No, what's most interesting about this proposal is that it attempts to force the U.S.'s warped-so-far-it's-broken IP model on to the rest of the world:
In the U.S., the Digital Millennium Copyright Act prohibits unauthorized circumvention. Outside the U.S., however, many jurisdictions only have conventional copyright laws that only protect creative works....
Requirement #2: High-definition disc formats must have renewable security that does not create legal loopholes that will help pirates escape prosecution.
Or, in other words: Live somewhere without DMCA-like laws? Tough titty. Ph34r t3h U.5.4. W3 0wnz j00!!!
Re:There's advertising and then there's advertisin
on
TV Piracy is Next
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· Score: 1
But what'll happen to "World's Funniest Commercials #26"?
The mind boggles at the concept of 42 minutes of Dick Clark shilling Pepsi Blue while introducing the random-B-grade-celebrity-with-humourous-anecdote of the week...
Come to Australia - here we get Kommissar Rex on SBS in German, with English subtitles. You'll feel right at home.
On the plus side, plenty of Americans can't tell the different between our two countries, and at least you'll be able to point when telling them where to find kangaroos...
The major concern executives are having, is trying to ensure video tape operations do not put in commercials into the wrong aspect ratio...
Wow...
Imagine what shit is going to hit the fan when the ad execs start watching FTA digital here - complete with 16:9 & 14:9 ads pillarboxed in the 4:3 area! That's... quick guesstimate... 40% less screen space than their ads should be occupying!
(note to aliens and other-worlders: here in Australia, the powers-that-be mandated that all FTA digital be widescreen. That means no AR switching in the stream. Which means that 4:3 content is transmitted in a 4:3 box in the centre of the 16:9 picture.
For some reason - I've heard it variously attributed to stupid ad-execs, clueless producers, and slow-to-update TV stations - most advertising content, aside from in-house station promos, is supplied in 4:3 format. Even ads produced in 16:9 are masked top and bottom to fit in the 4:3 dub. So, it's transmitted in the standard FTA digital 4:3 method - with black boxes up and down the sides of the 16:9 transmission.
In a world of *magic fabricators* and the free flow of ideas... The only problem is if these means are NOT released to the people, but controlled by companies
Exactly.
In a world of magic fabricators, where everything has a zero cost of manufacture, value will attach to those things which can not be manufactured by machinery - ideas, concepts, dare I say "business methods"?
Imagine a world where nothing has an intrinsic value - except life, and intellectual property...
Of course, that's assuming that the cost of manufacture is truly zero - if it's even just "near-zero" by the slightest degree, the economy will re-stabilise around that gap. You think paying per-meg is bad - how about paying *per electron*?
Pole slugs, heel-end slugs, multiple windings, opposed windings, balanced windings, serial / parallel resitance, serial / parallel capacitance, diode clamping,...
All things done to the humble relay to modify operate / release characteristics and timing for use in logic circuits.
Who said 20 years in Telecomms was a waste of a life? Well, I did - just last week, in fact! But it did lead to an appreciation of some of the weird & wonderful design & engineering tricks pulled just to Make Stuff Work...
Given that nothing is unbreakable/unhackable/unspoofable, the real danger is putting into widespread use something that people believe to be unbreakable/unhackable/unspoofable.
Good point. Pity you then mentioned guns, and brought the wingnuts out of hiding.
Perhaps you may have done better with a more pertinent and non-arguable example. Like CSS in DVDs...
(Disclaimer: I grew up around guns. I've owned guns, and used them for both work and (ahem!) pleasure. I also think that most people who own them, shouldn't. Rationalising excuses for why you should be allowed to point them at people should automatically exclude you from owning one.)
As an unrepentant gadget freak, I don't find most of the devices appealing. It's just more grossly overpriced crap to sell you. Give me a decent stereo and my cellphone headset and I'm fine.
15 years ago, you didn't have a cellphone. 30 years ago, you didn't get a decent stereo.
See how this sort of thing works yet? What will you be unable to do without in 15 years time?
It's all in how you define "bad", and your own personal moral compass.
Take me, for example : Despite a sense of outrage at the way the world runs, it seems people consider me to be a little too moral. Hell, I know I do - I could never deliberately hurt a friend, and when I do accidently, it causes me great guilt. Hell, I still feel guilty over minor little incidents that involved nobody else! when I was a kid.
However, there's a guy here in Australia who's currently in the news because of a share "scam" - basically, he's sending letters to small shareholders, little old ladies and men etc, offering to buy their share parcels at considerably below their value. People seem to find this reprehensible...
