If you can't say it with written words, it wasn't worth saying.
While I agree with your point, I don't know if I'd go quite that far. A lot of content, especially in the realm of creative works, is more fully enjoyable in multimedia format. I'd rather hear a band play a song than read the sheet music; I'd rather watch actors perform Shakespeare than read the script.
But for a non-creative work like a gadget review? Put the digicam down. Text will carry the essential value of the content just fine.
I mean yeah... "only" 800 deaths is kind of callous. I'm not sure what the whole aim of that was.
It's just a statistic. Why do we need to ascribe an "aim" to it?
There's a popular notion, especially among those of us who were of school age during the Cold War, that in the event of a nuclear attack, if the blast doesn't kill you, the fallout will take care of that in short order. They've now crunched the numbers and determined that may not be true after all.
Seems to me the best way to go would be to get more track certified for 120-150mph runs in the northeast corridor
Of course, that idea is complicated by the fact that the Northeast Corridor is among the most densely populated areas in the nation, and a hundred thousand homeowners who don't want a bullet train whooshing through their backyards (in some cases literally -- upgrading the track for high speed trains will require use of Eminent Domain to seize some homeowners' properties) is a force to be reckoned with.
Americans abandoned railways in favor of trucks and airplanes fifty years ago, and I don't think we're ever going back.
The Japanese, who probably ride more miles of rail than any other country in the world, rely on plain old rails. Even the famous Bullet Trains run on rails.
Well, sure, because plain old rails were the best technology available at the time when the train systems were constructed. Will they tear down the tracks and replace them with maglev once that technology becomes feasible? Probably not, because the economic hit of shutting down arterial railways for a couple years would be devastating. But that's hardly an argument that maglev is inherently inferior to rail transit.
Comedy Central is famous for getting shows like this and then killing them off quick. MST3K anyone?
Zwuh?
The Comedy Channel/Comedy Central picked up a quirky little program from a Minneapolis UHF station, and turned it into a national sensation (turning itself one of the top-tier cable networks at the same time). MST3K ran on CC for seven seasons.
Honestly, Futurama would be more at risk returning to Fox -- the network that already short-sightedly cancelled the program once -- than to a cable network like Comedy Central, which has typically taken very good care of its cash cows.
Now the emulation hasn't really kept up with the advancing consoles. The bests emulators you can find are Playstation and N64, which are very old systems by today's standards.
Those are the best hobbyist-authored emulators, perhaps.
Microsoft and Sony have both implemented backward-compatibility in their 7th-generation consoles by writing emulators for their 6th-generation consoles. Since they had access to the official specs (and often, the original design talent) for the emulated systems, they were able to write emulators the exceed the capabilities of even the brilliant hackers and reverse-engineers that work on things like Project64 and MAME.
That, and strong is the money at Harvard. Even stronger, the privilege of those who attend. They have all the resources to take the RIAA's campaign down. No wonder why they avoid them.
Explain, then, why the RIAA is not similarly afraid of the other 7 Ivy schools!
Is the money and privilege less strong at Yale and Princeton than at Harvard? Has not a single one of the RIAA's Winged Monkey Corps graduated from the highly-ranked law schools at Columbia and Pennsylvania?
Why continue to bill in a way that contradicts basic economic reasoning???
You're looking at one side of the economic equation, which is consumer psychology. The person placing the call is the one requesting a service, therefore he alone should be billed.
I'm not sure I find this argument all that compelling. Would most people find a mobile phone that could place, but not receive, calls to be useful? I carry a phone because I want people to be able to communicate with me, and I'm willing to pay for the service when someone does need to reach me.
There's also infrastructure. The cost of carrying a call on a cellular network is the same whether the call was originated on the local handset or remotely. It's easier for them to bill the same regardless of where the call originated than to charge normal rates for some airtime, and eat the costs (or enter contracts with every other carrier to recipocally recoup costs) of other airtime.
So companies should not try to figure out "How do we FORCE people to see our adds", but "What can we do that people WANT to see our adds".
Maybe they could offer a discount on your home video purchases if you agree to sit through a short advertisement before the movie is played, or something like that...
