Which has been ruled legal in court, if I recall correctly. While it is legal to copyright the "arrangement" of the information, grabbing somebody's yellow pages and transcribing the whole thing with some re-typsetting makes that list of phone numbers yours, even to redistribute.
Search for the phrase "phone book" on the page. Copying "creative Works," like fiction or poetry, is frowned upon, while copying facts is not. The copyright is "in the expression" to quote the site, not in any underlying facts. If facts were copyrightable, we'd all be completely screwed. As it stands right now, we're only 97% screwed.
You don't have to watch the promo shows it records. You would actually have to navigate to the show and play it to be "forced" to watch it. On my (US) tivo, they are easily distinguishable. It doesn't take any of your recording time away. I fail to see how this is "not any better than broadcast TV."
The poster is correct. In the US, you are supposed to pay sales tax on internet purchases when you file your taxes at the end of the year. But I seriously doubt everybody remembers to file every book or CD they ordered, even if they try to be honest and get big items like new laptops. It will mean less work filing your taxes, which is always nice.
You don't understand why people want all-in-one units, and I don't understand why people want their pockets brimming with phones, text pagers, PDAs, digital cameras, gameboys, mp3 players, and GPS units. I'm as picky about size as you, so I don't know why anyone wants a huge phone either. I want a tiny phone that does everything, is that so much to ask? (see Samsung i500 for a phone that gets closer to what i want)
Both of us are likely to have products to choose from. There's no need to lambast the other side for liking something you do not. It's like a VI/Emacs argument-- who cares? Just use what you prefer and try not to proselytize. Nokia still makes plenty of "just plain cell phones," although most do have at least a simple address book and calendar. I imagine most other cell companies do as well, and will continue to do so in the future.
So, good luck to you in your cell-phone hunt, Giant-Bag-Of-Devices Man!!!
Why are you charging per IP? Charge these people by the traffic they use. I also fail to understand how having two machines behind a NAT can use twice as much bandwidth. I would assume you cap the bandwidth already, but if not-- a single machine with a 100MBps ethernet card could saturate a whole stack o' T1 connections. There is no need for more than one box running 24/7 to eat all of your bandwidth and then some.
I understand the need to make money-- you are a business after all. But don't charge based on how people use the bits after they get there (whether they all go to the same PC or get split up by a router)-- charge them based on how many bits they use. If they want extra IPs for $12, that's cool too. But don't enforce it on everyone. That's a massive waste of IP space.
I'm not sure if you meant this as a troll or not, but either way, it should be addressed.
You are correct that there will be additional risk associated with a new technology. Old and refined is almost always a safer bet than new and untested.
However, your other arguments against a space elevator don't make sense.
"You'd still need to develop boosters and fuel to carry on from there."
Well, sure-- but the vast majority of the fuel in a current spacecraft is just for getting it off the earth. This is what the space elevator replaces. So you could still use current tech for maneuvering, with tiny fuel tanks compared to today's behemoths.
"It's obviously not the way to commoditize space travel"
It may be tough to build, but it's a heck of a lot better solution for commoditizing space travel than strapping yourself to billions of dollars worth of single-use hardware in a flying-brick reentry vehicle that requires months of intensive labor between flights. Chemical rockets will *never* commoditize space travel. A space elevator *might*. I would like to see it tried.
I'll ignore the emotional argument for what it is.
I fail to see how any spaceflight proponent can see the elevator as anything *but* an elegant solution. It removes the need for most of your fuel, greatly reduces your launch costs, and you get most of your launch energy back on the trip back down. If it gets space entry down to the level of general affordability, then the real exploration, and all that "flying" you're excited about can happen between the planets and stars.
Considering the Archos Jukebox Studio 20GB runs for $130(with rebate)-$160 if you watch the sales, and $225 even at Amazon, I think $199 is definitely overpriced. And it's USB, so it plugs into just about every machine available (not just the occaisonal firewire box) and mounts as a standard USB storage device. Heck, for $200, it's almost worth it just as a portable HDD.
