Ever seen "Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning? It's hollywood's worst nightmare. It's hilarious. It has your "magical Hollywood special effects" that now only need the same kind of PC you have on your desk.
If they showed it in a theater I'd pay to see it there, even though I've already seen it on my 42 inch TV (s-video out from the computer).
The world has changed. If Hollywood doesn't want to give their crown to Finland they had better change with the times. The old ways of business are no longer possible with the advent of cheap computers that can do all of the special effects anyone wants to do, and the internet to publicize and distribute them.
When the environment changes drastically, an organism (or industry) must evolve or die. The carriage manufacturers that didn't go on to become automobile manufacturers died. The vaudville performers that didn't go on to become movie stars went the way of the buggy whip as well. If Holly wood wants to survive it has to figure out a way to live within the new paradigm. The asteroid has hit and the dinasaurs are in deep trouble.
I didn't. My daughter trusted the people who supplied the goods her employer was selling and ran the program manually, hoping for the "extras" (she knew my Offspring CD among others had videos).
She didn't think for a moment (and truthfully neither did I) that any reputable company would ever put a rootkit on a CD, let alone a music CD.
They're no longer reputable, the rootkit took care of that.
Britney spears with four male backup singers (and dead DRM, of course)
3. I think you're wrong about the DRM. DRM was stillborn, as every pipe dream (in the case of the RIAA, crack pipe dream) is. DRM is already dead, was dead to begin with. What man can make, man can break. What a team of programmers can create, a million nerds can can shred in an evening.
Once the lock's broken anyone can get in.
She's dead, Jim. She's always been dead. That's not wedding rice, that's maggots.
I would. I have no problem whatever making life miserable for thieves and miscreants like those bastards who run the entertainment industries.
"The VCR is to Hollywood what Jack The Ripper was to women" -Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA when he made that stupid comment.
Fuck 'em all. When they start running respectable businesses I'l respect their businesses.
They're a few years too damned late
on
Sony BMG Dropping DRM
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I was hit by the Sony Trojan when my daughter played a BMG title she'd bought from the music store she worked at at the time (she manages a Gamestop now).
I'll never EVER buy a Sony ANYTHING again, and the only way I'll get a Sony-BMG CD is used. And the only way I'll download any BMG artist is from P2P "piracy". That God damned rootkit was a damned stupid move. Someone should have gone to prison for it. If I rooted their computers I'd be with Linda; well, actually not since Dwight is a maximum security women's prison, but I'd be behind bars.
And all she did was have some dope on her, she didn't hurt anyone, threaten anyone, or cost anyone any money.
If you own Sony stock, please do me a favor and sell it. Sony is EVIL in all capital letters.
But chemicals aren't electricity. And I imagine you could make a chemical computer, but it woudn't necessarily be a Turing archetecture. They used to have analog computers, of course they weren't as computationally powerful as digital computers but they lacked the rounding errors that haunt digital computing. I made a very primitive one once when I was about 12, it was basically an electric slide rule, with a bettery, two potentiometers and a voltmeter. But there were big, complex ones built at the time that could do some fantastic stuff.
Just think about their brains controlling their muscles. Somehow they have to be calculating how much neuronal stimulation to apply to a muscle to get the desired amount of force. Isn't that math?
My brain controls my muscles but I don't calculate anything, I just point and it goes. They have recently discovered that ape brains are hard-wired for math, in fact I submitted the slashdot story about it.
I think it can be argued that brains are computers of sorts, since your brain can in fact compute, but not Turing machines. I don't believe an abacus is a Turing machine, either, but it is in fact pretty much how a digital computer works (alveit decimal instead of binary).
she's the spitting image of Loni Anderson (picture is from wikipedia when the linked picture was taken, only a little shorter, a tiny bit heavier, with bigger tits and with black hair.
In the journals I confused two TV shows, Anderson was on "WKRP", I said "Taxi" in the journals. I probably got them confused because Amy is a cab driver.
My problem is my age. I'm older than Amy's parents. I did meet a good looking woman my age the day before yesterday, but I fear she's as psycho as Amy (see Tis the season to commit suicide. I'd like to take Amy to bed, and I like her as a friend, but I wouldn't want a relationship with her farther than drinking/fuckbuddies.
