First, this is a levy, not a tariff. This new charge will be applied to all recordable media sold in Canada, not those imported into the country.
Second, the government has been trying to get this off the ground since 1999. (Many of you will remember the first time this story came around). However, I can still buy a 50-pack of 80-min CD-Rs for $35 CAD in Toronto. Public and political opposition to this move prevented it from being enacted back then; it can again this time. The story got a lot of press in Canada at the time and the Globe and Mail ran several high-profile editorials attacking the proposed levies. Remember: this levy is only a proposal, and the Copyright Board of Canada will be holding public hearings into the matter. It's a simple matter to type up a letter to your MP, and as many of them have so little to do that they are bored silly, they are likely to give your letter some attention, especially if it is halfway-intelligent.
This proposal is so basically flawed that it really stands little chance of ever being enacted and will likely fall to the wayside as it did in 1999. It is unlikely that this idea could withstand a court challenge. Moreover, were this levy actually imposed, there would be a big boom in business for American online computer shops. I'm pretty sure that Canada Customs has better things to do than to levy a $5 charge on your $30 CD-R purchase.
You can see the Copyright Board's original proposal from Dec. 2000 here.
This seems to be another blow to Rogers' cable internet service. I mean, 1Mbit ADSL from Sympatico is ~35CAD a month, with no limits on amount of usage. Why would anyone who uses a lot of bandwidth on Rogers stay with them now? Can Rogers really afford to lose 10% of their cable modem customers?
When this is combined with the recent e-mail switch-over fiasco and the highly-publicized lawsuits, I don't see how Rogers is going to attract too many new customers. (For those who don't know, with the impending demise of excite@home, all Rogers customers had to switch from user@home.com to user@rogers.ca. It's not difficult to imagine the number of problems this created for the average joe user. There was even a channel on Rogers cable devoted exclusively to teaching people how to switch their e-mail software over.)
The e-mail problem soured Rogers for many low-end customers and this new tiered service is not going to endear them to anyone who wants a lot of bandwidth. Does this move make sense? Am I missing something?
The quality of the input signal is not a result of the DAC, but of the filtering afterwards.
If you have a perfect filter (they don't really exist, obviously), one can sample a 220 HZ signal at 440 HZ and recover the signal perfectly with an ideal low pass filter with a cutoff of 220 HZ.
Practically, a samplign rate of 3 or 4 times the bandwidth (maximum frequency) is adequate to use real filters to recover the signal perfectly.
When the signal exits the D/A it is stepped, and the low pass filter interpolates those steps into the actual, perfect sinusoid.
No one uses linear interpolating D/A's for this reason. All D/A conversion is followed by subsequent low-pass filtering. Even your speakers act as low pass filters, and in many cases suffice.
The thesaurus is almost never a good tool to do anything but replace repeat occurrences of the same word with a couple of different words to liven up the text-- standard "Elements of Style" approach.
A thesaurus is not primarily useful for finding synonyms of words. Rather, its major use is finding that word on the tip of your tongue that you just can't remember, or for finding a new word that you didn't know. Thesauruses list words by related concepts. Word's thesaurus is utterly useless for this function, which is why I never use it. I still pull my Roget's off the shelf now and then, however.
Maybe I am wrong, but it seems to me that communications systems are unlikely to be a target for terrorist attacks.
Terrorists are not contemplating a military victory over the United States by conventional means. The attack on the World Trade Centre is evidence enough: they attacked a symbol that would attract a lot of press. Destroying communications systems would be self-defeating. If news distribution is disrupted, they have failed--terrorism is inherently dependent on publicity.
Moreover, since Microsoft would have to pay a $2.50 licensing fee to Fraunhofer for each copy of Windows shipped, it seems as though they have a very valid reason for not wanting to encode at rates above 56kb/s.
It's a no-brainer; because it would cost Microsoft, financially and in terms of market share, to support someone else's high-quality standard, they simply won't. This decision is no more malicious than any of Microsoft's other moves. I'd be willing to bet that if Microsoft had been able to include support for encoding high-quality MP3s for nothing, they would have.
