If you're using one of the two widely pirated keys for XP (XXXXX-640-0000356-23XXX or XXXXX-640-2001765-23XXX), SP1 didn't install for you, and neither will SP2. So go ahead and change your key using Microsoft's own process. Search the web for valid keys....
... or at least wasted time on using the keygen for it:)
How long has DVDShrink been out? I remember DVDXCopy being out for a while, but never heard of Shrink until I got my DVD burner last month. I'm just wondering, because the lack of competitive software might be the reason it got popular in the first place.
P.S. I love DVDShrink. And DVD Decrypter. Hooray freeware!
Yeah, same here. No company would send out an email to a majority of its users telling them that their account will be suspended. The Hotmail one though was legit, and they did sort of threaten suspension - I might've only gotten that one right because I knew that Hotmail has been doing that for years now.
Some of my friends who are considering lasik are simply waiting until they know that the risk is worth the reward. A good indicator is to just wait until insurance companies offer lasik compensation. It might be a very long time for it to be part of a base plan, but by the time it becomes a common option, you can be sure of this: the insurance companies will trust lasik enough to charge the reasonable amout per month while expecting to pay out less than than that total to the lasiks gone wrong (mostly lawsuits of course, but also to second surgeries/medications). For that to work, lasik will have to be very, very successful. Insurance companies are charging a great deal of Americans, as well as all of our employers, a good deal of money, so you know they've already got the R&D ready to go on this. It's good to follow the advice of the FDA and experts of course, but unless you need your vision corrected now, feel free to wait.
So Slate says he's a software engineer, which I've heard. I've also heard from the same mouths that he writes trivia questions for a living - is there any truth to this? Like suppose his job is implement trivia questions into a software program?
Just what the rumor around here is, and I was wondering if it's true. It certainly explains his breadth of knowledge (and slight lack of newer pop culture questions).
I do (well, did), because they had interesting "real world" persectives on politcs and society. No other magazine had such a wide variety of material as Playboy. Newer magazines like Maxim have fun entertainment stuff, but they've never talked about Bush or Kerry in any articles. I bet Playboy has, though.
Night vision googles view light in the infrared spectrum, which is invisible to us. But emitting light at this wavelength (using an IR flashlight for examlpe) would just create a bright spot. The projectionist may not be able to see what you're doing if it's bright enough, but he'll know something's up because that will just attract his attention. The only way to create a 'blind spot' is to stop emitting IR, which involves a) getting cold (like, dead) or b) wearing a blanket over you.
Thankfully, no. War has not been declared by Congress since WWII. Granted, there's little difference on the battlefield, but our rights are a bit more safeguarded. Without a declaration of war, it's probably a bit harder to limit freedoms/resources of US citizens (like rationing or setting up internment camps). And martial law is a whole other step up. I can't forsee a scenario that would bring about the long-term occupation of an urban area by federal soldiers.
The werid thing to remember is that our government officials still represent our country. Even with this last presidential election being the closest in our history, a majority of the people still supported Bush only until very recently. For every libertarian bush-hater on/., there's a bunch of conservative flag-waving southerners who refer to all Arabs as ragheads. Those people could give two shits about the privacy of Baltimorians. Even if the video cameras popped up in Mobile, AL, they'd still support it if it meant they could keep those pesky Muslims out of the area.
Doesn't London have a great deal of CCTV cameras set up? As much as I've heard about their system, I've yet to hear serious complaints about privacy laws being broken.
The only area of Baltimore I visit on any sort of basis is the Inner Harbor - which is the "nice" area - home to most of it's attractions (National Aquarium, ESPNZone, etc.) and it's also home to an area that has a lot of bars that get packed every weekend by the 30 and under crowd. We're talking about tons of college kids coming up to Baltimore to have some fun once in a while. Like most cities, some blocks in Baltimore are fine, others are a bit more questionable. I think the CCTV cameras are going to be primarily used to keep an eye on the foot traffic around the harbor and it will ultimately used to keep down purse statching and assault. The city probably rubber-stamped this right through because they're now getting federal funds to build this video network that will end up being used to reduce crime. There are certainly other areas around Maryland that could use more anti-terrorism systems (DC, the Naval Acadamy, the NSA...etc), so I don't think terrorism is really the #1 issue here.
