The only thing all this cablecard crap is really going to accomplish is DRM. Why anyone would want to run out and buy an expensive DRM system that only reduces their options is beyond me.
So that they can watch more than their 7 local OTA channels in HD. Pretty simple really. No cable company is going to have the balls to broadcast anything unencrypted, unless they are really forced to do so.
I just recorded the superbowl in HD for grins and it ate up 35GB (yes that GIGAbytes) of hard drive space. Nobody is going to be passing this stuff around the net, or archiving it, or much of anything, DRM or not, - it's just too darn big.
DVDs were too darn big too. 9GB DVDs are floating around the net as 700MB videos. Admitedly, the quality is usually bad, but that's mainly thanks to crappy tools that companies like Divx put out.
HD content has been available on the net for years now. Videos are re-encoded with Xvid or WMV3 (aka WM9/VC-1) to 4.5GB sets so they can be recorded on to DVD-Rs.
Are any Linux users playing DVDs on their systems? Are you watching MPEG videos and MP3s? Did you pay the required license fees to do so? Then why do you care that a DIY HDTV PVR will now be (borderline) illegal as well? People want freedom, but they aren't willing to make any sacrifice to get it. So here we are.
If you want to see a change, people need to cancel their monthly subscriptions en masse, and stick to OTA out of spite. Or, just don't pay the additional charge to upgrade the equipment and subscription to HD.
The only thing worse to the entertainment industry than theoretical money lost due to copying, is real money lost, due to lots of people refusing to accept their restrictions...
Why don't they sue anybody who uses BitTorrent to distribute illegal, pirated copies of music?
For one, because they wouldn't have any legal right to do so.
They are suing companies based upon violation of their TRADEMARK, if the company in question happens to be using the BitTorrent trademark in conjection with any type of spyware.
They don't have any right to sue companies that aren't using the BitTorrent trademark, even if they are distributing spyware, porn, music, movies, etc.
In your world, how would BitTorrent have any ability to sue people for copyright infringment of content they have absolutely no rights to?
computer program costs nothing to copy, and the hardware's relatively cheap, and robots don't have families.
Not losing men would be a good thing. However, losing 40 multi-million dollar aircraft would probably even more demoralizing than losing one or two planes, and one pilot.
pop quiz, what lifts better, helium, hydrogen, or vaccuum?
Anti-gravity.
Obviously a vacuum would give more lift, but the stresses it exerts on the frame are incredible, requiring a much more massive structure, increasing the weight above any benefit it would provide, so it's not practical.
Hydrogen lifts better than helium, and doesn't have the problem a vacuum poses, but it's flamable, and difficult to contain, and so also impractical.
Whatever you may think humans have done to the planet, it's gone through much bigger changes before we were ever here. How about we let nature take its course and we worry about changing ourselves instead of the planet?
Nature's course may involve killing-off all living things...
Sure, the "planet" will always be okay, but it's just a big rock, isn't it? It's ourselves and all other living things that we are trying to look-out for, especially since we are at least partly to blame.
The bird won't get shocked, since there is no circuit being made.
No, no, no.
When you increase the voltage, the distance the electricity can jump (through the air) increases as well. Right now, the voltage is low enough that a bird's body won't bridge the gap between lines enough to cause a circuit.
However, if you increase the voltage significantly... Then the short distance between a bird's out-stretched wing and the nearest power line could be more than enough to make a circuit.
Certain innovations, including tabs and mouse gestures, were first developed for Opera. Subsequently, they were found to be very useful features, and thus were adopted by other browsers (Firefox included).
Opera didn't invent tabs, and frankly, the tab support in Opera was insane. Mozilla was the first to have sane tabs, going from one side to the other (right to left first, now left to right), rather than back in your history, which makes no sense considering human usage patterns of a web browser.
Mouse gestures, AFAIK, aren't part of Firefox yet, just an extension.
