Oddly computer chess programs may already meet this criteria. The programs usually apply a weight or value to a move and a weight and a value to the consequences down stream of the move. But there are times when the consequences are of equal value at some event horizon and random choices must be applied. As a consequence sequences of moves may be made that no human has ever made and the programmer could not really predict either. As machines have gotten more able the event horizon is at a deeper level. But we might reach the point at which only the player playing white can ever hope to win and the player with black may always lose. We are not in danger of a human ever being able to do that unless we alter his brain.
I disagree with your conclusions about computer chess, although you are quite right that it seems unlikely that if chess is ever "solved" (this is the correct term for what you talk about) so that the white player can always force a win that humans will be capable of remembering the data required to always force a win. And chess is a theoretically solvable game.
Computer chess at the highest levels like Deep Blue is little more than a highly specialized data base lookup. The laws of chess require you to have to make a move within time constraints, so if the program can't pick between equally good choices, it would have to rely on some kind of random choice that the programmer would have allowed for (ie. use a random number generator or pick the line likely to result in more exchange of material, etc.). In the early days of computing it was thought that for computers to get really good at chess, they would have to be able to use some kind of AI, but damn IBM for realizing that they could cheat and simply throw massive amounts of processors, computer memory and massive databases of moves at the problem rather than having to actually do real AI work for computers to beat humans at it. That Deep Thought is just a variation on Deep Blue where it's really good at searching through databases of stored information rather than being able to actually do any real kind of AI work. Basically Deep Blue and Deep Thought are brute forcing a solution through technology rather than actually breaking any kind of AI ground, although they may have some really cool and nifty search algorithms to do the job that others lack.
Yes, it's certainly possible for any chess game to get "out of book" and get a sequence of moves where the outcome isn't known, but that can easily by handled by programming approaches that have existed for decades. For example, a program may look to see if the opponent has left a piece undefended by mistake and simply grab it if it doesn't seem to be a deliberate sacrifice (ie. "If I take piece A, will that leave me vulnerable to a next move attack by a different piece?"), you can try to simply exchange material, evaluate positional strength and play to that (ie. "I'm strong on the king side and my opponent is weak there, so I'll push for a king side attack") and so on. These kinds of approaches have been in the best computer chess programs for decades now and there's nothing novel about them.
Keep in mind, that TSA has yet to have stopped a single bombing. The only reasons we've not had a plane go down is due to lack of effort, not any increase in security. The few attempts that have been made, made it through the TSA with ease and it was the efforts of passengers or the stupidity of the attacker that saved the plane.
The famous "few attempts that have been made" originated in foreign countries, not in the USA. You admit that there is a "lack of effort". Huh. You'd like us to believe that this is because "teh TSA am stoopid" or something that amounts to that, but in fact it very well could be that the bad guys have decided that the likelihood of getting a bomb on a plane is not "100%" or close to it like you seem to believe but quite a bit below that. I'd say maybe a 5-10% chance of getting through security successfully. Suicide bombers are a limited quantity and the chance of failure could be a disaster because if the would be bomber gets caught by the TSA, the US government now has access to the type of bomb being used and may be able to get the failed terrorist to talk. This is exactly what happened with Richard Reid.
People have car alarms not because they believe that it makes their car impossible to break into but because it raises the bar so that it may be more trouble than it's worth. Actually I think the TSA is working because if it was truly as bad as you and other complainers claim, there would have been a successful attempt already. I think the bad guys have decided that the risk is too high that they won't get away with it and the success would not be worth the risk of getting caught.
I wish I could find out when the last time is that you even flew to/from/within the USA. I had a friend a few years ago who would go into a full blown hissy fit and rant about the TSA, making pretty much the same arguments as you. He last flew around 1998 and he is very likely to never in his life get on a plane again. It has nothing at all to do with the TSA - he has no reason or desire to ever travel by plane. Yet from all his complaining you'd think that he was some kind of hard core road warrior who was at a different US airport every week. I have found that in general the people who complain the most about the TSA are the people who fly the least.
Let's get this clear - it's not illegal for Americans to travel to Cuba. Not at all.
Got that? Good. Now what is illegal, thanks to President Kennedy, is for Americans to spend money there without prior authorization from the US Department of Treasury. This is how the US government "gets" people who go to Cuba without permission. See, Kennedy signed the order during the Cold War and to prevent the Communists from arguing that the US was repressive and taking away the freedom of its citizens to go to Cuba, Kennedy simply made it illegal to spend money there unless you got special authorization to do so. Very rarely are US citizens truly forbidden from traveling anyway. I think in the past there may have been a few places where we actually legally couldn't travel to, but I'm not sure if any exist any more. I suppose it's worth mentioning that generally it's only when a Republican is president that the US government gets interested in prosecuting citizens for spending money in Cuba without prior authorization. This has not been a high priority of the Clinton or Obama presidencies.
Granted the bit about being able to travel to Cuba legally but not able to spend money there without prior authorization is a fine line and essentially the legal cases against such travelers have involved the US government arguing (probably without proof) that the traveler couldn't go there and not spend money. It's all a crock. It's not well known but my understanding (I have no personal experience here) is that the Obama administration has made it much easier for US citizens to go to Cuba legally via authorized cultural travel groups so there's not really a reason to just skirt the law and go without permission. The Bush administration had much tighter restrictions on travel to Cuba and a history of prosecuting citizens who got caught going there without prior authorization.
You raise some good points and you may be right, but I wondering if this is actually a sign that the CCP is losing control over the PLA (People's Liberation Army). For years to keep the military at their beck and call, the CCP has been working the propaganda machine into overdrive. My experience is that the average Chinese person, at least those in the big cities and not rural people, doesn't really trust the government or believe everything they say, but the propaganda works really well for those who join the PLA. I feel that China's military is pretty unprofessional and looking to start trouble and this is because they've been indoctrinated to believe that everybody is against good old China because of jealousy and if China doesn't fight tooth and nail for everything, they'll wind up with nothing. Throw in a few references to treaties they don't like that were signed in the 1800s (none of which are in force today, by the way) to bolster the claim that they've always been the victim and you have a military that acts like a rabid dog. Also, it doesn't help that the constitution of China pledges the PLA to defend the CCP, not China itself. So the CCP is at once both the state and more important than the state at the same time. It may be that all these years of indoctrination are bearing their inevitable ugly fruit now and they have to keep them busy building islands so they don't try to force an invasion of Taiwan, something that would possibly result in the US and Japan attacking China over.
This is a pissing war. Both sides may be sincere and well intentioned, but it's still a pissing war. Here's a manager type summary. I'll use TC to represent the TC developer who responder and Forkers for the person representing the people who want to fork it.
Forkers: We'd like your permission to fork your code and get the rights to it. We could just fork it without your permission and others no doubt will if you refuse to comply. We want your trademarks and your OK to put the forked code into a different license then you used. We've started looking at your code and while we do agree that there are problems there that desperately need to be fixed, we feel strongly that fixing your broken code is a million times easier than writing this from scratch. So will you play ball with us?
