Don't you understand that this is exactly what your parents thought of your music? And their parents before them? And so forth?
Sure, I think everyone understands that at some level.
The difference is, my parents didn't start to think contemporary music sucked in their twenties. The RIAA has turned the "generation gap" into a 30-day grace period.
That's exactly what escrow.com does. They aren't owned by eBay, but they've been around almost as long.
I mean what the hell are the fees for at eBay? A website and advertising all over the place? Everybody and their mother has a website
Not one that gets forty gazillion hits per day. When you're paying eBay's fees, you're paying for buyer eyeballs... the same thing you pay for when you place a classified in your local newspaper. Nothing new under the sun.
People make mistakes on occasion... big surprise. Leaving the seller negative feedback without even bothering to email first and give them a chance to make good on their mistake was lame as hell, just IMHO.
In this case, you can think of the alphabet as a base-26 numbering scheme.
IHNRTFA, but it sounds like the good old USPTO monkey squad has allowed Microsoft to patent the Maidenhead grid locator scheme, dating at least to 1980. Off to RTFA now....
If you take these steps, you've got a library full of paid-for music that's been compressed twice. Yuk.
Correct. That's a drawback of iTunes in general; before buying music from them, you need to decide if paying 99 cents for lossily-compressed tracks is a good idea.
It works for me because I don't perceive any loss going from 128 kbps AAC to 192 kbps MP3. At any rate, the psychological impact of DRM is worse for me than the psychoacoustic impact of multiple lossy transforms. YMMV.
1. Buy song(s) on iTunes 2. Burn song(s) to CD-R (which you should be doing anyway for archival purposes) 3. Tell iTunes to rip to MP3 format at an archival-quality (192 kbps or better) bit rate 4. Rip CD-R you just burned to MP3 files 5. Delete original DRM-crippled.AAC files that you purchased from iTunes. You don't need them anymore.
Voila, DRM-free songs from iTunes... and you didn't even have to run any cracking tools.
It boggles the mind that so many uber-leet Slashdotter types don't realize that iTunes lets you do this. As soon as you buy a track, you can, and should, convert it to an unencumbered format. After that, nothing Apple or the RIAA do in the future can affect how you listen to the music you purchased.
36%, now. Pardon me while I renounce my citizenship and move to a country whose population not only accepts the theory of evolution, but has undergone its effects.
It'd be worth staying up for, but the last time I did that, I jinxed the Mars Polar Lander.:(
If the Huygens timeline executes as planned, it will rank among the coolest engineering achievements in history. It will also have happened thanks to one guy who kept his eye on the ball when nobody else was paying attention.
Yeah, I imagine 3 characters is about the practical limit. The first tab goes in all the way, the second tab goes in halfway (which guarantees it priority when the first key is released), and the third tab barely goes in at all.
That's not a buffer, it's jam protection. Is the Wiki entry wrong, or am I misunderstanding something?
It's both. Every key has a corresponding slot in the tube full of bearings, and a corresponding tab for that slot. When a key is pressed, its tab will go all the way into its slot, part of the way, or not at all, depending on how many other tabs are already taking up space in the slotted tube. The type ball doesn't rotate and strike a character until the character's tab goes all the way into its slot.
Because the tube is almost full of bearings, there's not enough room for more than one tab to go all the way in. That's the jam-proofing part.
Now, when a key is released, its tab comes all the way out of the slot. If another tab is "waiting" for space in the slot, it can go all the way in now, and its character will be printed. You could potentially have several tabs at various stages of penetration, so to speak, depending on how much room was still left in the tube when their keys were pressed. As the bearings move out of the way, the other tabs will fall into the slot in the order in which their keys were pressed. That's a perfectly-legitimate FIFO buffer.
Sure, it's not perfect... but geez, most engineers would probably have thrown relays and crap at the problem, and ended up with a huge contraption whose MTBF was roughly lunchtime.
