He'd rented a sound system for 17 friends in a field? Well, I'm not going to judge before all the facts are in, but it seems a little excessive. And considering that local residents had complained about raves in the area before, it seems a little suspect.
However, the fact that the police shut down the party before they had anything more than suspicion is still wrong, I think. If they had the guys assurances that it wasn't a rave, wouldn't it have been enough just to send someone back at 8PM and someone at midnight?
Unfortunately, this isn't news. I haven't had access to Pandora since I can't remember. It's amazing how licensing only works in their favor. I have 200 CDs in America-- which according to the RIAA I only license-- and yet can't listen to them here because somehow it's illegal. Sigh...
Why am I complaining? Because I believe very firmly that in the past few years the telecommunications market has fallen victim to collusion.
It seems that many/.ers confuse the price people will pay with the correct price. See, the price you will pay is NOT the right price. The maximum price you will pay, correlated to the minimum price the supplier will charge, is the right price. That's where monopolies, duopolies, and collusion break things up. They make it so that the minimum price the supplier will charge is never reached, as they intentionally limit supply.
If you want a more abstract example of the harm that high SMS prices do, in a market where it's nigh impossible to break in, ask yourself why SMSes aren't more integrated into everyday life. I don't just mean human-to-human messages. I mean things like controlling your home thermostat. Or having your bike or car report its location, speed, etc. There are lots of uses for these kinds of short messages, but the insanely high cost per byte makes it completely prohibitive.
Ah, but these are not governmental-backed monopolies that are essential to life, now are they? Don't like GM, but something else (everyone else sure did). DVD too expensive? Rent it, watch another movie, or just pass it up.
Telephone, internet, electricity, or water too expensive? Too bad, suck it up and pay, because by all normal metrics, these are the basic tenets of modern life.
So when the few remaining cell phone operators pretty much simultaneously raised rates on SMSes, at a time when the whole gov't was turning a blind eye to any form of regulation (thus leading to the current world-wide crisis), smacks strongly of collusion. Which is when the gov't is supposed to intervene.
Guys, busting up AT&T was the *best* thing that ever happened to American telecommunications. To believe some people here on/., that should never have happened.
Please do so now, in detail, with references containing verifiable data on the costs.
I'm guessing you don't understand how SMSes work. You do realize that they are effectively free for the cell phone company, right? Your cell phone is already sending this kind of message every time it reports back to a tower. It's just that most of the message is empty, but the bandwidth is still used. So, by piggy-backing a human-to-human message onto the cell-to-tower report, you get an SMS that has an effectively $0.00 incidental cost.
That's point #1. Point #2 is that an SMS is an amazingly small amount of bandwidth compared to voice, and yet it costs far more than voice.
Of course, I could go on and on, but that would be saving you all the fun of independent research. I'm certain that if there are still things bothering you after you've read this (and don't miss the EU's current action against the European cell pseudo-monopolies!), people here will be happy to help.
Why should Congress bother with SMS pricing? Isn't that what competition is for?
Why? Because the cell providers are monopolies, created in part through the (very necessary) restriction of broadcast frequencies. Contrary to popular opinion, government *is* supposed to do good things for its citizens. I really admire that the EU has chosen to take the cell providers over there head-on, forcing them to lower rates. I disagree with how they did it, but that's only because they chose to regulate maximum prices instead of just breaking the monopolies up.
So when there were sufficient cell companies to have competition, American cell prices were the lowest in the world by far. Now that all the small players have been gobbled up, and we're only left with effectively three companies, there is no more competition.
Now, I'm not going to cheer crackers breaking into a private corporation's data services. The breech has tremendous privacy implications, and a lot of these fall squarely on the head of the consumer. However, I'd like to see a silver lining to this by seeing the data employed to put paid to the idea that SMSes have to cost so much. Time after time, the data has shown that SMSes *should* be giant cash cows for these monopolistic entities, but lacking internal financial data it has always been difficult to make an issue out of this at Congress. Of course the cell companies have every interest to keep this data private, but maybe in this case T-Mobile won't have the choice.
