, especially if the site goes out of their way to say where it is legal.
I have to use a VPN connection when I meet customers offsite or connect to work or work from home and I also do e-banking using SSL so I'm in the same boat.
If the government believes capitalism is a form of terrorism, I guess I'm OK with that...
I suspect contractual obligations to Broadcom require them for building in hardware acceleration, as in perhaps they get a discount rate on licensing the codecs if they require them. Tegra 3 (Kal El) has built in hardware acceleration for them and I think Snapdragon 4 as well.
Definitely not the fastest GPU, and certainly not the fastest SoC, but I don't know about when they started cobbling it together, or if they were trying to say fastest they could get at the price point they wanted to meet.
Reflow ovens... wow, didn't know they were even still used, but I guess I haven't done anything in electronics manufacturing in about 20 years. One of my first jobs was pulling boards off the etching machine and put them into the component and solder applying machine (it had a name, too, but like reflow oven, I won't remember unless I see/hear it again), which I believe automatically put them on the reflow oven's conveyor belt (or maybe someone else did). I figured technology would have moved on by now. These were big boards used in cash registers and I guess I didn't realize the technology scaled. It was a horribly boring job (and one easily replaced by a machine, I'm sure) so as soon as I found something better I was out of there.
Not to mention you don't necessarily need to go faster than light to go further than light travels over the same period by manipulating time. For instance if time bubbles are possible, you can float slow time on fast time. A few years ago that was said to be impossible due to the large amount of radiation that would exist in the zone of slow time, but another scientist proposed diverting that radiation with metamaterials, making it a viable option again. Anyhow, just because we can't do it today doesn't mean it isn't possible tomorrow.
And save resources? I'm hoping to repress you with my comments for a few hundred years, and that alone is worth the resources, Anonymous Coward! Some day I'll know who you really are...
Sure for human life, but how about after the singularity? We could make the transferred intelligence avatars much hardier than their flesh and blood counterparts.
People that play these games every day can school people that don't every time because they have every nuance down. I played a game of HL2 where I was dying constantly and never saw it coming. Later I watched the guy that had been sniping me and he was hitting targets that I couldn't even see because they were so faint and far away and getting head shots every time. It was insane (I learned later that he won several half life tourneys and we didn't stand a chance - he was mid-30s at the time, so age is only half the battle - practice like crazy is the other half).
I also remember a game of Battlefield 2 where I was killed within seconds wherever I spawned on the map by either a plane of a helicopter, and I never saw either (I heard them both, but they were very far away). I switched sides and watched the helicopter and they had 3 snipers sitting in the door picking off everyone at the spawn point and a guy resupplying them from behind. I couldn't see the plane, but I'm guessing it was just bombing the spawn from high up (by that point in the game there was only one uncaptured spawn, so it was pretty easy to target).
Note that the HL2 game was coordinated teams of people I knew in the office and the second game was random people, and one side was far more coordinated than the other (not to mention very good). The DOOM and Mechwarrior days didn't require a headset and extremely coordinated teams of players.
I wonder if Sinistar is NP-hard... I remember that game being insanely hard... or how about Defender with the hard dips turned on? Ever see that? Defender was crazy hard to begin with and they had dip switches that made it even harder.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, since we have a working reference design, a new MSRE-like small reactor (with some fixes for technological improvements) could be online in as little as 2-3 years if we had the will to do so, but that would include some serious concessions by the NRC because they don't allow reprocessing on site due to proliferation fears, even though the fuel could be tainted to make it not only bad for proliferation, but dangerous for weapon makers to handle.