Well, were you as amazed by typewriters then as they are by computers now?
I gotta throw my lot in with the other guy here. Mom's Smith-Corona manual typewriter was already an Antikythera-class artifact by the year I was born, but even though I was exposed to various early microcomputers while growing up, I was never inclined to take the Smith-Corona's complexity for granted. The guys who designed those old typewriters were not exactly the slow kids in class. (Do some Googling sometime about how IBM implemented a multicharacter typeahead buffer in the Selectric with a tube full of ball bearings.)
Later, I read a comment by Jim Williams of Analog Devices about an old-school Tektronix oscilloscope, the kind you could heat your living room with: "The thing just radiated intellectual honesty." Same deal with the Smith-Corona. Both instruments belonged to a time when what something did was intimately obvious from what it was... and how it worked was readily apparent from how it was made. Even a modern-day '1337 haX0r can still learn from the design ethos behind those old clunkers, and find reasons to be amazed by them.
Their worst nightmare is Tivo: they don't want you to be able to skip commercials. Hence the "broadcast flag" bit that's intended to cripple devices capable of making time-shiftable copies of the stream.
Devices which can circumvent the broadcast flag will be highly sought-after in the coming years.... and vigorously suppressed. This is one of those devices.
Now what legitimate reason do you have for listening to cell phone converstaions (ignoring the encryption and the "right to privacy" issue for a moment).
Let's see. As a licensed Amateur Radio operator, I'm not only permitted but required to ensure that my transmitted RF emissions are below certain thresholds outside the band I'm operating on. Now, I have no way to check my 902 MHz rig for spurious emissions in the adjacent AMPS band.
I can't even buy a used pre-ECPA receiver on eBay at this point. I guess if I ever accidentally interfere with the cellular folks, they can buy me a new HP 8565EC spectrum analyzer, and I'll track down the problem for them. That'll work.
Oh, and since I'm, like, this uber-paranoid guy, I'm constantly worried about bugs. I have a legitimate need to check for hidden transmitters in that portion of the spectrum, but now I can't, and they're HIDDEN UNDER THE FLOORBOARDS AND IRRADIATING ME FROM THE WALLS... (Sorry about that, ahem.)
Seriously, the ECPA's only exemption is for government agencies and (presumably) licensed government contractors. De jur, no other private citizen or company has a legitimate "need" for this technology. It was passed so the cellular companies could reassure their customers that nobody (who didn't own a TV set capable of tuning all the way up to UHF channel 83) could listen to them. Now that PCS, GSM, and other encrypted wireless technology has obviated the need for the ECPA, why hasn't it been repealed?
DeCSS has only one purpose.
Yep, you're right. To violate a law that did not exist before it was written and paid for by the same people I'm talking about here. "Legitimate uses" such as allowing people with Linux PCs to watch DVDs they legitimately purchased didn't enter into the equation, did they?
Your faith in the legislative and judicial branches is inspirational, I'll give you that much.
Also the author did win the DeCSS case.
Only because he didn't live in the "land of the free" (sic). The person who posted a simple href link to the code wasn't so lucky. See the link I provided.
Thanks; I didn't know they put their TOCs online. My copy of the magazine isn't handy, and I misstated one detail: according to the editorial, the FCC's request for comment referred to DACs rather than ADCs. For the moment, they appear to be more concerned about transmitting capability than receiving capability. (Which is even more asinine, as anyone seeking to cause ruckus on the airwaves can do it without a fast DAC. Are they going to repeal Lenz's Law next?)
Legitimate in whose opinion? Yours? My "need" for a general-coverage receiver was "legitimate" enough before 1987, but evidently not after that.
"What, in your obviously-informed opinion, is going to stop a similar consortium of HDTV broadcasters from buying legislation to outlaw unprotected high-bandwidth conversion hardware?"
Encryption technology, and dual use of high-speed conversion technology.
