I have twelve computers in my apartment and use all of them for something-or-other.
Your apartment looks like the one in "Pi", doesn't it? Are any of these computers currently calculating a 216-digit number that you'll use to predict the stock market?
"i hear the strangest most non-commercial shit ever on college radio."
This is probably why a lot of listeners stay away. Most people don't WANT to hear anything new, or risk their cozy bland existence by hearing anything which might challenge their concept of what constitutes "music". (end of bitter gripe). I do suspect that its very diversity is one of the factors hurting "college" or community radio - it's almost impossible to predict what will be playing when you tune in. Will it be death metal, reggae, christian rock, aboriginal talk radio or something completely unexpected? Personally, I like that. It's neat. I don't care for the Christian rock, but hey, turn off the radio for an hour, and later something else will be on:-)
"There is even a college station in L.A. that plays wall to wall industrial."
Cool:-D I have to put on a CD player to get my morning dose of Front Line Assembly...
Return it. When you've got a dead cartridge in your hand and you're trying to print out that last minute book report, don't despair. Head over to Best Buy and pick up a new cartridge. Then, spray a bottle of typewriter ink liberally all over the old cartridge and (optionally) your hands and arms. Head back to the store and accuse them of selling you a defective cartridge, which exploded (and thus drained all of its ink) when you installed it. Voila! You will have a new cartridge for free.
There's a word for this: FRAUD. It's the moral equivalent of putting a cockroach in your yogurt and then trying to sue the yogurt company. Shame on you for suggesting a _criminal activity_ to the innocent, pure-as-lambs Slashdot community!
Digital will always remain an approximation, with some error potential.
Hey, I'm cool with people who love their vinyl and spurn CD's. That's their right, and to boot they get to have a groovy music collection in huge cardboard sleeves with lots of room for decent jacket art.
But vinyl is also an "approximation", analog or no. The only limits on its ability to faithfully replay recorded sounds are the precision with which it was manufactured, and the sonic limits of the recording and playback apparatus. But I posit to you that digital technology can and ultimately will pass vinyl in terms of how closely it replicates the original sound. I suspect this has already happened, but if not, think of this. At some point, the sampling rate of digital recordings will surpass the ability to economically cut a modulated groove in a plastic disc. At that point, the digital recording will be unquestionably superior.
In the meantime, this CD-defending twit is going for a jog, and taking his music with him;-)
Bud: Intellectual Property is a sacred trust, it's what our free society is founded on. Do you think they give a damn about their Intellectual Property in Russia? I said, do you think they give a damn about their Intellectual Property in Russia? Otto: They don't have Intellectual Property in Russia, it's all free. Bud: All free? My ass! What are you, some kind of commie? Otto: No, I ain't no commie. Bud: Good. I don't want no commies in my car. No Christians either!
I stand corrected:-) Since I've never run a CD-ROM in the vertical position, I never noticed those little tabs. Clearly, my powers of observation need a little rejuvenation.
Now, a bunch of you are probably going to ask me why or call me a fag or say that I don't understand the meaning of case modding.
Hey fag! You don't understand the meaning of case modding. Go back to your fag computer shop and ask them to explain it to you, if they can find the time in between painting their nails and burning discs of Barbra Streisand mp3's.
Seriously, the orange doggie is a cool looking case, but are those SIDEWAYS 5.25" bays?! How the hell am I supposed to mount a CD-ROM drive or burner in those? The discs will fall out of the trays! I am all for cool/cute cases but they also need to be practical:-P
Your plans to use ground and airborne autonomous robots in combat are indeed impressive. I have to warn you though, that my recent analyses strongly indicate that your entire attack force can be beaten by the first opponent who fields a well-designed clone army, or for that matter a bunch of poorly-armed semi-sentient amphibians and a small boy. Consider yourselves warned.
I don't think ANYONE is under the illusion that consumers _want_ DRM. It's being sold to legislators as a way to protect "content providers" (ie. their compaign contributors) from their own pesky customers who don't behave the way they should. More likely it would be "Nobody is willing to pay for mp3's, because they're ALL stealing them! This is why we need the Hollings Bill!"