TC: Our code is so broken that you need to start from scratch. That's why we abandoned it - didn't think it was possible to fix without doing a complete re-write. So no, we're not going to "play ball".
China worried about the logical consequences of its own provocations against Japan as well as failing to heel those of North Korea (who essentially only China has open lines of communication).
Actually, I think you're wrong on both accounts. The military in China is a little bit crazy. Did you know that they are pledged by the constitution to support the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) rather than China itself? Think about that for a while. The civilian CCP government does control the PLA (People's Liberation Army), but for years now the PLA has been gaining in influence. I'm not sure even the CCP government really cares all that much about its provocations any more because they don't believe anybody will stand up to them, not even the USA.
China and North Korea are stuck with each other. Russia had the good sense to get out of that crazy game of financially supporting them early in Yeltsin's presidency, and that left China holding the bag. China doesn't have as much influence as you might think, nor do they use what little they have as well as they could. It's not well known by the public, but China has a lot of business deals with North Korea where basically they get rare earths and other minerals for below market rates. These deals are very important to China and are the main reason they prop up North Korea. China is really tired of North Korea behaving badly and causing trouble in its backyard, but they fear even more a united democratic Korea that might (who knows?) have US troops stationed in it near the Chinese border. So like it or not, they are committed firmly to the status quo because it represents a "least evil" option to them. When China says that they want a nuclear free Korean peninsula, they are quite sincere about that. They don't trust North Korea to maybe not use a nuke against them in anger or by mistake as their missile systems might simply go the wrong way and blow up in China by accident. But they aren't willing to do anything to get rid of the Kims and the Kims aren't getting rid of their nukes because they believe that their family survival depends on it. The only ways that North Korea is ever going to be nuclear free is that either the US is going to attack them and gamble that they can destroy their few nuclear missiles before they leave North Korean airspace or (much less likely) the regime will collapse quickly for some unforeseen reason and the new government will get rid of the nukes.
It is quite likely they have a few that they don't talk about just as Israel has a few they don't talk about. And while we're at it, South Korea probably has a couple as well.
Actually, it's not likely at all that either Japan or South Korea "have a few they don't talk about". Do I believe that both countries could possibly produce a nuclear weapon? Yes. But untested nukes are useless because they may not work. Neither country has ever carried out a test. Believe me, if they did, you would know about it. South Korea seems a bit iffier here because they've had some satellite launch problems so I've got a hunch that they may not necessarily be ready right now to make a nuke. With time? Yes. Absolutely. If I had to bet on it right now, I'd bet that Japan could probably produce one that would work correctly on a first try. The only only other country in Asia that was ever rumored to have nuclear weapon capability was Taiwan because they were strongly suspected of helping Israel and South Africa do nuclear testing decades ago, but as a Taiwan watcher I can say that if they ever had the capability, they abandoned it and it would be very difficult to impossible for them to quickly get that going again. In fact, I feel pretty confident that they don't have even one nuclear weapon and there is a chance that they simply don't have as much knowledge as Israel and South Africa did at the time. South Africa willingly became a nuclear free state but if you look carefully you find things where SA government officials admit that they know how to make nuclear weapons, but they chose not to do so.
For those who don't understand the reference, the Keystone Cops were incompetent policemen in a series of American silent movies. I read the article linked to in the article and basically Nokia dropped the money off in a paper bag in a parking lot and the police watched the pickup and then completely lost the blackmailer. To this day they have no idea at all who got the money and it seems that Nokia has only the word of the blackmailer that they wouldn't use the keys for nefarious purposes.
A mobile OS that isn't Apple's Garden of Pure Ideology, or linked directly to the mothership in Redmond if you actually want to do much of anything would also be nice to see.
Good morning, Mr. Rip Van Winkle. There are mobile phones that run an OS called Android that you seem not to have heard of but exactly meet your criteria. You might want to check that out. You can actually buy those in the USA right now.
I would encourage you to look closer. Just because the mainstream media didn't cover the trouble doesn't mean it didn't happen. Other news sources would disagree with your assertion that horrible things didn't happen to the visitors in S.Africa. But it is certainly true that crime was reduced while the world cup was being held, so in "relative terms" it's true. But it was also extremely temporary. They almost literally declared martial law in the region where the cup was held, but surrounding areas? Not so much. Visitors who wandered outside of designated areas did so at their own peril and were informed of such.
The word "bubble" comes to mind.
I was there in South Africa for the World Cup. Were you? If not, you don't get to pass off rumors as facts. And if you're one of those racist Afrikaners, your opinion means nothing because a lot of you are still living in the past.
I don't know where this "They almost literally declared martial law" stuff comes from. I stayed in the home of some South African friends, who by the way would have been classified as "colored" in the old Apartheid system, and other than having a lot more tourists, it was pretty much life goes on as usual there. I didn't see any unusual numbers of police or military anywhere. I went to two different major cities and even went with a friend to Kruger National Park for a few days and at no time did I see any unusual number of police or military, nor did I hear on the local news about tourists being the victims of crime. Yes, I'm sure that somewhere some tourist there got victimized in some way, but this suggestion that there was plenty of crime that got covered up is just nonsense. Your reference to the "mainstream media" troubles me quite a bit because that could suggest that you get your information from sources that the majority of us feel are unreliable and too politically oriented.
I can't speak for other countries where things may be different, but the US rules on exclusion that the Red Cross uses get more and more exclusionary every year and are now a bit nuts in my opinion. I was a regular blood donor and they used to call me and tell me that they liked to get my blood because it was "unusually clean" and was very suitable for giving to infants. Early this year I tried to donate and they deferred me for a year. Want to know why? It's because I rode on a train for no more than 60 minutes through a "malaria area". I traveled last year to China and I took a train ride of not more than 60 minutes between two large towns. The towns themselves were fine, but the area between them is supposedly a "malaria risk area". Even though I have had zero symptoms they consider my blood to be "at risk for malaria" and I can't donate until 1 year after the trip. So I'm sorry infants, but no blood from me for a while. The Red Cross had a worker who called me a few days after my deferral to talk to me about it and I told her that I felt that the Red Cross was far too exclusionary and she said she agreed with me, but there was nothing she could do about it. OK, maybe some of you will say that while there is little chance I have malaria, it's not zero and they need to be careful. OK, maybe - maybe - you have a point. Maybe. But are you aware that since last year there have been new exclusionary rules on women and now in the USA the majority of women who have ever been pregnant, even if they lost the baby, now cannot ever donate blood? Pregnant women may contain some kind of anti-body that a small number of blood recipients react violently towards so they've decided to ban something like 75% of pregnant women from ever donating again because that's about how many have this anti-body. It's going to reach the point where the only people the Red Cross in the US will ever take blood from are men who have never traveled outside the US even once. I predict that will be the next restriction.
I'm not sure how, but I'd never heard of this "Comics Code" you mentioned in your question.
Wow! That's a hell of a story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Thank god that's dead.
It's even worse then you think. Here's the story that many believe on why it really got started.
