Suppose a couple decides to have themselves cloned, and raise the clones as children. This could lead to some strange social consequences. What would happen if the children fell in love, and decided to start a family of their own? Secondly, if that were to happen, would the children be at all attracted to their parents?
Next problem. We've got technology that can use biotechnology as a security measure, because (in theory, anyway) no two fingerprints/retina scans/voiceprints/etc. are the same. What would happen if we had 50 people with the same physical features? That would almost certainly kill this security technology because it would probably be ineffective against clones (perhaps not the voiceprints, but otherwise . ..).
Finally, and this is again in the security area, wouldn't clones be far more likely to guess your passwords?
If you read the information that comes with the receivers and cards, you'll notice that they state that the cards are the property of Hughes and are on loan to the user. So they aren't liable for a lawsuit because they were destroying property they owned.
I can't believe how carefully this would have had to be planned. Sending a few bytes at a time to form a program? And nobody in the DirecTV cracker community caught on? If they were bright enough to reverse engineer the smartcards themselves, in addition to the code on them, you'd think at least one of them would have analyzed the "random" bytes coming through the satellite dish and noticed a program being formed. After all, they did code workarounds into their cracks (which probably included the parts of the program that had come down the "wire").
Now Slackware runs on Alphas, too. I can put one right next to my coffemaker that runs Linux. It used to run Java, but that made the coffee too strong.
If someone can get a small, powerful 3D engine on a PDA, coupled with a 3D accelleration chipset, this could lead to a very useful architectural tool, or perhaps something for sending messages R2D2-style (until there are widespread, portable holographic displays).
I see a couple of problems with this. First, Quake for a PDA would probably be more than a bit difficult to control (lack of real keyboard, etc.). Second, every PDA (that I know of, anyway) uses an LCD screen. LCD screens are terrible at displaying dark colors while you're in a room with more light than, say, a Christmas tree bulb.
Until flat CRT becomes affordable/common, and unless there are more buttons/keys/ways of controlling PDAs, I don't see many people playing this for more than a few minutes.
I've encountered the ASCII filter before. Since CmdrTaco answered the question about troll filters, and I don't pay attention to the/. hirarchy, I e-mail him. I still haven't gotten any replies yet, though.
What exactly is flawed in the first edition? I've got a copy of the advance proof, but not a first edition. I did notice spelling errors, etc., but nothing on a major scale.
Sony is a large record company (and a movie company, too, I think; someone correct me if I'm wrong). Many large record companies are against filesharing technologies (hence the push for copy-protected hard drives). This is just the next logical step in killing off all possible support for copying music, movies, and all other copyrighted content (which is what the MPAA is trying to do). What surprises me, though, is that they waited this long to do something.
If you don't believe me, look at what they did with the Playstation and Playstation 2s. You have to buy a mod chip or use the swap trick because PSX discs have 0s written in the blocks which CDR and CDRW drives write checksums to.
> The Requester shall operate facilities capable of terminating customer leased line IP connections onto a router in at least 50% of the geographic region in which the WorldCom Internet Network with which it desires to interconnect operates such facilities. This currently equates to 15 states in the United States, 8 countries in Europe, or 2 countries in the Asia-Pacific region.
Hmmm. If they're just trying to hook their larger competitors into a deal, what good does it do anyone else? They forbid peering with their networks through anyone else (presumably companies already peering). Anyone who's got enough equipment to cover half UUNet's geographic area is going to be pretty lonely at the top. How many ISPs do you know of (no, AOL is *not* an ISP, it's an advertising agency . ..) that even come close to this one requirement?
> "Although I can't yet release proprietary technical information publicly, there are other ways we might be able to help out with this sort of project. For example, we may be able to help with testing or verification of compatibility with various revisions of Dreamcast hardware."
There were reports of Iraq buying up lots of PS2s, but this seems like a much better solution. BSD has an already understood architecture (although it would be running on bizzare hardware), a wide source base (versus almost nothing for the PS2), etc. With the ethernet adaptor being released eventually, these things could probably be more cost effective for clustered processing than PS2s.
You're forgetting that people can spoof IP addresses. One day, when I was bored, I decided to test my firewall, so I had a friend of mine ping me/portscan me/etc. w/a spoofed address of 64.28.67.48 (look familiar, anyone?). Just because it looks like Harvard's trying to connect on prt 137, that doesn't mean they really are.
