Don't forget leeches. They're excellent at draining extra blood out of reattached limbs and digits. These stories make the round every couple of years. Next thing you know doctors will start using healing crystals and homeopathy.
Everyone likes to savege Rhapsody and other subscription services in comparison to ITMS. There's a seems to be some sort of resistance to renting the music and having to pay a monthly subscription fee.
However, people seems to have no problem with Netflix, satellite radio and cable tv which all use a very similar model. "Netflix is like Napster for movies, but they mail you the DVD and you can only have 3 at a time". With cable and satellite services you're stuck even more, your only choices are a finite number of preset channels.
What's so bad about renting your music when you rent most of your other stuff?
Along these lines, I bet the horribly named del.icio.us is next. It's a a kind of like Flikr for bookmarks, which could actually be a lot more useful than something for photos.
Pretty much everything in the parent post is just wrong.
All mediums are used for porn almost as soon as they are made
BetaMax, VHS, Cable and the Internet hardly count as "All mediums[sic]". Most media (writing, the printing press, radio, television, 8-track, etc...) didn't see a lot of porn use immediately. I would say the amount of radio porn has always been pretty small.
none has every stopped being used. Consumer BetaMax, which did have porn, has pretty much stopped being used.
No laws are going to stop it. A federal law against porn on VHS/DVD would shut down almost all US sales. A federal law holding ISPs responsible for porn would go a long ways to stopping internet porn. Never doubt the willingness of a big corporation to bow to a federally backed witch hunt.
Everyone needs either a photon microlight or if he's a bit geekier a arc aaa led flashlight. If you've never seen one, the photon is about the size of a stack of two quarters. The ARC is just slightly bigger than the aaa battery it runs on. The light output is far greater than the mag solitaire. I use one as a key chain fob.
You can keep one in your pocket all the time, it's amazing how often having a little light comes in useful.
Available all sort of places, but thinkgeek is one.
It depends on what you're using them for. If it's for a high drain device like a digital camera, NiMH are the way to go. However, for something that hits the battery slower and for longer like a remote control, or wireless keyboard, NiMH won't really last much longer than a rechargable alkaline would. I used the Renewal rechargable alkaline in my palm iii with good results until I got a clie.
In a recent test the QuesTec system judged that 32.1 percent of pitches were within the "strike zone", while the umpire called 31.4 percent as strikes.
According the the artice in wired, those two numbers are the percent strikes called by the actual human umpires in parks with and without the QuesTec system. The point was that the umpires are not looking over their shoulders: making adjustments to what they do based on the presence of the system. From the article:
While umps may feel unnerved with this latest gadget tracking their calls, their performance doesn't show it, he said.
The percentage of pitches called strikes in a QuesTec park is 32.1; in a non-QuesTec park, the percentage is 31.4, Alderson said.
Even if Dekaner interpreted the article correctly, the number are not really that meaningful. Just because the percentage of strikes called was close doesn't mean that it was mostly the same pitches being called as strikes.
The problem is that copyright is essentially unenforcible. Unless the people enforce copyright on themselves, you can't do it for them. Why do people enforce copyright? Because it's seen to be *fair*. You make something, you get to own it for a while, after that it goes into the public domain.
What the hell are you talking about? As far as I can tell you're saying that copyright won't be enforced unless people enforce it. Well, that's just a given. Do you mean "individual people"? Well, certainly on a small scale, but I assure you if Barnes and Noble makes illegal copies of Living History and selling them for $5, those laws will get enforced.
That's what's missing here. There is no "goes into the public domain." People are individually and unilaterally repealing copyright law, because it's not a fair law anymore. The people who make something never have to share it. That's not fair, because so much of what the creators do is stolen from the public domain (like all of Disney's plots), and just about every jazz riff.
Two points here.
Are you saying that people are ripping CDs in protest of the extension of copyright periods which even originally wouldn't expire until near the end of this century? "It's okay that I'm copying this Eminem song because now it's not going into the public domain until 2103 instead of 2083!" ?
You're completely missing the his point. He was not trying to compare music piracy to auto theft. He was responding to someone asking about borrowing a CD from a library and copying it. His point is just because a crime is convenient and easy to commit doesn't mean it's legal.
Here's my technique for curing hiccups. It has never failed me and actually makes some sense.