EC Publications had a successful line of comics in the early 1950s that changed the industry. EC was very successful and they had some of the best artists ever to work in the comics such as Jack Davis, Graham Ingels, Wally Wood, etc. EC's most successful comics were 3 horror comics - Tales From The Crypt, The Haunt Of Fear, and The Vault Of Horror. Anybody remember the old HBO TV series "Tales From The Crypt"? Well, they licensed the title and the concept from EC and even had some episodes based on stories that ran in the comics. EC had other comics such as crime story, war story and sci-fi. All are considered classics.
In an effort to give editor/writer/artist Harvey Kurtzman a chance to earn more money by giving him another comic to edit, Mad was created - as a comic book, not a magazine. Mad became a gigantic success and spawned quite a few imitators, including EC's own official imitation of Mad comic (yes, they really advertised it as such), Panic. Mad the comic did a lot of comics parodies and one they parodied was Archie. The story was called Starchie and they turned him into a juvenile delinquent. Now it is true that at the time some psychologists were actually suggesting that the reason so many kids were "juvenile delinquents" were that comics were warping their poor little minds. Desperate parents latched onto this explanation and the US Senate actually held hearings on it.
The story goes that the guy who published Archie just completely lost his mind over the Mad parody. In his fury, he got some other creators of (mostly less successful than EC) comics to create the Comics Code to "save the kids". Think about the children! Won't somebody think about the children! Well, it just so happens that the Code specifically forbade the use of certain words in comic book titles that just happened to be ones used by EC and they specifically forbade the types of stories that EC published. Was it coincidence? Revenge? I lean towards the latter. Remember, the US was a much less litigious place in those days. People didn't sue over anything and if you tried that, it often didn't work. EC responded by dropping all of their titles except Mad and putting out a new series of comics that had high quality art and conformed to the Code, but as these were nothing like their previous comics, they failed and nobody bought them. EC made one last gasp attempt to avoid the code with a series of "picto-fiction" magazines that had a few drawings and were mostly text, but nobody wanted those either. Mad became a magazine to avoid the Code altogether and the comics line was killed off by EC. So basically the story is that the Comics Code came into being to specifically punish EC Publications for doing a parody of Archie with the cover story being that the Code was there to "protect the children". Mad's original creator Harvey Kurtzman got into trouble with Archie again in the early 1960s when he did another parody starring Goodman Beaver and called "Goodman Goes Playboy". This parody featured Archie and various other characters now living the Playboy lifestyle. Archie's publisher sued again and forced a settlement where the copyright got transferred to him. The story vanished for decades but the copyright failed to be renewed and it's actually in the public domain now, one of the rare things that passed into public domain before the dreaded Bono Act made copyright renewal automatic.
If Snowden hadn't been treated like a traitor by his country, he wouldn't've had to flee in the first place. Uncle Sam only have himself to blame if snowden is spilling the beans in Russia.
You don't understand the event sequence, so you are wrong. It went like this.
1) Snowden steals a bunch of documents in secret. He flies to Hong Kong. At this point, nobody knows anything about him or what he has done except Snowden himself.
2) While in Hong Kong, Snowden gives a bunch of documents to various members of the press and holds a press conference to announce what he has done and to point out that he "had" to do it because it was the only way to let the American people know the truth.
3) The US government wakes up and realizes it has a really big problem on its hands. It's only now that the "traitor" charges begin and the US leans on China to send him back, instead prompting China to turn a blind eye as Russia agrees to make this its problem and headache to deal with. This gets China off the hook, although the Chinese have surely previously copied Snowden's stuff and possibly reached a deal with the USSR, cough cough, I mean Russia to share with each other what they find out.
Is it that he's being paid a market price for his team? How could it have been otherwise?
Well, technically you are correct, but the problem is that before this sale, only the Chicago Bulls ($1 billion) and the Los Angeles Lakers ($1.3 billion), were valued at even one billion US dollars among NBA teams. Basically what we have is a bunch of billionaires who for no good reason got into a bidding war on a team that has never even played for a championship, let alone won one, and the "winner" was the guy who was willing to badly overpay the most. Right now it's difficult to understand how this deal makes sense for Ballmer. And if he personally has the billions available to make this deal rather than just being a front man for an investment group, then he is maybe the most badly overpaid CEO in history. A few years ago an investment group shocked everybody by paying $2 billion US dollars for the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, but the deal began to make sense when you took into account that the team got a TV contract that was something like maybe $6 billion dollars. Nobody expected the Dodgers to sell for even a billion dollars, but a bidding war ensued and basically the winners were a group that could pay $2 billion up front and make it back on the TV contract. There's no evidence yet that Ballmer can get this money back and right now it just looks like a stupid decision where a jobless rich boy paid more than he should for the bragging rights of owning an NBA team. Maybe things will change in a few years and with new TV money he'll look like a genius, but right now it just looks like a bad deal.
Worse technology (check the 1080p frame rate - yikes! That will not look natural at all.) Higher price. It does look better though. The main difference is what I see as a problem with a lot of Kickstarter campaigns. Bublcam is getting funded because they asked for less than half of what the other guys want. There's a really simple rule of Kickstarter - the less money you ask for, the more likely you are to get it. The other guys raised more money than Bublcam, but because their goal was so high, they failed to reach it. I've seen quite a few funding campaigns fail because while the product was worthwhile, the amount asked for to fund it was not realistic. I think it was yesterday we had an article about an Indiegogo campaign for a robot to help with a malaria vaccine and while the goal is quite worthwhile, the amount asked for was too high for a disease that doesn't effect the vast majority of Slashdotters and unless things change drastically, it won't be funded either.
Look people, this is NOT a 2A issue, this is a 1A issue. When does censorship stop? Why can't gun plans be published?
This may be a first amendment issue, or perhaps it is a second amendment issue, but that will be up to a court to decide. What you fail to understand is that like many Americans (I am American too, so I"m allowed to say that), you think that all rights are absolute but they are not. Even Justice Scalia, who is as conservative as they come on the Supreme Court, pointed out in a gun ruling that the Supreme Court wasn't saying that there couldn't be any restrictions on guns just because the second amendment existed. The classic easy to understand example is that your right to free speech does not give you the right to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater when there isn't one and cause a panic leading to injuries and possibly death and then you just shrug it off and tell the police "You can't do anything to me. I exercised my free speech rights." Your right to free speech does not mean you can lie while under oath, for another example. If someone was to get your social security number, your bank account information, your address, credit card information and passwords to various accounts and publish that, would you happily ignore that as your life falls apart because the publisher was simply exercising his free speech rights?
NASA holding onto an out-moded Space Shuttle design, crimped the US's space efforts for decades.
Welcome to the Space X Dragon and someone finally with GUTS; Elon Musk.
