A poorly designed power supply could easily allow the voltage relative to ground of the TWO (or more) DC wires going to the computer to rise up to some level with AC modulation. An unshielded transformer that normally steps the voltage down would have a capacitive coupling between the windings that brings the voltage back up in a relative way. Consider a 120 volt primary and 12 volt secondary. The average voltage across the breadth of the primary, which is 60 volts, gets added to the secondary. So now you have two output wires that are 54 volts and 66 volts relative to ground. This common voltage passes through the DC conversion. The computer runs from the DC that is relative between two wires, while the AC is carried in common mode. Because it is capacitively coupled with relatively low capacitance, the available current is very low, and the voltage will drop as more of that voltage can be leaked back to ground. The ground wire would normally take it all away.
Getting a buzz from the ground wire itself only happens when other appliances or the wiring is faulty. And this can even be avoided by using a dedicated circuit with its own ground path all the way back to the main circuit panel (not a subpanel).
If you do get the buzz from the ground wire, something is wrong and needs to br tracked down and corrected immediately.
If you are only getting less than 30 volts between the metal case and a true ground, then it is capacitively coupled to the mains hot wire, or capacitively coupled to the transformer primary. If it were fully connected you would get the full line voltage, 100 to 240 volts depending on where you are. The later is extremely dangerous and could result is big electrical arcs and human corpses. The former is very annoying but not an emergency.
No computer should ever be designed to be operated without the earthing wire used to connect to the case to drain off the capacitively coupled voltage. This big reason, though, is not to eliminate that vibration feeling, but rather, to provide a safety path for electricity to go back to ground should a wire break or whatever and accidentally fully charge the case. That would be a quick short circuit and should throw off the circuit breaker.
If the source of the voltage on the case happens to be capacitive coupling in the transformer primary winding, and if the power is plugged into a 240 volt outlet in the USA (which normally uses 120 volts for most things), then you are likely to not get any vibration feeling at all. This is because 240 volts in the USA comes from a pair of 120 volt wires of opposite phasing. The balance between them is effectively 0 volts relative to ground. Power connections this way (both wires are equal but opposite voltage relative to ground) can also eliminate hum from audio equipment that might have that issue.
In any case, if you get a computer with no earthing pin on its AC mains power connection, you should insist that it be replaced (at least the AC adapter part) with one that has the proper connection to earth/ground.
.. a business should be able to know exactly who they're doing business with.
Sorry, but very few businesses ever need to know. If I go in to a business and want to buy something they sell and pay with cash, they don't need to know who I am (unless they are selling explosives, nukes, missles, anthrax, etc... but these kinds of products would have a law controlling their sale, anyway). If you (or your loan shark friend) want to extend credit to someone, then sure... find out who they really are. But I should not be encumbered by your need to do that above and beyond your requirements in the instance of you and me doing business. That is, if you want a sample of my DNA to loan me money, that's your choice (and mine not to do business with you). But the government should not be making everyone's life difficult just to make it easy for you to find out who people are.
Last week I bought a high definition TV at Walmart. I paid for it with cash. They have no idea who I am. They don't need to. They have chosen to take the risk that my cash may be counterfeit. They have means to check that and have even chosen not to routinely do that.
Radio Shack asks for my name and address. I always decline. Well, maybe next time I will tell them "Skapare" and "slashdot.org":-)
There might be legitimate reasons for a nationally standardized ID, but your example is just not one of them. Online, I am many people. It's a virtual world online, and there are virtual personas. If you want to make your loans online but have them apply in the real world, then that's a complication your have to deal with. Maybe you should get back to doing business face-to-face if you want to make sure that the face you are doing business with is one really connected to a body that can pay you back. Either you need to figure out how to make that dumb business model work, without getting freebies from the government my taxes are paid to, or you need to find another business model.
I got rid of floppies many, many years ago. I got rid of CD drives a couple years ago. Now my external media is memory cards (mostly SDHC) and whatever can plug into a USB, Firewire, or eSATA port. So now I have to plug in an external CD recorder and blow a recordable blank just to have the music I pay for in a usable form? This is a prime example of the silly shit we get when music is still DRM crippled. Not to mention I run the OS of my choice here.
That would be great if all motherboards were indeed able to boot from USB. The sad fact is, not all are. We need to do something about that. Booting from a USB key or an SD card in a USB connected would be a whole lot more convenient.
