> The danger of such conversations is that one gets into the irrational audiophile debate, even with those that > are not audiophiles,
There is a difference between obvious differences, such as between AM and FM radio, FM Radio and CD, etc. and the endless wanking that passes for discourse amongst 'audiophiles.' The big one is competence. I have noticed that the louder the mouth on the 'audiophile' the less knowledge they have on the subject and more money they have invested in their system.
> such as if the continous range of vinyl is really better than the sampling for CDs, which is clearly true, but can > anyone really tell the difference.
Well it is true.... over a very limited domain. If you haev a very well pressed LP, played on upper end equipment and maintained in absolutely perfect condition then yes, it has better specs than a CD. Since in the real world a CD is close to that perfection and much simpler to maintain with far cheaper equipment it wins.
> Or if differences heard between CD quality and near CD quality is just randomness generated by inferior amplifiers > then reproduced by overspeced speakers.
"Near CD quality" is a null term, used by marketing departments.
> One could even talk about the various chips used as amplifiers on soundcards or the iPod, but that just going to > denerate to the topic of the superiority of vacuum tubes, and how nothing has sounded good since the 70's.
Not really. Any modern solid state amplifier will have fairly good specs until driven to clipping. Those arguments about solid state vs tubes were valid in the seventies but no more. Try telling that to an 'audiophile' though. See above about their knowledge... it is all rumor and legend passed around the counter at the stereo shop.
> Therefore if we believe a certain setup is better, it will be.
Not at all. Try it yourself. Burn a CD-R with a test set. Pick music you are familiar with and rip a track as a.wav and chop it down to about two minutes, picking a chunk with quiet and busy passages. Then make.mp3 files at a couple of sample rates, then some.wmv and.aac. Then burn them all to an audio CD.
Now have someone assist you. Put the CD in a player hooked to a midrange system and have your assistant put the player in shuffle mode and make a record of the order the tracks play in. You listen to each selection and grade it 1 to 10. I'll bet good money you rate the original.wav at or near the top and the low bitrate.mp3 near the bottom. Where each codec/bitrate rates exactly will depend on the listener, the audio system and the selected music.
Don't believe the marketing spin. "Near CD Quality" is meaningless marketing speak, you can tell the difference with most compressed music until you get to fairly high bitrates. I have a hard time telling the difference between CDs and mini-discs for example. (My MD recorder doesn't support the lower bitrates.)
Ok, lets give em props for trying new things and respecting their fans enough to give them unencumbered.mp3 files. But dude, you just blew off several very valid drawbacks.
> > It costs more than a CD > yes it does, and has twice as many songs, and extra content. I have been arguing for a > while that if the labels want to sell recording, they need to follow the lead of movies > on DVD and have bonus content. Anyway, there are ways to lower the total cost.
Uh huh, Lots of CD sets with 29 tracks selling for less than $30. Most DVD films sell for less than $30 and as you note, they have lots of extras. Perhaps if they used mask ROM they could sell it at a comparable price to CD, but really music is overpriced in general. A CD with an hour or so of music needs to get down to $10 max.
> > The audio's lower quality > Yes, and I suppose that you are one of those that believe the average $200 home system or > car stereo can accurately reproduce the high frequencies and other detail that one loses > when one compresses. In any case, the bitrate is probably reletively high,
Wrong and wrong. If the are putting 29 tracks, videos and other extras on a puny 128MB flash drive they are compressing the hell out of it. And maybe you destroyed YOUR hearing with Marilyn Manson at 130dB or something, but I can still hear the difference between an original CD and a 128KBps MP3 track on $50 Altec Lansing speakers hooked up to a crappy laptop's sound card. Played on my primary home theater system it is painfully obvious. And no, I'm not some audiophile with a $2000 volume knob and 4 gauge power cables hooked to a seperate filtered breaker box. Heck, I have just two words to dispel any notion of audiophile status, Optimus Speakers. Twenty-five year old Radio Shack specials. The amp is a little newer though. It is a decent midrange Sony with 5.1 digital, still nothing special. (I keep using the old Optimus speakers because much of the heavy lifting is on the sub and center on 5.1 content and hey, old real speakers beat those little pussy satelite speakers so popular these days.) The point is 128Kbps MP3 is lame and I'd bet this item features 96Kbps or (horror!) 64Kbps and will sound like shit.
> For instance, download iTunes and import the music.
Never mind, I'm trying to reason with someone 'mindless consumer' enough to use iTunes. Probably a Mac user with an iPod. You probably can't tell the difference if you buy compressed music, Steve gave you a glass of the Kool-Aid and said there isn't a difference and to you there isn't. You certainly can't tell the differnce between unencumbered products and open ones. All I'd do with an iPod if somebody gave me one is put the sucker on eBay and get something that appears as a USB/Firewire drive that I can just drop files on and have it play them.
> If only I had a storage closet full of something as useful as USB drives.
Agreed. Ok, it is a puny drive today and will be darned near useless in a decade, but still better than a box of floppies or 8-tracks.
One problem is if this idea starts to catch on we will see a war over form factors and interfaces. You just know Sony will want to popularize MemoryStick, just as an obvious example. Then there will be the studios wanting to use SD to DRM the content, etc.
> Tt's just that he's now a "September 11 liberal" as he would say, and it is > instructive to see the response.
There are a fair number of those. Christopher Hitchens being another "Proud to be called a Leftist" Progressive drummed out of the order for disagreeing with the orthodox view of 9-11. All of the sane voices on the Left broke ranks over 9-11 which is why all they have left are crazed moonbats. Sane folk took UBL at his word that civilization was now in a steel cage grudge match to the death with the forces of howling barbarian madness and rapidly came to the conclusion that they would stand on the side of civilization. Even if it did mean being on the same side as Shrubbie. Only a fool fights in a burning house. They can and will oppose Bush on many issues and might even seek to replace him at the ballot box, but in a choice of him or UBL they didn't pick UBL's side out of spite.
The moonbat left, on the other hand, took the "Anybody but America" side as a pure reflex response, most lacking the higher mental faculties needed to have any other reaction.
If you think I'm being too hard on them, consider who recently said "America isn't worth dying for." Or who called the people who intentionally blow up civilians, when they can't cut off their heads with a camcorder running, "Patriots, much like our own minutemen."
And for the Eurotrash leftist who I just KNOW will be chiming in with some drivel about our bombs killing civilians and thereby attempting some perverted moral equivilence between the US military and UBL's barbarian hordes, let me stop you right here. Intent DOES count. Yes dead is still dead but there is a huge moral difference between aiming at a valid military target and accidentally killing civilians and going after them intentionally.
Look people, this is a War. Us killing UBL's troops is fair game. UBL going after our soldiers is fair game too. Being an American who wants our side to prevail I don't LIKE it when American soldiers are killed but am mature enough to understand that is what War is; it is why War should always be a last resort. But blowing up marketplaces and wedding parties is NOT fair game. Now pop quiz time, which side is killing the innocent on purpose? All right, now go crawl back into the hole you crawled out of and cancel that flame you were already typing.
As usual the US military is doing the hard work of protecting the world from evil and saving Europe's butt yet again. We should know by now to only expect ingratitude and snarky remarks as thanks but we can't save our own hides this time without also saving yours.
> And so, a new champion rised in the world of horribly silly open-source names.
If you actually followed things you would know what is going on..... Pajamas Media was the working name of the outfit. I.E. when they decided to try cashing in on this whole journalism in your pajamas thing. "Journalism in your pajamas" was how the MSM always referred to bloggers, long rich tradition there of taking a term of derision hurled by your foe and turning it back on them by adopting it as your own term. Well anyway, they all knew it wouldn't fly in production use and did all the usual things companies do when picking a 'brand name'. Except someone didn't do quite enough checking and they got into trouble. So now they are back to Pajamas Media while they come up with a name again.
And Taco's (don't try and weasel by claiming it to be SpyVSSpy's words, there were a hundred submissions and you picked that one for a reason) attempt at slander in the blurb only reveals the 'political bent' of this site.
1. Microsoft promising something 18 months down the road is meaningless. Hell, ANY tech company promising something 18 montsh out is meaningless.
