When a bill is proposed that actually crosses the line of common sense
this is the whole point of the slippery slope stuff. by the time the bill is proposed that crosses the line of common sense, the line has moved due to what you're used to cos of what was passed today and therefore the bill seems perfectly sane and logical then, even if it's totally unacceptable now.
ie american isn't a police state, but it's alot closer to one now than it has been in the past and the reason the general public doesn't complain is that the government has been moving slowly, ppl get used to the situation now and then the next removal of civil livbety is still only a small step. mny small steps can still go an awful long way.
I never really finished the game because the two vs one end levels were too hard for me back then:(
well, level 8 was the 2 vs 1, with both other houses against you, level 9 was 3 vs 1 with both other houses and the emperor against you.finishing the game was probably the easiest with harkonen as your palace power was the missile, as was the emperor's. when you played as harkonen you only had one nuke coming towards you every 10 minutes, destroying half your base. if you playted atreides/ordos then you had1 missile every five minutes, which was bloody hard at times. although your aim with them was always terrible, their aim to you was usually pretty good.
house atreides's palace power was fremen, which was kinda a bit sucky. some fremen troops appeared at random and walked straight towards an enem base to get shot to peices.
what was the ordos palace power... oh yes, sabateurs, they sucked mightily as well. same as the fremen basically.
damn fie game though, I put alot of time into that
Don't forget Sky+ has [i]two[/i] Sky Digital decoders.
no it doesn't. just the one decoder. however, it doesn;t need to decode something to record it. it reocrds the encrypted bitstream and decodes it when you want to watch it. I don;t however know what the implications are of recording something on a premium channel, changeing your subscription to not include tha5t channel and then trying to watch the program you've recorded.. does it work?
AFAIK, Tivo doesn't have any sky decoders - it can record two terrestrial channels at once, but it's limited to one sky channel, that your decoder is set to.
By going OSS, you no longer have to waste much (if any) company time, resources, effort, or money on software compliance issues.
actually, from what I've heard it doesn;t do that at all. not having any copyright software at all is even worse than having pirated software in the eyes of the BSA and they'll still "audit" you and probably make things very unpleasant. there are a number of stories floating round about the nasty kinda shit the bsa pull.
dave
PS. when rule the world it'll all be different I tell you, different...
Anyway in the current copyright laws copying is defined like stealing
well, kinda. in the UK a cort case in the 70's explicitly defined copyright infringement wasn't theft and threw a case out of court for it yet all the big companies keep saying it "copyright infringement is theft" "NO, IT's NOT"
I actually complained to the UK radio advertising authority once about a BSA ad saying that computer piracy is theft. the radio advertising authority completely didn;t want to know. they didn't give a shit
dave
PS. the case in questoin was oxford vs moss (iirc) a case where an oxford university student walked into the staffroom when it was quiet, photocopied an exam paper and walked out with the copy. oxford university accused hi oftheft and took him to court. the judges asked OU what they had actually lost, what was actually missing. when OU had to concede that nothing had actually been stolen the judge threw it out
here in america we certanly driver closer then 170 meters!
perhaps, but I bet you don't drive as fast either? quite a few of the autobahn's have no speed limit so you can bomb along at whatever speed your car is capable of doing/the road is safe for/you can stomach.
But why is light at night automatically considered wasted?
because if you can see the light from space then the light on the ground going up and thats not too much use to us eon the ground. the headlights of a car go sideways and there's no way you'd be able to see that from space (well, not at thos resolutions).
if you're making it yourself then thats 10 times too much, and if you're buying a nice kite from a shop then thats not enough:)
my pbsk warrior standard was over $300, although, to be fair, thats a damn nice kite.
if you're talking commerical parafoil's (ie the ones that look like james bond style controllable parachutes) then really you're talking up to and over $1000 depending on how big and what make, although the second hand market can get you some good deals, my best friend recently bought an 11.8 metre (yes, metre) wipika waterkite for a few hundred quid
while I've never done KAP, I have flown kites before (ie, big kites) and you need quite a big kite to hoist a decent camera. the reason disposables are so often used is because a) they're cheap and b) they're light.
the kind of camera's that have zoom lenses are heavy beggars, and how do you control the zoom? wires? remote control? thats all more weight. now a big power/traction ktie can carry alot but it's hardly secure.
with a light camera you can tie it down so that as long as you keep the kite steady then it should be good. with a heavier parcel then the weight will be harder to tie down as although a bi kite can undoubtedly take the weight, it's all concentrated in one spot which is bad news for a parawing style kite.
you can of course use something like a big delta too, but they are harder to carry around.
