KCRW - Santa Monica College radio station
on
Discovering New Music?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
This station is absolutely the best place I know of to find new, good music of almost all genres. Even if you do not live in Santa Monica, or even in California, KCRW webcasts live and archived music programming at
http://www.kcrw.com/ and also on Shoutcast, and they publish complete playlists for prior broadcasts, indexed by month and day (ending that annoying "oh my god I just heard the best new track but they didn't say who it was and I had to go to work/class" freakout thing.) Also, their announcing is extremely high quality, without the usual college radio bumbling. I know this sounds like a plug, but I have no affiliation with KCRW, other than making donations to them every year - I just plain love this station as a source for new music. (In particular, check out the late night broadcasts and "Metropolis.")
I think you've misinterpreted the decision completely, and I agree with those who are calling it a "huge legal win." The judge instructed the jury that unless ElcomSoft's product was intended to be used for copyright violation, ElcomSoft had not committed a crime under the DMCA. This principle, known as "mens rea," is supposed to apply to all criminal statutes, but the media and software cartels have been acting as though it did not apply to the DMCA. Instead, the cartels insisted that software or hardware is criminal if it might be used to violate a copyright, even if it is never used for that purpose, or if the legitimate uses far outweigh copyright-violating ones. The judge's instruction to the jury, and the jury's application of that instruction to reach an acquittal, is an unequivocal smackdown to the cartel position.
I am certain that glasses of champagne are being raised all over the US by manufacturers of DVD and CD-recorders, portable media devices such as IPod and Rio, personal computers, digital video recorders such as Tivo, and any other device that "might" be used to violate someone's copyright. The cartels' position that any slight chance of copyright violation makes these devices criminal under the DMCA has been used to strongarm these companies into accepting intrusive, restrictive DRM schemes that will be highly unpopular with their own customers. Although the tech companies (rightly) suspected that this was only the first step in the cartels' campaign to make the internet and other digital tools so unpalatable for consumers that they would gladly return to the forcefed industry gruel, they had to step to the RIAA/Disney beat or risk a high profile, expensive DMCA trial. Now that the threat of DMCA prosecution for products with an intended legal use has been greatly lessened (if not removed) by the judge's decision, these companies may feel they can shrug off the pressure from the cartels and give their customers the freedom and flexibility they want.
Sorry, but this is just pure baloney. Non-copyrightable material does not become copyrightable just because it lives on a floppy disk or a CD. The DMCA is the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, not the Digital Media and Whatever Junk is on it Act. If the content is not copyrightable, DMCA doesn't even purport to protect it, whether it is written in a digital file, steganographed into my hairdo, or whatever. And prices, as so many have stated already, are simply not copyrightable.
I am so 100% with you, quistas, on the spam thing. Supporting spammers allows the forces of evil to paint EFF as knee-jerk opposed to any form of internet regulation, rather than standing for a sensible, even-handed and realistic vision of the digital commons. Which is what I thought Prof. Lessig was advocating. So I have a counter-challenge for him:
Professor, I understand that you urge people to donate to the EFF an amount equal to what they spend on products from the MPAA, RIAA, and other cartels pushing for abusive laws and DRM schemes to further their Mafia-like control over information and culture. But the EFF has demonstrated that it will spend donations, not only for that purpose, but also on unconscionable lobbying against well-respected legislative and community tools to control spammers -- the hands-down worst abusers in the internet culture. I have read your book "The Future of Ideas" and was impressed by what you had to say. But I cannot for the life of me imagine how the ubiquitous spamming of unwilling net users could be regarded as a positive component of the "digital commons" you described.
So this is my challenge to you, Dr. Lessing:
Respond to this post with a persuasive defense of the EFF's pro-spam lobbying, which convinces me that my freedom as an internet user is enhanced by forcing me to continue being bombarded with emails for porn, fraud, and garbage products. If you persuade me, I will immediately donate $500 (the estimated amount I spent this year on cartel-controlled media) to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Well, if that's actually true, then there may be (emphasis on the "may") a trade secret violation. But prices still are not copyrightable, period. Secret or not-secret, they're facts.
