It's not clear what you mean by "wasted spectrum," or what benefits you expect to come from reclaiming it.
The entire AM broadcast band takes up the same bandwidth as one-fourth of a conventional TV channel. Like the entire MF/HF spectrum, it's completely useless for anything besides voice communication due to limited bandwidth and excessive noise.
The entire FM broadcast band occupies the equivalent of 5 TV channels. Any attempt to monkey with the FM BC allocation will render hundreds of millions of home and car radios obsolete. If you think DTV is a political boondoggle that offers insufficient benefits to consumers, you wouldn't want to think about messing with FM.
I also don't like having to pay taxes to support a police department just because there are so many people that are willing to physically steal anything they want.
That analogy doesn't hold water, and neither does the previously-cited "paying for health insurance doesn't give you permission to commit insurance fraud" analogy.
Both of these examples involve value delivered to the consumer in exchange for taxes and insurance premiums. The police are there to serve me when I need law enforcement services. The insurance company is there to serve me when I need health-care services. So I pay for both of them, more or less willingly.
Charging a tax on CD-R media, on the other hand, does not grant me any additional rights to goods or services in exchange for my payment. It is nothing more or less than government-sanctioned theft in the cases where it already happens. (In the US, cassettes already have such a "piracy" tax built in to their prices... didn't anyone know that?)
The US Constitution prohibits the government from "taking without compensation" in any form. This is exactly what laws like the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Act already do, of course, but nobody in the judiciary seems to give a flip. If the RIAA's lawmaking-by-payola strategy results in new "anti-piracy" taxes on CD-R media, it will only add one more straw to the same camel's-load of unconstitutional laws.
The question is, how far can Hilary go before ordinary people start to care?
My provider, http://www.giganews.com, already has a "Click here to submit DMCA removal requests" button.
(Besides, I hate the thought of using Usenet to distribute large binary files. Physically copying huge blocks of data all over the planet is just not the right way to do it. Sure, it works, but it's still a ridiculous waste of bandwidth and storage.)
So, do you refuse to listen to music now, since nobody "lets" you steal it, or do you just go and say, "Well, if I couldn't steal it, then I wouldn't listen to it..."
Fortunately, it's currently not difficult to "steal" the music I want to evaluate. The real problem is the threatened demise of private Internet streaming; that's where I usually become aware of new stuff.
My usual pattern has been:
1) Hear one song on MPEGRadio that sounds cool. Portishead's "Glory Box," to cite a real-life instance. That song was six years old when I heard it for the first time; I'm damned sure not going to stumble across it on eMpTyV or what passes for Top-40 radio ("All Britney, All The Time") these days.
2) Go to Napster/BearShare/whatever. Download every track by (again, e.g.) Portishead I can find. Say to myself, "Self, this r0x0rs."
3) Go to Amazon and start whaling on their Patented One-Click(tm) Button.
4) Go back to Napster and search the drives of people who had the good Portishead stuff, looking for similar music to "steal."
5) Discover Morcheeba, Lamb, Hooverphonic, Massive Attack, et al. Go back to step 3 above.
The problem I have is, if the RIAA actually does manage to shut down the streaming servers and the many heirs to Napster's throne, I will have no way to find new cool stuff to buy. I don't hang out in smoke-filled clubs, and at any rate, the examples I mentioned above probably haven't been played in clubs for years. The RIAA will have inconvenienced me, but what will really have happened is they'll have shot themselves in their collective feet, along with the artists they represent. No "stealing," no revenue. It really is that simple.
I can't speak for the "cheap" losers you refer to who make it a point of (dis)honor to use MP3 servers to avoid paying for music they enjoy. I'm not one of them; I don't know any of them; and frankly, I'm not sure they even exist in numbers large enough to warrant the RIAA's concern.
We figured games like Death Maze and Asylum were flukes. That they'd never catch on. We also figured the Infocom games -- Zork I and Deadline and Suspect -- would be the games that, over time, would last.
They were. I don't see any entire communities dedicated to keeping Death Maze and Asylum alive.
The good stuff endures. Unfortunately, it's been years since there was any "good stuff" available commercially in the interactive-fiction world.
Plus or minus an order of magnitude, at least, depending on frequency and conduction path through the body, and a whole hell of a lot of luck of either variety. The human body looks like a very nonlinear device.
Also, high-current AC circuits can pack some nasty surprises. A wedding ring or metal watch band makes a nifty one-turn transformer winding, for instance.
It doesn't pay to get too complacent with either high voltage levels, high current levels, or both.
Instead of redirecting ads.x10.com to localhost, redirect it to 208.233.99.162 (ak47.algebra.com). This server runs some sort of Javascript hack that automatically closes the window as soon as it appears.
