Can I please get a little more concern for the rights, privacy, and freedom of our own damned citizens before we go off pretending to be dudly do right elsewhere?
First off, it's a complete logical fallacy to claim that we shouldn't do X because Y isn't perfect. Nothing prevents both from happening, independent of each other.
Secondly, I'd like you to try that statement with other subjects, and see how good it sounds. eg. "Can I please get a little more food, before we go off sending aide to Africa?" "Can we please get cheaper Viagra, before sending tuberculosis vaccines to poor people?"
This world police shit is what keeps getting us in trouble in the first place.
No. As a matter of fact, US corporations doing absolutely criminal things, cooperating with repressive foreign governments, is one of the biggest contributors to the US' terrible world image. When guys like Castro and Chavez complain about the US to the world, they don't yell about the US making laws that protected their citizens... They're complaining about US companies buying oil and mineral rights for nothing, horrifically exploiting the poor, and cooperating with the government to squash unions, dissidents, political organizers, etc. etc. All things that were perfectly legal in those countries at the time, but abhorrent to anyone with any sense of morality or human rights.
Americans like yourself who are completely wrapped up in their own trivial local problems, and want to remain happily ignorant of terrible realities in the rest of the world, allowing them to continue, are what REALLY make for the US' terrible image.
The fact that I am familiar with them shows how influential they are. I suppose though, that influential != [ big || successful ].
I bet you've heard of Enron, too.
You know of CompUSA probably because they happened to advertise a lot, and perhaps were the only tech stores in some areas. Just because you're familiar with a brand, doesn't mean they are any good, or at all influential.
I'm not sure if maybe there are companies that, say, perform such services for a fee. That would be hugely beneficial to the computing community as a whole.
I'm dumbfounded that such an ignorant comment got modded up here on/. of all places...
If there are companies that recover data, how come we never hear about them in Slashdot articles?
We do... THIS VERY ONE, FOR INSTANCE.
Does anybody happen to know how I might go about recovering data from a similarly damaged disk?
If the drive physically works, there are plenty of methods out there for recovering data. If not, you'd better be willing to shovel out money for the service. There's good reason there are thousands of stories from/.ers about how they replaced circuit boards, threw it in the freezer, or even opened up the case and physically rotated the platters themselves.
At this point, with many cheap hard drives, fast networks, CD burners in nearly every computer around... You're just an idiot if you don't have at least infrequently backup selected (important) data from your computer.
Interesting, The digital distribution that Netflix DOES have is not overly encumbered with DRM
I don't know where you get this crap from. Netflix WatchNow videos couldn't include more restrictions IF THEY TRIED.
You have to have Windows XP installed, including a recent version of Windows Media Player. Yet you also have to install the "Netflix Player" which includes additional DRM. You can ONLY watch movies with the netflix player, and then, ONLY in an INTERNET EXPLORER browser window. It connects to Netflix's servers to authorize you to watch the movie, prompting you for your username and password again, if it doesn't have it saved. Then, every second that you watch the movie, the Netflix player is sending every bit of info back to Netflix. They know the exact millisecond where you paused the movie, rewound 5 minutes, then played it again. I haven't ever seen more intrusive DRM, and I have a hard time imagining how it could possibly get more "encumbered".
And so many of them are bundled / built in with the drivers for the hardware, so you can't even get rid of them!
If the OS doesn't execute them on startup, they can't do a thing. If you remove their "Run" entries from the registry, Windows doesn't know anything about them.
I suggest downloading and installing Startup.CPL as the first step on any machine, and removing any and all entries you don't want run, or even any you just don't recognize (almost nothing actually NEEDS to be run at startup).
USPS: Hey Netflix can you change your envelopes so they won't jam our machines? Netflix: Why should we? USPS: We'll charge your $0.17 per envelope to process them manually? Netflix: We'll change our envelope.
Actually, if I worked for Netflix, I'd suggest they go for PLAN B:
USPS: We're going to charge you $0.17 per envelope to process them manually... Netflix: Okay, we'll pay the $20 mil. By the way, from now on, we aren't going to drop off and pick up our mail directly from the post office. We're paying 1st class rates already, so you can deliver it to our building from now on. Hope that $20 mil. helps you cover the extra $100 mil. delivery cost. USPS: *cough* You know, $0.17 is a bit steep. Maybe we can work something out...
Ironically, these may turn into the CPUs dejour for Linux users...
