True, the fees themselves don't stack up anywhere near as much as the other parts of the awards, but they're separate items, and if an easy opportunity to knock one of them down comes by, I don't see why they shouldn't take it - the worst that could happen is that Universal sees through the plan, and just forks over the $400k in order to preserve the RIAA's lawyer fees, in which case the EFF has an extra $400k to throw at defending people from them.
Just because there are two parts to a problem and one is bigger doesn't mean you should completely ignore the "smaller" (yet still way overblown) part. If challenges to the $150k per song are successful in getting it dropped to the $0.99 that it's actually worth, that would still leave the average defendant stuck with hundreds of thousands in lawyer's fees, and the lawyers launching the suits making boatloads of cash for doing it - meaning that even with reduced "per infringement" awards, the RIAA is still free to bankrupt anyone who challenges them. Getting their lawyer's fees slashed hard will make it less profitable for the RIAA's legal team, and also cuts off part of their means of intimidating people into submission.
Actually, I think this is very much related to the RIAA's over-blown claims.
I think they've filed this request with the intention of Universal protesting it, calling the fees outrageous, and doing all of the research for the EFF on why fees that large are wrong in order to get them stopped.
Then the EFF can take that case work, and apply it in the next RIAA trial they're involved in, since in the US, a lot of law is built on precedent, and that would make a very useful precedent indeed.
1: Universal (RIAA member) gets fees chopped down massively
2: RIAA sues some college kid and wins massive awards including overblown attorney fees
3: EFF presents case precedent from RIAA member indicating those fees are excessive
The eight-character limit is due to them using the standard Unix crypt() function, which Unix passwords were traditionally encrypted with - it's a one-way encryption, so brute force is generally the only way to recover the passwords, and at the time the computations needed to guarantee cracking a password would take too long to make it worthwhile.
Of course, modern computing systems can run through all of the possible passwords in an 8-character password pretty quickly, so it's a good thing modern systems are switching over to md5 for password encryption.
The big problem I see is that a lot of sites on the internet (where most of the cracking is probably happening) won't allow non-alphanumeric characters, and refuse to allow you to use that password if you try to include them - that automatically cuts off multiple possible digits, and reduces the maximum password strength on their site by a massive degree. My own university is sadly one of these offenders - anything that isn't a letter or number gets your password disqualified, and yet they also complain when your password is "too simple"...
Surface gravity isn't just determined by density either - there's also the distance from the center of mass to be considered. I got the impression that the planet's mass was measured at 6 times earth, but it's actual diameter was not determined. Technically, it could be anything from a ball of Uranium half the diameter of earth to a loose saturn-like cloud collection the size of Neptune. (Saturn's average density is less than that of water.)
The surface gravity of the Uranium-ball planet would be much higher than that of the cloud, mainly because of the distance from the center of mass, since gravity falls off fast with greater distance. With a mass of 6x earth, there technically _should_ be a diameter at which the planet actually has a surface gravity similar to earth.
You mean Motion? It's ok for very low-end applications, but it doesn't handle things like motion detectors or alarm sensors, just cameras (and if they're USB, only one camera), and so it lacks the power that a lot of people would want in a security program.
Of course, I use it myself for a security camera, and have actually caught the person I suspected of stealing things from my office with it - having video proof is nice when you need to rat out the boss's pet for being slime.
The one that ran into me/fell apart in the parking lot was a Toyota.
Well, it was most of a Toyota. Still, outside of basic manufacturer's defects, most of the mechanical failures you'll see in cars are because the owner doesn't take care of it - and that's why the average person should not be allowed to have a flying car. It'd be raining flying-car-bits all day long.
The street I live on is one of the major through-streets to get from one end of my city to another, and it's constantly covered in bits of cars that have fallen off because the owner was an idiot. Over the last ten years, I've seen hub-caps, rear-view mirrors, bits of bumper, door handles, head lights (Yes, head-lights. No, I don't know how, it was just there in the middle of the street.), tail pipes, a few mufflers, one wheel (complete with part of the axle still attached), and a van's rear bench seat fall off of cars driving past my house. You want these people sailing over your head? That's dangerous!