If we're talking about Nintendo's hardware failures, though, I think the Game Boy Color ought to make the list. It was pretty stingy of them to release a handheld in 1998 that was designed around a by-then-23-year-old Z80 CPU, with the same sound circuitry as the by-then-9-year-old original Game Boy, and graphics hardware capable of showing fewer than 64 colors simultaneously.
It's no wonder that so few titles were developed and released for the device, and that the 32-bit ARM-based, multi-thousand-color, stereo-PCM Game Boy Advance was released a scant three years later.
file sharing was dealt a harsh blow that it took a while to recover from.
Maybe as far as the tech-ignornant mainstream media coult tell.
In practice, every song that had been available on Napster was again available on Kazaa by the next day (along with movies, commercial software, and porno).
that's the point of Kindle, isn't it? It is an electronic device that feels similar to a real book and let's you concentrate on the reading. It doesn't have a shiny screen and it won't distract you with calls.
And how is it different than all the other dedicated "e-Book Readers" that have come and gone from the market over the past decade? Besides having an "Amazon" logo on it, I mean.
it clearly came from an automated source. [...] Anyone with half a bit of technical knowledge call instantly tell this was sent from an automated source
Your condescension aside, it is NOT clear that the message came from an automated source, and certainly not proven.
So it has a header suggesting that the message was sent by a PHP script named "/linkmachine/auto.php". Do you know with any certainty what that script is, or how it works? Does the plaintiff?
Bennett explains that this is important because (pay attention now) the same judge that wasn't able to determine what spam looks like also sits more vital cases like child custody, property damage, and rape.
IANAL and especially not familiar with the applicable laws of Washington State, but to me "spamming" has at least as much to do with the distribution practices of the sender as with the content of the message.
One common, non-Hormel-trademark-infringing term for spam e-mail is "bulk unsolicited e-mail"; presumably both adjectives are requisite conditions for e-mail to be considered spam. The message Bennett sued over was unsolicited, but perhaps not "indiscriminate", which is another term often used to define spam; Bennett is not the webmaster of Slashdot, but he has some affiliation with the site, so the sender's misunderstanding may not be entirely unwarranted.
What was not proven in any way was that the message was sent in bulk. Part of the definition of spam being unmet, I believe the judge made the right decision in classifying the message as personal communication.
many judges he deals with would rather discard the case on some technicality than enforce the law.
I'm with the judge on this one, though.
The headers of the email show Haselton's address as the sole recipient, and no other messages were offered into evidence from the same sender to other recipients, demonstrating a pattern of spamming behavior.
There was no evidence presented that the message was anything other than one individual sending one other individual a personal message based on some incorrect information.
He didn't prove it was spam, so he lost. That's not a technicality, it's the fundamental tenet that a litigant must be able to prove their allegations.
A user on a flawed but protected computer receives a "poisoned" encrypted message, opens it... And what happens?
Think about how robots' heads explode in sci-fi when they are asked to consider a paradox such as "This statement is false."
Obviously the same thing will happen to a Celeron processor if it attempts to reconcile with itself the impossibility that 4.0 and 3.99999999901 are equal! THEY WILL USE THE EXPLODING COMPUTERS AS BOMBS
The x87 FPU instructions operate on 80 bit floating point numbers, compared to 32 bit integers
Surely the extra word-width for floating point operations is to effect greater precision, not speed? Those additional bits are used to ensure that a fraction like "1/3" is represented as 1365/4096 instead of just 11/32.
I suppose there are ways to misuse the floating point registers for fast parallel integer math, but I'm not a character on "Numb3rs" so I'm not familiar with them.
I think bees (or ants) should get the all-time patent rights to clustering a number of not so intelligent nodes into something that exhibits a higher degree of intelligence.
Which is not to say that there isn't any room for improvement. There's a lot to be learned from wolves, for example, where each member of the pack serves a unique and important role.
It's quite likely that by combining aspects of many of these ecologies, we could create a system even more efficient than any individual one.
Perhaps if the iconography of email programs was more "postcardy" instead of "envelopy", this would happen less.
Probably not. It's not like putting a snail-mail document in an envelope renders it invulnerable to interception. Any postal employee with a sufficient lack of gruntles would be able to read anything you send through the mail via a hacking technique known as "opening the envelope".