The performance hit is probably 10% when patching the microcode which should mean steep price mark-downs on this generation of CPUs. But it's only a 1% performance hit when patching the (Linux) kernel.
So why doesn't every OEM that sells Linux servers and desktops just buy up all of AMD's supplies of defective chips at a big discount, and pass the savings along? I'd buy a couple.
1. Are you telling me that a 160kbps MP2 is better than MP3 at higher bit rates?
Well, somewhere around 160+, but yes. MP3 introduces some distortions inherent in how it encodes, which MP2 does not. MP3s at any bitrate distort high frequencies.
2. Given a comparable bit rate (if the answer to question one is no) how do the file sizes compare?
file size = bitrate * length
It doesn't matter what codec you use. The same bitrate produces the same file size.
If you perhaps meant to ask what bitrate is needed for equivalent quality... MP2 needs about a 50% higher bitrate than MP3 for comparable quality. That holds true for lower bitrates, up until somewhere around 160kpbs (or 192, depending on the audio).
Like what? Sending Gestapo agents door-to-door looking for unlicensed software? Sending hitmen to Hungary to forcibly shut down websites offering their codecs for download?
Copyright infringement isn't legal in Hungary. Microsoft has just looked the other way, since it's more or less in their interest, at the moment. With a lawsuit, you'd see Microsoft's DLLs disappear from websites.
Every time MS or anyone else tries some type of software-based protection, someone else comes along and hacks it: DVD CSS, Blu-Ray's protection, etc.
DVD CSS was incredibly weak. Despite some workarounds, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD remain uncracked.
And Microsoft's own DRM remains pretty effective. Though software exists to allow you to strip DRM off WMV files, it only works if you're already authorized to view the file to begin with.
MS could add strong encryption to the codecs, but then they still have the problem where legitimate users have to have the keys to decrypt the codec to use it; that means you just need a copy of Windows, and you'll have the key. Reverse-engineering it to get that key isn't that hard.
Reverse engineering WMA isn't that hard either, but it hasn't been done. It's seems those that aren't actually involved enjoy saying how easy it is to crack DRM, while those actually doing it, do not.
WMA is just a codec, and plays just fine on my Ubuntu machine. I'm pretty sure there's nothing that MS can do to take that away from me (technically, at least).
The most recent versions of WMA (WMA9, format 0x162/0x163) can only be played through the use of Microsoft's binary-only DLLs. That means you can only play your WMAs on Linux as long as you stay on an x86 machine (or x86-64, with backwards compatibility, using a 32-bit binary).
As such, there are many things Microsoft could do to stop you from getting a copy of that DLL in the future, as well as making changes to future DLLs to prevent them from working outside Windows.
Prior to MP3, compressed music just wasn't something a normal person was aware of.
Long before I installed my first MP3 player, I (and most of the world) had RealAudio installed, and was regularly listening to (streaming) compressed audio.
Because it is so old, MP3 is widely supported. Everything plays MP3s. If I want to play music on my DVD player, MP3 is the format to use. It doesn't support AAC or WMA. Same thing with portables. What additional formats they support is hit and miss, but they -all- do MP3.
Then why doesn't everyone use MP2? Anything that will play MP3s will play MP2s, and there are many bits of hardware will handle MP2 audio, but NOT MP3... See: older DVD player, VCD/SVCD players, DV hardware, etc. Anything that does MPEG video has to handle MP2 audio, but not MP3.
Sure, AAC is better per bit. However if people already consider their music "perfect" then why do they care?
Umm... maybe because downloading an album will only take half as long, while sounding just as good?
On the other hand, mp3 is still patent-encumbered,
Use MP2 instead. Backwards compatibility is inherent. Anything that can play MP3 can play MP2 files as well. And at bitrates of 160kbps+ (Joint Stereo, psy-1) MP2 actually sounds better than any MP3 as well. Not to mention it both encodes and decodes faster.
In fact I'd put MP2 up against DD/AC3/A52 any day. Dolby has a history of bribing organizations to NOT include MP2 along-side AC3, such as the US DVD and HDTV standard. In the rest of the world, patent-free MP2 is allowed on DVDs and in digital TV, in addition to AC3.
The lack of support for open audio and video codecs is a real problem now, because essentially flash is shaping up to be a completely necessary part of people's ability to do things with their computers, and one of the many ways that adobe is keeping flash proprietary is that they only support proprietary audio and video codecs for flash.
