Releasing multitracks isn't a new thing for NIN, Trent also did this for the previous album "Year Zero", quite a few of the multitracks are available for free download (with a 'do whatever you want with it' licence) on remix.nin.com, and the full set is on an CD&DVD version of the remix album "Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D", which you can get for $15.
No, I don't want to store a charge in the dashboard capable of moving a ton down the road, as the article says, this stuff is far less efficient in terms of size than a lead acid battery. I want to store maybe 1% of the energy in the dash, and the other 99% in other parts of the car that can also be replaced with ultracapacitor. Yes, all parts of a car 'do' something, but many of the things they do could be just as well performed by a similarly shaped lump of ultracapacitor. Being the sides of the trunk, being the structural member inside the seats, being the spare wheel mounting bracket and so on are not tasks that are particularly difficult to perform, and if the ultracapacitor material has only half the strength of steel, then there's no reason why you can't simply use twice as much in those locations.
That they can be cycled as many times as you like without degrading, and they don't get damaged by being totally discharged. This opens up possibilities like contunially topping them back up with recovered braking energy, as well as getting rid of the buffer needed to prevent total discharge with conventional batteries.
Secondly, they are not volatile, so they could be built into a lot of places where you couldn't put a lead/acid battery - instead of your dashboard being.25in of plastic, it could easily be.24in of ultracapacitor with.01in of plastic coating. The same goes for every cosmetic part of the car that doesn't need to be transparent or comfy, as well as any structural members that the stuff turns out to have the right properties to replace. There's a hell of a lot of weight in a car that has the potential to be made out of ultracapacitor instead of whatever it's made of now.
It's going to take a considerable blow to the corporate bank balance before top management at Best Buy will stop treating the loss as 'yeah we lose some cash to mad women now and then' and actually spend time and effort on making sure this never ever happens again.
While $100,000 is more than enough to *give to her*, I'm not sure it's anywhere near enough to be *taken from them*.
While your argument makes sense if you don't already own all the gear, and if you are in a genre that requires a lot of hardware, but not everyone is. My setup for electronic music is all paid for already, and is mostly software-based, so the cost to me will just be time and 1 blank CDR. I take issue with 2 points you make:
1) You don't have to give away the album, just give 1 copy on a CD-R to the organisers if you want them to use their bandwidth to give your music exposure on their jukebox. You are free to licence the music any additional ways you like. I took part in last year's challenge with a group of friends from a music-related mailing list, we pressed up 100 CDs for sale, and we also decided to offer free mp3 downloads, but that was our choice not theirs.
2) You don't have to spend a lot of time on your album, in fact you are probibited from doing so, you have to make it in 1 month!
This year I'm going to make a whole album, collaborating with a friend from another county. I'm not doing it for fame, or for profit, I'm doing it because I'll learn a lot from the process of comitting to a tight schedule, and from attempting a musical style I've not tried before.
whatever sort of recovery mode these phones could go into was of no use without the existence of the new firmware. Phones with no ability other than to potentially install future software yet to be written are exactly as useful as a brick, hence the correct usage of the term 'bricked' to describe them. With no means in existence to revoke the changes, the phones were (at the time) irrevocably bricked. If your definition of irrevocable extends to all concievable future technological breakthroughs, then it's use would barely ever be justified by anyone other than theoretical physicists.
Until this firmware update was released, the bricked phones were "irrevocably" useless. The only ways to fix them were:
a) Travel into the future to some unknown date when Apple might issue a fix b) Write your own OS from scratch, and get it into the flash memory by methods unknown to science c) Grind the device down into it's component atoms and reassemble them in the original order d) Find the universe's 'undo' button or e) do some other practically impossible thing.
The fact that now method a) has now been found to have worked doesn't mean that method a) was previously a realistic enough option to count as an exception to the brickishness.
No, but you could sue them for selling the mug shots on a calendar. The legal position appears to be similar to the creative commons non-commercial licence, and the 'you can watch it but not set up your own cinema and charge admission' licence that DVDs have.