Now I could quite happily do that, and not feel a twinge of guilt. Don't ask me why, I just wouldn't - maybe it's because I feel very strongly that one should be aware of these things, and make decisions accordingly.
Or, maybe I'm just one very fscked-up person. That's a possibility too...
That link says 512k, but I think it's wrong - IIRC, it was the T1200 that had 512k (as well as a 20Meg HD!). I'm pretty sure the T1000 did only have 256k...
Funnily enough, I have a T1200 next to me at the moment. No good as a server, but makes a nice serial terminal / console for various things around the place (you'd be amazed how many things in the modern household have some sort of serial connectivity!). Besides that, it holds my ever-evolving version of the old "Trek" game, written in Turbo Basic;-)
Yeah, but those things are the most fucking cool land crabs you'll ever see outside a 1970's British Leyland showroom!
Bright red, migrate to the sea every couple of years, and millions of the little fuckers everywhere... I'm told their migration is simultaneously one of the most amazing, unsettling, and smelly things you'll ever experience!
All in all, one of the few natural wonders of this world that I hope to see before I die.
Re:52 Relays, all produced in 1958
on
Mechanical Pong
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· Score: 1
How about multi-thousand line telephone exchanges? Whole networks, in fact, composed of local, transit, and trunk exchanges - all automatic, all relay operated. Yes, lots of relays;-)
Hell, when I started with [insert evil Australian 'phone company here] 20 years ago, they still had such exchanges built with 1930's technology. I mean, a bimotional switch is just a big, complicated relay - right?
Let's not get into uniselectors...
And as for silicon creep - we had problems back then with something similar. The vapour and airborne spray from the silicone-based floor polish gradually accumulated on the relay contacts (attracted by the slight arcing?), leading to many aimless hours tracking down intermittent faults...
Finally, an typical suburban telephone exchange drew ~450A @ 52v DC (average current during business hours) - or, a respectable 23400 watts!
Didn't the US get skewered for doing this after the first gulf war?
Only by yourselves - as far as the rest of the world was concerned you did the right thing. You (well, the UN really) went in with a clearly defined objective (liberating Kuwait) and when you achieved that, you stopped.
And in Afganistan? Which is what lead to the rise of the Taliban. Which led to 9/11.
Uh, I think you've got your timeline mixed up there... Russia invaded Afghanistan, the U.S. supported the Afghani rebels (~Taliban), when Russia pulled out the Taliban came to power. A few years after that, when bin Laden living in Afghanistan co-ordinated the Sept. 11 attacks, then the U.S. went into Afghanistan, ostensibly to find and capture/kill him.
All the "liberation", "freedom", and "democracy" crap about Afghanistan and Iraq is a pea-and-shell game that was made up later.
Bad decisions? Well, yeah, as far as the rest of the world is concerned there were 2. Firstly, the U.S. supported a bunch of fundamentalist nutjobs in Afghanistan purely because they opposed Russia. Secondly, the U.S. attacked the closest thing that part of the Middle East had to a stable democracy because they didn't like the guy running it...
This does present a problem of ballot access (since now we have the government printing the ballots, and therefore, determining who will be on it when it comes time to print them), but I think that this can be rectified without compromising secrecy. For example, we could merely have a deadline, which was the last possible date to go to press and print enough ballots, and let anyone on who who was eligible, if they filed prior to the deadline (probably in October). And permit write ins for anyone that missed the deadline.
As we do in Australia (well, apart from the write-in bit...)
It works (roughly) like this: An election is called, at a time of the Prime Ministers' choosing, subject to a maximum term - currently 3 years. After the election is called, candidates have a certain amount of time (3 weeks?) to nominate, subject to evidence of a certain amount of support (500? signatures on the nomination documents). Ballot papers are printed after nominations close, and the printed order of candidates is determined by a publicly-viewable lottery.
Come election day (always a Saturday), you walk down to the local polling booth, get harangued by countless rabid fsckwits of all political stripes, and collect a fistful of "how to vote" cards from them. Unless you're both (a) a mindless party supporter and (b) incapable of choosing the one you want from the list on the ballot paper, you throw these in the thoughtfully-provided recycling bins. Then you proceed to collect your ballot paper (getting your name checked off a list in the process - turning up to vote is compulsory here, under threat of minor fines), go into a little cardboard box, and - using the provided pencil - mark off your choice(s).
When you've done this you fold your ballot paper, walk over to the ballot box, and stick it in the slot in the top. Come the close of voting at 6pm, hoards of people collect up these boxes, takes them to designated, well-supervised, and publicly-viewable counting places, and proceed to count them. Generally, unless the result is very tight (depending on postal / absentee votes), the results are known about 5 hours later.