Well, there are reasons why NASA pushed the shuttle for so long that have nothing to do with incompetency. The whole "Gee whiz! Look kids! It's reusable!" approach was a way to save money in the face of budget cuts. Why were budgets being cut, do you ask? Well, there is no shortage of Americans who say "Why are we throwing away money on NASA for nothing when we have too many problems at home to fix?" It took a long time and 2 spectacular fatal events before the message got driven home so clearly that even a government bureaucrat couldn't miss it that bolting the shuttle to giant launch rockets was always going to have a small but always present chance of a fatal accident that was unacceptably high. Putting a capsule on top of a rocket isn't sexy, but it works. Russia hasn't had even one fatality related to their launch system. NASA's ongoing Orion project is using the old school capsule approach because it just works. I fully commend Musk for getting Space X to where it is as he's going to basically save the space station, but NASA does now understand that right now the whole reusable shuttle idea is a bad one. Columbia drove it home that the shuttle could never be as safe as it needed to be because the whole idea was fatally flawed, so the only way to quickly get things done was to turn to private industry. Orion is going OK as far as I know, but the pace is pretty slow and it won't be passenger ready until probably a few years after Space X is already taking people to the space station.
As bad as politicians are at the federal level, they're even worse at state and local levels. The state where I live has a problem that all the neighboring states have too so I can only assume that it's like this everywhere in the USA. Basically our state Senators and Representatives are grossly incompetent and spend most of their time debating things and passing bills that have little use to the average citizen. The only reason that anything useful gets done at all is because we've had a tradition of (mostly) strong and competent governors who force through the really meaningful stuff. I don't believe for a minute that moving the authority away from the federal level and down to the state level would make things better.
The article in the 2nd link (1st link only says "abstract" in the link) is a joke. Well, the people who wrote it are serious, but it's a joke. They honestly cited The Onion as a source for one of their points without mentioning that The Onion is a satirical site. Do they even know that? They offer no alternative. They only say that the whole drone strike idea isn't working.
I think this is another situation on Slashdot like talking about electric cars where some people don't understand what the real reason for them is. Slashdot talks about electric cars and then someone inevitably says "The manufacturing isn't carbon neutral. It spews tons of pollutants into the air. And the electricity that powers the cars isn't carbon neutral either. It doesn't reduce greenhouse gases to have electric cars." and so on. The point of electric cars is not at all to reduce greenhouse gases or that they are supposedly made in environment beneficial ways. The point is to reduce dependance on foreign oil, which just happens to mostly belong to countries that are US hostile and Western hostile.
The US government may claim that the strikes are to cripple Al Queda, but that's not the real point. The real point is to kill bad guys. Anwar al-Awlaki was a constant thorn in the US government's side, managing to even recruit US born terrorists to his cause. He's dead now. He can't personally recruit any other Americans or work to destabilize Yemen any more. Dead terrorists may be replaced by less competent terrorists. That's a win for the US. Younger people may not know, but the US and Western Europe have both tried the "let's do nothing" approach in the 70s and 80s and all that accomplished was that terrorists got emboldened to do even deadlier things because they believed that they'd never be held accountable. Killing some of them may convince some people who haven't joined that joining them may be a really bad idea. There's value in that.
Let's not forget the "patriots" who destroyed others' legal property in protest against their rightful government. What's the difference, anyway?
...the difference is that the patriots of the American Revolution spent a few decades lobbying and writing essays before any violence, pursuing a diplomatic resolution even after the fighting broke out.
No, the difference is that nobody got killed by the Boston Tea Party. Also American society mostly backed the Boston Tea Party and its goals. You can't really make that claim that the majority of Americans were sympathetic to the other 3 cited cases. When society says "You're wrong and crazy" that is a difference.
Has DRM ever worked? One instance? I've never heard of it lasting longer than a few days.
Yes it has. Yes it does . Examples:
1) BluRay DRM took years to crack. Even the anti-DRM geniuses were baffled by it and especially the BD+ stuff. If I remember correctly it basically took someone to dump computer memory while playback was going on to get cracking working. Some of the experts were concerned in the early days that BD+ might not ever be cracked.
2) Cinavia is an audio watermark used on some BluRay discs. It can also be used on DVDs although the DVD specification does not require that a DVD player recognize it, so the number of DVDs that use it is very small. Currently Sony is about the only studio paranoid enough to pay the licensing cost for using it. Other Hollywood studios either don't use it at all or barely use it (1 or 2 releases to date out of their entire catalog) for the most part. Nobody uses it as much as Sony. Workarounds have been found to enable software BluRay players to play copied discs, but Cinavia itself cannot be removed without damaging the audio track in a way that many people could notice. There are no workarounds for stand alone BluRay players - if they have firmware that recognizes Cinavia, they will recognize copied discs that contain it and stop playback at some point (anywhere from immediately to approximately 10 minutes after the movie has started).
3) Apple's DRM on iTunes video still hasn't been cracked and the only way around it is to play the video and record it in real time using a streaming media recorder program.
4) I don't really keep up, but I think Windows current Windows Media DRM hasn't been cracked at all. Older versions were cracked though.
5) Netflix and some other video streaming sources use DRM that hasn't been cracked yet. Real time recording via a streaming media recorder is the only way to copy such videos.
No doubt, China will cooperate fully in extraditing members of their active military so they can stand trial in the US for following their orders.
Not an Obama hater, but seriously, Russia and now China? Trying to start WWIII on two fronts, in case one backs down? 2016 can't come fast enough.
The response against Russia has been so weak that I am completely shocked that today Putin gave the order to pull back from the Ukrainian border. I am baffled about what this is supposed to accomplish in regards to China unless the real reason is to make the accused afraid to travel to the USA or possibly certain US friendly countries that might extradite them. Since the high ups in China love their foreign trips to "decadent" Western democracies, just stopping certain people from traveling and severely annoying them may be the real purpose here. I wouldn't worry about WWIII.
The US govt doesn't know the meaning of the word. Sovereignty's another.
Neither does the EU or probably most if not all other countries in the world. Did you know that France makes Ebay restrict certain listings on every Ebay site in the world, not just the French Ebay site, so that French citizens are theoretically prevented (by IP address) from (gasp!) seeing them? Italy has also tried to enforce its law beyond its national borders. Spain went so far as to try people from crimes committed in Latin America that had nothing to do with Spanish citizens. Austria put a Holocaust denier in jail for a while for statements he made in the UK, not Austria. Once he came to Austria they simply nabbed him and charged them under their anti-Nazi laws for something that didn't even happen on Austrian soil. So spare me the usual US bashing.
Story in a nutshell: Comcast exec predicts bandwidth cap.
WTF?
Crap. They changed the headline now. But yeah, even by Slashdot standards this was pretty bad. We're all used to the posts where some industry guy will say something like "Not X. I can give you complete 100% assurance that it is not X and never will be X. Totally not X." and some guy will post the article claiming "He said X! X is coming! They swear X is coming!" Reading comprehension is a lost skill around here. Changing words to give a completely different meaning? That seems to be a disturbing new one for Slashdot.
I rip my CD with Exact Audio Copy to FLAC and/or use iTunes and rip to Apple Lossless.
I want to mention something with regards to Exact Audio Copy that some/many people here may not know. EAC has a longstanding bug that has never (as far I know) been fixed, despite being known for years. If you try to rip from a BluRay drive, the ripping slows down to a crawl and can take an hour or more to rip a single CD. Notice that I said "or more". This problem does not exist on drives that can't read BluRay discs. Ripping on those drives happens at reasonable speeds.
