I would also note that this is much more like a phone than an email system, since the underlying technology is very much like a cell phone than to a PC sending/receiving email.
How is this any different than employers reading your e-mail?
Because employers are reading email on work computer paid for entirely by work. In this case, they were reading messages on a pager where the user was paying for any and all costs over the 25k characters a month. In this case, since the business is not footing the bill themselves, they do should not have a right to monitor how that device is entirely being used (aside from the fact that it may have exceeded the stated limit of 25k characters that they were going to pay to cover).
As for your "
Since Text Messages and E-Mails are handled by third parties, wouldn't this also apply to the recent ruling that you don't have a right to privacy?
", I would argue the same about home phone conversations, and even the US Mail, since in the case of the phone, the voice data is being sent over data lines that are possibly leased by one company, processed at a teleco center, most likely leased from yet another third party, on equipment owned or leased to the phone company the user has a contract with, and sent over lines owned or leased possibly by yet another third party, to the destination teleco center possibly owned or leased to yet another third party which on gear owned or leased to possibly yet another third party who is under contract by the other person/business which the call is being placed to... As for the US Mail, it is a "third party", in the by definition since it is not the sender or receiver of the document/letter/package. But, we clearly have stated that those situations have the expected right to privacy.
Ahh, but that is just it. We are not talking about royalties here, just as we do not talk about price of the song when dealing with damages for making a copy of it. We are talking about violating the contracts which allow the company to distribute the CD's, which, in turn means the agreement which allowed the distributors make copies of the work, in which the performing artist gives the distributor(s) the right to make copies of their performance work (which is fundamentally owned by the artist in question), null and void, which in turn makes the each copy a copyright violation. Sucks to be the guys who wanted all those copyright laws in place now that they get to have that very weapon turned against them.
Seriously, I think the $60 Billion is still extremely low. At $20,000 per violation, that means only 3,000,000 violations, which I think is very light for the class of 300,000+ songs that are in the Payment Pending list. That is only estimating that 10 copies of each song were sold this way. The real numbers exist. They can find out EXACTLY how many copies of EACH unauthorized song were sold as all of that is accounted for each individual CD/Album/MP3 from the CRIA members. If we use the REAL number of songs and counts of infringement. I think we are talking easily more than 50 million violations here, not 3 million (which is only 10 sales per song, and we ALL know that a production run of CD's will be in the thousands each, and each COPY is a violation, not just each SALE, even broken CD's at the manufacturing site are unauthorized copies that took place (you know all that breakage cost part that they put into the contracts), they still count in terms of unauthorized/pirate copies). And remember, it is per song, so an album may have 15+ individual infringements in it, not a single infringement for the entire album.
And don't say that the DSi is what I am describing, because it most certainly is NOT. I want to be able to easily, and cheaply replace and or upgrade the memory within the device. Having 1GB built in is all and good as long as it has an expansion slot that takes normal micro, micro, or normal SDHC memory cards.
The main problem to Nintendo is flashcarts make it ridiculously easy to pirate games. Almost too easy - it's far easier to lug around a tiny flashcart than 10 game cartridges.
There is a simple solution to this, sell people what they want, how they want it. Sell your own FlashCart and sell games over the internet with digital download to a flashcart (or a CD/DVD that can be used on a computer to download to a flash memory that is compatible with the flashcart). The market is basically saying that we want this, so they should start selling it that way...
I wouldn't be adverse to that arrangement if the salary was correct myself. Unfortunately, the current salary is not correct for that work arrangement. Too many places are now simply cutting the night shift and changing over to pagers/on-call support, but not changing the salaries and expecting/demanding that this is how things are now done. I would also bet that your position has things like annual bonuses, which reflect the extra hard work you may have done over the course of the year above and beyond the normal 40 work week.
Many times I would simply like to see a few % of the money saved by having me come in to fix something vs letting it be down/broken until the next normal work day. If it is really that important that it can't wait, then it is important enough to pay the people who maintain it for having to give up plans of going on a weekend trip, or out drinking, or whatever it may be, and stay in access of a phone and 30minutes to an hour to go in if need be.