I agree... I've never understood modern Christianity's ability to take some parts of the Bible at face value while acknowledging and accepting the fact that other parts are just so much made-up nonsense.
As an agnostic, I actually have more respect for the faith of the hardcore fundamentalist types than I do for the more "progressive" denominations. At least the fundies stick to their guns (sometimes a little too literally).
People can rationalize their beliefs to a truly amazing extent, and religion is by no means unique in that respect. Much of the ideological backlash Copernicus had to put up with didn't even come from the Church, for instance. It's easy to blame all irrational human behavior on our atavistic God/alpha leader-seeking genes, but it's also very wrong.
Might be a nice, cheap input controller for my car MP3 player. That's a lot of UI functionality for $250-$300, compared to what you pay for off-the-shelf automotive display solutions.
Correct, Franklin was a publisher. But it's safe to say it never occurred to him to try to usurp the kind of power that laws like the DMCA give publishers today.
Funny thing is, I have never seen any of these "responsible" people willing to assume liability for damages in case it is too late. Are you?
More religiosity.
I could sell you anything on that basis. Are you sure you're willing to assume liability for the state of your own immortal soul if you fail to believe in the Great Pumpkin?
Again, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. At heart, your argument ("but... but... what if...?") amounts to a demand that we all move back into the caves, just to be safe.
Re:Stupidity is Self Curing
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 4
The big problem I see with current trends (especially in the U.S.) is that nothing we're doing is sustainable. We're using up our natural resources at a frightening fast rate. We're still polluting like mad, we're pumping tremendous amounts of C02 and methane into the atmosphere and eventually we'll kill off the human race or just most of the planet. If every one in the world lived like the US did, we'd need 3 Earths to handle the demand on natural resources.
Unfortunately, from the extent of your hyperbole above, it sounds like you've adopted the opinion of a very few, largely-self-styled experts as if they were handed down to Moses on stone tablets. (Sorry -- it really is tough to avoid the "religion" metaphor when discussing these things.)
Are you aware that as recently as the 1970s we were supposedly heading for another ice age? At least, we were according to the same clique of "environmental scientists" who are now telling us we're heading for imminent global heat death.
The effects you're talking about constitute, in the words of Carl Sagan, "extraordinary claims." Do you really think it's unreasonable for us to demand "extraordinary proof" to go along with them?
In short, read what you're writing, for Pete's sake, and understand what you're asking of the rest of us. If you successfully convince me to buy that happy neo-Malthusian crap you're selling, you'll have compelled me to rearrange my lifestyle more drastically than anything short of a severe car crash, life-threatening disease, or limited nuclear war could have done. I'd have to destroy my own car (of course, we ran out of fossil fuels about 10 years ago according to the prevailing environmental opinions^h^h^h^h^hscience of the 70s era, so no great loss there), stop washing my clothes, and swear not to reproduce (of course, not washing my clothes should take care of that problem nicely).
No, I'm not going to take decisions like this lightly... and no, you're not going to win me, or any other typical American I know, over to your cause by resorting to violence and vandalism. At a minimum, it's going to take irrefutable proof of anthropogenic contributions to global warming and undeniable evidence of consequential harm. We don't have that right now, and we won't for a long time, if ever. Will it be too late then? Maybe.
But then, I'm willing to bet that somehow, things aren't quite as bad as you're making them sound.
Re:Stupidity is Self Curing
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 2
Umm.... should we really have that problem in the first place?
Maybe not, but if you're right, we'd better stop vandalizing cars and start sterilizing people. That's the only way to deal with the problem in the long run, in the view of all the neo-Malthusians on here.
Slashdot Mirror
What happens to you when the plane is de-pressurized?
Duh, it doesn't hit a building full of people?
Do you ever think?
Well, there's a question that rebuts itself nicely.
It's not clear what you mean by "wasted spectrum," or what benefits you expect to come from reclaiming it.
The entire AM broadcast band takes up the same bandwidth as one-fourth of a conventional TV channel. Like the entire MF/HF spectrum, it's completely useless for anything besides voice communication due to limited bandwidth and excessive noise.
The entire FM broadcast band occupies the equivalent of 5 TV channels. Any attempt to monkey with the FM BC allocation will render hundreds of millions of home and car radios obsolete. If you think DTV is a political boondoggle that offers insufficient benefits to consumers, you wouldn't want to think about messing with FM.
They want to use YOUR money to make THEM rich.
Never mind, of course, that the only way THAT can happen is if these evil capitalist pig-dogs actually succeed in HELPING sick people.
I guess your whole life is just one big zero-sum game, huh?