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Oddly computer chess programs may already meet this criteria. The programs usually apply a weight or value to a move and a weight and a value to the consequences down stream of the move. But there are times when the consequences are of equal value at some event horizon and random choices must be applied. As a consequence sequences of moves may be made that no human has ever made and the programmer could not really predict either. As machines have gotten more able the event horizon is at a deeper level. But we might reach the point at which only the player playing white can ever hope to win and the player with black may always lose. We are not in danger of a human ever being able to do that unless we alter his brain.
I disagree with your conclusions about computer chess, although you are quite right that it seems unlikely that if chess is ever "solved" (this is the correct term for what you talk about) so that the white player can always force a win that humans will be capable of remembering the data required to always force a win. And chess is a theoretically solvable game.
Computer chess at the highest levels like Deep Blue is little more than a highly specialized data base lookup. The laws of chess require you to have to make a move within time constraints, so if the program can't pick between equally good choices, it would have to rely on some kind of random choice that the programmer would have allowed for (ie. use a random number generator or pick the line likely to result in more exchange of material, etc.). In the early days of computing it was thought that for computers to get really good at chess, they would have to be able to use some kind of AI, but damn IBM for realizing that they could cheat and simply throw massive amounts of processors, computer memory and massive databases of moves at the problem rather than having to actually do real AI work for computers to beat humans at it. That Deep Thought is just a variation on Deep Blue where it's really good at searching through databases of stored information rather than being able to actually do any real kind of AI work. Basically Deep Blue and Deep Thought are brute forcing a solution through technology rather than actually breaking any kind of AI ground, although they may have some really cool and nifty search algorithms to do the job that others lack.
Yes, it's certainly possible for any chess game to get "out of book" and get a sequence of moves where the outcome isn't known, but that can easily by handled by programming approaches that have existed for decades. For example, a program may look to see if the opponent has left a piece undefended by mistake and simply grab it if it doesn't seem to be a deliberate sacrifice (ie. "If I take piece A, will that leave me vulnerable to a next move attack by a different piece?"), you can try to simply exchange material, evaluate positional strength and play to that (ie. "I'm strong on the king side and my opponent is weak there, so I'll push for a king side attack") and so on. These kinds of approaches have been in the best computer chess programs for decades now and there's nothing novel about them.
Keep in mind, that TSA has yet to have stopped a single bombing. The only reasons we've not had a plane go down is due to lack of effort, not any increase in security. The few attempts that have been made, made it through the TSA with ease and it was the efforts of passengers or the stupidity of the attacker that saved the plane.
The famous "few attempts that have been made" originated in foreign countries, not in the USA. You admit that there is a "lack of effort". Huh. You'd like us to believe that this is because "teh TSA am stoopid" or something that amounts to that, but in fact it very well could be that the bad guys have decided that the likelihood of getting a bomb on a plane is not "100%" or close to it like you seem to believe but quite a bit below that. I'd say maybe a 5-10% chance of getting through security successfully. Suicide bombers are a limited quantity and the chance of failure could be a disaster because if the would be bomber gets caught by the TSA, the US government now has access to the type of bomb being used and may be able to get the failed terrorist to talk. This is exactly what happened with Richard Reid.
People have car alarms not because they believe that it makes their car impossible to break into but because it raises the bar so that it may be more trouble than it's worth. Actually I think the TSA is working because if it was truly as bad as you and other complainers claim, there would have been a successful attempt already. I think the bad guys have decided that the risk is too high that they won't get away with it and the success would not be worth the risk of getting caught.
I wish I could find out when the last time is that you even flew to/from/within the USA. I had a friend a few years ago who would go into a full blown hissy fit and rant about the TSA, making pretty much the same arguments as you. He last flew around 1998 and he is very likely to never in his life get on a plane again. It has nothing at all to do with the TSA - he has no reason or desire to ever travel by plane. Yet from all his complaining you'd think that he was some kind of hard core road warrior who was at a different US airport every week. I have found that in general the people who complain the most about the TSA are the people who fly the least.
Let's get this clear - it's not illegal for Americans to travel to Cuba. Not at all.
Got that? Good. Now what is illegal, thanks to President Kennedy, is for Americans to spend money there without prior authorization from the US Department of Treasury. This is how the US government "gets" people who go to Cuba without permission. See, Kennedy signed the order during the Cold War and to prevent the Communists from arguing that the US was repressive and taking away the freedom of its citizens to go to Cuba, Kennedy simply made it illegal to spend money there unless you got special authorization to do so. Very rarely are US citizens truly forbidden from traveling anyway. I think in the past there may have been a few places where we actually legally couldn't travel to, but I'm not sure if any exist any more. I suppose it's worth mentioning that generally it's only when a Republican is president that the US government gets interested in prosecuting citizens for spending money in Cuba without prior authorization. This has not been a high priority of the Clinton or Obama presidencies.
Granted the bit about being able to travel to Cuba legally but not able to spend money there without prior authorization is a fine line and essentially the legal cases against such travelers have involved the US government arguing (probably without proof) that the traveler couldn't go there and not spend money. It's all a crock. It's not well known but my understanding (I have no personal experience here) is that the Obama administration has made it much easier for US citizens to go to Cuba legally via authorized cultural travel groups so there's not really a reason to just skirt the law and go without permission. The Bush administration had much tighter restrictions on travel to Cuba and a history of prosecuting citizens who got caught going there without prior authorization.
You raise some good points and you may be right, but I wondering if this is actually a sign that the CCP is losing control over the PLA (People's Liberation Army). For years to keep the military at their beck and call, the CCP has been working the propaganda machine into overdrive. My experience is that the average Chinese person, at least those in the big cities and not rural people, doesn't really trust the government or believe everything they say, but the propaganda works really well for those who join the PLA. I feel that China's military is pretty unprofessional and looking to start trouble and this is because they've been indoctrinated to believe that everybody is against good old China because of jealousy and if China doesn't fight tooth and nail for everything, they'll wind up with nothing. Throw in a few references to treaties they don't like that were signed in the 1800s (none of which are in force today, by the way) to bolster the claim that they've always been the victim and you have a military that acts like a rabid dog. Also, it doesn't help that the constitution of China pledges the PLA to defend the CCP, not China itself. So the CCP is at once both the state and more important than the state at the same time. It may be that all these years of indoctrination are bearing their inevitable ugly fruit now and they have to keep them busy building islands so they don't try to force an invasion of Taiwan, something that would possibly result in the US and Japan attacking China over.
This is a pissing war. Both sides may be sincere and well intentioned, but it's still a pissing war. Here's a manager type summary. I'll use TC to represent the TC developer who responder and Forkers for the person representing the people who want to fork it.
Forkers: We'd like your permission to fork your code and get the rights to it. We could just fork it without your permission and others no doubt will if you refuse to comply. We want your trademarks and your OK to put the forked code into a different license then you used. We've started looking at your code and while we do agree that there are problems there that desperately need to be fixed, we feel strongly that fixing your broken code is a million times easier than writing this from scratch. So will you play ball with us?
TC: Our code is so broken that you need to start from scratch. That's why we abandoned it - didn't think it was possible to fix without doing a complete re-write. So no, we're not going to "play ball".