(ot) I HEREBY OFFER MY SERVICES TO SLASHDOT
on
Linux on the iPod
·
· Score: 1
For the reasonable fee of $10 per story, I am offering my services to the editors of/. as a proofreader and duplicate checker. Additionally, I will assist if necessary (at a negotiable hourly rate) in adding code to automatically send the article blurbs to my wireless device. I am unable to proofread overnight, so that will have to be covered by another shift, or written off as "happy slashdot error time."
I cannot guarantee 100% error correction, but I will stake my job on significantly decreased rates of grammar and spelling mistakes, and far fewer dupes.
I would also like a T-shirt that says "I work for slashdot".
Please, for the sake of your readers, hire me. I want to help!
And at the risk of my precious, precious Karma, I'll go out on a limb and say that I *like* the happy fisher-price XP look. But everybody's different. This is just aesthetics, and you can skin it however you darned well please. How the default skin for your OS's window manager looks is by no means a good way to judge an operating system.
To paraphrase your quote, Linux looks like some kid ate a box of blocky, bitmapped alphabet characters and threw up all over the screen. And then proceeded to toss in a couple dozen icons drawn by his retarded brother. Plus, in a user-interface nightmare, every distro feels the need to put 15 apps that do the same thing on your "start-like menu", whether it be your control panel or a word processor.
But hey, I like Linux, too, and it's not too tough for me to ditch the extra apps, fix the retarded fonts, and replace the icons with something slightly more consistent and less "giant smelly foot and poorly-drawn envelope."
Style is irrelevant to functionality, as long as you can reconfigure it. Which you can.
Yes, the batteries are different. I didn't mean to compare them directly, only to show that one degraded significantly more after a year. I should have been clearer. I meant that the battery in the 600x *initially* lasted for 2 hours, but by the end of one year was down to 30-45 minutes. At that time, I had a desktop, so the laptop was not heavily used. The new A30 initially lasted about two hours under heavy use, as it was issued to replace both machines. A year later, it still lasts about two hours.
Of course, the 600x isn't nearly as bad as my old Fujitsu 435Dx, where at the end of a year the battery lasted about 2 minutes. That one was so bad I got a shiny new battery as the result of a class-action lawsuit, though.
If you want battery life, get a deep-cycle marine battery.
I had a work-issued 600x for a year. By the end of the year the battery lasted well under an hour of moderate use (infrequent disk access with time to spin down, very little heavy CPU usage).
I have an A30 now, and I'm at roughly the one-year mark. Despite driving an enormous LCD screen, the battery still manages to last nearly two hours under *heavy* use (DVD playback and gaming on an airplane.)
So yes, I'd say my 600x had a clearly subpar battery.
Ah, painball. The great american sport.
on
Potato Bazookas
·
· Score: 1
We used to play painball, but then we discovered that funball was more fun and less painful than painball.
You don't get 50% compression with zip. The algorithms in traditional data compression software are not well-designed for working with sound files. I don't know the mathematical details of why, but I have tried it.
A sweet little phone. Smaller than my old StarTac with a 16MB 66MHz color Palm built in. I opted to go with the T-mobile sidekick, though, as it was closer to what I wanted.
My must-haves: 1. always-on unlimited instant messaging. 2. widely syncable calendar and address book 3. POP email access 4. works as a phone 5. fits in my pocket
My wishes: 1. 640x480 or greater built-in camera 2. color screen 3. user-accessible GPS navigation 4. MP3 player
The sidekick fits most of my requirements. It's a little big for my taste, but still pocketable, and the synchronization is one-way for the time being. (Two-way software is supposedly coming soon from intellisync) But it was $50 from Amazon, so I can afford to buy it while everybody else figures theirs out.
I looked at the Treo 300, and although their synching is better and you can run 3rd-party apps, the OS suffers from an inability to multitask. Meaning I can't leave my IM running in the background. Also, a crash on your treo (very common with AIM) wipes the data (oops, lost my phone book!!), whereas a crash on the sidekick simply requires a reboot, and your unit restores all your data from a network backup in a matter of minutes.
I am assuming that the i500 will have similar limitations to the Treo. But if you don't want IM, it should be an outstanding little phone.