Maybe Mozilla/Firefox haven't do much "NEW", but what they have done is taken simple concepts, and made them stop sucking... First decent tabs. First decent download manager. First blocking images from 3rd party servers (caused quite an uproar). First with a good bookmark manager. etc. etc. etc.
That hurt Opera a bit, I think. You have to pay for Opera while the others were free. Then you could choose ads instead, but most people don't like those. So Opera never got a huge following.
Haha... Umm, no. The ads were slightly annoying, and the price was rather high, but that wasn't the problem... not at all. The problem was the terrible interface.
Look at the bookmarks system. Every menu and sub-menu has 4 different items I'd never use which clogged-up the screen space "Open All" "Bookmark this page here" etc. And you couldn't even manage them in any sane way. You open a bookmarks sidebar, which doesn't show you where in the heirarchy you are, so managing bookmarks is like fixing a car while looking through a microscope.
Then there are the tab system, which works in a completely insane way... When you close one, it takes you to the last one you had open, which is pretty much never what anyone would want. If you click on three links, you want to switch to one, then when you close it you want to go to the next one... You had no idea what page you'd be dumped into when you closed the current tab, so you'd spend a second just re-orienting yourself, seeing what tab is highlighted, and what the URL is. Plus, like everything else in Opera, the bookmark tab bar was far too big and clunky.
Then there was the preferences, which looks like preferences chop suey... Hundreds of options are thrown-in, but you really can't guess what section one will be under. You really have to go through ALL sections to find an option you want. Plus, when you get there, the available options probably don't cover what you really want... eg. maybe you can block all images from all sites, and only allow whitelisted sites, but no blacklists. Cookies would probably be just the opposite.
Like the tab bar, all the other bars took up far too much of the screen real estate. You'd have a stop button on one line, the URL box on another, the back/forward buttons on another, tabs on another, the file menu on another, the status bar on another, etc. Pretty soon half your screen is used by bars, even though they're all half-empty, or filled with buttons you'll never want nor use.
Plus things like the download manager which perhaps didn't have any way of automatically deleting the entry for a file after being successfully downloaded, no key tied to delete, and the NEXT item wouldn't get focus after the previous one got deleted, so declutering the download box by de-listing the last 20 items you downloaded could take 3 minutes...
And so on, and so on, and so on. I really wanted to like Opera. It was a tiny, fast, and stable browser back when Netscape and IE were painfully slow (on current hardware), and infuriatingly unstable. Still, even though I tried successive versions over the years, after weeks of use, I couldn't stand any one of them. They've just barely started to de-cruft the interface, and usually they add a bunch more at the same time.
Re:Missing topic: when browsers weren't free
on
A History of Firefox
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· Score: 1
Remember - that was 1997. A 5 meg download was quite annoying back then.
Bah! 56K modems were already comming out in '97, and 33.6 modems weren't bad. I downloaded 600MB Linux ISOs over dial-up (it took 2-3 days of course).
Re:Something about the mozilla suite on linux?
on
A History of Firefox
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· Score: 1
But then there was a speedy fork which became very popular on windows as an alternative to ie, thus mozilla greatly changed their position, almost abandoning their old userbase for their new intiative of evengalistic saving of windows/ie users.
That's just nonsense. Mozilla was evangelizing to Windows users long before the switch to Firefox, and Firefox wasn't only better/faster/popular on Windows, but on every platform.
If you run 100,000 volts through a neighborhood line you'd reduce line losses, but you'd have to send tree trimming crews out alot more often, and they'd have to cut trees much further back.
Not to mention the added cost of sending out maintenance crews to pick-up the thoroughly burnt bodies of any unfortunate bird that lands on a power line...
Then again, if the voltage was high enough, there wouldn't be anything to pick-up. Of course you'd still have the problem of wasting dozens of amps every time you fried a bird...
Nuclear still has a lot of unsolved problems. Nobody knows how to deal with nuclear waste.
Really? Then what's are they doing with the gigantic nuclear waste disposal facility in Nevada?