I also don't like having to pay taxes to support a police department just because there are so many people that are willing to physically steal anything they want.
That analogy doesn't hold water, and neither does the previously-cited "paying for health insurance doesn't give you permission to commit insurance fraud" analogy.
Both of these examples involve value delivered to the consumer in exchange for taxes and insurance premiums. The police are there to serve me when I need law enforcement services. The insurance company is there to serve me when I need health-care services. So I pay for both of them, more or less willingly.
Charging a tax on CD-R media, on the other hand, does not grant me any additional rights to goods or services in exchange for my payment. It is nothing more or less than government-sanctioned theft in the cases where it already happens. (In the US, cassettes already have such a "piracy" tax built in to their prices... didn't anyone know that?)
The US Constitution prohibits the government from "taking without compensation" in any form. This is exactly what laws like the DMCA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Act already do, of course, but nobody in the judiciary seems to give a flip. If the RIAA's lawmaking-by-payola strategy results in new "anti-piracy" taxes on CD-R media, it will only add one more straw to the same camel's-load of unconstitutional laws.
The question is, how far can Hilary go before ordinary people start to care?
My provider, http://www.giganews.com, already has a "Click here to submit DMCA removal requests" button.
(Besides, I hate the thought of using Usenet to distribute large binary files. Physically copying huge blocks of data all over the planet is just not the right way to do it. Sure, it works, but it's still a ridiculous waste of bandwidth and storage.)
Who are the Brutal Death Metal Fags? Sounds interesting, but I couldn't find anything by them at Sam Goody's.
You are still breaking the rules and going against the will of a lot of people, without whom that music wouldn't exist.
:)
Correct, but as has been noted, we don't always get what we want in life.
So, do you refuse to listen to music now, since nobody "lets" you steal it, or do you just go and say, "Well, if I couldn't steal it, then I wouldn't listen to it..."
Fortunately, it's currently not difficult to "steal" the music I want to evaluate. The real problem is the threatened demise of private Internet streaming; that's where I usually become aware of new stuff.
My usual pattern has been:
1) Hear one song on MPEGRadio that sounds cool. Portishead's "Glory Box," to cite a real-life instance. That song was six years old when I heard it for the first time; I'm damned sure not going to stumble across it on eMpTyV or what passes for Top-40 radio ("All Britney, All The Time") these days.
2) Go to Napster/BearShare/whatever. Download every track by (again, e.g.) Portishead I can find. Say to myself, "Self, this r0x0rs."
3) Go to Amazon and start whaling on their Patented One-Click(tm) Button.
4) Go back to Napster and search the drives of people who had the good Portishead stuff, looking for similar music to "steal."
5) Discover Morcheeba, Lamb, Hooverphonic, Massive Attack, et al. Go back to step 3 above.
The problem I have is, if the RIAA actually does manage to shut down the streaming servers and the many heirs to Napster's throne, I will have no way to find new cool stuff to buy. I don't hang out in smoke-filled clubs, and at any rate, the examples I mentioned above probably haven't been played in clubs for years. The RIAA will have inconvenienced me, but what will really have happened is they'll have shot themselves in their collective feet, along with the artists they represent. No "stealing," no revenue. It really is that simple.
I can't speak for the "cheap" losers you refer to who make it a point of (dis)honor to use MP3 servers to avoid paying for music they enjoy. I'm not one of them; I don't know any of them; and frankly, I'm not sure they even exist in numbers large enough to warrant the RIAA's concern.
I "steal" music to evaluate it. If you don't let me "steal" the music first, I will not buy it.
Don't like it? Tough. I can live without your music WAY longer than you can live without my money.
We figured games like Death Maze and Asylum were flukes. That they'd never catch on. We also figured the Infocom games -- Zork I and Deadline and Suspect -- would be the games that, over time, would last.
They were. I don't see any entire communities dedicated to keeping Death Maze and Asylum alive.
The good stuff endures. Unfortunately, it's been years since there was any "good stuff" available commercially in the interactive-fiction world.
At some point, that's likely to change.
This program never ceases to amaze me...
.PDF capture, I don't see how Adobe stays in business.
Yep. Between Paint Shop Pro for imaging and ABBYY FineReader for
It takes 100mA for a second to stop your heart.
Plus or minus an order of magnitude, at least, depending on frequency and conduction path through the body, and a whole hell of a lot of luck of either variety. The human body looks like a very nonlinear device.
Also, high-current AC circuits can pack some nasty surprises. A wedding ring or metal watch band makes a nifty one-turn transformer winding, for instance.
It doesn't pay to get too complacent with either high voltage levels, high current levels, or both.