Sadly, the 'solution' that Jagex (the company that runs RuneScape) have put in place is to turn their MMPORG into the first MSPORG (massively single player online realtime game), by blocking players from making ANY kind of transaction that involves transferring value from one character to another, making they game a mockery of it's former self:
They removed player vs player combat ('the wilderness'), to stop traders deliberately losing fights to transfer wealth, ignoring the fact that a huge portion of their playerbase was only there for the PvP combat.
They removed the ability to offer players more than 5% above of below their (often wildy inaccurately) fixed prices when buying and selling items.
They removed the ability to give friends gifts worth more than an absurdly tiny amount.
They arbitrarily killed the fletching skill because the price of the most commonly fletched item is fixed at a point where nobody will buy them, ignoring hundreds (if not thousands) of posts on the official forums telling them that this price is wrong.
Unsurprisingly, the playerbase is either rioting, quitting (as I have), or spending a lot of time on the official 'rants' forum, where over 70,000 posts have already been 'removed so we can look through them more easily' - which is incidentally about as believable as the post you quoted above.
Oh, and the real world traders have simply switched to offering 'power levelling', where they grind your character for you, instead of selling you RuneScape gold, so the problem hasn't been cured at all. The cheating hasn't been stopped at all, it's just been moved to a method that doesn't involve stolen credit cards being used to buy accounts!
Firstly, who elected the ACPO and gave them the power to change laws?
Secondly, these are (as you say) guidelines not laws. Individual police forces can (and do) set their own policies differently, and offciers have discretion to prosecute for a 1mph over the limit case, or ignore a 100mph over the limit case... and that's what's wrong with the law as it stands.
No, mr troll, i've clearly stated im not in favour of dangerous driving, and plenty of people have been charged with doing 31 in a 30 zone, the percentage leeway depends on the police deciding if they like you or not, which is another example of what's wrong with our speeding laws.
If you are defending the system, maybe you can tell me why the safe speed for any road never varies with time or weather but will always be exactly divisible by 10? Or am I right when I say that speeding is not the same as going dangerously fast?
The flaw in your logic is that speed limits are not the same as proper laws. They are not set by politicians, debated in parliament, and you can't vote out the people who choose them if you disagree with them. They are set by mysterious quangos, with no accountability and no effective means to appeal against them when they are set wrongly.
In the UK we have a law against dangerous driving. Have you ever wondered who someone caught doing 31 mph in a non-residential area on an empty dual carriageway is charged with speeding but not dangerous driving? It's because breaking a speed limit that is only there to give revenue to a 'camera partnership' isn't dangerous.
You're right about red lights being a real danger point. Why do we have far more speed traps than red light cameras? It's because safe drivers do go faster than wrongly set limits, but they don't run red lights, so red light cameras wouldn't rake in the cash like speed traps.
He's got one solution to breaking up these jams, but it's a hard one to convince people about. Why is everyone missing the other, much simpler solution?
All we need to do to get rid of any given traffic jam is to take cars away from the front of the jam faster than they are being added at the back. If drivers were simply taught to consider that if they are the front car in a long queue then they are the problem that is holding up all the people behind, and it's their duty to stop holding everyone up, then we would have a jam solution that appeals to driver's self interest.
If cops started handing out tickets for not pulling away quickly from the front of a jam, we'd quickly have a lot fewer jams.
I believe they are SPECS cameras, but as with all the SPECS systems I know of in the UK, the two points are very close to each other, within a few meters. This is to allow the two photos the police use to prove your speed to be taken with the same fixed postion camera.
Very few of our motorways are actually equipped with this system, as far as I know it's only the middle of the M42 near Birminham and the Western 1/3 of the M25 London ringroad. As I have to drive on both of these occasionally, I am all too aware that while the idea might be sound, the implementation is hopeless. The M25 system is very basic, and unless you go there in the dead of night, you'll have to fight through exactly the sort of standing wave that this system is supposed to get rid of, caused by cars braking from the 70mph permitted outside the system to the 60 that the controlled section seems stuck at most of the time.