So why doesn't mail theft happen more often? Because letter carriers are penalized if they mishandle the materials entrusted to their care. It's a good idea.
While radiohead and reznor can self promote and distribute themselves, how many other bands can boast the same?
I dunno, let me log into MySpace and see how long it takes me to count to a million.
Even for the few bands capable of reaching the cusp of The Big Time, record companies still do not provide an irreplacable service. The musicians can always hire a manager to handle the promotion, financies, scheduling, embezzlement, etc.
The advertisers and content owners who want to protect it using ever increasing amount of DRM is the customer. Got it?
Just one question. Why would the advertisers want to make it more difficult for potential consumers to see their advertising?
Content owners are using DRM to artificially limit the amount of eyeballs that their advertisers can get access to. How are advertisers allowing this to happen?
Copyright only covers the form of expression not the ideas expressed. So unless she was a material contributer or the lexicon copied large sections of her books, there's no successful routs for suit here either.
I agree, they should publish the book, but take out all the content that originated with Rowling.
I'm sure "The _____ ______ Lexicon" will be a best seller. Art students will use its many blank pages as a sketchbook; teenage girls, as a diary.
I would happily and joyfully give up my right to vote in the next election for one million dollars.
Because of the electoral college system, something like three-quarters of us in the United States live in a place where the outcome of our state's voting is preordained before the polls have even opened. It would therefore make sense for those of us in those states to take the $1M, although there would be no incentive to offer it.
Besides which, in 2004 the presidential candidates spent an estimated $600 million each on campaigning, and each ended up with about 60 million votes. If a vote can be decided for $10 a head, why would anyone spend a million?
Slashdot Mirror
If you can't say it with written words, it wasn't worth saying.
While I agree with your point, I don't know if I'd go quite that far. A lot of content, especially in the realm of creative works, is more fully enjoyable in multimedia format. I'd rather hear a band play a song than read the sheet music; I'd rather watch actors perform Shakespeare than read the script.
But for a non-creative work like a gadget review? Put the digicam down. Text will carry the essential value of the content just fine.
I mean yeah... "only" 800 deaths is kind of callous. I'm not sure what the whole aim of that was.
It's just a statistic. Why do we need to ascribe an "aim" to it?
There's a popular notion, especially among those of us who were of school age during the Cold War, that in the event of a nuclear attack, if the blast doesn't kill you, the fallout will take care of that in short order. They've now crunched the numbers and determined that may not be true after all.
Seems to me the best way to go would be to get more track certified for 120-150mph runs in the northeast corridor
Of course, that idea is complicated by the fact that the Northeast Corridor is among the most densely populated areas in the nation, and a hundred thousand homeowners who don't want a bullet train whooshing through their backyards (in some cases literally -- upgrading the track for high speed trains will require use of Eminent Domain to seize some homeowners' properties) is a force to be reckoned with.
Americans abandoned railways in favor of trucks and airplanes fifty years ago, and I don't think we're ever going back.
The Japanese, who probably ride more miles of rail than any other country in the world, rely on plain old rails. Even the famous Bullet Trains run on rails.
Well, sure, because plain old rails were the best technology available at the time when the train systems were constructed. Will they tear down the tracks and replace them with maglev once that technology becomes feasible? Probably not, because the economic hit of shutting down arterial railways for a couple years would be devastating. But that's hardly an argument that maglev is inherently inferior to rail transit.
Comedy Central is famous for getting shows like this and then killing them off quick. MST3K anyone?
Zwuh?
The Comedy Channel/Comedy Central picked up a quirky little program from a Minneapolis UHF station, and turned it into a national sensation (turning itself one of the top-tier cable networks at the same time). MST3K ran on CC for seven seasons.
Honestly, Futurama would be more at risk returning to Fox -- the network that already short-sightedly cancelled the program once -- than to a cable network like Comedy Central, which has typically taken very good care of its cash cows.
Now the emulation hasn't really kept up with the advancing consoles. The bests emulators you can find are Playstation and N64, which are very old systems by today's standards.