What an utterly perfect, though vulgar, analogy. However, think of it this way: You may be willing to pay Cindy $100,000 to touch her tits, but she ain't selling. Now, you find out that, say, Gretchen Mol (here playing the part of "another country's space agency") WILL let you touch her tits for $100,000, but there's a good chance you won't enjoy it _nearly_ as much. Still interested? Hmm...
(OT) I just saw Cindy in a commercial today. What a classy woman, she puts all these new waifs to shame:-)
"In other news, the Nam-Shub of Enki has been released onto the internet and is being rapidly disseminated through P2P file sharing. An increasing number of computer users are suffering from a strange neurological affliction the authorities have designated "Snow Crash". The Neurolinguistic Hackers' Association sent out a press release saying 'We told you this was going to happen sooner or later'."
Chat scares the shit out of me. Because of it, I've had to explain what a 'pedophile' is.
Perhaps you should have explained that anyway, if in fact you really do have a daughter and aren't just shamelessly trolling (and if you have reached parental age without learning to spell "loser" correctly, I hope you aren't helping kiddo with her homework!).
I swear I hear the word "pedophile" every 2 minutes on the TV news these days. Yes, it's an ugly thing to have to explain to a kid, but you have to, just like you have to explain when little Timmy comes home and asks "Why did Billy-Bob call Ira a 'kike' at school today?".
Even if people all use "approved" monitors and computers, they will be using them to view "free content" (free as in free speech, not free beer).
One of the nasty features of this sort of hardware "rights protection" is likely to be the tagging of any content WITHOUT DRM as "pirated". This is because the media companies know that no encryption scheme is crack-proof, and if they can't prevent cracking, they have to instead prevent anyone playing the cracked content. This has the added benefit of crushing smaller indy content producers who don't have the $$ or desire to use DRM. Surprise! Your "free content", distributed without DRM technology, won't play. Too bad, go rent "Men in Black III" instead.
You probably don't know what kind of perverts there are in the UK government. In fact, you don't want to know.
If they're typical graduates of the "public schools", I think the record speaks for itself - they'll be getting a sexual thrill out of knowing your girlfriend just bought a rubber raincoat and wellys...
"What I want is a foolproof system that next time I walk into a bookstore will point out "You will like this book. You will hate this book, but read it anyway cause everyone else loves it. Don't waste you time on this one. Look for this one in the library, you won't like it enough to pay for it"... However there is no such system."
Well, it isn't foolproof, but there is a system. It's called "your brain". The more you read, the more you learn to discern the crap from the must-reads. Like any neural net, your brain must be trained, however, so stop reading Slashdot RIGHT NOW and pick up another book;-)
To extend the analogy, your brain, and the brains of others, form a kind of distributed network which can process a lot more data than you could ever alone. So if you want to know if a book is worth reading, look for reviews. Not just the ones in the paper, but the ones on amazon.com, peoples' web pages, whatever you can find. You'll be surprised how effective this "system" can be.
Hmmm. What's MusicNet cost? 10 dollars a month? That means that if you download, uh, over 40000 songs in a month, you're costing them money.
You're forgetting about the "over-download fee" which will be charged against the artist's $0.0025 if their song gets downloaded too much. In fact, if you download even more, the artists have to start paying the record company.
OK, so I made this up, but it'd be perfectly in line with the other terms of their contracts.
Human scientific knowledge has grown to such staggering amount since the Renaissance (when, if one is willing to be generous, one person might hope to know the entire scientific body of knowledge in their society), that nobody can verify everything themselves. That's why we have peer review. The peer review publishing process ensures that any study has to be scrutinized by an editorial board of other scientists who ARE experts in the field of study. The well-conducted science with verifiable results gets published, the rest gets discarded or redone properly.
Sure, I suppose the reviewers for a journal could conspire to knowlingly let a fraudulent paper through, or suppress a valid one with interesting results that go against the accepted theories. In the first case, the bad science would inevitably be noticed by the journal's readers (other professional scientists, after all), and the editors would be disgraced. In the second case, some other journal's editors would accept and publish the paper, "scooping" journal #1 and claiming the glory of publishing the groundbreaking new research.
Like all self-policing systems, it has flaws, but by and large it works fantastically well, uncovering charlatans and incompetents, and allowing the dissemination of well-validated new information to the scientific world. It's not physically possible to verify everything in life yourself, which is why you sometimes have to trust others to properly verify things for you. But that trust cannot be blind, nor based on "faith". This holds as true for your doctor or auto mechanic as for the editors of a journal.