This fulfills all your requirements - access (anyone can nominate subject to a bare minimum of support), no favour (the order of the ballot papers is random, so the incumbent can't ensure they're listed first), secrecy (yes, the process is run by the Australian Electoral Commission - a goverment department, but with a strong and deserved reputation for honesty and scruples), and transparency (the whole process is open to be viewed by the public. Admittedly, nobody except the rabidly fanatical and party mechanics usually turns up - but the opportunity is there...).
It honestly beats me why America sticks with the Collegiate system - if only for the reason that it shows up the fact that true democracy is an illusion, by removing the voter one step further from the process.
Oh, and what the rest of the world knows as the "Australian" ballot is merely the idea of having pre-printed ballots (and maybe the secure box to put them in?).
I have arguements about this with... well, everybody! Co-workers, customers, etc.
If you follow the roots (there's that word again!) of the word, "root-ers" is the correct pronunciation. Because a router "routes" ("roots" Tee-hee!) traffic - it sends it on a path. Now, if it routed ("r-ow-ted", not nearly so funny as "root";-) traffic, it'd be turning it aside...
Just because you have a homophonic dislike of the pronunciation doesn't mean it's incorrect...
As well, calling it a "root-er" just seems to piss people off, which is an admirable aim in itself;-)
One key assumption many have is that economics is a zero-sum game.
Well, it is. People who claim it isn't are forgetting to factor in the opportunity costs, the "hidden" costs which are actually the out-of-sight places where value is taken from to "generate" growth.
They may not be traditional hidden costs - they may be things like your own stress level, mental or physical health, societal function, etc - but they are costs.
Sure, new opportunites for growth open - at the same time, the cost of these opportunities opening is that other opportunities close. And there's now way of telling (guessing, estimating, yes - but not telling for sure) whice were the better opportunities in the long-term.
It's not so different from the organisations claiming "losses" from copyright infringment, non-favourable IP laws, and the invention of motor cars - it's not a loss, it's just the loss of the "right to make a profit" in a direction they'd planned.
Hey, I'd be happy if the TV stations transmitted a real program guide in their digital streams - not just shitty "NOW / NEXT" data, or sometimes an even shittier separate "Program Guide" video channel.
Hell, I'd be happy enough if the NOW / NEXT info was accurate. Though the info from the ABC, at least here in Brisbane, is within a second or two - when it's working, that is...
Note for Americans : Australia, in the capital cities, has 5 FTA stations:
the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) - government-owned, considered to be left-leaning regardless of whoever is in power, but probably more central than left. Programming consists of everything from mainly British shows to innovative local productions - which usually never achieve popularity until they are head-hunted / ripped off and mangled by one of the 3 commercial stations. Ad-less (well, internal ads only, between programs)
SBS (Special Broadcasting Service) - known as "Sex Before Sleep" by people who think the word "knickers" is rude and funny. Nominally a "multicultural" station (in the best sense of the word), plays everything from PBS news and documentaries, through comedy (South Park, Daily Show, etc), anime, non-mainstream sport (soccer, Tour de France, etc), to "European" movies;-) Semi-commercial - government sponsored, but with commercial advertising between programs.
7, 9, & 10 - the 3 commercial channels. One's tied up with AOL, another's tied up with Microsoft / MSN, and the other one has no money so runs "The Simpsons" on a mobius loop interspersed with "Big Brother", "Australian Idol", and even less-successful local reality TV. All run as many programs as they can fit in between the ads...
Thankfully, we don't really have a Fox, though Ch9 comes close - without the soaring eagle and giant phallic missile graphics...
Funny you should say that - I was talking to a friend just the other week about his new GPS toy, geocaching, and the Degree Confluence Project. I said it would be interesting to take panoramic pictures every 5 years or so, just to see how things change...
Slashdot Mirror
But what'll happen to "World's Funniest Commercials #26"?
The mind boggles at the concept of 42 minutes of Dick Clark shilling Pepsi Blue while introducing the random-B-grade-celebrity-with-humourous-anecdote of the week...
Come to Australia - here we get Kommissar Rex on SBS in German, with English subtitles. You'll feel right at home.
On the plus side, plenty of Americans can't tell the different between our two countries, and at least you'll be able to point when telling them where to find kangaroos...
Imagine what shit is going to hit the fan when the ad execs start watching FTA digital here - complete with 16:9 & 14:9 ads pillarboxed in the 4:3 area! That's
(note to aliens and other-worlders: here in Australia, the powers-that-be mandated that all FTA digital be widescreen. That means no AR switching in the stream. Which means that 4:3 content is transmitted in a 4:3 box in the centre of the 16:9 picture.