Furthermore, while nuclear proponents love to give you estimates of how cheap nuclear energy is to produce, the market says otherwise -- every US nuclear plant was built by massive subsidies.
The fact that it hasn't been done, doesn't prove anything. Funny that you're now convinced you understand the market, when even the experts don't.
Companies make their decisions based on many factors, and price is certainly not the only one. To claim that as proof of anything, rather than spending a few minutes to actually look-up real numbers, is pure, unmitigated bullshit.
BTW as other posters noted the "dependency on oil" (sic) has very little to do with nuclear plants.
That's not entirely true. At the very least, home heating oil could be eliminated if electricity was cheaper.
I don't see any way it can achieve any real MPG improvement. It only charges the small accessory 12V battery used for starting the car and running the power accessories
It's called "conservation of energy". The energy in that 12V battery has to come from somewhere. If it comes from solar panels instead of from gasoline, you're using less gasoline. Period.
I actually had the idea years ago to modify standard cars for electricity similarly to this... Lots of gasoline is wasted charging the battery, and in cold climates, de-icing the windows, and heating up the engine and passenger compartment. You'd have to modify the alternator so it would only keep the battery charged up to (eg.) 50%, as well, but it would save a several gallons.
I can't believe you got moderated up for this drivel.
.. remember the alternative sun being created by (or attempted by) the Chinese?
No, I don't remember the Chinese trying to create a star.
But, solar and wind energy (unlike say Hydrogen) are so region specific, that they impose problems for wide-spread acceptability.
Hydrogen isn't an energy source, it's energy storage (a battery). Wind and solar are energy sources, not storage methods. The two are not mutually exclusive, nor inextricably tied to each other. So what was your point?
And there arent any means found to store them successfully.
It is very easy to store electricity. There are many, many options to chose from:
last exploit I remember of winamp Was when that disaster known as Winamp TV came out.
Disaster? NSV streams are the ONLY decent internet TV channels I've come across. Some channels like "Freedom TV" have very good content most of the time. Other channels like the "'50's commercials" channel is good for killing a few minutes too. Other channels vary in quality from program to program, but are often interesting, at least. I wouldn't recomend throwing away your TV because of them, but it's a lot better than the crap streams available elsewhere.
Fortunately, you don't need Winamp... MPlayer does a fairly good job with NSV streams, so you only needed Winamp so you could make a playlist of all available streams, and then send that to your non-Windows system. Now there are programs like streamlister so you don't even need Windows/Winamp for that part.
Porn site operators found out rather quickly you could incorporate pop-up ads when you connect to their streams.
The pop-up was just a symptom, not an exploit by any stretch. The security hole was than Winamp would automatically open it's built-in browser to the URL specified in the stream, and the built-in browser uses Internet Explorer... Yes, a preference change eliminates this.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course not, which was exactly my point.
There's no remotely practical way around it, if they crank up the voltage much. So the whole idea is a non-starter.
Actually, it's down to $15/mo now. Dial-up will be pronounced dead quite soon...
Intel hasn't had problems meeting demand? Really?
I guess I was confused by the fact that Intel has been having lots of problems meeting demand for numerous different chips they manufacture...
So that they can watch more than their 7 local OTA channels in HD. Pretty simple really. No cable company is going to have the balls to broadcast anything unencrypted, unless they are really forced to do so.
DVDs were too darn big too. 9GB DVDs are floating around the net as 700MB videos. Admitedly, the quality is usually bad, but that's mainly thanks to crappy tools that companies like Divx put out.
HD content has been available on the net for years now. Videos are re-encoded with Xvid or WMV3 (aka WM9/VC-1) to 4.5GB sets so they can be recorded on to DVD-Rs.
Are any Linux users playing DVDs on their systems? Are you watching MPEG videos and MP3s? Did you pay the required license fees to do so? Then why do you care that a DIY HDTV PVR will now be (borderline) illegal as well? People want freedom, but they aren't willing to make any sacrifice to get it. So here we are.