I'm no expert a KAP though, I have to admit, I did some reading on it a few years ago but never tried it. some of the KAP images I've seen in the last have been pretty stunning though.
dave
PS. current kites: pbsk warrior and VP (favourite 2 line kites ever flown), spirit of air omega xs, elliot ekko 2.8, revolution EXP (would love a speed series one day, esp if resailed by peter betancourt), a nice Rok and a few others
not quite so sure it's as cut and dried like that but yeah the old skool divx was indeed an excellent example of consumers telling the industry uite where they could stick it
My Sony DAV-S500 does have digital out, as well as support for SACD.
well, you're not alone. virtually all sacd/dvda player have a digital out, often 2. however when you play an sacd/dvda in the players you'll find the digital out has gone strangely quiet
There is no reason that 90% of the artists out there should be earning more then average Joe
well, to be fair, 90%+ of artists probably earn less than the average joe, 90% of high level music company exec's however... thats a different story (I had to beat them to death with their own shoes...)
Would it sound worse running 6 channel analog to your amplifier, than running the digital signal and decoding it with your amp
how many dacs do you need? with digital inputs then you need one dac per output channel no matter how many digital sources you've got. a good dac is a way of transforming an old cd player, but good dac's are expensive.
in my system I have a cd player, dvd player, digital radio and midisc player. all of which output in digital. I would rather get a really nice pre/pro with damn good dac's which will with with any digital input, than get a nice dac for each component (which I wouldn't do as I can't afford it).
whereas with sacd/dvda nly outputting in analogue then my investment in dac's suddenly becomes useless as the players refuse to let me use them.
These are exactly the people who won't care about copy protection
these are exactly the kind of people who *will* care about copy protection as it means they can;t reuse their investment in high quality external dac's and means that they have to rely on the bass management capabilities in the player (which are usually fairly basic) and can't use the often much more advanced fine bass control available to the pre/pro.
audiophiles don't give a stuff about mp3's really, but what they do care about is quality of sound and doing things right. a 6 channel analogue out means that they are not maximising the capabilities of their equipment.
here's an example. the player might allow you to set a bass crossover of 80hz, yet you main speakers can go down to 45hz, and at better quality than your sub. your pre/pro will allow you a much finer control of the crossover point but thats irrelevant as you can;t use it.
more importantly I think. one of the coming "big things" is room correction. the biggest influence on sound quality for many people is the room you're listening to the music in. systems by companies such as TacT allow you to measure the frequency characteristics of the room and pre-correct the audio signal for the room before it hits the power amp (and therefore, speaker). this requires a digital copy of the sound to work on and if all you can get from your player is analogue then thats a wasted preamp stage and it means that it's quite likely that a cd could sound far better than an sacd or dvda as the cd signal is being properly processed to sound great in your room, and the sacd/dvda isn't.
thats why audiophiles care
dave
PS. room correction is a pretty small field in consumer electronics now, but I reckon it'll become bigger news in 5-10 years
they *should* play on normal cd players as the standard mentions putting a cd layer in, alas it only has it as an option, not as required. hell, most of the sony discs only have an sacd layer and therefore a cd player won't even know you've put a disc in.
DVD-A *should* always come with a standard CD layer (usually in Dolby Digital or DTS)
not quite sure what you mean here. if it was a cd layer (like hybrid sacd's have) then it would be plain redbook stereo and would play in any cd player (thats the idea behind sony's hybrid discs', except that that afaik, only a few of the sacd's out there actually are hybrid's. most just have the sacd layer and no cd layer).
or do you mean that the dvda disc should have a dvda layer and a dvdv layer, the latter having a dolby digital (for ubiquity) or dts (for bandwidth) track with the same music on?
or do you mean a cd layer with a DTS track encoded on it (like current dts disc's (note, not "dts cd's" as they are not redbook standard, and neither do they label themselves as such)).