Those who do not study hostory are doomed to repeat it
They called it "copy protection" in the 1980's. That's all DRM is, is copy protection by another name
Yes, but perhaps they are studying history and are looking at another failed technology from the 1970s - quadraphonic sound. Quadraphonics was a brilliant concept, provided everyone had loads of cash to waste. It had four channels of sound instead of stereo's two, but required twice everything, including hte speakers which are always the most expensive part of any system.
Quadraphonics required a higher end turntable good enough to reach the supersonic, as the rear channels were modulated with a 40khz tone and then demodulated in the preamp.
So a five hundred dollar stereo sounded far, far superior to a five hundred dollar quadraphonic stereo.
The thing is, a few things changed - five channel dolby isn't exactly the same thing, although it's very similar. Digital came along, with its reduced (at present sampling rates) high frequency response CDs that no longer required what speaker manufacturers called "supertweeters". The CD required no hugh end player; you could encode four channels as easily as two, without modulation. And the four large woofers were done away with by introducing a single "subwoofer".
But "copy protection" failed in the market for a different reason, not because it added a little to the consumer item at a vast cost like quadraphonics, but added absolutely nothing for the consumer but frustration.
As digital sound sucessfully brought back quadraphonics under a new name, the Dumb Restrictions on Media crowd think the same thing might happen with Copy Protection. But it won't, because a) unlike quadraphonics or 5.1 dolby it adds nothing whatever for the paying customer, and b) no technological breakthrough will or can make it work.
Copy Protection failed not because of expense, but because it was a pain in the ass that added nothing. This is what they're not seeing. Also what they're not seeing is what someone used to use for a sig here: "making bits not copyable is like making water not wet."
I completely disagree. The calculus on the simulation argument is surprisingly solid when you think about it (Bostrom, for instance, has some pretty good arguments for it).
stronger footing with which to criticize science I believe.
Religion doesn't criticize science. Religion and science ask and answer completely different questions. The guy who is the subject of this very unscientific conjecture isn't doing science here.
Science doesn't criticize religion, either. By their very nature religious tenets are neither provable nor disprovable, removing them completely from the realm of science.
Science and religion are not mutually exclusive, no matter what most slashdotters seem to think.
-mcgrew
PS- I refuse to argue about the existance of the color red with a man blind from birth.
You might be interested to read about my death in 1976. No blind man will ever convince me that the color red doesn't exist, even though there is no scientific proof of "red", which scientifically is nothing more than an electromagnetic frequency.
Science and religion are in two separate realms, and ask (and answer) completely different questions.
I still don't know what task it was I was supposed to do. Maybe I'm doing it right now.
All computers ultimately reduce to the Turing Machine. This includes neural networks and at least some classes of quantum computer.
Do you have anything to actually back that up? They haven't even invented quantum computers yest, and if by "neural network" you mean livingbrain tissue, you're flat wron, and it's based on facts, not speculation. The brain is a chemical process using various mixes of chemical. Thought, sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell, are nothing more than a complex chemical reactions. If brains were turing machines than dogs could do math.
However, not all problems reduce to computable problems.
If you mean like the exact value of PI nobody here will argue (nobody sane anyway) but you can simulate anything, and you don't even have to know how a thing actually works to simulate it. Your race car game on your Nintendo, for instance, doesn't recreate all the gears, nuts, bolts, etc in each virtual car, even though with a big enough computer you theoretically could.
Sure, it's crap, and untestable crap, but it's interesting crap. Or The Matrix wouldn't have made so much money.
Rather than a VR simulation, I'd hazard a guess that this is some sort of prison. I mean, if I were designing a VR siulation I'd make it a hell of a lot more enjoyable than this crap we're all living in. Why would anyone deliberately choose a character that suffers from clinical depression, bipolar disorder, or any of the other horrible mental illnesses there are? Why would someone choose a character that breaks his neck at age 16 and spends the next sixty years in a wheelchair? No way in hell would I have deliberately chosen a scenario where I'd have a beautiful roommate who won't fuck me.
I like the line in one STNG episode involving the holodeck, Data, and a bad guy from Sherlock Holmes where Picard says "who knows, this may just be some sort of entertainment media poaying on a table in someone's living room" before mugging the camera.