The M42 system is more complex, with limits enforced by hundreds of spy cameras, with the ability to allow cars to use the hard shoulder at busy times. This seems more of a revenue generating exercise than a congestion removal system, as the limit is nearly always 50mph even if there is barely another car in sight. Drivers have responded by speeding up between the camera traps and braking just before them, which is dangerous, causes exactly the standing wave effect it's designed to avoid, and wasted petrol increasing CO2 emissions... well done UK government!
Why aim for Warcraft? Unless the aim is to limit research to owners of high-end computers who rank graphics at least as high as gameplay and have large amounts of spare time and will put up with grinding, then it's the wrong model to compare such a project to.
Planetarion peaked at over 100,000 players (before it went pay-to-play) and all you need to play it is a browser. It's a simple game to code, as evidenced by the countless clones that were quickly written when the owners started charging. Gameplay there happens in 3-month (or so) rounds, with rule changes each round, so it's the perfect model for the research described.
Cutting things down further, the browser-based NationStates is so trivial it's barely even a game, and there's practically no in-game interaction between players, but 1.9 million nations have been created. It works because it's a nice idea, and it has forums where people roleplay all the things the game ought to include but doesn't.
If you want a game where economics play a big part, aim it at web users. There's a huge and nearly empty market for an blackberry/iPhone MMPORG. Make it turn-based so you can play it to a decent standard even if you only log in once a day, and hard-core players don't need to check in more than once an hour. Political Asylum provides an excellent model of how this can work.
Apple actually had Kindle's market sector covered way back in 1993. The Newton had pretty much the same form factor, and with applications like Paperback it was an excellent book viewer in it's time.
Compare these 2 quotes from the original source of the story:
Our study involved data from 60 participants... Twenty of these participants were iPhone owners" and "21% of iPhone owners were not aware of the magnifying glass correction feature" So, either 4 and 1/5ths of a user knew about it, or User Centric are pulling these figures out of their ass. Given that they are using a ridiculously tiny sample size, and they don't bother to say who paid for this survey, I'm betting the latter.
Not only that! "Scott is also the executive sponsor for Microsoft's Operational Enterprise Risk Management efforts and supports the integration of management principles from the Quality & Business Excellence team, which drive continuous and breakthrough process improvements across the company."
The RIAA is well aware that p2p sells more CDs, their problem it it's often not their CDs.
My CD purchasing has vastly increased since I've been able to try before I buy using p2p... but I've mostly been discovering wonderful but tiny non RIAA labels, and unsigned bands who put out their own CDs, instead of blindly buying whatever lowest common denominator act the RIAA cartel is pushing with a recoupable advertising budget in the millions.
Without p2p, I'd never have risked buying a CD by Kattoo for example, but after a recommendation on OiNK, I bought all 3 Kattoo albums (hear them at http://www.myspace.com/kattoo - stunning classical/IDM crossover music, but sales figures in 3 digits). I'm concentrating on obscure indie CDs not because it's not because I'm ethically opposed to the RIAA (even thought I am) but because I prefer it.
The truth is that the cartel only want people to buy their heavily hyped CDs, not CDs in general. It's not p2p's loss of revenue they have a problem with (they know p2p boosts CD sales), it's p2p's loosening the stranglehold they have on the market thats their problem with it.
The same goes for net radio, it's less susceptible to payola and features indie labels too much, that's why the RIAA want to tax it into oblivion.
(Disclaimer: I do have 1 on my own tracks on a compilation CD released on a non RIAA label myself, but I'm not slashvertising it here, go try that kattoo link instead, his stuff is amazing!).
If the FCC takes effective action on this complaint, then they are effectively mandating net neutrality as part of their remit, so no law would be needed.
Slashdot Mirror
Releasing multitracks isn't a new thing for NIN, Trent also did this for the previous album "Year Zero", quite a few of the multitracks are available for free download (with a 'do whatever you want with it' licence) on remix.nin.com, and the full set is on an CD&DVD version of the remix album "Y34RZ3R0R3M1X3D", which you can get for $15.