I work in a plant growth research lab, and we bought one of these to get real time images of protoplasts (plant cells in culture). It was cheap, and produces surprisingly good-quality images. Of course, we also got a $100,000 Bausch & Lomb scope to do more "serious" work...
OK, yeah we all hate yuppies, and LUsers as well, but geez, who cares what these women (and yes, you seem to think their gender is relevant here) want to do with their _own property_? If they want to run 8 feet of video cable to their monitor, and you get paid to do it, where's the bad? These are mass-manufactured objects, it's not like a work of art is being shut away in that closet... And personally, if I had a roll top desk, I'd want it to close too. They're cool. Granted, the design pre-dates PC's, but if this lady wanted the two to work together, good for her. Don't be so judgmental, a contemptuous geek is not a pretty thing:-(
Cut the price in half, with the artists' cut per CD doubling. Then the business might approach "reasonable" and "fair". However, #1 "Music is life, it's immeasurable" is also true. All the more reason for it to be accessible.
I have more CDs now than I need, and I know a lot of people have more than me.
To be pedantic, nobody "needs" ANY CD's - we could all survive and reproduce in a Pol Pot society where intellectual and creative thought were outlawed and people laboured from dawn to dusk. However, my CD collecton continually grows because I grow as a person. This includes picking up new releases, but also discovering older artists and bands who may have long since disbanded. Did I know 2 years ago how good the Velvet Underground were? Nope. Conversely, I eagerly await an opportunity to buy Microbunny's new album, "hot off the press". If I stop buying CD's, I basically become like my uncle, who has decided that nothing worthwhile has been recorded since 1970. Not so good.
I'm sure the Bush administration secretly loves any genre of entertainment which they think desensitizes people to killing, and shortens their attention span.
The first, because they need a future generation of soldiers who don't care about the people who die when fire Hellfire missiles from a remotely piloted drone - "if it happens on the little screen it's just a game!". Ronald Reagan, I believe, stated that video games were good training for future fighter pilots:-)
The second, because they've seen how effective some carefuly controlled TV is at reducing the vast majority of people to semi-sentient sheep, unable to intelligently analyze their own government's actions.
Slashdot Mirror
Like I want THAT popping up, even momentarily, when I'm at work! I want to *keep* my job after all... Do Salon ads now need a NSFW warning?
I have twelve computers in my apartment and use all of them for something-or-other.
Your apartment looks like the one in "Pi", doesn't it? Are any of these computers currently calculating a 216-digit number that you'll use to predict the stock market?
:-)
"i hear the strangest most non-commercial shit ever on college radio."
:-)
:-D I have to put on a CD player to get my morning dose of Front Line Assembly...
This is probably why a lot of listeners stay away. Most people don't WANT to hear anything new, or risk their cozy bland existence by hearing anything which might challenge their concept of what constitutes "music". (end of bitter gripe). I do suspect that its very diversity is one of the factors hurting "college" or community radio - it's almost impossible to predict what will be playing when you tune in. Will it be death metal, reggae, christian rock, aboriginal talk radio or something completely unexpected? Personally, I like that. It's neat. I don't care for the Christian rock, but hey, turn off the radio for an hour, and later something else will be on
"There is even a college station in L.A. that plays wall to wall industrial."
Cool
Return it. When you've got a dead cartridge in your hand and you're trying to print out that last minute book report, don't despair. Head over to Best Buy and pick up a new cartridge. Then, spray a bottle of typewriter ink liberally all over the old cartridge and (optionally) your hands and arms. Head back to the store and accuse them of selling you a defective cartridge, which exploded (and thus drained all of its ink) when you installed it. Voila! You will have a new cartridge for free.
There's a word for this: FRAUD. It's the moral equivalent of putting a cockroach in your yogurt and then trying to sue the yogurt company. Shame on you for suggesting a _criminal activity_ to the innocent, pure-as-lambs Slashdot community!
Digital will always remain an approximation, with some error potential.
;-)
Hey, I'm cool with people who love their vinyl and spurn CD's. That's their right, and to boot they get to have a groovy music collection in huge cardboard sleeves with lots of room for decent jacket art.