Furthermore, someone in the WSJ article argues that if Microsoft ships something with Windows it will become the de facto standard. How about Sound Recorder? Wordpad? Paint? MS Telnet? Hyperterminal? How about Microsoft's ubiquitous MSN icons every time you install anything? I think that there is ample precedent that if one of the default Windows programs is greatly lacking in features or quality, people will go out onto the net or to their local store and buy something that does what they want. I can't think of an example of a product that was seriously crappy that won out simply because it was in Windows. Except, that is, for Windows itself.;)
Sunday Morning on CBC Radio, Michael Enright of CBC's This Morning program conducted an interview with Jimmy Carter regarding the softwood lumber dispute between Canada and the USA. He got really snippy quickly, and told Mr Carter to hurry up his answers, and called him a "washed-up peanut farmer from Hicksville". Mr Carter shot back that Enright himself was washed up, as he was once on the radio five days a week, not just on Sundays. Carter also expressed fear that "subsidized Canadian lumber producers will use two-by-fours to pound into submission U.S. border guards."
Of course, the whole thing was a joke, and Mr Carter's part was played by an actor. It was not really very funny. However, this little bit slipped past BOTH of Canada's national newspapers, and they reported it as real front-page news this Monday morning.
Now, THAT'S the mark of a successful April Fool's joke.
I don't seem to be able to load the Globe's article from their website, but I am not sure why.
It seems to have disappeared from their website while I was typing up this comment. Hmmm...
Sympatico, which is the major provider of residential DSL in Canada, offers a 1Mbit service, which is ~128 kilobyte/sec. The service costs ~$40 per month, apart from any promotions. I am unaware of any company offering a better deal in BC, or anywhere else in Canada.
This service is already available in Toronto, from Look/Idirect. Moreover, the broadcast is from the world's tallest freestanding structure, the CN Tower.
CN Tower: 1815 ft, 5 in.
Sears Tower: 1454 ft, 1707 ft. with antennas
I am a Blue Jays fan living in Toronto, so getting the games on local radio is not a problem. However, MLB broadcasts the local team's feed over the internet. I often enjoy listening, for example, to the Yankees' guys do the Yankees-Blue Jays games when they are in New York. It's a nice change of pace, and gives me a different perspective on my home team. I guess that now I am going to have to pay 9.99 to get the feed for every team in the American League...
And you-- yes, YOU! Don't give me any of your criticisms about range, size, price, availability, and other practicalities and trivialities. Let me get away with being wrong. I'm happy here.
It seems to me that one of the bigger benefits of Tivo is a truly easy way to skip over advertising in TV programs. Therefore, wouldn't the viewing habits of a large group of people who never see your advertising be rather worthless? I mean, of course, there are other means of advertising, but am I missing something here?
The issue of the "Privacy Foundation" is not that Tivo has been collecting data unbeknownst to its users. Moreover, they are concerned that the manual is misleading about what info it collects. They also feel that Tivo does not provide an easy way for users to opt-out of data collection.
I agree with you, on the whole, but you missed their point. However, they do have one legitimate concern, in my opinion:
When an online company closes, its database often becomes a potential asset for sale.
This problem is, of course, not unique to Tivo. The same argument could even apply to Slashdot. Hey, Taco! You'd better keep my long and illustrious history of first posts, hot grits and goatse.cx posts secret from my future employers!
I fully expect, of course, once Napster has been effectively shut down, to see millions of dollars more revenue for the music labels. That will surely happen, right? I mean Napster has cost the RIAA members untold millions in lost album sales, right?
Yes, but regardless of your high moral ground and karma-whoring, it's a really funny picture.
Also--as anyone with experience diagnosing Windows problems can tell you--simply because Windows says that you have a hardware problem does not necessarily mean that one has a hardware problem.
This may stand for some as the ultimate proof of Microsoft's satanic associations, but it is simply one nutcase in the company mouthing off. Posters have provided enough obvious parallels to non-software things that it should be clear that preventing someone from publishing his OWN work is a fundamental violation of the First Amendment of the USA's Constitution. Any law or movement towards prohibiting such free expression would be attacked and killed by the ACLU in approximately four seconds. That's what they are there for.
A more interesting topic for discussion, now that we have all calmed down a notch, is to ask why a (reasonably) high-level suit at Microsoft would publicly say something so clueless. Any suggestions?
Yes, all the tips make sense except the biased advice about free personal ads. It it surprising that a pay site will advise you that all those free sites are hangouts for perverts/child molesters/rapists?
Why do people refuse to give credit these days? The parent post was written by Deborah Brown, and can be found here:
http://www.personalads4free.com/romance.htm (All of the tips do make sense, of course.)