China worried about the logical consequences of its own provocations against Japan as well as failing to heel those of North Korea (who essentially only China has open lines of communication).
Actually, I think you're wrong on both accounts. The military in China is a little bit crazy. Did you know that they are pledged by the constitution to support the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) rather than China itself? Think about that for a while. The civilian CCP government does control the PLA (People's Liberation Army), but for years now the PLA has been gaining in influence. I'm not sure even the CCP government really cares all that much about its provocations any more because they don't believe anybody will stand up to them, not even the USA.
China and North Korea are stuck with each other. Russia had the good sense to get out of that crazy game of financially supporting them early in Yeltsin's presidency, and that left China holding the bag. China doesn't have as much influence as you might think, nor do they use what little they have as well as they could. It's not well known by the public, but China has a lot of business deals with North Korea where basically they get rare earths and other minerals for below market rates. These deals are very important to China and are the main reason they prop up North Korea. China is really tired of North Korea behaving badly and causing trouble in its backyard, but they fear even more a united democratic Korea that might (who knows?) have US troops stationed in it near the Chinese border. So like it or not, they are committed firmly to the status quo because it represents a "least evil" option to them. When China says that they want a nuclear free Korean peninsula, they are quite sincere about that. They don't trust North Korea to maybe not use a nuke against them in anger or by mistake as their missile systems might simply go the wrong way and blow up in China by accident. But they aren't willing to do anything to get rid of the Kims and the Kims aren't getting rid of their nukes because they believe that their family survival depends on it. The only ways that North Korea is ever going to be nuclear free is that either the US is going to attack them and gamble that they can destroy their few nuclear missiles before they leave North Korean airspace or (much less likely) the regime will collapse quickly for some unforeseen reason and the new government will get rid of the nukes.
It is quite likely they have a few that they don't talk about just as Israel has a few they don't talk about. And while we're at it, South Korea probably has a couple as well.
Actually, it's not likely at all that either Japan or South Korea "have a few they don't talk about". Do I believe that both countries could possibly produce a nuclear weapon? Yes. But untested nukes are useless because they may not work. Neither country has ever carried out a test. Believe me, if they did, you would know about it. South Korea seems a bit iffier here because they've had some satellite launch problems so I've got a hunch that they may not necessarily be ready right now to make a nuke. With time? Yes. Absolutely. If I had to bet on it right now, I'd bet that Japan could probably produce one that would work correctly on a first try. The only only other country in Asia that was ever rumored to have nuclear weapon capability was Taiwan because they were strongly suspected of helping Israel and South Africa do nuclear testing decades ago, but as a Taiwan watcher I can say that if they ever had the capability, they abandoned it and it would be very difficult to impossible for them to quickly get that going again. In fact, I feel pretty confident that they don't have even one nuclear weapon and there is a chance that they simply don't have as much knowledge as Israel and South Africa did at the time. South Africa willingly became a nuclear free state but if you look carefully you find things where SA government officials admit that they know how to make nuclear weapons, but they chose not to do so.
For those who don't understand the reference, the Keystone Cops were incompetent policemen in a series of American silent movies. I read the article linked to in the article and basically Nokia dropped the money off in a paper bag in a parking lot and the police watched the pickup and then completely lost the blackmailer. To this day they have no idea at all who got the money and it seems that Nokia has only the word of the blackmailer that they wouldn't use the keys for nefarious purposes.
A mobile OS that isn't Apple's Garden of Pure Ideology, or linked directly to the mothership in Redmond if you actually want to do much of anything would also be nice to see.
Good morning, Mr. Rip Van Winkle. There are mobile phones that run an OS called Android that you seem not to have heard of but exactly meet your criteria. You might want to check that out. You can actually buy those in the USA right now.
I would encourage you to look closer. Just because the mainstream media didn't cover the trouble doesn't mean it didn't happen. Other news sources would disagree with your assertion that horrible things didn't happen to the visitors in S.Africa. But it is certainly true that crime was reduced while the world cup was being held, so in "relative terms" it's true. But it was also extremely temporary. They almost literally declared martial law in the region where the cup was held, but surrounding areas? Not so much. Visitors who wandered outside of designated areas did so at their own peril and were informed of such.
The word "bubble" comes to mind.
I was there in South Africa for the World Cup. Were you? If not, you don't get to pass off rumors as facts. And if you're one of those racist Afrikaners, your opinion means nothing because a lot of you are still living in the past.
I don't know where this "They almost literally declared martial law" stuff comes from. I stayed in the home of some South African friends, who by the way would have been classified as "colored" in the old Apartheid system, and other than having a lot more tourists, it was pretty much life goes on as usual there. I didn't see any unusual numbers of police or military anywhere. I went to two different major cities and even went with a friend to Kruger National Park for a few days and at no time did I see any unusual number of police or military, nor did I hear on the local news about tourists being the victims of crime. Yes, I'm sure that somewhere some tourist there got victimized in some way, but this suggestion that there was plenty of crime that got covered up is just nonsense. Your reference to the "mainstream media" troubles me quite a bit because that could suggest that you get your information from sources that the majority of us feel are unreliable and too politically oriented.
I can't speak for other countries where things may be different, but the US rules on exclusion that the Red Cross uses get more and more exclusionary every year and are now a bit nuts in my opinion. I was a regular blood donor and they used to call me and tell me that they liked to get my blood because it was "unusually clean" and was very suitable for giving to infants. Early this year I tried to donate and they deferred me for a year. Want to know why? It's because I rode on a train for no more than 60 minutes through a "malaria area". I traveled last year to China and I took a train ride of not more than 60 minutes between two large towns. The towns themselves were fine, but the area between them is supposedly a "malaria risk area". Even though I have had zero symptoms they consider my blood to be "at risk for malaria" and I can't donate until 1 year after the trip. So I'm sorry infants, but no blood from me for a while. The Red Cross had a worker who called me a few days after my deferral to talk to me about it and I told her that I felt that the Red Cross was far too exclusionary and she said she agreed with me, but there was nothing she could do about it. OK, maybe some of you will say that while there is little chance I have malaria, it's not zero and they need to be careful. OK, maybe - maybe - you have a point. Maybe. But are you aware that since last year there have been new exclusionary rules on women and now in the USA the majority of women who have ever been pregnant, even if they lost the baby, now cannot ever donate blood? Pregnant women may contain some kind of anti-body that a small number of blood recipients react violently towards so they've decided to ban something like 75% of pregnant women from ever donating again because that's about how many have this anti-body. It's going to reach the point where the only people the Red Cross in the US will ever take blood from are men who have never traveled outside the US even once. I predict that will be the next restriction.
I'm not sure how, but I'd never heard of this "Comics Code" you mentioned in your question. Wow! That's a hell of a story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... Thank god that's dead.
It's even worse then you think. Here's the story that many believe on why it really got started.
EC Publications had a successful line of comics in the early 1950s that changed the industry. EC was very successful and they had some of the best artists ever to work in the comics such as Jack Davis, Graham Ingels, Wally Wood, etc. EC's most successful comics were 3 horror comics - Tales From The Crypt, The Haunt Of Fear, and The Vault Of Horror. Anybody remember the old HBO TV series "Tales From The Crypt"? Well, they licensed the title and the concept from EC and even had some episodes based on stories that ran in the comics. EC had other comics such as crime story, war story and sci-fi. All are considered classics.