Yeah, because licensed commercial encryption keys never leak to the public, resulting in all kinds of crazy court rulings that prevent me from even being able to link to an example without legal consequences.
Yeah, I guess I'm just paranoid. You're right. Carry on! </adjust_tinfoil>
Care to tell me what in the world that has to do with anything? A Google search on "dual-use technology" returns nothing particularly enlightening. The term usually comes up in connection with technology exports.
A receiver that covers 870-890 MHz has legitimate uses beyond monitoring AMPS cell-phone conversations, but that didn't stop the cellular lobby from buying the ECPA. What, in your obviously-informed opinion, is going to stop a similar consortium of HDTV broadcasters from buying legislation to outlaw unprotected high-bandwidth conversion hardware?
Don't you guys get tired of being paranoid every second of every day, about everything?
I remember an editorial in QEX not too long ago that suggested there were already political efforts under way to regulate the sale of high-performance ADCs.
SDR is eventually going to make the Stalinist wannabees on Capitol Hill very nervous indeed. There is already precedent for banning the manufacture and sale of certain types of receiving equipment (Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 1987), so I would not take the availability of this technology for granted if I were you. It wouldn't be the least bit surprising to see a Federal ban on private ownership of high-speed analog-to-digital converters at the IC level.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't you understand that this is exactly what your parents thought of your music? And their parents before them? And so forth?
Sure, I think everyone understands that at some level.
The difference is, my parents didn't start to think contemporary music sucked in their twenties. The RIAA has turned the "generation gap" into a 30-day grace period.
That's exactly what escrow.com does. They aren't owned by eBay, but they've been around almost as long.
I mean what the hell are the fees for at eBay? A website and advertising all over the place? Everybody and their mother has a website
Not one that gets forty gazillion hits per day. When you're paying eBay's fees, you're paying for buyer eyeballs... the same thing you pay for when you place a classified in your local newspaper. Nothing new under the sun.
People make mistakes on occasion... big surprise. Leaving the seller negative feedback without even bothering to email first and give them a chance to make good on their mistake was lame as hell, just IMHO.
Why would anyone want to do base-30 mathematics?
In this case, you can think of the alphabet as a base-26 numbering scheme.
IHNRTFA, but it sounds like the good old USPTO monkey squad has allowed Microsoft to patent the Maidenhead grid locator scheme, dating at least to 1980. Off to RTFA now....
If you take these steps, you've got a library full of paid-for music that's been compressed twice. Yuk.
Correct. That's a drawback of iTunes in general; before buying music from them, you need to decide if paying 99 cents for lossily-compressed tracks is a good idea.
It works for me because I don't perceive any loss going from 128 kbps AAC to 192 kbps MP3. At any rate, the psychological impact of DRM is worse for me than the psychoacoustic impact of multiple lossy transforms. YMMV.
No, not "very true."
.AAC files that you purchased from iTunes. You don't need them anymore.
1. Buy song(s) on iTunes
2. Burn song(s) to CD-R (which you should be doing anyway for archival purposes)
3. Tell iTunes to rip to MP3 format at an archival-quality (192 kbps or better) bit rate
4. Rip CD-R you just burned to MP3 files
5. Delete original DRM-crippled
Voila, DRM-free songs from iTunes... and you didn't even have to run any cracking tools.
It boggles the mind that so many uber-leet Slashdotter types don't realize that iTunes lets you do this. As soon as you buy a track, you can, and should, convert it to an unencumbered format. After that, nothing Apple or the RIAA do in the future can affect how you listen to the music you purchased.
Boeing is in the middle of a massive struggle with Airbus, and it's unlikely both can survive.
Yeah, because the US Department of Defense is just itching to send a few hundred billion dollars a year to France.
If I had the type of money these guys have, there's no way I'd waste it on something ... risky and untested
Wait. I think I see why you don't have the type of money those guys have.