The name Yahoo! is supposed to stand for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos.
In a society, lots of things happen that you disagree with. That difference of opinion does not give you the right to legislate my freedoms. Moreover, when did the purpose of libraries become solely "research and education"?
One small example of how well censorware works: at a public computer the other day, it blocked the course listings website of the University of Toronto's Department of Religion. I am not sure why--perhaps the page had mentions of sexuality. Check it out, and tell me if this is valid "research and education".
Of course, censorware also blocks Slashdot discussions frequently, as well.
Nonetheless, despite all their assurances, SPAM.com will still spam you.
From their "privacy policy":
Hormel Foods collects personal identifying information only when guests knowingly provide such information along with submissions of information you make, or with ordering information for merchandise or to sign up for the SPAM Fan Club. Such information will only be used for internal purposes or to provide further information regarding our product and related activities (i.e., promotions, offers, etc.).
Information provided will only be used for internal Company purposes such as marketing and promotional purposes and will not be shared with any third parties other than those contractually obligated to perform services for Hormel Foods and which are legally bound to keep that information confidential. We do not sell, rent, loan, trade or otherwise disclose your personal identifying information to any other third parties unless release of the information is required by law or governmental investigations or proceedings.
You could always do what my friend and I did while teenagers. We would duplicate the postmark/contract number that indicated "no postage necessary" and print it on all our envelopes. Everything we mailed out was on the bill of Mr Junk-mailer. Of course, being paranoid, we left our return address off the mail, but it worked for us until we grew up a little.:)
Slashdot Mirror
First, this is a levy, not a tariff. This new charge will be applied to all recordable media sold in Canada, not those imported into the country.
Second, the government has been trying to get this off the ground since 1999. (Many of you will remember the first time this story came around). However, I can still buy a 50-pack of 80-min CD-Rs for $35 CAD in Toronto. Public and political opposition to this move prevented it from being enacted back then; it can again this time. The story got a lot of press in Canada at the time and the Globe and Mail ran several high-profile editorials attacking the proposed levies. Remember: this levy is only a proposal, and the Copyright Board of Canada will be holding public hearings into the matter. It's a simple matter to type up a letter to your MP, and as many of them have so little to do that they are bored silly, they are likely to give your letter some attention, especially if it is halfway-intelligent.
This proposal is so basically flawed that it really stands little chance of ever being enacted and will likely fall to the wayside as it did in 1999. It is unlikely that this idea could withstand a court challenge. Moreover, were this levy actually imposed, there would be a big boom in business for American online computer shops. I'm pretty sure that Canada Customs has better things to do than to levy a $5 charge on your $30 CD-R purchase.
You can see the Copyright Board's original proposal from Dec. 2000 here.
This seems to be another blow to Rogers' cable internet service. I mean, 1Mbit ADSL from Sympatico is ~35CAD a month, with no limits on amount of usage. Why would anyone who uses a lot of bandwidth on Rogers stay with them now? Can Rogers really afford to lose 10% of their cable modem customers?
When this is combined with the recent e-mail switch-over fiasco and the highly-publicized lawsuits, I don't see how Rogers is going to attract too many new customers. (For those who don't know, with the impending demise of excite@home, all Rogers customers had to switch from user@home.com to user@rogers.ca. It's not difficult to imagine the number of problems this created for the average joe user. There was even a channel on Rogers cable devoted exclusively to teaching people how to switch their e-mail software over.)
The e-mail problem soured Rogers for many low-end customers and this new tiered service is not going to endear them to anyone who wants a lot of bandwidth. Does this move make sense? Am I missing something?
The quality of the input signal is not a result of the DAC, but of the filtering afterwards.
If you have a perfect filter (they don't really exist, obviously), one can sample a 220 HZ signal at 440 HZ and recover the signal perfectly with an ideal low pass filter with a cutoff of 220 HZ.
Practically, a samplign rate of 3 or 4 times the bandwidth (maximum frequency) is adequate to use real filters to recover the signal perfectly.
When the signal exits the D/A it is stepped, and the low pass filter interpolates those steps into the actual, perfect sinusoid.
No one uses linear interpolating D/A's for this reason. All D/A conversion is followed by subsequent low-pass filtering. Even your speakers act as low pass filters, and in many cases suffice.