In an effort to give editor/writer/artist Harvey Kurtzman a chance to earn more money by giving him another comic to edit, Mad was created - as a comic book, not a magazine. Mad became a gigantic success and spawned quite a few imitators, including EC's own official imitation of Mad comic (yes, they really advertised it as such), Panic. Mad the comic did a lot of comics parodies and one they parodied was Archie. The story was called Starchie and they turned him into a juvenile delinquent. Now it is true that at the time some psychologists were actually suggesting that the reason so many kids were "juvenile delinquents" were that comics were warping their poor little minds. Desperate parents latched onto this explanation and the US Senate actually held hearings on it.
The story goes that the guy who published Archie just completely lost his mind over the Mad parody. In his fury, he got some other creators of (mostly less successful than EC) comics to create the Comics Code to "save the kids". Think about the children! Won't somebody think about the children! Well, it just so happens that the Code specifically forbade the use of certain words in comic book titles that just happened to be ones used by EC and they specifically forbade the types of stories that EC published. Was it coincidence? Revenge? I lean towards the latter. Remember, the US was a much less litigious place in those days. People didn't sue over anything and if you tried that, it often didn't work. EC responded by dropping all of their titles except Mad and putting out a new series of comics that had high quality art and conformed to the Code, but as these were nothing like their previous comics, they failed and nobody bought them. EC made one last gasp attempt to avoid the code with a series of "picto-fiction" magazines that had a few drawings and were mostly text, but nobody wanted those either. Mad became a magazine to avoid the Code altogether and the comics line was killed off by EC. So basically the story is that the Comics Code came into being to specifically punish EC Publications for doing a parody of Archie with the cover story being that the Code was there to "protect the children". Mad's original creator Harvey Kurtzman got into trouble with Archie again in the early 1960s when he did another parody starring Goodman Beaver and called "Goodman Goes Playboy". This parody featured Archie and various other characters now living the Playboy lifestyle. Archie's publisher sued again and forced a settlement where the copyright got transferred to him. The story vanished for decades but the copyright failed to be renewed and it's actually in the public domain now, one of the rare things that passed into public domain before the dreaded Bono Act made copyright renewal automatic.
If Snowden hadn't been treated like a traitor by his country, he wouldn't've had to flee in the first place. Uncle Sam only have himself to blame if snowden is spilling the beans in Russia.
You don't understand the event sequence, so you are wrong. It went like this.
1) Snowden steals a bunch of documents in secret. He flies to Hong Kong. At this point, nobody knows anything about him or what he has done except Snowden himself.
2) While in Hong Kong, Snowden gives a bunch of documents to various members of the press and holds a press conference to announce what he has done and to point out that he "had" to do it because it was the only way to let the American people know the truth.
3) The US government wakes up and realizes it has a really big problem on its hands. It's only now that the "traitor" charges begin and the US leans on China to send him back, instead prompting China to turn a blind eye as Russia agrees to make this its problem and headache to deal with. This gets China off the hook, although the Chinese have surely previously copied Snowden's stuff and possibly reached a deal with the USSR, cough cough, I mean Russia to share with each other what they find out.
Is it that he's being paid a market price for his team? How could it have been otherwise?
Well, technically you are correct, but the problem is that before this sale, only the Chicago Bulls ($1 billion) and the Los Angeles Lakers ($1.3 billion), were valued at even one billion US dollars among NBA teams. Basically what we have is a bunch of billionaires who for no good reason got into a bidding war on a team that has never even played for a championship, let alone won one, and the "winner" was the guy who was willing to badly overpay the most. Right now it's difficult to understand how this deal makes sense for Ballmer. And if he personally has the billions available to make this deal rather than just being a front man for an investment group, then he is maybe the most badly overpaid CEO in history. A few years ago an investment group shocked everybody by paying $2 billion US dollars for the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, but the deal began to make sense when you took into account that the team got a TV contract that was something like maybe $6 billion dollars. Nobody expected the Dodgers to sell for even a billion dollars, but a bidding war ensued and basically the winners were a group that could pay $2 billion up front and make it back on the TV contract. There's no evidence yet that Ballmer can get this money back and right now it just looks like a stupid decision where a jobless rich boy paid more than he should for the bragging rights of owning an NBA team. Maybe things will change in a few years and with new TV money he'll look like a genius, but right now it just looks like a bad deal.
Looks better, works simpler, uses a sane resolution....
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bublcam/bublcam-360o-camera-technology-for-everyone
They are well into stretch goals...
Worse technology (check the 1080p frame rate - yikes! That will not look natural at all.) Higher price. It does look better though. The main difference is what I see as a problem with a lot of Kickstarter campaigns. Bublcam is getting funded because they asked for less than half of what the other guys want. There's a really simple rule of Kickstarter - the less money you ask for, the more likely you are to get it. The other guys raised more money than Bublcam, but because their goal was so high, they failed to reach it. I've seen quite a few funding campaigns fail because while the product was worthwhile, the amount asked for to fund it was not realistic. I think it was yesterday we had an article about an Indiegogo campaign for a robot to help with a malaria vaccine and while the goal is quite worthwhile, the amount asked for was too high for a disease that doesn't effect the vast majority of Slashdotters and unless things change drastically, it won't be funded either.
Look people, this is NOT a 2A issue, this is a 1A issue. When does censorship stop? Why can't gun plans be published?
This may be a first amendment issue, or perhaps it is a second amendment issue, but that will be up to a court to decide. What you fail to understand is that like many Americans (I am American too, so I"m allowed to say that), you think that all rights are absolute but they are not. Even Justice Scalia, who is as conservative as they come on the Supreme Court, pointed out in a gun ruling that the Supreme Court wasn't saying that there couldn't be any restrictions on guns just because the second amendment existed. The classic easy to understand example is that your right to free speech does not give you the right to yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater when there isn't one and cause a panic leading to injuries and possibly death and then you just shrug it off and tell the police "You can't do anything to me. I exercised my free speech rights." Your right to free speech does not mean you can lie while under oath, for another example. If someone was to get your social security number, your bank account information, your address, credit card information and passwords to various accounts and publish that, would you happily ignore that as your life falls apart because the publisher was simply exercising his free speech rights?
NASA holding onto an out-moded Space Shuttle design, crimped the US's space efforts for decades.
Welcome to the Space X Dragon and someone finally with GUTS; Elon Musk.