If you want to see a change, people need to cancel their monthly subscriptions en masse, and stick to OTA out of spite. Or, just don't pay the additional charge to upgrade the equipment and subscription to HD.
The only thing worse to the entertainment industry than theoretical money lost due to copying, is real money lost, due to lots of people refusing to accept their restrictions...
For one, because they wouldn't have any legal right to do so.
They are suing companies based upon violation of their TRADEMARK, if the company in question happens to be using the BitTorrent trademark in conjection with any type of spyware.
They don't have any right to sue companies that aren't using the BitTorrent trademark, even if they are distributing spyware, porn, music, movies, etc.
In your world, how would BitTorrent have any ability to sue people for copyright infringment of content they have absolutely no rights to?
Not losing men would be a good thing. However, losing 40 multi-million dollar aircraft would probably even more demoralizing than losing one or two planes, and one pilot.
Anti-gravity.
Obviously a vacuum would give more lift, but the stresses it exerts on the frame are incredible, requiring a much more massive structure, increasing the weight above any benefit it would provide, so it's not practical.
Hydrogen lifts better than helium, and doesn't have the problem a vacuum poses, but it's flamable, and difficult to contain, and so also impractical.
First, by frequency hoping and other spread-spectrum radio methods.
Second, with bombs. With lots of bombs. With lots of large bombs. With lots of large and fast bombs.
Get the picture? Jamming in a war-zone gives you a very short life expectancy.
Nature's course may involve killing-off all living things...
Sure, the "planet" will always be okay, but it's just a big rock, isn't it? It's ourselves and all other living things that we are trying to look-out for, especially since we are at least partly to blame.
No, no, no.
When you increase the voltage, the distance the electricity can jump (through the air) increases as well. Right now, the voltage is low enough that a bird's body won't bridge the gap between lines enough to cause a circuit.
However, if you increase the voltage significantly... Then the short distance between a bird's out-stretched wing and the nearest power line could be more than enough to make a circuit.
Yes, either:
A) Non-stop sex
or
B) Being homosexual
will solve this problem completely...
Opera didn't invent tabs, and frankly, the tab support in Opera was insane. Mozilla was the first to have sane tabs, going from one side to the other (right to left first, now left to right), rather than back in your history, which makes no sense considering human usage patterns of a web browser.
Mouse gestures, AFAIK, aren't part of Firefox yet, just an extension.
Maybe Mozilla/Firefox haven't do much "NEW", but what they have done is taken simple concepts, and made them stop sucking... First decent tabs. First decent download manager. First blocking images from 3rd party servers (caused quite an uproar). First with a good bookmark manager. etc. etc. etc.
Haha... Umm, no. The ads were slightly annoying, and the price was rather high, but that wasn't the problem... not at all. The problem was the terrible interface.
Look at the bookmarks system. Every menu and sub-menu has 4 different items I'd never use which clogged-up the screen space "Open All" "Bookmark this page here" etc. And you couldn't even manage them in any sane way. You open a bookmarks sidebar, which doesn't show you where in the heirarchy you are, so managing bookmarks is like fixing a car while looking through a microscope.
Then there are the tab system, which works in a completely insane way... When you close one, it takes you to the last one you had open, which is pretty much never what anyone would want. If you click on three links, you want to switch to one, then when you close it you want to go to the next one... You had no idea what page you'd be dumped into when you closed the current tab, so you'd spend a second just re-orienting yourself, seeing what tab is highlighted, and what the URL is. Plus, like everything else in Opera, the bookmark tab bar was far too big and clunky.
Then there was the preferences, which looks like preferences chop suey... Hundreds of options are thrown-in, but you really can't guess what section one will be under. You really have to go through ALL sections to find an option you want. Plus, when you get there, the available options probably don't cover what you really want... eg. maybe you can block all images from all sites, and only allow whitelisted sites, but no blacklists. Cookies would probably be just the opposite.
Like the tab bar, all the other bars took up far too much of the screen real estate. You'd have a stop button on one line, the URL box on another, the back/forward buttons on another, tabs on another, the file menu on another, the status bar on another, etc. Pretty soon half your screen is used by bars, even though they're all half-empty, or filled with buttons you'll never want nor use.