In a word, no. Russia put probes on Venus (mush harsher env than titan) in 1967
Launched from Earth, though... not an autonomous orbiter. The two-stage nature of the Huygens mission is what makes it so interesting, IMO.
36%, now. Pardon me while I renounce my citizenship and move to a country whose population not only accepts the theory of evolution, but has undergone its effects.
"Educated" and "smart" form a two-dimensional orthogonal basis. Kaku is living proof of that.
It's an unmanned probe.
Shyeah. Try telling that to the men and women back at Mission Control.
... at SpaceFlight Now
:(
It'd be worth staying up for, but the last time I did that, I jinxed the Mars Polar Lander.
If the Huygens timeline executes as planned, it will rank among the coolest engineering achievements in history. It will also have happened thanks to one guy who kept his eye on the ball when nobody else was paying attention.
the message that one must be skeptical
This, from the author of "Travels"? Crichton is perhaps the least skeptical person, in or out of the scientific fields, that I've ever encountered.
Or at least, he was. I'll have to check the new book out, it sounds like.
Yeah, I imagine 3 characters is about the practical limit. The first tab goes in all the way, the second tab goes in halfway (which guarantees it priority when the first key is released), and the third tab barely goes in at all.
That's not a buffer, it's jam protection. Is the Wiki entry wrong, or am I misunderstanding something?
It's both. Every key has a corresponding slot in the tube full of bearings, and a corresponding tab for that slot. When a key is pressed, its tab will go all the way into its slot, part of the way, or not at all, depending on how many other tabs are already taking up space in the slotted tube. The type ball doesn't rotate and strike a character until the character's tab goes all the way into its slot.
Because the tube is almost full of bearings, there's not enough room for more than one tab to go all the way in. That's the jam-proofing part.
Now, when a key is released, its tab comes all the way out of the slot. If another tab is "waiting" for space in the slot, it can go all the way in now, and its character will be printed. You could potentially have several tabs at various stages of penetration, so to speak, depending on how much room was still left in the tube when their keys were pressed. As the bearings move out of the way, the other tabs will fall into the slot in the order in which their keys were pressed. That's a perfectly-legitimate FIFO buffer.
Sure, it's not perfect... but geez, most engineers would probably have thrown relays and crap at the problem, and ended up with a huge contraption whose MTBF was roughly lunchtime.
Well, were you as amazed by typewriters then as they are by computers now?
I gotta throw my lot in with the other guy here. Mom's Smith-Corona manual typewriter was already an Antikythera-class artifact by the year I was born, but even though I was exposed to various early microcomputers while growing up, I was never inclined to take the Smith-Corona's complexity for granted. The guys who designed those old typewriters were not exactly the slow kids in class. (Do some Googling sometime about how IBM implemented a multicharacter typeahead buffer in the Selectric with a tube full of ball bearings.)
Later, I read a comment by Jim Williams of Analog Devices about an old-school Tektronix oscilloscope, the kind you could heat your living room with: "The thing just radiated intellectual honesty." Same deal with the Smith-Corona. Both instruments belonged to a time when what something did was intimately obvious from what it was... and how it worked was readily apparent from how it was made. Even a modern-day '1337 haX0r can still learn from the design ethos behind those old clunkers, and find reasons to be amazed by them.
Their worst nightmare is Tivo: they don't want you to be able to skip commercials. Hence the "broadcast flag" bit that's intended to cripple devices capable of making time-shiftable copies of the stream.
Devices which can circumvent the broadcast flag will be highly sought-after in the coming years.... and vigorously suppressed. This is one of those devices.
Now what legitimate reason do you have for listening to cell phone converstaions (ignoring the encryption and the "right to privacy" issue for a moment).
Let's see. As a licensed Amateur Radio operator, I'm not only permitted but required to ensure that my transmitted RF emissions are below certain thresholds outside the band I'm operating on. Now, I have no way to check my 902 MHz rig for spurious emissions in the adjacent AMPS band.
