Dual-format players that cost only a little more than a single-format player are quite probable in the HD-DVD vs. BD war. With VHS and Beta, it was all or nothing - the technology didn't lend itself easily to a dual-format system. With the HD war, you're dealing with spinning, shiny, dimpled disks of plastic being read by a 405nm laser. Sure, the disks need different optics for reading, and the data's arranged a bit differently, but it shouldn't cost that much more for a dual-format player, once the tech is more mature. I think there are already two dual-format players available (or nearly available) on the market.
Wouldn't it be funny if this whole format war never materialized? All that effort by Sony to develop a competing format, and it goes nowhere.
I'm guessing it'll turn into a wikified version of Ripoffreport.com, where anyone can show up and anonymously bash any product, service, or company of their choosing. It'll be impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff. Dunno about them getting sued, seems like the safe harbor provisions of the CDA would apply.
Personally, I think the trick is short terms that can be renewed over and over, with ever-increasing fees. A good starting point would be 20 years, with 5 year renewal periods thereafter. Initial registration of the copyright is free, and at the end of 20 years if you want 5 more years you pay $1,000. When that's up, you can pay $2,000 for 5 more years. Then $4,000, $8,000, $16,000, etc. Pretty soon, all but the biggest cash-cow copyrights (think Disney, Star Wars, Harry Potter, etc) will fall into public domain.
It's a good system, precisely because it lets the copyright holder judge the true value of the work to them. Walt Disney Co. is in the best position to decide if keeping Steamboat Willie out of the public domain for 5 more years is worth $16 million dollars. Especially when you know in 5 years, it'll cost you $32 million dollars to renew again - are you really gonna make $16 million on that one copyrighted work in the next five years?
For other works, the 'average joe' artist gets 20 free years, and can extend the copyright for a nominal fee in the beginning, if it turns out the work in question is actually worth something. 20 years is a long time to wait in the wings to "rip off" some nobody screenwriter who turns out a particularly interesting spec script. If the script is really that good, someone will buy it within the first 20 year period. If it was garbage, it'll probably always be garbage.
By having renewable terms, you can prevent the case of a popular franchise being overrun by public domain-created works, because it's financially prudent to keep renewing as long as the copyright holder is making money. So, even though Star Wars is over 20 years old, George Lucas can keep renewing on and on and on... until it just doesn't make financial sense. Hell, he can keep renewing until he runs out of money, for all I care.
Logically, one uses the renewal fees to fund the whole scheme. Any leftover money goes to the NEA or public television or some other arts-promoting group. That way, the big winners in the copyright realm (movie studios mostly) who are pouring millions and millions into the system to keep old stuff copyrighted are giving the seed money to a whole new generation of artists.
Under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Rule 41(a), Plaintiffs generally only get one chance to voluntarily dismiss their case "without prejudice". If the Plaintiffs re-file, and voluntarily dismiss again, it's treated as a decision on the merits of the case (i.e., the Plaintiffs lose). Many state courts have similar rules on multiple voluntary dismissals, to prevent lawsuit abuse and harassment by Plaintiffs.
Those are criminal cases, not civil cases. Someone who knows bluebook citation should also know that these sorts of copyright cases that the RIAA is pursuing are all civil cases, not criminal ones (obviously - criminal cases are prosecuted by the government!). When the feds knock on your door, then you can start worrying about doctrines like "willful blindness".
Not to say that such concepts wouldn't necessarily be argued in a civil copyright infringement case, but there's really no law on the subject. It's tough to say how a fair use analysis would be affected if the user believed they were not making any infringing copies (but in fact were). Current fair use law doesn't really care whether or not you thought you were infringing when you made your 'illegal' copy. I'm not sure that there's much legal difference between downloading a song from a P2P network, or Allofmp3, when neither download is sanctioned by the RIAA. It'll be interesting to see if the RIAA tries to go after Allofmp3's customers in the U.S....