Well, there are reasons why NASA pushed the shuttle for so long that have nothing to do with incompetency. The whole "Gee whiz! Look kids! It's reusable!" approach was a way to save money in the face of budget cuts. Why were budgets being cut, do you ask? Well, there is no shortage of Americans who say "Why are we throwing away money on NASA for nothing when we have too many problems at home to fix?" It took a long time and 2 spectacular fatal events before the message got driven home so clearly that even a government bureaucrat couldn't miss it that bolting the shuttle to giant launch rockets was always going to have a small but always present chance of a fatal accident that was unacceptably high. Putting a capsule on top of a rocket isn't sexy, but it works. Russia hasn't had even one fatality related to their launch system. NASA's ongoing Orion project is using the old school capsule approach because it just works. I fully commend Musk for getting Space X to where it is as he's going to basically save the space station, but NASA does now understand that right now the whole reusable shuttle idea is a bad one. Columbia drove it home that the shuttle could never be as safe as it needed to be because the whole idea was fatally flawed, so the only way to quickly get things done was to turn to private industry. Orion is going OK as far as I know, but the pace is pretty slow and it won't be passenger ready until probably a few years after Space X is already taking people to the space station.
As bad as politicians are at the federal level, they're even worse at state and local levels. The state where I live has a problem that all the neighboring states have too so I can only assume that it's like this everywhere in the USA. Basically our state Senators and Representatives are grossly incompetent and spend most of their time debating things and passing bills that have little use to the average citizen. The only reason that anything useful gets done at all is because we've had a tradition of (mostly) strong and competent governors who force through the really meaningful stuff. I don't believe for a minute that moving the authority away from the federal level and down to the state level would make things better.
The article in the 2nd link (1st link only says "abstract" in the link) is a joke. Well, the people who wrote it are serious, but it's a joke. They honestly cited The Onion as a source for one of their points without mentioning that The Onion is a satirical site. Do they even know that? They offer no alternative. They only say that the whole drone strike idea isn't working.
I think this is another situation on Slashdot like talking about electric cars where some people don't understand what the real reason for them is. Slashdot talks about electric cars and then someone inevitably says "The manufacturing isn't carbon neutral. It spews tons of pollutants into the air. And the electricity that powers the cars isn't carbon neutral either. It doesn't reduce greenhouse gases to have electric cars." and so on. The point of electric cars is not at all to reduce greenhouse gases or that they are supposedly made in environment beneficial ways. The point is to reduce dependance on foreign oil, which just happens to mostly belong to countries that are US hostile and Western hostile.
The US government may claim that the strikes are to cripple Al Queda, but that's not the real point. The real point is to kill bad guys. Anwar al-Awlaki was a constant thorn in the US government's side, managing to even recruit US born terrorists to his cause. He's dead now. He can't personally recruit any other Americans or work to destabilize Yemen any more. Dead terrorists may be replaced by less competent terrorists. That's a win for the US. Younger people may not know, but the US and Western Europe have both tried the "let's do nothing" approach in the 70s and 80s and all that accomplished was that terrorists got emboldened to do even deadlier things because they believed that they'd never be held accountable. Killing some of them may convince some people who haven't joined that joining them may be a really bad idea. There's value in that.
Let's not forget the "patriots" who destroyed others' legal property in protest against their rightful government. What's the difference, anyway?
...the difference is that the patriots of the American Revolution spent a few decades lobbying and writing essays before any violence, pursuing a diplomatic resolution even after the fighting broke out.
No, the difference is that nobody got killed by the Boston Tea Party. Also American society mostly backed the Boston Tea Party and its goals. You can't really make that claim that the majority of Americans were sympathetic to the other 3 cited cases. When society says "You're wrong and crazy" that is a difference.
Has DRM ever worked? One instance? I've never heard of it lasting longer than a few days.
Yes it has. Yes it does . Examples:
1) BluRay DRM took years to crack. Even the anti-DRM geniuses were baffled by it and especially the BD+ stuff. If I remember correctly it basically took someone to dump computer memory while playback was going on to get cracking working. Some of the experts were concerned in the early days that BD+ might not ever be cracked.
2) Cinavia is an audio watermark used on some BluRay discs. It can also be used on DVDs although the DVD specification does not require that a DVD player recognize it, so the number of DVDs that use it is very small. Currently Sony is about the only studio paranoid enough to pay the licensing cost for using it. Other Hollywood studios either don't use it at all or barely use it (1 or 2 releases to date out of their entire catalog) for the most part. Nobody uses it as much as Sony. Workarounds have been found to enable software BluRay players to play copied discs, but Cinavia itself cannot be removed without damaging the audio track in a way that many people could notice. There are no workarounds for stand alone BluRay players - if they have firmware that recognizes Cinavia, they will recognize copied discs that contain it and stop playback at some point (anywhere from immediately to approximately 10 minutes after the movie has started).
3) Apple's DRM on iTunes video still hasn't been cracked and the only way around it is to play the video and record it in real time using a streaming media recorder program.
4) I don't really keep up, but I think Windows current Windows Media DRM hasn't been cracked at all. Older versions were cracked though.
5) Netflix and some other video streaming sources use DRM that hasn't been cracked yet. Real time recording via a streaming media recorder is the only way to copy such videos.
No doubt, China will cooperate fully in extraditing members of their active military so they can stand trial in the US for following their orders.
Not an Obama hater, but seriously, Russia and now China? Trying to start WWIII on two fronts, in case one backs down? 2016 can't come fast enough.
The response against Russia has been so weak that I am completely shocked that today Putin gave the order to pull back from the Ukrainian border. I am baffled about what this is supposed to accomplish in regards to China unless the real reason is to make the accused afraid to travel to the USA or possibly certain US friendly countries that might extradite them. Since the high ups in China love their foreign trips to "decadent" Western democracies, just stopping certain people from traveling and severely annoying them may be the real purpose here. I wouldn't worry about WWIII.
The US govt doesn't know the meaning of the word. Sovereignty's another.
Neither does the EU or probably most if not all other countries in the world. Did you know that France makes Ebay restrict certain listings on every Ebay site in the world, not just the French Ebay site, so that French citizens are theoretically prevented (by IP address) from (gasp!) seeing them? Italy has also tried to enforce its law beyond its national borders. Spain went so far as to try people from crimes committed in Latin America that had nothing to do with Spanish citizens. Austria put a Holocaust denier in jail for a while for statements he made in the UK, not Austria. Once he came to Austria they simply nabbed him and charged them under their anti-Nazi laws for something that didn't even happen on Austrian soil. So spare me the usual US bashing.
Headline: "Comcast predicts storage cap"
Story in a nutshell: Comcast exec predicts bandwidth cap.
WTF?
Crap. They changed the headline now. But yeah, even by Slashdot standards this was pretty bad. We're all used to the posts where some industry guy will say something like "Not X. I can give you complete 100% assurance that it is not X and never will be X. Totally not X." and some guy will post the article claiming "He said X! X is coming! They swear X is coming!" Reading comprehension is a lost skill around here. Changing words to give a completely different meaning? That seems to be a disturbing new one for Slashdot.
I rip my CD with Exact Audio Copy to FLAC and/or use iTunes and rip to Apple Lossless.
I want to mention something with regards to Exact Audio Copy that some/many people here may not know. EAC has a longstanding bug that has never (as far I know) been fixed, despite being known for years. If you try to rip from a BluRay drive, the ripping slows down to a crawl and can take an hour or more to rip a single CD. Notice that I said "or more". This problem does not exist on drives that can't read BluRay discs. Ripping on those drives happens at reasonable speeds.