I think dvda's should go for the middle option I specified (and indeed, they might for all I know) as thats how they can get ppl to buy their media without needing the new hardware right now
I like sacd in concept more than dvda I have to admit. the format mandates a stereo track in addition to any multichannel track, however, I do think that a cd layer should also be part of the standard so that ppl can buy an sacd without a player, safe in the knowledge that if/when they get an sacd player things will get better.
dave
PS. I also think that cd's album's should come with a free dvd video disc of the artists music vid's. otherwise they'll only go to waste
plz note you can drag windows around with xinerama
yeah, the problem with that is that it's suddenly one big display, and not 2 (or more) independant displays. when it's one big display then you're talking one wm for the pair, ie windows maximising across a monitor bezel etc, which just seems kind of hideous to me.
with 2 independant displays then you can have different wm's on each, when you maximise a window there is no danger that it will span monitors (and what happens in xinerama if you have three screen's in an L arrangement?)
as I understand it, with a system of sunray thin clients and a big sunserver. you put your ID card into the reader on the sunray and log in etc. then if you pull the card out it all disappears. go to another term and your old session reappears there.
can anyone comfirm this? and is there any chance we could see this kind of functionality in XF86? (which I would love, then I could transfer from desktop to laptop seamlessly).
a method of repointing single X clients from one server to another would also be a pretty cool thing.
no, alas you can't, for exactly the same reason that I can't repoint an app displaying on box one to an X server on box 2 while the app is running. it's a bugger though, that would be very cool. still, I'm sure it's coming via some enteprising hacker.
Slashdot Mirror
When a bill is proposed that actually crosses the line of common sense
this is the whole point of the slippery slope stuff. by the time the bill is proposed that crosses the line of common sense, the line has moved due to what you're used to cos of what was passed today and therefore the bill seems perfectly sane and logical then, even if it's totally unacceptable now.
ie american isn't a police state, but it's alot closer to one now than it has been in the past and the reason the general public doesn't complain is that the government has been moving slowly, ppl get used to the situation now and then the next removal of civil livbety is still only a small step. mny small steps can still go an awful long way.
dave
I never really finished the game because the two vs one end levels were too hard for me back then :(
well, level 8 was the 2 vs 1, with both other houses against you, level 9 was 3 vs 1 with both other houses and the emperor against you.finishing the game was probably the easiest with harkonen as your palace power was the missile, as was the emperor's. when you played as harkonen you only had one nuke coming towards you every 10 minutes, destroying half your base. if you playted atreides/ordos then you had1 missile every five minutes, which was bloody hard at times. although your aim with them was always terrible, their aim to you was usually pretty good.
house atreides's palace power was fremen, which was kinda a bit sucky. some fremen troops appeared at random and walked straight towards an enem base to get shot to peices.
what was the ordos palace power... oh yes, sabateurs, they sucked mightily as well. same as the fremen basically.
damn fie game though, I put alot of time into that
dave
Don't forget Sky+ has [i]two[/i] Sky Digital decoders.
no it doesn't. just the one decoder. however, it doesn;t need to decode something to record it. it reocrds the encrypted bitstream and decodes it when you want to watch it. I don;t however know what the implications are of recording something on a premium channel, changeing your subscription to not include tha5t channel and then trying to watch the program you've recorded.. does it work?
AFAIK, Tivo doesn't have any sky decoders - it can record two terrestrial channels at once, but it's limited to one sky channel, that your decoder is set to.
nope, it can only record one thing at once
dave
yes, okay. my bad phrasing, but I think you know what I meant.
dave
By going OSS, you no longer have to waste much (if any) company time, resources, effort, or money on software compliance issues.
actually, from what I've heard it doesn;t do that at all. not having any copyright software at all is even worse than having pirated software in the eyes of the BSA and they'll still "audit" you and probably make things very unpleasant. there are a number of stories floating round about the nasty kinda shit the bsa pull.
dave
PS. when rule the world it'll all be different I tell you, different...
