That fellow (Jeff Bauman) who lost both legs below the knee, the one whose femoral artery is being pinched shut by Carlos Arredondo as he's being wheeled away from the incident, identified his attacker.
Okay, but then why the hell was he still standing there?
If some guy dropped a backpack near me and walked away, I would call as much attention to it as possible and get the hell out of there.
"Hey dude! You left your backpack here!" -- and if he doesn't respond, you start telling everyone else around you. 'That guy just dropped his bag here and walked away."
I get not wanting to make waves or cause confrontation. But you ignore hinky shit at your own peril.
I grow plants indoors. I have found that a mix of big-box-store available 6500k and 4500k CFLs work quite well
Does anybody have any experience growing plants under LEDs? Does it work?
Yes. LEDs work just as well as CFLs. Better in some ways, because the low heat of LEDs means you can get them much closer to the plants. You can effectively surround a plant with flexible LED strips for maximum coverage. And of course they are more efficient, lumens per watt.
They are also wickedly expensive. I've grown lettuce, tomatoes, quinoa, and peppers under LED as supplemental light in a sunny window, and the setup I used was close to $150. Roughly the equivalent of 60W CFL, but running at 20W. Cost-wise, you're still better off with CFL unless heat is an issue.
The "ugly and harsh light" is described in the industry as Color Temperature. I'm not sure if it is a requirement to include but most bulbs come with a Color Rendering Index (CRI) rating. It's a scale from 0-100 (100 being a reference incandescent bulb) to rate the Color Temperature of a bulb.
CRI doesn't measure color temperature; it's an indirect measure of the fullness of the spectrum given off by the bulb.
Color temperature tells you how reddish or bluish the light is -- does it look more like incandescent light (reddish) or daylight (bluish)?
CRI tells you how well the light given off by the bulb will allow you to see a range of colors. A CRI of 100 means perfect color fidelity. A CRI of under 90 or so and you will notice that some colors don't look right, because the bulb has dark bands in its spectrum. The CRI measuring process takes color temperature into account -- both warm white and cool white bulbs can have similarly high CRI scores.
For an example of extremely poor CRI, see low pressure sodium bulbs that used to be used a security and parking lot lights. Everything illuminated by them -- cars, clothing, faces -- looks either yellow, black, or dark purple.
The judge said that the viewers were members of the public, therefore when Zediva played a DVD for a subscriber it was a "public performance". Ridiculous.
So if my apartment building (a private residence) wanted to do the same thing - shared DVD jukebox in the basement - it would be just fine. Woo hoo!
Could they not just host overseas and then re"broadcast" back to the US? Any program there are numerous sites transmitting a live feed of from overseas. I always wondered about the legality of that since they are not part of the US copyright system.
They would need bigger antennas, wouldn't they?
Though I guess they could put a boat in international waters off the coast of NYC and stream whatever signal they could pick up.
After a bit of black magics (I used a search engine. MAGIC!) It's Chicken with cheese.
Show your work.
Fried chicken cutlet with cheese is pictured next to some stories about the Spicy With, but where do you see the sandwich described in detail? What condiments are on it? Etc.
Oh man, if only there was some sort of ARTICLE ABOUT THE TOPIC IN QUESTION, LINKED FROM THE BRIEF SUMMARY.
Having graduated from Betaspring, Crunchbutton replicated its Yale model by setting up a delivery service for Brown students to order the popular “Spicy With” sandwich from Jo’s, a campus eatery operated by Brown Dining Services.
Now insurance companies can figure out who will get it, so they can make sure they don't get stuck with you.
Actually, I think most health insurance companies would consider someone who is set to develop Alzheimer's in six years a pretty good risk. They are likely to be dead within 10 years. There aren't any particularly effective medications, and no expensive medical procedures associated with the disease. There is the cost of placement in a nursing home during the final stages, but that's about it.
The "digital" on the package is marketing for the uninformed. Like "color" used to be.
