Good point; I wonder how the burden of proof would actually fall?
However, some here have pointed out that there is additional coded info being inserted (and which this program may not remove all of). I wonder if some of those are user-ID codes from some internal Apple database? If so they would be tougher to fake. Then the RIAA (or the defense) could always subpeona Apple to verify the codes against their database entry for the accused.
Ahh, the guy who caused me to "forget" how to swallow, just in time for a visit with my super-cook aunt:)
I watched an episode where he demonstrated that swallowing is more sophisticated than just throwing food down your throat. I subsequently tried to "observe" my own swallow reflex; but, being a true reflex action, conscious observation disrupted the whole process. Then I started to get scared that I might swallow wrong and choke myself; from there, the self-consciousness made it impossible to swallow properly, and I could only (literally) choke down a few swallows of food in a sitting.
Everyone wondered why I wasn't chowing down as usual, but it wasn't until the end of the trip that I admitted what was going on. Eventually, of course, I got over it, and I can now shovel food down my throat with the best of them:) However, I still have trouble swallowing pills, or chugging a beer, because I re-learned the swallow reflex in a way that prevented too much food going down at once.
Nonetheless, I think Mr. Wizard's departure is well worth noting. A toast to Mr Wizard!:-)
Exactly, it's all about timing. If Pirates I/II had come out on Blu-Ray at another time, the sales figures wouldn't have been as high. As it is, it's a direct tie-in to the new installment.
Sounds like they've already done it. There is some value there, mostly for anti-social bums like me:) I like the flexibility and expansive world of MMOs, but I hate the people and I hate logging on. And at some level, I like the idea that my character will become "somebody" in the game world, even if it doesn't start out that way. The Elder Scrolls games fit me almost perfectly...
The nose-smilie:-) is superior in oddly-formatted web-forums because it's less susceptible to font-damage. Some fonts/formats shove the colon and parenthesis too close together, or make the latter too large; it's then easy to miss the colon altogether and mistake the whole thing for a misplaced end-parenthesis. (OTOH, the simpler smilie can be more subtle for same reason:)
Actually LEDs are less efficient than most fluorescents for a given amount of light output. Unless the current backlights are unusually inefficient, the LEDs may actually hinder battery life.
In non-technical terms, it's like claiming that your house is always unlocked, thus any evidence they ever find there should never be admissible, since anybody could have put it there. And as I said above, the judge didn't go for it, and rightfully so IMO. So this isn't "police look for open access points, and go fishing wherever they find one" but rather "an open access point doesn't get you out of finding DVDs of illegal material in your house."
This is an interesting point, since he had a roommate, and he apparently also claimed that police should have included his roommate's room in the search as well. I think the idea was to cast doubt based on the fact that the roommate could have decided to stash some of his illegal stuff in this guy's room (while leaving other traces in his own room). Obviously this is doubtful, but it is possible.
I'm sure there must be case law on the roommate scenario, since it probably comes up often in drug cases. Does anyone know what the precedents are?
It depends. "Soccer moms" and cute girls will get a warning and a smile; other "normal" people will get a ticket; but "suspicious" looking individuals (like rock musicians) will get the full treatment, and most don't know their rights well enough to avoid a search. And if they really want you, they can always lie and make up an excuse to search...
Doh! Just submitted a dupe post to this one. Basically this happened to me. I fell and hurt my hand while on vacation, and when I got back I found that my typing "stance" had changed. Now my pinkie hovers over the CapsLock instead of the A key, and if I pull it in then the ring finger is pushed out of alignment... I'm actually typing fairly normally now, but there's no way I could have typed "normally" on that first day back, and even now I'm sure my pattern has changed.
Besides the obvious mood changes, etc. There's also the issue of injury.
I fell and hurt my hand while in Germany. When I got back, I sat down to work and tried to type, and I found that my pinkie was hovering over the CapsLock key?! Despite having no broken bones (according to the doc) I somehow managed to mess up my hand such that I can't hold my last two fingers close together anymore. As a result my 'natural' typing stance now puts the pinkie over the shift/Lock/Tab column instead of ZAQ; and if I pull that finger in to hit the correct key, then my ring finger is pushed slightly out of alignment with *its* column, etc. Needless to say, my typing pattern has changed. I'm actually back up to speed, but I'm certain there's a delay in hitting the A key vs. how I typed before.
Any biometric system should have a fallback, just in case something like this happens. And you'd better be darn sure that you can remember the answers to those "security questions", even several years after you set them up.
It's the lack of selectivity that makes it seem natural, or at least something sensed using the common senses. Ok, you can drive the bees off with cell radiation, I can buy that. But the idea that *every* natural predator, scavenger, and parasite of bees happens to be sensitive to the same specific radiation?! Come on, what are the odds!