For some reason - I've heard it variously attributed to stupid ad-execs, clueless producers, and slow-to-update TV stations - most advertising content, aside from in-house station promos, is supplied in 4:3 format. Even ads produced in 16:9 are masked top and bottom to fit in the 4:3 dub. So, it's transmitted in the standard FTA digital 4:3 method - with black boxes up and down the sides of the 16:9 transmission.
Many FTA digital watchers think this is funny...)
In a world of magic fabricators, where everything has a zero cost of manufacture, value will attach to those things which can not be manufactured by machinery - ideas, concepts, dare I say "business methods"?
Imagine a world where nothing has an intrinsic value - except life, and intellectual property...
Of course, that's assuming that the cost of manufacture is truly zero - if it's even just "near-zero" by the slightest degree, the economy will re-stabilise around that gap. You think paying per-meg is bad - how about paying *per electron*?
You make it sound like war is always about oil, or dicksize, or what somebody once said about your daddy...
Ah, relays!
...
Pole slugs, heel-end slugs, multiple windings, opposed windings, balanced windings, serial / parallel resitance, serial / parallel capacitance, diode clamping,
All things done to the humble relay to modify operate / release characteristics and timing for use in logic circuits.
Who said 20 years in Telecomms was a waste of a life? Well, I did - just last week, in fact! But it did lead to an appreciation of some of the weird & wonderful design & engineering tricks pulled just to Make Stuff Work...
Perhaps you may have done better with a more pertinent and non-arguable example. Like CSS in DVDs...
(Disclaimer: I grew up around guns. I've owned guns, and used them for both work and (ahem!) pleasure. I also think that most people who own them, shouldn't. Rationalising excuses for why you should be allowed to point them at people should automatically exclude you from owning one.)
See how this sort of thing works yet? What will you be unable to do without in 15 years time?
It's all in how you define "bad", and your own personal moral compass.
Take me, for example : Despite a sense of outrage at the way the world runs, it seems people consider me to be a little too moral. Hell, I know I do - I could never deliberately hurt a friend, and when I do accidently, it causes me great guilt. Hell, I still feel guilty over minor little incidents that involved nobody else! when I was a kid.
However, there's a guy here in Australia who's currently in the news because of a share "scam" - basically, he's sending letters to small shareholders, little old ladies and men etc, offering to buy their share parcels at considerably below their value. People seem to find this reprehensible...
Now I could quite happily do that, and not feel a twinge of guilt. Don't ask me why, I just wouldn't - maybe it's because I feel very strongly that one should be aware of these things, and make decisions accordingly.
Or, maybe I'm just one very fscked-up person. That's a possibility too...
T1000?
;-)
That link says 512k, but I think it's wrong - IIRC, it was the T1200 that had 512k (as well as a 20Meg HD!). I'm pretty sure the T1000 did only have 256k...
Funnily enough, I have a T1200 next to me at the moment. No good as a server, but makes a nice serial terminal / console for various things around the place (you'd be amazed how many things in the modern household have some sort of serial connectivity!). Besides that, it holds my ever-evolving version of the old "Trek" game, written in Turbo Basic
Bright red, migrate to the sea every couple of years, and millions of the little fuckers everywhere
All in all, one of the few natural wonders of this world that I hope to see before I die.
How about multi-thousand line telephone exchanges? Whole networks, in fact, composed of local, transit, and trunk exchanges - all automatic, all relay operated. Yes, lots of relays ;-)
Hell, when I started with [insert evil Australian 'phone company here] 20 years ago, they still had such exchanges built with 1930's technology. I mean, a bimotional switch is just a big, complicated relay - right?
Let's not get into uniselectors...
And as for silicon creep - we had problems back then with something similar. The vapour and airborne spray from the silicone-based floor polish gradually accumulated on the relay contacts (attracted by the slight arcing?), leading to many aimless hours tracking down intermittent faults...
Finally, an typical suburban telephone exchange drew ~450A @ 52v DC (average current during business hours) - or, a respectable 23400 watts!
Uh, I think you've got your timeline mixed up there... Russia invaded Afghanistan, the U.S. supported the Afghani rebels (~Taliban), when Russia pulled out the Taliban came to power. A few years after that, when bin Laden living in Afghanistan co-ordinated the Sept. 11 attacks, then the U.S. went into Afghanistan, ostensibly to find and capture/kill him.
All the "liberation", "freedom", and "democracy" crap about Afghanistan and Iraq is a pea-and-shell game that was made up later.