I showed by father a 4 GB SDHC memory card the other day. He asked what it was. I told him it was 2700 floppies squished into a handy package. This thing has the capacity of 6 CDs or nearly a single layer DVD. CDs or DVDs just get in the way now days. Who needs them. A CF card can be had with 16GB and hold a whole HD movie.
I've seen occaisional SSH connections drop since I started on Comcast. That never happened on dial-up. What it appears to me that they are doing is just taking a small sampling of packets... such as maybe 1 in 10000. Then it adds the connetion tuple (host:port of each end) to a big hash table without concern of replacements. If the connection was already in the table and is seen again, it forges the RST packet. It won't happen on web connections hardly ever. On connections that last a long time AND have a lot of traffic, it gradually kills them off. It could work with quite few resources that way. For example, a PC could never handle the load of the flow through a backbone router. But if it merely got a small fraction sampling, it would gradually drop most long lived busy connections. Use IPsec to avoid it or make connections automatically restart (like BT already does).
If the selling of the access card at the brick and mortor store were an option, in lieu of credit/bank card or paypal payment directly online, then I would say that is a good idea, given that so many early teens and pre-teens don't have access to payment methods any other way. The problem is making it the only option... if they wanted to market to widely. Given the selection they have, it appears not to be so.
If your code segfaults due to dereferencing a bad pointer, then it is not a correct implemention of the graph search algorithm. It might be close, but close does not count. Yes, in practice, systems must work 100%.
So if I use one of these to record the nightly news every day in UNcompressed high definition, it will wear out in just over 273 years in the worst case, or last nearly 2738 years in the best case. It's more likely to be stolen as primitive relic in that time frame:-)
Some of what you propose already exists. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_license. You might want to also look into how this is done for mechanical reproduction rights through the Harry Fox Agency web site. Then what you can do is read up on how things are done now, and propose any expansion of this you believe should be done. One area I personally believe should be changed is expanding mechanical reproduction rights so that a 500 copy minimum is not longer required.
This is exactly why proprietary formats are bad, at least for documents that need to be kept for a long time for some reason, such as archival or historical documents. Even if open source office applications do similar things and depricate support for old formats, the older application versions might at least be available. Or third party developers could more easily create conversion programs. While open source programs do also exist to read these old proprietary documents today, we don't know if future proprietary document formats will be able to be supported. The open formats will be supportable.
I have an old Tyan mobo in an AT (not ATX) case, in the garage gathering dust, that has a pair of 133 MHz Pentiums in it, and something like 32 MB of RAM. Yes, dual processors were around for quite a while. Maybe the OP mean "dual core".
Put the CEO and top executives of Sony and Toshiba in a locked room with a water fountain and a single bathroom/toilet available. Slide pizza under the door every day with random toppings. Let them out only after they have decided which format is the one.
2. Ripping music one has bought does no harm. It has been paid for.
The RIAA sees it as a harm. They need more revenues to bolster their failed business model. So they are looking at all the possible approaches to gouge consumers as deep and bloody as possible. One approach is to get you to pay again for each different device you can play music on. And they want you to buy the CD again if the first one gets scratched. Want a backup... buy 2 CDs. Want to let your spouse listen, too... buy another CD. Want to play music from your computer... buy a DRM-crippled copy that requires root-kit infested spyware to play, in between popping up ads.
No. The article did not say that the lawsuit is because of ripping. It is the Slashdot headline that is misleading/incorrect. What the article is saying is that the RIAA is using the argument that ripping is, or may be, illegal. It's just another incident of many times when RIAA has tried to scare people into not ripping CDs (based on the possibility they could construct a legal arguement to support that notion, or may well in the future actually sue on that basis alone), and apparently trying to make a case to get Congress to make more laws to help the bottom line in their failing business model.
I suspect there are quite a number of people who have been very law abiding in their intentions and made sure they are not making the music they legally buy, and then copy into their computer, available to others on the internet. They also make sure they do not loan, give away, or resell, the original CD they legally bought. But these people are being considered by the RIAA to be infringing on copyrights. The RIAA has suggested this in the past, but it is becoming a lot clearer now that the RIAA thinks of these people as criminals. Now that so many people who first thought of themselves as law abiding are going to realize they may well be criminals, anyway, how many of them will no longer see file sharing as a barrier of legality? More of these people will either quit buying CDs, now, or will join in the file sharing. So merely copying a CD to a computer has become the gateway "drug" to get into file sharing for many people. Either direction hurts the music industry. But what else is there? You can't even enjoy the music without being a criminal.
Maybe you should RTFA. The argument could have been made that distributing, or merely making available for distribution, was the infringement. But they are in fact saying that merely copying the music to the computer is (an) infringement.