Dang! I'd forgotten all about that -- they used to sell color TV antennas at a higher price, and with fancier packaging. And of course there was no difference between those and the "normal" rooftop antennas that everyone had been using for decades.
This explains why reception on my grandparent's TV was still poor, despite the new color antenna they put up. It was the same as the old one!
It's stated everywhere across Google+ that profiles are for humans only and you may NOT create profiles for organisations, clubs, companies, bands and alike. Those should be represented by a Google+ PAGE, not a Google+ PROFILE.
It's not rocket science. At least if you can recogize the difference between two words, even if they start woth the same letter.
And that policy is bullshit, because that not always how the real world works. Shouldn't your mass-market social software try to appeal to the broadest range of use cases, rather than forcing a narrow view of the world?
Organizations, people, and things--collectively: entities--should be able to create both pages and profiles as they see fit. An organization or thing has just as much right to an identity as a person does, if they choose to express their identity in that way. Sometimes an organization wants to be represented as having a voice, a la the OP's info@org email address. If they send email to their followers as info@, then why can't they Google+ post to their followers in the same voice?
The classic example of this is a celebrity account. Do you really think that Jessica Simpson's profile is written by an individual? It is almost certainly a collective endeavor, and yet she gets a profile not a page.
It's their service, they can make whatever policies they want. But if they aren't liberal about identities then people are going to complain, and rightly so.
with a nice little carbon tax with a "starter" rate of say $5 per gallon of gas imposed. It would kill two birds with one stone:
1. Put the brakes on the rate of expansion of fossil fuel use and GHG emissions growth
2. Start making a dent in the US deficit and debt
But of course, being a rational, sensible, simple, and effective policy, this would naturally be political suicide.
Political suicide is trying to change, on anything shorter than a generational scale, the main problem:
Cheap land plus cheap oil plus a service-oriented economy made it a no-brainer (literally!) for Americans to develop, build, and purchase homes and offices in suburbs and exurbs.
Factories need to be next to rivers and railroads; cubicle farms and big-box retail do not. Universal automobile ownership allowed us to trade the immediate problems of population density for the deferred problems of decentralization and infrastructure maintenance. Who wouldn't want to leave a crowded apartment building for a single-family home with room for a dog and a garden, all other things being equal?
Two or more generations of Americans now see the car and the suburban experience as their birthright. You're not going to change that with a tax on gas, you're just going to piss them all off and lose the next election. Better to create incentives for housing and business development that is near reliable mass transit or, better yet, doesn't require any use of transit to get between home, work, and local businesses.
It's no big deal. If some monopolist messed around with a single platform it would be easy to replace html with an ad hoc markup language, make a browser for that and ignore all previous standards. I'm not joking. There is really nothing magic about document markup and "mobile" application frameworks, almost any undergraduate CS student could come up with something better than what we have now, and an alternative WWW would be adopted very swifty if the old one for some reason became inconvenient to most users.
I was just thinking the same thing the other day while reading the post from a guy who wants to be a web developer complaining that his Comp-Sci curriculum isn't web focused. As if the World Wide Web was the pinnacle of human communications.
People forget how quickly The Internet because The Web -- basically about 5 years. It was a lot smaller then, but our tools and methods were primitive compared to now.
HTML/CSS/JavaScript over HTTP(S) is the de-facto standard because it can be coerced into working well enough, and no one entity controls it. Come back in 20 years and we could all be using, and coding for, something else entirely. The HTTPS part, in particular, is looking increasingly unsteady on its pins.
I have no idea how you'd get a sheet of glass that had an accordion fold to it, but that would (in theory) allow you to get more non-parallelism within the same total package width.
It's like waking up in a crappy mirror universe where all the work that we have done on security in the past 10 years is out the window, because unbeknownst to anyone but the browser vendors, our web browsers will go ahead and execute code embedded in non-executable mimetypes.
