Weirdly, Shazam have published a fairly thorough paper on how their search algorithm works. While devoid of any actual code, it doesn't seem as though the blog in question has given away any trade secrets that aren't easily derived from this paper and other bodies of work online.
Of course, by threatening the guy Shazam & LDS have created their very own Streisand Effect; this is front page on/., Digg, Reddit, YCombinator, etc., which means millions of people have now seen the "infringing" code, with many saving it or tweaking it. I'm certain someone will mirror it in a country that doesn't validate software patents as well. One also wonders if they're going to sue Google or demand they clear the cache.
As for me, I won't be using their software, and I will be contacting them to register my disgust, though it probably will make no difference in their attitude.
You can read the full text of the bill on the Library of Congress website. Here is the offending piece:
Section 493:
29 The institution certifies that the institution
A has developed plans to effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material, including through the use of a variety of technology-based
B will, to the extent practicable, offer alternatives to illegal downloading or peer-to-peer distribution of intellectual property, as determined by the institution in consultation with the chief technology officer or other designated officer of the institution.
That said, language about it has been in there since the very first draft in 2007, Section 485:
An annual disclosure that explicitly informs students that unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material, including unauthorized peer-to-peer file sharing, may subject the students to civil and criminal liabilities;
2 a summary of the penalties for violation of Federal copyright laws;
3 a description of the institution's policies with respect to unauthorized peer-to-peer file sharing, including disciplinary actions that are taken against students who engage in unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials using the institution's information technology system; and
4 a description of actions that the institution takes to prevent and detect unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material on the institution's information technology system.
The bill's primary sponsor, Rep. George Miller, doesn't appear to get any funding at all from the RIAA/MPAA according to OpenSecrets, so I'm guessing that language was put in place by one of the other 29 cosponsors, or by committee. I'd love to find out where that provision originated.
What I have not doped out yet to my own satisfaction is whether the tepid response from Washington is the fault of the current administration, confusion regarding the digital nature of the breach and assets, or a little of both.
Oh for fuck's sake...
What you see as tepid, I see as extremely diplomatic. There's an open investigation into this, the Dept. of State surely doesn't have all the details yet. What would you prefer they do, issue a hawkish, threatening letter? Or perhaps demands?
8 years of poor foreign policy and unnecessary demands got us very little sympathy or friends on the global stage. I think maybe you should give the Dept of State time to process all the details before they issue an ultimatum.
Do you really need to ask? Because no one would opt-in for it! But just do it without telling anyone, and most people outside of tech groups don't even know what it is or that it's operating in the background.
Quoth Grace Hopper, "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission."
in an increasingly competitive market, advertisers have realised that it is more important than ever to create attention for their product.
The first clips will [...] show adverts by the drinks company Pepsi.
So Pepsi needs to create attention for their product? Is there anyone on this earth over the age of 2 that doesn't know what Pepsi-Cola is? I mean, I rarely drink cola as it is, but if I open up a magazine and a Pepsi ad starts shouting at me, you can be damned sure I will never drink that brand again.
And what's to say that electricity prices won't jump up dramatically with people suddenly charging their cars on the grid every day?
Also, assuming that a GM car will last for 10 years, particularly a first-generation plug-in hybrid, is a pretty tall order.
Besides, $109k for any car that does 0-60 in less than 4 (and has a chassis designed by lotus) is not a bad a deal
It's actually a terrible deal, considering you can buy a used Lotus Elise for under $40,000 USD, and then add a turbo kit by Force Fed for around $10k. That puts it in the 4.0 or less area for less than half the cost of a Tesla.
Similarly, a BMW 1 or 3 series (x35i) with modified boost will run at those speeds, for even less. You can pick up a base 135i for under $40k, then add in a JB3 unit from Burger Tuning for $600.
Frankly, I think the Tesla Roadster is vastly overpriced. I'd love to own one, but it's just so far out of the realm of possibility, it's ridiculous. I could even afford an Elise/Exige, but not the all-electric equivalent. Shame.
They know where you and your family are...now it's time to turn the tables so that you know where they live and can make better decisions about where to allow your kids to play.
That's great for the very stereotypical creepy, mustachioed child molester, but ever-increasingly the phrase, "sex offender" has nothing to do with children at all. That same title now applies to people convicted of statutory rape, even if they were 17 & 18 at the time. It applies to people who streak, people who are caught skinny-dipping, people who are caught having sex in public (including in their car), and even people who happened to urinate behind a tree in some places. Yet they have the same social stigma & registration entries in the database as people who raped children.