Wake up RIAA and realize that the price of music drives piracy. People will always have an incentive to crack DRM if they can't get the music for a fair price legally. I imagine the music industry is scared to death of sliding music prices, even though that's where it's going to head eventually. There is some point between "overpriced" and "free" at which both consumers and most artists will be happy. Those artists who expect to become millionaires from a popular record (and who don't tour), are going to be sorely disappointed. Those artists who are happy making a decent living, and who actually produce good music, will prosper.
Gotta give credit where it's due. I'm sure that this has saved more than a few lives, at the very least some serious injuries. Could the soldier who brainstormed this please stand up and be recognized... hooah!
I would think that this tactic would be harder for insurgents to get around... the tripwire needs to be there to work after all. You could make the tripline super sensitive, so the string itself sets it off, but that would put the soldiers further from the blast when it happened. Also, setting a super-sensitive tripline would hopefully kill a few more terrorists while they're setting it up.
The insurgents' next tactics will probably involve laser-armed proximity mines like in Star Wars: Jedi Knight 2. It's cool though, you just jump really high to minimize damage, then hit F5 a few times to heal...
Yeah, I like that idea. Have tiers of memory, depending on how often you'll write-erase it. Fast RAM for running programs, constant writing and erasing. Then some small chunk of flash memory for a temporary files cache - replace every year or so when it burns out, and it never stores any data except when the computer is up and running. Another, large flash memory chip for the 'hard drive' where you'll keep documents, media, etc., written to occasionally (10-20 times a day?). Finally, a flash chip for the OS and programs - this would almost never get written to - just when installing programs and updating the OS.
>As it is, it looks less like research and more like unfettered spending to find "yet another" way to dominate.
Umm.. should Microsoft be researching ways to help its competition take it over? Of course MS is going to be looking for the next killer 'thing' (app, console, music player, etc.) to lead the market. That's the beauty of a market - companies have incentives to do things which make the company stronger.
Well, the goal has to be limited erase-write cycles on the flash memory. Just thinking of a normal operating system, you erase-write on the hard drive most often for a swapfile, temporary internet caching, and document editing. On a CF and fast RAM only laptop, you simply can't have any kind of a swapfile, period. Everything like that has to go into fast RAM. Ditto for caching of internet files. If you knock those two out, I would say that document/file editing isn't going to make too big of a hit. You would only write to the CF drive when actually performing a user-directed SAVE operation, or perhaps for automatic saving. No temp files being written to the CF drive during the editing process. Everything gets chucked into fast RAM. You'd also need to design the filesystem for the CF memory to spread out the write-erase cycles evenly.
Another alternative would be to use a combination of fast RAM, a main CF storage drive, and a smaller, easily replaceable CF card that acts as a go-between for the fast RAM and the main CF storage drive. The idea would be that you can replace the CF card when it gets burned out after a couple hundred thousand write-erase cycles of doing document caching and perhaps temp internet file caching. Last time I checked, a 512MB flash card was going for under ten bucks, who cares if you replace it once a year?
Also, as time goes on, flash memory is getting cheaper, more durable, with more write-erase cycles. Having an easily replaceable CF card for caching your editable files and internet crap would be a big bonus in the ease-of-upgrade category. You might reach a point where you CAN use the CF drive as a swapfile, and can cut down on the more expensive fast RAM in future models of the laptop.
Not if you plant a roadside bomb, and want to trigger it the exact moment a particular Humvee drives past it. A timer wouldn't work very well. You could run wire from a blasting cap to a detonator, get a safe distance away, and wait to trigger it then, but the cellphone makes it all wireless. Not all of these jihadists are suicidal - they want to live to bomb our troops another day. I can see this sort of thing being pretty important to have in a warzone... not so much in the good old USA.