I can't even buy a used pre-ECPA receiver on eBay at this point. I guess if I ever accidentally interfere with the cellular folks, they can buy me a new HP 8565EC spectrum analyzer, and I'll track down the problem for them. That'll work.
Oh, and since I'm, like, this uber-paranoid guy, I'm constantly worried about bugs. I have a legitimate need to check for hidden transmitters in that portion of the spectrum, but now I can't, and they're HIDDEN UNDER THE FLOORBOARDS AND IRRADIATING ME FROM THE WALLS... (Sorry about that, ahem.)
Seriously, the ECPA's only exemption is for government agencies and (presumably) licensed government contractors. De jur, no other private citizen or company has a legitimate "need" for this technology. It was passed so the cellular companies could reassure their customers that nobody (who didn't own a TV set capable of tuning all the way up to UHF channel 83) could listen to them. Now that PCS, GSM, and other encrypted wireless technology has obviated the need for the ECPA, why hasn't it been repealed?
DeCSS has only one purpose.
Yep, you're right. To violate a law that did not exist before it was written and paid for by the same people I'm talking about here. "Legitimate uses" such as allowing people with Linux PCs to watch DVDs they legitimately purchased didn't enter into the equation, did they?
Your faith in the legislative and judicial branches is inspirational, I'll give you that much.
Also the author did win the DeCSS case.
Only because he didn't live in the "land of the free" (sic). The person who posted a simple href link to the code wasn't so lucky. See the link I provided.
Thanks; I didn't know they put their TOCs online. My copy of the magazine isn't handy, and I misstated one detail: according to the editorial, the FCC's request for comment referred to DACs rather than ADCs. For the moment, they appear to be more concerned about transmitting capability than receiving capability. (Which is even more asinine, as anyone seeking to cause ruckus on the airwaves can do it without a fast DAC. Are they going to repeal Lenz's Law next?)
Does anyone have a docket number for that RFC?
Those with legitimate needs
Legitimate in whose opinion? Yours? My "need" for a general-coverage receiver was "legitimate" enough before 1987, but evidently not after that.
"What, in your obviously-informed opinion, is going to stop a similar consortium of HDTV broadcasters from buying legislation to outlaw unprotected high-bandwidth conversion hardware?"
Encryption technology, and dual use of high-speed conversion technology.
Yeah, because licensed commercial encryption keys never leak to the public, resulting in all kinds of crazy court rulings that prevent me from even being able to link to an example without legal consequences.
Yeah, I guess I'm just paranoid. You're right. Carry on! </adjust_tinfoil>
Look up dual-use technology and try again.
Care to tell me what in the world that has to do with anything? A Google search on "dual-use technology" returns nothing particularly enlightening. The term usually comes up in connection with technology exports.
A receiver that covers 870-890 MHz has legitimate uses beyond monitoring AMPS cell-phone conversations, but that didn't stop the cellular lobby from buying the ECPA. What, in your obviously-informed opinion, is going to stop a similar consortium of HDTV broadcasters from buying legislation to outlaw unprotected high-bandwidth conversion hardware?
Don't you guys get tired of being paranoid every second of every day, about everything?
So sayeth the Anonymous Coward....
What you're talking about already exists, actually. See www.flex-radio.com.
I remember an editorial in QEX not too long ago that suggested there were already political efforts under way to regulate the sale of high-performance ADCs.
SDR is eventually going to make the Stalinist wannabees on Capitol Hill very nervous indeed. There is already precedent for banning the manufacture and sale of certain types of receiving equipment (Electronic Communications Privacy Act, 1987), so I would not take the availability of this technology for granted if I were you. It wouldn't be the least bit surprising to see a Federal ban on private ownership of high-speed analog-to-digital converters at the IC level.
It's the age old case of man believing his logic is impenetrable, where in reality it amounts to nothing more than the finger pointing to the moon
Would this be the same moon we sent some dudes up to tromp around on?