How much further do the RIAA have to dig before the John Does can start a class action RICO lawsuit?
No, I don't want to store a charge in the dashboard capable of moving a ton down the road, as the article says, this stuff is far less efficient in terms of size than a lead acid battery. I want to store maybe 1% of the energy in the dash, and the other 99% in other parts of the car that can also be replaced with ultracapacitor. Yes, all parts of a car 'do' something, but many of the things they do could be just as well performed by a similarly shaped lump of ultracapacitor. Being the sides of the trunk, being the structural member inside the seats, being the spare wheel mounting bracket and so on are not tasks that are particularly difficult to perform, and if the ultracapacitor material has only half the strength of steel, then there's no reason why you can't simply use twice as much in those locations.
As far as I can see, they have 2 big plus points:
.25in of plastic, it could easily be .24in of ultracapacitor with .01in of plastic coating. The same goes for every cosmetic part of the car that doesn't need to be transparent or comfy, as well as any structural members that the stuff turns out to have the right properties to replace. There's a hell of a lot of weight in a car that has the potential to be made out of ultracapacitor instead of whatever it's made of now.
That they can be cycled as many times as you like without degrading, and they don't get damaged by being totally discharged. This opens up possibilities like contunially topping them back up with recovered braking energy, as well as getting rid of the buffer needed to prevent total discharge with conventional batteries.
Secondly, they are not volatile, so they could be built into a lot of places where you couldn't put a lead/acid battery - instead of your dashboard being
You dont need to sign up, our records show you already opted in.
It's going to take a considerable blow to the corporate bank balance before top management at Best Buy will stop treating the loss as 'yeah we lose some cash to mad women now and then' and actually spend time and effort on making sure this never ever happens again.
While $100,000 is more than enough to *give to her*, I'm not sure it's anywhere near enough to be *taken from them*.
While your argument makes sense if you don't already own all the gear, and if you are in a genre that requires a lot of hardware, but not everyone is. My setup for electronic music is all paid for already, and is mostly software-based, so the cost to me will just be time and 1 blank CDR. I take issue with 2 points you make:
1) You don't have to give away the album, just give 1 copy on a CD-R to the organisers if you want them to use their bandwidth to give your music exposure on their jukebox. You are free to licence the music any additional ways you like. I took part in last year's challenge with a group of friends from a music-related mailing list, we pressed up 100 CDs for sale, and we also decided to offer free mp3 downloads, but that was our choice not theirs.
2) You don't have to spend a lot of time on your album, in fact you are probibited from doing so, you have to make it in 1 month!
This year I'm going to make a whole album, collaborating with a friend from another county. I'm not doing it for fame, or for profit, I'm doing it because I'll learn a lot from the process of comitting to a tight schedule, and from attempting a musical style I've not tried before.
Surely the existence of the original letter would allow a defence of promissory estoppel against the patent troll?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estoppel#Promissory_estoppel
I wonder if that's why the troll caved so easily? (badum tish!)
whatever sort of recovery mode these phones could go into was of no use without the existence of the new firmware. Phones with no ability other than to potentially install future software yet to be written are exactly as useful as a brick, hence the correct usage of the term 'bricked' to describe them. With no means in existence to revoke the changes, the phones were (at the time) irrevocably bricked. If your definition of irrevocable extends to all concievable future technological breakthroughs, then it's use would barely ever be justified by anyone other than theoretical physicists.
Until this firmware update was released, the bricked phones were "irrevocably" useless. The only ways to fix them were:
a) Travel into the future to some unknown date when Apple might issue a fix
b) Write your own OS from scratch, and get it into the flash memory by methods unknown to science
c) Grind the device down into it's component atoms and reassemble them in the original order
d) Find the universe's 'undo' button or
e) do some other practically impossible thing.
The fact that now method a) has now been found to have worked doesn't mean that method a) was previously a realistic enough option to count as an exception to the brickishness.