"15 things to toggle on and off" is not the same as "15 things that can be set to an integer value from 0 to 9."
15 factorial is a tad large, yes. But that's not what I meant. Since they are on/off, it would be 2^15.
32,000 games, just like Combat for the Atari 2600!
on
Phantom Game Console
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Remember the old "Combat" game for the atari 2600? I believe it was marketed as something like "40 games in one!" even though the games were all on the order of:
1. Tanks shoot eachother 2. Tanks shoot eachother with bouncing bullets 3. Tanks shoot eachother around obstacles 4. Tanks shoot eachother around obstacles with bouncing bullets
etc...
All they would need is one game and 15 things to toggle on and off, and that should get you to about 32,000 different "games".
"When was the last time you asked someone how his relationship was doing or how his kid is recovering from the illness or how he likes his new boss in the middle of a quake match? "
Wednesday night. (It's thursday morning)
What else am I going to do when I'm dead? And I suck and get killed a lot. Do you also think that playing basketball with your friends is a lousy way to have fun together, just because relationship discussions during the game are extremely limited? Can you think of a better way to get 10 people across the country into a conference call at the same time than by centering it around something they all enjoy doing? Try it. Call 10 out-of-state friends and try to get them into a 3-hour conference call. Then, try it again with 10 out-of-state gamer friends, and invite them to play a game and chat. Tell me which one gets more friends together.
I've been playing Battlefield 1942 the last few months with a group of old friends scattered around all corners of the country. We use Roger Wilco so we can all talk to eachother while playing-- it's a fantastic way to catch up with friends, and a game that forces you to work as a team to win. Even the guys playing with us who aren't on our voice server are definitely typing. To not do so would lose you the game.
But communicating aside, I agree with you. Excess is bad, and if you're not enjoying it, why play?
Corn-fed middle-agers pretending they're old!!! Back in my day, we used mercury delay lines, and we LIKED it. Sure, the younger engineers and their tension-coiled torsional-wave nickel-wire delay lines, and their kids with their fancy ferro-magnetic cores and whirly, multiheaded drum memories stored more, but give me a long, vibrating trough full of toxic liquid metal any day.
That's fantastically awful. Do you have links? I can't believe this happened!! Fraud is fraud, even in the murky world of religion and law.
If you can't prove anything (supreme beings, distant historical miracles, etc...) leave it alone-- but for the court to ignore blatant trickery and lying under "separation of church and state" is ridiculous. If I want to rob people, all I have to do now is to do it in the name of God through some mystical-ish technology-assisted cheating.
I'm holding off buying any HD hardware until at least two of my three major TV uses are available in HD. Since I watch very little OTA television, and even on cable I only watch things I've recorded, having an HDTV for that is pointless.
When I can some of the following with HDTV, I'll get one:
1. Use my Tivo. (this one's enough by itself) 2. Play console games. (Yeah, yeah, xbox has 720p on a few games, and gamecube does 480p, but limited support doesn't count) 3. Watch DVDs. (slightly better on HD, but DVDs are 480p at best, and only that when the DVD is telecined and the progressive frames can be reconstructed.) When we have HDVD, then I'll be happy.
Besides, this gives me a good excuse to wait for prices to continue dropping on everything. Everybody's different, though-- and if you use your HDTV now, cool.:) Gives those of us who are waiting somebody to mooch off of for basketball games and movie parties.
The resolution (as determined by number of pixels) will not get better. Manufacturers are currently counting each one-color pixel in the
RG GB
blocks as one. That block is 4 pixels. Foveon-based cameras would have
(RGB) (RGB) (RGB) (RGB)
which is still 4 pixels, but gives you more accurate color information at each pixel and reduces moire. So, while there will not be any more pixels per area with Foveon CCDs, the *effective* picture resolution will be much better.
I wish I had known this before I shopped for digicams-- it feels like false advertising to me, and I learned after I had made my purchase. Manufacturers ought to be required to state "4 single-color Megapixels" or "1 Megapixel effective with color" for 4MP cameras with traditional CCDs.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. It sucks grand ass. But 'tis the law nonetheless.