Speaking of legal violations, I have to wonder about the antitrust implications of the various megastores all lowering their prices in lockstep, and below cost, since they're all acting through the same lawyer and seem to know each other's price movements. Again, I've done no specific legal research on this case, and know only the facts that were posted here, but things like "Robinson-Patman," "predatory pricing," and "oligopoly" come to mind.:-)
Actually, if FatWallet is planning to pursue legal remedies (apparently so, given that they've contacted EFF and ChillingEffects), it is better strategy to comply with the cease-desist letter. I won't go into a huge law tutorial here, but suffice it to say that you can't sue or obtain damages for a hypothetical harm. This is called the "standing doctrine." If FatWallet ignored the letter, they would incur no cognizable harm (either to their business/mission or to their interest in free speech.) Thus, a court could easily find that they "lacked standing to sue" Walmart, et al. if the letters turned out to be unlawful in any respect.
Would you all wake up and smell the coffee. The nearly universal girl/woman aversion to Tomb Raider has nothing to do with whether Tomb Raider is sexist (and I don't think it is). It has to do with whether Tomb Raider's sexy, and how that triggers the social taboos about homosexuality, which are especially strong in teenagers.
Picture a roomful of teenage boys breaking a new game out of the box, and instead of the usual muscular hero with armor, they have to play as a half-naked Chippendale dancer knockoff, oiled washboard abs gleaming, and wearing little more than a hugely enlarged bulging codpiece.
Would teenage boys play this game for one lousy second? No, they'd drop it like a steaming turd, exactly the way girls do with Tomb Raider, and for the same reason. Well, maybe gay teenage boys would like the game (and I mean that as no putdown, I'm gay myself), and actually maybe some girls would like it too. But straight guys would feel weird staring at that character - they'd be going "man, this is too queer! Is anyone seeing me play this? I hope not."
Let me slap y'all upside the head with a clue-by-four: it is totally uncool for teenage boys to sit and stare for hours at a sexy half-naked guy. And most grown up straight guys would feel this way also. For the same reason, it is totally uncool for teenage girls to sit and stare for hours at Lara Croft. It makes them feel "queer," which is perfectly OK if you are queer (and don't care who knows), but 90% or more of the female population doesn't fit that category. So give it up - the vast majority of women and girls are going to hate this game, period, forever.
But that's exactly why the big labels are trying to kill off webcasting. Webcasters see a value in playing independent artists, because webcasters are not in the payola network sponsored by the RIAA. Just as that system started to be a viable way for newer innovative artists to be heard, the RIAA drones pressured the Copyright Office to kill off the webcasters by making them pay per-listener royalties (which the airwave stations under the RIAA's thumb don't have to pay.)
We could hear the difference only with classical music, and only at the very high end, but since we do mix a substantial amount of classical into our mixes and playlists, it's a meaningful difference. I hope to have a few spare hours to try the variable bitrate again, because I've learned more about it since our first test. But my gf is the one doing the bulk of the ripping, and she sits at a Mac and uses Itunes, which doesn't seem to have variable bitrate. I wish I knew what encoder was embedded in it.
I really need to look at my Winamp setup, because everything about using it for mp3s sucks since the last upgrade.
I work for a large law firm that shall remain anonymous. Much of our user population is still using Word 97, and for various reasons I don't agree with, secretaries are actually being trained to use macro based templates to perform relatively simple functions, so everybody has macros turned on. (Don't blame me, I'm a lawyer, not IT. Our IT department sucks like a vacuum, mainly because of a few powerful old farts who miss their quill pens, hate computers, and won't retire.)