Also, it's a bit older than 1637. One of the ancient Chinese philosophers (don't remember which one, someone will post I'm sure) said "last night I dreamed I was a butterfly. So now I ask, am I a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming I am a man?"
He says that the existence of quantum phenomena could be due to the underlying digital nature of the simulation
But the simulation is done using old fashioned using ANALOG computers! Digital computers weren't invented until the 1940s and the computers this simulation is running on are fourteen billion years old, give or take a few million milinea. Doesn't anybody remember analog computers? Jees, you kids today...
-mcgrew PS- I was a beta tesster for dirt. We never did get all the bugs out. Where's Slartibartfast when you need him? That slacker!
(no real journal today, just a "coming soon" trailor)
a worm-like firmware agent could be introduced to an estimated 20,000 networks in New York City alone. "Although the researchers did not develop any attack code
"Scenario?" With a "worm-like software agent?" Wake me up when (a) such a firmware worm is written or (b) when someone from the security community can be a little more specific as to how such a worm could work. I remain skeptical.
After all, they've been telling us about Linux and Mac viruses for years, but I have yet to hear of anyone actually getting infected by one.
Slashdot Mirror
Tami just turned 42.
She's only 20 and you're an idiot.
Ever seen "Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning? It's hollywood's worst nightmare. It's hilarious. It has your "magical Hollywood special effects" that now only need the same kind of PC you have on your desk.
If they showed it in a theater I'd pay to see it there, even though I've already seen it on my 42 inch TV (s-video out from the computer).
The world has changed. If Hollywood doesn't want to give their crown to Finland they had better change with the times. The old ways of business are no longer possible with the advent of cheap computers that can do all of the special effects anyone wants to do, and the internet to publicize and distribute them.
When the environment changes drastically, an organism (or industry) must evolve or die. The carriage manufacturers that didn't go on to become automobile manufacturers died. The vaudville performers that didn't go on to become movie stars went the way of the buggy whip as well. If Holly wood wants to survive it has to figure out a way to live within the new paradigm. The asteroid has hit and the dinasaurs are in deep trouble.
I didn't. My daughter trusted the people who supplied the goods her employer was selling and ran the program manually, hoping for the "extras" (she knew my Offspring CD among others had videos).
She didn't think for a moment (and truthfully neither did I) that any reputable company would ever put a rootkit on a CD, let alone a music CD.
They're no longer reputable, the rootkit took care of that.
No, an abacus is not a turing machine. But you can implement an abacus with a turing machine.
A modern computer is simply a complex binary abacus. How many beads do I have to string on my abacus before it bnecomes self-aware?
I'm a nerd, I even mod my jokes.
"What?"
""Nothing -- here's your nine pence."
"I'm not dead!"
"Here -- he says he's not dead!"
"Yes, he is."
"I'm not!"
"He isn't."
"Well, he will be soon, he's very ill."
"I'm getting better!"
"No, you're not -- you'll be stone dead in a moment."
"h, I can't take him like that -- it's against regulations."
"I don't want to go in the cart!"
"Oh, don't be such a baby."
"I can't take him..."
"I feel fine!"
"Oh, do us a favor..."
"I can't."
"Well, can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won't be long."
"Naaah, I got to go on to SCO's -- they've lost nine today."
"Well, when is your next round?"
"Thursday."
"I think I'll go for a walk."
"You're not fooling anyone y'know. Look, isn't there something you can do?"
"I feel happy... I feel happy.
[whap]"
"Ah, thanks very much."
"Not at all. See you on Thursday."
"Right."
Britney spears with four male backup singers (and dead DRM, of course)
3. I think you're wrong about the DRM. DRM was stillborn, as every pipe dream (in the case of the RIAA, crack pipe dream) is. DRM is already dead, was dead to begin with. What man can make, man can break. What a team of programmers can create, a million nerds can can shred in an evening.
Once the lock's broken anyone can get in.
She's dead, Jim. She's always been dead. That's not wedding rice, that's maggots.
-mcgrew
I would never do this
I would. I have no problem whatever making life miserable for thieves and miscreants like those bastards who run the entertainment industries.
"The VCR is to Hollywood what Jack The Ripper was to women" -Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA when he made that stupid comment.
Fuck 'em all. When they start running respectable businesses I'l respect their businesses.