The thesaurus is almost never a good tool to do anything but replace repeat occurrences of the same word with a couple of different words to liven up the text-- standard "Elements of Style" approach.
A thesaurus is not primarily useful for finding synonyms of words. Rather, its major use is finding that word on the tip of your tongue that you just can't remember, or for finding a new word that you didn't know. Thesauruses list words by related concepts. Word's thesaurus is utterly useless for this function, which is why I never use it. I still pull my Roget's off the shelf now and then, however.
Uh Oh...
:-)
> who is cmdr taco
A 20th century celebrity of some sort?
There might be more than one.
> who is richard stallman
He is the founder of the Free Software Foundation, and author of the GNU public license.
> what is open source
Free software.
> Who likes to eat human feces
Bill Gates.
Maybe I am wrong, but it seems to me that communications systems are unlikely to be a target for terrorist attacks.
Terrorists are not contemplating a military victory over the United States by conventional means. The attack on the World Trade Centre is evidence enough: they attacked a symbol that would attract a lot of press. Destroying communications systems would be self-defeating. If news distribution is disrupted, they have failed--terrorism is inherently dependent on publicity.
Moreover, since Microsoft would have to pay a $2.50 licensing fee to Fraunhofer for each copy of Windows shipped, it seems as though they have a very valid reason for not wanting to encode at rates above 56kb/s.
;)
It's a no-brainer; because it would cost Microsoft, financially and in terms of market share, to support someone else's high-quality standard, they simply won't. This decision is no more malicious than any of Microsoft's other moves. I'd be willing to bet that if Microsoft had been able to include support for encoding high-quality MP3s for nothing, they would have.
Furthermore, someone in the WSJ article argues that if Microsoft ships something with Windows it will become the de facto standard. How about Sound Recorder? Wordpad? Paint? MS Telnet? Hyperterminal? How about Microsoft's ubiquitous MSN icons every time you install anything? I think that there is ample precedent that if one of the default Windows programs is greatly lacking in features or quality, people will go out onto the net or to their local store and buy something that does what they want. I can't think of an example of a product that was seriously crappy that won out simply because it was in Windows. Except, that is, for Windows itself.
This is stolen, uncredited, from the Rush Limbaugh website. I can't link to it anymore, as it has moved to the pay section of his site.
We had a term for this in university...
Moreover, if you're going to plagiarize, you might find something a little more profound than Rush Limbaugh
Sunday Morning on CBC Radio, Michael Enright of CBC's This Morning program conducted an interview with Jimmy Carter regarding the softwood lumber dispute between Canada and the USA. He got really snippy quickly, and told Mr Carter to hurry up his answers, and called him a "washed-up peanut farmer from Hicksville". Mr Carter shot back that Enright himself was washed up, as he was once on the radio five days a week, not just on Sundays. Carter also expressed fear that "subsidized Canadian lumber producers will use two-by-fours to pound into submission U.S. border guards."
Of course, the whole thing was a joke, and Mr Carter's part was played by an actor. It was not really very funny. However, this little bit slipped past BOTH of Canada's national newspapers, and they reported it as real front-page news this Monday morning.
Now, THAT'S the mark of a successful April Fool's joke.
I don't seem to be able to load the Globe's article from their website, but I am not sure why.
It seems to have disappeared from their website while I was typing up this comment. Hmmm...
Sympatico, which is the major provider of residential DSL in Canada, offers a 1Mbit service, which is ~128 kilobyte/sec. The service costs ~$40 per month, apart from any promotions. I am unaware of any company offering a better deal in BC, or anywhere else in Canada.
This service is already available in Toronto, from Look/Idirect. Moreover, the broadcast is from the world's tallest freestanding structure, the CN Tower.
CN Tower: 1815 ft, 5 in.
Sears Tower: 1454 ft, 1707 ft. with antennas
I am a Blue Jays fan living in Toronto, so getting the games on local radio is not a problem. However, MLB broadcasts the local team's feed over the internet. I often enjoy listening, for example, to the Yankees' guys do the Yankees-Blue Jays games when they are in New York. It's a nice change of pace, and gives me a different perspective on my home team. I guess that now I am going to have to pay 9.99 to get the feed for every team in the American League...
Wireless 1394!
And you-- yes, YOU! Don't give me any of your criticisms about range, size, price, availability, and other practicalities and trivialities. Let me get away with being wrong. I'm happy here.