So yeah, it might help protect your children, or it might just show you the house of a guy who really needed to take a leak, and happened to get caught. But hey, feel free to use it and get extremely paranoid at the rapidly growing number of people it shows...
Obviously the confusion is stemming from the fact that the submitter used the wrong abbreviation.
Lowercase "nm" is nanometer. NM, Nm or nmi are appropriate for nautical mile. Neither of which are to be confused with the newton-meter, which is N m. (N.B. there is a space between N and m for newton-meter.)
Back when 10.3 was coming out, Apple announced a feature entitled "Home on iPod", that would let you take your home settings, etc., with you on the iPod, so that you could recreate your home operating environment on any mac. It was in developer builds, and then was suddenly dropped. For those of you who don't remember it, here's a bit on it from Apple Insider.
There was a lot of speculation at the time that it disappeared because it was overheating iPods, but Apple said nothing about it. I can't help but wonder at this point if that's exactly what happened.
That link to Babula Blog...really, we couldn't find a non-partisan site talking about this event? Instead, we have to read this kind of crap:
The results of this fraudulent vote was tilted heavily in Zelaya's favor, ensuring he could go ahead and illegally change the constitution so he could remain in power for as long as he wanted to. ACORN, I'm sure, is taking notes.
It doesn't matter what Zelaya's politics were, if this is true then he clearly had no problem with electoral fraud. People on both sides of the political spectrum, from the extremists to the moderates, have shown time & time again that they will do whatever they can to stay in power. It is not limited to only the left or only the right, and making silly jabs at the "other" side like that is not only distasteful but juvenile as well.
First thing I did with NoScript was block google analytics. They're on about 99% of the sites that I visit on a daily basis, and I'm really not comfortable with them tracking me from site to site like that.
I don't like their terms, so I'm not buying an iPhone. Not that Verizon is great by any means, but through them I have unlimited voice, data, and 1000 texts per month for about $65, after taxes & fees. The same deal with the iPhone would cost me about double that per month. I'll keep my crappy WM phone for the time being.
Thank you, I was thinking the exact same thing, one sentence in. Maybe it's because I know people who do have Crohn's, but it seemed to me that it would be something you'd bring up as a possibility to a patient with recurrent symptoms.
1) The torrented shows are of higher quality than Hulu offers.
2) The torrented shows work fine in Boxee/AppleTV, whereas Hulu keeps going out of their way to break Boxee support.
3) The torrented shows don't have ads that cut in at 200% volume compared to the episodes on Hulu.
Very frustrating. I'd be willing to buy more content from iTunes and just requiem off the DRM, except that the prices are just too high compared to DVD releases, so I generally just go without and wait for the DVDs to come out a few months later.
Capable cars in the US are limited to 135 mph, and 240 km/h (~150mph) in Europe.
As someone who takes his cars to track day events & drag strips, where I can legally drive any speed I like, I would certainly not be in favor of further speed limiting. And I'm sure residents of larger, sparsely-populated states wouldn't be in favor of them either. The speed limit in parts of Texas is 80 mph, a limiter at 85 mph would mean you couldn't really pass anyone.
Has anyone pondered the fact that maybe the updates aren't really that frequent at all, and the developers just push out minor changes so that all updated users get a forced visit to their homepage when they reload Firefox?
I know about the feature, only it doesn't work for every game.
If I suspended GTA in the middle of a car chase or something, when I tried to resume the game it would take me back to my last saved point and lose my current progress. Maybe it was a firmware bug or something, but I remember it distinctly, it was utterly infuriating! Lumines worked perfectly though with it, I could suspend a game at any time and resume it later, leading to epic 900,000 point games that spanned several days of gameplay on the train.
Everything the parent said is 100% true. It's a slick piece of hardware, but after nearly 8 months of not using it, I finally just sold mine to a friend for his kids to use.
I used my PSP while riding the train to & from work every day, about 35 minutes in each direction. As a result,
I wound up playing Lumines more than anything else because every other game I tried was a complete joke, or, in the case of GTA, too convoluted & involved for easy pick-up & put-down gameplay. If I can't turn the game off at my stop without losing all of my progress, then it's not worth playing.