2. This announcement is for Europe, without software patents.... for now. Of course if in 18 months there just HAPPEN to be software patents and said patents are licensed under their no-GNU terms... oh well, who wants to support smelly hippies anyway.
3. The only promised the ability to write, kida curious since most of the EU objections are about random folk being able to READ their government's output.
4. There is no committment to continue using this 'standardized' format in any future product. So there is nothing to provent them from releasing a future Office that uses an 'embraced and extended' version and either not documenting the changes at all or another 18 months after it ships.
Hmm, I hope they hurry the hell up and do the conversion BEFORE the city gets burned down around them.:)
Ok, Ok, some of us just can't resist a bit of taunting the French. Actually I do hope it can be pulled off for a change, getting tired of reading about conversion projects started and then scrapped as things either get complicated or Microsoft's wallet opens to local politicians.
How could you do that in a free society? No, just remove the government's monopoly grant and the market will correct things on its own.
> Otherwise I don't see how you are going to get anyone to give up a huge chunk of their salary to buy a very expensive > share. How do you fire someone? Suing for breach of contract?
Easy, if you want the job you become a partner in the co-op. And remember, the cash value embodied in that share would represent a big chunk of your pension. (The Co-op would have a pretty big and diverse portfolio backing that one share you own, much like an IRA or 401K.) Would mean 'regular folk' would need to know a bit about how the world works, much like doctors, lawyers and accountants form up partnerships and such today. But while a limited partnership works fine for a dozen lawyers, it doesn't scale to thousands of auto workers. For that you need a corporation. A nice side effect of a general increase in knowledge of economics would be a lot more votors rejecting the simplistic drivel that passes for economic policy, especially in the Democratic Party.
> If co-ops were that useful, we would see many more of them around today and its not like the presence of unions > are stopping them.
Yes they do, government forbids ANYTHING from competing with a union and has the guns to make it's decisions stick.
> I am ambivalent about giving particular unions monopolies over organizing certain jobs, but its not like they > don't have to compete with non-union outfits nor are all industries unionized.
Yes, many industries aren't unionized anymore.... and notice which is in which catagory. Dying industries are unionized, I'd say killed in no small part BY the union. The only exception is government employees, that 'isdustry' is of course thriving.
> And you may think shareholder plutocracy in a private-sector corporation is a common good, but it isn't nor is it a > democracy, which is measured in individuals not dollars.
It is a perfect democracy, of course I'm no more keen on the idea of pure Democracy than the Founders, who loathed the concept. But in the case of a corporation it works better than in a form of government. And in my idea of one share per person co-ops, votes ARE individuals. That was the reason for stating it the way I did, so power couldn't accumulate either at the top or in a outside investment house over time.
> The issue was the media's portrayal of unions and such, and you defended them using a false conception of "union" > which exists only in your personal "world".
No, I think 'unions' as they currently exist are wicked creatures of the State and was proposing a social construct that could both empower the individual workers, allow free market forces to regulate affairs and generally be moral.
> I think you did not want to address my charge that pro-capital extremism abounds in the industry and there is > nothing to balance it.
Extremism in the defense of Liberty is no vice. And the Free Market is the best expression of economic liberty yet devised. Now if by that you argue that the capital side of the capital/labor equation is unbalanced, I'd be somewhat inclined to agree, but through government interferrence with the marketplace. Corporate welfare is even worse than the other sort and don't get me started on the wickedness of government regulation and the market distortions it causes, giant corporations can afford the army of lawyers to deal with it and love the fact it tends to prevent new entrants to highly regulated industries, allowing them virtual monopolies.
> So even unions should operate as a group of shareholders in order to be considered "moral".
It is the only moral way for a large group TO operate. Think about it, you either have a sole owner (i.e. a Company), a Partnership (a small group of owners) or a Corporation (with shareholders). The thing that make it a Union isntead of a normal Corporation is in who owns it. Yes, if GM outsourced all of their labor into a normal Corporation owned by the idiots and idle rich on Wall Street you would have "Meet the New Boss, same as the Old Boss" and workers would be screwed. Which is why I suggested divesting it to the UAW, which is, in theory at least (reality is it is owned by the mob), owned by the workers. The correct term for such an organization is a Co-Op and they have been successfully used for decades.
Now as for the option you appear to prefer, wherein the Government picks a corrupt gang of mobsters with connections to the elected officials making the decision, grants them an absolute monopoly over labor in a particular industry and backs up that monopoly grant with National Guard troops if required. Please explain how that enhances Freedom, advances the interests of the Workers, or for that matter advances any greater good? Advancing the cause of World Socialism isn't a greater good.
> What a sense of 'balance': No democratic controls through government, no workplace democracy where the poor can participate.
Here is where I think you are going off the track. Democratic controls can and do exist without the blessings (I'd say meddling) of Government. A shareholders meeting is the closest thing to pure Democracy yet invented outside of the Ballot Inititive. 50.0001% of shares vote and the Board and CEO can go screw themselves, the majority rules and the motion carries.
And why SHOULD the 'poor' participate in a Union? Almost by definition, once you are in the Union you ain't poor anymore and why should some bum on the street be telling the UAW what is in their best interest?
In my world the workers in the "Labor Co-Op" the UAW would be transformed into would own one share each. No common or preferred stock, because it would dilute to outside control within a generation. They would elect a CEO and Board just like any other Corporation and be subject to Sarbanes-Oxley, etc to ensure accounting transparency. New workers would buy their 'Share' through a financing plan as a payroll deduction and upon termination prior to retirement would be required to sell it (or the portion they had bought so far) back with the proceeds rolling into a tax defered retirement plan. But no fractional ownership since, like a home being financed, even though much of it is financed the asset is still owned, and voted, by the worker. Since pensions are a big part of the deal, retired workers would remain shareholders until death, at which point the current value of their share becomes part of their estate, although it's value would probabably have been drained into their retirement benefits through advanced accounting practices.
>...it really does sadden me that Microsoft is seriously considering this.
Do you really have trouble seeing why they are going in this direction?
Think about this from their point of view. Until the last couple of years Microsoft was an easy company for an investor to get a handle on. It all boiled down to a few bullet points an idiot could understand.
1. Microsoft gets $30-80 on every PC sold in the developed world.
2. PC sales are increasing annually.
3. For it's sales, Microsoft has almost no overhead, it is all profit.
4. Through blatently illegal tying deals competition with Microsoft is impossible so their revenue stream is invulnerable. I.E, Microsoft prints money and you better get on the gravy train today because that stock just goes up, splits and goes up some more.
Starting about the turn of the century all that changed. The sales growth for PCs stabilized and pricing pressure on a PC means that even maintaining that $30-80 per PC is not going to be sustainable. So you play Bill Gates for a minute, just what do you do?
1. Take the money and run. Just not in Bill G or Balmer's personality, they MUST fight Heck, to not fight would be a criminal neglect of their fiduciary responsibility to the other shareholders.
2. Admit defeat and transition from a high growth company to a high dividend utility type company, slashing R&D and just soaking up the monopoly rents, keeping the investors happy with ever increasing dividends. Would be a great idea if it would work. The penguin army won't allow it so it would end up devolving to option 3:
3. Pull an AT&T and admit the market is going away and amortize everything away, assuming the corporation no longer to be 'an ongoing operation.'
4. Find new ways to extract revenue from a stable and still (although at a slower rate) growing userbase. Getting a license fee on a PC once when it is sold isn't viable anymore. We are rapidly heading to a $300 PC & monitor world made worse by an average retention time moving from three years average to five or more. Their only option is annual licensing, where the get a recurring revenue stream from the user or advertising, where they sell the user's attention for money.
Not that I really care, I have been enlisted in the penguin army for ten years now.:)
>..but both IE and Netscape used to charge for bookmark placement. What do you think the > browser wars were about? Why do you think they fought over the market for a product they > were giving away?
Or for that matter, what do you think is behind the Mozilla Foundation closing Firefox? Yup, they are co-branding the start page, search and bookmarks to raise revenue.
Yes kids, Firefox is Free as in Beer but is NOT Free as in Freedom. Mozilla is a discontinued product, also now 'protected' by Trademarks and restricted. Seamonkey is a Free Software offshoot that might release a 1.0 by year's end.