Thank you, for reminding me why I've been boycotting Sony since 2004. Makes it a little hard, because I actually *like* my Sony-Ericsson phone's interface, and it's on its last legs, but clearly 5 years running Sony hasn't changed its stance. Damn you all for buying PS3s and keeping them afloat!
Is Russia the last country where engineers are not (yet) forced by corporations to intentionally produce designs that fail two days after warranty expires? There used to be a lot of equipment manufactured by various countries (Germany is the first one that comes to mind) that lasted virtually forever -- old cars or weapons systems, but one rarely sees anything of the sort these days."
What a load of malarkey. Things last just fine these days. There are any number of reasons that you could have the impression that that's not the case.
1) We just have so much *more* of it that there are more things to break. 2) Systems are more complex, and a little thing breaking tends to take out the whole system. I.e. piece of ice on the booster tank, taking out the whole shuttle. 3) Older things that are still around are a self-fulfilling prophesy. They seem to be better built because we have no idea how many of them were produced in the first place. Ask yourself this, though. How many old toasters are still out there? Surely if they were universally built, no one would ever buy a new one. Likewise for so many tools and kitchen appliances.
My personal history with cars since the mid-90's: none of them breaking, ever. My friends rarely have problems. I worked in an auto shop, and most of our repairs were either routine maintenance or "luxury stuff", such as power windows or cruise control. Very, very rarely the car itself. Now, my parents cars had breakdown after breakdown when I was a kid. They wound up junking them because, clearly, these 1970s cars didn't last. And don't get me started on my dad's E-type. What parts of it aren't rusted through and through are simply broken and irreplaceable.
I think the makers of these kinds of comments are confusing maintenance with quality. The simple fact was that things were expensive enough that it was worth repairing them. When something breaks these days, it's usually just a bad cap, transistor, or something simple like that. Very easy to fix and repair, but no one has the schematics and things move so quickly these days you'd have to be a highly-paid professional. Which no one is willing to pay for.
Except for one thing: airplanes. Airplanes built in the 1910s are still flying today. They're maintenance nightmares, but compared to the new purchase price they're worth it so people do it.
So today's TV isn't worse. It's just that we're too cheap to repair it when a $0.02 component breaks.
Call me crazy, but I'd instantly switch from LaTeX to just about anything if it could be good enough. I don't need fantastic published documents here. I just need a proper editor that doesn't require learning insane and (somewhat) inane code groupings in order to to simple things. I wound up writing a whole scientific thesis on Pages.app because writing in TeX completely and utterly disrupts my creative process (I have trouble concentrating on the task at hand when I have to stop for 5 minutes to figure out how to do something new. I have trouble reading the paper when I can't effectively see the section I just wrote)
Not claiming everyone is like me, but I personally would switch to Word, no matter that I hate it, if it could approximate TeX's advantages.
Just thought I'd point out that, while most of the ideas are sound-- if not net energy loses when you consider the energy cost of producing everything required to charge your iPod-- the idea of using the fireplace as "waste" heat just shows how out of touch the writer is with the laws of thermodynamics and the relative efficiency of these kinds of power generators.
This is effectively a heat engine, and so we can produce no more energy than the maximum permitted by a Carnot engine. Thus, there is very little exergy (layman's definition: useful energy that can extracted.) in such a process. To use your fireplace, or any other source of heat in the home that is designed to heat your home, to generate electrical power is absurd. You wind up losing far more than you gain, as you will now have to run your fireplace that much more to make up for all the "cold" you're bringing into the house.
Bleh, are people really that desperate to get energy for nothing? Have they not yet learned that just using less of the stuff is by far the best way?
A single power failure during a write can ruin a perfectly good SD card. It took me a single try.
I'm using a microcontroller to write to an SD card, and have lost a couple of them in the process. I admit that this has been a mystery as to exactly why this was occurring. I think your comment is interesting, but the great google in the sky comes up blank. Do you give any links or references so I can better understand this?