The article at http://www.math.purdue.edu/~clomont/Math/Papers/20 03/InvSqrt.pdf really explains it better, but the point is to trick the code into performing integer operations on a float. You start the function with a float, which is 32 bits, arranged in a very specific sequence: first bit is sign (0 for positive, 1 for neg), next 8 bits are exponent (offset by 127 to allow positive and negative exponents), and the last 23 bits are the mantissa (normalized to assume the decimal point has a binary 1 to its left). So, the simple good old number 21 in float is the sequence 0 10000011 01010000000000000000000, for the sign, exponent, and mantissa (omit the spaces of course). That same number 21, stored as a 32-bit integer is 00000000 00000000 00000000 00010101 (again, omit the spaces).
The trick of this function is to take the 32 bits of data that are really a float, but process it as if it's an integer. So you take that cumbersome number 21 as a float, then BAM! presto, turn it directly to an integer not through type conversion, but by simply treating those same 32 bits as if they were representing an integer all along.
Let's use the number 21 as an example in the function call.
The binary representation of 21 as a float is 01000001 10101000 00000000 00000000 (broken into 8-bit words for clarity). The function then goes to create a new integer i, whose value is also 01000001 10101000 00000000 00000000 (which happens to be 1101529088 in decimal). The magical line of the code, i = 0x5f3759df - (i>>1), takes that integer i, shifts its bits one to the right (turning our 01000001 10101000 00000000 00000000 into 00100000 11010100 00000000 00000000, or 550764544 in decimal), then subtracts it (still doing integer math here) from 0x5f3759df (which is 01011111 00110111 01011001 11011111 or 1597463007 in decimal), and winds up with 00111110 01100011 01011001 11011111 (or 1046698463 in decimal).
Now, for its next trick, it takes that wonky integer 1046698463, and turns it back into a floating point number, by the same trick used above, i.e. simply by looking at those same 32 bits, and pretending they're a float, not an int. The binary representation of 1046698463, 00111110 01100011 01011001 11011111, is the same as 0.22202251851558685 in float.
From here on out, it's all floating math. Apply the Newton-Rhapson method (thats the next line), we get x = 0.22202251851558685 * (1.5 - ( (21*.5) * 0.22202251851558685^2 )) = 0.218117811. We return this value at the closing of the function. As it turns out, the inverse square root of 21 is 0.21821789... (thanks Google calc). So, I have no idea WHY the Float to Int to Float trick works, but it works very well.
That's why KOTOR will go down in history as one of the best RPGs ever. 50 hours of gameplay, side quests, quirky characters, believable characters, and I didn't want it to end.
And HL2 did seem a bit short, now that I think about it. But it's got serious replay value, much more so than any other FPS in recent memory.
A de novo review is one made without any deference to the lower court. The reviewing court looks at all of the evidence, issues, etc., from a fresh new perspective. Doesn't mean there's any new evidence presented, just that the reviewing judge sort of mentally inserts himself into the shoes of the first (magistrate) judge, and decides all of the issues as if the magistrate judge had never been there.
Generally speaking, questions of fact are reviewed under a higher standard of deference than questions of law (usually de novo). When a judge makes a factual finding (i.e. Witness X is lying, the car was going 50 mph, etc.), that factual finding is usually not overturned on appeal unless it is "clearly erroneous".
However, if the judge simply makes a legal finding (statute XYZ applies in this case, affirmative defense ABC is not available to the defendants, etc.), those findings are reviewed de novo generally - the appellate judge takes a fresh look at the law.
But this will hopefully spur them on, to get back where they belong. I just hope they don't get desperate and start slashing prices - that may work in the short run, but long term, AMD will sink into "second tier" status, simply because they go cheap. AMD has surpassed Intel in quality for years, and has mostly shaken off the 'discount chip' label.
Nobody wants to be seen as the Dollar General of processors...Cyrix anyone?
Depends on if they're their own ISP or not. DMCA takedown notices are directed at ISPs, and as you well know, most ISPs go running and crapping their pants at the first whisper of a takedown order. This DMCA exemption would shield the archive from any actual liability for circumventing access controls, but that might not prevent a twitchy ISP from shutting down the content. Making a takedown request in bad faith (i.e. when you know damn well there's no infringment) is actionable, but those sorts of cases are rarely pursued by anyone except the EFF.