And don't think the Audio Home Recording Act, especially its section 1008 provision, will necessarily protect you. That law specifies devices that contain the Serial Copy Management System, and media (where you store the music) that requires royalty payments (e.g. some portion of your hard drive cost goes to pay the music industry). Although the ruling in the Rio case (when the music industry tried to destroy the first MP3 player) said a computer hard drive was outside the scope of the AHRA, you don't get any protection from the AHRA for music on a hard drive, either (and this seems to be the basis of some past RIAA statements). So if you made yourself a copy via SCMS enabled DAT, then AHRA 1008 does protect you. But if it was by other means without SCMS, then AHRA provides no such protection.
So this is (or has now become) an issue of merely "ripping a CD to a computer". The RIAA focused the issue that way by their own choosing. While they are unlikely to find out about most instances of ripping, at least not for a while, or at least not without installing some root kit, we can see their attitudes and political directions clearly.
I have no sympathy for the guy for his music sharing activities. But this is a case where the RIAA is taking advantage of his action methods to further support these extended arguments that they have already also made in the past.
I have a couple major ways to get music onto my computer. The first is to buy (or steal) Compact Discs (or those old vinyl records if I had something to play them with) and copy the music onto my computer from there. The second is to download the music, which could be either legally purchased or found being given away illegally by someone. And now the music industry tells me the first option is out.
Given the trends in the way music is listened to these days, which involves a spectrum from listening to huge collections stored on a computer to listening via small portable devices, the compact disk itself, for more and more people, is nothing more than the "purchase medium" in much the same way most commercial software is legally purchased. But if the music industry says "no" to using the Compact Disc to get our music, then I guess we have to quit buying those. Of course there will be some exceptions such as those available from places like CD Baby and Magnatune.
If the music industry thinks I'm going to listen to my music by actually playing the CD on some big clunky mechanical device, they are totally out of touch. But then, we've known that for a few years, already. It seems the music industry itself will drive the CD into oblivion even before the public was going to.
Slashdot Mirror
A poorly designed power supply could easily allow the voltage relative to ground of the TWO (or more) DC wires going to the computer to rise up to some level with AC modulation. An unshielded transformer that normally steps the voltage down would have a capacitive coupling between the windings that brings the voltage back up in a relative way. Consider a 120 volt primary and 12 volt secondary. The average voltage across the breadth of the primary, which is 60 volts, gets added to the secondary. So now you have two output wires that are 54 volts and 66 volts relative to ground. This common voltage passes through the DC conversion. The computer runs from the DC that is relative between two wires, while the AC is carried in common mode. Because it is capacitively coupled with relatively low capacitance, the available current is very low, and the voltage will drop as more of that voltage can be leaked back to ground. The ground wire would normally take it all away.
Getting a buzz from the ground wire itself only happens when other appliances or the wiring is faulty. And this can even be avoided by using a dedicated circuit with its own ground path all the way back to the main circuit panel (not a subpanel).
If you do get the buzz from the ground wire, something is wrong and needs to br tracked down and corrected immediately.
If you are only getting less than 30 volts between the metal case and a true ground, then it is capacitively coupled to the mains hot wire, or capacitively coupled to the transformer primary. If it were fully connected you would get the full line voltage, 100 to 240 volts depending on where you are. The later is extremely dangerous and could result is big electrical arcs and human corpses. The former is very annoying but not an emergency.
No computer should ever be designed to be operated without the earthing wire used to connect to the case to drain off the capacitively coupled voltage. This big reason, though, is not to eliminate that vibration feeling, but rather, to provide a safety path for electricity to go back to ground should a wire break or whatever and accidentally fully charge the case. That would be a quick short circuit and should throw off the circuit breaker.
If the source of the voltage on the case happens to be capacitive coupling in the transformer primary winding, and if the power is plugged into a 240 volt outlet in the USA (which normally uses 120 volts for most things), then you are likely to not get any vibration feeling at all. This is because 240 volts in the USA comes from a pair of 120 volt wires of opposite phasing. The balance between them is effectively 0 volts relative to ground. Power connections this way (both wires are equal but opposite voltage relative to ground) can also eliminate hum from audio equipment that might have that issue.
In any case, if you get a computer with no earthing pin on its AC mains power connection, you should insist that it be replaced (at least the AC adapter part) with one that has the proper connection to earth/ground.