But the problem is nobody is willing to build them and people are unwilling to back a technology they see as faulty, even though technologically it is like comparing a car engine to a gas turbine (basically the same thing in, same thing out, right?). The power companies don't want them because they already have a working design ("why fix something that ain't broke?"), despite safety flaws. The anti-nuclear people (most are liberal Democrats who think it is an environmental threat, even though it is one of the cleanest energy sources) say that it isn't a thorium reactor, it is a uranium reactor (since the thorium is converted to uranium before fission) and therefore creates the same toxic waste as uranium reactor. Ignored is safety, the 3% waste, the fact that 83% of that 3% is non-toxic in 10 years and most of the rest can be recycled, and LFTR and some other thorium reactor designs can actually run as uranium reactors and burn the nuclear waste we already have. To me, something that has built in passive safety, 99% fuel efficiency, can be shut down when the energy isn't needed, and can run on garbage (which is what nuclear waste is, essentially) sounds like a solution, but call me a fool...
Politicians have forgotten about anything other than LWR/PWRs. Why? because in the 1960s, they were concerned with only one thing, breeding nuclear fuel for nuclear weapons, so they killed off designs that did that poorly like MSRE. Our needs have shifted since then, but with the government only seeing accidents with LWR/PWR designs they are scared off when they hear nuclear reactor, despite other designs being massively different and sometimes much safer.
My guess is ARPA continues to use the money on stuff like better batteries, but I agree, this should be $0 until the budget is balanced - in fact, I would take it one step further - is at a surplus to pay back debt and start funding social security and medicare for the future. I personally wish they'd do research on the types of Gen IV reactors that burn nuclear waste instead and turn a storage problem into an energy solution. That said, there are a lot worse things for the federal government to waste money on.
And speaking of balancing the budget, why not close some of the loopholes that people use not to pay taxes? Let's make Senators fly coach instead of first class, stay in hotel rooms not suites, not get lifetime pay for doing a job even after they stop working, etc - I'm sick of footing their bills for luxury living - they can foot their own bump to first class. And even though the wealthiest people pay 70% of taxes, 50% of them don't pay - figure that out. We could use a bit of austerity here, starting with cutting perks to the rich who don't need those perks in the first place and are abusing power to have them. And I completely disagree with taxing the rich more - fix the tax code and collect taxes already. I realize that isn't an overnight process, since the damn thing is a wall of tomes (over 70k pages), but start with some big ones and work your way down.
Actually, Santorum isn't going far enough with rape - if he wants to go all biblical about rape, the rapist and rape victim need to marry - if not they are both adulterers. Adultery requires death by stoning. A man having sex with another woman after taking a girl's virginity and the first woman still being alive (legal marriage or not)? Death by stoning. Sex with another woman who is not a widow and not a virgin and her husband hasn't died in the interim? Death by stoning. Non-widow woman having sex with a man while her husband or ex-husband still lives (divorce is OK, sex while spouse lives is not)? Death by stoning. Divorce and remarriage while the first wife is living? Death by stoning. Apparently a widow can screw all she wants as long as she doesn't get pregnant and doesn't sell her services... I believe prostitution is also death by stoning.
By my accounts, biblically, most of the US has committed adultery and should be stoned to death. Since that includes me, I find it hard to be a good Christian and also not to find it hypocritical, as I have committed several of the most heinous sins in the Bible (I've broken the 10 commandments, and that certainly isn't the only time - my neighbor's grass is perfect... oh dammit, broke #10 again). I have issues with banning abortion for these same reasons (personally I think states should decide) - sure it may be murder, but so is (biblical) adultery and most of us have committed that sin, and just because we haven't committed it in the legal sense doesn't mean we haven't committed it in the biblical sense. We have to have societal norms and have to set a bar where something is or is not a criminal offense rather than a societal stigma, however, so I think there is a vast opinion one way or the other on issues like that.
And you didn't see that coming when they announced they were Microsoft only, and that was back in the XP timeframe (pre Windows 2003?), so all its servers were probably being run as admin users?
As both a QA person (professionally) and a developer (OSS mostly, though I do systems engineering and automation scripting for my job), I find the job of programming to make something work. I find the job of QA as do everything I can possibly do to break the code I'm given. It is a bit different mentality - one I follow the happy path, and the other I often follow deep, dark roads. For instance, doing some access control list testing I may have some very convoluted access list with 30+ rules, whereas the developer only has 3-4 rules (and in fact, just did that and it breaks - badly).