OTOH, something like a natural poison that's been around a long time could be detected by all those natural enemies. Even an "unnatural" chemical could be detectable simply as a bad smell. But EM radiation in that band is just not something that every animal species is going to detect.
Mod parent up --this is the reason why AMD/ATI is doing this. Although if I understand things correctly, it's technically M$ itself approving DRM-compliant designs/drivers. I actually think that the studios would easier to please, if only because they don't know enough about the technologies involved to see the obvious loopholes. M$ is likely to be more draconian than the **AA themselves would be, at least at first.
The viewing distance is all-important in determining how much resolution you can actually distinguish. And of course viewing angle affects the sense of immersion. Put the two together and you find that _only_ 1080i/p resolutions produce sufficient detail at the viewing angle recommended for movie viewing. The angle in question is 30deg, as defined by the SMPTE. (The THX standard actually requires a wider angle and thus a higher resolution, which no current commercial home format can meet.)
Yeah, I was just going to point out a bit of wisdom my old boss gave me: Racist feelings in a particular area always focus on the largest (or most visible) minority in that area. Which in the case of Scotland would obviously be the English. Other minorities usually get off easy by comparison, not counting the hard-core bigots of course.
Is there such a thing as a reverse class-action suit? 'Cause if they're going to sue M$ for this, then they need to include the developers of every PC game ever made!
Everyone knows that trying to play a game on the minimum hardware is an excercise in frustration and futility. You need at least the recommended specs to run the game decently in most cases.
Even more to the point, modern games turn off resource-intensive features when running on older PCs; and since much of the hype around the latest FPS is centered on the advanced (read: resource-intensive) graphics, anyone playing "Half-Quake of Doom 37" on an older PC is missing much of the advertised experience. Micro$oft is simply copying the 3D game developers' design/business model, just as they copied the 3D idea itself.
I can hear the difference clearly on certain tracks, at least with home-ripped CDs. For one thing, the iTunes AAC encoder seems to have quality issues. However, the same tracks from the iTunes Store sound much better, maybe even better than the 320k LAME MP3s I ripped w/ EAC?!
Keep in mind that all of the countries that are listed above the US are much smaller than the US, with higher population densities. Thus it's easier to reach high broadband penetration rates in those countries.
I may be wrong, but I think the idea is that both twins are chimeras of the same two sets of paternal genes, and the same maternal genes. So if the two gene-sets can co-exist within the one twin, then they should also be viable when transferred to the other twin (who already has those same two gene-sets). The only reason the twins are not considered completely identical is that the gene-sets filled different niches within their respective bodies.
Chances are that you'll never actually have to use assembler in your professional life. However, learning one of the simpler assembly languages (eg. the 68k processor family) provides insight into the inner working of the processor. And that in turn can help in understanding programming language features, OS/driver code, etc. For instance, I never really understood C pointers until I learned assembler.
If you only ever plan to play in the highly abstracted realms of Java/Perl/Basic, then you could probably get by without it. But if you think you might ever deal with C (or even C++), any amount of embedded programming, or situations where processor efficiency is crucial, then you really should familiarize yourself with assembler.
There are two kinds of "Messy": those who know where everything is, and those who don't.
For some people, the "mess" is actually a highly efficient personal organizing system. These people have huge stacks of papers in seemingly random locations, but they know exactly where a particular document is within those stacks and piles. If someone were to go in and "organize" their office, they would be completely lost and their productivity would suffer (as described in the article).
Then there are other people (like me) who are just plain messy:) Once I put a piece of paper down, I don't have a clue where where I left it. When I do have retrieve something, I have to search through the stack(s). OTOH, in my job I find that I rarely have to do that, especially since most important documents are stored electronically anyway. Of course the electronic documents aren't organized that much better, but search tools help me find things quickly enough, given a rough starting point.
Yours is a perfect example of the hidden cost here: disposal of toxic materials. CFLs contain mercury, and to dispose of them *safely* costs money. Most people just chuck them in the garbage, but you're supposed to take them to special CFL disposal centers.
The cost of proper disposal is *not* currently included in the purchase price. Instead, you pay for it in taxes, assuming that your local government even bothers to run a disposal program (highly unlikely). More likely the next generation will pay it in the form of landfill cleanup to get rid of all the improperly disposed-of mercury.
I suspect the same is true for those nickel(-cadmium?) batteries in the Prius. The price you pay for operating the Prius is not the same as the total *societal* cost.
Good point; I wonder how the burden of proof would actually fall?
However, some here have pointed out that there is additional coded info being inserted (and which this program may not remove all of). I wonder if some of those are user-ID codes from some internal Apple database? If so they would be tougher to fake. Then the RIAA (or the defense) could always subpeona Apple to verify the codes against their database entry for the accused.