Which has been ruled legal in court, if I recall correctly. While it is legal to copyright the "arrangement" of the information, grabbing somebody's yellow pages and transcribing the whole thing with some re-typsetting makes that list of phone numbers yours, even to redistribute.
See here for info: http://www.writing-world.com/rights/fair.html
Search for the phrase "phone book" on the page. Copying "creative Works," like fiction or poetry, is frowned upon, while copying facts is not. The copyright is "in the expression" to quote the site, not in any underlying facts. If facts were copyrightable, we'd all be completely screwed. As it stands right now, we're only 97% screwed.
You don't have to watch the promo shows it records. You would actually have to navigate to the show and play it to be "forced" to watch it. On my (US) tivo, they are easily distinguishable. It doesn't take any of your recording time away. I fail to see how this is "not any better than broadcast TV."
The poster is correct. In the US, you are supposed to pay sales tax on internet purchases when you file your taxes at the end of the year. But I seriously doubt everybody remembers to file every book or CD they ordered, even if they try to be honest and get big items like new laptops. It will mean less work filing your taxes, which is always nice.
You don't understand why people want all-in-one units, and I don't understand why people want their pockets brimming with phones, text pagers, PDAs, digital cameras, gameboys, mp3 players, and GPS units. I'm as picky about size as you, so I don't know why anyone wants a huge phone either. I want a tiny phone that does everything, is that so much to ask? (see Samsung i500 for a phone that gets closer to what i want)
Both of us are likely to have products to choose from. There's no need to lambast the other side for liking something you do not. It's like a VI/Emacs argument-- who cares? Just use what you prefer and try not to proselytize. Nokia still makes plenty of "just plain cell phones," although most do have at least a simple address book and calendar. I imagine most other cell companies do as well, and will continue to do so in the future.
So, good luck to you in your cell-phone hunt, Giant-Bag-Of-Devices Man!!!
Your friend,
I-Do-Not-Have-Enough-Pockets-For-That Man.
Why are you charging per IP? Charge these people by the traffic they use. I also fail to understand how having two machines behind a NAT can use twice as much bandwidth. I would assume you cap the bandwidth already, but if not-- a single machine with a 100MBps ethernet card could saturate a whole stack o' T1 connections. There is no need for more than one box running 24/7 to eat all of your bandwidth and then some.
I understand the need to make money-- you are a business after all. But don't charge based on how people use the bits after they get there (whether they all go to the same PC or get split up by a router)-- charge them based on how many bits they use. If they want extra IPs for $12, that's cool too. But don't enforce it on everyone. That's a massive waste of IP space.
I'm not sure if you meant this as a troll or not, but either way, it should be addressed.
You are correct that there will be additional risk associated with a new technology. Old and refined is almost always a safer bet than new and untested.
However, your other arguments against a space elevator don't make sense.
"You'd still need to develop boosters and fuel to carry on from there."
Well, sure-- but the vast majority of the fuel in a current spacecraft is just for getting it off the earth. This is what the space elevator replaces. So you could still use current tech for maneuvering, with tiny fuel tanks compared to today's behemoths.
"It's obviously not the way to commoditize space travel"
It may be tough to build, but it's a heck of a lot better solution for commoditizing space travel than strapping yourself to billions of dollars worth of single-use hardware in a flying-brick reentry vehicle that requires months of intensive labor between flights. Chemical rockets will *never* commoditize space travel. A space elevator *might*. I would like to see it tried.
I'll ignore the emotional argument for what it is.
I fail to see how any spaceflight proponent can see the elevator as anything *but* an elegant solution. It removes the need for most of your fuel, greatly reduces your launch costs, and you get most of your launch energy back on the trip back down. If it gets space entry down to the level of general affordability, then the real exploration, and all that "flying" you're excited about can happen between the planets and stars.
Considering the Archos Jukebox Studio 20GB runs for $130(with rebate)-$160 if you watch the sales, and $225 even at Amazon, I think $199 is definitely overpriced. And it's USB, so it plugs into just about every machine available (not just the occaisonal firewire box) and mounts as a standard USB storage device. Heck, for $200, it's almost worth it just as a portable HDD.