As for seeking a job, I'd be curious what methodology is used - I started as a waterfall and was hired as an automation developer, but I got moved to manual testing when those jobs went to India (and got very, very close to being laid off - everyone below me got cut). I worked full time waterfall manual testing for 4 years (with various QA methodologies, most of them forced by ISO and other standardizations) and moved to an Agile testing team, which is much different - often I help developers code in the beginning and they help me test at the end (and we have built in automation).
Copyright in the US is generally life of author + 70 years or 120 years, whichever comes first, but that depends on when it was published. Corporate ownership is life of author + 95 years or 120 years, whichever comes first. There are a lot more complexities depending on when or where it was published, especially if published outside the United States - see
http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm
They don't need to own a license, they own the song itself. Even the artist that created the song needs a license to play or listen to the it, called a reciprocal license in contracts. Woe be to the musician that doesn't get a reciprocal license - you'd need to pay money to play your own material...
I've found the stack matters probably more-so than the amp for audio quality in a live setting (I've used a crappy head and it still sounded good with my stack), but I had a great head and a crappy stack for many years because I was too poor to buy a better one and had to use quite a bit of compression to make it sound good.
But while he talked about compression, I think his last statement in that paragraph is more about things like auto tune, which is more about manipulating the sound rather than laying it out stereo-phonically (the part about "processing that audiophiles criticize" - auto-tune is highly criticized by audiophiles).
But the real bane of the pop world IMO is too many songs using I-V-vi-IV or the sensitive singer songwriter variant vi-IV-I-V like every Lady Gaga hit (see Pachelbel rant or Axis of Awesome, but they just scratch the surface).
Only if you owe sales tax on the purchase - If you sold it for a penny, for instance, you wouldn't owe sales tax since the sales tax rounds to 0. Also you aren't required to collect sales tax for states you don't live in - it is the responsibility of the user to pay their use (sales) tax. You are required to keep extensive records, however, and provide them to the other states if requested. I think most states require a license, as well.
Anyhow, I would have been amazed if this was illegal. When you buy music, you are buying a license to listen to the music and (sometimes) the media it is written on, not the music itself, which the recording studio likely owns (sometimes the artist does). This is why ripping to mp3 is legal (you can legally own an archival copy), but file sharing is not (you are not supposed to create copies for your friends - fair use applies more for your friends listening to it rather than making a copy, but if you made a copy for yourself and your friends listen to it, that is OK, so it is a bit of a gray area). In fact, technically you aren't supposed to share a recording with someone in the same room (again, fair use). If you have a ripped mp3 and sold it, you would need to include or destroy the original media if it exists (would be interesting if they buy one song from a CD...).
I think the question being asked is more where are *any* jobs in Open Source, and how do you find such jobs.
From my experience working for a closed source company (though we have open APIs, and people have developed OSS products with our APIs), we have paid for support for Red Hat, SuSE, Apache (I think), and Solr, but getting jobs with those usually mean contributing to them and getting hired.
We have paid support for java, though there is an open source implementation of that as well. However, the way Oracle's been rankling management here, I don't know how long we will support it. Our product requirements force us to bundle it with a specific, tested version, but Oracle's requirements are to use their installer and upgrade it when upgrades come out. I can guarantee the latter isn't going to happen.
You could try the sourceforge jobs board, though many I've seen there are for MS or perl and it isn't updated often.
http://jobs.sourceforge.net/jobboard.php
American business outsourcing at its best - it cost Americans jobs and moved them overseas.
I am not a pirate and have never used MegaUpload for anything, so I don't really know what kind of content was on it, but I kinda see irony there - stopping copyright infringement is supposed to create jobs here...
You aren't going far enough - it doesn't just require blocking access - it requires websites actually removing content about those sites as well (for sure PIPA had this, didn't read SOPA, but I heard it was in there as well). If that isn't censorship, I'd like to know what is.