Sorry, but very few businesses ever need to know. If I go in to a business and want to buy something they sell and pay with cash, they don't need to know who I am (unless they are selling explosives, nukes, missles, anthrax, etc ... but these kinds of products would have a law controlling their sale, anyway). If you (or your loan shark friend) want to extend credit to someone, then sure ... find out who they really are. But I should not be encumbered by your need to do that above and beyond your requirements in the instance of you and me doing business. That is, if you want a sample of my DNA to loan me money, that's your choice (and mine not to do business with you). But the government should not be making everyone's life difficult just to make it easy for you to find out who people are.
Last week I bought a high definition TV at Walmart. I paid for it with cash. They have no idea who I am. They don't need to. They have chosen to take the risk that my cash may be counterfeit. They have means to check that and have even chosen not to routinely do that.
Radio Shack asks for my name and address. I always decline. Well, maybe next time I will tell them "Skapare" and "slashdot.org" :-)
There might be legitimate reasons for a nationally standardized ID, but your example is just not one of them. Online, I am many people. It's a virtual world online, and there are virtual personas. If you want to make your loans online but have them apply in the real world, then that's a complication your have to deal with. Maybe you should get back to doing business face-to-face if you want to make sure that the face you are doing business with is one really connected to a body that can pay you back. Either you need to figure out how to make that dumb business model work, without getting freebies from the government my taxes are paid to, or you need to find another business model.
I got rid of floppies many, many years ago. I got rid of CD drives a couple years ago. Now my external media is memory cards (mostly SDHC) and whatever can plug into a USB, Firewire, or eSATA port. So now I have to plug in an external CD recorder and blow a recordable blank just to have the music I pay for in a usable form? This is a prime example of the silly shit we get when music is still DRM crippled. Not to mention I run the OS of my choice here.
WMD? What's that? Wiser Music Distribution?
That would be great if all motherboards were indeed able to boot from USB. The sad fact is, not all are. We need to do something about that. Booting from a USB key or an SD card in a USB connected would be a whole lot more convenient.
I showed by father a 4 GB SDHC memory card the other day. He asked what it was. I told him it was 2700 floppies squished into a handy package. This thing has the capacity of 6 CDs or nearly a single layer DVD. CDs or DVDs just get in the way now days. Who needs them. A CF card can be had with 16GB and hold a whole HD movie.
Things just keep getting smaller.
I was at Walmart this evening, browsing around. Guess what I found in the clearance section: 4 Toshiba brand HD-DVD players!
I've seen occaisional SSH connections drop since I started on Comcast. That never happened on dial-up. What it appears to me that they are doing is just taking a small sampling of packets ... such as maybe 1 in 10000. Then it adds the connetion tuple (host:port of each end) to a big hash table without concern of replacements. If the connection was already in the table and is seen again, it forges the RST packet. It won't happen on web connections hardly ever. On connections that last a long time AND have a lot of traffic, it gradually kills them off. It could work with quite few resources that way. For example, a PC could never handle the load of the flow through a backbone router. But if it merely got a small fraction sampling, it would gradually drop most long lived busy connections. Use IPsec to avoid it or make connections automatically restart (like BT already does).
If the selling of the access card at the brick and mortor store were an option, in lieu of credit/bank card or paypal payment directly online, then I would say that is a good idea, given that so many early teens and pre-teens don't have access to payment methods any other way. The problem is making it the only option ... if they wanted to market to widely. Given the selection they have, it appears not to be so.
If your code segfaults due to dereferencing a bad pointer, then it is not a correct implemention of the graph search algorithm. It might be close, but close does not count. Yes, in practice, systems must work 100%.
... then you can't afford it, yet. Wait a couple years and pick them up in the discount bin at Walmart.
So if I use one of these to record the nightly news every day in UNcompressed high definition, it will wear out in just over 273 years in the worst case, or last nearly 2738 years in the best case. It's more likely to be stolen as primitive relic in that time frame :-)
... I felt so swapped out, yesterday.
A computer the size of a small planet couldn't simulate much more than a medium sized asteroid at full quantum detail.
Now it's the "big boot".
Some of what you propose already exists. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_license. You might want to also look into how this is done for mechanical reproduction rights through the Harry Fox Agency web site. Then what you can do is read up on how things are done now, and propose any expansion of this you believe should be done. One area I personally believe should be changed is expanding mechanical reproduction rights so that a 500 copy minimum is not longer required.