Am I the only who's bothered by the ridiculous lopsidedness of the reporting? Torrentfreaks makes no bones about hiding its prejudices. However, they're not judge, nor jury, nor executioner, no matter how enthusiastically they pretend they were. For instance, in Exhibit A, the fact that half the charges were dropped seems to be a perfectly normal part of the process in Sweden, i.e. a step forward but hardly a victory, to hear it from other/.ers. Continuing, in Exhibit B, who cares if the "so-called computer expert" couldn't get his powerpoint presentation working? That doesn't mean squat; we've all had recalcitrant computers and projectors but that hardly means we're incompetent.
Does anyone remember the Saddam Hussein's information minister, Mohammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, who swore that Iraq were winning victory after victory, and that the Americans were absolutely not in Bagdhad? All this at the very moment the American army was already in the city and closing in on them? To tanks, no intruders, only liars.
Feel free to replace "tanks" with "laws", "intruders" with "guilty defendants", and "liars" with "RIAA.
That being said, I fully support the Pirate Bay, the Pyratbyran, and their arguments. I hope that Sweden *does* have the courage to tell American businesses that just because they pass bankrupt laws on the backs of their own citizens doesn't mean they get to go overseas, like a certain rampaging giant gorilla of renown, and attack more sensible nations. I just want to feel that they're honestly winning the fight, instead of getting carried away by the fanboy'ing at Torrentfreaks.
Well, I think that's my point. I'm not going to tell everyone where I think they should spend their money (that's why the *AA taxes are such bankrupt ideas!). Personally, I think the US tip system works quite well for waiters and servers, and don't see why the patronage system wouldn't work quite well in these circumstances. It's absolutely true that the artistically inclined need to eat, and it would be a shame if our entire society gave up art to work a 9-5 job, but somewhere we have to come to terms with what we think the art is "worth", and then act on it. As you say, if it's worth something, to us, we should have no trouble paying for it!
Please, spare me the drama. There are plenty of examples in everyday life of how we "correct" things we find objectionable. Taxes are high on tobacco, alcohol, etc... because we want to discourage that behavior. Taxes are low on food, and rebates are provided for certain projects (building a new factory, installing solar panels) because we want to encourage that sort of behavior.
Supply and demand is only one of the economic laws engineers, indeed everyone, should be familiar with. The law of elastic demand is equally important, and in these cases, when the supply is infinite (digital bits), it is far more relevant.
And as to whether there are more people capable of doing children's theater, as opposed to engineering, I think you've gotten things backwards. Just about any old bloke can become an engineer. It's not that hard to do something useful with math and science, as there's so much still to be done. (We're not talking about good engineers here, just decent ones.) Without moralizing, I'd say it's a lot harder to find people with the gift of sacrificing themselves to change someone else's life.
No, I firmly believe there isn't. They chose the wrong strategy, and got caught out in the cold. They lead lives that are so different from ours, they've become convinced by their own arguments, just like the Wall Street bankers and their bonuses. The RIAA really doesn't have much of a choice but to throw in the towel and start off in a different direction. Of course, they won't, and I'll be one of those cheering their burial.
They've made it this far because a large part of their argument comes from the idea that file-sharing is globally illegal. This type of file sharing has to be made firmly, clearly, and once-and-for-all clearly legal. Somewhere, we have to ask ourselves what value do recorded music, video, and programs have? If we're not happy with the free-market answer, we have to find it in ourselves to come up with a solution that modifies the free-market such that we support these activities. Simply declaring the free-market illegal is not a valid strategy. It hasn't ever worked in the past-- witness alcohol, drugs, etc...-- and it's not working now.
Now, I for one think that the arts are far more worthy than the sciences. As an engineer, I was offered a salary 5 times what a friend was making, even though I was going to do numerical analysis of toilet paper (no shit, pun intended) and she was working 80 hour days with children's theater. If the fact that we live in a society that values toilet paper more than theater offends you, then you need to make the decisions in your life that reflect this.
Science is an awesome hobby, and it's what I do for a living, but somewhere we're seriously out of whack when business is worth more than life. The RIAA mentality shows this, and there's really nothing they can do except fight until they've carved out a sufficiently well protected niche that they can survive in some minimal fashion. To take an analogy from Go, they're trying desperately to make two eyes, even though the game is practically over.