Bad decisions? Well, yeah, as far as the rest of the world is concerned there were 2. Firstly, the U.S. supported a bunch of fundamentalist nutjobs in Afghanistan purely because they opposed Russia. Secondly, the U.S. attacked the closest thing that part of the Middle East had to a stable democracy because they didn't like the guy running it...
It works (roughly) like this
An election is called, at a time of the Prime Ministers' choosing, subject to a maximum term - currently 3 years. After the election is called, candidates have a certain amount of time (3 weeks?) to nominate, subject to evidence of a certain amount of support (500? signatures on the nomination documents). Ballot papers are printed after nominations close, and the printed order of candidates is determined by a publicly-viewable lottery.
Come election day (always a Saturday), you walk down to the local polling booth, get harangued by countless rabid fsckwits of all political stripes, and collect a fistful of "how to vote" cards from them. Unless you're both (a) a mindless party supporter and (b) incapable of choosing the one you want from the list on the ballot paper, you throw these in the thoughtfully-provided recycling bins. Then you proceed to collect your ballot paper (getting your name checked off a list in the process - turning up to vote is compulsory here, under threat of minor fines), go into a little cardboard box, and - using the provided pencil - mark off your choice(s).
When you've done this you fold your ballot paper, walk over to the ballot box, and stick it in the slot in the top. Come the close of voting at 6pm, hoards of people collect up these boxes, takes them to designated, well-supervised, and publicly-viewable counting places, and proceed to count them. Generally, unless the result is very tight (depending on postal / absentee votes), the results are known about 5 hours later.
This fulfills all your requirements - access (anyone can nominate subject to a bare minimum of support), no favour (the order of the ballot papers is random, so the incumbent can't ensure they're listed first), secrecy (yes, the process is run by the Australian Electoral Commission - a goverment department, but with a strong and deserved reputation for honesty and scruples), and transparency (the whole process is open to be viewed by the public. Admittedly, nobody except the rabidly fanatical and party mechanics usually turns up - but the opportunity is there...).
It honestly beats me why America sticks with the Collegiate system - if only for the reason that it shows up the fact that true democracy is an illusion, by removing the voter one step further from the process.
Oh, and what the rest of the world knows as the "Australian" ballot is merely the idea of having pre-printed ballots (and maybe the secure box to put them in?).
"DVD-New - Now with BLUE lasers!"
Wanna bet John Citizen, his wife Mary J. Citizen, and the "Star Wars : HD Exxxtreme X SE Edition*" half of
You just need to market it properly. And half of that is just removing the old gear from sale while talking up the new...
(* Greedo shoots himself...)
I have arguements about this with ... well, everybody! Co-workers, customers, etc.
;-) traffic, it'd be turning it aside...
;-)
If you follow the roots (there's that word again!) of the word, "root-ers" is the correct pronunciation. Because a router "routes" ("roots" Tee-hee!) traffic - it sends it on a path. Now, if it routed ("r-ow-ted", not nearly so funny as "root"
Just because you have a homophonic dislike of the pronunciation doesn't mean it's incorrect...
As well, calling it a "root-er" just seems to piss people off, which is an admirable aim in itself
Well, it is. People who claim it isn't are forgetting to factor in the opportunity costs, the "hidden" costs which are actually the out-of-sight places where value is taken from to "generate" growth.
They may not be traditional hidden costs - they may be things like your own stress level, mental or physical health, societal function, etc - but they are costs.
Sure, new opportunites for growth open - at the same time, the cost of these opportunities opening is that other opportunities close. And there's now way of telling (guessing, estimating, yes - but not telling for sure) whice were the better opportunities in the long-term.
It's not so different from the organisations claiming "losses" from copyright infringment, non-favourable IP laws, and the invention of motor cars - it's not a loss, it's just the loss of the "right to make a profit" in a direction they'd planned.
I hope you realise you've prevented me from getting the G450 TV-out working with my Nova-T DVB-T card...
Please, think of the children!
"Now children, can you spell 'cultural hegemony'? No? Then it's back to civics class for you..."
And still you wonder why a goodly part of the rest of the world dislikes you...
Hell, I'd be happy enough if the NOW / NEXT info was accurate. Though the info from the ABC, at least here in Brisbane, is within a second or two - when it's working, that is...
Note for Americans : Australia, in the capital cities, has 5 FTA stations:
Thankfully, we don't really have a Fox, though Ch9 comes close - without the soaring eagle and giant phallic missile graphics...
Funny you should say that - I was talking to a friend just the other week about his new GPS toy, geocaching, and the Degree Confluence Project. I said it would be interesting to take panoramic pictures every 5 years or so, just to see how things change...