Kinda funny that a country where it is legal to write up how to build and connect a car bomb, make fertilizer explosives, gunpowder, etc. due to freedom of speech is trying to make it illegal to talk about things like removing copyright protection on something they legally own a license to, and are allowed to make an archival backup copy of by law (that is already illegal by DMCA, I believe, but links aren't).
Anyhow, any time the RIAA or a studio is feeling pain I feel good. Schadenfreude for when I worked with those people and they ripped me off at every opportunity.
Well Cary H. Sherman's opinion is biased the other way, so it all balances out in the end, right?
In any case, he is wrong, particularly because American copyright law doesn't apply anywhere except to America, not to mention that piracy and counterfeiting are already illegal and the methods they were proposing would have little impact because they don't understand the technology, unlike most slashdotters.
He wants solutions? How about an international copyright accord, where works copyrighted inside the US fall under the international accord for other countries? We could keep our own copyright for inside the US, but not blacklist public domain sites outside the US, as this law was going to do (and that alone would impact thousands of wikipedia articles), by excluding sites that are foreign but abide by the international copyright accord.
That is the feel good part, but unfortunately there is only one way for enforcement - a firewall at every border that only allows encrypted or encoded packets through if they were encoded with the federal copyright protection encoder. The firewall needs to do deep packet inspection, as well. All digital copyrighted works will require a unique tag with a legal license embedded and be registered with the federal copyright database, and all players and readers need to deny access if that tag doesn't exist and check if the license is in use (requiring internet to be on at all times). Make it illegal to use proxy servers outside of the United States and make the punishment for using an external proxy server death (hey, why not - if we're going to be draconian, we may as well use Draco's law, which was death for any crime).
The Jehovah's Witnesses I met said any object allegedly over 6000(ish) years is a trick of Lucifer's to lead you from faith.
I laughed at them then (also their maths - a generation is exactly 20 years?!), and then again a few years later when the world didn't unexpectedly end like they predicted on the day they predicted. I've never quite figured out why Satan is so enamored with this world, since all the angels were granted God's power (and if Satan thinks it is too difficult to make his own world, faking rocks and plants and stuff would be a bit too much work, too). My current theory is God and Satan have a bet going.
That is just the music, and mostly affected TV shows in the earlier days of DVDs - the studios had only licensed it for the broadcast and had to get a new license to include them in DVD releases. Some studios paid low rates originally (sometimes free even, for promotion) to use the song in the original broadcast and then were asked practically extortion level rates (often per song) to include them in the DVD, even if the artist was basically unheard of other than in that broadcast. The broadcast/movie industry called them on it and switched the songs rather than pay the fees and the music industry eventually backed off on their high prices (probably because major music studios were losing revenue when the songs were switched) so I haven't really heard of this as a problem lately.
should be fair use case - you can make a backup of things you own to another format for archival purposes*
Note that some VHS tapes can't be copied - they are designed to show streaks and discontinuity if they are. I remember this was one of the controversial features of Basic Instinct on VHS.
* as long as they aren't encrypted, because that breaks decryption laws like the DMCA.
naive or sarcasm... not sure - going with the former
1337 is leetspeak (internet slang that actually predates the internet, but that is quibbling) for leet, which is slang for elite, so it means elite hacker.
The math makes sense, but the way they group it with "other costs" it is deceiving - the keywords are actually salaries and consulting expenses, not other costs. They obviously had to hire and/or contract some computer security professionals to fix their broken security and make sure it doesn't happen again and they're blaming part of the expense as having to hire these professionals. To put this in perspective, it is a lot like saying "we had to hire desk guards because people were just taking the keys to sleep in the rooms without paying for them and that is costing us an additional $400,000 in salaries."
And for the first time the national debt skyrocketed in peacetime. Reaganomics was badly broken, despite what conservatives say.
