Robbing convenience stores does lead to higher sales for Coke, anyway, so it's just silly, period.
Someone is more likely to take a coke if it's free than if it's not, so more will get drunk in total. Meanwhile, the store has already paid Coke for the drinks, and now it has to replace them.
And, yes, anyone who thinks 'The ends do not justify the means' is a fool. By that logic, we shouldn't even enforce copyrights, because by any measure, locking people up and fining them is worse than copyright infringement. We do that precisely the ends (detering copyright infringement) supposedly justifies the means. (harming people who just want to watch the lastest Alias)
And, anyway, all you need to refute that is to pick a kind of fish that can't rest, like a shark. Sharks never lay down on a ledge, because they can't stop moving. (Well, can't without dying.)
Spiders can't fly, but they can float, which is even scarier, because they don't need to use any energy, so can do it forever. (Well, okay, they obviously need to stop when they want to eat.)
They just stick out some webbing and catch the wind and float off, right into your face.
Maybe if you throw yourself at the ground and miss using a rocket or something. Most of us mere mortals can't throw ourselves at escape velocity, especially not downward. (Not too downward, though. Remember, you need to miss.)
So you're saying that kilobits is 1000 bits, and kilobytes is 1024 bytes?
That's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard of, and not the least bit true.
Data transfer rates are always using 1000, regardless of whether they're in bits or bytes. It's just that almost no one writes data transfer in bytes, just like absolutely no one writes storage in bits.
But, google for '60 megabytes USB' and see how many people assert that USB 2.0's 480 megabits a second is 60 megabytes a second, whereas in your universe it's apparently 62.9 megabytes a second. Google for '63 megabtyes USB' and '62.9 megabytes USB' and see how far that gets you.
But, luckily, there is one place where data transfer is in bytes. IDE bus speeds, because those transfer whole bytes at a time. If you'd do the math, you're see when they're talking about, for example, ATA-100 drives, rthey are talking about them operating at 100 MB/s, not 100 MiB/s. They can't be talking about the latter, the damn bus is only 100 Mhz. You can't transfer 104857600 bytes in 100000000 cycles.
If Congress grants authority to the FCC, that won't magically make the FCC's previous order legal. They'll have to issue a new one.
Why is that important? Well, the deadline was in two weeks to require broadcast flag support. I don't know what kind of rules the FCC has to follow, but considering they gave us like a six month ramp up last time, I doubt they can make a manufacturing rule that takes effect in less than two weeks.
So even if Congress betrays the American people again by siding with...sorry...so when Congress betrays the American people by siding with the media companies, we'll still get a bit more time.
We can simplify this to two databases and show if the drive is lying, you're screwed. Forgive me, I'm not a database expert, but I can see a fundamental flaw with lying hardware.
You have, say, an ecommerce shop with a credit card processing setup. You accept a transaction, save it to disk, send off the CC request, and then finish it when the request clears.
Now, if power fails at any time. you're covered. If it fails before save the transaction to disk, you're fine. The order's gone, but you're fine.
If it fails after you saved it, but before the CC company gets back to you, you need to ask the CC company 'Did I send this to you, and did it clear?'. Complicated, but I'm sure it's doable.
All this stuff has been worked out by experts, and I'm sure there are nice terms for all of them, but the concept is not that hard.
However, there is one extreme point of failure if the hardware lies...you could have sent off the request, and the original transaction record could have vanished.
You told it to write to disk, you even synced it, you're even using a RAID in case it fails....but if the hardwares says 'Yeah, I wrote it', so you send off the CC request, but it was lying, you're sunk, and there's nothing you can do about that...you just billed someone for something you have no record of. Even after carefully waiting for the record to be saved to disk...
And, of course, depending how you have things set up, that just as easily be 'you just shipped something without billing for it'.
Here's some fun math for you. A 9600 modem vs. a 14.4k modem.
Now, according to you, the 14.4k should mean ~'14063' bits a second.
How, then, do you explain that 14400 bits a second is exactly 1.5 times 9600? 14.4k modems are 1.5 times faster than 9600, and they transfer 14400 bits a second, and they're called 14.4k modems.
Looky, they measure modems where k=1000. They incidently measure network speeds the same way.
In fact, they've always measured everything except memory that way. Your.5GB of memory may indeed be 512MB and 524288kB and 536870912 bytes, but it's the only thing that does that, except, oddly enough, some file and disk size measurements in the OS. Your 1Gb/s network card is exactly 10 times faster than your 100M/s card, not 10.24.
Whcih, incidently, is damn good, because otherwise it would be hell to convert bus speeds to data transfer speeds.