This is exactly why proprietary formats are bad, at least for documents that need to be kept for a long time for some reason, such as archival or historical documents. Even if open source office applications do similar things and depricate support for old formats, the older application versions might at least be available. Or third party developers could more easily create conversion programs. While open source programs do also exist to read these old proprietary documents today, we don't know if future proprietary document formats will be able to be supported. The open formats will be supportable.
I have an old Tyan mobo in an AT (not ATX) case, in the garage gathering dust, that has a pair of 133 MHz Pentiums in it, and something like 32 MB of RAM. Yes, dual processors were around for quite a while. Maybe the OP mean "dual core".
Put the CEO and top executives of Sony and Toshiba in a locked room with a water fountain and a single bathroom/toilet available. Slide pizza under the door every day with random toppings. Let them out only after they have decided which format is the one.
Yes.
The RIAA sees it as a harm. They need more revenues to bolster their failed business model. So they are looking at all the possible approaches to gouge consumers as deep and bloody as possible. One approach is to get you to pay again for each different device you can play music on. And they want you to buy the CD again if the first one gets scratched. Want a backup ... buy 2 CDs. Want to let your spouse listen, too ... buy another CD. Want to play music from your computer ... buy a DRM-crippled copy that requires root-kit infested spyware to play, in between popping up ads.
The RIAA opposes fair use.
No. The article did not say that the lawsuit is because of ripping. It is the Slashdot headline that is misleading/incorrect. What the article is saying is that the RIAA is using the argument that ripping is, or may be, illegal. It's just another incident of many times when RIAA has tried to scare people into not ripping CDs (based on the possibility they could construct a legal arguement to support that notion, or may well in the future actually sue on that basis alone), and apparently trying to make a case to get Congress to make more laws to help the bottom line in their failing business model.
I suspect there are quite a number of people who have been very law abiding in their intentions and made sure they are not making the music they legally buy, and then copy into their computer, available to others on the internet. They also make sure they do not loan, give away, or resell, the original CD they legally bought. But these people are being considered by the RIAA to be infringing on copyrights. The RIAA has suggested this in the past, but it is becoming a lot clearer now that the RIAA thinks of these people as criminals. Now that so many people who first thought of themselves as law abiding are going to realize they may well be criminals, anyway, how many of them will no longer see file sharing as a barrier of legality? More of these people will either quit buying CDs, now, or will join in the file sharing. So merely copying a CD to a computer has become the gateway "drug" to get into file sharing for many people. Either direction hurts the music industry. But what else is there? You can't even enjoy the music without being a criminal.
Maybe you should RTFA. The argument could have been made that distributing, or merely making available for distribution, was the infringement. But they are in fact saying that merely copying the music to the computer is (an) infringement.
And don't think the Audio Home Recording Act, especially its section 1008 provision, will necessarily protect you. That law specifies devices that contain the Serial Copy Management System, and media (where you store the music) that requires royalty payments (e.g. some portion of your hard drive cost goes to pay the music industry). Although the ruling in the Rio case (when the music industry tried to destroy the first MP3 player) said a computer hard drive was outside the scope of the AHRA, you don't get any protection from the AHRA for music on a hard drive, either (and this seems to be the basis of some past RIAA statements). So if you made yourself a copy via SCMS enabled DAT, then AHRA 1008 does protect you. But if it was by other means without SCMS, then AHRA provides no such protection.
So this is (or has now become) an issue of merely "ripping a CD to a computer". The RIAA focused the issue that way by their own choosing. While they are unlikely to find out about most instances of ripping, at least not for a while, or at least not without installing some root kit, we can see their attitudes and political directions clearly.
I have no sympathy for the guy for his music sharing activities. But this is a case where the RIAA is taking advantage of his action methods to further support these extended arguments that they have already also made in the past.
I have a couple major ways to get music onto my computer. The first is to buy (or steal) Compact Discs (or those old vinyl records if I had something to play them with) and copy the music onto my computer from there. The second is to download the music, which could be either legally purchased or found being given away illegally by someone. And now the music industry tells me the first option is out.
Given the trends in the way music is listened to these days, which involves a spectrum from listening to huge collections stored on a computer to listening via small portable devices, the compact disk itself, for more and more people, is nothing more than the "purchase medium" in much the same way most commercial software is legally purchased. But if the music industry says "no" to using the Compact Disc to get our music, then I guess we have to quit buying those. Of course there will be some exceptions such as those available from places like CD Baby and Magnatune.
If the music industry thinks I'm going to listen to my music by actually playing the CD on some big clunky mechanical device, they are totally out of touch. But then, we've known that for a few years, already. It seems the music industry itself will drive the CD into oblivion even before the public was going to.