Also the above second paragraph is making a bad assumption that the leaky pipe was actually caused by it not being replaced when it should have been or that the people responsible realized that it needed to be replaced and didn't, and wasn't just some screw up, or caused by some other issue (like the new pipe not meeting standards, having a mechanical failure, or some other event which caused the pipe to leak, like a bad seal/connection).
I love the crux of their argument being that the plants are operating at 120% of their initial design... Unfortunately, the author has no clue as to why that output figure was increased. The actual generators (i.e. the turbines, wires, etc., that are turned by the steam which produce the electricity) have been updated using today's technology. Generator technology has increased dramatically over the last 40 years from when the original plants were produced. In fact, generators have been updated in the plants during most refueling cycles in their normal operation. As those generators increased in efficiency, so too has the output power gone up at the plants. That increased efficiency has allowed the same power from the nuclear reactor to create more output power.
Tritium laced water is bad in the water supply, I agree. But as the author said, these happened at one location which the original owner thought was going to be decommissioned. It should have been made know to the new purchasers that some maintenance was not done. I mean, really, would you put a new exhaust system on a 15 year old car which has over 250,000 miles on it? No, you would patch up the one you got and get ready to buy a new car, which is what the previous owner did. They did neglect to tell the new owner of the "car" about the issue and that there was only a temporary patch in place...
The departments are separate, you are correct (and I even said that myself, "fired by the advertisement department"). The ads are down because the distribution of the magazines themselves are down. We have seen staples of the industry close up shop in the print world, like Electronic Gaming Monthly. The print side of the industry is collapsing due to the internet. You need to remember the same people who are the target customer/demographic is also the same demographic most likely to know how to use a computer and search the internet for information, such as reviews, cheat codes, maps, hints, etc., which is exactly the information that people had really been waiting for in the magazines (when they first debuted at least).
Depending on how much the parent company spends in ads on the site/magazine, the score will be inflated higher. The few times that an editor or reviewer really did stand up and score a bad game as such, they were immediately fired by the advertising department. There was a big scandal a few years back when the editor actually spoke out against one such firing... I am too tired to look it up myself right now.
Anyway, reviews anymore from the "gaming press" are total garbage due to this mechanic. The ads in the magazine are more important to the company than the reviews themselves. When was the last time you saw an EA game get a 1 out of 10.... And trust me, there are many deserving candidates, like the yearly sports rehash which change nothing in the game, just which player is on which team. Or Race Driver Grid, or Darkar 2009, or Rally Stars.... The magazines would just not post a review of a game when it gets bad because they don't want to potentially lose their ads from the publisher...
Think back to 1985 or 1986... These kinds of scans simply didn't exist. Computer use was only just starting to happen in hospitals. CAT scans and MRI scans were just finally making their way into most hospitals....
Unfortunately if that was done, we would see things like Evolution removed or taught next to Intelligent Design as though Intelligent Design was a leading scientific accepted theory.
But you just said it yourself. They were hiding the tree ring data because after 1960 it had an absolute KNOWN error based on instrumentation readings which outright showed that the methodology from the tree ring data was incorrect.
ANYONE who thinks information recorded in tiny wiggles in groves and played through a bunch of springs (stylus, cartridge coils, tonearm, not to mention the non-trivial compliance of the record itself) and then amplified by two-three orders of magnitude is a more accurate representation than a full digital string (almost independent of bit rate) is deluding themselves.