I had a similar experience - my Sony Ericsson T68 had problems, and I got free replacement after they made me wait 3 days to make sure it wasn't a temporary thing (I, too, went in person). But I believe that T-Mobile and other carriers make it easy because they're not the ones losing money - they probably getting warrenties from the phone manufacturers. So, just playing devil's advocate here, but maybe that's why they were so cool with it.
I consider my T-Mobile office to be very good, yet I still had a sales guy swear I'd continue to get free unlimited text messanging with my new, "upgraded" plan, only to find out they charge me for them now, and the phone lackeys didn't change it for me.
That would be nice, but you can already get music from your iPod to your A/V receiver without wires. The iTrip sends signals over FM. Not digital, but I don't think there will be much demand for a WiFi iPod while this is around. But hey, we can all hope;)
No, I know about cigarette burns and switching reels and such. What I'm talking about is different, and they are definitely used as watermarks. Perhaps a misnomer, because they're visible, but that's what they are. They rely on the assumption that the person filming the movie is too lazy to remove the dots, which is a fine assumption, because if I ever taped a movie in a theater, I wouldn't care if the dots were still there. And having visible dots is really the best way to find the locale of the leaked movie. I'm sure you know this, but if the movie is being taped in a theater off of a movie screen, all digital watermarking schemes are useless, as well as "subtle pixel changes", as these will certainly be lost as the camcorder encodes the movie into whatever format is being used. Thus, the MPAA resorted to using dots that will remain visible, but they keep them small as to not piss off the viewers (these orange/brown dots are often used against a blue sky, which provides a nice contrast as blue is the opposite of orange)
> Maybe it would make more sense, i think, to flash the serial number of the film print for a frame or two at random points in the film.
That's almost exactly what they do. Every non-indie movie I've seen in the last 6 months (including The Day After Tomorrow, which I saw yesterday) has had a little graphic pop up about halfway through the movie. It's a series of orange dots arranged in a pattern, and sometimes more than one pattern appears. The patterns correspond to the movie location, so the MPAA can find out what theater had lax security as they watch the pirated movie that they're investigating. It's not terribly distracting, and I don't think most people even realize when it happens. But since I knew about these buggers from a previous/. story, I end up getting pissed off at just about every movie I see now:) It's really a shame they have to put these in during the middle of the movie, where it distracts me.
So far, Imageos has photographed only Orlando, Fla. If it gets funding, it plans to photograph the 25 largest cities in the country over the next five years using more than a dozen vans.
So they'll hit their goal. Only one city per two states will be checked. I would like to see this hit suburbs as well, and then Mapquest & company can buy the database -- directions on suburban roads are much hard than city addresses.
If you ever decide to switch, go back to T-Mobile and try their phone risk-free like the other poster (I think it's only 3 days though, not 14). I only say this because on T-Mobile's map, my work's complex was the only grey spot on there. I tried it anyway (because no other carriers worked at my house, and I have a work phone anyway), only to find I do get reception (2/5 bars) -- good enough that I've never dropped a call. YMMV, but that's my case.
I have yet to see really detailed coverage maps for cellular provided by the providers themselves
I know that T-Mobile has very detailed maps that employees may access -- I'm sure the major carriers have this as well, so just ask a salesguy when you look into your next phone.
Since my area is a little rural, but between some big cities (Baltimore and DC), my cell reception can vary wildly. So I asked the rep at the store, and he goes on the internet and shows me very detailed maps of their coverage (tenths of a mile in scale). I asked if I could view these pages at home, and he said it's only for T-Mobile use, and so it's not publicly available. But the data is there.
Since the pop-ups invovle a 3rd party (and since the data comes from a server that isn't running llbean.com), I'd say it's more like a company paying some teens to watch people as they approach a B&M LL Bean store, and as they get near the entrance, the teens run up with ads for other companies.
A slight difference, but an important one... these pop-ups, while still very much in the grey area legally, aren't hijacking any of LL Bean's content. The pop-up sofware is already on the users' PCs, so they're not coming from a hacked llbean.com.
It's still stupid though. I can see people not using IE due to ignorance/fear of unpopular software, but who doesn't use a pop-up blocker? Sheesh. I can't believe those things are still around.