For the reasonable fee of $10 per story, I am offering my services to the editors of /. as a proofreader and duplicate checker. Additionally, I will assist if necessary (at a negotiable hourly rate) in adding code to automatically send the article blurbs to my wireless device. I am unable to proofread overnight, so that will have to be covered by another shift, or written off as "happy slashdot error time."
I cannot guarantee 100% error correction, but I will stake my job on significantly decreased rates of grammar and spelling mistakes, and far fewer dupes.
I would also like a T-shirt that says "I work for slashdot".
Please, for the sake of your readers, hire me. I want to help!
And at the risk of my precious, precious Karma, I'll go out on a limb and say that I *like* the happy fisher-price XP look. But everybody's different. This is just aesthetics, and you can skin it however you darned well please. How the default skin for your OS's window manager looks is by no means a good way to judge an operating system.
To paraphrase your quote, Linux looks like some kid ate a box of blocky, bitmapped alphabet characters and threw up all over the screen. And then proceeded to toss in a couple dozen icons drawn by his retarded brother. Plus, in a user-interface nightmare, every distro feels the need to put 15 apps that do the same thing on your "start-like menu", whether it be your control panel or a word processor.
But hey, I like Linux, too, and it's not too tough for me to ditch the extra apps, fix the retarded fonts, and replace the icons with something slightly more consistent and less "giant smelly foot and poorly-drawn envelope."
Style is irrelevant to functionality, as long as you can reconfigure it. Which you can.
Yes, the batteries are different. I didn't mean to compare them directly, only to show that one degraded significantly more after a year. I should have been clearer. I meant that the battery in the 600x *initially* lasted for 2 hours, but by the end of one year was down to 30-45 minutes. At that time, I had a desktop, so the laptop was not heavily used. The new A30 initially lasted about two hours under heavy use, as it was issued to replace both machines. A year later, it still lasts about two hours.
Of course, the 600x isn't nearly as bad as my old Fujitsu 435Dx, where at the end of a year the battery lasted about 2 minutes. That one was so bad I got a shiny new battery as the result of a class-action lawsuit, though.
If you want battery life, get a deep-cycle marine battery.
I had a work-issued 600x for a year. By the end of the year the battery lasted well under an hour of moderate use (infrequent disk access with time to spin down, very little heavy CPU usage).
I have an A30 now, and I'm at roughly the one-year mark. Despite driving an enormous LCD screen, the battery still manages to last nearly two hours under *heavy* use (DVD playback and gaming on an airplane.)
So yes, I'd say my 600x had a clearly subpar battery.
We used to play painball, but then we discovered that funball was more fun and less painful than painball.
You don't get 50% compression with zip. The algorithms in traditional data compression software are not well-designed for working with sound files. I don't know the mathematical details of why, but I have tried it.
A sweet little phone. Smaller than my old StarTac with a 16MB 66MHz color Palm built in. I opted to go with the T-mobile sidekick, though, as it was closer to what I wanted.
My must-haves:
1. always-on unlimited instant messaging.
2. widely syncable calendar and address book
3. POP email access
4. works as a phone
5. fits in my pocket
My wishes:
1. 640x480 or greater built-in camera
2. color screen
3. user-accessible GPS navigation
4. MP3 player
The sidekick fits most of my requirements. It's a little big for my taste, but still pocketable, and the synchronization is one-way for the time being. (Two-way software is supposedly coming soon from intellisync) But it was $50 from Amazon, so I can afford to buy it while everybody else figures theirs out.
I looked at the Treo 300, and although their synching is better and you can run 3rd-party apps, the OS suffers from an inability to multitask. Meaning I can't leave my IM running in the background. Also, a crash on your treo (very common with AIM) wipes the data (oops, lost my phone book!!), whereas a crash on the sidekick simply requires a reboot, and your unit restores all your data from a network backup in a matter of minutes.
I am assuming that the i500 will have similar limitations to the Treo. But if you don't want IM, it should be an outstanding little phone.
15 factorial would be 15 different symbols we could arrange in any order. Or 15 15-position switches, with each value used only once.
Or something.
But I'm sure about the 2^15 part!!