Would it have been so hard to limit JavaScript execution to the handful of content types where it is supposed to be found? Apparently. So now images are Turing-complete, and all your cookies can be lifted by someone who puts <script src="http://private.com/users/you/profile.jpg"></script> in a page you visit.
Is this a case where corporate personhood is a good thing?
Does this mean what you should do is fire up a trust and have the trust purchase all the media? Then the trust lives on (and is ownership transfers or was likely already shared with your intended recipient(s)).
Regardless of the mechanism (another poster pointed out that Blind Trust isn't the right way) this idea deserves some serious consideration.
It would seem that one of the benefits of a family corporation or some other legal entity with "personhood" rights would be the perfect licensee of digital media, because then the media could be legally shared amongst all the members of that entity, survive individual life spans, etc.
To date, none of the services I've seen have any concept that the purchaser might not be a biological, individual human. What happens when someone purchases Kindle books on a corporate credit card? Who do they "belong" to? Yes, there is just one license, but that license could be used by anyone in the company. There must be case law about corporate ownership of licenses, but does it apply to licenses intended for individual use?
To complicate matters, in the US we generally have a notion that anything that we license as individuals can be shared with our immediate family unless there is some active countermeasure against such sharing (and even then, what judge would convict me for stripping DRM to share an ebook with my wife?) It's utterly ridiculous to imply that a parent can't share tracks that she purchased with her child, for the child's personal use. And if the parent should die? Show me the court that would deny an orphan's access to music purchased by a dead parent.
Q) How many Androids does it take to fly a satellite?
A) Two. One to fly the satellite, and the other to power the robotic finger that dismisses the "Battery Full" notification and relaunch the flight control app whenever the solar panels are temporarily obscured by a shadow.
Not really a joke, but based on my experience using an Android phone as a 24x7 webcam. Every time there is a power glitch, the "Battery Full" notice takes over the screen and foobars the IP Webcam app. The OS just wasn't designed for standalone operation, big surprise.
I suppose NASA will use their own distro that dispenses with things like touch screen control and notifications and such.
Note to criminals: stop using email, SMS, and phones to communicate. Switch to video.
You think they're running out of storage now, wait until they get an investigation with several hundred hours of FaceTime video as primary evidence. In addition to storing it, they'll need to log the footage and have all the audio transcribed.
Before you condemn this measure, please think it through.
This is, fairly obviously, an attempt to create a situation whereby any alien intelligence that finds our noisy little planet will arrive here already indebted to intellectual property holders, and be forced to trade their own intellectual property in order to satisfy the debt.
Sure, its a short-term loss for freedom of expression. But imagine our collective satisfaction when we discover the massive amount of licensing fees racked up by alien scientists and exologists as they traded our broadcast signals around prior to visiting. We'll start off with a positive balance of trade, and that's a big win!
Note to humanity: the demand for licensing fees should be hand-delivered by the lawyers who thought up this genius scheme.
The idea is to control the message by putting your best face(s) forward. PR agents dress in power suits and have the good hair, white teeth, and classy bling, which allows journalists to take them seriously and/or put them on camera. They tend to be good at writing/videoing releases/posts/tweets/virals that distract from anything negative that other people are saying, without giving any actual information or committing to a course of action (since that's Marketing's job). Most people tend to believe professional message crafters who look confident and successful over the random complaints and whining of people who are obviously victims and losers.
And if they don't, then you use the fallback plan: vicious attack lawyers.
SpaceX I've heard of, and Boeing of course, but Sierra Nevada Corporation?
I see that they're an extremely successful Federal contractor for electronic systems, and that they're developing parts for Scaled Composites. But their website is a bit short on company history. Where did the Ozmens come from? What was SNC doing before they took over in 1994? It seems to be a real success story, but is it really? Or are they just very, very good at getting government contracts?
I'm amazed by how many people, who would otherwise completely ignore an unsolicited email from a random person, will suddenly start to tremble if the email sounds like it comes from a lawyer. I guess the endless stories of patent trolls and copyright suits have got people pretty scared.