Does anyone here know why people don't just use heavy machines to just drive over minefields? I would think a specially-built machine, much like a bulldozer could just run over the mines (like with a heavy front end that could absorb shock/shrapnel, with the cab and driver 10 feet back behind lots of plexiglass and steel). Run over the field enough, and you'll have a clean minefield.
My only guess is that the mines are too powerful. But anti-personel mines don't generate that much force (they are designed to injure, not kill, as to get more people off the battlefield). Even the larger ones... it seems like if we just built a large machine with the driver secured behind some protection (hell, make it remote control), we could just blow them up....
Yeah, my bad, I got that backwards. I should've stated it the other way: supposing you have a fixed length, and you want to divide it into n segments. This particular example yields 10.5, an even more worthless number than 10 (how many times have you needed to cut a board into 10 pieces?). But as I stated in another thread, the carpenter will often want to divide his board in fourths (or to a lesser extent, thirds and sixths), in which case the 12" comes in handy. With metric, you only get to divide it in fifths (and half, but same with imperial).
But yeah, I wouldn't care if, as a modern society, we used metric 100% of the time. It would be a bit harder to do some things, but metric wins out over all.
Actually, a hybrid system would be best. One based on practical values, but still scales perfectly from there on out (for length, use the length from the elbow to the wrist for an average-size person, for weight, use, oh, the weight of water sitting in a cubic whatever-the-elbow-to-wrist-thing-is... etc.). So base it off something good, then use a factor of 10, and use the properites of water to scale it.
Systems of measure should be optimized to the needs of those that use them. I don't expect a physicist working on interplanetary calculations to use Imperial, because it's just not suited for it. Scaling units by 10 is easy for the scientist, and his unit conversions will be a snap.
At the same time, I don't expect a carpenter working on a treehouse to use Metric. He doesn't care that a cubic centimeter of water weighs one gram, he wants to know how many 4" boards he can get out of 3.5' feet of wood. Since his measurments stay within one order of magnitude, and he's doing simple integer divisions, he should use Imperial.
Because of this, I use both. I use Metric most of the time (it's was easier to learn than Imperial), but if I'm doing something small, or I don't have anything to measure with, I use Imperial (it's a lot easier to snap a twig to the length of my foot than it is to measure the distance from the north pole to the equator and divide by 1,000, which is what a meter is).
But I agree with you... the differences are overrated by now, since it's not too difficult for a carpenter to grab a ruler, and a scientist most certainly has a calculator/computer within reach.
Oh, I know, metric-to-metric conversions are easy, and thank God they use water as their base for their units. Makes it easy to replicate in labs around the world. But to play devil's advocate here for the non-scientists: who the hell walks around with a ton of water and a giant cube of plexiglass? Without that, you can't find out how long a meter is (without loss of congruence, you'll still need exactly a kg of water and a smaller cube to find a cm). As you probably know, the meter itself is derived from dividing the longitudinal line from the north pole to the goddamned equator, going through Paris. That's just insane, and not replicable when you really just want to cut your piece of wood to 1m in length. Oppose this to say, the foot. To do that, just look down (assuming you're about the same size as your current king;))
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If you're using one of the two widely pirated keys for XP (XXXXX-640-0000356-23XXX or XXXXX-640-2001765-23XXX), SP1 didn't install for you, and neither will SP2. So go ahead and change your key using Microsoft's own process. Search the web for valid keys....
Not only that, but there's no such thing as Acura outside the U.S. - they just call them all Hondas, because that's what they really are.
... or at least wasted time on using the keygen for it :)
How long has DVDShrink been out? I remember DVDXCopy being out for a while, but never heard of Shrink until I got my DVD burner last month. I'm just wondering, because the lack of competitive software might be the reason it got popular in the first place.
P.S. I love DVDShrink. And DVD Decrypter. Hooray freeware!
Yeah, same here. No company would send out an email to a majority of its users telling them that their account will be suspended. The Hotmail one though was legit, and they did sort of threaten suspension - I might've only gotten that one right because I knew that Hotmail has been doing that for years now.