You're just about completely wrong.
Flash video 7 used a slightly modified h.263 codec. Non-standard, I must admit, but it was very quickly reverse engineered. Not only can anything based on libavcodec play flash videos, but the open source Flash player/plugin GNASH can play them as well, even though it's still developing, and quite buggy at the moment.
Flash 9 added On2's proprietary VP6 codec, but use of that format has been quite limited.
And what's the audio codec with both of them? Plain old MP3.
Plus, Adobe long ago announced the shift to completely standard video formats. The recent beta versions of the Flash9 plugin can play MP4 files with h.264 and AAC audio. All 100% open standard, and interchangeable with Quicktime, MPlayer, etc.
Now matter how much java applets may have sucked in various ways, at least the technology was always free as in beer (and is now becoming free as in speech).
Flash was opened up before Java was, and there are numerous 3rd party implementations of Flash. Gnash is even open source, and can handle many of the common Flash videos found in the wild.
Options A and B can be pursued with MRBM-sized missiles,
You're just splitting hairs here. There's little effective difference between ICBMs and MRBMs. Nearly all off the (very few) countries that posses MRBMs also have ICBMs.
Or you could patent some procedure used, so that people can see the source code, but if they do anything with it, they violate your patent.
No, you couldn't do that. In fact that's exactly the scenario given as an example case for section 7:
For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
If you're getting hit with these restrictions, chances are, you, yourself, are an "indian giver" -- you want to pretend to share, except, not really.
Just because someone can't share absolutely everything, doesn't mean they don't want to share.
The technology to disable satellites dates back to the 1970s... in about the same way that modern fighter jets date back to the 1900s...
ICBMs were ridiculously, unbelievably expensive then, and are now just ridiculously expensive, beyond the means of all but a few of the top world powers.
Short of a war with Russia or China, the satellites are plenty safe. ICBMs aren't the kind of weapons that can be quietly smuggled out of a country and sold on the black market.
And even in that case, the sheer number the US Military has in orbit should make that an impractical strategy... Far easier to send up a few fighter jets to shoot down the slow, stupid, flying computers.
What is to say that technology in the future wont advance to also include jamming the drones you plan to fly over a foes city?
The laws of physics.
You can't jam such a highly directional signal, unless you're located directly between the drone and the satellite... in which case, you can probably think of better options.
The only real option is to disable the satellite, which isn't an easy proposition.
Why the fuck are we building bigger and better and more expensive bombs when all of our operations are counter-terrorist ops?
It's ironic...
It seems like half the country condemns the US military for preparing to fight the last war, while the other half, like yourself, condemns them for preparing for anything different than the last war.
It's long been established that digital "copies" in memory are legal, due to both necessity and transience.
For the rest, fair use exceptions will clearly cover most of the examples they mention, such as making copies of a writing for educational purposes.
There are very, very few of their examples are even somewhat questionable, but even there, responsibility probably falls on someone else (eg. the tattoo artist/shop).
The truth of the matter is, it isn't difficult to avoid copyright infringement. It takes just the slightest bit of effort to send out e-mails with eg. a link to a page instead of a copy of it. Those who are actually guilty of copyright infringement are either ignorant of the laws, or not trying to stay legal. I make no judgment about either, but the fact is, TFA's assertion that it's impossible to avoid running afoul of copyright law is unmitigated nonsense.
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As opposed to buying the movie itself... which contributes money to the very thing the movie was preaching against?
I enjoy rhubarb.
First off, it's a complete logical fallacy to claim that we shouldn't do X because Y isn't perfect. Nothing prevents both from happening, independent of each other.
Secondly, I'd like you to try that statement with other subjects, and see how good it sounds. eg. "Can I please get a little more food, before we go off sending aide to Africa?" "Can we please get cheaper Viagra, before sending tuberculosis vaccines to poor people?"
No. As a matter of fact, US corporations doing absolutely criminal things, cooperating with repressive foreign governments, is one of the biggest contributors to the US' terrible world image. When guys like Castro and Chavez complain about the US to the world, they don't yell about the US making laws that protected their citizens... They're complaining about US companies buying oil and mineral rights for nothing, horrifically exploiting the poor, and cooperating with the government to squash unions, dissidents, political organizers, etc. etc. All things that were perfectly legal in those countries at the time, but abhorrent to anyone with any sense of morality or human rights.