Along with the dozen or so other stories of cars crashing due to mechanical failure, I've actually been hit by a car due to a mechanical failure in the car - the break line snapped on a rotten, rusted out junk heap of a car in a parking lot, and it rolled into me, and destroyed what little remained of it's rotted out front bumper. (Also, leaving bits of engine sitting on the parking lot behind itself when it was towed away.) On the plus side, I wasn't hurt at all, but my pants were ruined - the stains from the rotten fibre-glass squishing into them never did come out.
While I realize this is an extreme example, it's the sort of care people take of their _ground_ cars, and it would be the same sort of care they took of their _flying_ cars too. I can already picture junkers with bits falling off sailing overhead dropping vital and important parts on me before crashing into the side of some building because the steering system fell out.
Actually, politicians tend to say "EVERYONE deserves all the schooling they can get, even if we have to bleed every working man and woman dry to subsidize it."
You haven't been paying much attention to politicians lately, and you've got the "before/after" backwards on that government shoveling of money. The trend over the last decade has been very much along the lines of reducing the money that goes to education, and especially to universities - that is the reason the cost to the individual students is going up.
Essentially, "F" means "you fail", and "F-" means "You fail so hard you either never showed up, or you put effort into doing badly." I've had both in my class - the most memorable of which was an F- student who submitted a 136 page appeal of his grade, of which only one sentence was even remotely related to my course (stating that he was appealing his grade in it, and should have an A+ instead of F-) - the rest was ranting about the Cyberterrorists (who have his password) that keep stealing and/or vandalizing his car. He included diagrams. That's the sort of person who gets an F-.
The degree system in Ontario goes on a point system for calculating average grades - "F-" is worth 0, while "F" gets you 1 point, (There's no such thing as an F+, fortunately.) up to A+ which is worth 13 - they average the points over your courses, and use that to decide your average grade. If your average is below a certain level, they'll ask you to withdraw from your program of study.
That means that a student with all 90% to 100% scores, except for one F will have a lower average than a student who has all exactly 80% scores. I blame this on John Snobelen, the high-school dropout who was made education minister of Ontario for half of a term ("moved" to a different post in 1997) - he didn't like being in a "low importance, low profile position", so he promised to create an educational crisis, and by golly we still haven't really recovered from it.
The University I teach at demanded that all profs use a "standardized" percentile to letter grade translation as follows:
0-34% = F-
35-49% = F
50-59% = D range
60-69% = C range
70-79% = B range
80-100% = A range
And if you calculate 2.7/4.0, you get about 67.5%, which fits into her being a "C" student. Basically, she barely passed, put forth minimal effort, and feels that she's entitled to be handed everything ahead of those students who got a 4.0. (You know - the ones who actually learned things and put forth effort.)
Being a C student isn't just nothing to brag about, it's something to actively avoid talking about.
Part of the reason they have to raise their prices faster than inflation is because the government-supplied part of their funding is steadily being withdrawn, and the money has to come from somewhere. It's pretty simple math, really:
Cost = Facilities + (# of Students * # of courses per student) + research budget
Income = Gov. Grants + Tuition + Donations + Industry Grants
If you reduce the income, then something from the cost has to go down.
If you reduce the research budget, then Industry Grants will also dry up, further reducing the Income, so that's not going to work.
If you reduce the facilities, you don't have places to put the students.
If you reduce the students or courses, you lose Tuition, and Income goes down further.
That means that you _must_ keep the Income balanced with the Cost. Politicians however look at it and say "Bah! Nobody needs nunna that thar book lernin'! Ah'll jus take their budget ta pay fer mah fishin' industry project this month." So the Cost has not changed, but the Income has gone down.
And then more and more students enrol, increasing cost out of proportion to the respective increase in Income due to more tuition being paid. (Guess what? Your degree costs the University more than you paid in Tuition!)
The _ONLY_ way that the rising spiral of costs can be dealt with is to either increase tuition (which reduces the number of students as well, thus reducing the costs and bringing it closer to balance) or to find some other source of income. In the current economy, how much money do you donate to your local university? Not very much I'd wager.
Actually, it does support @font-face, just not with standard font files. Microsoft's reason for this was because some people make TrueType font files and put them under copywrite,and they felt that allowing the use of.ttf files for font distribution would enable copywrite violations. Instead, you have to use a Microsoft utility to convert the font files into a special Microsoft font format for web pages called EOT - which doesn't actually solve the stated problem, but does make it difficult for anyone else to use the font file for things other than embedding in web pages that will be viewed with IE after you've put it on your website.
