My guess is that you would lose sound quality. You're making a lossy compression of a lossy compression. You're certainly not going to get back any signal in the conversion;)
Considering vorbis is supposed to be less lossy than comparable bitrate mp3, you could probably do it, but it wouldn't sound any better. Then, what's the point? Players will (should) be able to handle both formats. I guess it would be a way to decrease file size...
IF CFOs aren't supposed to be tech people (and I fully agree here), then what the hell is he doing writing an article that even discusses technology, much less ripping it as inadequate? Just get your stupid ass back to what you do best, counting beans and cutting checks!
Someone else has already paid the devil for you. The money goes directly to the store you buy it from, nowhere else. Remember, your gripe is against the RIAA, not the retailers (unless you really are into Napster for the thievery);)
He said that the cosmological constant, which provided a force that counteracted gravity in just the right way to create a static universe, was the biggest blunder of his life. Turns out, he may have been right about the presence of a cosmological constant. He was only wrong about the effect of such a constant... no one is trying to use it to create a static universe. They're just using it to describe the zero-point energy fluctuations that have been theorized.
There is no such thing as a true vacuum. The speed of sound (anywhere) is sqrt(\gamma P / \rho), where gamma is the ratio of specific heats, 5/3 for an ideal gas, P is the local gas pressure which can be estimated from the ideal gas law, and \rho is the local mass density.
In that same article, the phrase (actually paraphrased here) '[the legality of DeCSS] would allow anyone to copy DVDs'...
If these f***ing journalists bothered READING anything before spouting off, they'd realize that there are plenty of programs out there that copy DVDs, and the central purpose of DeCSS is to 'De'crypt the 'CSS' protecting access to the DVD.
Idiots. Oh yeah, it's not just the NYT, the Associated Press actually released the article, so it's their hacks who screwed up this particular article.
My previous post said that "at the very least it is wrong not to identify" deja.com's inserted links. I didn't mean to suggest that this practice would be acceptable to everyone.
You have perfectly valid arguments against the practice... some of the same ones that I have, although I wasn't trying to argue my point of view here.
The original point of the thread was to discuss the legality of inserting these links into posts made to a semi-public board (public in the sense that anyone can read them, but a site that is hosted by a privately owned company). Legality and moral veritude are two different issues. There are many perfectly legal actions that I find reprehensible, but as long as it is legal, there will be people or companies out there that will ignore any ethical issues and practice these actions.
Right, but suppose you were posting a message about how much you hate (insert your favorite pet peeve) and Slashdot, much to your chagrin, inserted a link to a particular site advocating (fill in the same thing, here)...
For instance, suppose I were to post something bad about the KKK here... Now SlashDot's little parser recognizes KKK, and inserts a link to a white supremacy website. I'd not be happy in the least.
The problem is that none of these automagic parsers understands context. If you are advocating a product, you probably wouldn't mind the extra bit of advertising. If, on the other hand, you wrote up a bad review, told others how much you hate a certain organization, etc. and a link popped into existence, you might be a little more miffed.
I agree that it is wrong not to, at the very least, identify changes to the post made by deja.com... in fact, I addressed this with another post in this forum.
To your other point, it is quite different than your example of posting Nazi propaganda with my name on it. That example consists of an entirely forged post with someone else's name on it. And, no, I would most definately be unhappy about that. However, what deja.com is doing is not so much making up posts with your name on it, but taking your posts, and adding links to products in effort to expand the readers' options (at least that's what I got from their response). I'm not saying that I would necessarily like that... but it's not like they are going to put links to Nazi propaganda into my posts about great/horrible the latest AMD processor is, etc.
Now, if VA Linux inserted a link to Freshmeat *within your post* on Slashdot, you might think otherwise... or maybe not;)
The point is that, unless deja.com is somehow uniquely identifying links that they have inserted into posts, they will probably engender some amount of confusion on the part of their readers.
ObDisclaimer: I only use deja.com about once every 6 months, so I'm not that familiar with their service... That said, if they passed through extant hyperlinks unmolested, while marking automagically inserted deja.com hyperlinks, maybe with a small image tag at the end of the link, they might avoid some of this confusion.
That still won't placate people who get all up in arms about copyrights, when they know basically nothing about copyright statutes and limitations in the first place... but if deja.com insists on inserting these links, it's a good first step.
I don't think it's been legally tested, but this issue came up when Jon Katz compiled a bunch of/. postings into his book about the Columbine shootings.
Outside of a vocal minority's displeasure of being (anonymously) associated with Katz's writing, the typical view is that, once you post copyrighted material (that you hold the copyright to, otherwise you have infringed on another's copyright) to a public forum, be it a message kiosk on your local college campus, or an electronic messaging system, such as deja.com or the/. forums, you have implicitly given up any copyrights you may have held, and the work passes into public domain.