Some of my friends who are considering lasik are simply waiting until they know that the risk is worth the reward. A good indicator is to just wait until insurance companies offer lasik compensation. It might be a very long time for it to be part of a base plan, but by the time it becomes a common option, you can be sure of this: the insurance companies will trust lasik enough to charge the reasonable amout per month while expecting to pay out less than than that total to the lasiks gone wrong (mostly lawsuits of course, but also to second surgeries/medications). For that to work, lasik will have to be very, very successful. Insurance companies are charging a great deal of Americans, as well as all of our employers, a good deal of money, so you know they've already got the R&D ready to go on this. It's good to follow the advice of the FDA and experts of course, but unless you need your vision corrected now, feel free to wait.
Just what the rumor around here is, and I was wondering if it's true. It certainly explains his breadth of knowledge (and slight lack of newer pop culture questions).
I do (well, did), because they had interesting "real world" persectives on politcs and society. No other magazine had such a wide variety of material as Playboy. Newer magazines like Maxim have fun entertainment stuff, but they've never talked about Bush or Kerry in any articles. I bet Playboy has, though.
Night vision googles view light in the infrared spectrum, which is invisible to us. But emitting light at this wavelength (using an IR flashlight for examlpe) would just create a bright spot. The projectionist may not be able to see what you're doing if it's bright enough, but he'll know something's up because that will just attract his attention. The only way to create a 'blind spot' is to stop emitting IR, which involves a) getting cold (like, dead) or b) wearing a blanket over you.
Actually, our national anthem was writting during a battle at Fort McHenry, which is closer to Baltimore than DC. Correct war, though :)
The werid thing to remember is that our government officials still represent our country. Even with this last presidential election being the closest in our history, a majority of the people still supported Bush only until very recently. For every libertarian bush-hater on /., there's a bunch of conservative flag-waving southerners who refer to all Arabs as ragheads. Those people could give two shits about the privacy of Baltimorians. Even if the video cameras popped up in Mobile, AL, they'd still support it if it meant they could keep those pesky Muslims out of the area.
The only area of Baltimore I visit on any sort of basis is the Inner Harbor - which is the "nice" area - home to most of it's attractions (National Aquarium, ESPNZone, etc.) and it's also home to an area that has a lot of bars that get packed every weekend by the 30 and under crowd. We're talking about tons of college kids coming up to Baltimore to have some fun once in a while. Like most cities, some blocks in Baltimore are fine, others are a bit more questionable. I think the CCTV cameras are going to be primarily used to keep an eye on the foot traffic around the harbor and it will ultimately used to keep down purse statching and assault. The city probably rubber-stamped this right through because they're now getting federal funds to build this video network that will end up being used to reduce crime. There are certainly other areas around Maryland that could use more anti-terrorism systems (DC, the Naval Acadamy, the NSA...etc), so I don't think terrorism is really the #1 issue here.
I consider my T-Mobile office to be very good, yet I still had a sales guy swear I'd continue to get free unlimited text messanging with my new, "upgraded" plan, only to find out they charge me for them now, and the phone lackeys didn't change it for me.
That would be nice, but you can already get music from your iPod to your A/V receiver without wires. The iTrip sends signals over FM. Not digital, but I don't think there will be much demand for a WiFi iPod while this is around. But hey, we can all hope ;)
Ah! Finally, tracked down the name. They're called Cap Codes.
Link about them in Kill Bill, and some guys rant about them
No, I know about cigarette burns and switching reels and such. What I'm talking about is different, and they are definitely used as watermarks. Perhaps a misnomer, because they're visible, but that's what they are. They rely on the assumption that the person filming the movie is too lazy to remove the dots, which is a fine assumption, because if I ever taped a movie in a theater, I wouldn't care if the dots were still there. And having visible dots is really the best way to find the locale of the leaked movie. I'm sure you know this, but if the movie is being taped in a theater off of a movie screen, all digital watermarking schemes are useless, as well as "subtle pixel changes", as these will certainly be lost as the camcorder encodes the movie into whatever format is being used. Thus, the MPAA resorted to using dots that will remain visible, but they keep them small as to not piss off the viewers (these orange/brown dots are often used against a blue sky, which provides a nice contrast as blue is the opposite of orange)
That's almost exactly what they do. Every non-indie movie I've seen in the last 6 months (including The Day After Tomorrow, which I saw yesterday) has had a little graphic pop up about halfway through the movie. It's a series of orange dots arranged in a pattern, and sometimes more than one pattern appears. The patterns correspond to the movie location, so the MPAA can find out what theater had lax security as they watch the pirated movie that they're investigating. It's not terribly distracting, and I don't think most people even realize when it happens. But since I knew about these buggers from a previous /. story, I end up getting pissed off at just about every movie I see now :) It's really a shame they have to put these in during the middle of the movie, where it distracts me.