But back to my original point - there are many contexts where it is literally day-to-day routine for lawyers to email Word documents back and forth, with each recipient detaching and saving the file, throwing in a few edits, and sending it back. In some situations, such as court documents that typically are negotiated, then filed jointly (e.g., proposed pretrial and scheduling orders), this interaction occurs among parties who are adversaries in a lawsuit - the farthest thing I can imagine from a trusted exchange.
This alone allows substantial opportunity for exploitation. Even if you don't know any specific filenames, it seems as though you could easily grab the Registry, which is always named the same thing, and learn at least some path and filename information from it. And also keep in mind that many firms (not ours, fortunately) use a stupid auto-format that appends the path and filename into the footer of a document. Let's say I was an unscrupulous lawyer co-drafting a scheduling order, and knew about this exploit. I might go through the earlier files and records in the case, and look at the briefs my opponent filed. If the filename was in the footer, I could rig the scheduling order to get the brief, which would contain not only the printed text I'd already seen when the brief was filed, but perhaps leftover redlines, comments, those mysterious fragments at the bottom, etc.
To answer your obvious questions: (1) no, I haven't tried it, and I'm not planning to, so I don't know if it would actually work, and (2) I have sent the Bugtraq link to the one non-worthless person in our IT department, and (3) yes, I realize this is not a macro exploit technically, so turning macros off won't help. But folks, this is really scary, and I am sure that legal practice is not the only line of business where "enemies" or untrusted parties exchange Word documents via email. That is how the world does business these days.
how about @home? Their cable modem service was down at least 50% of the time, their tech support was trained to lie to customers ("No, we're not down. It must be you"), and they bait-and-switched new subscribers to higher rates after the first few months. With that kind of crap service, they couldn't expand or even keep their customer base, and they went under.
My computer audio is similar to yours, and I definitely notice the difference. I did my blind listen tests for mp3 bitrate two ways - on my PC's audio setup, and on the Mac's audio outputted to an "audiophile" stereo. And I used classical music with lots of piano and violin, full of high transients that sound like crap in bad mp3. Using fixed bitrate, I could "hear the difference" in all files lower than 320 when encoded in Blade or Lame on the PC, and all files lower than 256 on the I-Tunes encoder that comes with Mac OS, consistently identifying the original.
Interestingly, my blind test convinced me that Blade was better than Lame, and I'm using Blade for all encoding done on the PC now. Since everyone seems to like Lame so much, I wonder if there's some weird setting I overlooked.
And has anyone else a weird problem that their mp3s sound different on Winamp than on other software? Like, noticably crappier? I disabled the preamp/equalizer and tried all kinds of settings in the Winamp mp3 codec. This only started when I upgraded to the last Winamp version.
it's 10base T, which as they sort of acknowledge, only works if you use 160 kbps or less encoding. Since I (like many) use 320, this device would not work for me -- I need my full duplex 100 speeds to stream my files. I also don't see why anyone would seriously be marketing a device limited to 10base t these days, but whatever.
This is exactly the point. The letters only carry weight if they come from voters and/or donors. The "donor thing" is a problem, obviously. Campaign finance reform is attempting, slowly, to work on it. But the "voter thing" we can AND MUST work on ourselves or it will never change.
How many times have I seen the act of voting in a US get flamed on/. and other similar fora? I don't care if you don't like the choices - start a write in campaign for someone you like better. But unless and until the political world is convinced that the "geek bloc" represents a substantial number of real votes, that they either must court or lose to the other guy/gal, the letters are pretty much pointless.
I suggest attaching a copy of your last ballot stub to the letter. (I'm starting an archive of my stubs so I can attach them all.) If you don't have a stub - see above.
This thread has gotten a little confused, probably because the phrase "criminally liable" doesn't make sense. Just like a wetware person, a corporation can be sued by a private party, held liable if a legal wrong has been proved, and made to pay monetary compensation and possibly punitive damages. This is called "civil liability." The corporation pays the damages out of its funds, and this will impact the bottom line of its financial statements, and thus the value of its shares. In this way, the shareholders as owners of the corporation collectively bear responsibility for the corporation's misconduct, but only to the extent of their monetary investment. And investors cannot be sued personally for what the corporation has done. Despite the recent abuses and the need to correct them, most people who think about it for more than a second realize that without this key protection afforded by the corporate structure, the free flow of investment capital would largely dry up.