Americans like yourself who are completely wrapped up in their own trivial local problems, and want to remain happily ignorant of terrible realities in the rest of the world, allowing them to continue, are what REALLY make for the US' terrible image.
I bet you've heard of Enron, too.
You know of CompUSA probably because they happened to advertise a lot, and perhaps were the only tech stores in some areas. Just because you're familiar with a brand, doesn't mean they are any good, or at all influential.
I'm dumbfounded that such an ignorant comment got modded up here on
We do... THIS VERY ONE, FOR INSTANCE.
If the drive physically works, there are plenty of methods out there for recovering data. If not, you'd better be willing to shovel out money for the service. There's good reason there are thousands of stories from
At this point, with many cheap hard drives, fast networks, CD burners in nearly every computer around... You're just an idiot if you don't have at least infrequently backup selected (important) data from your computer.
I don't know where you get this crap from. Netflix WatchNow videos couldn't include more restrictions IF THEY TRIED.
You have to have Windows XP installed, including a recent version of Windows Media Player. Yet you also have to install the "Netflix Player" which includes additional DRM. You can ONLY watch movies with the netflix player, and then, ONLY in an INTERNET EXPLORER browser window. It connects to Netflix's servers to authorize you to watch the movie, prompting you for your username and password again, if it doesn't have it saved. Then, every second that you watch the movie, the Netflix player is sending every bit of info back to Netflix. They know the exact millisecond where you paused the movie, rewound 5 minutes, then played it again. I haven't ever seen more intrusive DRM, and I have a hard time imagining how it could possibly get more "encumbered".
And I couldn't take the performance hit of XP, compared to 2000...
In fact, I still miss NT4, but there's just too much software that doesn't work on it anymore.
If the OS doesn't execute them on startup, they can't do a thing. If you remove their "Run" entries from the registry, Windows doesn't know anything about them.
I suggest downloading and installing Startup.CPL as the first step on any machine, and removing any and all entries you don't want run, or even any you just don't recognize (almost nothing actually NEEDS to be run at startup).
http://www.mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml
Actually, if I worked for Netflix, I'd suggest they go for PLAN B:
USPS: We're going to charge you $0.17 per envelope to process them manually...
Netflix: Okay, we'll pay the $20 mil. By the way, from now on, we aren't going to drop off and pick up our mail directly from the post office. We're paying 1st class rates already, so you can deliver it to our building from now on. Hope that $20 mil. helps you cover the extra $100 mil. delivery cost.
USPS: *cough* You know, $0.17 is a bit steep. Maybe we can work something out...
NellyMoser has been reverse engineered and is included in libavcodec.
Ironically, these may turn into the CPUs dejour for Linux users...
The performance hit is probably 10% when patching the microcode which should mean steep price mark-downs on this generation of CPUs. But it's only a 1% performance hit when patching the (Linux) kernel.
So why doesn't every OEM that sells Linux servers and desktops just buy up all of AMD's supplies of defective chips at a big discount, and pass the savings along? I'd buy a couple.
Well, somewhere around 160+, but yes. MP3 introduces some distortions inherent in how it encodes, which MP2 does not. MP3s at any bitrate distort high frequencies.
file size = bitrate * length
It doesn't matter what codec you use. The same bitrate produces the same file size.
If you perhaps meant to ask what bitrate is needed for equivalent quality... MP2 needs about a 50% higher bitrate than MP3 for comparable quality. That holds true for lower bitrates, up until somewhere around 160kpbs (or 192, depending on the audio).
Copyright infringement isn't legal in Hungary. Microsoft has just looked the other way, since it's more or less in their interest, at the moment. With a lawsuit, you'd see Microsoft's DLLs disappear from websites.
DVD CSS was incredibly weak. Despite some workarounds, Blu-Ray and HD-DVD remain uncracked.
And Microsoft's own DRM remains pretty effective. Though software exists to allow you to strip DRM off WMV files, it only works if you're already authorized to view the file to begin with.
Reverse engineering WMA isn't that hard either, but it hasn't been done. It's seems those that aren't actually involved enjoy saying how easy it is to crack DRM, while those actually doing it, do not.
The most recent versions of WMA (WMA9, format 0x162/0x163) can only be played through the use of Microsoft's binary-only DLLs. That means you can only play your WMAs on Linux as long as you stay on an x86 machine (or x86-64, with backwards compatibility, using a 32-bit binary).
As such, there are many things Microsoft could do to stop you from getting a copy of that DLL in the future, as well as making changes to future DLLs to prevent them from working outside Windows.