I know this because legal@mozilla.org has informed me that I must either obtain their permission to license the trademark (meaning it wouldn't be Free Software and would not be permitted to redistributable the source under a DFSG Free Software license) or change the name. I had been waiting for Debian to settle on a new name to avoid name comfiusion but it appears they have opted for the "screw em, they wouldn't dare sue" approach instead. Not having a well funded not-for-profit behind me I plan on changing the name the next time I make a major new release.
> or that trade unions should operate everywhere and replace the CEO and the boardroom.
Sure, I'm all for that..... So long as these 'trade unions' of yours operate on a level playing field without the govenmnent granting them a monopoly and that they replace the CEO by buying sufficient quantities of the stock to be able to elect their guy.
Oh, but that isn't what you meant? You want the government to sieze the assets of the corporations and give control of them to their pet union gangsters? Nah, screw you hippie.
You see, I have a very different view of what a union should be. Instead of the government dictating (by armed force in many cases) one corrupt union thug to have absolute authority over who works in an industry and how much they must be paid, I see a more capitalistic approach as the only moral way to form a union. I see a union as more an outsourcing initiated by the workers instead of management. Normal outsourcing happens when management decides the workers are't worth keeping around compared to what an outsourcing firm is bidding to get the same work done. A union should form when the workers decide they could get more money on the open market for their services if they all quit and formed their own company, which would offer their services at a price in their best interests. Of course without a government monopoly the original company could either reject the union's offer, hire new workers themselves or outsource it to a competing union.
To illustrate with an example, take the UAW. Right now things are confusing and disfunctional. Do autoworkers work for GM or the UAW? Well both and neither. In my world GM would divest the personel and payroll deoartments to the UAW (details of the split would be twitchy, mostly due to the pension disaster) and then contract with the UAW outright for labor. To keep the dealing honest the government would butt the hell out so if the sides couldn't reach agreement GM could sign a contract with a different union or start building a personel dept again and directly hire workers outside the union. The workers still gain the economic advantage of collective bargaining but it would be done in a purely capitalist way.
> I know he calls himself a conservative, but at his core, Bill O'Reilly is a self-important media whore.
Well that too, but politically he is a populist. Populists we know here in Louisiana, where Huey Long ruled long ago and his dark shadow still lurks. They tend to be rather dimwitted with a uncanny animal like cunning ability to latch onto the popular zietgiest.
But he certainly doesn't fit into either of of the major Conservative camps. (btw, those two groups are the libertarian leaning small government free market conservatives and the social/moral values conservatives)
> At least you started with Fox News...fair and balanced my ass.
Of course they aren't balanced. Which, in a sort of paradox, makes them balanced since they now singlehandendly counterbalance the 'progressive' biases of the rest of the nets. Sort of a TV version of Limbaugh's infamous "I don't need equal time, I am equal time!".
Personally I don't mind bias all that much as long as it is in the open and Fox does often admit that while they make an effort to present both sides, they do come at issues with a conservative viewpoint. Neither Bill O'Reilly or Maureen Dowd bother me since both are pretty open about their position advocacy. What pisses me off is when asshats like Dan Rather or Helen Thomas claim with a straight face to be impartial in their reporting when they are as biased as Rush Limbaugh or Al Franken.
Or take the Sunday morning yak yak shows. I don't get Face the Nation over my local CBS station, but both NBC's Meet the Press and ABC's This Week program are hosted by former Democratic Party aparatchiks with no major experience in journalism prior to taking the helm at their respective high prestige posts? Harmless Coincidence? We are supposed to believe both are presenting a 'balanced' view of politics?
> "...an entity otherwise eligible for the press exception would not lose > its eligibility merely because of a lack of objectivity..."
Well of course not. Otherwise they would have to close down CBS and Fox News right off the bat. And then come back and get CNN, ABC and NBC the next day. On the third day they would shutter the NY Times, the Washington Post and pull the plug on the EIB Network's sat feed.
Of course by day four folks would show up in Washington with their 'Sporting Goods' and voice their 'opinion' about Campaign Finance Reform, reminding Congress that in the end the 1st Amendment, along with the rest are ultimately preserved by a willingness to exercise the 2nd Amendment.:)
> I'll say it one more time: I'm not a Communist, and nor do I support them.
Sorry to be the one to break the news.... but you are either a Communist who can't even admit it to himself or what ol Joe called a "Useful Idiot." Anybody who could write the next paragraph in your post can only be one or the other.
> As for the rest of it: half the problems and deaths in the last century were caused > by the US and its meddling in other countries' internal affairs. A large part of the > Soviet Union's behaviour was caused through its fear of the US and its aggressive > behaviour.
Yea right. The Soviets stated openly that their longterm goal was total global dominion, and that conversion by the sword was a perfectly acceptable way of attaining that goal. And until Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, we never openly took the offensive against them, nay, all 'right thinking people' believed we were going to end up Communists ourselves, it was only a matter of time. Vietnam and Korea were more battles against Red China than Soviet Russia.
But if you want to go on believing Stalin just had to murder millions of his own defenseless slaves, starting only a couple of years after rising to power mind you, that he had to sign the pact with Hitler, that he and his successors had to keep the gulags humming right up until they fell from power, that China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Cuba, etc ALL had to become Hells on Earth, all because they were terrified of the West; well then I guess you are entitled to live in your own little dream reality. Only don't be too suprised when we who actually know what the hell we are writing about giggle and point at ya.
> Why do American Slashdotters always bring up China?
Because they are the best icon to represent the flaw at the heart of the UN, that a majority of the voting members represent unfree regimes. Which is why nothing important can be entrusted to their misrule. The UN fighting to make the world safe for Freedom? Hah, the UN is fighting to keep it's member dictators on their iron thrones.
> You do realise that it's the UN that manages the international phone system, don't you? > Does China censor your phone calls?
Which is why the insane tariff systems are never going away. Which why VoIP is likely to be stymied. And yes I suspect China does indeed monitor international calls.
For that matter so do we. We just do it in a sneaky way by having the Brits spy on our calls and 'share the intelligence' and then we return the favor.
> Besides, what happened in places like the Soviet Union isn't representative > of what Communism can mean.
Communists never tire of telling this whopper, in the hope of pulling off a Big Lie, hopeing thereby to make it possible to suggest trying it again; this time of course they promise to "Do it right."
Listen up kids, Communism, Socialism, Welfare Socialism, Democratic Socialism, National Socialism, etc. Call it whatever you want, tweak the edges however you want it all falls to the same core defect. We buried hundreds of millions of people during the 20th Century in various failed attempts to get it right because Leftists of all stripes just refused to believe it as every attempt at building their Utopias collapsed into one dictatorship after another, concentration camp after concentration camp and mass murder following mass murder.
It all comes down to force. If you want to install a select elite to make everyone else's decisions for them you have to be willing to put the disenters up against a wall or the great unwashed mass of the people, being much wiser in agregate than your elite experts, will simply ignore them, work around them, etc. All Socialist experiments eventually realize this and instead of humbly facing reality; that people not only WANT to be Free but that they actually prosper without the 'enlightened leadership of the Party' and return to a Representive form of Government they always go for the Camps and the AK-47s instead.
And we now know that no government can repress it's People so utterly that they won't eventually reclaim their Liberty. We are still waiting for the last few Communist holdouts to collapse, but History is now clearly against them. China sorta realizes it and is looking for a way out that doesn't involve the transitional chaos Russia and the former Soviet Slave States are going through. Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam are the last ones who even make a big public show of believing Communism still has a future, but we all know they won't make it another twenty years.
> You have the.xxx backwards - it was actually a good idea,
No..xxx was the dumbest idea to come down the pike in at least a decade. Two options:
1. All porn sites would be forced (threat of criminal liability) to relocate to.xxx, 90% of the Internet drops a block on the domain and bye bye open Internet. And of course anything remotely non-child safe would eventually be forced into.xxx. If you have any sort of imagination you can imagine how it would play out in the courts. The Internet becomes a lame Disneyland parody of itself.