No, but you could sue them for selling the mug shots on a calendar. The legal position appears to be similar to the creative commons non-commercial licence, and the 'you can watch it but not set up your own cinema and charge admission' licence that DVDs have.
The truth and Jagex announcements often fail to match up very well.
Sadly, the 'solution' that Jagex (the company that runs RuneScape) have put in place is to turn their MMPORG into the first MSPORG (massively single player online realtime game), by blocking players from making ANY kind of transaction that involves transferring value from one character to another, making they game a mockery of it's former self:
They removed player vs player combat ('the wilderness'), to stop traders deliberately losing fights to transfer wealth, ignoring the fact that a huge portion of their playerbase was only there for the PvP combat.
They removed the ability to offer players more than 5% above of below their (often wildy inaccurately) fixed prices when buying and selling items.
They removed the ability to give friends gifts worth more than an absurdly tiny amount.
They arbitrarily killed the fletching skill because the price of the most commonly fletched item is fixed at a point where nobody will buy them, ignoring hundreds (if not thousands) of posts on the official forums telling them that this price is wrong.
Unsurprisingly, the playerbase is either rioting, quitting (as I have), or spending a lot of time on the official 'rants' forum, where over 70,000 posts have already been 'removed so we can look through them more easily' - which is incidentally about as believable as the post you quoted above.
Oh, and the real world traders have simply switched to offering 'power levelling', where they grind your character for you, instead of selling you RuneScape gold, so the problem hasn't been cured at all. The cheating hasn't been stopped at all, it's just been moved to a method that doesn't involve stolen credit cards being used to buy accounts!
Firstly, who elected the ACPO and gave them the power to change laws?
Secondly, these are (as you say) guidelines not laws. Individual police forces can (and do) set their own policies differently, and offciers have discretion to prosecute for a 1mph over the limit case, or ignore a 100mph over the limit case... and that's what's wrong with the law as it stands.
No, mr troll, i've clearly stated im not in favour of dangerous driving, and plenty of people have been charged with doing 31 in a 30 zone, the percentage leeway depends on the police deciding if they like you or not, which is another example of what's wrong with our speeding laws.
If you are defending the system, maybe you can tell me why the safe speed for any road never varies with time or weather but will always be exactly divisible by 10? Or am I right when I say that speeding is not the same as going dangerously fast?
The flaw in your logic is that speed limits are not the same as proper laws. They are not set by politicians, debated in parliament, and you can't vote out the people who choose them if you disagree with them. They are set by mysterious quangos, with no accountability and no effective means to appeal against them when they are set wrongly.
In the UK we have a law against dangerous driving. Have you ever wondered who someone caught doing 31 mph in a non-residential area on an empty dual carriageway is charged with speeding but not dangerous driving? It's because breaking a speed limit that is only there to give revenue to a 'camera partnership' isn't dangerous.
You're right about red lights being a real danger point. Why do we have far more speed traps than red light cameras? It's because safe drivers do go faster than wrongly set limits, but they don't run red lights, so red light cameras wouldn't rake in the cash like speed traps.
He's got one solution to breaking up these jams, but it's a hard one to convince people about. Why is everyone missing the other, much simpler solution?
All we need to do to get rid of any given traffic jam is to take cars away from the front of the jam faster than they are being added at the back. If drivers were simply taught to consider that if they are the front car in a long queue then they are the problem that is holding up all the people behind, and it's their duty to stop holding everyone up, then we would have a jam solution that appeals to driver's self interest.
If cops started handing out tickets for not pulling away quickly from the front of a jam, we'd quickly have a lot fewer jams.
I believe they are SPECS cameras, but as with all the SPECS systems I know of in the UK, the two points are very close to each other, within a few meters. This is to allow the two photos the police use to prove your speed to be taken with the same fixed postion camera.
Very few of our motorways are actually equipped with this system, as far as I know it's only the middle of the M42 near Birminham and the Western 1/3 of the M25 London ringroad. As I have to drive on both of these occasionally, I am all too aware that while the idea might be sound, the implementation is hopeless. The M25 system is very basic, and unless you go there in the dead of night, you'll have to fight through exactly the sort of standing wave that this system is supposed to get rid of, caused by cars braking from the 70mph permitted outside the system to the 60 that the controlled section seems stuck at most of the time.