And I think the fact people are arguing otherwise shows exactly why we need 'kibibyte' and whatnot, no matter how silly those names were. It's so bad it confuses us.
TV shows sent to affilites in the US are still broadcast in the clear for the most part, because many can't decode encrypted ones.
Which means if you have a 'big' (whatever the technical term is) sat dish, you can watch TV shows without ads, in advance, and record them digitally.
It's actually rather obvious which is which. If it has anything besides the network logo, or non-perfect commercial editing, it's from a broadcast. If not, it's probably from satellite and never had commercials to start with.
Oddly enough, thanks to conservative Christians, it's now perfectly legal to sell devices that 'edit' TV shows and movies.
This was designed to allow a DVD player that skips (or possibly just blanks) 'offensive' scenes. I'm sure the law attempts to actually limit it to 'offensive content' instead of ads. But the post office has a law saying you can stop offensive mail to you, and the courts said, point-blank, that the post office is allowed no judgement in that...if you say the Radio Shack catalog is offensive, or third class mail, or green envelopes, they legally have to stop it.
So, legally, it's probably okay, now, to sell a device that talks to a bunch of other devices and lets you vote on where ads are, and skips them if enough people agree.
And what I think the FCC should step in and say is: You get these frequencies for free, and in return you had to provide useful content on them. Well, we're changing the rules. Not only do you have to provide useful content on them, you are required by law to provide in last 48 hours you broadcast for download on the internet, in 30 minute sections, so this useful content can be seen if people miss it.
It can be DRMd and expire at 48 hours, and you can even disallow fast forwarding. Although, of course, the availiblity and format of your net content might be discussed next license renewal. If it doesn't work under Linux, the FCC is going to be waving some letters at you.
And unlike other things the FCC likes to screw around with these days, it probably actually has the authority to do something like that, just like it can mandate a TV station keep a record of complaints and announce call letters on the air.
I don't know what that has to do with anything, except it's even crappier than I imagined. It fucking starts playing music without permission, although oddly enough it wants permission to load the rest of the way...into something that looks like a damn dHTML web page, and would be trivial to code in any number of tools as such.
Congrats, your developer friend is, in fact, a moron. Music without permission, which causes something like 20% of people to immediately close the browser, because they are in a place they cannot play music and do not have a volume knob handy. And a perfectly normal dynamic web page that takes 20 seconds to load on DSL, and then doesn't, in fact, actually load until you click something, which is just goofy.
I shudder to think how long it takes over dialup.
Oh, apparently you can turn the music off...after it loads and you click in it. Clever.
The complaints about your web page have nothing to do with OSS at all. The person complaining was just using that as an excuse to attack the completely idiotic use of flash. You've managed to force everyone to download all the pictures and everything before seeing a single thing.
I like how you say I'm wrong, though, when it is you who say it was an ad. It's is not an ad, it's a normal 'webpage', but it's not like I could magically find it to check. I don't think it's unreasonable to believe people (Well, at least not OSS advocates) do not complain when they can't see ads.
And an 'open standard' is, by definition, a standard controlled by a community, not a specific company. The Windows API is not an open standard, even if MS perfectly documented it and Wine perfectly implimented it.
Read it carefully, people. He said this app was 'advertising a minor celebrity pool player'.
Some OSS advocate complained because someone had a flash ad they couldn't read?
Does that sound even the vaguest bit likely? People don't complain when they can't see flash ads, they complain when they can. (Although an 'OSS advocate' would probably be using Firefox and just block it.)
Oh, and SWF is not an open standard, it is owned and controlled by Macromedia. (Perhaps you are thinking of its competitor, SVF.) That said, it's a documented and unpatented standard, and there are open source players for it.
So, basically, you say an 'advocate' complains because he can't see an ad (crazy) because there are no open source players for it (wrong). You replied that it was an open standard (wrong) and that it was the best solution. (wrong, unless it was an interactive ad, and you called it a 'movie', so that's doubtful)
Um, copyright has nothing to do with this. It's patented. It is a violation of the patent to use the patented method, even if you reinvented it yourself. (Which is trival to do.)
There's no way that will fly in the courts, unless they start issuing passports to all US citizens who want them, and are unable to revoke them.
There are some interesting court cases deciding if the executive branch can revoke passports at will, like it says it can, but those hinge on the fact it doesn't actually have congressional authority to do so, not that it might be unconstitutional, because it's not currently so...the US government has the right to say 'We do not authorize this person to travel in our name'.
What they do not have, however, and should be a fun court case, is the ability to revoke a citizen's permission to enter the country and still leave him a citizen. By saying 'We only accept a passport' and 'we can revoke passports at will', they are essentially claiming such.