2. Porn sites don't have to move. In which case I have to ask, Just what was the fscking point again?
Longer term the correct solution is to deprecate ALL of the top level domains and deny renewals. Force everyone into the country tlds and this problem vanishes. If the French want.xxx.fr or heck, even porn.fr, go for it!
>...hence it is producing (especially when the battery is full) more power than is > used, but still causing the same amount of load on the engine.
Oh God, what are they teaching kids in school these days. No. The more electrical load on an alternator the more force is required to drive it.
When a high load device, such as a high torque motor, starts up a generator will noticably bog down for a moment and the engine will rev to compensate. Trust me on this, I'm in Southwest Louisiana, Rita taught us a thing or two about generators.:)
Same thing on a rig with one of these puppies. If it is going to generate non-trivial amounts of hydrogen it is going to require a non-trivial quantity of energy in the form of electrical current and an alternator driven by an internal combustion engine isn't very efficient. Most use simple shunt regulators for heaven's sake! That means the power you get from burning the hydrogen is a lot less than what went into seperating it from water. So unless it makes the diesel burn a LOT better it won't be paying its way.
It will make the engine run 'greener' though, which is what this is likely mostly about.
> This pdf file might be helpful (or search for it on google to see the html version).
Yes, very helpful. Note that the test appears to have been made WITHOUT the alternator being loaded with the hydrogen extraction. When something sounds too good to be true, always look for what they skate around. In this case the report discusses where the manufacturer claims to obtain their hydrogen but by implication that means they didn't actually have one on hand, so they didn't have one connected to the electrical system.
So I'd say snake oil barring a more honest test. Yes it might provide some green benefits, but as for fuel savings, bull. And anyway, even if we take them at their word it isn't anything to write home about. Run the numbers people. Up to $14,000 for the initial investment for at best a 10% fuel savings? And I suspect there is some installation expenses as well. So lets round the numbers and say $15,000 to save 10%. Assume diesel averages $2.75 (It is back down to levels way under that here) for the next couple of years. That means until you save 5,454 gallons you aren't ahead. Even for a big rig that translates to a LOT of hours of operation. And that assumes no additional expenses to maintain either the device or additional wear on the engine from running it hotter.
None of this matters. The RIAA is trying to impose an outdated idea on a population too numerous and clever to stand for it. I don't particularly like the idea of warez (and that IS what 95% of P2P traffic is) as a Free Software zealot, but we passed a tipping point years ago. The average person today (especially among the 30 population) no longer considers swapping files to be immoral.
Eventually the law will catch up to practice, but until it does the [RM]PAA will continue to drive it underground. I predict they will be increasingly successful at driving it underground and totally ineffectual in achieving their goal of stopping it from occuring. Consider: twenty years ago the local 'computer clubs' were essentially nothing more than groups of folks bringing their computers together for the purpose of trading vast quantities of software. Or put bluntly, as soon as the commom man was given a printing press he set forth printing with a vengence.
RMS was again spot on. Copyright law made sense when it was regulating the select few wealthy enough to own a printing press because THEY could agree it was in their longterm best interest. Now that everyone has one the game has changed and either the law changes regarding copyright or the law changes to eliminate our representive form of government because longterm, the government cannot continue to have the consent of the governed and keep locking vast numbers of registered voters.
And while twenty years ago it was only software being copies, technology has marched ever onward and there will never agian be a seperation between computer software, music and video. And those old swapmeets show the logical end path of this game.
In the olden days you had a few 'yo ho ho pirates' in every town that essentially had EVERYTHING. We will soon see affordable storage systems to make that sort of thing possible with music, with video only a few years later. Imagine a world when the top level pirates have a couple of portable USB drives with every song that charted on Billboard's charts since they began, trading it out in every town, on every college campus, etc. in perfect flac format or 320Kbps mp3. In exchange they get every NEW song that is released so that their collection stays complete. (These obsessive compulsive collectors gotta have em all after all and THEY won't pay for a CD, hence they trade.) For the RIAA, the RIAA's days will become numbered. Sure they can try to sting a few of them, but it won't work in the end. And remember, a generation or two in drive storage later the same thing happens to video. The top level traders will have EVERY hollywood release, every episode of every telivision show, etc. Then it is the MPAA's turn to know real fear.
The end game comes as storage continues it's increase. To the point where EVERYONE can afford an iPod large enough to hold essentially everything. Then some wit will release a sync program. So that every time you get to know someone well enough to figure they ain't a Fed you will 'sync' your media collection, each of you getting what the other has, replacing lower quality rips with higher quality, etc. Then it IS over.
What that world looks like, where copyright has been totally rendered comic, I can't really imagine. But it IS coming and we had better be thinking about ways to survive the whirlwind of change it will bring with it because there is only one other option. That would be the dark distopia of DRM and pay for play that THEY have planned for us.
Seriously, the article is a bad joke propagated from the same Asshat "IP" pimps who represented Digital Convergence in their insane attempts to redefine 'innovation' to include XOR and MIME64 encoding in the CueCat: fiasco. Still have their hilariously vague Cease and Desist letter. I told em to either FOAD or actually file charges. At least they were bright enough to fold instead of call because I wasn't bluffing.
Sorry, no patent granted in 1995 could possibly be relevent. The NES itself would be more than sufficent prior art to invalidate it should they try to claim it applies to any of it's technology.
And maybe I'm wrong, but didn't Atari WIN vs Nintendo over their attempts to use a dependence of a trademarked phrase in their carts to outlaw 3rd party titles? I know history is being rewritten a lot lately so maybe I need to get the latest point revision installed into my brain or something.
They were correct though that regardless of right, wrong, legal or illegal that Nintendo would likely sue any small outfit attempting a clone into oblivion. And since I don't see enough profit to interest a larger one that pretty much wraps it up for clones.
Ok, maybe I'm just daft. But am I the only one who is looking at this per title 'emulation file' and thinking it isn't anything of the sort? How much do you want to bet they plan to emulate the non-critical code, which is possible with the hardware available, but have that emulator somehow merge in custom recompiled/ported code for the time critical bits? Because face it folks, the CPU cycles available to them just ain't there to fully emulate a P733 in software. If so you can pretty much forget any titles from companies that have managed to get on Microsoft's shit list since they released. And any that pushed the hardware to the limit but weren't big financial successes. Sure they would invest whatever effort were required to get Halo running, even if it were basically recompiling the whole set of binaries, but how much effort will go into obscure games?
And of course any new X-Box titles will ship with any needed rebuilt bits for X-Box 360.
All in all, if they get the list of supported titles up a lot more AND these games actually work close to the same their decision to go with a totally new hardware platform will be vindicated. But that is a lot of IF.
What is it with this EVERYTHING on the Internet is a webpage. The browser is the only client these days outside IM and P2P warez trading for 95% of users. And even though Javascript was never intended for 'real' programming it is the only language all browsers implement so it is what everyone is forced to use. It wasn't supposed to be this way and it doesn't have to BE this way.
If nothing else, if we want to download clients and run them in the browser, having them talk to a backend server for the data, why not get a more appropriate language? Java would be perfect if Sun weren't a bunch of asshats, but just because it won't ever be truly Free or cross platform is no reason to reject other candidates. Tcl/Tk has had a fully sandboxed browser plugin for a decade and it is 100% Free Software. It runs on every known platform where IE or Mozilla runs and could be ported anywhere else needed. I'm sure it isn't the only one. Or do we continue shoehorning everything into html?
> He's basically fed up with format change, and he's ticked off that there are things he > thinks he ought to be able to do with the new format (copy it freely to every digital > device) that he can't do.
No, it isn't the format change. We all know that is unavoidable. This is different. This is THEM assuming total control. In the past, all media was essentially free. You could loan it to a friend, make a working copy (dump an LP to tape for the road, etc) make mix tapes, etc. You couldn't make and sell copies, not because of a technoligical restriction but simply because, well it is illegal. Not anymore. They want the right to dictate where and how you will play it, how long you can play it and eventually will insist on the right to charge you by the play. Unless we say NO, right now.