If, however, they operate as their own ISP, they can cram any DMCA takedown orders back in the faces of the requester, knowing they have a shield. I would expect given the rarity of these sorts of exemptions, and the value in protecting them, any bad faith takedown requests would be pursued aggressively by EFF and others. We can hope anyways.
This just screams for a special wiimote that looks, feels, and sounds like a lightsaber. Of course, it'll be a $100 add-on, but how bad-ass would it be to see your on-screen character swinging around a lightsaber, matching every one of your real movements. Of course, you'd still be able to play with the regular controls, but having a functional lightsaber remote as a limited-edition add on would probably generate a lot of interest.
Of course, methinks a lot of people in the target demographic would get winded after about 30 seconds of gameplay, and give up...
So, in the future, someone can hack your passenger flight and take control of it remotely?
Hope they stock clean underwear along with the barf bags on these flights.
That's a bit farfetched, wouldn't you say? So long as there's a market with options, MS would never be able to pull that off. That's why we have anti-trust laws, which theoretically keep one company from gaining a stranglehold on a particular market segment. With open standards, Linux, and Macs, I'd say MS really doesn't have a legal monopoly in desktops anymore - just a huge market share. And they've got nothing in game consoles or music players - those markets are pretty open.
The market share enjoyed by MS is not increasing, it's decreasing - MS missed their window for draconian measures awhile ago.
Especially when those federal laws explicitly state that they preempt state law. Noting the opinions here, it seems the old saying rings true, "an activist judge is any judge whose rulings you disagree with".
It's a sticky area of the law. The statement "Bush is an idiot" will always be protected opinion. The statement "In my opinion, Mr. Smith is a nasty pedophile" will never be protected as opinion (though it may be OK for other reasons).
Simply adding the phrase "in my opinion" to a statement that is essentially a fact, offers no protection. Courts look at a number of factors to see if a statement is opinion or fact, including context, whether the statement is capable of a provable or unprovable meaning (usually the hallmark of a 'fact'), and so on.
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't it be funny if this whole format war never materialized? All that effort by Sony to develop a competing format, and it goes nowhere.
I'm guessing it'll turn into a wikified version of Ripoffreport.com, where anyone can show up and anonymously bash any product, service, or company of their choosing. It'll be impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff. Dunno about them getting sued, seems like the safe harbor provisions of the CDA would apply.
It's a good system, precisely because it lets the copyright holder judge the true value of the work to them. Walt Disney Co. is in the best position to decide if keeping Steamboat Willie out of the public domain for 5 more years is worth $16 million dollars. Especially when you know in 5 years, it'll cost you $32 million dollars to renew again - are you really gonna make $16 million on that one copyrighted work in the next five years?
For other works, the 'average joe' artist gets 20 free years, and can extend the copyright for a nominal fee in the beginning, if it turns out the work in question is actually worth something. 20 years is a long time to wait in the wings to "rip off" some nobody screenwriter who turns out a particularly interesting spec script. If the script is really that good, someone will buy it within the first 20 year period. If it was garbage, it'll probably always be garbage.
By having renewable terms, you can prevent the case of a popular franchise being overrun by public domain-created works, because it's financially prudent to keep renewing as long as the copyright holder is making money. So, even though Star Wars is over 20 years old, George Lucas can keep renewing on and on and on... until it just doesn't make financial sense. Hell, he can keep renewing until he runs out of money, for all I care.
Logically, one uses the renewal fees to fund the whole scheme. Any leftover money goes to the NEA or public television or some other arts-promoting group. That way, the big winners in the copyright realm (movie studios mostly) who are pouring millions and millions into the system to keep old stuff copyrighted are giving the seed money to a whole new generation of artists.
f*cking snitches... "I know it was you Fredo. You broke my heart. You broke my heart!"