But it is important to recognize that the protection of the "corporate veil," as it's known to lawyers, is not absolute. The mere fact that you are an executive or director of a corporation does not constitute a license to commit crimes. If you do commit fraud, or any other criminal act, while serving in that capacity, the government can prosecute you just as it could any other citizen. My feeling, echoed by many at this juncture, is that far too few criminal prosecutions have been brought, and far too little attention given to ferreting out fraud and other criminal conduct by corporate officers. This systemic failure probably is in large part responsible for the wholesale breakdown in ethics among corporate officers that is now being exposed. But since the corporate structure does not protect individuals from criminal prosecution in the first place, eliminating it would not affect the degree of oversight or the rate of prosecution.
Sounds like Barnes and Noble has a very cool setup, analogous to what the Washington Post is doing. I was not aware of it, though, because I shop for books, music, and pretty much everything else online. So from my perspective, and from the perspective of the growing number of customers who shop online, this is like saying "OK, you can look at the car before you buy it, but only if you go to a car lot in Boise, Idaho. Where you shop, you have to take your car sight unseen."
Moreover, the point was not to make an "excuse" for P2P, but to point out how, unlike other industries, the RIAA machine's continued existence depends on keeping the consumer uninformed. Barnes and Noble has clearly decided, like most rational retailers, that they will sell more CDs by informing the consumer. However, RIAA does not necessarily see a cent of that - I will bet my left buttock that the "Kodo" taiko drum group you discovered through Barnes and Noble's open marketing was not put out by any of the studios in RIAA's cartel. So Barnes and Noble, in effect, is putting another nail in the RIAA machine's coffin.
Does anyone know whether RIAA has taken a stand against Barnes and Noble's marketing practices, threatened any kind of legal action, or demanded royalties for songs that customers listen to in the store? Given their stance on webcasting, it seems unlikely that they would let this pass.
I installed ME about a year ago because my music software (Cubase, Reaktor) crashed the shit out of 98SE, and my pro audio card (Echo Layla) was looking like it would never have drivers for Win2K. I've had few if any problems with ME - it crashes far less than 98SE, and seems to work as well as any MS system with the music stuff and games, which is all I use Windows for anyway. Our Windows and Mac boxen are firewalled off behind a Linux box and router, so the lesser security of ME vs. the NT kernel is not as much concern as it might be to some. I'm satisfied enough with ME that even though Echo now has Win2K drivers, and I already own a copy of Win2K, I haven't bothered to migrate. Just my two cents.
It's even worse than your analogy. Not only are you prohibited from test driving your music before buying, you can't even get the tiniest hint of what it really sounds like. What if you went to a car dealer, and you couldn't even see a single car? Because they were all in car-sized plastic jewel cases, and until you forked out your $20,000-plus, you could only read the liner notes and look at the car company's promotional pictures?
That's how it would be if RIAA ran the car industry, and it's a darn good thing that they don't - not just for the customers but for the car makers. Think of all the impulse buys they would lose if potential customers couldn't walk through the lot, seeing, touching, smelling the new car smell . . . . Now, it's true that car dealers have problems with theft off the lot, and they'd have less theft if they kept the cars locked away from potential buyers. But such measures would cut heavily into their sales, so they don't dream of trying it. In most business sectors, the sellers of quality merchandise understand intuitively that knowledge of the product sells the product. Contrast this to the shady used car dealer trying to pass off lemons as good cars -- that's the guy who won't even let you kick the tires, much less test drive.