Those are the best hobbyist-authored emulators, perhaps.
Microsoft and Sony have both implemented backward-compatibility in their 7th-generation consoles by writing emulators for their 6th-generation consoles. Since they had access to the official specs (and often, the original design talent) for the emulated systems, they were able to write emulators the exceed the capabilities of even the brilliant hackers and reverse-engineers that work on things like Project64 and MAME.
That, and strong is the money at Harvard. Even stronger, the privilege of those who attend. They have all the resources to take the RIAA's campaign down. No wonder why they avoid them.
Explain, then, why the RIAA is not similarly afraid of the other 7 Ivy schools!
Is the money and privilege less strong at Yale and Princeton than at Harvard? Has not a single one of the RIAA's Winged Monkey Corps graduated from the highly-ranked law schools at Columbia and Pennsylvania?
Why continue to bill in a way that contradicts basic economic reasoning???
You're looking at one side of the economic equation, which is consumer psychology. The person placing the call is the one requesting a service, therefore he alone should be billed.
I'm not sure I find this argument all that compelling. Would most people find a mobile phone that could place, but not receive, calls to be useful? I carry a phone because I want people to be able to communicate with me, and I'm willing to pay for the service when someone does need to reach me.
There's also infrastructure. The cost of carrying a call on a cellular network is the same whether the call was originated on the local handset or remotely. It's easier for them to bill the same regardless of where the call originated than to charge normal rates for some airtime, and eat the costs (or enter contracts with every other carrier to recipocally recoup costs) of other airtime.
So companies should not try to figure out "How do we FORCE people to see our adds", but "What can we do that people WANT to see our adds".
Maybe they could offer a discount on your home video purchases if you agree to sit through a short advertisement before the movie is played, or something like that...
I wished the Super Game Boy would have continued for GB Color/Advance/etc..
I guess you're not aware of the Game Boy Player for GameCube, then?
If we're talking about Nintendo's hardware failures, though, I think the Game Boy Color ought to make the list. It was pretty stingy of them to release a handheld in 1998 that was designed around a by-then-23-year-old Z80 CPU, with the same sound circuitry as the by-then-9-year-old original Game Boy, and graphics hardware capable of showing fewer than 64 colors simultaneously.
It's no wonder that so few titles were developed and released for the device, and that the 32-bit ARM-based, multi-thousand-color, stereo-PCM Game Boy Advance was released a scant three years later.
file sharing was dealt a harsh blow that it took a while to recover from.
Maybe as far as the tech-ignornant mainstream media coult tell.
In practice, every song that had been available on Napster was again available on Kazaa by the next day (along with movies, commercial software, and porno).
that's the point of Kindle, isn't it? It is an electronic device that feels similar to a real book and let's you concentrate on the reading. It doesn't have a shiny screen and it won't distract you with calls.
And how is it different than all the other dedicated "e-Book Readers" that have come and gone from the market over the past decade? Besides having an "Amazon" logo on it, I mean.
'Cannibis' [sic] starts with 'C'.
'Cancer' starts with 'C'.
What are some other words that start with 'C'?
Learn these.
Are you stupid?
Are you an asshole?
it clearly came from an automated source. [...] Anyone with half a bit of technical knowledge call instantly tell this was sent from an automated source
Your condescension aside, it is NOT clear that the message came from an automated source, and certainly not proven.
So it has a header suggesting that the message was sent by a PHP script named "/linkmachine/auto.php". Do you know with any certainty what that script is, or how it works? Does the plaintiff?
Bennett explains that this is important because (pay attention now) the same judge that wasn't able to determine what spam looks like also sits more vital cases like child custody, property damage, and rape.
IANAL and especially not familiar with the applicable laws of Washington State, but to me "spamming" has at least as much to do with the distribution practices of the sender as with the content of the message.
One common, non-Hormel-trademark-infringing term for spam e-mail is "bulk unsolicited e-mail"; presumably both adjectives are requisite conditions for e-mail to be considered spam. The message Bennett sued over was unsolicited, but perhaps not "indiscriminate", which is another term often used to define spam; Bennett is not the webmaster of Slashdot, but he has some affiliation with the site, so the sender's misunderstanding may not be entirely unwarranted.