ISP terms of service today generally seem to be oriented toward forcing the customers to only use certain parts (sites) of the HTTP protocol (and POP/IMAP and SMTP). Sprint's TOS is an excellent example. You're not permitted to download virii/illegal material (FTP), run game servers (misc. protocols), run servers (part of HTTP, FTP, IRC, etc.), portscan (test for various protocols), spam (SMTP), post things that they don't agree with (NNTP, HTTP, etc.), "post, publish, transmit, reproduce, distribute or in any way exploit any information, software or other material obtained through Services for commercial purposes" (you can't use it to make money in *any* way), "upload, post, publish, reproduce, transmit or distribute in any way any component of the Services or derivative works, as Services are copyrighted as a collective work under U.S. copyright laws" (you even look at a copyrighted picture and you've violated the TOS), use anonymous mail (various HTTP sites, and POP/IMAP/SMTP servers), "make any unauthorized attempt to gain access to any account or computer resource not belonging to that user" (telnet), etc. While some of these things aren't strictly forbidden, "Sprint may take any action it deems appropriate without notice to protect the Services and its facilities for provision of the Services" (i.e. they can cut off your service for any reason, at any time).
the plugins. You can get a plugin to do just about anything. For instance, many of you have probably heard of AOLiza. Occasionally, I've got a bot running on TheAliceBot. That screen name uses a GAIM plugin to turn it into a bot based on the Alice bot engine (it works GAIM version 9.20, but not the latest version of GAIM; perhaps someone could edit the source and post a link . . . ?). You can't do that with AOL's IM client. Secondly, you can have more than one instance of GAIM running on the same desktop, each logged onto a different screen name. You can't do that either (without a patch) with AOL's client.
Hmmm. Yes, you're right. I realized that the possiblity of foreign nationals requisitioning documents is fairly high, but I thought that it'd at least be one more hoop for them to jump through. Thinking it through again, it doesn't make any sense.
They could tell others the document number. Because people would be able to requisition documents themselves, all someone would have to do would be to have a TV news station show the doc number and have people requisition it. I advocate keeping people from discussing the documents' conents in the open, not from discussing the documents themselves.
The Freedom of Information Act is a bit to permissive, IMHO. There should be a small clause in it preventing people from taking about the specifics of what they got using it outside of special forums, or some such meetingplace. Sure, it's old technology, but there are plenty of foreign nations (some of them hostile) that don't have comparable technology. People should be free to tell others what they learned in a topical faction, and let them request the documents on their own (maybe including a provision for filling out a quick form at city hall, and come back in a week for the documents).
It's like the way we have been using our military. The press wants details for everything we do, as we do it. Oops, the foreign government we're fighting got a copy of today's paper? Now they know exactly what we're doing, and a list of probable reasons why. How'd they know how to retaliate?
We should be able to requisition documents from the government, but they shouldn't be public domain. Simply restrict discussion of the material.
I think you'd be better off with a regular SVGA monitor. Standard TVs generally have resolutions of 512x384. I'm not sure about arcade monitors, but you'd probably get something comparable. BTW, if you really wanted to turn it into a hack job, you could probably wire the joysticks into the joystick port on the computer. You can use a pair of 2-button joysticks in the same port at the same time.
were part of the reason the Internet economy became so popular. Many people began to see technology for what it is: integral to all parts of our lives, wheter we like it or not. People decided to take advantage of it. This helped lead to the Internet stock craze, but it also helped the economy in a more direct way. Companies were willing to give huge piles of cash to people who could certify their systems as being Y2K compatible. That provided a huge boost to our economy. It's cooling off now, but it gave us a shot in the arm that set the stage for the mass deployment of Internet companies. Granted, you have to be more careful as an Internet company today, but investors are willing to invest in a good, solid money-making company. Technology awareness was heightened because people were curious and looked at computers to see what all the fuss was about.
You're neglecting the Norweigian countries. Either Sweden or The Netherlands (I've forgotten which) has an average income tax of 90%. This is because nearly everything is socialized in the country. What happens then is people become lazy, figuring that no matter what, they'll be covered by the government, and they won't be able to make any decent money that's not taken by taxes anyway, so why bother?
The difference between charity and government handing out benefits is the simple fact that charity is voluntary. It's a matter of my own ethics. If you'll look at one of my earlier posts, I do support price caps on health care (it's far too expensive now). Cut health care prices down to a reasonable level and the health care industry will be able to cover a lot more people (because more people will be able to afford it), charities will be able to help more people, and because health care isn't much different from one doctor to the next, they'd have great incentive to provide discounts (i.e. agree to come in for 4 checkups this year and get a 50% discount) to get more customers. I am not justifying greed and the neglect of the less fortunate, but what I am saying is that I don't agree with the government assuming the role of caretaker.
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Suppose a couple decides to have themselves cloned, and raise the clones as children. This could lead to some strange social consequences. What would happen if the children fell in love, and decided to start a family of their own? Secondly, if that were to happen, would the children be at all attracted to their parents?
.).