Actually, what those people are referring to as better is the fact that frequencies lower that 20Hz and higher than 44Khz are still in that particular recording. I would love to have the noise floor of CD while keeping the frequency range of records... There have been plenty of studies that show the human body still detects and interprets infrasound and ultrasound, even if the human ear can not discern or recognize a particular pitch or tone to those frequency ranges. Specifically, studies have shown that there is a MUCH higher emotional reaction to music containing those frequency ranges. In particular, the experimental concert Infrasonic, did a pretty good job of proving this fact. Link to article on study
As the subject says, it will all depend on your source material. Most recordings now are so compressed and level maxed that there are absolutely no dynamics at all. All of it is done in the name of radio since no one wants to be the song that can't be heard. There is a max transmittable volume for a signal, and thus, if your recording leaves in the space to keep dynamics such that a drum's attack has very large peak followed by an extremely fast drop off in sound pressure, that the things like vocals will be relatively quieter than that drum, the drum then becomes the loudest noise of the recording, forcing all other things in the recording to be relative to that peak, which in tern will cause them to be "softer" on the radio for a good quality, high dynamic recording. What almost all audio mixes do now is simply chop off all those peaks so that their song is constantly at a high amplitude throughout. This has the effect of compressing all those peaks down, and losing all that signal quality, and is actually compressing the amount of audio data in the waveform itself since they are shifting the entire wave up in amplitude while keeping the same upper boundary, thus squaring the waveform and losing data, which is no different than lossy compression algorithms for things like MP3. In fact converting a waveform that is already amplitude compressed, can save "data space" while not losing much quality. In fact, it may even add some of those lost dynamics back by sampling at points in the waveform where the wave may be under that peak volume and thus (along with the fewer samples) under-representing the true value amplitude for a section of the waveform.
Then of course, you have the fact that audio mixes are being done to try and compensate for piss poor speakers like ear-buds, giving huge boosts to the amplitude of lower frequencies, and trying to cut the amplitude of higher frequencies as well (because let us face it, that 1/16th inch piezoelectric speaker that make-up ear-buds just doesn't have the power or mass to move enough air to reproduce lower frequency sounds with any kind of accuracy). Quality speakers, in a well designed environment will always show the difference in recording quality. When you use poor speakers, you are listening more to what the speaker does to the recording than what might be found in recording quality.
Further, as they tighten their control over the products they sell, they can't understand why they are selling less and less of that product.
Nail + Head
They still live under the delusion of entitlement to money for their product (i.e. if I put a product on the market, it will always sell). I don't understand how that is so when they themselves have seen gigantic movie flops, like "The Adventures of Pluto Nash", "Cutthroat Island" (put Carolco out of business... note that this was the same studio/production company that made "Terminator 2"), or "Town and Country", and still think that if they make it people will buy it. Also just because the box office numbers were good does not mean the sales will also be good (there are plenty of movies that you really only need to see once, especially now that we are in sequel and re-hash world, simply re-doing past movies and updating the special effects...).
Then to top the above, they keep trying to see us less and less, at higher cost. I can honestly say I have almost completely stopped purchasing CD's (I only buy a few select ones, all of which are private indy labels unaffiliated with the MPAA), and I have also been buying less DVD/BluRay (from a person who has 1000+, I think I have purchased 2 movies this entire year, with only 2 more that I expect to buy for the rest of the year as well, both of which come out next two weeks). The more that they have been doing things like force me to watch previews by locking out the system from accepting commands, the less I have been buying. Maybe one day they will look at themselves and legitimately ask the question, why did they lose out on making sales to someone like me.
I think you have some of that backwards. Porn will be right after this, particularly CP, and some of the more extreme ones (think "2 girls one cup"). Then it will be copyright....
Go take a look. It is around 50MB of space. Yes, it is typically a live CD, or USB distro. But that doesn't mean you can't get it to work. I personally have installed it on a system without CD/DVD, USB, etc., by doing a network install. That may or may not work in your case, as I do not know any PCMCIA network cards which support PXE-boot. That said, you could remove the hard drive. Pop it into another computer and do the install that way. The live CD distributions do a full hardware check even after doing a hard-drive install, so as long as it can detect your hardware normally, it will work even after you pop it back into your laptop. You won't find another light weight distribution that is as fully functioning as DSL out there. You can even get apt-get to work with DSL to install some other applications if you want (assuming that the system has enough power to run them).
Slashdot Mirror
Might be a little overkill, but should be able to do what you want. Take a look http://www.phprojekt.com/index.php?&newlang=eng
I would also note that this is much more like a phone than an email system, since the underlying technology is very much like a cell phone than to a PC sending/receiving email.
How is this any different than employers reading your e-mail?