But vinyl is also an "approximation", analog or no. The only limits on its ability to faithfully replay recorded sounds are the precision with which it was manufactured, and the sonic limits of the recording and playback apparatus. But I posit to you that digital technology can and ultimately will pass vinyl in terms of how closely it replicates the original sound. I suspect this has already happened, but if not, think of this. At some point, the sampling rate of digital recordings will surpass the ability to economically cut a modulated groove in a plastic disc. At that point, the digital recording will be unquestionably superior.
In the meantime, this CD-defending twit is going for a jog, and taking his music with him
Bud: Intellectual Property is a sacred trust, it's what our free society is founded on. Do you think they give a damn about their Intellectual Property in Russia? I said, do you think they give a damn about their Intellectual Property in Russia?
Otto: They don't have Intellectual Property in Russia, it's all free.
Bud: All free? My ass! What are you, some kind of commie?
Otto: No, I ain't no commie.
Bud: Good. I don't want no commies in my car. No Christians either!
I stand corrected :-) Since I've never run a CD-ROM in the vertical position, I never noticed those little tabs. Clearly, my powers of observation need a little rejuvenation.
Now, a bunch of you are probably going to ask me why or call me a fag or say that I don't understand the meaning of case modding.
:-P
Hey fag! You don't understand the meaning of case modding. Go back to your fag computer shop and ask them to explain it to you, if they can find the time in between painting their nails and burning discs of Barbra Streisand mp3's.
Seriously, the orange doggie is a cool looking case, but are those SIDEWAYS 5.25" bays?! How the hell am I supposed to mount a CD-ROM drive or burner in those? The discs will fall out of the trays! I am all for cool/cute cases but they also need to be practical
Your plans to use ground and airborne autonomous robots in combat are indeed impressive. I have to warn you though, that my recent analyses strongly indicate that your entire attack force can be beaten by the first opponent who fields a well-designed clone army, or for that matter a bunch of poorly-armed semi-sentient amphibians and a small boy. Consider yourselves warned.
I don't think ANYONE is under the illusion that consumers _want_ DRM. It's being sold to legislators as a way to protect "content providers" (ie. their compaign contributors) from their own pesky customers who don't behave the way they should. More likely it would be "Nobody is willing to pay for mp3's, because they're ALL stealing them! This is why we need the Hollings Bill!"
What an utterly perfect, though vulgar, analogy. However, think of it this way: You may be willing to pay Cindy $100,000 to touch her tits, but she ain't selling. Now, you find out that, say, Gretchen Mol (here playing the part of "another country's space agency") WILL let you touch her tits for $100,000, but there's a good chance you won't enjoy it _nearly_ as much. Still interested? Hmm...
:-)
(OT) I just saw Cindy in a commercial today. What a classy woman, she puts all these new waifs to shame
"In other news, the Nam-Shub of Enki has been released onto the internet and is being rapidly disseminated through P2P file sharing. An increasing number of computer users are suffering from a strange neurological affliction the authorities have designated "Snow Crash". The Neurolinguistic Hackers' Association sent out a press release saying 'We told you this was going to happen sooner or later'."
"Mom, Verisign are dicks. Stay a while, have some pie." :-)
Chat scares the shit out of me. Because of it, I've had to explain what a 'pedophile' is.
Perhaps you should have explained that anyway, if in fact you really do have a daughter and aren't just shamelessly trolling (and if you have reached parental age without learning to spell "loser" correctly, I hope you aren't helping kiddo with her homework!).
I swear I hear the word "pedophile" every 2 minutes on the TV news these days. Yes, it's an ugly thing to have to explain to a kid, but you have to, just like you have to explain when little Timmy comes home and asks "Why did Billy-Bob call Ira a 'kike' at school today?".
Even if people all use "approved" monitors and computers, they will be using them to view "free content" (free as in free speech, not free beer).
One of the nasty features of this sort of hardware "rights protection" is likely to be the tagging of any content WITHOUT DRM as "pirated". This is because the media companies know that no encryption scheme is crack-proof, and if they can't prevent cracking, they have to instead prevent anyone playing the cracked content. This has the added benefit of crushing smaller indy content producers who don't have the $$ or desire to use DRM. Surprise! Your "free content", distributed without DRM technology, won't play. Too bad, go rent "Men in Black III" instead.