And yeah, UMD movies, why on earth would I want them!? So I can rewatch half of my DVD collection in "teeny weeny eyestrain-o-vision"? (Thanks, Yahtzee.) Fuck that.
Ahh, a Philadelphian! Do yourself a favor and go see it at the IMAX in King of Prussia instead, very soft, reclining, comfortable seats.
The Tuttleman theatre at the Franklin Institute was designed almost twenty years ago, and was intended for short educational films, not full-length features. If you recall, it used to be named the Tuttleman-Omniverse Theatre, not Tuttleman-IMAX.
Slashdot Mirror
Weirdly, Shazam have published a fairly thorough paper on how their search algorithm works. While devoid of any actual code, it doesn't seem as though the blog in question has given away any trade secrets that aren't easily derived from this paper and other bodies of work online.
/., Digg, Reddit, YCombinator, etc., which means millions of people have now seen the "infringing" code, with many saving it or tweaking it. I'm certain someone will mirror it in a country that doesn't validate software patents as well. One also wonders if they're going to sue Google or demand they clear the cache.
Of course, by threatening the guy Shazam & LDS have created their very own Streisand Effect; this is front page on
As for me, I won't be using their software, and I will be contacting them to register my disgust, though it probably will make no difference in their attitude.
Section 493:
That said, language about it has been in there since the very first draft in 2007, Section 485:
The bill's primary sponsor, Rep. George Miller, doesn't appear to get any funding at all from the RIAA/MPAA according to OpenSecrets, so I'm guessing that language was put in place by one of the other 29 cosponsors, or by committee. I'd love to find out where that provision originated.
Oh for fuck's sake...
What you see as tepid, I see as extremely diplomatic. There's an open investigation into this, the Dept. of State surely doesn't have all the details yet. What would you prefer they do, issue a hawkish, threatening letter? Or perhaps demands?
8 years of poor foreign policy and unnecessary demands got us very little sympathy or friends on the global stage. I think maybe you should give the Dept of State time to process all the details before they issue an ultimatum.
Do you really need to ask? Because no one would opt-in for it! But just do it without telling anyone, and most people outside of tech groups don't even know what it is or that it's operating in the background.
Quoth Grace Hopper, "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission."
So Pepsi needs to create attention for their product? Is there anyone on this earth over the age of 2 that doesn't know what Pepsi-Cola is? I mean, I rarely drink cola as it is, but if I open up a magazine and a Pepsi ad starts shouting at me, you can be damned sure I will never drink that brand again.
And what's to say that electricity prices won't jump up dramatically with people suddenly charging their cars on the grid every day? Also, assuming that a GM car will last for 10 years, particularly a first-generation plug-in hybrid, is a pretty tall order.
It's actually a terrible deal, considering you can buy a used Lotus Elise for under $40,000 USD, and then add a turbo kit by Force Fed for around $10k. That puts it in the 4.0 or less area for less than half the cost of a Tesla.
Similarly, a BMW 1 or 3 series (x35i) with modified boost will run at those speeds, for even less. You can pick up a base 135i for under $40k, then add in a JB3 unit from Burger Tuning for $600.
Frankly, I think the Tesla Roadster is vastly overpriced. I'd love to own one, but it's just so far out of the realm of possibility, it's ridiculous. I could even afford an Elise/Exige, but not the all-electric equivalent. Shame.
Water all over the monitor...nicely done!
That's great for the very stereotypical creepy, mustachioed child molester, but ever-increasingly the phrase, "sex offender" has nothing to do with children at all. That same title now applies to people convicted of statutory rape, even if they were 17 & 18 at the time. It applies to people who streak, people who are caught skinny-dipping, people who are caught having sex in public (including in their car), and even people who happened to urinate behind a tree in some places. Yet they have the same social stigma & registration entries in the database as people who raped children.
So yeah, it might help protect your children, or it might just show you the house of a guy who really needed to take a leak, and happened to get caught. But hey, feel free to use it and get extremely paranoid at the rapidly growing number of people it shows...
Obviously the confusion is stemming from the fact that the submitter used the wrong abbreviation.
Lowercase "nm" is nanometer. NM, Nm or nmi are appropriate for nautical mile. Neither of which are to be confused with the newton-meter, which is N m. (N.B. there is a space between N and m for newton-meter.)