For a second there I thought it said RECTAL scans
"Hmm...we don't seem to have you retina scan, your fingerprint or your colonic map on file."
here endeth the futurama quote
dave
stand.org.uk use faxyourmp.com to send faxes via I beleive.
dave
Hey, it's called "Year of the Sheep" for a reason.
err, year of the goat I beleive
dave
Anyway in the current copyright laws copying is defined like stealing
well, kinda. in the UK a cort case in the 70's explicitly defined copyright infringement wasn't theft and threw a case out of court for it yet all the big companies keep saying it "copyright infringement is theft" "NO, IT's NOT"
I actually complained to the UK radio advertising authority once about a BSA ad saying that computer piracy is theft. the radio advertising authority completely didn;t want to know. they didn't give a shit
dave
PS. the case in questoin was oxford vs moss (iirc) a case where an oxford university student walked into the staffroom when it was quiet, photocopied an exam paper and walked out with the copy. oxford university accused hi oftheft and took him to court. the judges asked OU what they had actually lost, what was actually missing. when OU had to concede that nothing had actually been stolen the judge threw it out
here in america we certanly driver closer then 170 meters!
perhaps, but I bet you don't drive as fast either? quite a few of the autobahn's have no speed limit so you can bomb along at whatever speed your car is capable of doing/the road is safe for/you can stomach.
dave
But why is light at night automatically considered wasted?
because if you can see the light from space then the light on the ground going up and thats not too much use to us eon the ground. the headlights of a car go sideways and there's no way you'd be able to see that from space (well, not at thos resolutions).
dave
Nice Kite: $100
:)
:)
$100? hohoho, spot the guy who doesn't fly em
if you're making it yourself then thats 10 times too much, and if you're buying a nice kite from a shop then thats not enough
my pbsk warrior standard was over $300, although, to be fair, thats a damn nice kite.
if you're talking commerical parafoil's (ie the ones that look like james bond style controllable parachutes) then really you're talking up to and over $1000 depending on how big and what make, although the second hand market can get you some good deals, my best friend recently bought an 11.8 metre (yes, metre) wipika waterkite for a few hundred quid
dave
Wide-angle or zoom lens
while I've never done KAP, I have flown kites before (ie, big kites) and you need quite a big kite to hoist a decent camera. the reason disposables are so often used is because a) they're cheap and b) they're light.
the kind of camera's that have zoom lenses are heavy beggars, and how do you control the zoom? wires? remote control? thats all more weight. now a big power/traction ktie can carry alot but it's hardly secure.
with a light camera you can tie it down so that as long as you keep the kite steady then it should be good. with a heavier parcel then the weight will be harder to tie down as although a bi kite can undoubtedly take the weight, it's all concentrated in one spot which is bad news for a parawing style kite.
you can of course use something like a big delta too, but they are harder to carry around.
I'm no expert a KAP though, I have to admit, I did some reading on it a few years ago but never tried it. some of the KAP images I've seen in the last have been pretty stunning though.
dave
PS. current kites: pbsk warrior and VP (favourite 2 line kites ever flown), spirit of air omega xs, elliot ekko 2.8, revolution EXP (would love a speed series one day, esp if resailed by peter betancourt), a nice Rok and a few others
Like Linux, though, this game's been on every piece of hardware imaginable.
even, apparently a dvd. aparently the dvd menuing system is powerful enough to play dragons lair on and someone did port it.
funnily enough I've never played the game but I remember reading reviews for the amiga waaay back when
dave
DivX the video rental scheme, not the codec.
:)
ahh, gotcha
not quite so sure it's as cut and dried like that but yeah the old skool divx was indeed an excellent example of consumers telling the industry uite where they could stick it
dave
My Sony DAV-S500 does have digital out, as well as support for SACD.
well, you're not alone. virtually all sacd/dvda player have a digital out, often 2. however when you play an sacd/dvda in the players you'll find the digital out has gone strangely quiet
dave
SACD, meet DivX. DivX, meet SACD.
err... wtf?
sacd is a music only format with the potential for very high quality. DivX is a video codec...
dave
There is no reason that 90% of the artists out there should be earning more then average Joe
well, to be fair, 90%+ of artists probably earn less than the average joe, 90% of high level music company exec's however... thats a different story (I had to beat them to death with their own shoes...)
dave
Would it sound worse running 6 channel analog to your amplifier, than running the digital signal and decoding it with your amp
how many dacs do you need? with digital inputs then you need one dac per output channel no matter how many digital sources you've got. a good dac is a way of transforming an old cd player, but good dac's are expensive.