Don't mistake this for supporting Dems - to me Democrats and Republicans are the same low hanging fruit with just a slightly different flavor. I mean, for f*@ks sake, SOPA had Lamar Smith and Al Franken backing it, and if the conservative Republican and crazy liberal see eye-to-eye and fail to see how it will cause mass censorship to legitimate sites we have a problem. SOPA's potential impact on foreign public domain servers scared me most, since some of these have copyrighted content in the US (and say it is!) even though it is public domain in their country. Now imagine wikipedia and google having to delist any of those a US copyright holder wanted blocked. It isn't fair to users in that country since they can't use US based tools like google to find this legally obtainable content and much of the content may even be legal to US users, so it isn't fair to them, either, especially if the site goes out of their way to say where it is legal.
I have to use a VPN connection when I meet customers offsite or connect to work or work from home and I also do e-banking using SSL so I'm in the same boat.
If the government believes capitalism is a form of terrorism, I guess I'm OK with that...
I suspect contractual obligations to Broadcom require them for building in hardware acceleration, as in perhaps they get a discount rate on licensing the codecs if they require them. Tegra 3 (Kal El) has built in hardware acceleration for them and I think Snapdragon 4 as well.
Definitely not the fastest GPU, and certainly not the fastest SoC, but I don't know about when they started cobbling it together, or if they were trying to say fastest they could get at the price point they wanted to meet.
Reflow ovens... wow, didn't know they were even still used, but I guess I haven't done anything in electronics manufacturing in about 20 years. One of my first jobs was pulling boards off the etching machine and put them into the component and solder applying machine (it had a name, too, but like reflow oven, I won't remember unless I see/hear it again), which I believe automatically put them on the reflow oven's conveyor belt (or maybe someone else did). I figured technology would have moved on by now. These were big boards used in cash registers and I guess I didn't realize the technology scaled. It was a horribly boring job (and one easily replaced by a machine, I'm sure) so as soon as I found something better I was out of there.
Not to mention you don't necessarily need to go faster than light to go further than light travels over the same period by manipulating time. For instance if time bubbles are possible, you can float slow time on fast time. A few years ago that was said to be impossible due to the large amount of radiation that would exist in the zone of slow time, but another scientist proposed diverting that radiation with metamaterials, making it a viable option again. Anyhow, just because we can't do it today doesn't mean it isn't possible tomorrow.
Hey, if smart people aren't breeding, they have to continue somehow or else we get http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy
And save resources? I'm hoping to repress you with my comments for a few hundred years, and that alone is worth the resources, Anonymous Coward! Some day I'll know who you really are...
Sure for human life, but how about after the singularity? We could make the transferred intelligence avatars much hardier than their flesh and blood counterparts.
People that play these games every day can school people that don't every time because they have every nuance down. I played a game of HL2 where I was dying constantly and never saw it coming. Later I watched the guy that had been sniping me and he was hitting targets that I couldn't even see because they were so faint and far away and getting head shots every time. It was insane (I learned later that he won several half life tourneys and we didn't stand a chance - he was mid-30s at the time, so age is only half the battle - practice like crazy is the other half).
I also remember a game of Battlefield 2 where I was killed within seconds wherever I spawned on the map by either a plane of a helicopter, and I never saw either (I heard them both, but they were very far away). I switched sides and watched the helicopter and they had 3 snipers sitting in the door picking off everyone at the spawn point and a guy resupplying them from behind. I couldn't see the plane, but I'm guessing it was just bombing the spawn from high up (by that point in the game there was only one uncaptured spawn, so it was pretty easy to target).
Note that the HL2 game was coordinated teams of people I knew in the office and the second game was random people, and one side was far more coordinated than the other (not to mention very good). The DOOM and Mechwarrior days didn't require a headset and extremely coordinated teams of players.
I wonder if Sinistar is NP-hard... I remember that game being insanely hard... or how about Defender with the hard dips turned on? Ever see that? Defender was crazy hard to begin with and they had dip switches that made it even harder.