It seems like the only legal issue here is the validity of postfixes claiming sole ownership of such posts for the author. Not that I want to see this tested in the courts, but it seems like common sense SHOULD prevail... if you don't want others to make use of your statements, don't post them in a public forum. Put them in a medium supported by copyright laws, instead.
Before you write this off as flamebait, consider: Sen. Hatch asked her, among other questions if fair use included ripping a CD for personal use, and making a copy for use in the car (essentially the same act... technically, one is making a perfect copy, the other a lossy copy). She answered that neither fell within fair use.
I guess no one has clued her in on the legal judgement from the early 80s that said both time and phase shifting were, in fact, covered by the fair use clause of the copyright acts.
How else do you think we are able to buy VCRs? There was a big push to have these outlawed, because we could make copies of copyrighted material for use at our convenience. The courts said: 'Big deal, it's fair use!'
I have to argue that copying a CD falls more squarely under fair use than does copying a movie from television. In the former case, you have paid The Evil Bastards (TM) for a copy of the CD. In the latter, you are copying a 'free broadcast'.
I seriously doubt that I share ANY demographic category with Sen. Hatch, but I am glad he has seen the evils perpetrated under the name of the DMCA and is actively trying to do something about it.
When I was in school at North Carolina State University (read, the entire decade of the 90s) we started off with telephonic registration. The rules were simple: Starting on a specific day (typically a given Sunday), all seniors had access, first dial, first serve. The next Sunday, juniors got access as well. The next week, Sophmores, etc. Everyone of a given class had exactly the same priority, ie. dial, hang up, press redial, etc. until you got through.
Some time during the late 90s, they instituted on-line registration, which had registration windows exactly like the dial up reigstration. Only without the hassle of busy signals.
The only real difference between lining up and waiting at the registrar's office and the telephonic registration system is that you got to wait in the comfort of your dorm room/apartment rather than long uncomfortable lines with no access to restrooms!
The reason we watch at these frequencies is that the Earth's atmosphere is transparent to radiation at those frequencies. There's no reason to perform searches at frequencies that won't get through the atmosphere (like particular UV frequencies, except when there's a hole in the ozone!)
Unless the little green men have a vastly different ecology (not carbon based, don't require oxygen/water, etc. and thus a wildly different atmosphere) it is very likely that they are searching the same frequencies as we are.
I think you miss the point... the list was for the most influential algorithms in science and engineering. My guess is that they mean classical science and engineering rather than computer science/engineering. IMO, there should always be a distinction between these fields. Public-key cryprography serves no purpose in the classical sciences (other than protecting your sensitive data on radioactive isotopes, etc.:)
License agreements (and all legal documents) are supposed to be understood by the parties entering into the agreement. As it stands, most EULAs are full of legal mumbo-jumbo.
If I'm installing a piece of software at 2am, am I really expected to read through a lengthy document and consult a lawyer when I don't understand a particular clause? If you ask the company whose product I've just bought, yes.
If you ask me, that is an unreasonable expectation. Do you know what lawyers cost? Do you think I should have to keep one on retainer just for the cases where I install commercial software? Hell, that would cost as much or more as buying the software in the first place!
Additionally, these companies try to avoid any liability issues. Suppose I buy a defective dishwasher that sparks and catches my house on fire... who is responsible for that? Maytag (or whoever, no offense to Maytag intended or implied).
If a memory leak in someone's latest, greatest software package corrupts vital data (say in the kernel of my new media-less Windows 2000 system), who's to blame? No one. (Well, I'd be the one to blame if I was stupid enough to rely on M$ Win2000 for anything more important than minesweeper!) Problem is that many companies do rely on software such as this, and pay large amounts of money to do so... you'd think they would have bought a bit of accountability to go along with it.
The problem is that, when Windows hands out icons, it only looks at the first extension and hides the rest of the filename (unless you specifically try to change it). I agree that the problem is people mindlessly clicking on whatever they get sent, but in this case, it looks like it's a movie. There's no harm in watching a movie clip, right;o}
They don't say how these guys got access to the computers, per se (not up to date firewall protection... ooo, that's informative). They don't say what the trojan is called so we can go looking for it. They don't say how 'xanim trojan-file' will cause anything other than an error to occur...:)
I find all of this somewhat hard to swallow, given the lack of details given. Does anyone know of another article with cold, hard facts?