The counterintuitive, myopic policies of RIAA and its marketing-machine clients stem from their shady used-car dealer psychology. The RIAA machine clearly recognizes that quality music will sell itself to informed listeners. Music that sells itself doesn't need an RIAA machine, so RIAA necessarily becomes the enemy of both quality music and informed listeners, to preserve its own existence. That, in and of itself, explains why the trash the big labels put out keeps getting inexorably worse. If sites like the Washington Post succeed in convincing a critical mass of musicians that they are better off without the RIAA machine, no Fritz Hollings, Bono amendment, or anything else can save this dinosaur industry that exists solely to hard-sell crappy music to malleable children and teens. To speed this day along, I will be making a point of visiting the site, listening to the downloads, and purchasing CDs of bands that I like.
In researching the answer to my own questions, I ran across the following site which provides something like a taxonomy of mathematics: http://www.math.niu.edu/~rusin/known-math/index/to ur_div.html Perhaps someone else will find this helpful as well.
I have never known of a department of continuing education at the type of "small private college" that was described. On the contrary, departments of continuing education are (at least in the US) pretty much exclusively found at the megalopolis state school and -- guess where -- the very community colleges that the post to which I replied was dissing up one side and down the other. Did you not read his post? Or did you just not think your response through?
Speaking as someone whose math motivations and base level are about the same as the guy who started this thread -- I definitely would not start with "What is Mathematics."
I bought it for the same reason, and I'm sure it's a great book, but I got about one chapter into it, and realized I did not have the fundamental knowledge layer that was necessary. It's not a question of raw intelligence - I can and do grasp most stuff just by looking at it. But trying to read and understand this book fully for someone like me whose formal math education is limited to Algebra and Plane Geometry, in high school 20 years ago, is a waste of time because I don't really speak the langauge yet.
Two things that have worked for me fairly well, and would work better if I had more time to do them:
1. Used math texts can be bought for 5 or 10 bucks on Ebay. I browse through them, working the problems or not at my pleasure; and
2. The "prep" books that help people cram for exams - there are several series of these available.
The biggest problem with my approach is that I
don't know what I need to learn first, and in what sequence. Like: how much of trig should you grasp before trying calculus? What exactly are all those different algebras? What math would help me the most in task X, Y or Z? So I would love to do the community college thing too - I live near a good one and they have a ton of math classes from baby to very high level. But it's not feasible right now with job and family committments. I've been keeping an eye on that MIT Open Courseware project site, because I thought there might be syllabi, someday, that I could draw upon to guide my progress. But so far, just a promise of something in the future.
But would your college accept a student who had a job, kids, and little money, and didn't want a degree but just to pick up a little advanced math in night school? I doubt it. Even if you did, it would probably cost $1000 per credit hour, and this guy can't afford it. Please get real - would your school even let him in the door?
Yeah, I agree. There is a dramatic difference in cards when you do high-level sound processing. I use Reaktor and Cubase VST/32 for my audio projects and there is, like, no point trying to do that that through anything Sound Blaster ever thought about making. Real time sound crunching with acceptably low latency is not possible. So I have dual sound interfaces - an Echo Layla 24/96 with a breakout box for audio, and a Live for gaming (because Echo has never gotten its DirectX mode up to snuff and probably never will since it's not a gamer card.)
I've occasionally tried running games through the Echo, and frankly I think they sound better on the Live. Also, I don't know why I'd want to waste 32 bit audio processing power on sound clips that are recorded in 16 bit by the game publisher. Given that game companies are not likely to waste CD and hard drive space offering their sound effects in 24 bit audio, I don't really understand why the Audigy marketing goes to so much trouble making false claims about that capability. I guess they are trying to appeal to audiophiles, but there is so much USB and Firewire hardware on the market for trackers/synth tweakers/DJs these days, I don't know why anyone would try to fill that need with their internal sound card anymore. (If USB options had been available when I bought the Echo, I'd have gone that way instead.) Bottom line - the basic Live is all you need for gaming.