Slashdot Mirror
> The danger of such conversations is that one gets into the irrational audiophile debate, even with those that
.wav and chop it down to about two minutes, picking a chunk with quiet and busy passages. Then make .mp3 files at a couple of sample rates, then some .wmv and .aac. Then burn them all to an audio CD.
.wav at or near the top and the low bitrate .mp3 near the bottom. Where each codec/bitrate rates exactly will depend on the listener, the audio system and the selected music.
> are not audiophiles,
There is a difference between obvious differences, such as between AM and FM radio, FM Radio and CD, etc. and the endless wanking that passes for discourse amongst 'audiophiles.' The big one is competence. I have noticed that the louder the mouth on the 'audiophile' the less knowledge they have on the subject and more money they have invested in their system.
> such as if the continous range of vinyl is really better than the sampling for CDs, which is clearly true, but can
> anyone really tell the difference.
Well it is true.... over a very limited domain. If you haev a very well pressed LP, played on upper end equipment and maintained in absolutely perfect condition then yes, it has better specs than a CD. Since in the real world a CD is close to that perfection and much simpler to maintain with far cheaper equipment it wins.
> Or if differences heard between CD quality and near CD quality is just randomness generated by inferior amplifiers
> then reproduced by overspeced speakers.
"Near CD quality" is a null term, used by marketing departments.
> One could even talk about the various chips used as amplifiers on soundcards or the iPod, but that just going to
> denerate to the topic of the superiority of vacuum tubes, and how nothing has sounded good since the 70's.
Not really. Any modern solid state amplifier will have fairly good specs until driven to clipping. Those arguments about solid state vs tubes were valid in the seventies but no more. Try telling that to an 'audiophile' though. See above about their knowledge... it is all rumor and legend passed around the counter at the stereo shop.
> Therefore if we believe a certain setup is better, it will be.
Not at all. Try it yourself. Burn a CD-R with a test set. Pick music you are familiar with and rip a track as a
Now have someone assist you. Put the CD in a player hooked to a midrange system and have your assistant put the player in shuffle mode and make a record of the order the tracks play in. You listen to each selection and grade it 1 to 10. I'll bet good money you rate the original
Don't believe the marketing spin. "Near CD Quality" is meaningless marketing speak, you can tell the difference with most compressed music until you get to fairly high bitrates. I have a hard time telling the difference between CDs and mini-discs for example. (My MD recorder doesn't support the lower bitrates.)
Ok, lets give em props for trying new things and respecting their fans enough to give them unencumbered .mp3 files. But dude, you just blew off several very valid drawbacks.
> > It costs more than a CD
> yes it does, and has twice as many songs, and extra content. I have been arguing for a
> while that if the labels want to sell recording, they need to follow the lead of movies
> on DVD and have bonus content. Anyway, there are ways to lower the total cost.
Uh huh, Lots of CD sets with 29 tracks selling for less than $30. Most DVD films sell for less than $30 and as you note, they have lots of extras. Perhaps if they used mask ROM they could sell it at a comparable price to CD, but really music is overpriced in general. A CD with an hour or so of music needs to get down to $10 max.
> > The audio's lower quality
> Yes, and I suppose that you are one of those that believe the average $200 home system or
> car stereo can accurately reproduce the high frequencies and other detail that one loses
> when one compresses. In any case, the bitrate is probably reletively high,
Wrong and wrong. If the are putting 29 tracks, videos and other extras on a puny 128MB flash drive they are compressing the hell out of it. And maybe you destroyed YOUR hearing with Marilyn Manson at 130dB or something, but I can still hear the difference between an original CD and a 128KBps MP3 track on $50 Altec Lansing speakers hooked up to a crappy laptop's sound card. Played on my primary home theater system it is painfully obvious. And no, I'm not some audiophile with a $2000 volume knob and 4 gauge power cables hooked to a seperate filtered breaker box. Heck, I have just two words to dispel any notion of audiophile status, Optimus Speakers. Twenty-five year old Radio Shack specials. The amp is a little newer though. It is a decent midrange Sony with 5.1 digital, still nothing special. (I keep using the old Optimus speakers because much of the heavy lifting is on the sub and center on 5.1 content and hey, old real speakers beat those little pussy satelite speakers so popular these days.) The point is 128Kbps MP3 is lame and I'd bet this item features 96Kbps or (horror!) 64Kbps and will sound like shit.
> For instance, download iTunes and import the music.
Never mind, I'm trying to reason with someone 'mindless consumer' enough to use iTunes. Probably a Mac user with an iPod. You probably can't tell the difference if you buy compressed music, Steve gave you a glass of the Kool-Aid and said there isn't a difference and to you there isn't. You certainly can't tell the differnce between unencumbered products and open ones. All I'd do with an iPod if somebody gave me one is put the sucker on eBay and get something that appears as a USB/Firewire drive that I can just drop files on and have it play them.
> If only I had a storage closet full of something as useful as USB drives.
Agreed. Ok, it is a puny drive today and will be darned near useless in a decade, but still better than a box of floppies or 8-tracks.
One problem is if this idea starts to catch on we will see a war over form factors and interfaces. You just know Sony will want to popularize MemoryStick, just as an obvious example. Then there will be the studios wanting to use SD to DRM the content, etc.
> Tt's just that he's now a "September 11 liberal" as he would say, and it is
> instructive to see the response.
There are a fair number of those. Christopher Hitchens being another "Proud to be called a Leftist" Progressive drummed out of the order for disagreeing with the orthodox view of 9-11. All of the sane voices on the Left broke ranks over 9-11 which is why all they have left are crazed moonbats. Sane folk took UBL at his word that civilization was now in a steel cage grudge match to the death with the forces of howling barbarian madness and rapidly came to the conclusion that they would stand on the side of civilization. Even if it did mean being on the same side as Shrubbie. Only a fool fights in a burning house. They can and will oppose Bush on many issues and might even seek to replace him at the ballot box, but in a choice of him or UBL they didn't pick UBL's side out of spite.
The moonbat left, on the other hand, took the "Anybody but America" side as a pure reflex response, most lacking the higher mental faculties needed to have any other reaction.
If you think I'm being too hard on them, consider who recently said "America isn't worth dying for." Or who called the people who intentionally blow up civilians, when they can't cut off their heads with a camcorder running, "Patriots, much like our own minutemen."
And for the Eurotrash leftist who I just KNOW will be chiming in with some drivel about our bombs killing civilians and thereby attempting some perverted moral equivilence between the US military and UBL's barbarian hordes, let me stop you right here. Intent DOES count. Yes dead is still dead but there is a huge moral difference between aiming at a valid military target and accidentally killing civilians and going after them intentionally.
Look people, this is a War. Us killing UBL's troops is fair game. UBL going after our soldiers is fair game too. Being an American who wants our side to prevail I don't LIKE it when American soldiers are killed but am mature enough to understand that is what War is; it is why War should always be a last resort. But blowing up marketplaces and wedding parties is NOT fair game. Now pop quiz time, which side is killing the innocent on purpose? All right, now go crawl back into the hole you crawled out of and cancel that flame you were already typing.
As usual the US military is doing the hard work of protecting the world from evil and saving Europe's butt yet again. We should know by now to only expect ingratitude and snarky remarks as thanks but we can't save our own hides this time without also saving yours.
> And so, a new champion rised in the world of horribly silly open-source names.
If you actually followed things you would know what is going on..... Pajamas Media was the working name of the outfit. I.E. when they decided to try cashing in on this whole journalism in your pajamas thing. "Journalism in your pajamas" was how the MSM always referred to bloggers, long rich tradition there of taking a term of derision hurled by your foe and turning it back on them by adopting it as your own term. Well anyway, they all knew it wouldn't fly in production use and did all the usual things companies do when picking a 'brand name'. Except someone didn't do quite enough checking and they got into trouble. So now they are back to Pajamas Media while they come up with a name again.
And Taco's (don't try and weasel by claiming it to be SpyVSSpy's words, there were a hundred submissions and you picked that one for a reason) attempt at slander in the blurb only reveals the 'political bent' of this site.
Lets put this PR spin through the reality filter.
1. Microsoft promising something 18 months down the road is meaningless. Hell, ANY tech company promising something 18 montsh out is meaningless.