Shocked and astonished I am! Scandalous! That a company should do exactly what we pay them to and report to us exactly what they are doing, and that somehow we would still be ignorant of the exact nature of their activities! Those responsible should be fired, obviously!
We all know that crime can be defined as black and white: it's either illegal or it's not. And with that definition, you can justify anything you want till the cows come home.
I prefer to think of crimes as things that go against human nature and rights, not against one particular country's judicial system. Of course, this is a very limited viewpoint that I am allowed because, like most everyone here, I'm in no position to actually act on my opinions. In the "real" legal world, the line isn't so clear. However, since this is a philosophical discussion about what is right and wrong, I don't see the importance of discussing what is legal and illegal.
And I think you understand that point very well, so there's not much point in picking apart my arguments based on technical semantics of what a "crime" is and isn't.
Your above statement is one of the reasons I think that automated traffic cameras are a good idea. Unlike human police offers, they don't take bribes, and they won't ticket somebody out of revenge. The fines are a good disincentive, but not overly punitive.
You know what? I've got a friend who says exactly the same thing. And. I. cannot. logically. disagree. We just have a different value system. Racial profiling is a terrible thing and one of the great benefits of speed cameras is that it simply disappears in the flash of a bright light. While I strongly feel that this benefit is not worth the cost, there's no denying it exists and if that's what's important to you then we have arrived at the classic "agree to disagree" moments.
If more people saw the value in automated traffic monitoring systems, then I think we'd be able to lobby to improve the implementations more effectively.
True, but cf. the above. Inspite of the value, I think the cost of any sort of automated punishement system outweighs the benefits. The most flagrant example of this is the Rockefeller Laws, putting drug users in jail automatically no matter the real severity of their "crime".
Heh. That's a funny way of expressing things. I'll have to remember that later. Especially as now living in Europe for the past years I can definitely relate to what you're saying, since at the time when I got my license in my state you only had to have your permit for 30 days after you turned 16.
(As an aside, I'll say I'm against drawing to stiff a line on what's a kid and what's not. My concern is that sometime in the future, the Supreme Court is going to hear a case against some category of blatenly wrong juvenille law-- such as curfew-- where they will have no choice but to rule that it's unconstitutional to discriminate against people of any age, not just people over a certain age. And that's going to open up a can of worms we don't want opened. How's a parent supposed to be responsible for their child when the law clearly dictates that "child" does not exist? Ick.)
Getting back to the point, I don't think adults should go to jail for an adminstrative prank, either. An earlier poster made a reference to "MAN SEX" as a pranked plate on his tow truck. I wouldn't have done that myself, but I think it's pretty funny that he and his friends liked it. To go from that to harassing someone is actually a pretty important step, but not one that should land them in jail. Would it be fair to put someone in jail if they called the IRS and anonymously informed them you were cheating on your taxes? Fines, community service, and a restraining order would be the correct reaction, not putting them in jail.
I'll reiterate my original point. We need to stop being an 0wnership culture. Diplomatic victories are the best kind, as everyone progresses. Punishment should be about prevention not revenge.
But, speeding is a crime in that by speeding you are needlessly endangering other people's lives. Laws are not necessarily what is moral and in some cases for need of practicality, laws must be preventative instead of reactionary. Not that I'm advocating the extent to which they go, but by your logic we should remove ALL airport security.
Driving needlessly endangers other people's lives. Heck, so does existence. There's a certain amount of gray area in this. And while laws are not necessarily moral, the people who apply them are by definition.
In any case, not to get distracted from the subject at hand, I refute that speeding, as defined by going faster than a posted limit, is needlessly endangering lives. Those limits are decided by engineers who have NOT decided on the best speed. They've applied some rules of thumb, some rules of law, and some rules of common sense to arrive at a nice round number that is more correct than not. However, with cameras you're no longer talking more or less. You're talking exactly, atomically, right or wrong.
P.S. I'm missing the link between airport security and machines making legal choices. P.S.S. And being a pilot, I can assure you that most of airport security is a farce. But I think just about everybody already knows that.