But are people with, say, Alzheimer's aware of what they are missing out on?
I would say that yes, in the early stages they quite often are aware of it. My grandfather had Alzheimer's before he died, and was constantly upset by all of the things he couldn't remember, even from a few minutes ago. Eventually he gave up trying, and started just living further and further in the past, since it was all he could remember. My grandmother on the other side is now in the early stages of it as well, and realizes exactly what's happening. Oddly enough, she's sufficiently upbeat about it that she actually jokes that it won't make much difference, she's always been a stereotypical blonde anyways, and could never remember things properly before it started - the only difference is that now she's got an excuse.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking too when I read the article. They have to have a way for the yeast to get access to the nutrients, and they'd be alive and reproducing (yeast is like that...) so wouldn't there be a chance of it breaking free of the fuel cell? Designing the cell to have pores "too small" for the yeast to pass just means that you would have to wait for a mutation in the yeast cells (low probability, but still possible) that made them small enough to get out - into your blood supply, which is food for them...
Also, an annoying idiot has gone away. That's a positive outcome in my books. It's not interpretation, it's cold hard reality - they're dead, and their argument has failed.
No, I'd rather shoot a solipsist in the face. After all, the reality of my gun going off in their face is purely subjective, and if they decide that it's not "real" to them, they should be just fine.
It's one of those few situations where the old "I'm philosophically right because I'm still alive after the duel" argument is actually valid.
These solipsism arguments could also be called "argument from pretentious stupidity", and have no place in a discussion about the real world.
To properly and fully debunk the myth that cockroaches will outlast the human race, you must kill _all_ of the cockroaches, without first killing all of the humans. It would definitely make for an interesting episode.
Sorry, just checked the actual machine and it's Fedora 10 that worked fine out of box.
Fedora 9 did have a problem with the wireless drivers, but everything else worked fine.
Instructions here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EeePc for putting fedora on your Eee
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True, the fees themselves don't stack up anywhere near as much as the other parts of the awards, but they're separate items, and if an easy opportunity to knock one of them down comes by, I don't see why they shouldn't take it - the worst that could happen is that Universal sees through the plan, and just forks over the $400k in order to preserve the RIAA's lawyer fees, in which case the EFF has an extra $400k to throw at defending people from them.
Just because there are two parts to a problem and one is bigger doesn't mean you should completely ignore the "smaller" (yet still way overblown) part. If challenges to the $150k per song are successful in getting it dropped to the $0.99 that it's actually worth, that would still leave the average defendant stuck with hundreds of thousands in lawyer's fees, and the lawyers launching the suits making boatloads of cash for doing it - meaning that even with reduced "per infringement" awards, the RIAA is still free to bankrupt anyone who challenges them. Getting their lawyer's fees slashed hard will make it less profitable for the RIAA's legal team, and also cuts off part of their means of intimidating people into submission.
Actually, I think this is very much related to the RIAA's over-blown claims.
I think they've filed this request with the intention of Universal protesting it, calling the fees outrageous, and doing all of the research for the EFF on why fees that large are wrong in order to get them stopped.
Then the EFF can take that case work, and apply it in the next RIAA trial they're involved in, since in the US, a lot of law is built on precedent, and that would make a very useful precedent indeed.
The eight-character limit is due to them using the standard Unix crypt() function, which Unix passwords were traditionally encrypted with - it's a one-way encryption, so brute force is generally the only way to recover the passwords, and at the time the computations needed to guarantee cracking a password would take too long to make it worthwhile.
Of course, modern computing systems can run through all of the possible passwords in an 8-character password pretty quickly, so it's a good thing modern systems are switching over to md5 for password encryption.
The big problem I see is that a lot of sites on the internet (where most of the cracking is probably happening) won't allow non-alphanumeric characters, and refuse to allow you to use that password if you try to include them - that automatically cuts off multiple possible digits, and reduces the maximum password strength on their site by a massive degree. My own university is sadly one of these offenders - anything that isn't a letter or number gets your password disqualified, and yet they also complain when your password is "too simple"...