If browsers were still $40, then we'd likely have a bunch of good ones to pick from
We don't need a "bunch of good ones to pick from." IE is fine.
Instead of redirecting ads.x10.com to localhost, redirect it to 208.233.99.162 (ak47.algebra.com). This server runs some sort of Javascript hack that automatically closes the window as soon as it appears.
Ran across this gem on alt.marketing.online.ebay.
... they sound like a spectacular construction method. One that would have been immortalized in art.
I'm skeptical of the kite theory simply because we haven't run across any paintings or etchings of people using them to raise the stones.
I agree... I've never understood modern Christianity's ability to take some parts of the Bible at face value while acknowledging and accepting the fact that other parts are just so much made-up nonsense.
As an agnostic, I actually have more respect for the faith of the hardcore fundamentalist types than I do for the more "progressive" denominations. At least the fundies stick to their guns (sometimes a little too literally).
People can rationalize their beliefs to a truly amazing extent, and religion is by no means unique in that respect. Much of the ideological backlash Copernicus had to put up with didn't even come from the Church, for instance. It's easy to blame all irrational human behavior on our atavistic God/alpha leader-seeking genes, but it's also very wrong.
The sonic boom would have come from the upper atmosphere, where the meteor would have been travelling at significant higher velocity.
Just prior to impact, its speed would have been determined by its terminal velocity. 100-200 MPH sounds reasonable.
Hey Jon, pretend the people on the island are being persecuted for being different and the dinosaurs are the "jocks" and then maybe you'll like it!
Hey, considering all the Lord of the Flies allusions in the movie, it's actually not that much of a stretch.
Might be a nice, cheap input controller for my car MP3 player. That's a lot of UI functionality for $250-$300, compared to what you pay for off-the-shelf automotive display solutions.
30% of American households still have black and white TV.
Can you provide a citation for that statistic?
Correct, Franklin was a publisher. But it's safe to say it never occurred to him to try to usurp the kind of power that laws like the DMCA give publishers today.
Funny thing is, I have never seen any of these "responsible" people willing to assume liability for damages in case it is too late. Are you?
More religiosity.
I could sell you anything on that basis. Are you sure you're willing to assume liability for the state of your own immortal soul if you fail to believe in the Great Pumpkin?
Again, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. At heart, your argument ("but... but... what if...?") amounts to a demand that we all move back into the caves, just to be safe.
Thanks, but I gave at the airport.
Well I have yet to see a CEO assasinated by environmentalist wackos.
Not for lack of trying.
The big problem I see with current trends (especially in the U.S.) is that nothing we're doing is sustainable. We're using up our natural resources at a frightening fast rate. We're still polluting like mad, we're pumping tremendous amounts of C02 and methane into the atmosphere and eventually we'll kill off the human race or just most of the planet. If every one in the world lived like the US did, we'd need 3 Earths to handle the demand on natural resources.
Unfortunately, from the extent of your hyperbole above, it sounds like you've adopted the opinion of a very few, largely-self-styled experts as if they were handed down to Moses on stone tablets. (Sorry -- it really is tough to avoid the "religion" metaphor when discussing these things.)
Are you aware that as recently as the 1970s we were supposedly heading for another ice age? At least, we were according to the same clique of "environmental scientists" who are now telling us we're heading for imminent global heat death.
The effects you're talking about constitute, in the words of Carl Sagan, "extraordinary claims." Do you really think it's unreasonable for us to demand "extraordinary proof" to go along with them?
In short, read what you're writing, for Pete's sake, and understand what you're asking of the rest of us. If you successfully convince me to buy that happy neo-Malthusian crap you're selling, you'll have compelled me to rearrange my lifestyle more drastically than anything short of a severe car crash, life-threatening disease, or limited nuclear war could have done. I'd have to destroy my own car (of course, we ran out of fossil fuels about 10 years ago according to the prevailing environmental opinions^h^h^h^h^hscience of the 70s era, so no great loss there), stop washing my clothes, and swear not to reproduce (of course, not washing my clothes should take care of that problem nicely).
No, I'm not going to take decisions like this lightly... and no, you're not going to win me, or any other typical American I know, over to your cause by resorting to violence and vandalism. At a minimum, it's going to take irrefutable proof of anthropogenic contributions to global warming and undeniable evidence of consequential harm. We don't have that right now, and we won't for a long time, if ever. Will it be too late then? Maybe.
But then, I'm willing to bet that somehow, things aren't quite as bad as you're making them sound.
Umm.... should we really have that problem in the first place?
Maybe not, but if you're right, we'd better stop vandalizing cars and start sterilizing people. That's the only way to deal with the problem in the long run, in the view of all the neo-Malthusians on here.