2. This announcement is for Europe, without software patents.... for now. Of course if in 18 months there just HAPPEN to be software patents and said patents are licensed under their no-GNU terms... oh well, who wants to support smelly hippies anyway.
3. The only promised the ability to write, kida curious since most of the EU objections are about random folk being able to READ their government's output.
4. There is no committment to continue using this 'standardized' format in any future product. So there is nothing to provent them from releasing a future Office that uses an 'embraced and extended' version and either not documenting the changes at all or another 18 months after it ships.
Hmm, I hope they hurry the hell up and do the conversion BEFORE the city gets burned down around them. :)
Ok, Ok, some of us just can't resist a bit of taunting the French. Actually I do hope it can be pulled off for a change, getting tired of reading about conversion projects started and then scrapped as things either get complicated or Microsoft's wallet opens to local politicians.
> Well I suppose you could outlaw unions.
How could you do that in a free society? No, just remove the government's monopoly grant and the market will correct things on its own.
> Otherwise I don't see how you are going to get anyone to give up a huge chunk of their salary to buy a very expensive
> share. How do you fire someone? Suing for breach of contract?
Easy, if you want the job you become a partner in the co-op. And remember, the cash value embodied in that share would represent a big chunk of your pension. (The Co-op would have a pretty big and diverse portfolio backing that one share you own, much like an IRA or 401K.) Would mean 'regular folk' would need to know a bit about how the world works, much like doctors, lawyers and accountants form up partnerships and such today. But while a limited partnership works fine for a dozen lawyers, it doesn't scale to thousands of auto workers. For that you need a corporation. A nice side effect of a general increase in knowledge of economics would be a lot more votors rejecting the simplistic drivel that passes for economic policy, especially in the Democratic Party.
> If co-ops were that useful, we would see many more of them around today and its not like the presence of unions
> are stopping them.
Yes they do, government forbids ANYTHING from competing with a union and has the guns to make it's decisions stick.
> I am ambivalent about giving particular unions monopolies over organizing certain jobs, but its not like they
> don't have to compete with non-union outfits nor are all industries unionized.
Yes, many industries aren't unionized anymore.... and notice which is in which catagory. Dying industries are unionized, I'd say killed in no small part BY the union. The only exception is government employees, that 'isdustry' is of course thriving.
> And you may think shareholder plutocracy in a private-sector corporation is a common good, but it isn't nor is it a
> democracy, which is measured in individuals not dollars.
It is a perfect democracy, of course I'm no more keen on the idea of pure Democracy than the Founders, who loathed the concept. But in the case of a corporation it works better than in a form of government. And in my idea of one share per person co-ops, votes ARE individuals. That was the reason for stating it the way I did, so power couldn't accumulate either at the top or in a outside investment house over time.
> The issue was the media's portrayal of unions and such, and you defended them using a false conception of "union"
> which exists only in your personal "world".
No, I think 'unions' as they currently exist are wicked creatures of the State and was proposing a social construct that could both empower the individual workers, allow free market forces to regulate affairs and generally be moral.
> I think you did not want to address my charge that pro-capital extremism abounds in the industry and there is
> nothing to balance it.
Extremism in the defense of Liberty is no vice. And the Free Market is the best expression of economic liberty yet devised. Now if by that you argue that the capital side of the capital/labor equation is unbalanced, I'd be somewhat inclined to agree, but through government interferrence with the marketplace. Corporate welfare is even worse than the other sort and don't get me started on the wickedness of government regulation and the market distortions it causes, giant corporations can afford the army of lawyers to deal with it and love the fact it tends to prevent new entrants to highly regulated industries, allowing them virtual monopolies.
> So even unions should operate as a group of shareholders in order to be considered "moral".
It is the only moral way for a large group TO operate. Think about it, you either have a sole owner (i.e. a Company), a Partnership (a small group of owners) or a Corporation (with shareholders). The thing that make it a Union isntead of a normal Corporation is in who owns it. Yes, if GM outsourced all of their labor into a normal Corporation owned by the idiots and idle rich on Wall Street you would have "Meet the New Boss, same as the Old Boss" and workers would be screwed. Which is why I suggested divesting it to the UAW, which is, in theory at least (reality is it is owned by the mob), owned by the workers. The correct term for such an organization is a Co-Op and they have been successfully used for decades.
Now as for the option you appear to prefer, wherein the Government picks a corrupt gang of mobsters with connections to the elected officials making the decision, grants them an absolute monopoly over labor in a particular industry and backs up that monopoly grant with National Guard troops if required. Please explain how that enhances Freedom, advances the interests of the Workers, or for that matter advances any greater good? Advancing the cause of World Socialism isn't a greater good.
> What a sense of 'balance': No democratic controls through government, no workplace democracy where the poor can participate.
Here is where I think you are going off the track. Democratic controls can and do exist without the blessings (I'd say meddling) of Government. A shareholders meeting is the closest thing to pure Democracy yet invented outside of the Ballot Inititive. 50.0001% of shares vote and the Board and CEO can go screw themselves, the majority rules and the motion carries.
And why SHOULD the 'poor' participate in a Union? Almost by definition, once you are in the Union you ain't poor anymore and why should some bum on the street be telling the UAW what is in their best interest?
In my world the workers in the "Labor Co-Op" the UAW would be transformed into would own one share each. No common or preferred stock, because it would dilute to outside control within a generation. They would elect a CEO and Board just like any other Corporation and be subject to Sarbanes-Oxley, etc to ensure accounting transparency. New workers would buy their 'Share' through a financing plan as a payroll deduction and upon termination prior to retirement would be required to sell it (or the portion they had bought so far) back with the proceeds rolling into a tax defered retirement plan. But no fractional ownership since, like a home being financed, even though much of it is financed the asset is still owned, and voted, by the worker. Since pensions are a big part of the deal, retired workers would remain shareholders until death, at which point the current value of their share becomes part of their estate, although it's value would probabably have been drained into their retirement benefits through advanced accounting practices.
> ...it really does sadden me that Microsoft is seriously considering this.
:)
Do you really have trouble seeing why they are going in this direction?
Think about this from their point of view. Until the last couple of years Microsoft was an easy company for an investor to get a handle on. It all boiled down to a few bullet points an idiot could understand.
1. Microsoft gets $30-80 on every PC sold in the developed world.
2. PC sales are increasing annually.
3. For it's sales, Microsoft has almost no overhead, it is all profit.
4. Through blatently illegal tying deals competition with Microsoft is impossible so their revenue stream is invulnerable. I.E, Microsoft prints money and you better get on the gravy train today because that stock just goes up, splits and goes up some more.
Starting about the turn of the century all that changed. The sales growth for PCs stabilized and pricing pressure on a PC means that even maintaining that $30-80 per PC is not going to be sustainable. So you play Bill Gates for a minute, just what do you do?
1. Take the money and run. Just not in Bill G or Balmer's personality, they MUST fight Heck, to not fight would be a criminal neglect of their fiduciary responsibility to the other shareholders.
2. Admit defeat and transition from a high growth company to a high dividend utility type company, slashing R&D and just soaking up the monopoly rents, keeping the investors happy with ever increasing dividends. Would be a great idea if it would work. The penguin army won't allow it so it would end up devolving to option 3:
3. Pull an AT&T and admit the market is going away and amortize everything away, assuming the corporation no longer to be 'an ongoing operation.'
4. Find new ways to extract revenue from a stable and still (although at a slower rate) growing userbase. Getting a license fee on a PC once when it is sold isn't viable anymore. We are rapidly heading to a $300 PC & monitor world made worse by an average retention time moving from three years average to five or more. Their only option is annual licensing, where the get a recurring revenue stream from the user or advertising, where they sell the user's attention for money.
Not that I really care, I have been enlisted in the penguin army for ten years now.
> ..but both IE and Netscape used to charge for bookmark placement. What do you think the
> browser wars were about? Why do you think they fought over the market for a product they
> were giving away?
Or for that matter, what do you think is behind the Mozilla Foundation closing Firefox? Yup, they are co-branding the start page, search and bookmarks to raise revenue.