Surface gravity isn't just determined by density either - there's also the distance from the center of mass to be considered. I got the impression that the planet's mass was measured at 6 times earth, but it's actual diameter was not determined. Technically, it could be anything from a ball of Uranium half the diameter of earth to a loose saturn-like cloud collection the size of Neptune. (Saturn's average density is less than that of water.) The surface gravity of the Uranium-ball planet would be much higher than that of the cloud, mainly because of the distance from the center of mass, since gravity falls off fast with greater distance. With a mass of 6x earth, there technically _should_ be a diameter at which the planet actually has a surface gravity similar to earth.
You mean Motion? It's ok for very low-end applications, but it doesn't handle things like motion detectors or alarm sensors, just cameras (and if they're USB, only one camera), and so it lacks the power that a lot of people would want in a security program.
Of course, I use it myself for a security camera, and have actually caught the person I suspected of stealing things from my office with it - having video proof is nice when you need to rat out the boss's pet for being slime.
The one that ran into me/fell apart in the parking lot was a Toyota.
Well, it was most of a Toyota. Still, outside of basic manufacturer's defects, most of the mechanical failures you'll see in cars are because the owner doesn't take care of it - and that's why the average person should not be allowed to have a flying car. It'd be raining flying-car-bits all day long.
The street I live on is one of the major through-streets to get from one end of my city to another, and it's constantly covered in bits of cars that have fallen off because the owner was an idiot. Over the last ten years, I've seen hub-caps, rear-view mirrors, bits of bumper, door handles, head lights (Yes, head-lights. No, I don't know how, it was just there in the middle of the street.), tail pipes, a few mufflers, one wheel (complete with part of the axle still attached), and a van's rear bench seat fall off of cars driving past my house. You want these people sailing over your head? That's dangerous!
Along with the dozen or so other stories of cars crashing due to mechanical failure, I've actually been hit by a car due to a mechanical failure in the car - the break line snapped on a rotten, rusted out junk heap of a car in a parking lot, and it rolled into me, and destroyed what little remained of it's rotted out front bumper. (Also, leaving bits of engine sitting on the parking lot behind itself when it was towed away.) On the plus side, I wasn't hurt at all, but my pants were ruined - the stains from the rotten fibre-glass squishing into them never did come out.
While I realize this is an extreme example, it's the sort of care people take of their _ground_ cars, and it would be the same sort of care they took of their _flying_ cars too. I can already picture junkers with bits falling off sailing overhead dropping vital and important parts on me before crashing into the side of some building because the steering system fell out.
That's not true. There is the greased axle of the wheel of fortune.
The universe rotates around a TV studio in Hollywood?
No wonder movie stars are so vain.
Actually, politicians tend to say "EVERYONE deserves all the schooling they can get, even if we have to bleed every working man and woman dry to subsidize it."
You haven't been paying much attention to politicians lately, and you've got the "before/after" backwards on that government shoveling of money. The trend over the last decade has been very much along the lines of reducing the money that goes to education, and especially to universities - that is the reason the cost to the individual students is going up.
Essentially, "F" means "you fail", and "F-" means "You fail so hard you either never showed up, or you put effort into doing badly." I've had both in my class - the most memorable of which was an F- student who submitted a 136 page appeal of his grade, of which only one sentence was even remotely related to my course (stating that he was appealing his grade in it, and should have an A+ instead of F-) - the rest was ranting about the Cyberterrorists (who have his password) that keep stealing and/or vandalizing his car. He included diagrams. That's the sort of person who gets an F-.
The degree system in Ontario goes on a point system for calculating average grades - "F-" is worth 0, while "F" gets you 1 point, (There's no such thing as an F+, fortunately.) up to A+ which is worth 13 - they average the points over your courses, and use that to decide your average grade. If your average is below a certain level, they'll ask you to withdraw from your program of study.
That means that a student with all 90% to 100% scores, except for one F will have a lower average than a student who has all exactly 80% scores. I blame this on John Snobelen, the high-school dropout who was made education minister of Ontario for half of a term ("moved" to a different post in 1997) - he didn't like being in a "low importance, low profile position", so he promised to create an educational crisis, and by golly we still haven't really recovered from it.