Next problem. We've got technology that can use biotechnology as a security measure, because (in theory, anyway) no two fingerprints/retina scans/voiceprints/etc. are the same. What would happen if we had 50 people with the same physical features? That would almost certainly kill this security technology because it would probably be ineffective against clones (perhaps not the voiceprints, but otherwise . .
Finally, and this is again in the security area, wouldn't clones be far more likely to guess your passwords?
If you read the information that comes with the receivers and cards, you'll notice that they state that the cards are the property of Hughes and are on loan to the user. So they aren't liable for a lawsuit because they were destroying property they owned.
I can't believe how carefully this would have had to be planned. Sending a few bytes at a time to form a program? And nobody in the DirecTV cracker community caught on? If they were bright enough to reverse engineer the smartcards themselves, in addition to the code on them, you'd think at least one of them would have analyzed the "random" bytes coming through the satellite dish and noticed a program being formed. After all, they did code workarounds into their cracks (which probably included the parts of the program that had come down the "wire").
Now Slackware runs on Alphas, too. I can put one right next to my coffemaker that runs Linux. It used to run Java, but that made the coffee too strong.
> Though getting it on to a nintendo cartridge would probably be the harder part
Not particularly. You can get all the hardware you would need (including flash carts) at http://www.reinerziegler.de
If someone can get a small, powerful 3D engine on a PDA, coupled with a 3D accelleration chipset, this could lead to a very useful architectural tool, or perhaps something for sending messages R2D2-style (until there are widespread, portable holographic displays).
I see a couple of problems with this. First, Quake for a PDA would probably be more than a bit difficult to control (lack of real keyboard, etc.). Second, every PDA (that I know of, anyway) uses an LCD screen. LCD screens are terrible at displaying dark colors while you're in a room with more light than, say, a Christmas tree bulb.
Until flat CRT becomes affordable/common, and unless there are more buttons/keys/ways of controlling PDAs, I don't see many people playing this for more than a few minutes.
I've encountered the ASCII filter before. Since CmdrTaco answered the question about troll filters, and I don't pay attention to the /. hirarchy, I e-mail him. I still haven't gotten any replies yet, though.
Seriously. It was filtered as ASCII art. I uploaded a copy onto my Crosswinds account. http://www.crosswinds.net/~kreeblah/slashCII.html
What exactly is flawed in the first edition? I've got a copy of the advance proof, but not a first edition. I did notice spelling errors, etc., but nothing on a major scale.
Sony is a large record company (and a movie company, too, I think; someone correct me if I'm wrong). Many large record companies are against filesharing technologies (hence the push for copy-protected hard drives). This is just the next logical step in killing off all possible support for copying music, movies, and all other copyrighted content (which is what the MPAA is trying to do). What surprises me, though, is that they waited this long to do something.
If you don't believe me, look at what they did with the Playstation and Playstation 2s. You have to buy a mod chip or use the swap trick because PSX discs have 0s written in the blocks which CDR and CDRW drives write checksums to.
> The Requester shall operate facilities capable of terminating customer leased line IP connections onto a router in at least 50% of the geographic region in which the WorldCom Internet Network with which it desires to interconnect operates such facilities. This currently equates to 15 states in the United States, 8 countries in Europe, or 2 countries in the Asia-Pacific region.
.) that even come close to this one requirement?
Hmmm. If they're just trying to hook their larger competitors into a deal, what good does it do anyone else? They forbid peering with their networks through anyone else (presumably companies already peering). Anyone who's got enough equipment to cover half UUNet's geographic area is going to be pretty lonely at the top. How many ISPs do you know of (no, AOL is *not* an ISP, it's an advertising agency . .
> "Although I can't yet release proprietary technical information publicly, there are other ways we might be able to help out with this sort of project. For example, we may be able to help with testing or verification of compatibility with various revisions of Dreamcast hardware."
There were reports of Iraq buying up lots of PS2s, but this seems like a much better solution. BSD has an already understood architecture (although it would be running on bizzare hardware), a wide source base (versus almost nothing for the PS2), etc. With the ethernet adaptor being released eventually, these things could probably be more cost effective for clustered processing than PS2s.
You're forgetting that people can spoof IP addresses. One day, when I was bored, I decided to test my firewall, so I had a friend of mine ping me/portscan me/etc. w/a spoofed address of 64.28.67.48 (look familiar, anyone?). Just because it looks like Harvard's trying to connect on prt 137, that doesn't mean they really are.
It wouldn't need to be repealed, just twisted from what it says to what some lawyer thinks it should mean, as has been done in recent years.