Because employers are reading email on work computer paid for entirely by work. In this case, they were reading messages on a pager where the user was paying for any and all costs over the 25k characters a month. In this case, since the business is not footing the bill themselves, they do should not have a right to monitor how that device is entirely being used (aside from the fact that it may have exceeded the stated limit of 25k characters that they were going to pay to cover).
As for your "
Since Text Messages and E-Mails are handled by third parties, wouldn't this also apply to the recent ruling that you don't have a right to privacy?
", I would argue the same about home phone conversations, and even the US Mail, since in the case of the phone, the voice data is being sent over data lines that are possibly leased by one company, processed at a teleco center, most likely leased from yet another third party, on equipment owned or leased to the phone company the user has a contract with, and sent over lines owned or leased possibly by yet another third party, to the destination teleco center possibly owned or leased to yet another third party which on gear owned or leased to possibly yet another third party who is under contract by the other person/business which the call is being placed to... As for the US Mail, it is a "third party", in the by definition since it is not the sender or receiver of the document/letter/package. But, we clearly have stated that those situations have the expected right to privacy.
Ahh, but that is just it. We are not talking about royalties here, just as we do not talk about price of the song when dealing with damages for making a copy of it. We are talking about violating the contracts which allow the company to distribute the CD's, which, in turn means the agreement which allowed the distributors make copies of the work, in which the performing artist gives the distributor(s) the right to make copies of their performance work (which is fundamentally owned by the artist in question), null and void, which in turn makes the each copy a copyright violation. Sucks to be the guys who wanted all those copyright laws in place now that they get to have that very weapon turned against them.
Seriously, I think the $60 Billion is still extremely low. At $20,000 per violation, that means only 3,000,000 violations, which I think is very light for the class of 300,000+ songs that are in the Payment Pending list. That is only estimating that 10 copies of each song were sold this way. The real numbers exist. They can find out EXACTLY how many copies of EACH unauthorized song were sold as all of that is accounted for each individual CD/Album/MP3 from the CRIA members. If we use the REAL number of songs and counts of infringement. I think we are talking easily more than 50 million violations here, not 3 million (which is only 10 sales per song, and we ALL know that a production run of CD's will be in the thousands each, and each COPY is a violation, not just each SALE, even broken CD's at the manufacturing site are unauthorized copies that took place (you know all that breakage cost part that they put into the contracts), they still count in terms of unauthorized/pirate copies). And remember, it is per song, so an album may have 15+ individual infringements in it, not a single infringement for the entire album.
And don't say that the DSi is what I am describing, because it most certainly is NOT. I want to be able to easily, and cheaply replace and or upgrade the memory within the device. Having 1GB built in is all and good as long as it has an expansion slot that takes normal micro, micro, or normal SDHC memory cards.
The main problem to Nintendo is flashcarts make it ridiculously easy to pirate games. Almost too easy - it's far easier to lug around a tiny flashcart than 10 game cartridges.
There is a simple solution to this, sell people what they want, how they want it. Sell your own FlashCart and sell games over the internet with digital download to a flashcart (or a CD/DVD that can be used on a computer to download to a flash memory that is compatible with the flashcart). The market is basically saying that we want this, so they should start selling it that way...
I am now really glad I don't have GPS in my cellphone. In fact, I am glad I almost never even have my cellphone with me anymore...
I wouldn't be adverse to that arrangement if the salary was correct myself. Unfortunately, the current salary is not correct for that work arrangement. Too many places are now simply cutting the night shift and changing over to pagers/on-call support, but not changing the salaries and expecting/demanding that this is how things are now done. I would also bet that your position has things like annual bonuses, which reflect the extra hard work you may have done over the course of the year above and beyond the normal 40 work week.
Many times I would simply like to see a few % of the money saved by having me come in to fix something vs letting it be down/broken until the next normal work day. If it is really that important that it can't wait, then it is important enough to pay the people who maintain it for having to give up plans of going on a weekend trip, or out drinking, or whatever it may be, and stay in access of a phone and 30minutes to an hour to go in if need be.