Unless the demand comes in a registered letter to my home or business address, it goes in the spam folder where it belongs.
For goodness sake, if you're going to try to extort thousands of dollars from me, at least have the courtesy to fork out for some stationery and a postage stamp, you know?
This actually turns out to be a real benefit for me. I ripped hundreds of albums over ten years ago into 96 and 128 bit mp3's, and lately I've been nagging myself to drag them out and re-rip them to a better sounding rate. This just did it all for me and I'm downloading the upgraded files now.
Thanks Amazon! You're the best! Apple wants me to pay for this, you gave it to me for freee.
That's true as long as you don't mind Amazon's watermarks and intentional glitches in your music.
I strongly suspect (though I have no proof) that the digital files that Amazon sells and streams are not pristine rips from CD or masters. They almost certainly have a way to tell if any random mp3 in the wild is "one of ours". Just like how cartographers introduce minor errors or made-up streets in order to prevent other publishers from copying their work undetected.
I do have some proof actually. A friend of mine and I both bought the same mp3 track from Amazon, and then compared the files and md5 checksums. Same metadata, different checksum. Our amateur conclusion is that the tracks were watermarked with our account IDs or something. But neither of us cared enough to do a deeper analysis.
Take something like a lungfish or whale that wouldn't suffocate in air and they could probably maneuver adequately once they acclimated to the dramatically slower response times.
Heck, equip them with large, low-mass fin extensions and they'd probably be able to maneuver a LOT better than humans who never evolved to navigate in a fluid environment.
Oh yes, do please apply for a research grant for this.
Forget segways and monorails. I plan on zipping around my future space station home on a bionically-enhanced dolphin!
Slashdot Mirror
That fellow (Jeff Bauman) who lost both legs below the knee, the one whose femoral artery is being pinched shut by Carlos Arredondo as he's being wheeled away from the incident, identified his attacker.
Okay, but then why the hell was he still standing there?
If some guy dropped a backpack near me and walked away, I would call as much attention to it as possible and get the hell out of there.
"Hey dude! You left your backpack here!" -- and if he doesn't respond, you start telling everyone else around you. 'That guy just dropped his bag here and walked away."
I get not wanting to make waves or cause confrontation. But you ignore hinky shit at your own peril.
I grow plants indoors. I have found that a mix of big-box-store available 6500k and 4500k CFLs work quite well
Does anybody have any experience growing plants under LEDs? Does it work?
Yes. LEDs work just as well as CFLs. Better in some ways, because the low heat of LEDs means you can get them much closer to the plants. You can effectively surround a plant with flexible LED strips for maximum coverage. And of course they are more efficient, lumens per watt.
They are also wickedly expensive. I've grown lettuce, tomatoes, quinoa, and peppers under LED as supplemental light in a sunny window, and the setup I used was close to $150. Roughly the equivalent of 60W CFL, but running at 20W. Cost-wise, you're still better off with CFL unless heat is an issue.
The "ugly and harsh light" is described in the industry as Color Temperature. I'm not sure if it is a requirement to include but most bulbs come with a Color Rendering Index (CRI) rating. It's a scale from 0-100 (100 being a reference incandescent bulb) to rate the Color Temperature of a bulb.
CRI doesn't measure color temperature; it's an indirect measure of the fullness of the spectrum given off by the bulb.
Color temperature tells you how reddish or bluish the light is -- does it look more like incandescent light (reddish) or daylight (bluish)?
CRI tells you how well the light given off by the bulb will allow you to see a range of colors. A CRI of 100 means perfect color fidelity. A CRI of under 90 or so and you will notice that some colors don't look right, because the bulb has dark bands in its spectrum. The CRI measuring process takes color temperature into account -- both warm white and cool white bulbs can have similarly high CRI scores.
For an example of extremely poor CRI, see low pressure sodium bulbs that used to be used a security and parking lot lights. Everything illuminated by them -- cars, clothing, faces -- looks either yellow, black, or dark purple.