Long before I installed my first MP3 player, I (and most of the world) had RealAudio installed, and was regularly listening to (streaming) compressed audio.
Then why doesn't everyone use MP2? Anything that will play MP3s will play MP2s, and there are many bits of hardware will handle MP2 audio, but NOT MP3... See: older DVD player, VCD/SVCD players, DV hardware, etc. Anything that does MPEG video has to handle MP2 audio, but not MP3.
Umm... maybe because downloading an album will only take half as long, while sounding just as good?
Use MP2 instead. Backwards compatibility is inherent. Anything that can play MP3 can play MP2 files as well. And at bitrates of 160kbps+ (Joint Stereo, psy-1) MP2 actually sounds better than any MP3 as well. Not to mention it both encodes and decodes faster.
In fact I'd put MP2 up against DD/AC3/A52 any day. Dolby has a history of bribing organizations to NOT include MP2 along-side AC3, such as the US DVD and HDTV standard. In the rest of the world, patent-free MP2 is allowed on DVDs and in digital TV, in addition to AC3.
You're just about completely wrong.
Flash video 7 used a slightly modified h.263 codec. Non-standard, I must admit, but it was very quickly reverse engineered. Not only can anything based on libavcodec play flash videos, but the open source Flash player/plugin GNASH can play them as well, even though it's still developing, and quite buggy at the moment.
Flash 9 added On2's proprietary VP6 codec, but use of that format has been quite limited.
And what's the audio codec with both of them? Plain old MP3.
Plus, Adobe long ago announced the shift to completely standard video formats. The recent beta versions of the Flash9 plugin can play MP4 files with h.264 and AAC audio. All 100% open standard, and interchangeable with Quicktime, MPlayer, etc.
Flash was opened up before Java was, and there are numerous 3rd party implementations of Flash. Gnash is even open source, and can handle many of the common Flash videos found in the wild.
Patented != Proprietary
MP3 has been an open format from the beginning. It just isn't royalty free. The same is true for everything MPEG, from MPEG-2 to h.264
You're just splitting hairs here. There's little effective difference between ICBMs and MRBMs. Nearly all off the (very few) countries that posses MRBMs also have ICBMs.
If you distribute the code under GPLv2, covered by patent, you are implicitly giving everyone a royalty-free license to use that patent.
It's pretty clear:
royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you
No, you couldn't do that. In fact that's exactly the scenario given as an example case for section 7:
Just because someone can't share absolutely everything, doesn't mean they don't want to share.
The technology to disable satellites dates back to the 1970s... in about the same way that modern fighter jets date back to the 1900s...
ICBMs were ridiculously, unbelievably expensive then, and are now just ridiculously expensive, beyond the means of all but a few of the top world powers.
Short of a war with Russia or China, the satellites are plenty safe. ICBMs aren't the kind of weapons that can be quietly smuggled out of a country and sold on the black market.
And even in that case, the sheer number the US Military has in orbit should make that an impractical strategy... Far easier to send up a few fighter jets to shoot down the slow, stupid, flying computers.
The laws of physics.
You can't jam such a highly directional signal, unless you're located directly between the drone and the satellite... in which case, you can probably think of better options.
The only real option is to disable the satellite, which isn't an easy proposition.
It's ironic...
It seems like half the country condemns the US military for preparing to fight the last war, while the other half, like yourself, condemns them for preparing for anything different than the last war.
TFA is complete and total crap.
It's long been established that digital "copies" in memory are legal, due to both necessity and transience.
For the rest, fair use exceptions will clearly cover most of the examples they mention, such as making copies of a writing for educational purposes.
There are very, very few of their examples are even somewhat questionable, but even there, responsibility probably falls on someone else (eg. the tattoo artist/shop).
The truth of the matter is, it isn't difficult to avoid copyright infringement. It takes just the slightest bit of effort to send out e-mails with eg. a link to a page instead of a copy of it. Those who are actually guilty of copyright infringement are either ignorant of the laws, or not trying to stay legal. I make no judgment about either, but the fact is, TFA's assertion that it's impossible to avoid running afoul of copyright law is unmitigated nonsense.
If you're halfway competent and intelligent, you continue to learn from experience, and very soon know MORE than your teachers did.
If that wasn't the case, knowledge would continue to shrink, as a bit of it is lost every generation, while in reality, the opposite is true.