What was not proven in any way was that the message was sent in bulk. Part of the definition of spam being unmet, I believe the judge made the right decision in classifying the message as personal communication.
many judges he deals with would rather discard the case on some technicality than enforce the law.
I'm with the judge on this one, though.
The headers of the email show Haselton's address as the sole recipient, and no other messages were offered into evidence from the same sender to other recipients, demonstrating a pattern of spamming behavior.
There was no evidence presented that the message was anything other than one individual sending one other individual a personal message based on some incorrect information.
He didn't prove it was spam, so he lost. That's not a technicality, it's the fundamental tenet that a litigant must be able to prove their allegations.
A user on a flawed but protected computer receives a "poisoned" encrypted message, opens it... And what happens?
Think about how robots' heads explode in sci-fi when they are asked to consider a paradox such as "This statement is false."
Obviously the same thing will happen to a Celeron processor if it attempts to reconcile with itself the impossibility that 4.0 and 3.99999999901 are equal! THEY WILL USE THE EXPLODING COMPUTERS AS BOMBS
The x87 FPU instructions operate on 80 bit floating point numbers, compared to 32 bit integers
Surely the extra word-width for floating point operations is to effect greater precision, not speed? Those additional bits are used to ensure that a fraction like "1/3" is represented as 1365/4096 instead of just 11/32.
I suppose there are ways to misuse the floating point registers for fast parallel integer math, but I'm not a character on "Numb3rs" so I'm not familiar with them.
I think bees (or ants) should get the all-time patent rights to clustering a number of not so intelligent nodes into something that exhibits a higher degree of intelligence.
Which is not to say that there isn't any room for improvement. There's a lot to be learned from wolves, for example, where each member of the pack serves a unique and important role.
It's quite likely that by combining aspects of many of these ecologies, we could create a system even more efficient than any individual one.
Imagine a Bee-Wolf cluster...
Perhaps if the iconography of email programs was more "postcardy" instead of "envelopy", this would happen less.
Probably not. It's not like putting a snail-mail document in an envelope renders it invulnerable to interception. Any postal employee with a sufficient lack of gruntles would be able to read anything you send through the mail via a hacking technique known as "opening the envelope".
So why doesn't mail theft happen more often? Because letter carriers are penalized if they mishandle the materials entrusted to their care. It's a good idea.
While radiohead and reznor can self promote and distribute themselves, how many other bands can boast the same?
I dunno, let me log into MySpace and see how long it takes me to count to a million.
Even for the few bands capable of reaching the cusp of The Big Time, record companies still do not provide an irreplacable service. The musicians can always hire a manager to handle the promotion, financies, scheduling, embezzlement, etc.
The advertisers and content owners who want to protect it using ever increasing amount of DRM is the customer. Got it?
Just one question. Why would the advertisers want to make it more difficult for potential consumers to see their advertising?
Content owners are using DRM to artificially limit the amount of eyeballs that their advertisers can get access to. How are advertisers allowing this to happen?
Copyright only covers the form of expression not the ideas expressed. So unless she was a material contributer or the lexicon copied large sections of her books, there's no successful routs for suit here either.
I agree, they should publish the book, but take out all the content that originated with Rowling.
I'm sure "The _____ ______ Lexicon" will be a best seller. Art students will use its many blank pages as a sketchbook; teenage girls, as a diary.
I would happily and joyfully give up my right to vote in the next election for one million dollars.
Because of the electoral college system, something like three-quarters of us in the United States live in a place where the outcome of our state's voting is preordained before the polls have even opened. It would therefore make sense for those of us in those states to take the $1M, although there would be no incentive to offer it.
Besides which, in 2004 the presidential candidates spent an estimated $600 million each on campaigning, and each ended up with about 60 million votes. If a vote can be decided for $10 a head, why would anyone spend a million?
it would seem NO amount of copyrighted material was extracted and used, but rather statistics and facts about the series of works are being written.
"Facts" from a work of narrative fiction are much different than a list of phone numbers or the statistics from a sporting event, though.
Can there be any argument that the lexicon book would NOT be a derivative work of Rowling's stories?