The judge said that the viewers were members of the public, therefore when Zediva played a DVD for a subscriber it was a "public performance". Ridiculous.
So if my apartment building (a private residence) wanted to do the same thing - shared DVD jukebox in the basement - it would be just fine. Woo hoo!
Could they not just host overseas and then re"broadcast" back to the US? Any program there are numerous sites transmitting a live feed of from overseas. I always wondered about the legality of that since they are not part of the US copyright system.
They would need bigger antennas, wouldn't they?
Though I guess they could put a boat in international waters off the coast of NYC and stream whatever signal they could pick up.
After a bit of black magics (I used a search engine. MAGIC!)
It's Chicken with cheese.
Show your work.
Fried chicken cutlet with cheese is pictured next to some stories about the Spicy With, but where do you see the sandwich described in detail? What condiments are on it? Etc.
Oh man, if only there was some sort of ARTICLE ABOUT THE TOPIC IN QUESTION, LINKED FROM THE BRIEF SUMMARY.
Having graduated from Betaspring, Crunchbutton replicated its Yale model by setting up a delivery service for Brown students to order the popular “Spicy With” sandwich from Jo’s, a campus eatery operated by Brown Dining Services.
Okay, but what's on the sandwich?
If it was truly pointless and wasteful, as an American I'm pretty sure I would have heard of it before now.
Now insurance companies can figure out who will get it, so they can make sure they don't get stuck with you.
Actually, I think most health insurance companies would consider someone who is set to develop Alzheimer's in six years a pretty good risk. They are likely to be dead within 10 years. There aren't any particularly effective medications, and no expensive medical procedures associated with the disease. There is the cost of placement in a nursing home during the final stages, but that's about it.
The "digital" on the package is marketing for the uninformed. Like "color" used to be.
Dang! I'd forgotten all about that -- they used to sell color TV antennas at a higher price, and with fancier packaging. And of course there was no difference between those and the "normal" rooftop antennas that everyone had been using for decades.
This explains why reception on my grandparent's TV was still poor, despite the new color antenna they put up. It was the same as the old one!
It's stated everywhere across Google+ that profiles are for humans only and you may NOT create profiles for organisations, clubs, companies, bands and alike. Those should be represented by a Google+ PAGE, not a Google+ PROFILE.
It's not rocket science. At least if you can recogize the difference between two words, even if they start woth the same letter.
And that policy is bullshit, because that not always how the real world works. Shouldn't your mass-market social software try to appeal to the broadest range of use cases, rather than forcing a narrow view of the world?
Organizations, people, and things--collectively: entities--should be able to create both pages and profiles as they see fit. An organization or thing has just as much right to an identity as a person does, if they choose to express their identity in that way. Sometimes an organization wants to be represented as having a voice, a la the OP's info@org email address. If they send email to their followers as info@, then why can't they Google+ post to their followers in the same voice?
The classic example of this is a celebrity account. Do you really think that Jessica Simpson's profile is written by an individual? It is almost certainly a collective endeavor, and yet she gets a profile not a page.
It's their service, they can make whatever policies they want. But if they aren't liberal about identities then people are going to complain, and rightly so.
with a nice little carbon tax with a "starter" rate of say $5 per gallon of gas imposed.
It would kill two birds with one stone:
1. Put the brakes on the rate of expansion of fossil fuel use and GHG emissions growth
2. Start making a dent in the US deficit and debt
But of course, being a rational, sensible, simple, and effective policy, this would naturally be political suicide.
Political suicide is trying to change, on anything shorter than a generational scale, the main problem:
Cheap land plus cheap oil plus a service-oriented economy made it a no-brainer (literally!) for Americans to develop, build, and purchase homes and offices in suburbs and exurbs.
Factories need to be next to rivers and railroads; cubicle farms and big-box retail do not. Universal automobile ownership allowed us to trade the immediate problems of population density for the deferred problems of decentralization and infrastructure maintenance. Who wouldn't want to leave a crowded apartment building for a single-family home with room for a dog and a garden, all other things being equal?