Take a deep breath: This is not one of those long drawn out affairs. Sit or stand up straight. Lean forward just a little. Open your mouth. Open your throat. Inhale all the way. It should take less than a second to fill your lungs.
Pause: about half a second should do it.
Top off:Now draw in as much more air as you can. If you do it right you should feel some stretching in your abdomen.
Pause
Exhale normally.
Take a normal breath. (You don't want to hyperventilate.
Repeat 2 more times. If your hiccups persist repeat sets of two until they're gone.
Notes:
If you're having trouble drawing a proper deep breath try sticking an empty toilet paper roll in your mouth and breathing through that.
At no time should you actually close your mouth nose or throat. Keep your airways open.
Independent Scientific Review Boards. Independent of whom? The actual article doesn't use the word at all. These are government committees, with government appointed members. What's independent about that?
Politicizing ScienceThis is not about politicizing science, it's about politicizing science policy. Granted, policy, does affect science, but if you don't have politics in policy, where do you have it?
The article quotes people as complaining that it wasn't this bad since the Reagan administration. That was a whole 3 presidents ago. This is business as usual.
Koolance makes a couple of different water cooled cases. They come with a resevoir two pumps and a radiator on top of the case with 3 fans cooling it. The speed of the fans can be proportional to the temperature of the CPU making it relatively quiet. You can get extra blocks for your hard drives, motherboard and graphics cards.
I built my latest system with one and it's been running like a champ. Dumps a lot of heat into the room though. I recommend them if you're interested in having a quieter system. Especially if you can build your own system, but don't feel up to doing your own water system.
I'm just being a pain, but that technically wasn't a pun.
From dictionary.com a pun is "play on words, sometimes on different senses of the same word and sometimes on the similar sense or sound of different words."
The "pun" here is presumably on the word "heard". However, it's two identical uses of the word. Maybe a bad joke, but not a pun.
There is a very common misperception that there's some law or amendment or something that prevents companies from trying to censor people. There's not. The First Amendment restricts what the government is able to do. Not private people or corporations.
Let's get this straight once and for all. The Constitution for the most part restricts what the government is able to do. Let's take a look at the First Amendment.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the
right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Please note that it is Congress being restricted here. There's no mention of private parties. It is quite common for contracts between private entities to place restrictions on speech. NDA's for employees and timed NDA's for review hardware. Settlements of big lawsuits almost always have a restriction in them about speaking about the case.
For example, if you work for a company and make a very public statement criticizing that company. They have every right to fire you. Your "First Amendment" rights aren't being violated. The government isn't doing anything. This is just is just a general example and there are some protected behaviors like whistle-blowing and such.
I haven't read the article, but just from the quote, he has a point.
Streaming video is encoded to one or more bitrates. Usually just one. Most of the time the bitrate chosen is the one with the greatest potential audience: one that will fit through a 28.8 modem.
You can encode your stream with multiple bit rates or encode multiple versions of the clip, but that's more work and a lot of people don't bother.
Dvorak's point is: it doesn't matter how good your connection is 20 Kbs video looks crappy. And that's what's available a lot of the time.
This is not a technology that will ever see the outside of more than a handful of houses.
- Many people (I'm not one) care about the actual color of their houses. They can spend hour poring over books of paint chips. Having a house constantly change between a couple probably ugly colors will be completely unacceptable. What color do you paint the trim?
- While having a house that's not dark in the summer will help quite a bit with cooling, the actual heat absorbed by a dark color in the winter would be minimal.
I don't have any references, but I recall reading about getting city buildings to paint their roofs white instead of black to reduce the urban heat island effect. It was stated that it wouldn't make much difference in the winter for keeping things warm.
Also, consider how hot black asphalt gets on a sunny summer day. Now consider how hot it gets on a sunny winter day when the temperature is 0.
It's conceivable that this paint could find applications, but I don't it's going to be anything like energy efficient houses.
A large percentage of the students at MIT already have access to archives of virtually all materials from a course. They're "known" as bibles and they're especially common at the many fraternities at MIT.
Professors are aware of this and the content of the tests change quite often. And believe me even knowing what will be covered on the test is of limited help.
This would also help put students without access to bibles on a more even footing.
Professors will hardly notice having to do this. Pity the the poor TA.
MIT students get screwed so hard and so frequently that a class with an out of date web site hardly appears on the radar.