Also the above second paragraph is making a bad assumption that the leaky pipe was actually caused by it not being replaced when it should have been or that the people responsible realized that it needed to be replaced and didn't, and wasn't just some screw up, or caused by some other issue (like the new pipe not meeting standards, having a mechanical failure, or some other event which caused the pipe to leak, like a bad seal/connection).
I love the crux of their argument being that the plants are operating at 120% of their initial design... Unfortunately, the author has no clue as to why that output figure was increased. The actual generators (i.e. the turbines, wires, etc., that are turned by the steam which produce the electricity) have been updated using today's technology. Generator technology has increased dramatically over the last 40 years from when the original plants were produced. In fact, generators have been updated in the plants during most refueling cycles in their normal operation. As those generators increased in efficiency, so too has the output power gone up at the plants. That increased efficiency has allowed the same power from the nuclear reactor to create more output power.
Tritium laced water is bad in the water supply, I agree. But as the author said, these happened at one location which the original owner thought was going to be decommissioned. It should have been made know to the new purchasers that some maintenance was not done. I mean, really, would you put a new exhaust system on a 15 year old car which has over 250,000 miles on it? No, you would patch up the one you got and get ready to buy a new car, which is what the previous owner did. They did neglect to tell the new owner of the "car" about the issue and that there was only a temporary patch in place...
The departments are separate, you are correct (and I even said that myself, "fired by the advertisement department"). The ads are down because the distribution of the magazines themselves are down. We have seen staples of the industry close up shop in the print world, like Electronic Gaming Monthly. The print side of the industry is collapsing due to the internet. You need to remember the same people who are the target customer/demographic is also the same demographic most likely to know how to use a computer and search the internet for information, such as reviews, cheat codes, maps, hints, etc., which is exactly the information that people had really been waiting for in the magazines (when they first debuted at least).
Depending on how much the parent company spends in ads on the site/magazine, the score will be inflated higher. The few times that an editor or reviewer really did stand up and score a bad game as such, they were immediately fired by the advertising department. There was a big scandal a few years back when the editor actually spoke out against one such firing... I am too tired to look it up myself right now.
Anyway, reviews anymore from the "gaming press" are total garbage due to this mechanic. The ads in the magazine are more important to the company than the reviews themselves. When was the last time you saw an EA game get a 1 out of 10.... And trust me, there are many deserving candidates, like the yearly sports rehash which change nothing in the game, just which player is on which team. Or Race Driver Grid, or Darkar 2009, or Rally Stars.... The magazines would just not post a review of a game when it gets bad because they don't want to potentially lose their ads from the publisher...
Think back to 1985 or 1986... These kinds of scans simply didn't exist. Computer use was only just starting to happen in hospitals. CAT scans and MRI scans were just finally making their way into most hospitals....
Well, not directly He3 I guess, but we did talk about a helium shortage coming... http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/14/0219246
Unfortunately if that was done, we would see things like Evolution removed or taught next to Intelligent Design as though Intelligent Design was a leading scientific accepted theory.
But you just said it yourself. They were hiding the tree ring data because after 1960 it had an absolute KNOWN error based on instrumentation readings which outright showed that the methodology from the tree ring data was incorrect.
ANYONE who thinks information recorded in tiny wiggles in groves and played through a bunch of springs (stylus, cartridge coils, tonearm, not to mention the non-trivial compliance of the record itself) and then amplified by two-three orders of magnitude is a more accurate representation than a full digital string (almost independent of bit rate) is deluding themselves.