Two or more generations of Americans now see the car and the suburban experience as their birthright. You're not going to change that with a tax on gas, you're just going to piss them all off and lose the next election. Better to create incentives for housing and business development that is near reliable mass transit or, better yet, doesn't require any use of transit to get between home, work, and local businesses.
It's no big deal. If some monopolist messed around with a single platform it would be easy to replace html with an ad hoc markup language, make a browser for that and ignore all previous standards. I'm not joking. There is really nothing magic about document markup and "mobile" application frameworks, almost any undergraduate CS student could come up with something better than what we have now, and an alternative WWW would be adopted very swifty if the old one for some reason became inconvenient to most users.
I was just thinking the same thing the other day while reading the post from a guy who wants to be a web developer complaining that his Comp-Sci curriculum isn't web focused. As if the World Wide Web was the pinnacle of human communications.
People forget how quickly The Internet because The Web -- basically about 5 years. It was a lot smaller then, but our tools and methods were primitive compared to now.
HTML/CSS/JavaScript over HTTP(S) is the de-facto standard because it can be coerced into working well enough, and no one entity controls it. Come back in 20 years and we could all be using, and coding for, something else entirely. The HTTPS part, in particular, is looking increasingly unsteady on its pins.
Anyone played ForrumWarz?
Discourse was co-authored by the same developer, Robin Ward.
http://blog.discourse.org/2013/02/the-discourse-team/
Draw your own conclusions, but it should be incredibly stable under a heavy load, and randomly pelt you with evil flames from hell.
The outer pane could zig-zag, no?
I have no idea how you'd get a sheet of glass that had an accordion fold to it, but that would (in theory) allow you to get more non-parallelism within the same total package width.
I read the TFA, that's a great summary.
It's like waking up in a crappy mirror universe where all the work that we have done on security in the past 10 years is out the window, because unbeknownst to anyone but the browser vendors, our web browsers will go ahead and execute code embedded in non-executable mimetypes.
Would it have been so hard to limit JavaScript execution to the handful of content types where it is supposed to be found? Apparently. So now images are Turing-complete, and all your cookies can be lifted by someone who puts <script src="http://private.com/users/you/profile.jpg"></script> in a page you visit.
Is this a case where corporate personhood is a good thing?
Does this mean what you should do is fire up a trust and have the trust purchase all the media? Then the trust lives on (and is ownership transfers or was likely already shared with your intended recipient(s)).
Regardless of the mechanism (another poster pointed out that Blind Trust isn't the right way) this idea deserves some serious consideration.
It would seem that one of the benefits of a family corporation or some other legal entity with "personhood" rights would be the perfect licensee of digital media, because then the media could be legally shared amongst all the members of that entity, survive individual life spans, etc.
To date, none of the services I've seen have any concept that the purchaser might not be a biological, individual human. What happens when someone purchases Kindle books on a corporate credit card? Who do they "belong" to? Yes, there is just one license, but that license could be used by anyone in the company. There must be case law about corporate ownership of licenses, but does it apply to licenses intended for individual use?
To complicate matters, in the US we generally have a notion that anything that we license as individuals can be shared with our immediate family unless there is some active countermeasure against such sharing (and even then, what judge would convict me for stripping DRM to share an ebook with my wife?) It's utterly ridiculous to imply that a parent can't share tracks that she purchased with her child, for the child's personal use. And if the parent should die? Show me the court that would deny an orphan's access to music purchased by a dead parent.
Q) How many Androids does it take to fly a satellite?
A) Two. One to fly the satellite, and the other to power the robotic finger that dismisses the "Battery Full" notification and relaunch the flight control app whenever the solar panels are temporarily obscured by a shadow.
Not really a joke, but based on my experience using an Android phone as a 24x7 webcam. Every time there is a power glitch, the "Battery Full" notice takes over the screen and foobars the IP Webcam app. The OS just wasn't designed for standalone operation, big surprise.