No, CD drives are allowed after takeoff is completed. I hate this problem too- the CD apparently reduces battery life by about 1/3 - also, I have to haul the CD drive around, even though the game is fully installed. In Civ III at least you can remove the CD drive after the game starts up - it doesn't continuously ping. But what a pain for travelers - there ought to be some way to play a game you bought legitimately without lugging a CD. All software companies are concerned about piracy, but if Office made you insert the CD every time you ran the program, don't you think people would stop buying it and choose something else to do office work? If the same alternative was available for games, I wouldn't buy the CD-dependent version either. I have no desire to rip software developers off, but I have seriously considered searching the web for a cracked version of CivIII that does not require a CD. If I am going to be forced to do this just to play the legitimate games I've purchased, why would I not eventually just say the-heck-with-purchasing? It is the same problem that crippled CDs have - if the music on them is so much less portable than a regular downloadable file, why would anyone choose to spend money on the CD rather than just search the web?
Slashdot Mirror
I am certain that glasses of champagne are being raised all over the US by manufacturers of DVD and CD-recorders, portable media devices such as IPod and Rio, personal computers, digital video recorders such as Tivo, and any other device that "might" be used to violate someone's copyright. The cartels' position that any slight chance of copyright violation makes these devices criminal under the DMCA has been used to strongarm these companies into accepting intrusive, restrictive DRM schemes that will be highly unpopular with their own customers. Although the tech companies (rightly) suspected that this was only the first step in the cartels' campaign to make the internet and other digital tools so unpalatable for consumers that they would gladly return to the forcefed industry gruel, they had to step to the RIAA/Disney beat or risk a high profile, expensive DMCA trial. Now that the threat of DMCA prosecution for products with an intended legal use has been greatly lessened (if not removed) by the judge's decision, these companies may feel they can shrug off the pressure from the cartels and give their customers the freedom and flexibility they want.
Professor, I understand that you urge people to donate to the EFF an amount equal to what they spend on products from the MPAA, RIAA, and other cartels pushing for abusive laws and DRM schemes to further their Mafia-like control over information and culture. But the EFF has demonstrated that it will spend donations, not only for that purpose, but also on unconscionable lobbying against well-respected legislative and community tools to control spammers -- the hands-down worst abusers in the internet culture. I have read your book "The Future of Ideas" and was impressed by what you had to say. But I cannot for the life of me imagine how the ubiquitous spamming of unwilling net users could be regarded as a positive component of the "digital commons" you described.
So this is my challenge to you, Dr. Lessing:
Respond to this post with a persuasive defense of the EFF's pro-spam lobbying, which convinces me that my freedom as an internet user is enhanced by forcing me to continue being bombarded with emails for porn, fraud, and garbage products. If you persuade me, I will immediately donate $500 (the estimated amount I spent this year on cartel-controlled media) to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Speaking of legal violations, I have to wonder about the antitrust implications of the various megastores all lowering their prices in lockstep, and below cost, since they're all acting through the same lawyer and seem to know each other's price movements. Again, I've done no specific legal research on this case, and know only the facts that were posted here, but things like "Robinson-Patman," "predatory pricing," and "oligopoly" come to mind. :-)
Picture a roomful of teenage boys breaking a new game out of the box, and instead of the usual muscular hero with armor, they have to play as a half-naked Chippendale dancer knockoff, oiled washboard abs gleaming, and wearing little more than a hugely enlarged bulging codpiece.
Would teenage boys play this game for one lousy second? No, they'd drop it like a steaming turd, exactly the way girls do with Tomb Raider, and for the same reason. Well, maybe gay teenage boys would like the game (and I mean that as no putdown, I'm gay myself), and actually maybe some girls would like it too. But straight guys would feel weird staring at that character - they'd be going "man, this is too queer! Is anyone seeing me play this? I hope not."
Let me slap y'all upside the head with a clue-by-four: it is totally uncool for teenage boys to sit and stare for hours at a sexy half-naked guy. And most grown up straight guys would feel this way also. For the same reason, it is totally uncool for teenage girls to sit and stare for hours at Lara Croft. It makes them feel "queer," which is perfectly OK if you are queer (and don't care who knows), but 90% or more of the female population doesn't fit that category. So give it up - the vast majority of women and girls are going to hate this game, period, forever.