in my system I have a cd player, dvd player, digital radio and midisc player. all of which output in digital. I would rather get a really nice pre/pro with damn good dac's which will with with any digital input, than get a nice dac for each component (which I wouldn't do as I can't afford it).
whereas with sacd/dvda nly outputting in analogue then my investment in dac's suddenly becomes useless as the players refuse to let me use them.
dave
These are exactly the people who won't care about copy protection
these are exactly the kind of people who *will* care about copy protection as it means they can;t reuse their investment in high quality external dac's and means that they have to rely on the bass management capabilities in the player (which are usually fairly basic) and can't use the often much more advanced fine bass control available to the pre/pro.
audiophiles don't give a stuff about mp3's really, but what they do care about is quality of sound and doing things right. a 6 channel analogue out means that they are not maximising the capabilities of their equipment.
here's an example. the player might allow you to set a bass crossover of 80hz, yet you main speakers can go down to 45hz, and at better quality than your sub. your pre/pro will allow you a much finer control of the crossover point but thats irrelevant as you can;t use it.
more importantly I think. one of the coming "big things" is room correction. the biggest influence on sound quality for many people is the room you're listening to the music in. systems by companies such as TacT allow you to measure the frequency characteristics of the room and pre-correct the audio signal for the room before it hits the power amp (and therefore, speaker). this requires a digital copy of the sound to work on and if all you can get from your player is analogue then thats a wasted preamp stage and it means that it's quite likely that a cd could sound far better than an sacd or dvda as the cd signal is being properly processed to sound great in your room, and the sacd/dvda isn't.
thats why audiophiles care
dave
PS. room correction is a pretty small field in consumer electronics now, but I reckon it'll become bigger news in 5-10 years
Since SACD's play on regular cd players
they *should* play on normal cd players as the standard mentions putting a cd layer in, alas it only has it as an option, not as required. hell, most of the sony discs only have an sacd layer and therefore a cd player won't even know you've put a disc in.
dave
DVD-A *should* always come with a standard CD layer (usually in Dolby Digital or DTS)
not quite sure what you mean here. if it was a cd layer (like hybrid sacd's have) then it would be plain redbook stereo and would play in any cd player (thats the idea behind sony's hybrid discs', except that that afaik, only a few of the sacd's out there actually are hybrid's. most just have the sacd layer and no cd layer).
or do you mean that the dvda disc should have a dvda layer and a dvdv layer, the latter having a dolby digital (for ubiquity) or dts (for bandwidth) track with the same music on?
or do you mean a cd layer with a DTS track encoded on it (like current dts disc's (note, not "dts cd's" as they are not redbook standard, and neither do they label themselves as such)).
I think dvda's should go for the middle option I specified (and indeed, they might for all I know) as thats how they can get ppl to buy their media without needing the new hardware right now
I like sacd in concept more than dvda I have to admit. the format mandates a stereo track in addition to any multichannel track, however, I do think that a cd layer should also be part of the standard so that ppl can buy an sacd without a player, safe in the knowledge that if/when they get an sacd player things will get better.
dave
PS. I also think that cd's album's should come with a free dvd video disc of the artists music vid's. otherwise they'll only go to waste
plz note you can drag windows around with xinerama
yeah, the problem with that is that it's suddenly one big display, and not 2 (or more) independant displays. when it's one big display then you're talking one wm for the pair, ie windows maximising across a monitor bezel etc, which just seems kind of hideous to me.
with 2 independant displays then you can have different wm's on each, when you maximise a window there is no danger that it will span monitors (and what happens in xinerama if you have three screen's in an L arrangement?)
dave
well, it's been done in other X setup's.
as I understand it, with a system of sunray thin clients and a big sunserver. you put your ID card into the reader on the sunray and log in etc. then if you pull the card out it all disappears. go to another term and your old session reappears there.
can anyone comfirm this? and is there any chance we could see this kind of functionality in XF86? (which I would love, then I could transfer from desktop to laptop seamlessly).
a method of repointing single X clients from one server to another would also be a pretty cool thing.
dave
Can you drag apps between them
no, alas you can't, for exactly the same reason that I can't repoint an app displaying on box one to an X server on box 2 while the app is running. it's a bugger though, that would be very cool. still, I'm sure it's coming via some enteprising hacker.
dave