Slashdot Mirror
My guess is that you would lose sound quality. You're making a lossy compression of a lossy compression. You're certainly not going to get back any signal in the conversion ;)
Eric
Considering vorbis is supposed to be less lossy than comparable bitrate mp3, you could probably do it, but it wouldn't sound any better. Then, what's the point? Players will (should) be able to handle both formats. I guess it would be a way to decrease file size...
Eric
IF CFOs aren't supposed to be tech people (and I fully agree here), then what the hell is he doing writing an article that even discusses technology, much less ripping it as inadequate? Just get your stupid ass back to what you do best, counting beans and cutting checks!
Eric
Someone else has already paid the devil for you. The money goes directly to the store you buy it from, nowhere else. Remember, your gripe is against the RIAA, not the retailers (unless you really are into Napster for the thievery) ;)
Eric
He said that the cosmological constant, which provided a force that counteracted gravity in just the right way to create a static universe, was the biggest blunder of his life. Turns out, he may have been right about the presence of a cosmological constant. He was only wrong about the effect of such a constant... no one is trying to use it to create a static universe. They're just using it to describe the zero-point energy fluctuations that have been theorized.
Eric
Please post any response you get from the wanker.
Cheers
Eric
There is no such thing as a true vacuum. The speed of sound (anywhere) is sqrt(\gamma P / \rho), where gamma is the ratio of specific heats, 5/3 for an ideal gas, P is the local gas pressure which can be estimated from the ideal gas law, and \rho is the local mass density.
Eric
In that same article, the phrase (actually paraphrased here) '[the legality of DeCSS] would allow anyone to copy DVDs'...
If these f***ing journalists bothered READING anything before spouting off, they'd realize that there are plenty of programs out there that copy DVDs, and the central purpose of DeCSS is to 'De'crypt the 'CSS' protecting access to the DVD.
Idiots. Oh yeah, it's not just the NYT, the Associated Press actually released the article, so it's their hacks who screwed up this particular article.
Eric
My previous post said that "at the very least it is wrong not to identify" deja.com's inserted links. I didn't mean to suggest that this practice would be acceptable to everyone.
You have perfectly valid arguments against the practice... some of the same ones that I have, although I wasn't trying to argue my point of view here.
The original point of the thread was to discuss the legality of inserting these links into posts made to a semi-public board (public in the sense that anyone can read them, but a site that is hosted by a privately owned company). Legality and moral veritude are two different issues. There are many perfectly legal actions that I find reprehensible, but as long as it is legal, there will be people or companies out there that will ignore any ethical issues and practice these actions.
Eric
Right, but suppose you were posting a message about how much you hate (insert your favorite pet peeve) and Slashdot, much to your chagrin, inserted a link to a particular site advocating (fill in the same thing, here)...
For instance, suppose I were to post something bad about the KKK here... Now SlashDot's little parser recognizes KKK, and inserts a link to a white supremacy website. I'd not be happy in the least.
The problem is that none of these automagic parsers understands context. If you are advocating a product, you probably wouldn't mind the extra bit of advertising. If, on the other hand, you wrote up a bad review, told others how much you hate a certain organization, etc. and a link popped into existence, you might be a little more miffed.
Just a thought...
Eric
To your other point, it is quite different than your example of posting Nazi propaganda with my name on it. That example consists of an entirely forged post with someone else's name on it. And, no, I would most definately be unhappy about that. However, what deja.com is doing is not so much making up posts with your name on it, but taking your posts, and adding links to products in effort to expand the readers' options (at least that's what I got from their response). I'm not saying that I would necessarily like that... but it's not like they are going to put links to Nazi propaganda into my posts about great/horrible the latest AMD processor is, etc.
Eric
Now, if VA Linux inserted a link to Freshmeat *within your post* on Slashdot, you might think otherwise... or maybe not ;)
The point is that, unless deja.com is somehow uniquely identifying links that they have inserted into posts, they will probably engender some amount of confusion on the part of their readers.
ObDisclaimer: I only use deja.com about once every 6 months, so I'm not that familiar with their service... That said, if they passed through extant hyperlinks unmolested, while marking automagically inserted deja.com hyperlinks, maybe with a small image tag at the end of the link, they might avoid some of this confusion.
That still won't placate people who get all up in arms about copyrights, when they know basically nothing about copyright statutes and limitations in the first place... but if deja.com insists on inserting these links, it's a good first step.
Eric
I don't think it's been legally tested, but this issue came up when Jon Katz compiled a bunch of /. postings into his book about the Columbine shootings.
/. forums, you have implicitly given up any copyrights you may have held, and the work passes into public domain.