I was hit by the Sony Trojan when my daughter played a BMG title she'd bought from the music store she worked at at the time (she manages a Gamestop now).
I'll never EVER buy a Sony ANYTHING again, and the only way I'll get a Sony-BMG CD is used. And the only way I'll download any BMG artist is from P2P "piracy". That God damned rootkit was a damned stupid move. Someone should have gone to prison for it. If I rooted their computers I'd be with Linda; well, actually not since Dwight is a maximum security women's prison, but I'd be behind bars.
And all she did was have some dope on her, she didn't hurt anyone, threaten anyone, or cost anyone any money.
If you own Sony stock, please do me a favor and sell it. Sony is EVIL in all capital letters.
-mcgrew
But chemicals aren't electricity. And I imagine you could make a chemical computer, but it woudn't necessarily be a Turing archetecture. They used to have analog computers, of course they weren't as computationally powerful as digital computers but they lacked the rounding errors that haunt digital computing. I made a very primitive one once when I was about 12, it was basically an electric slide rule, with a bettery, two potentiometers and a voltmeter. But there were big, complex ones built at the time that could do some fantastic stuff.
Just think about their brains controlling their muscles. Somehow they have to be calculating how much neuronal stimulation to apply to a muscle to get the desired amount of force. Isn't that math?
My brain controls my muscles but I don't calculate anything, I just point and it goes. They have recently discovered that ape brains are hard-wired for math, in fact I submitted the slashdot story about it.
I think it can be argued that brains are computers of sorts, since your brain can in fact compute, but not Turing machines. I don't believe an abacus is a Turing machine, either, but it is in fact pretty much how a digital computer works (alveit decimal instead of binary).
she's the spitting image of Loni Anderson (picture is from wikipedia when the linked picture was taken, only a little shorter, a tiny bit heavier, with bigger tits and with black hair.
In the journals I confused two TV shows, Anderson was on "WKRP", I said "Taxi" in the journals. I probably got them confused because Amy is a cab driver.
Great looking broad, too bad she's a psycho.
My problem is my age. I'm older than Amy's parents. I did meet a good looking woman my age the day before yesterday, but I fear she's as psycho as Amy (see Tis the season to commit suicide. I'd like to take Amy to bed, and I like her as a friend, but I wouldn't want a relationship with her farther than drinking/fuckbuddies.
I am going to start going back to the gym though.
Those who do not study hostory are doomed to repeat it
They called it "copy protection" in the 1980's. That's all DRM is, is copy protection by another name
Yes, but perhaps they are studying history and are looking at another failed technology from the 1970s - quadraphonic sound. Quadraphonics was a brilliant concept, provided everyone had loads of cash to waste. It had four channels of sound instead of stereo's two, but required twice everything, including hte speakers which are always the most expensive part of any system.
Quadraphonics required a higher end turntable good enough to reach the supersonic, as the rear channels were modulated with a 40khz tone and then demodulated in the preamp.
So a five hundred dollar stereo sounded far, far superior to a five hundred dollar quadraphonic stereo.
The thing is, a few things changed - five channel dolby isn't exactly the same thing, although it's very similar. Digital came along, with its reduced (at present sampling rates) high frequency response CDs that no longer required what speaker manufacturers called "supertweeters". The CD required no hugh end player; you could encode four channels as easily as two, without modulation. And the four large woofers were done away with by introducing a single "subwoofer".
But "copy protection" failed in the market for a different reason, not because it added a little to the consumer item at a vast cost like quadraphonics, but added absolutely nothing for the consumer but frustration.
As digital sound sucessfully brought back quadraphonics under a new name, the Dumb Restrictions on Media crowd think the same thing might happen with Copy Protection. But it won't, because a) unlike quadraphonics or 5.1 dolby it adds nothing whatever for the paying customer, and b) no technological breakthrough will or can make it work.
Copy Protection failed not because of expense, but because it was a pain in the ass that added nothing. This is what they're not seeing. Also what they're not seeing is what someone used to use for a sig here: "making bits not copyable is like making water not wet."
I completely disagree. The calculus on the simulation argument is surprisingly solid when you think about it (Bostrom, for instance, has some pretty good arguments for it).
And the answer to the equation is, of course, 42.
is like trying to prove that there is no gravity
But there really is no gravity! Everything is just fucking hilarious.
stronger footing with which to criticize science I believe.