Never. It's always a prank. If you want to argue that after getting caught ten times and clearly refusing to mend your ways that you should face some stiffer penalties, I couldn't agree more. That doesn't change that putting someone in jail for an administrative prank is wrong. And the knee jerk reaction to *want* that is perverted.
Here's a solution: why not take away their driver's license? That would have the same effect on stopping the abuse, while ratcheting up the pressure (getting caught driving with a suspended license is far more serious) all without the slightest risk of permanently scars.
Well, the accuracy of the cameras is now no longer in question...
Of course it still is. The accuracy of machines will always be in question. I'm a controls engineer and I can tell you all day long about how machines screw up doing simple tasks they've done 100 times before, or simply get things wrong all the time but no one notices because according to those in control, the machine functions "well enough".
As long as there's no way for citizens' groups to validate these cameras without fear of getting stiff fines or thrown in jail, their accuracy will always be suspect. There are simply too many advantages to getting it wrong, and too few to getting it right.
A photo does nothing more than prove you were there at a certain time. Now, if there were some video, and you could demonstrate an average, that would be at least not be legally bankrupt and founded on solid principles that jury of peers can judge on. But of course, before issuing a ticket said video would have to be reviewed by a person, who would have to be paid, and moreover would then be responsible for the judgement. So obviously this model is not economically viable for those giving the tickets, so we're using a system that is very much in doubt, all because people bend over and accept it.
Slashdot Mirror
I see lots of posts saying that the reason people don't like the Segway is because they're "like wheelchairs for people too lazy to walk."
So what does that make cars, then?
He'd rented a sound system for 17 friends in a field? Well, I'm not going to judge before all the facts are in, but it seems a little excessive. And considering that local residents had complained about raves in the area before, it seems a little suspect.
However, the fact that the police shut down the party before they had anything more than suspicion is still wrong, I think. If they had the guys assurances that it wasn't a rave, wouldn't it have been enough just to send someone back at 8PM and someone at midnight?
Unfortunately, this isn't news. I haven't had access to Pandora since I can't remember. It's amazing how licensing only works in their favor. I have 200 CDs in America-- which according to the RIAA I only license-- and yet can't listen to them here because somehow it's illegal. Sigh...
Why am I complaining? Because I believe very firmly that in the past few years the telecommunications market has fallen victim to collusion.
It seems that many /.ers confuse the price people will pay with the correct price. See, the price you will pay is NOT the right price. The maximum price you will pay, correlated to the minimum price the supplier will charge, is the right price. That's where monopolies, duopolies, and collusion break things up. They make it so that the minimum price the supplier will charge is never reached, as they intentionally limit supply.
If you want a more abstract example of the harm that high SMS prices do, in a market where it's nigh impossible to break in, ask yourself why SMSes aren't more integrated into everyday life. I don't just mean human-to-human messages. I mean things like controlling your home thermostat. Or having your bike or car report its location, speed, etc. There are lots of uses for these kinds of short messages, but the insanely high cost per byte makes it completely prohibitive.
Ah, but these are not governmental-backed monopolies that are essential to life, now are they? Don't like GM, but something else (everyone else sure did). DVD too expensive? Rent it, watch another movie, or just pass it up.
Telephone, internet, electricity, or water too expensive? Too bad, suck it up and pay, because by all normal metrics, these are the basic tenets of modern life.
So when the few remaining cell phone operators pretty much simultaneously raised rates on SMSes, at a time when the whole gov't was turning a blind eye to any form of regulation (thus leading to the current world-wide crisis), smacks strongly of collusion. Which is when the gov't is supposed to intervene.
Guys, busting up AT&T was the *best* thing that ever happened to American telecommunications. To believe some people here on /., that should never have happened.
Please do so now, in detail, with references containing verifiable data on the costs.
I'm guessing you don't understand how SMSes work. You do realize that they are effectively free for the cell phone company, right? Your cell phone is already sending this kind of message every time it reports back to a tower. It's just that most of the message is empty, but the bandwidth is still used. So, by piggy-backing a human-to-human message onto the cell-to-tower report, you get an SMS that has an effectively $0.00 incidental cost.
That's point #1. Point #2 is that an SMS is an amazingly small amount of bandwidth compared to voice, and yet it costs far more than voice.