95% of MIT undergraduates live in dormitories or official living groups. Anyone who would be classified as "underpriveleged" lives in a dorm on campus. There are numerous public computer facilites available on campus. This is the result of Project Athena which is quite popular with the student body. Anyone who wants access to the material can get easy access to it. Though, it can be hard to find a free machine near the end of the term.
Try and get a few facts before posting stuff like this.
Paid Subscription has hardly been "skipped over". It's been tried and it seems to works in some places and not others.
Slate tried subscription when they launched. In fact there was a great deal of coverage specifically because they were trying a subscription model. Slate is no longer charging a subscription fee.
thestreet.com also had a paid subscrption model that failed.
The Wall Street Journal charges a yearly fee for online access to what is basically the content of the print paper. They've been doing this for years, and it seems to be successful for them (though I wouldn't really know).
There are probably too many other examples to list, but it's a model that's been tried and largely been failure.
Slashdot Mirror
You have the sequence wrong. It's
1
11
21
1211
111221
312211
13112221
1113213211
Don't forget leeches. They're excellent at draining extra blood out of reattached limbs and digits. These stories make the round every couple of years. Next thing you know doctors will start using healing crystals and homeopathy.
However, people seems to have no problem with Netflix, satellite radio and cable tv which all use a very similar model. "Netflix is like Napster for movies, but they mail you the DVD and you can only have 3 at a time". With cable and satellite services you're stuck even more, your only choices are a finite number of preset channels. What's so bad about renting your music when you rent most of your other stuff?
Along these lines, I bet the horribly named del.icio.us is next. It's a a kind of like Flikr for bookmarks, which could actually be a lot more useful than something for photos.
All mediums are used for porn almost as soon as they are made BetaMax, VHS, Cable and the Internet hardly count as "All mediums[sic]". Most media (writing, the printing press, radio, television, 8-track, etc...) didn't see a lot of porn use immediately. I would say the amount of radio porn has always been pretty small.
none has every stopped being used. Consumer BetaMax, which did have porn, has pretty much stopped being used.
No laws are going to stop it. A federal law against porn on VHS/DVD would shut down almost all US sales. A federal law holding ISPs responsible for porn would go a long ways to stopping internet porn. Never doubt the willingness of a big corporation to bow to a federally backed witch hunt.
No problem you just need to back up a little.
You can keep one in your pocket all the time, it's amazing how often having a little light comes in useful.
Available all sort of places, but thinkgeek is one.
This is not necessarily a sign of too many games. If no MMO games ever closed, that would be a sure sign that there weren't enough of them.
The Dishnetwork PVR systems do direct digital recording of the stream. The first one, DishPlayer 7100, came out 4 years ago.
I always wonder why these systems don't get more attention, Dishnetwork has had these out almost as long as Tivo and has shipped many more units.
It depends on what you're using them for. If it's for a high drain device like a digital camera, NiMH are the way to go. However, for something that hits the battery slower and for longer like a remote control, or wireless keyboard, NiMH won't really last much longer than a rechargable alkaline would. I used the Renewal rechargable alkaline in my palm iii with good results until I got a clie.
According the the artice in wired, those two numbers are the percent strikes called by the actual human umpires in parks with and without the QuesTec system. The point was that the umpires are not looking over their shoulders: making adjustments to what they do based on the presence of the system. From the article:
While umps may feel unnerved with this latest gadget tracking their calls, their performance doesn't show it, he said. The percentage of pitches called strikes in a QuesTec park is 32.1; in a non-QuesTec park, the percentage is 31.4, Alderson said.
Even if Dekaner interpreted the article correctly, the number are not really that meaningful. Just because the percentage of strikes called was close doesn't mean that it was mostly the same pitches being called as strikes.
According to Salon, rampant piracy (not the on-line kind) has hit Mexico's music industry very hard.
What the hell are you talking about? As far as I can tell you're saying that copyright won't be enforced unless people enforce it. Well, that's just a given. Do you mean "individual people"? Well, certainly on a small scale, but I assure you if Barnes and Noble makes illegal copies of Living History and selling them for $5, those laws will get enforced.
That's what's missing here. There is no "goes into the public domain." People are individually and unilaterally repealing copyright law, because it's not a fair law anymore. The people who make something never have to share it. That's not fair, because so much of what the creators do is stolen from the public domain (like all of Disney's plots), and just about every jazz riff.
Two points here.