Another interesting point is...can they require specific documentation at all? Even non-revokable documentation, like birth certificates. US citizens don't have the right to enter the US 'if they prove they're citizens how the government wishes them to', they just have the ability to enter, period.
And the government has the right to challenge that claim, of course, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what gives the government specific authority to set documentation standards instead of how the government is supposed to decide things...in court. (I can see in addition to court, but not instead of.)
And, while we're at it, most OSS supporters would love it if illegal copying of MS software stopped completely and immediately.
If everyone started having to pay for it, the use would automatically drop. Small resellers would stop putting one copy on fifty machines, and actually start looking at the price.
There's a reason MS has taken this long to go after illegal copies...any copies help it more than no copies do. Even if they don't get paid, they set standards with them. It's better to have 90% of the market with half that legal (Which is close to what it is now, if you include Asia.) than 60% of the market with them all legal.
Recently? Well, at this point, though, MS has saturated the market, and thus the only people it can sell to are people who already have a copy, thus the recent talk about tightening updates for illegal copies. It's the final nail in the coffin.
The argument the Confederate states didn't secede is just idiotic.
If they didn't, who the hell surrendered to the Union? Just a bunch of random people with guns? How can a country surrender if it doesn't exist?
And if that's so, why was Lincoln able to punish the states for the (apparently illegal) behavior of members of their government? If Ahnold went crazy and managed to convince a National Guard unit to shot up a Naval base, can the Feds impose requirements on California? Of course not. They can arrest him, and the people doing the shooting, and that's it.
The only way you can impose terms on a 'conquered country' is if the country actually exists and was conquered. Duh. You can only punish states for being part of the Confederacy if they were part of the Confederacy, and to be part of the Confederacy, they had to cease being in the Union.
So we're in some sort of logical paradox where the states couldn't secede, but the Union gets to treat them as if they did, for no apparent reason. Apparently, it's not illegal for Federal troups to wander around disassembling railroads and burning buildings.
And you thought the 'losing state's rights' was the worse legal side effect of the Civil War!;)
The whole thing is completely illogical.
And it's just as bad if, as most people who know anything about the law have to admit, they did secede...because, you're right, we never voted ourselves back into statehood...we're an occupied territory, being treated, in violation of the Constitution, as a state.
I think they should have to write every bill they voted for that passes. (Aka, you don't ahve to write it if you didn't vote for it, and you don't if it failed.)
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Someone is more likely to take a coke if it's free than if it's not, so more will get drunk in total. Meanwhile, the store has already paid Coke for the drinks, and now it has to replace them.
And, yes, anyone who thinks 'The ends do not justify the means' is a fool. By that logic, we shouldn't even enforce copyrights, because by any measure, locking people up and fining them is worse than copyright infringement. We do that precisely the ends (detering copyright infringement) supposedly justifies the means. (harming people who just want to watch the lastest Alias)
What's your point?
And, anyway, all you need to refute that is to pick a kind of fish that can't rest, like a shark. Sharks never lay down on a ledge, because they can't stop moving. (Well, can't without dying.)
There is no non-supersymmetric string theory right now that seems good, although there's no reason there couldn't be.
I think there are still a few competing ones, but they are all supersymmetric.
So this experiment might be more important than people think. Even if supersymmetry exists, we might be able to remove whole classes of theories.
However, it disproves superstring theory, because that's what the 'super' is talking about, supersymmetry.
They just stick out some webbing and catch the wind and float off, right into your face.
But I've always been biased against Flying Fish, at least until I learned the way to beat them was just to keep running as fast as possible.
Sure, if you pick them up and drop them they can fall, but by that logic anything can fly if you pick it up and put it in an airplane.
And you thought you were so clever, Mr. I-Forgot-Some-Animals-Live-Underwater.
Tomorrow this will have been on /. yesterday.
Actually, considering when I'm posting, this was on /. yesterday.
Maybe if you throw yourself at the ground and miss using a rocket or something. Most of us mere mortals can't throw ourselves at escape velocity, especially not downward. (Not too downward, though. Remember, you need to miss.)
That's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard of, and not the least bit true.
Data transfer rates are always using 1000, regardless of whether they're in bits or bytes. It's just that almost no one writes data transfer in bytes, just like absolutely no one writes storage in bits.
But, google for '60 megabytes USB' and see how many people assert that USB 2.0's 480 megabits a second is 60 megabytes a second, whereas in your universe it's apparently 62.9 megabytes a second. Google for '63 megabtyes USB' and '62.9 megabytes USB' and see how far that gets you.