Point #3 is linking back to /. http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/01/29/0244208
Of course, I could go on and on, but that would be saving you all the fun of independent research. I'm certain that if there are still things bothering you after you've read this (and don't miss the EU's current action against the European cell pseudo-monopolies!), people here will be happy to help.
Why should Congress bother with SMS pricing? Isn't that what competition is for?
Why? Because the cell providers are monopolies, created in part through the (very necessary) restriction of broadcast frequencies. Contrary to popular opinion, government *is* supposed to do good things for its citizens. I really admire that the EU has chosen to take the cell providers over there head-on, forcing them to lower rates. I disagree with how they did it, but that's only because they chose to regulate maximum prices instead of just breaking the monopolies up.
So when there were sufficient cell companies to have competition, American cell prices were the lowest in the world by far. Now that all the small players have been gobbled up, and we're only left with effectively three companies, there is no more competition.
Now, I'm not going to cheer crackers breaking into a private corporation's data services. The breech has tremendous privacy implications, and a lot of these fall squarely on the head of the consumer. However, I'd like to see a silver lining to this by seeing the data employed to put paid to the idea that SMSes have to cost so much. Time after time, the data has shown that SMSes *should* be giant cash cows for these monopolistic entities, but lacking internal financial data it has always been difficult to make an issue out of this at Congress. Of course the cell companies have every interest to keep this data private, but maybe in this case T-Mobile won't have the choice.
Penguin poop... from... SPAAAAAAAAAAAACE.
(Followed by obligatory non-caps message to defeat the lameness filter.)
Thank you, for reminding me why I've been boycotting Sony since 2004. Makes it a little hard, because I actually *like* my Sony-Ericsson phone's interface, and it's on its last legs, but clearly 5 years running Sony hasn't changed its stance. Damn you all for buying PS3s and keeping them afloat!
Is Russia the last country where engineers are not (yet) forced by corporations to intentionally produce designs that fail two days after warranty expires? There used to be a lot of equipment manufactured by various countries (Germany is the first one that comes to mind) that lasted virtually forever -- old cars or weapons systems, but one rarely sees anything of the sort these days."
What a load of malarkey. Things last just fine these days. There are any number of reasons that you could have the impression that that's not the case.
1) We just have so much *more* of it that there are more things to break.
2) Systems are more complex, and a little thing breaking tends to take out the whole system. I.e. piece of ice on the booster tank, taking out the whole shuttle.
3) Older things that are still around are a self-fulfilling prophesy. They seem to be better built because we have no idea how many of them were produced in the first place. Ask yourself this, though. How many old toasters are still out there? Surely if they were universally built, no one would ever buy a new one. Likewise for so many tools and kitchen appliances.
My personal history with cars since the mid-90's: none of them breaking, ever. My friends rarely have problems. I worked in an auto shop, and most of our repairs were either routine maintenance or "luxury stuff", such as power windows or cruise control. Very, very rarely the car itself. Now, my parents cars had breakdown after breakdown when I was a kid. They wound up junking them because, clearly, these 1970s cars didn't last. And don't get me started on my dad's E-type. What parts of it aren't rusted through and through are simply broken and irreplaceable.
I think the makers of these kinds of comments are confusing maintenance with quality. The simple fact was that things were expensive enough that it was worth repairing them. When something breaks these days, it's usually just a bad cap, transistor, or something simple like that. Very easy to fix and repair, but no one has the schematics and things move so quickly these days you'd have to be a highly-paid professional. Which no one is willing to pay for.
Except for one thing: airplanes. Airplanes built in the 1910s are still flying today. They're maintenance nightmares, but compared to the new purchase price they're worth it so people do it.
So today's TV isn't worse. It's just that we're too cheap to repair it when a $0.02 component breaks.
Call me crazy, but I'd instantly switch from LaTeX to just about anything if it could be good enough. I don't need fantastic published documents here. I just need a proper editor that doesn't require learning insane and (somewhat) inane code groupings in order to to simple things. I wound up writing a whole scientific thesis on Pages.app because writing in TeX completely and utterly disrupts my creative process (I have trouble concentrating on the task at hand when I have to stop for 5 minutes to figure out how to do something new. I have trouble reading the paper when I can't effectively see the section I just wrote)
Not claiming everyone is like me, but I personally would switch to Word, no matter that I hate it, if it could approximate TeX's advantages.