You're completely missing the his point. He was not trying to compare music piracy to auto theft. He was responding to someone asking about borrowing a CD from a library and copying it. His point is just because a crime is convenient and easy to commit doesn't mean it's legal.
- Take a deep breath: This is not one of those long drawn out affairs. Sit or stand up straight. Lean forward just a little. Open your mouth. Open your throat. Inhale all the way. It should take less than a second to fill your lungs.
- Pause: about half a second should do it.
- Top off:Now draw in as much more air as you can. If you do it right you should feel some stretching in your abdomen.
- Pause
- Exhale normally.
- Take a normal breath. (You don't want to hyperventilate.
- Repeat 2 more times. If your hiccups persist repeat sets of two until they're gone.
Notes:If you're having trouble drawing a proper deep breath try sticking an empty toilet paper roll in your mouth and breathing through that.
At no time should you actually close your mouth nose or throat. Keep your airways open.
The article quotes people as complaining that it wasn't this bad since the Reagan administration. That was a whole 3 presidents ago. This is business as usual.
I built my latest system with one and it's been running like a champ. Dumps a lot of heat into the room though. I recommend them if you're interested in having a quieter system. Especially if you can build your own system, but don't feel up to doing your own water system.
From dictionary.com a pun is "play on words, sometimes on different senses of the same word and sometimes on the similar sense or sound of different words."
The "pun" here is presumably on the word "heard". However, it's two identical uses of the word. Maybe a bad joke, but not a pun.
There is a very common misperception that there's some law or amendment or something that prevents companies from trying to censor people. There's not. The First Amendment restricts what the government is able to do. Not private people or corporations.
Let's get this straight once and for all. The Constitution for the most part restricts what the government is able to do. Let's take a look at the First Amendment.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Please note that it is Congress being restricted here. There's no mention of private parties. It is quite common for contracts between private entities to place restrictions on speech. NDA's for employees and timed NDA's for review hardware. Settlements of big lawsuits almost always have a restriction in them about speaking about the case.
For example, if you work for a company and make a very public statement criticizing that company. They have every right to fire you. Your "First Amendment" rights aren't being violated. The government isn't doing anything. This is just is just a general example and there are some protected behaviors like whistle-blowing and such.
XFS and JFS are both sold as part of a commercial (as opposed to "open" or "free") operating system. Reiserfs is not.
I haven't read the article, but just from the quote, he has a point.
Streaming video is encoded to one or more bitrates. Usually just one. Most of the time the bitrate chosen is the one with the greatest potential audience: one that will fit through a 28.8 modem.
You can encode your stream with multiple bit rates or encode multiple versions of the clip, but that's more work and a lot of people don't bother.
Dvorak's point is: it doesn't matter how good your connection is 20 Kbs video looks crappy. And that's what's available a lot of the time.
This is not a technology that will ever see the outside of more than a handful of houses.
- Many people (I'm not one) care about the actual color of their houses. They can spend hour poring over books of paint chips. Having a house constantly change between a couple probably ugly colors will be completely unacceptable. What color do you paint the trim?
- While having a house that's not dark in the summer will help quite a bit with cooling, the actual heat absorbed by a dark color in the winter would be minimal.
I don't have any references, but I recall reading about getting city buildings to paint their roofs white instead of black to reduce the urban heat island effect. It was stated that it wouldn't make much difference in the winter for keeping things warm.
Also, consider how hot black asphalt gets on a sunny summer day. Now consider how hot it gets on a sunny winter day when the temperature is 0.
It's conceivable that this paint could find applications, but I don't it's going to be anything like energy efficient houses.
Professors are aware of this and the content of the tests change quite often. And believe me even knowing what will be covered on the test is of limited help.
This would also help put students without access to bibles on a more even footing.
Try and get a few facts before posting stuff like this.
Paid Subscription has hardly been "skipped over". It's been tried and it seems to works in some places and not others.
Slate tried subscription when they launched. In fact there was a great deal of coverage specifically because they were trying a subscription model. Slate is no longer charging a subscription fee.
thestreet.com also had a paid subscrption model that failed.
The Wall Street Journal charges a yearly fee for online access to what is basically the content of the print paper. They've been doing this for years, and it seems to be successful for them (though I wouldn't really know).
There are probably too many other examples to list, but it's a model that's been tried and largely been failure.
What's even worse, when I hear the name, I hear "ack censure". Do they really want their company associated with official disapproval?