Back when 10.3 was coming out, Apple announced a feature entitled "Home on iPod", that would let you take your home settings, etc., with you on the iPod, so that you could recreate your home operating environment on any mac. It was in developer builds, and then was suddenly dropped. For those of you who don't remember it, here's a bit on it from Apple Insider.
There was a lot of speculation at the time that it disappeared because it was overheating iPods, but Apple said nothing about it. I can't help but wonder at this point if that's exactly what happened.
For the record, I've complained the same about links to DailyKos that were completely out of line.
It doesn't matter what Zelaya's politics were, if this is true then he clearly had no problem with electoral fraud. People on both sides of the political spectrum, from the extremists to the moderates, have shown time & time again that they will do whatever they can to stay in power. It is not limited to only the left or only the right, and making silly jabs at the "other" side like that is not only distasteful but juvenile as well.
Only on /. could this comment get modded up to 5, Insightful.
For the record, Ehra-Lessien's main straight is exactly 9 kilometers in length.
First thing I did with NoScript was block google analytics. They're on about 99% of the sites that I visit on a daily basis, and I'm really not comfortable with them tracking me from site to site like that.
I don't like their terms, so I'm not buying an iPhone. Not that Verizon is great by any means, but through them I have unlimited voice, data, and 1000 texts per month for about $65, after taxes & fees. The same deal with the iPhone would cost me about double that per month. I'll keep my crappy WM phone for the time being.
Thank you, I was thinking the exact same thing, one sentence in. Maybe it's because I know people who do have Crohn's, but it seemed to me that it would be something you'd bring up as a possibility to a patient with recurrent symptoms.
Here are my ICSI results.
Direct UDP access to remote DNS servers (port 53) is allowed.
Direct TCP access to remote DNS servers (port 53) is allowed.
My office is just outside of Philadelphia, so southeastern PA, for regional results.
Particularly true when:
1) The torrented shows are of higher quality than Hulu offers.
2) The torrented shows work fine in Boxee/AppleTV, whereas Hulu keeps going out of their way to break Boxee support.
3) The torrented shows don't have ads that cut in at 200% volume compared to the episodes on Hulu.
Very frustrating. I'd be willing to buy more content from iTunes and just requiem off the DRM, except that the prices are just too high compared to DVD releases, so I generally just go without and wait for the DVDs to come out a few months later.
Capable cars in the US are limited to 135 mph, and 240 km/h (~150mph) in Europe.
As someone who takes his cars to track day events & drag strips, where I can legally drive any speed I like, I would certainly not be in favor of further speed limiting. And I'm sure residents of larger, sparsely-populated states wouldn't be in favor of them either. The speed limit in parts of Texas is 80 mph, a limiter at 85 mph would mean you couldn't really pass anyone.
Has anyone pondered the fact that maybe the updates aren't really that frequent at all, and the developers just push out minor changes so that all updated users get a forced visit to their homepage when they reload Firefox?
I know about the feature, only it doesn't work for every game.
If I suspended GTA in the middle of a car chase or something, when I tried to resume the game it would take me back to my last saved point and lose my current progress. Maybe it was a firmware bug or something, but I remember it distinctly, it was utterly infuriating! Lumines worked perfectly though with it, I could suspend a game at any time and resume it later, leading to epic 900,000 point games that spanned several days of gameplay on the train.
Everything the parent said is 100% true. It's a slick piece of hardware, but after nearly 8 months of not using it, I finally just sold mine to a friend for his kids to use.
I used my PSP while riding the train to & from work every day, about 35 minutes in each direction. As a result, I wound up playing Lumines more than anything else because every other game I tried was a complete joke, or, in the case of GTA, too convoluted & involved for easy pick-up & put-down gameplay. If I can't turn the game off at my stop without losing all of my progress, then it's not worth playing.
And yeah, UMD movies, why on earth would I want them!? So I can rewatch half of my DVD collection in "teeny weeny eyestrain-o-vision"? (Thanks, Yahtzee.) Fuck that.
Ahh, a Philadelphian! Do yourself a favor and go see it at the IMAX in King of Prussia instead, very soft, reclining, comfortable seats.
The Tuttleman theatre at the Franklin Institute was designed almost twenty years ago, and was intended for short educational films, not full-length features. If you recall, it used to be named the Tuttleman-Omniverse Theatre, not Tuttleman-IMAX.