Not to say that such concepts wouldn't necessarily be argued in a civil copyright infringement case, but there's really no law on the subject. It's tough to say how a fair use analysis would be affected if the user believed they were not making any infringing copies (but in fact were). Current fair use law doesn't really care whether or not you thought you were infringing when you made your 'illegal' copy. I'm not sure that there's much legal difference between downloading a song from a P2P network, or Allofmp3, when neither download is sanctioned by the RIAA. It'll be interesting to see if the RIAA tries to go after Allofmp3's customers in the U.S....
Wake up RIAA and realize that the price of music drives piracy. People will always have an incentive to crack DRM if they can't get the music for a fair price legally. I imagine the music industry is scared to death of sliding music prices, even though that's where it's going to head eventually. There is some point between "overpriced" and "free" at which both consumers and most artists will be happy. Those artists who expect to become millionaires from a popular record (and who don't tour), are going to be sorely disappointed. Those artists who are happy making a decent living, and who actually produce good music, will prosper.
I would think that this tactic would be harder for insurgents to get around... the tripwire needs to be there to work after all. You could make the tripline super sensitive, so the string itself sets it off, but that would put the soldiers further from the blast when it happened. Also, setting a super-sensitive tripline would hopefully kill a few more terrorists while they're setting it up.
The insurgents' next tactics will probably involve laser-armed proximity mines like in Star Wars: Jedi Knight 2. It's cool though, you just jump really high to minimize damage, then hit F5 a few times to heal...
Military also uses VBIED a lot - that's Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Device.
Yeah, I like that idea. Have tiers of memory, depending on how often you'll write-erase it. Fast RAM for running programs, constant writing and erasing. Then some small chunk of flash memory for a temporary files cache - replace every year or so when it burns out, and it never stores any data except when the computer is up and running. Another, large flash memory chip for the 'hard drive' where you'll keep documents, media, etc., written to occasionally (10-20 times a day?). Finally, a flash chip for the OS and programs - this would almost never get written to - just when installing programs and updating the OS.
Umm.. should Microsoft be researching ways to help its competition take it over? Of course MS is going to be looking for the next killer 'thing' (app, console, music player, etc.) to lead the market. That's the beauty of a market - companies have incentives to do things which make the company stronger.
Another alternative would be to use a combination of fast RAM, a main CF storage drive, and a smaller, easily replaceable CF card that acts as a go-between for the fast RAM and the main CF storage drive. The idea would be that you can replace the CF card when it gets burned out after a couple hundred thousand write-erase cycles of doing document caching and perhaps temp internet file caching. Last time I checked, a 512MB flash card was going for under ten bucks, who cares if you replace it once a year?
Also, as time goes on, flash memory is getting cheaper, more durable, with more write-erase cycles. Having an easily replaceable CF card for caching your editable files and internet crap would be a big bonus in the ease-of-upgrade category. You might reach a point where you CAN use the CF drive as a swapfile, and can cut down on the more expensive fast RAM in future models of the laptop.
Not if you plant a roadside bomb, and want to trigger it the exact moment a particular Humvee drives past it. A timer wouldn't work very well. You could run wire from a blasting cap to a detonator, get a safe distance away, and wait to trigger it then, but the cellphone makes it all wireless. Not all of these jihadists are suicidal - they want to live to bomb our troops another day. I can see this sort of thing being pretty important to have in a warzone... not so much in the good old USA.
Please?
The trick of this function is to take the 32 bits of data that are really a float, but process it as if it's an integer. So you take that cumbersome number 21 as a float, then BAM! presto, turn it directly to an integer not through type conversion, but by simply treating those same 32 bits as if they were representing an integer all along.
Let's use the number 21 as an example in the function call.