You probably don't know what kind of perverts there are in the UK government. In fact, you don't want to know.
If they're typical graduates of the "public schools", I think the record speaks for itself - they'll be getting a sexual thrill out of knowing your girlfriend just bought a rubber raincoat and wellys...
I wish Slashdot editors would post more porn. My fingers are getting numb scrolling over crap like the above on the front page.
:-P
Slashdot doesn't need to post pr0n. We have a user who advertizes it in his sig
Well, it isn't foolproof, but there is a system. It's called "your brain". The more you read, the more you learn to discern the crap from the must-reads. Like any neural net, your brain must be trained, however, so stop reading Slashdot RIGHT NOW and pick up another book
To extend the analogy, your brain, and the brains of others, form a kind of distributed network which can process a lot more data than you could ever alone. So if you want to know if a book is worth reading, look for reviews. Not just the ones in the paper, but the ones on amazon.com, peoples' web pages, whatever you can find. You'll be surprised how effective this "system" can be.
You're forgetting about the "over-download fee" which will be charged against the artist's $0.0025 if their song gets downloaded too much. In fact, if you download even more, the artists have to start paying the record company.
OK, so I made this up, but it'd be perfectly in line with the other terms of their contracts.
Sure, I suppose the reviewers for a journal could conspire to knowlingly let a fraudulent paper through, or suppress a valid one with interesting results that go against the accepted theories. In the first case, the bad science would inevitably be noticed by the journal's readers (other professional scientists, after all), and the editors would be disgraced. In the second case, some other journal's editors would accept and publish the paper, "scooping" journal #1 and claiming the glory of publishing the groundbreaking new research.
Like all self-policing systems, it has flaws, but by and large it works fantastically well, uncovering charlatans and incompetents, and allowing the dissemination of well-validated new information to the scientific world. It's not physically possible to verify everything in life yourself, which is why you sometimes have to trust others to properly verify things for you. But that trust cannot be blind, nor based on "faith". This holds as true for your doctor or auto mechanic as for the editors of a journal.
I work in a plant growth research lab, and we bought one of these to get real time images of protoplasts (plant cells in culture). It was cheap, and produces surprisingly good-quality images. Of course, we also got a $100,000 Bausch & Lomb scope to do more "serious" work...
OK, yeah we all hate yuppies, and LUsers as well, but geez, who cares what these women (and yes, you seem to think their gender is relevant here) want to do with their _own property_? If they want to run 8 feet of video cable to their monitor, and you get paid to do it, where's the bad? These are mass-manufactured objects, it's not like a work of art is being shut away in that closet... And personally, if I had a roll top desk, I'd want it to close too. They're cool. Granted, the design pre-dates PC's, but if this lady wanted the two to work together, good for her. Don't be so judgmental, a contemptuous geek is not a pretty thing :-(
Cut the price in half, with the artists' cut per CD doubling. Then the business might approach "reasonable" and "fair". However, #1 "Music is life, it's immeasurable" is also true. All the more reason for it to be accessible.
I have more CDs now than I need, and I know a lot of people have more than me.
To be pedantic, nobody "needs" ANY CD's - we could all survive and reproduce in a Pol Pot society where intellectual and creative thought were outlawed and people laboured from dawn to dusk. However, my CD collecton continually grows because I grow as a person. This includes picking up new releases, but also discovering older artists and bands who may have long since disbanded. Did I know 2 years ago how good the Velvet Underground were? Nope. Conversely, I eagerly await an opportunity to buy Microbunny's new album, "hot off the press". If I stop buying CD's, I basically become like my uncle, who has decided that nothing worthwhile has been recorded since 1970. Not so good.
I'm sure the Bush administration secretly loves any genre of entertainment which they think desensitizes people to killing, and shortens their attention span.
:-)
The first, because they need a future generation of soldiers who don't care about the people who die when fire Hellfire missiles from a remotely piloted drone - "if it happens on the little screen it's just a game!". Ronald Reagan, I believe, stated that video games were good training for future fighter pilots
The second, because they've seen how effective some carefuly controlled TV is at reducing the vast majority of people to semi-sentient sheep, unable to intelligently analyze their own government's actions.