I really need to look at my Winamp setup, because everything about using it for mp3s sucks since the last upgrade.
But back to my original point - there are many contexts where it is literally day-to-day routine for lawyers to email Word documents back and forth, with each recipient detaching and saving the file, throwing in a few edits, and sending it back. In some situations, such as court documents that typically are negotiated, then filed jointly (e.g., proposed pretrial and scheduling orders), this interaction occurs among parties who are adversaries in a lawsuit - the farthest thing I can imagine from a trusted exchange.
This alone allows substantial opportunity for exploitation. Even if you don't know any specific filenames, it seems as though you could easily grab the Registry, which is always named the same thing, and learn at least some path and filename information from it. And also keep in mind that many firms (not ours, fortunately) use a stupid auto-format that appends the path and filename into the footer of a document. Let's say I was an unscrupulous lawyer co-drafting a scheduling order, and knew about this exploit. I might go through the earlier files and records in the case, and look at the briefs my opponent filed. If the filename was in the footer, I could rig the scheduling order to get the brief, which would contain not only the printed text I'd already seen when the brief was filed, but perhaps leftover redlines, comments, those mysterious fragments at the bottom, etc.
To answer your obvious questions: (1) no, I haven't tried it, and I'm not planning to, so I don't know if it would actually work, and (2) I have sent the Bugtraq link to the one non-worthless person in our IT department, and (3) yes, I realize this is not a macro exploit technically, so turning macros off won't help. But folks, this is really scary, and I am sure that legal practice is not the only line of business where "enemies" or untrusted parties exchange Word documents via email. That is how the world does business these days.
Interestingly, my blind test convinced me that Blade was better than Lame, and I'm using Blade for all encoding done on the PC now. Since everyone seems to like Lame so much, I wonder if there's some weird setting I overlooked.
And has anyone else a weird problem that their mp3s sound different on Winamp than on other software? Like, noticably crappier? I disabled the preamp/equalizer and tried all kinds of settings in the Winamp mp3 codec. This only started when I upgraded to the last Winamp version.
it's 10base T, which as they sort of acknowledge, only works if you use 160 kbps or less encoding. Since I (like many) use 320, this device would not work for me -- I need my full duplex 100 speeds to stream my files. I also don't see why anyone would seriously be marketing a device limited to 10base t these days, but whatever.
How many times have I seen the act of voting in a US get flamed on /. and other similar fora? I don't care if you don't like the choices - start a write in campaign for someone you like better. But unless and until the political world is convinced that the "geek bloc" represents a substantial number of real votes, that they either must court or lose to the other guy/gal, the letters are pretty much pointless.
I suggest attaching a copy of your last ballot stub to the letter. (I'm starting an archive of my stubs so I can attach them all.) If you don't have a stub - see above.
But it is important to recognize that the protection of the "corporate veil," as it's known to lawyers, is not absolute. The mere fact that you are an executive or director of a corporation does not constitute a license to commit crimes. If you do commit fraud, or any other criminal act, while serving in that capacity, the government can prosecute you just as it could any other citizen. My feeling, echoed by many at this juncture, is that far too few criminal prosecutions have been brought, and far too little attention given to ferreting out fraud and other criminal conduct by corporate officers. This systemic failure probably is in large part responsible for the wholesale breakdown in ethics among corporate officers that is now being exposed. But since the corporate structure does not protect individuals from criminal prosecution in the first place, eliminating it would not affect the degree of oversight or the rate of prosecution.
Moreover, the point was not to make an "excuse" for P2P, but to point out how, unlike other industries, the RIAA machine's continued existence depends on keeping the consumer uninformed. Barnes and Noble has clearly decided, like most rational retailers, that they will sell more CDs by informing the consumer. However, RIAA does not necessarily see a cent of that - I will bet my left buttock that the "Kodo" taiko drum group you discovered through Barnes and Noble's open marketing was not put out by any of the studios in RIAA's cartel. So Barnes and Noble, in effect, is putting another nail in the RIAA machine's coffin.