The binary representation of 21 as a float is 01000001 10101000 00000000 00000000 (broken into 8-bit words for clarity). The function then goes to create a new integer i, whose value is also 01000001 10101000 00000000 00000000 (which happens to be 1101529088 in decimal). The magical line of the code, i = 0x5f3759df - (i>>1), takes that integer i, shifts its bits one to the right (turning our 01000001 10101000 00000000 00000000 into 00100000 11010100 00000000 00000000, or 550764544 in decimal), then subtracts it (still doing integer math here) from 0x5f3759df (which is 01011111 00110111 01011001 11011111 or 1597463007 in decimal), and winds up with 00111110 01100011 01011001 11011111 (or 1046698463 in decimal).
Now, for its next trick, it takes that wonky integer 1046698463, and turns it back into a floating point number, by the same trick used above, i.e. simply by looking at those same 32 bits, and pretending they're a float, not an int. The binary representation of 1046698463, 00111110 01100011 01011001 11011111, is the same as 0.22202251851558685 in float.
From here on out, it's all floating math. Apply the Newton-Rhapson method (thats the next line), we get x = 0.22202251851558685 * (1.5 - ( (21*.5) * 0.22202251851558685^2 )) = 0.218117811. We return this value at the closing of the function. As it turns out, the inverse square root of 21 is 0.21821789... (thanks Google calc). So, I have no idea WHY the Float to Int to Float trick works, but it works very well.
Whew!
And HL2 did seem a bit short, now that I think about it. But it's got serious replay value, much more so than any other FPS in recent memory.
Generally speaking, questions of fact are reviewed under a higher standard of deference than questions of law (usually de novo). When a judge makes a factual finding (i.e. Witness X is lying, the car was going 50 mph, etc.), that factual finding is usually not overturned on appeal unless it is "clearly erroneous".
However, if the judge simply makes a legal finding (statute XYZ applies in this case, affirmative defense ABC is not available to the defendants, etc.), those findings are reviewed de novo generally - the appellate judge takes a fresh look at the law.
Nobody wants to be seen as the Dollar General of processors...Cyrix anyone?
If, however, they operate as their own ISP, they can cram any DMCA takedown orders back in the faces of the requester, knowing they have a shield. I would expect given the rarity of these sorts of exemptions, and the value in protecting them, any bad faith takedown requests would be pursued aggressively by EFF and others. We can hope anyways.
This just screams for a special wiimote that looks, feels, and sounds like a lightsaber. Of course, it'll be a $100 add-on, but how bad-ass would it be to see your on-screen character swinging around a lightsaber, matching every one of your real movements. Of course, you'd still be able to play with the regular controls, but having a functional lightsaber remote as a limited-edition add on would probably generate a lot of interest. Of course, methinks a lot of people in the target demographic would get winded after about 30 seconds of gameplay, and give up...
So, in the future, someone can hack your passenger flight and take control of it remotely? Hope they stock clean underwear along with the barf bags on these flights.
That's a bit farfetched, wouldn't you say? So long as there's a market with options, MS would never be able to pull that off. That's why we have anti-trust laws, which theoretically keep one company from gaining a stranglehold on a particular market segment. With open standards, Linux, and Macs, I'd say MS really doesn't have a legal monopoly in desktops anymore - just a huge market share. And they've got nothing in game consoles or music players - those markets are pretty open. The market share enjoyed by MS is not increasing, it's decreasing - MS missed their window for draconian measures awhile ago.
Especially when those federal laws explicitly state that they preempt state law. Noting the opinions here, it seems the old saying rings true, "an activist judge is any judge whose rulings you disagree with".
It's a sticky area of the law. The statement "Bush is an idiot" will always be protected opinion. The statement "In my opinion, Mr. Smith is a nasty pedophile" will never be protected as opinion (though it may be OK for other reasons). Simply adding the phrase "in my opinion" to a statement that is essentially a fact, offers no protection. Courts look at a number of factors to see if a statement is opinion or fact, including context, whether the statement is capable of a provable or unprovable meaning (usually the hallmark of a 'fact'), and so on.