Plus things like the download manager which perhaps didn't have any way of automatically deleting the entry for a file after being successfully downloaded, no key tied to delete, and the NEXT item wouldn't get focus after the previous one got deleted, so declutering the download box by de-listing the last 20 items you downloaded could take 3 minutes...
And so on, and so on, and so on. I really wanted to like Opera. It was a tiny, fast, and stable browser back when Netscape and IE were painfully slow (on current hardware), and infuriatingly unstable. Still, even though I tried successive versions over the years, after weeks of use, I couldn't stand any one of them. They've just barely started to de-cruft the interface, and usually they add a bunch more at the same time.
Bah! 56K modems were already comming out in '97, and 33.6 modems weren't bad. I downloaded 600MB Linux ISOs over dial-up (it took 2-3 days of course).
That's just nonsense. Mozilla was evangelizing to Windows users long before the switch to Firefox, and Firefox wasn't only better/faster/popular on Windows, but on every platform.
What you're really thinking of, I don't know.
Not to mention the added cost of sending out maintenance crews to pick-up the thoroughly burnt bodies of any unfortunate bird that lands on a power line...
Then again, if the voltage was high enough, there wouldn't be anything to pick-up. Of course you'd still have the problem of wasting dozens of amps every time you fried a bird...
Really? Then what's are they doing with the gigantic nuclear waste disposal facility in Nevada?
The fact that it hasn't been done, doesn't prove anything. Funny that you're now convinced you understand the market, when even the experts don't.
Companies make their decisions based on many factors, and price is certainly not the only one. To claim that as proof of anything, rather than spending a few minutes to actually look-up real numbers, is pure, unmitigated bullshit.
That's not entirely true. At the very least, home heating oil could be eliminated if electricity was cheaper.
No, they already have working models, just on a much smaller scale.
Errrm... What? Apples aren't as effective as Oranges?
By what metric are you TRYING to compare the two?
I believe he was referring to the second link, which is a large PV cell site in Nevada (ie. "middle of desert").
No, actually they're not. If you read-up on the Sterling system, you'll find that it's going to provide cheaper electricity than other sources.
It's called "conservation of energy". The energy in that 12V battery has to come from somewhere. If it comes from solar panels instead of from gasoline, you're using less gasoline. Period.
I actually had the idea years ago to modify standard cars for electricity similarly to this... Lots of gasoline is wasted charging the battery, and in cold climates, de-icing the windows, and heating up the engine and passenger compartment. You'd have to modify the alternator so it would only keep the battery charged up to (eg.) 50%, as well, but it would save a several gallons.
No, I don't remember the Chinese trying to create a star.
Hydrogen isn't an energy source, it's energy storage (a battery). Wind and solar are energy sources, not storage methods. The two are not mutually exclusive, nor inextricably tied to each other. So what was your point?
It is very easy to store electricity. There are many, many options to chose from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_storage#Stora
Disaster? NSV streams are the ONLY decent internet TV channels I've come across. Some channels like "Freedom TV" have very good content most of the time. Other channels like the "'50's commercials" channel is good for killing a few minutes too. Other channels vary in quality from program to program, but are often interesting, at least. I wouldn't recomend throwing away your TV because of them, but it's a lot better than the crap streams available elsewhere.
Fortunately, you don't need Winamp... MPlayer does a fairly good job with NSV streams, so you only needed Winamp so you could make a playlist of all available streams, and then send that to your non-Windows system. Now there are programs like streamlister so you don't even need Windows/Winamp for that part.
The pop-up was just a symptom, not an exploit by any stretch. The security hole was than Winamp would automatically open it's built-in browser to the URL specified in the stream, and the built-in browser uses Internet Explorer... Yes, a preference change eliminates this.
I didn't say it was all-out boring, genius, I said it was: "...more boring than FRICKIN' ROCKETS."