Ahh, the guy who caused me to "forget" how to swallow, just in time for a visit with my super-cook aunt :)
:) However, I still have trouble swallowing pills, or chugging a beer, because I re-learned the swallow reflex in a way that prevented too much food going down at once.
:-)
I watched an episode where he demonstrated that swallowing is more sophisticated than just throwing food down your throat. I subsequently tried to "observe" my own swallow reflex; but, being a true reflex action, conscious observation disrupted the whole process. Then I started to get scared that I might swallow wrong and choke myself; from there, the self-consciousness made it impossible to swallow properly, and I could only (literally) choke down a few swallows of food in a sitting.
Everyone wondered why I wasn't chowing down as usual, but it wasn't until the end of the trip that I admitted what was going on. Eventually, of course, I got over it, and I can now shovel food down my throat with the best of them
Nonetheless, I think Mr. Wizard's departure is well worth noting. A toast to Mr Wizard!
Exactly, it's all about timing. If Pirates I/II had come out on Blu-Ray at another time, the sales figures wouldn't have been as high. As it is, it's a direct tie-in to the new installment.
Sounds like they've already done it. There is some value there, mostly for anti-social bums like me :) I like the flexibility and expansive world of MMOs, but I hate the people and I hate logging on. And at some level, I like the idea that my character will become "somebody" in the game world, even if it doesn't start out that way. The Elder Scrolls games fit me almost perfectly...
The nose-smilie :-) is superior in oddly-formatted web-forums because it's less susceptible to font-damage. Some fonts/formats shove the colon and parenthesis too close together, or make the latter too large; it's then easy to miss the colon altogether and mistake the whole thing for a misplaced end-parenthesis. (OTOH, the simpler smilie can be more subtle for same reason :)
I've always been a slow reader,
and what they're describing is a big part of my problem.
When I read,
I can only focus on two or three words at a time,
and I have to scan across to read a whole line.
I've always been amazed
at people who claim that they can read a whole line at a time
without scanning,
even if it's just a narrow newspaper column.
And the succession of undifferentiated lines in standard block text
makes it easy to lose one's place and have to back up a line.
So this idea makes a lot of sense to me.
Too bad it's so inefficient in terms of space.
But see, wasn't this easier?
Actually LEDs are less efficient than most fluorescents for a given amount of light output. Unless the current backlights are unusually inefficient, the LEDs may actually hinder battery life.
I'm sure there must be case law on the roommate scenario, since it probably comes up often in drug cases. Does anyone know what the precedents are?
It depends. "Soccer moms" and cute girls will get a warning and a smile; other "normal" people will get a ticket; but "suspicious" looking individuals (like rock musicians) will get the full treatment, and most don't know their rights well enough to avoid a search. And if they really want you, they can always lie and make up an excuse to search...
IIRC, Julius Caesar was elected Consul, and later "elected" dictator-for-life as well. Look how that turned out.
Doh! Just submitted a dupe post to this one. Basically this happened to me. I fell and hurt my hand while on vacation, and when I got back I found that my typing "stance" had changed. Now my pinkie hovers over the CapsLock instead of the A key, and if I pull it in then the ring finger is pushed out of alignment... I'm actually typing fairly normally now, but there's no way I could have typed "normally" on that first day back, and even now I'm sure my pattern has changed.
Besides the obvious mood changes, etc. There's also the issue of injury.
I fell and hurt my hand while in Germany. When I got back, I sat down to work and tried to type, and I found that my pinkie was hovering over the CapsLock key?! Despite having no broken bones (according to the doc) I somehow managed to mess up my hand such that I can't hold my last two fingers close together anymore. As a result my 'natural' typing stance now puts the pinkie over the shift/Lock/Tab column instead of ZAQ; and if I pull that finger in to hit the correct key, then my ring finger is pushed slightly out of alignment with *its* column, etc. Needless to say, my typing pattern has changed. I'm actually back up to speed, but I'm certain there's a delay in hitting the A key vs. how I typed before.
Any biometric system should have a fallback, just in case something like this happens. And you'd better be darn sure that you can remember the answers to those "security questions", even several years after you set them up.
Now Micro$oft knows that there are exactly 244 bootleg-software manufacturers in China!
Well, 243, plus that one idiot who actually bought a copy to use...
It's the lack of selectivity that makes it seem natural, or at least something sensed using the common senses. Ok, you can drive the bees off with cell radiation, I can buy that. But the idea that *every* natural predator, scavenger, and parasite of bees happens to be sensitive to the same specific radiation?! Come on, what are the odds!
OTOH, something like a natural poison that's been around a long time could be detected by all those natural enemies. Even an "unnatural" chemical could be detectable simply as a bad smell. But EM radiation in that band is just not something that every animal species is going to detect.