But, luckily, there is one place where data transfer is in bytes. IDE bus speeds, because those transfer whole bytes at a time. If you'd do the math, you're see when they're talking about, for example, ATA-100 drives, rthey are talking about them operating at 100 MB/s, not 100 MiB/s. They can't be talking about the latter, the damn bus is only 100 Mhz. You can't transfer 104857600 bytes in 100000000 cycles.
Why is that important? Well, the deadline was in two weeks to require broadcast flag support. I don't know what kind of rules the FCC has to follow, but considering they gave us like a six month ramp up last time, I doubt they can make a manufacturing rule that takes effect in less than two weeks.
So even if Congress betrays the American people again by siding with...sorry...so when Congress betrays the American people by siding with the media companies, we'll still get a bit more time.
BTW, the damn music on that site almost woke up other people in my house last night.
You have, say, an ecommerce shop with a credit card processing setup. You accept a transaction, save it to disk, send off the CC request, and then finish it when the request clears.
Now, if power fails at any time. you're covered. If it fails before save the transaction to disk, you're fine. The order's gone, but you're fine.
If it fails after you saved it, but before the CC company gets back to you, you need to ask the CC company 'Did I send this to you, and did it clear?'. Complicated, but I'm sure it's doable.
All this stuff has been worked out by experts, and I'm sure there are nice terms for all of them, but the concept is not that hard.
However, there is one extreme point of failure if the hardware lies...you could have sent off the request, and the original transaction record could have vanished.
You told it to write to disk, you even synced it, you're even using a RAID in case it fails....but if the hardwares says 'Yeah, I wrote it', so you send off the CC request, but it was lying, you're sunk, and there's nothing you can do about that...you just billed someone for something you have no record of. Even after carefully waiting for the record to be saved to disk...
And, of course, depending how you have things set up, that just as easily be 'you just shipped something without billing for it'.
I'm not an expert on this, but doesn't SMART do the same thing for IDE? Return mapping messages?
Here's some fun math for you. A 9600 modem vs. a 14.4k modem.
Now, according to you, the 14.4k should mean ~'14063' bits a second.
How, then, do you explain that 14400 bits a second is exactly 1.5 times 9600? 14.4k modems are 1.5 times faster than 9600, and they transfer 14400 bits a second, and they're called 14.4k modems.
Looky, they measure modems where k=1000. They incidently measure network speeds the same way.
In fact, they've always measured everything except memory that way. Your .5GB of memory may indeed be 512MB and 524288kB and 536870912 bytes, but it's the only thing that does that, except, oddly enough, some file and disk size measurements in the OS. Your 1Gb/s network card is exactly 10 times faster than your 100M/s card, not 10.24.
Whcih, incidently, is damn good, because otherwise it would be hell to convert bus speeds to data transfer speeds.
And I think the fact people are arguing otherwise shows exactly why we need 'kibibyte' and whatnot, no matter how silly those names were. It's so bad it confuses us.
TV shows sent to affilites in the US are still broadcast in the clear for the most part, because many can't decode encrypted ones.
Which means if you have a 'big' (whatever the technical term is) sat dish, you can watch TV shows without ads, in advance, and record them digitally.
It's actually rather obvious which is which. If it has anything besides the network logo, or non-perfect commercial editing, it's from a broadcast. If not, it's probably from satellite and never had commercials to start with.
Oddly enough, thanks to conservative Christians, it's now perfectly legal to sell devices that 'edit' TV shows and movies.
This was designed to allow a DVD player that skips (or possibly just blanks) 'offensive' scenes. I'm sure the law attempts to actually limit it to 'offensive content' instead of ads. But the post office has a law saying you can stop offensive mail to you, and the courts said, point-blank, that the post office is allowed no judgement in that...if you say the Radio Shack catalog is offensive, or third class mail, or green envelopes, they legally have to stop it.
So, legally, it's probably okay, now, to sell a device that talks to a bunch of other devices and lets you vote on where ads are, and skips them if enough people agree.
And what I think the FCC should step in and say is: You get these frequencies for free, and in return you had to provide useful content on them. Well, we're changing the rules. Not only do you have to provide useful content on them, you are required by law to provide in last 48 hours you broadcast for download on the internet, in 30 minute sections, so this useful content can be seen if people miss it.
It can be DRMd and expire at 48 hours, and you can even disallow fast forwarding. Although, of course, the availiblity and format of your net content might be discussed next license renewal. If it doesn't work under Linux, the FCC is going to be waving some letters at you.
And unlike other things the FCC likes to screw around with these days, it probably actually has the authority to do something like that, just like it can mandate a TV station keep a record of complaints and announce call letters on the air.