Apparently I've been working with binary for too long. I can't do real math anymore!!
"15 things to toggle on and off" is not the same as "15 things that can be set to an integer value from 0 to 9."
15 factorial is a tad large, yes. But that's not what I meant. Since they are on/off, it would be 2^15.
Remember the old "Combat" game for the atari 2600? I believe it was marketed as something like "40 games in one!" even though the games were all on the order of:
1. Tanks shoot eachother
2. Tanks shoot eachother with bouncing bullets
3. Tanks shoot eachother around obstacles
4. Tanks shoot eachother around obstacles with bouncing bullets
etc...
All they would need is one game and 15 things to toggle on and off, and that should get you to about 32,000 different "games".
"When was the last time you asked someone how his relationship was doing or how his kid is recovering from the illness or how he likes his new boss in the middle of a quake match? "
Wednesday night. (It's thursday morning)
What else am I going to do when I'm dead? And I suck and get killed a lot. Do you also think that playing basketball with your friends is a lousy way to have fun together, just because relationship discussions during the game are extremely limited? Can you think of a better way to get 10 people across the country into a conference call at the same time than by centering it around something they all enjoy doing? Try it. Call 10 out-of-state friends and try to get them into a 3-hour conference call. Then, try it again with 10 out-of-state gamer friends, and invite them to play a game and chat. Tell me which one gets more friends together.
I've been playing Battlefield 1942 the last few months with a group of old friends scattered around all corners of the country. We use Roger Wilco so we can all talk to eachother while playing-- it's a fantastic way to catch up with friends, and a game that forces you to work as a team to win. Even the guys playing with us who aren't on our voice server are definitely typing. To not do so would lose you the game.
But communicating aside, I agree with you. Excess is bad, and if you're not enjoying it, why play?
Corn-fed middle-agers pretending they're old!!! Back in my day, we used mercury delay lines, and we LIKED it. Sure, the younger engineers and their tension-coiled torsional-wave nickel-wire delay lines, and their kids with their fancy ferro-magnetic cores and whirly, multiheaded drum memories stored more, but give me a long, vibrating trough full of toxic liquid metal any day.
That's fantastically awful. Do you have links? I can't believe this happened!! Fraud is fraud, even in the murky world of religion and law.
If you can't prove anything (supreme beings, distant historical miracles, etc...) leave it alone-- but for the court to ignore blatant trickery and lying under "separation of church and state" is ridiculous. If I want to rob people, all I have to do now is to do it in the name of God through some mystical-ish technology-assisted cheating.
I'm holding off buying any HD hardware until at least two of my three major TV uses are available in HD. Since I watch very little OTA television, and even on cable I only watch things I've recorded, having an HDTV for that is pointless.
:) Gives those of us who are waiting somebody to mooch off of for basketball games and movie parties.
When I can some of the following with HDTV, I'll get one:
1. Use my Tivo. (this one's enough by itself)
2. Play console games. (Yeah, yeah, xbox has 720p on a few games, and gamecube does 480p, but limited support doesn't count)
3. Watch DVDs. (slightly better on HD, but DVDs are 480p at best, and only that when the DVD is telecined and the progressive frames can be reconstructed.) When we have HDVD, then I'll be happy.
Besides, this gives me a good excuse to wait for prices to continue dropping on everything. Everybody's different, though-- and if you use your HDTV now, cool.
Shucks, I've been on the Indiana list for nearly a year now. You're just now getting one of these in Massachusetts? ;)
The resolution (as determined by number of pixels) will not get better. Manufacturers are currently counting each one-color pixel in the
RG
GB
blocks as one. That block is 4 pixels. Foveon-based cameras would have
(RGB) (RGB)
(RGB) (RGB)
which is still 4 pixels, but gives you more accurate color information at each pixel and reduces moire. So, while there will not be any more pixels per area with Foveon CCDs, the *effective* picture resolution will be much better.
I wish I had known this before I shopped for digicams-- it feels like false advertising to me, and I learned after I had made my purchase. Manufacturers ought to be required to state "4 single-color Megapixels" or "1 Megapixel effective with color" for 4MP cameras with traditional CCDs.