Does anyone know whether RIAA has taken a stand against Barnes and Noble's marketing practices, threatened any kind of legal action, or demanded royalties for songs that customers listen to in the store? Given their stance on webcasting, it seems unlikely that they would let this pass.
That's how it would be if RIAA ran the car industry, and it's a darn good thing that they don't - not just for the customers but for the car makers. Think of all the impulse buys they would lose if potential customers couldn't walk through the lot, seeing, touching, smelling the new car smell . . . . Now, it's true that car dealers have problems with theft off the lot, and they'd have less theft if they kept the cars locked away from potential buyers. But such measures would cut heavily into their sales, so they don't dream of trying it. In most business sectors, the sellers of quality merchandise understand intuitively that knowledge of the product sells the product. Contrast this to the shady used car dealer trying to pass off lemons as good cars -- that's the guy who won't even let you kick the tires, much less test drive.
The counterintuitive, myopic policies of RIAA and its marketing-machine clients stem from their shady used-car dealer psychology. The RIAA machine clearly recognizes that quality music will sell itself to informed listeners. Music that sells itself doesn't need an RIAA machine, so RIAA necessarily becomes the enemy of both quality music and informed listeners, to preserve its own existence. That, in and of itself, explains why the trash the big labels put out keeps getting inexorably worse. If sites like the Washington Post succeed in convincing a critical mass of musicians that they are better off without the RIAA machine, no Fritz Hollings, Bono amendment, or anything else can save this dinosaur industry that exists solely to hard-sell crappy music to malleable children and teens. To speed this day along, I will be making a point of visiting the site, listening to the downloads, and purchasing CDs of bands that I like.
http://www.math.niu.edu/~rusin/known-math/index/t
Perhaps someone else will find this helpful as well.
I bought it for the same reason, and I'm sure it's a great book, but I got about one chapter into it, and realized I did not have the fundamental knowledge layer that was necessary. It's not a question of raw intelligence - I can and do grasp most stuff just by looking at it. But trying to read and understand this book fully for someone like me whose formal math education is limited to Algebra and Plane Geometry, in high school 20 years ago, is a waste of time because I don't really speak the langauge yet.
Two things that have worked for me fairly well, and would work better if I had more time to do them:
1. Used math texts can be bought for 5 or 10 bucks on Ebay. I browse through them, working the problems or not at my pleasure; and
2. The "prep" books that help people cram for exams - there are several series of these available.
The biggest problem with my approach is that I don't know what I need to learn first, and in what sequence. Like: how much of trig should you grasp before trying calculus? What exactly are all those different algebras? What math would help me the most in task X, Y or Z? So I would love to do the community college thing too - I live near a good one and they have a ton of math classes from baby to very high level. But it's not feasible right now with job and family committments. I've been keeping an eye on that MIT Open Courseware project site, because I thought there might be syllabi, someday, that I could draw upon to guide my progress. But so far, just a promise of something in the future.
I've occasionally tried running games through the Echo, and frankly I think they sound better on the Live. Also, I don't know why I'd want to waste 32 bit audio processing power on sound clips that are recorded in 16 bit by the game publisher. Given that game companies are not likely to waste CD and hard drive space offering their sound effects in 24 bit audio, I don't really understand why the Audigy marketing goes to so much trouble making false claims about that capability. I guess they are trying to appeal to audiophiles, but there is so much USB and Firewire hardware on the market for trackers/synth tweakers/DJs these days, I don't know why anyone would try to fill that need with their internal sound card anymore. (If USB options had been available when I bought the Echo, I'd have gone that way instead.) Bottom line - the basic Live is all you need for gaming.
So I agree with the first guy: they don't like computers.