Yes kids, Firefox is Free as in Beer but is NOT Free as in Freedom. Mozilla is a discontinued product, also now 'protected' by Trademarks and restricted. Seamonkey is a Free Software offshoot that might release a 1.0 by year's end.
I know this because legal@mozilla.org has informed me that I must either obtain their permission to license the trademark (meaning it wouldn't be Free Software and would not be permitted to redistributable the source under a DFSG Free Software license) or change the name. I had been waiting for Debian to settle on a new name to avoid name comfiusion but it appears they have opted for the "screw em, they wouldn't dare sue" approach instead. Not having a well funded not-for-profit behind me I plan on changing the name the next time I make a major new release.
> or that trade unions should operate everywhere and replace the CEO and the boardroom.
Sure, I'm all for that..... So long as these 'trade unions' of yours operate on a level playing field without the govenmnent granting them a monopoly and that they replace the CEO by buying sufficient quantities of the stock to be able to elect their guy.
Oh, but that isn't what you meant? You want the government to sieze the assets of the corporations and give control of them to their pet union gangsters? Nah, screw you hippie.
You see, I have a very different view of what a union should be. Instead of the government dictating (by armed force in many cases) one corrupt union thug to have absolute authority over who works in an industry and how much they must be paid, I see a more capitalistic approach as the only moral way to form a union. I see a union as more an outsourcing initiated by the workers instead of management. Normal outsourcing happens when management decides the workers are't worth keeping around compared to what an outsourcing firm is bidding to get the same work done. A union should form when the workers decide they could get more money on the open market for their services if they all quit and formed their own company, which would offer their services at a price in their best interests. Of course without a government monopoly the original company could either reject the union's offer, hire new workers themselves or outsource it to a competing union.
To illustrate with an example, take the UAW. Right now things are confusing and disfunctional. Do autoworkers work for GM or the UAW? Well both and neither. In my world GM would divest the personel and payroll deoartments to the UAW (details of the split would be twitchy, mostly due to the pension disaster) and then contract with the UAW outright for labor. To keep the dealing honest the government would butt the hell out so if the sides couldn't reach agreement GM could sign a contract with a different union or start building a personel dept again and directly hire workers outside the union. The workers still gain the economic advantage of collective bargaining but it would be done in a purely capitalist way.
> I know he calls himself a conservative, but at his core, Bill O'Reilly is a self-important media whore.
Well that too, but politically he is a populist. Populists we know here in Louisiana, where Huey Long ruled long ago and his dark shadow still lurks. They tend to be rather dimwitted with a uncanny animal like cunning ability to latch onto the popular zietgiest.
But he certainly doesn't fit into either of of the major Conservative camps. (btw, those two groups are the libertarian leaning small government free market conservatives and the social/moral values conservatives)
> At least you started with Fox News...fair and balanced my ass.
Of course they aren't balanced. Which, in a sort of paradox, makes them balanced since they now singlehandendly counterbalance the 'progressive' biases of the rest of the nets. Sort of a TV version of Limbaugh's infamous "I don't need equal time, I am equal time!".
Personally I don't mind bias all that much as long as it is in the open and Fox does often admit that while they make an effort to present both sides, they do come at issues with a conservative viewpoint. Neither Bill O'Reilly or Maureen Dowd bother me since both are pretty open about their position advocacy. What pisses me off is when asshats like Dan Rather or Helen Thomas claim with a straight face to be impartial in their reporting when they are as biased as Rush Limbaugh or Al Franken.
Or take the Sunday morning yak yak shows. I don't get Face the Nation over my local CBS station, but both NBC's Meet the Press and ABC's This Week program are hosted by former Democratic Party aparatchiks with no major experience in journalism prior to taking the helm at their respective high prestige posts? Harmless Coincidence? We are supposed to believe both are presenting a 'balanced' view of politics?
> "...an entity otherwise eligible for the press exception would not lose
:)
> its eligibility merely because of a lack of objectivity..."
Well of course not. Otherwise they would have to close down CBS and Fox News right off the bat. And then come back and get CNN, ABC and NBC the next day. On the third day they would shutter the NY Times, the Washington Post and pull the plug on the EIB Network's sat feed.
Of course by day four folks would show up in Washington with their 'Sporting Goods' and voice their 'opinion' about Campaign Finance Reform, reminding Congress that in the end the 1st Amendment, along with the rest are ultimately preserved by a willingness to exercise the 2nd Amendment.
> I'll say it one more time: I'm not a Communist, and nor do I support them.
Sorry to be the one to break the news.... but you are either a Communist who can't even admit it to himself or what ol Joe called a "Useful Idiot." Anybody who could write the next paragraph in your post can only be one or the other.
> As for the rest of it: half the problems and deaths in the last century were caused
> by the US and its meddling in other countries' internal affairs. A large part of the
> Soviet Union's behaviour was caused through its fear of the US and its aggressive
> behaviour.
Yea right. The Soviets stated openly that their longterm goal was total global dominion, and that conversion by the sword was a perfectly acceptable way of attaining that goal. And until Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, we never openly took the offensive against them, nay, all 'right thinking people' believed we were going to end up Communists ourselves, it was only a matter of time. Vietnam and Korea were more battles against Red China than Soviet Russia.
But if you want to go on believing Stalin just had to murder millions of his own defenseless slaves, starting only a couple of years after rising to power mind you, that he had to sign the pact with Hitler, that he and his successors had to keep the gulags humming right up until they fell from power, that China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Cuba, etc ALL had to become Hells on Earth, all because they were terrified of the West; well then I guess you are entitled to live in your own little dream reality. Only don't be too suprised when we who actually know what the hell we are writing about giggle and point at ya.
Bet you believe "Bush Lied, Kids Died!" also.
> Why do American Slashdotters always bring up China?
Because they are the best icon to represent the flaw at the heart of the UN, that a majority of the voting members represent unfree regimes. Which is why nothing important can be entrusted to their misrule. The UN fighting to make the world safe for Freedom? Hah, the UN is fighting to keep it's member dictators on their iron thrones.
> You do realise that it's the UN that manages the international phone system, don't you?
> Does China censor your phone calls?
Which is why the insane tariff systems are never going away. Which why VoIP is likely to be stymied. And yes I suspect China does indeed monitor international calls.
For that matter so do we. We just do it in a sneaky way by having the Brits spy on our calls and 'share the intelligence' and then we return the favor.
> Besides, what happened in places like the Soviet Union isn't representative
> of what Communism can mean.
Communists never tire of telling this whopper, in the hope of pulling off a Big Lie, hopeing thereby to make it possible to suggest trying it again; this time of course they promise to "Do it right."
Listen up kids, Communism, Socialism, Welfare Socialism, Democratic Socialism, National Socialism, etc. Call it whatever you want, tweak the edges however you want it all falls to the same core defect. We buried hundreds of millions of people during the 20th Century in various failed attempts to get it right because Leftists of all stripes just refused to believe it as every attempt at building their Utopias collapsed into one dictatorship after another, concentration camp after concentration camp and mass murder following mass murder.
It all comes down to force. If you want to install a select elite to make everyone else's decisions for them you have to be willing to put the disenters up against a wall or the great unwashed mass of the people, being much wiser in agregate than your elite experts, will simply ignore them, work around them, etc. All Socialist experiments eventually realize this and instead of humbly facing reality; that people not only WANT to be Free but that they actually prosper without the 'enlightened leadership of the Party' and return to a Representive form of Government they always go for the Camps and the AK-47s instead.
And we now know that no government can repress it's People so utterly that they won't eventually reclaim their Liberty. We are still waiting for the last few Communist holdouts to collapse, but History is now clearly against them. China sorta realizes it and is looking for a way out that doesn't involve the transitional chaos Russia and the former Soviet Slave States are going through. Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam are the last ones who even make a big public show of believing Communism still has a future, but we all know they won't make it another twenty years.
> You have the .xxx backwards - it was actually a good idea,
.xxx was the dumbest idea to come down the pike in at least a decade. Two options:
.xxx, 90% of the Internet drops a block on the domain and bye bye open Internet. And of course anything remotely non-child safe would eventually be forced into .xxx. If you have any sort of imagination you can imagine how it would play out in the courts. The Internet becomes a lame Disneyland parody of itself.