Good explanation though :)
So far, Imageos has photographed only Orlando, Fla. If it gets funding, it plans to photograph the 25 largest cities in the country over the next five years using more than a dozen vans.
So they'll hit their goal. Only one city per two states will be checked. I would like to see this hit suburbs as well, and then Mapquest & company can buy the database -- directions on suburban roads are much hard than city addresses.
If you ever decide to switch, go back to T-Mobile and try their phone risk-free like the other poster (I think it's only 3 days though, not 14). I only say this because on T-Mobile's map, my work's complex was the only grey spot on there. I tried it anyway (because no other carriers worked at my house, and I have a work phone anyway), only to find I do get reception (2/5 bars) -- good enough that I've never dropped a call. YMMV, but that's my case.
I know that T-Mobile has very detailed maps that employees may access -- I'm sure the major carriers have this as well, so just ask a salesguy when you look into your next phone.
Since my area is a little rural, but between some big cities (Baltimore and DC), my cell reception can vary wildly. So I asked the rep at the store, and he goes on the internet and shows me very detailed maps of their coverage (tenths of a mile in scale). I asked if I could view these pages at home, and he said it's only for T-Mobile use, and so it's not publicly available. But the data is there.
A slight difference, but an important one... these pop-ups, while still very much in the grey area legally, aren't hijacking any of LL Bean's content. The pop-up sofware is already on the users' PCs, so they're not coming from a hacked llbean.com.
It's still stupid though. I can see people not using IE due to ignorance/fear of unpopular software, but who doesn't use a pop-up blocker? Sheesh. I can't believe those things are still around.
My only guess is that the mines are too powerful. But anti-personel mines don't generate that much force (they are designed to injure, not kill, as to get more people off the battlefield). Even the larger ones... it seems like if we just built a large machine with the driver secured behind some protection (hell, make it remote control), we could just blow them up....
But yeah, I wouldn't care if, as a modern society, we used metric 100% of the time. It would be a bit harder to do some things, but metric wins out over all.
Actually, a hybrid system would be best. One based on practical values, but still scales perfectly from there on out (for length, use the length from the elbow to the wrist for an average-size person, for weight, use, oh, the weight of water sitting in a cubic whatever-the-elbow-to-wrist-thing-is... etc.). So base it off something good, then use a factor of 10, and use the properites of water to scale it.
At the same time, I don't expect a carpenter working on a treehouse to use Metric. He doesn't care that a cubic centimeter of water weighs one gram, he wants to know how many 4" boards he can get out of 3.5' feet of wood. Since his measurments stay within one order of magnitude, and he's doing simple integer divisions, he should use Imperial.
Because of this, I use both. I use Metric most of the time (it's was easier to learn than Imperial), but if I'm doing something small, or I don't have anything to measure with, I use Imperial (it's a lot easier to snap a twig to the length of my foot than it is to measure the distance from the north pole to the equator and divide by 1,000, which is what a meter is).
But I agree with you... the differences are overrated by now, since it's not too difficult for a carpenter to grab a ruler, and a scientist most certainly has a calculator/computer within reach.
Oh, I know, metric-to-metric conversions are easy, and thank God they use water as their base for their units. Makes it easy to replicate in labs around the world. But to play devil's advocate here for the non-scientists: who the hell walks around with a ton of water and a giant cube of plexiglass? Without that, you can't find out how long a meter is (without loss of congruence, you'll still need exactly a kg of water and a smaller cube to find a cm). As you probably know, the meter itself is derived from dividing the longitudinal line from the north pole to the goddamned equator, going through Paris. That's just insane, and not replicable when you really just want to cut your piece of wood to 1m in length. Oppose this to say, the foot. To do that, just look down (assuming you're about the same size as your current king ;))