Actually, what those people are referring to as better is the fact that frequencies lower that 20Hz and higher than 44Khz are still in that particular recording. I would love to have the noise floor of CD while keeping the frequency range of records... There have been plenty of studies that show the human body still detects and interprets infrasound and ultrasound, even if the human ear can not discern or recognize a particular pitch or tone to those frequency ranges. Specifically, studies have shown that there is a MUCH higher emotional reaction to music containing those frequency ranges. In particular, the experimental concert Infrasonic, did a pretty good job of proving this fact. Link to article on study
As the subject says, it will all depend on your source material. Most recordings now are so compressed and level maxed that there are absolutely no dynamics at all. All of it is done in the name of radio since no one wants to be the song that can't be heard. There is a max transmittable volume for a signal, and thus, if your recording leaves in the space to keep dynamics such that a drum's attack has very large peak followed by an extremely fast drop off in sound pressure, that the things like vocals will be relatively quieter than that drum, the drum then becomes the loudest noise of the recording, forcing all other things in the recording to be relative to that peak, which in tern will cause them to be "softer" on the radio for a good quality, high dynamic recording. What almost all audio mixes do now is simply chop off all those peaks so that their song is constantly at a high amplitude throughout. This has the effect of compressing all those peaks down, and losing all that signal quality, and is actually compressing the amount of audio data in the waveform itself since they are shifting the entire wave up in amplitude while keeping the same upper boundary, thus squaring the waveform and losing data, which is no different than lossy compression algorithms for things like MP3. In fact converting a waveform that is already amplitude compressed, can save "data space" while not losing much quality. In fact, it may even add some of those lost dynamics back by sampling at points in the waveform where the wave may be under that peak volume and thus (along with the fewer samples) under-representing the true value amplitude for a section of the waveform.
Then of course, you have the fact that audio mixes are being done to try and compensate for piss poor speakers like ear-buds, giving huge boosts to the amplitude of lower frequencies, and trying to cut the amplitude of higher frequencies as well (because let us face it, that 1/16th inch piezoelectric speaker that make-up ear-buds just doesn't have the power or mass to move enough air to reproduce lower frequency sounds with any kind of accuracy). Quality speakers, in a well designed environment will always show the difference in recording quality. When you use poor speakers, you are listening more to what the speaker does to the recording than what might be found in recording quality.
Further, as they tighten their control over the products they sell, they can't understand why they are selling less and less of that product.
Nail + Head
They still live under the delusion of entitlement to money for their product (i.e. if I put a product on the market, it will always sell). I don't understand how that is so when they themselves have seen gigantic movie flops, like "The Adventures of Pluto Nash", "Cutthroat Island" (put Carolco out of business... note that this was the same studio/production company that made "Terminator 2"), or "Town and Country", and still think that if they make it people will buy it. Also just because the box office numbers were good does not mean the sales will also be good (there are plenty of movies that you really only need to see once, especially now that we are in sequel and re-hash world, simply re-doing past movies and updating the special effects...).
Then to top the above, they keep trying to see us less and less, at higher cost. I can honestly say I have almost completely stopped purchasing CD's (I only buy a few select ones, all of which are private indy labels unaffiliated with the MPAA), and I have also been buying less DVD/BluRay (from a person who has 1000+, I think I have purchased 2 movies this entire year, with only 2 more that I expect to buy for the rest of the year as well, both of which come out next two weeks). The more that they have been doing things like force me to watch previews by locking out the system from accepting commands, the less I have been buying. Maybe one day they will look at themselves and legitimately ask the question, why did they lose out on making sales to someone like me.
Muscle weighs more than fat.
Yes, per pound, muscle weighs more than fat... (please note the sarcasm)
I think you have some of that backwards. Porn will be right after this, particularly CP, and some of the more extreme ones (think "2 girls one cup"). Then it will be copyright....
Unfortunately for him (and anyone with only a PCMCIA network card), there is no PXE-boot support for such a device.
I have to also agree with some other people that suggest getting a newer laptop, at least one with a CD drive.
Or at least a network card that supports PXE-boot.
Go take a look. It is around 50MB of space. Yes, it is typically a live CD, or USB distro. But that doesn't mean you can't get it to work. I personally have installed it on a system without CD/DVD, USB, etc., by doing a network install. That may or may not work in your case, as I do not know any PCMCIA network cards which support PXE-boot. That said, you could remove the hard drive. Pop it into another computer and do the install that way. The live CD distributions do a full hardware check even after doing a hard-drive install, so as long as it can detect your hardware normally, it will work even after you pop it back into your laptop. You won't find another light weight distribution that is as fully functioning as DSL out there. You can even get apt-get to work with DSL to install some other applications if you want (assuming that the system has enough power to run them).