Outside of a vocal minority's displeasure of being (anonymously) associated with Katz's writing, the typical view is that, once you post copyrighted material (that you hold the copyright to, otherwise you have infringed on another's copyright) to a public forum, be it a message kiosk on your local college campus, or an electronic messaging system, such as deja.com or the
It seems like the only legal issue here is the validity of postfixes claiming sole ownership of such posts for the author. Not that I want to see this tested in the courts, but it seems like common sense SHOULD prevail... if you don't want others to make use of your statements, don't post them in a public forum. Put them in a medium supported by copyright laws, instead.
Eric
Eric
IIRC, it's The Exorcist
Eric
OK, you got me there... I wasn't think in such overly general terms ;)
And an idiot too...
Before you write this off as flamebait, consider: Sen. Hatch asked her, among other questions if fair use included ripping a CD for personal use, and making a copy for use in the car (essentially the same act... technically, one is making a perfect copy, the other a lossy copy). She answered that neither fell within fair use.
I guess no one has clued her in on the legal judgement from the early 80s that said both time and phase shifting were, in fact, covered by the fair use clause of the copyright acts.
How else do you think we are able to buy VCRs? There was a big push to have these outlawed, because we could make copies of copyrighted material for use at our convenience. The courts said: 'Big deal, it's fair use!'
I have to argue that copying a CD falls more squarely under fair use than does copying a movie from television. In the former case, you have paid The Evil Bastards (TM) for a copy of the CD. In the latter, you are copying a 'free broadcast'.
I seriously doubt that I share ANY demographic category with Sen. Hatch, but I am glad he has seen the evils perpetrated under the name of the DMCA and is actively trying to do something about it.
Eric
When I was in school at North Carolina State University (read, the entire decade of the 90s) we started off with telephonic registration. The rules were simple: Starting on a specific day (typically a given Sunday), all seniors had access, first dial, first serve. The next Sunday, juniors got access as well. The next week, Sophmores, etc. Everyone of a given class had exactly the same priority, ie. dial, hang up, press redial, etc. until you got through.
Some time during the late 90s, they instituted on-line registration, which had registration windows exactly like the dial up reigstration. Only without the hassle of busy signals.
The only real difference between lining up and waiting at the registrar's office and the telephonic registration system is that you got to wait in the comfort of your dorm room/apartment rather than long uncomfortable lines with no access to restrooms!
Eric
The reason we watch at these frequencies is that the Earth's atmosphere is transparent to radiation at those frequencies. There's no reason to perform searches at frequencies that won't get through the atmosphere (like particular UV frequencies, except when there's a hole in the ozone!)
Unless the little green men have a vastly different ecology (not carbon based, don't require oxygen/water, etc. and thus a wildly different atmosphere) it is very likely that they are searching the same frequencies as we are.
That would suck!
Eric
I think you miss the point... the list was for the most influential algorithms in science and engineering. My guess is that they mean classical science and engineering rather than computer science/engineering. IMO, there should always be a distinction between these fields. Public-key cryprography serves no purpose in the classical sciences (other than protecting your sensitive data on radioactive isotopes, etc. :)
Eric
I also move to nominate this post as the 'winner'!
Eric
License agreements (and all legal documents) are supposed to be understood by the parties entering into the agreement. As it stands, most EULAs are full of legal mumbo-jumbo.
If I'm installing a piece of software at 2am, am I really expected to read through a lengthy document and consult a lawyer when I don't understand a particular clause? If you ask the company whose product I've just bought, yes.
If you ask me, that is an unreasonable expectation. Do you know what lawyers cost? Do you think I should have to keep one on retainer just for the cases where I install commercial software? Hell, that would cost as much or more as buying the software in the first place!
Additionally, these companies try to avoid any liability issues. Suppose I buy a defective dishwasher that sparks and catches my house on fire... who is responsible for that? Maytag (or whoever, no offense to Maytag intended or implied).
If a memory leak in someone's latest, greatest software package corrupts vital data (say in the kernel of my new media-less Windows 2000 system), who's to blame? No one. (Well, I'd be the one to blame if I was stupid enough to rely on M$ Win2000 for anything more important than minesweeper!) Problem is that many companies do rely on software such as this, and pay large amounts of money to do so... you'd think they would have bought a bit of accountability to go along with it.
Eric
Really?? I'm not sitting in front of a Win box, but I *thought* that's how it works. Oh well, it's Friday. I'm allowed to be a bit stupid, right?
Eric
The problem is that, when Windows hands out icons, it only looks at the first extension and hides the rest of the filename (unless you specifically try to change it). I agree that the problem is people mindlessly clicking on whatever they get sent, but in this case, it looks like it's a movie. There's no harm in watching a movie clip, right ;o}
Eric
I find all of this somewhat hard to swallow, given the lack of details given. Does anyone know of another article with cold, hard facts?
Eric