I suppose NASA will use their own distro that dispenses with things like touch screen control and notifications and such.
Note to criminals: stop using email, SMS, and phones to communicate. Switch to video.
You think they're running out of storage now, wait until they get an investigation with several hundred hours of FaceTime video as primary evidence. In addition to storing it, they'll need to log the footage and have all the audio transcribed.
Before you condemn this measure, please think it through.
This is, fairly obviously, an attempt to create a situation whereby any alien intelligence that finds our noisy little planet will arrive here already indebted to intellectual property holders, and be forced to trade their own intellectual property in order to satisfy the debt.
Sure, its a short-term loss for freedom of expression. But imagine our collective satisfaction when we discover the massive amount of licensing fees racked up by alien scientists and exologists as they traded our broadcast signals around prior to visiting. We'll start off with a positive balance of trade, and that's a big win!
Note to humanity: the demand for licensing fees should be hand-delivered by the lawyers who thought up this genius scheme.
So how does a company control the corp message?
Public Relations.
The idea is to control the message by putting your best face(s) forward. PR agents dress in power suits and have the good hair, white teeth, and classy bling, which allows journalists to take them seriously and/or put them on camera. They tend to be good at writing/videoing releases/posts/tweets/virals that distract from anything negative that other people are saying, without giving any actual information or committing to a course of action (since that's Marketing's job). Most people tend to believe professional message crafters who look confident and successful over the random complaints and whining of people who are obviously victims and losers.
And if they don't, then you use the fallback plan: vicious attack lawyers.
Any other questions?
SpaceX I've heard of, and Boeing of course, but Sierra Nevada Corporation?
I see that they're an extremely successful Federal contractor for electronic systems, and that they're developing parts for Scaled Composites. But their website is a bit short on company history. Where did the Ozmens come from? What was SNC doing before they took over in 1994? It seems to be a real success story, but is it really? Or are they just very, very good at getting government contracts?
This shed a little light on it: http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2007/apr/08/fatih-ozmen-mystery-man-behind-sierra-nevada/
I'm amazed by how many people, who would otherwise completely ignore an unsolicited email from a random person, will suddenly start to tremble if the email sounds like it comes from a lawyer. I guess the endless stories of patent trolls and copyright suits have got people pretty scared.
Unless the demand comes in a registered letter to my home or business address, it goes in the spam folder where it belongs.
For goodness sake, if you're going to try to extort thousands of dollars from me, at least have the courtesy to fork out for some stationery and a postage stamp, you know?
This actually turns out to be a real benefit for me. I ripped hundreds of albums over ten years ago into 96 and 128 bit mp3's, and lately I've been nagging myself to drag them out and re-rip them to a better sounding rate. This just did it all for me and I'm downloading the upgraded files now.
Thanks Amazon! You're the best! Apple wants me to pay for this, you gave it to me for freee.
That's true as long as you don't mind Amazon's watermarks and intentional glitches in your music.
I strongly suspect (though I have no proof) that the digital files that Amazon sells and streams are not pristine rips from CD or masters. They almost certainly have a way to tell if any random mp3 in the wild is "one of ours". Just like how cartographers introduce minor errors or made-up streets in order to prevent other publishers from copying their work undetected.
I do have some proof actually. A friend of mine and I both bought the same mp3 track from Amazon, and then compared the files and md5 checksums. Same metadata, different checksum. Our amateur conclusion is that the tracks were watermarked with our account IDs or something. But neither of us cared enough to do a deeper analysis.
Take something like a lungfish or whale that wouldn't suffocate in air and they could probably maneuver adequately once they acclimated to the dramatically slower response times.
Heck, equip them with large, low-mass fin extensions and they'd probably be able to maneuver a LOT better than humans who never evolved to navigate in a fluid environment.
Oh yes, do please apply for a research grant for this.
Forget segways and monorails. I plan on zipping around my future space station home on a bionically-enhanced dolphin!