Religion doesn't criticize science. Religion and science ask and answer completely different questions. The guy who is the subject of this very unscientific conjecture isn't doing science here.
Science doesn't criticize religion, either. By their very nature religious tenets are neither provable nor disprovable, removing them completely from the realm of science.
Science and religion are not mutually exclusive, no matter what most slashdotters seem to think.
-mcgrew
PS- I refuse to argue about the existance of the color red with a man blind from birth.
it's called paranoid schizophrenia
You should know, old friend! And have you been taking your meds?
-mcgrew
PS- if you see any of the old K5 gang, let them know where the sucessor to the "Paxil Diaries" is!
You might be interested to read about my death in 1976. No blind man will ever convince me that the color red doesn't exist, even though there is no scientific proof of "red", which scientifically is nothing more than an electromagnetic frequency.
Science and religion are in two separate realms, and ask (and answer) completely different questions.
I still don't know what task it was I was supposed to do. Maybe I'm doing it right now.
-mcgrew
Latest two "real" journals:
Mo' Moe, and a nerd license suspension
A Letter from Prison
wrong drug I think...
(the saying at the bottom of this page, right now, says "You possess a mind not merely twisted, but actually sprained".)
All computers ultimately reduce to the Turing Machine. This includes neural networks and at least some classes of quantum computer.
Do you have anything to actually back that up? They haven't even invented quantum computers yest, and if by "neural network" you mean livingbrain tissue, you're flat wron, and it's based on facts, not speculation. The brain is a chemical process using various mixes of chemical. Thought, sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell, are nothing more than a complex chemical reactions. If brains were turing machines than dogs could do math.
However, not all problems reduce to computable problems.
If you mean like the exact value of PI nobody here will argue (nobody sane anyway) but you can simulate anything, and you don't even have to know how a thing actually works to simulate it. Your race car game on your Nintendo, for instance, doesn't recreate all the gears, nuts, bolts, etc in each virtual car, even though with a big enough computer you theoretically could.
Sure, it's crap, and untestable crap, but it's interesting crap. Or The Matrix wouldn't have made so much money.
Rather than a VR simulation, I'd hazard a guess that this is some sort of prison. I mean, if I were designing a VR siulation I'd make it a hell of a lot more enjoyable than this crap we're all living in. Why would anyone deliberately choose a character that suffers from clinical depression, bipolar disorder, or any of the other horrible mental illnesses there are? Why would someone choose a character that breaks his neck at age 16 and spends the next sixty years in a wheelchair? No way in hell would I have deliberately chosen a scenario where I'd have a beautiful roommate who won't fuck me.
I like the line in one STNG episode involving the holodeck, Data, and a bad guy from Sherlock Holmes where Picard says "who knows, this may just be some sort of entertainment media poaying on a table in someone's living room" before mugging the camera.
Also, it's a bit older than 1637. One of the ancient Chinese philosophers (don't remember which one, someone will post I'm sure) said "last night I dreamed I was a butterfly. So now I ask, am I a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming I am a man?"
-mcgrew
He says that the existence of quantum phenomena could be due to the underlying digital nature of the simulation
But the simulation is done using old fashioned using ANALOG computers! Digital computers weren't invented until the 1940s and the computers this simulation is running on are fourteen billion years old, give or take a few million milinea. Doesn't anybody remember analog computers? Jees, you kids today...
-mcgrew
PS- I was a beta tesster for dirt. We never did get all the bugs out. Where's Slartibartfast when you need him? That slacker!
(no real journal today, just a "coming soon" trailor)
a worm-like firmware agent could be introduced to an estimated 20,000 networks in New York City alone.
"Although the researchers did not develop any attack code
"Scenario?" With a "worm-like software agent?" Wake me up when (a) such a firmware worm is written or (b) when someone from the security community can be a little more specific as to how such a worm could work. I remain skeptical.
After all, they've been telling us about Linux and Mac viruses for years, but I have yet to hear of anyone actually getting infected by one.
in other words, WOLF!!!!!!
Ha! They'll never guess my router admin password, which is '5l@$hd0t.!st.ps0t!'
Ah, the classics never die, do they? My wifi password is... oh wait I don't have wifi