ISP terms of service today generally seem to be oriented toward forcing the customers to only use certain parts (sites) of the HTTP protocol (and POP/IMAP and SMTP). Sprint's TOS is an excellent example. You're not permitted to download virii/illegal material (FTP), run game servers (misc. protocols), run servers (part of HTTP, FTP, IRC, etc.), portscan (test for various protocols), spam (SMTP), post things that they don't agree with (NNTP, HTTP, etc.), "post, publish, transmit, reproduce, distribute or in any way exploit any information, software or other material obtained through Services for commercial purposes" (you can't use it to make money in *any* way), "upload, post, publish, reproduce, transmit or distribute in any way any component of the Services or derivative works, as Services are copyrighted as a collective work under U.S. copyright laws" (you even look at a copyrighted picture and you've violated the TOS), use anonymous mail (various HTTP sites, and POP/IMAP/SMTP servers), "make any unauthorized attempt to gain access to any account or computer resource not belonging to that user" (telnet), etc. While some of these things aren't strictly forbidden, "Sprint may take any action it deems appropriate without notice to protect the Services and its facilities for provision of the Services" (i.e. they can cut off your service for any reason, at any time).
the plugins. You can get a plugin to do just about anything. For instance, many of you have probably heard of AOLiza. Occasionally, I've got a bot running on TheAliceBot. That screen name uses a GAIM plugin to turn it into a bot based on the Alice bot engine (it works GAIM version 9.20, but not the latest version of GAIM; perhaps someone could edit the source and post a link . . . ?). You can't do that with AOL's IM client. Secondly, you can have more than one instance of GAIM running on the same desktop, each logged onto a different screen name. You can't do that either (without a patch) with AOL's client.
Hmmm. Yes, you're right. I realized that the possiblity of foreign nationals requisitioning documents is fairly high, but I thought that it'd at least be one more hoop for them to jump through. Thinking it through again, it doesn't make any sense.
The SCOCE oversees the TIC and the ITP, which jointly oversee the operations of the TTSC and the TQSC.
They could tell others the document number. Because people would be able to requisition documents themselves, all someone would have to do would be to have a TV news station show the doc number and have people requisition it. I advocate keeping people from discussing the documents' conents in the open, not from discussing the documents themselves.
The Freedom of Information Act is a bit to permissive, IMHO. There should be a small clause in it preventing people from taking about the specifics of what they got using it outside of special forums, or some such meetingplace. Sure, it's old technology, but there are plenty of foreign nations (some of them hostile) that don't have comparable technology. People should be free to tell others what they learned in a topical faction, and let them request the documents on their own (maybe including a provision for filling out a quick form at city hall, and come back in a week for the documents).
It's like the way we have been using our military. The press wants details for everything we do, as we do it. Oops, the foreign government we're fighting got a copy of today's paper? Now they know exactly what we're doing, and a list of probable reasons why. How'd they know how to retaliate?
We should be able to requisition documents from the government, but they shouldn't be public domain. Simply restrict discussion of the material.
I think you'd be better off with a regular SVGA monitor. Standard TVs generally have resolutions of 512x384. I'm not sure about arcade monitors, but you'd probably get something comparable. BTW, if you really wanted to turn it into a hack job, you could probably wire the joysticks into the joystick port on the computer. You can use a pair of 2-button joysticks in the same port at the same time.
were part of the reason the Internet economy became so popular. Many people began to see technology for what it is: integral to all parts of our lives, wheter we like it or not. People decided to take advantage of it. This helped lead to the Internet stock craze, but it also helped the economy in a more direct way. Companies were willing to give huge piles of cash to people who could certify their systems as being Y2K compatible. That provided a huge boost to our economy. It's cooling off now, but it gave us a shot in the arm that set the stage for the mass deployment of Internet companies. Granted, you have to be more careful as an Internet company today, but investors are willing to invest in a good, solid money-making company. Technology awareness was heightened because people were curious and looked at computers to see what all the fuss was about.
Um . . . wouldn't Y2K be 2048, instead of 2000?
You're neglecting the Norweigian countries. Either Sweden or The Netherlands (I've forgotten which) has an average income tax of 90%. This is because nearly everything is socialized in the country. What happens then is people become lazy, figuring that no matter what, they'll be covered by the government, and they won't be able to make any decent money that's not taken by taxes anyway, so why bother?
The difference between charity and government handing out benefits is the simple fact that charity is voluntary. It's a matter of my own ethics. If you'll look at one of my earlier posts, I do support price caps on health care (it's far too expensive now). Cut health care prices down to a reasonable level and the health care industry will be able to cover a lot more people (because more people will be able to afford it), charities will be able to help more people, and because health care isn't much different from one doctor to the next, they'd have great incentive to provide discounts (i.e. agree to come in for 4 checkups this year and get a 50% discount) to get more customers. I am not justifying greed and the neglect of the less fortunate, but what I am saying is that I don't agree with the government assuming the role of caretaker.