The M42 system is more complex, with limits enforced by hundreds of spy cameras, with the ability to allow cars to use the hard shoulder at busy times. This seems more of a revenue generating exercise than a congestion removal system, as the limit is nearly always 50mph even if there is barely another car in sight. Drivers have responded by speeding up between the camera traps and braking just before them, which is dangerous, causes exactly the standing wave effect it's designed to avoid, and wasted petrol increasing CO2 emissions... well done UK government!
Why aim for Warcraft? Unless the aim is to limit research to owners of high-end computers who rank graphics at least as high as gameplay and have large amounts of spare time and will put up with grinding, then it's the wrong model to compare such a project to.
Planetarion peaked at over 100,000 players (before it went pay-to-play) and all you need to play it is a browser. It's a simple game to code, as evidenced by the countless clones that were quickly written when the owners started charging. Gameplay there happens in 3-month (or so) rounds, with rule changes each round, so it's the perfect model for the research described.
Cutting things down further, the browser-based NationStates is so trivial it's barely even a game, and there's practically no in-game interaction between players, but 1.9 million nations have been created. It works because it's a nice idea, and it has forums where people roleplay all the things the game ought to include but doesn't.
If you want a game where economics play a big part, aim it at web users. There's a huge and nearly empty market for an blackberry/iPhone MMPORG. Make it turn-based so you can play it to a decent standard even if you only log in once a day, and hard-core players don't need to check in more than once an hour. Political Asylum provides an excellent model of how this can work.
Apple actually had Kindle's market sector covered way back in 1993. The Newton had pretty much the same form factor, and with applications like Paperback it was an excellent book viewer in it's time.
Compare these 2 quotes from the original source of the story:
... Twenty of these participants were iPhone owners"
Our study involved data from 60 participants
and
"21% of iPhone owners were not aware of the magnifying glass correction feature"
So, either 4 and 1/5ths of a user knew about it, or User Centric are pulling these figures out of their ass. Given that they are using a ridiculously tiny sample size, and they don't bother to say who paid for this survey, I'm betting the latter.
Not only that! "Scott is also the executive sponsor for Microsoft's Operational Enterprise Risk Management efforts and supports the integration of management principles from the Quality & Business Excellence team, which drive continuous and breakthrough process improvements across the company."
I'm guessing he got fired for using the Dilbert mission statement generator on his CV.
The RIAA is well aware that p2p sells more CDs, their problem it it's often not their CDs.
My CD purchasing has vastly increased since I've been able to try before I buy using p2p... but I've mostly been discovering wonderful but tiny non RIAA labels, and unsigned bands who put out their own CDs, instead of blindly buying whatever lowest common denominator act the RIAA cartel is pushing with a recoupable advertising budget in the millions.
Without p2p, I'd never have risked buying a CD by Kattoo for example, but after a recommendation on OiNK, I bought all 3 Kattoo albums (hear them at http://www.myspace.com/kattoo - stunning classical/IDM crossover music, but sales figures in 3 digits). I'm concentrating on obscure indie CDs not because it's not because I'm ethically opposed to the RIAA (even thought I am) but because I prefer it.
The truth is that the cartel only want people to buy their heavily hyped CDs, not CDs in general. It's not p2p's loss of revenue they have a problem with (they know p2p boosts CD sales), it's p2p's loosening the stranglehold they have on the market thats their problem with it.
The same goes for net radio, it's less susceptible to payola and features indie labels too much, that's why the RIAA want to tax it into oblivion.
(Disclaimer: I do have 1 on my own tracks on a compilation CD released on a non RIAA label myself, but I'm not slashvertising it here, go try that kattoo link instead, his stuff is amazing!).
If the FCC takes effective action on this complaint, then they are effectively mandating net neutrality as part of their remit, so no law would be needed.