.xxx.fr or heck, even porn.fr, go for it!
No.
1. All porn sites would be forced (threat of criminal liability) to relocate to
2. Porn sites don't have to move. In which case I have to ask, Just what was the fscking point again?
Longer term the correct solution is to deprecate ALL of the top level domains and deny renewals. Force everyone into the country tlds and this problem vanishes. If the French want
> ...hence it is producing (especially when the battery is full) more power than is
:)
> used, but still causing the same amount of load on the engine.
Oh God, what are they teaching kids in school these days. No. The more electrical load on an alternator the more force is required to drive it.
When a high load device, such as a high torque motor, starts up a generator will noticably bog down for a moment and the engine will rev to compensate. Trust me on this, I'm in Southwest Louisiana, Rita taught us a thing or two about generators.
Same thing on a rig with one of these puppies. If it is going to generate non-trivial amounts of hydrogen it is going to require a non-trivial quantity of energy in the form of electrical current and an alternator driven by an internal combustion engine isn't very efficient. Most use simple shunt regulators for heaven's sake! That means the power you get from burning the hydrogen is a lot less than what went into seperating it from water. So unless it makes the diesel burn a LOT better it won't be paying its way.
It will make the engine run 'greener' though, which is what this is likely mostly about.
> This pdf file might be helpful (or search for it on google to see the html version).
Yes, very helpful. Note that the test appears to have been made WITHOUT the alternator being loaded with the hydrogen extraction. When something sounds too good to be true, always look for what they skate around. In this case the report discusses where the manufacturer claims to obtain their hydrogen but by implication that means they didn't actually have one on hand, so they didn't have one connected to the electrical system.
So I'd say snake oil barring a more honest test. Yes it might provide some green benefits, but as for fuel savings, bull. And anyway, even if we take them at their word it isn't anything to write home about. Run the numbers people. Up to $14,000 for the initial investment for at best a 10% fuel savings? And I suspect there is some installation expenses as well. So lets round the numbers and say $15,000 to save 10%. Assume diesel averages $2.75 (It is back down to levels way under that here) for the next couple of years. That means until you save 5,454 gallons you aren't ahead. Even for a big rig that translates to a LOT of hours of operation. And that assumes no additional expenses to maintain either the device or additional wear on the engine from running it hotter.
None of this matters. The RIAA is trying to impose an outdated idea on a population too numerous and clever to stand for it. I don't particularly like the idea of warez (and that IS what 95% of P2P traffic is) as a Free Software zealot, but we passed a tipping point years ago. The average person today (especially among the 30 population) no longer considers swapping files to be immoral.
Eventually the law will catch up to practice, but until it does the [RM]PAA will continue to drive it underground. I predict they will be increasingly successful at driving it underground and totally ineffectual in achieving their goal of stopping it from occuring. Consider: twenty years ago the local 'computer clubs' were essentially nothing more than groups of folks bringing their computers together for the purpose of trading vast quantities of software. Or put bluntly, as soon as the commom man was given a printing press he set forth printing with a vengence.
RMS was again spot on. Copyright law made sense when it was regulating the select few wealthy enough to own a printing press because THEY could agree it was in their longterm best interest. Now that everyone has one the game has changed and either the law changes regarding copyright or the law changes to eliminate our representive form of government because longterm, the government cannot continue to have the consent of the governed and keep locking vast numbers of registered voters.
And while twenty years ago it was only software being copies, technology has marched ever onward and there will never agian be a seperation between computer software, music and video. And those old swapmeets show the logical end path of this game.
In the olden days you had a few 'yo ho ho pirates' in every town that essentially had EVERYTHING. We will soon see affordable storage systems to make that sort of thing possible with music, with video only a few years later. Imagine a world when the top level pirates have a couple of portable USB drives with every song that charted on Billboard's charts since they began, trading it out in every town, on every college campus, etc. in perfect flac format or 320Kbps mp3. In exchange they get every NEW song that is released so that their collection stays complete. (These obsessive compulsive collectors gotta have em all after all and THEY won't pay for a CD, hence they trade.) For the RIAA, the RIAA's days will become numbered. Sure they can try to sting a few of them, but it won't work in the end. And remember, a generation or two in drive storage later the same thing happens to video. The top level traders will have EVERY hollywood release, every episode of every telivision show, etc. Then it is the MPAA's turn to know real fear.
The end game comes as storage continues it's increase. To the point where EVERYONE can afford an iPod large enough to hold essentially everything. Then some wit will release a sync program. So that every time you get to know someone well enough to figure they ain't a Fed you will 'sync' your media collection, each of you getting what the other has, replacing lower quality rips with higher quality, etc. Then it IS over.
What that world looks like, where copyright has been totally rendered comic, I can't really imagine. But it IS coming and we had better be thinking about ways to survive the whirlwind of change it will bring with it because there is only one other option. That would be the dark distopia of DRM and pay for play that THEY have planned for us.
Seriously, the article is a bad joke propagated from the same Asshat "IP" pimps who represented Digital Convergence in their insane attempts to redefine 'innovation' to include XOR and MIME64 encoding in the CueCat: fiasco. Still have their hilariously vague Cease and Desist letter. I told em to either FOAD or actually file charges. At least they were bright enough to fold instead of call because I wasn't bluffing.
Sorry, no patent granted in 1995 could possibly be relevent. The NES itself would be more than sufficent prior art to invalidate it should they try to claim it applies to any of it's technology.
And maybe I'm wrong, but didn't Atari WIN vs Nintendo over their attempts to use a dependence of a trademarked phrase in their carts to outlaw 3rd party titles? I know history is being rewritten a lot lately so maybe I need to get the latest point revision installed into my brain or something.
They were correct though that regardless of right, wrong, legal or illegal that Nintendo would likely sue any small outfit attempting a clone into oblivion. And since I don't see enough profit to interest a larger one that pretty much wraps it up for clones.
Ok, maybe I'm just daft. But am I the only one who is looking at this per title 'emulation file' and thinking it isn't anything of the sort? How much do you want to bet they plan to emulate the non-critical code, which is possible with the hardware available, but have that emulator somehow merge in custom recompiled/ported code for the time critical bits? Because face it folks, the CPU cycles available to them just ain't there to fully emulate a P733 in software. If so you can pretty much forget any titles from companies that have managed to get on Microsoft's shit list since they released. And any that pushed the hardware to the limit but weren't big financial successes. Sure they would invest whatever effort were required to get Halo running, even if it were basically recompiling the whole set of binaries, but how much effort will go into obscure games?
And of course any new X-Box titles will ship with any needed rebuilt bits for X-Box 360.
All in all, if they get the list of supported titles up a lot more AND these games actually work close to the same their decision to go with a totally new hardware platform will be vindicated. But that is a lot of IF.
What is it with this EVERYTHING on the Internet is a webpage. The browser is the only client these days outside IM and P2P warez trading for 95% of users. And even though Javascript was never intended for 'real' programming it is the only language all browsers implement so it is what everyone is forced to use. It wasn't supposed to be this way and it doesn't have to BE this way.
If nothing else, if we want to download clients and run them in the browser, having them talk to a backend server for the data, why not get a more appropriate language? Java would be perfect if Sun weren't a bunch of asshats, but just because it won't ever be truly Free or cross platform is no reason to reject other candidates. Tcl/Tk has had a fully sandboxed browser plugin for a decade and it is 100% Free Software. It runs on every known platform where IE or Mozilla runs and could be ported anywhere else needed. I'm sure it isn't the only one. Or do we continue shoehorning everything into html?
> He's basically fed up with format change, and he's ticked off that there are things he
> thinks he ought to be able to do with the new format (copy it freely to every digital
> device) that he can't do.
No, it isn't the format change. We all know that is unavoidable. This is different. This is THEM assuming total control. In the past, all media was essentially free. You could loan it to a friend, make a working copy (dump an LP to tape for the road, etc) make mix tapes, etc. You couldn't make and sell copies, not because of a technoligical restriction but simply because, well it is illegal. Not anymore. They want the right to dictate where and how you will play it, how long you can play it and eventually will insist on the right to charge you by the play. Unless we say NO, right now.