Just thought I'd point out that, while most of the ideas are sound-- if not net energy loses when you consider the energy cost of producing everything required to charge your iPod-- the idea of using the fireplace as "waste" heat just shows how out of touch the writer is with the laws of thermodynamics and the relative efficiency of these kinds of power generators.
This is effectively a heat engine, and so we can produce no more energy than the maximum permitted by a Carnot engine. Thus, there is very little exergy (layman's definition: useful energy that can extracted.) in such a process. To use your fireplace, or any other source of heat in the home that is designed to heat your home, to generate electrical power is absurd. You wind up losing far more than you gain, as you will now have to run your fireplace that much more to make up for all the "cold" you're bringing into the house.
Bleh, are people really that desperate to get energy for nothing? Have they not yet learned that just using less of the stuff is by far the best way?
A single power failure during a write can ruin a perfectly good SD card. It took me a single try.
I'm using a microcontroller to write to an SD card, and have lost a couple of them in the process. I admit that this has been a mystery as to exactly why this was occurring. I think your comment is interesting, but the great google in the sky comes up blank. Do you give any links or references so I can better understand this?
Am I the only who's bothered by the ridiculous lopsidedness of the reporting? Torrentfreaks makes no bones about hiding its prejudices. However, they're not judge, nor jury, nor executioner, no matter how enthusiastically they pretend they were. For instance, in Exhibit A, the fact that half the charges were dropped seems to be a perfectly normal part of the process in Sweden, i.e. a step forward but hardly a victory, to hear it from other /.ers. Continuing, in Exhibit B, who cares if the "so-called computer expert" couldn't get his powerpoint presentation working? That doesn't mean squat; we've all had recalcitrant computers and projectors but that hardly means we're incompetent.
Does anyone remember the Saddam Hussein's information minister, Mohammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, who swore that Iraq were winning victory after victory, and that the Americans were absolutely not in Bagdhad? All this at the very moment the American army was already in the city and closing in on them? To tanks, no intruders, only liars.
Feel free to replace "tanks" with "laws", "intruders" with "guilty defendants", and "liars" with "RIAA.
That being said, I fully support the Pirate Bay, the Pyratbyran, and their arguments. I hope that Sweden *does* have the courage to tell American businesses that just because they pass bankrupt laws on the backs of their own citizens doesn't mean they get to go overseas, like a certain rampaging giant gorilla of renown, and attack more sensible nations. I just want to feel that they're honestly winning the fight, instead of getting carried away by the fanboy'ing at Torrentfreaks.
Well, I think that's my point. I'm not going to tell everyone where I think they should spend their money (that's why the *AA taxes are such bankrupt ideas!). Personally, I think the US tip system works quite well for waiters and servers, and don't see why the patronage system wouldn't work quite well in these circumstances. It's absolutely true that the artistically inclined need to eat, and it would be a shame if our entire society gave up art to work a 9-5 job, but somewhere we have to come to terms with what we think the art is "worth", and then act on it. As you say, if it's worth something, to us, we should have no trouble paying for it!
How would you "correct" this?
Please, spare me the drama. There are plenty of examples in everyday life of how we "correct" things we find objectionable. Taxes are high on tobacco, alcohol, etc... because we want to discourage that behavior. Taxes are low on food, and rebates are provided for certain projects (building a new factory, installing solar panels) because we want to encourage that sort of behavior.
Supply and demand is only one of the economic laws engineers, indeed everyone, should be familiar with. The law of elastic demand is equally important, and in these cases, when the supply is infinite (digital bits), it is far more relevant.
And as to whether there are more people capable of doing children's theater, as opposed to engineering, I think you've gotten things backwards. Just about any old bloke can become an engineer. It's not that hard to do something useful with math and science, as there's so much still to be done. (We're not talking about good engineers here, just decent ones.) Without moralizing, I'd say it's a lot harder to find people with the gift of sacrificing themselves to change someone else's life.