Mod parent up --this is the reason why AMD/ATI is doing this. Although if I understand things correctly, it's technically M$ itself approving DRM-compliant designs/drivers. I actually think that the studios would easier to please, if only because they don't know enough about the technologies involved to see the obvious loopholes. M$ is likely to be more draconian than the **AA themselves would be, at least at first.
US response to China's widespread human rights violations, sweatshop labor conditions, and suppression of dissent: *chirp* *chirp*
US response to China's half-hearted enforcement of US Big Media copyrights: OMG! WTF?!! We must complain and protest most vigorously!!!111oneone!
The viewing distance is all-important in determining how much resolution you can actually distinguish. And of course viewing angle affects the sense of immersion. Put the two together and you find that _only_ 1080i/p resolutions produce sufficient detail at the viewing angle recommended for movie viewing. The angle in question is 30deg, as defined by the SMPTE. (The THX standard actually requires a wider angle and thus a higher resolution, which no current commercial home format can meet.)
Here's a link to a full analysis complete with graphs of screen size vs. optimal viewing distance: http://www.surrealsystemsonline.com/SVTVSize.htm
Yeah, I was just going to point out a bit of wisdom my old boss gave me: Racist feelings in a particular area always focus on the largest (or most visible) minority in that area. Which in the case of Scotland would obviously be the English. Other minorities usually get off easy by comparison, not counting the hard-core bigots of course.
Is there such a thing as a reverse class-action suit? 'Cause if they're going to sue M$ for this, then they need to include the developers of every PC game ever made!
Everyone knows that trying to play a game on the minimum hardware is an excercise in frustration and futility. You need at least the recommended specs to run the game decently in most cases.
Even more to the point, modern games turn off resource-intensive features when running on older PCs; and since much of the hype around the latest FPS is centered on the advanced (read: resource-intensive) graphics, anyone playing "Half-Quake of Doom 37" on an older PC is missing much of the advertised experience. Micro$oft is simply copying the 3D game developers' design/business model, just as they copied the 3D idea itself.
I can hear the difference clearly on certain tracks, at least with home-ripped CDs. For one thing, the iTunes AAC encoder seems to have quality issues. However, the same tracks from the iTunes Store sound much better, maybe even better than the 320k LAME MP3s I ripped w/ EAC?!
Keep in mind that all of the countries that are listed above the US are much smaller than the US, with higher population densities. Thus it's easier to reach high broadband penetration rates in those countries.
I may be wrong, but I think the idea is that both twins are chimeras of the same two sets of paternal genes, and the same maternal genes. So if the two gene-sets can co-exist within the one twin, then they should also be viable when transferred to the other twin (who already has those same two gene-sets). The only reason the twins are not considered completely identical is that the gene-sets filled different niches within their respective bodies.
Chances are that you'll never actually have to use assembler in your professional life. However, learning one of the simpler assembly languages (eg. the 68k processor family) provides insight into the inner working of the processor. And that in turn can help in understanding programming language features, OS/driver code, etc. For instance, I never really understood C pointers until I learned assembler.
If you only ever plan to play in the highly abstracted realms of Java/Perl/Basic, then you could probably get by without it. But if you think you might ever deal with C (or even C++), any amount of embedded programming, or situations where processor efficiency is crucial, then you really should familiarize yourself with assembler.
There are two kinds of "Messy": those who know where everything is, and those who don't.
:) Once I put a piece of paper down, I don't have a clue where where I left it. When I do have retrieve something, I have to search through the stack(s). OTOH, in my job I find that I rarely have to do that, especially since most important documents are stored electronically anyway. Of course the electronic documents aren't organized that much better, but search tools help me find things quickly enough, given a rough starting point.
For some people, the "mess" is actually a highly efficient personal organizing system. These people have huge stacks of papers in seemingly random locations, but they know exactly where a particular document is within those stacks and piles. If someone were to go in and "organize" their office, they would be completely lost and their productivity would suffer (as described in the article).
Then there are other people (like me) who are just plain messy
Yours is a perfect example of the hidden cost here: disposal of toxic materials. CFLs contain mercury, and to dispose of them *safely* costs money. Most people just chuck them in the garbage, but you're supposed to take them to special CFL disposal centers.
The cost of proper disposal is *not* currently included in the purchase price. Instead, you pay for it in taxes, assuming that your local government even bothers to run a disposal program (highly unlikely). More likely the next generation will pay it in the form of landfill cleanup to get rid of all the improperly disposed-of mercury.
I suspect the same is true for those nickel(-cadmium?) batteries in the Prius. The price you pay for operating the Prius is not the same as the total *societal* cost.