Congrats, your developer friend is, in fact, a moron. Music without permission, which causes something like 20% of people to immediately close the browser, because they are in a place they cannot play music and do not have a volume knob handy. And a perfectly normal dynamic web page that takes 20 seconds to load on DSL, and then doesn't, in fact, actually load until you click something, which is just goofy.
I shudder to think how long it takes over dialup.
Oh, apparently you can turn the music off...after it loads and you click in it. Clever.
The complaints about your web page have nothing to do with OSS at all. The person complaining was just using that as an excuse to attack the completely idiotic use of flash. You've managed to force everyone to download all the pictures and everything before seeing a single thing.
I like how you say I'm wrong, though, when it is you who say it was an ad. It's is not an ad, it's a normal 'webpage', but it's not like I could magically find it to check. I don't think it's unreasonable to believe people (Well, at least not OSS advocates) do not complain when they can't see ads.
And an 'open standard' is, by definition, a standard controlled by a community, not a specific company. The Windows API is not an open standard, even if MS perfectly documented it and Wine perfectly implimented it.
Some OSS advocate complained because someone had a flash ad they couldn't read?
Does that sound even the vaguest bit likely? People don't complain when they can't see flash ads, they complain when they can. (Although an 'OSS advocate' would probably be using Firefox and just block it.)
Oh, and SWF is not an open standard, it is owned and controlled by Macromedia. (Perhaps you are thinking of its competitor, SVF.) That said, it's a documented and unpatented standard, and there are open source players for it.
So, basically, you say an 'advocate' complains because he can't see an ad (crazy) because there are no open source players for it (wrong). You replied that it was an open standard (wrong) and that it was the best solution. (wrong, unless it was an interactive ad, and you called it a 'movie', so that's doubtful)
Um, copyright has nothing to do with this. It's patented. It is a violation of the patent to use the patented method, even if you reinvented it yourself. (Which is trival to do.)
There's no way that will fly in the courts, unless they start issuing passports to all US citizens who want them, and are unable to revoke them.
There are some interesting court cases deciding if the executive branch can revoke passports at will, like it says it can, but those hinge on the fact it doesn't actually have congressional authority to do so, not that it might be unconstitutional, because it's not currently so...the US government has the right to say 'We do not authorize this person to travel in our name'.
What they do not have, however, and should be a fun court case, is the ability to revoke a citizen's permission to enter the country and still leave him a citizen. By saying 'We only accept a passport' and 'we can revoke passports at will', they are essentially claiming such.
Another interesting point is...can they require specific documentation at all? Even non-revokable documentation, like birth certificates. US citizens don't have the right to enter the US 'if they prove they're citizens how the government wishes them to', they just have the ability to enter, period.
And the government has the right to challenge that claim, of course, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what gives the government specific authority to set documentation standards instead of how the government is supposed to decide things...in court. (I can see in addition to court, but not instead of.)
If everyone started having to pay for it, the use would automatically drop. Small resellers would stop putting one copy on fifty machines, and actually start looking at the price.
There's a reason MS has taken this long to go after illegal copies...any copies help it more than no copies do. Even if they don't get paid, they set standards with them. It's better to have 90% of the market with half that legal (Which is close to what it is now, if you include Asia.) than 60% of the market with them all legal.
Recently? Well, at this point, though, MS has saturated the market, and thus the only people it can sell to are people who already have a copy, thus the recent talk about tightening updates for illegal copies. It's the final nail in the coffin.
If they didn't, who the hell surrendered to the Union? Just a bunch of random people with guns? How can a country surrender if it doesn't exist?
And if that's so, why was Lincoln able to punish the states for the (apparently illegal) behavior of members of their government? If Ahnold went crazy and managed to convince a National Guard unit to shot up a Naval base, can the Feds impose requirements on California? Of course not. They can arrest him, and the people doing the shooting, and that's it.
The only way you can impose terms on a 'conquered country' is if the country actually exists and was conquered. Duh. You can only punish states for being part of the Confederacy if they were part of the Confederacy, and to be part of the Confederacy, they had to cease being in the Union.
So we're in some sort of logical paradox where the states couldn't secede, but the Union gets to treat them as if they did, for no apparent reason. Apparently, it's not illegal for Federal troups to wander around disassembling railroads and burning buildings.
And you thought the 'losing state's rights' was the worse legal side effect of the Civil War! ;)
The whole thing is completely illogical.
And it's just as bad if, as most people who know anything about the law have to admit, they did secede...because, you're right, we never voted ourselves back into statehood...we're an occupied territory, being treated, in violation of the Constitution, as a state.
By hand. Their own hand, not an aide's.