The University I teach at demanded that all profs use a "standardized" percentile to letter grade translation as follows:
0-34% = F-
35-49% = F
50-59% = D range
60-69% = C range
70-79% = B range
80-100% = A range
And if you calculate 2.7/4.0, you get about 67.5%, which fits into her being a "C" student. Basically, she barely passed, put forth minimal effort, and feels that she's entitled to be handed everything ahead of those students who got a 4.0. (You know - the ones who actually learned things and put forth effort.)
Being a C student isn't just nothing to brag about, it's something to actively avoid talking about.
Part of the reason they have to raise their prices faster than inflation is because the government-supplied part of their funding is steadily being withdrawn, and the money has to come from somewhere. It's pretty simple math, really:
Cost = Facilities + (# of Students * # of courses per student) + research budget
Income = Gov. Grants + Tuition + Donations + Industry Grants
If you reduce the income, then something from the cost has to go down.
If you reduce the research budget, then Industry Grants will also dry up, further reducing the Income, so that's not going to work.
If you reduce the facilities, you don't have places to put the students.
If you reduce the students or courses, you lose Tuition, and Income goes down further.
That means that you _must_ keep the Income balanced with the Cost. Politicians however look at it and say "Bah! Nobody needs nunna that thar book lernin'! Ah'll jus take their budget ta pay fer mah fishin' industry project this month." So the Cost has not changed, but the Income has gone down.
And then more and more students enrol, increasing cost out of proportion to the respective increase in Income due to more tuition being paid. (Guess what? Your degree costs the University more than you paid in Tuition!)
The _ONLY_ way that the rising spiral of costs can be dealt with is to either increase tuition (which reduces the number of students as well, thus reducing the costs and bringing it closer to balance) or to find some other source of income. In the current economy, how much money do you donate to your local university? Not very much I'd wager.
All of the Radio Shack stores in Canada (that I've been able to find at least) were rebranded as "The Source" years ago.
http://jontangerine.com/log/2008/10/font-face-in-ie-making-web-fonts-work
Happiness is mandatory citizen! Smile, and move along.
But are people with, say, Alzheimer's aware of what they are missing out on?
I would say that yes, in the early stages they quite often are aware of it. My grandfather had Alzheimer's before he died, and was constantly upset by all of the things he couldn't remember, even from a few minutes ago. Eventually he gave up trying, and started just living further and further in the past, since it was all he could remember. My grandmother on the other side is now in the early stages of it as well, and realizes exactly what's happening. Oddly enough, she's sufficiently upbeat about it that she actually jokes that it won't make much difference, she's always been a stereotypical blonde anyways, and could never remember things properly before it started - the only difference is that now she's got an excuse.
Yeah, that's what I was thinking too when I read the article. They have to have a way for the yeast to get access to the nutrients, and they'd be alive and reproducing (yeast is like that...) so wouldn't there be a chance of it breaking free of the fuel cell? Designing the cell to have pores "too small" for the yeast to pass just means that you would have to wait for a mutation in the yeast cells (low probability, but still possible) that made them small enough to get out - into your blood supply, which is food for them...
No, usually it's only supposed to be like this until noon.
Oh, and for the record, I use lynx all the time at work.
Why would you do something like that?
Also, an annoying idiot has gone away. That's a positive outcome in my books. It's not interpretation, it's cold hard reality - they're dead, and their argument has failed.
Ask a solipsist.
No, I'd rather shoot a solipsist in the face. After all, the reality of my gun going off in their face is purely subjective, and if they decide that it's not "real" to them, they should be just fine.
It's one of those few situations where the old "I'm philosophically right because I'm still alive after the duel" argument is actually valid.
These solipsism arguments could also be called "argument from pretentious stupidity", and have no place in a discussion about the real world.
And so they shall inherit the earth from the Cockroaches.
To properly and fully debunk the myth that cockroaches will outlast the human race, you must kill _all_ of the cockroaches, without first killing all of the humans. It would definitely make for an interesting episode.
Sorry, just checked the actual machine and it's Fedora 10 that worked fine out of box. Fedora 9 did have a problem with the wireless drivers, but everything else worked fine. Instructions here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EeePc for putting fedora on your Eee
I've got fedora 9 on my Eee 900, and everything works out of the box. (including the wireless)