It seems to me that one of the bigger benefits of Tivo is a truly easy way to skip over advertising in TV programs. Therefore, wouldn't the viewing habits of a large group of people who never see your advertising be rather worthless? I mean, of course, there are other means of advertising, but am I missing something here?
To play devil's advocate for a second:
The issue of the "Privacy Foundation" is not that Tivo has been collecting data unbeknownst to its users. Moreover, they are concerned that the manual is misleading about what info it collects. They also feel that Tivo does not provide an easy way for users to opt-out of data collection.
I agree with you, on the whole, but you missed their point. However, they do have one legitimate concern, in my opinion:
When an online company closes, its database often becomes a potential asset for sale.
This problem is, of course, not unique to Tivo. The same argument could even apply to Slashdot. Hey, Taco! You'd better keep my long and illustrious history of first posts, hot grits and goatse.cx posts secret from my future employers!
I fully expect, of course, once Napster has been effectively shut down, to see millions of dollars more revenue for the music labels. That will surely happen, right? I mean Napster has cost the RIAA members untold millions in lost album sales, right?
Right?
Yes, but regardless of your high moral ground and karma-whoring, it's a really funny picture.
Also--as anyone with experience diagnosing Windows problems can tell you--simply because Windows says that you have a hardware problem does not necessarily mean that one has a hardware problem.
NO ONE IS GOING TO CRIMINALIZE OPEN SOURCE!
repeat after me,
NO ONE IS GOING TO CRIMINALIZE OPEN SOURCE!
This may stand for some as the ultimate proof of Microsoft's satanic associations, but it is simply one nutcase in the company mouthing off. Posters have provided enough obvious parallels to non-software things that it should be clear that preventing someone from publishing his OWN work is a fundamental violation of the First Amendment of the USA's Constitution. Any law or movement towards prohibiting such free expression would be attacked and killed by the ACLU in approximately four seconds. That's what they are there for.
A more interesting topic for discussion, now that we have all calmed down a notch, is to ask why a (reasonably) high-level suit at Microsoft would publicly say something so clueless. Any suggestions?
Yes, all the tips make sense except the biased advice about free personal ads. It it surprising that a pay site will advise you that all those free sites are hangouts for perverts/child molesters/rapists?
Why do people refuse to give credit these days? The parent post was written by Deborah Brown, and can be found here:
http://www.personalads4free.com/romance.htm (All of the tips do make sense, of course.)
Bzzt. You missed the point.
In response to someone telling him that he should not end a sentence with a preposition, WC said (more or less):
This is the sort of English pedantry up with which I will not put.
Much funnier and more appropriate.
heinzkeinz
I submitted this item two days ago...
Let's see if I can get mod'ed down as "Stupid" for not following the link in the article to which I replied.
From http://docs.yahoo.com/info/misc/history.html:
The name Yahoo! is supposed to stand for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle" but Filo and Yang insist they selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos.
In a society, lots of things happen that you disagree with. That difference of opinion does not give you the right to legislate my freedoms. Moreover, when did the purpose of libraries become solely "research and education"?
One small example of how well censorware works: at a public computer the other day, it blocked the course listings website of the University of Toronto's Department of Religion. I am not sure why--perhaps the page had mentions of sexuality. Check it out, and tell me if this is valid "research and education".
Of course, censorware also blocks Slashdot discussions frequently, as well.
heinzkeinz
Nonetheless, despite all their assurances, SPAM.com will still spam you.
From their "privacy policy":
Hormel Foods collects personal identifying information only when guests knowingly provide such information along with submissions of information you make, or with ordering information for merchandise or to sign up for the SPAM Fan Club. Such information will only be used for internal purposes or to provide further information regarding our product and related activities (i.e., promotions, offers, etc.).
Information provided will only be used for internal Company purposes such as marketing and promotional purposes and will not be shared with any third parties other than those contractually obligated to perform services for Hormel Foods and which are legally bound to keep that information confidential. We do not sell, rent, loan, trade or otherwise disclose your personal identifying information to any other third parties unless release of the information is required by law or governmental investigations or proceedings.
You could always do what my friend and I did while teenagers. We would duplicate the postmark/contract number that indicated "no postage necessary" and print it on all our envelopes. Everything we mailed out was on the bill of Mr Junk-mailer. Of course, being paranoid, we left our return address off the mail, but it worked for us until we grew up a little. :)