No, I firmly believe there isn't. They chose the wrong strategy, and got caught out in the cold. They lead lives that are so different from ours, they've become convinced by their own arguments, just like the Wall Street bankers and their bonuses. The RIAA really doesn't have much of a choice but to throw in the towel and start off in a different direction. Of course, they won't, and I'll be one of those cheering their burial.
They've made it this far because a large part of their argument comes from the idea that file-sharing is globally illegal. This type of file sharing has to be made firmly, clearly, and once-and-for-all clearly legal. Somewhere, we have to ask ourselves what value do recorded music, video, and programs have? If we're not happy with the free-market answer, we have to find it in ourselves to come up with a solution that modifies the free-market such that we support these activities. Simply declaring the free-market illegal is not a valid strategy. It hasn't ever worked in the past-- witness alcohol, drugs, etc...-- and it's not working now.
Now, I for one think that the arts are far more worthy than the sciences. As an engineer, I was offered a salary 5 times what a friend was making, even though I was going to do numerical analysis of toilet paper (no shit, pun intended) and she was working 80 hour days with children's theater. If the fact that we live in a society that values toilet paper more than theater offends you, then you need to make the decisions in your life that reflect this.
Science is an awesome hobby, and it's what I do for a living, but somewhere we're seriously out of whack when business is worth more than life. The RIAA mentality shows this, and there's really nothing they can do except fight until they've carved out a sufficiently well protected niche that they can survive in some minimal fashion. To take an analogy from Go, they're trying desperately to make two eyes, even though the game is practically over.
Shocked and astonished I am! Scandalous! That a company should do exactly what we pay them to and report to us exactly what they are doing, and that somehow we would still be ignorant of the exact nature of their activities! Those responsible should be fired, obviously!
Err... why's everyone looking at me like that?
We all know that crime can be defined as black and white: it's either illegal or it's not. And with that definition, you can justify anything you want till the cows come home.
I prefer to think of crimes as things that go against human nature and rights, not against one particular country's judicial system. Of course, this is a very limited viewpoint that I am allowed because, like most everyone here, I'm in no position to actually act on my opinions. In the "real" legal world, the line isn't so clear. However, since this is a philosophical discussion about what is right and wrong, I don't see the importance of discussing what is legal and illegal.
And I think you understand that point very well, so there's not much point in picking apart my arguments based on technical semantics of what a "crime" is and isn't.
Your above statement is one of the reasons I think that automated traffic cameras are a good idea. Unlike human police offers, they don't take bribes, and they won't ticket somebody out of revenge. The fines are a good disincentive, but not overly punitive.
You know what? I've got a friend who says exactly the same thing. And. I. cannot. logically. disagree. We just have a different value system. Racial profiling is a terrible thing and one of the great benefits of speed cameras is that it simply disappears in the flash of a bright light. While I strongly feel that this benefit is not worth the cost, there's no denying it exists and if that's what's important to you then we have arrived at the classic "agree to disagree" moments.
If more people saw the value in automated traffic monitoring systems, then I think we'd be able to lobby to improve the implementations more effectively.
True, but cf. the above. Inspite of the value, I think the cost of any sort of automated punishement system outweighs the benefits. The most flagrant example of this is the Rockefeller Laws, putting drug users in jail automatically no matter the real severity of their "crime".
Heh. That's a funny way of expressing things. I'll have to remember that later. Especially as now living in Europe for the past years I can definitely relate to what you're saying, since at the time when I got my license in my state you only had to have your permit for 30 days after you turned 16.
(As an aside, I'll say I'm against drawing to stiff a line on what's a kid and what's not. My concern is that sometime in the future, the Supreme Court is going to hear a case against some category of blatenly wrong juvenille law-- such as curfew-- where they will have no choice but to rule that it's unconstitutional to discriminate against people of any age, not just people over a certain age. And that's going to open up a can of worms we don't want opened. How's a parent supposed to be responsible for their child when the law clearly dictates that "child" does not exist? Ick.)
Getting back to the point, I don't think adults should go to jail for an adminstrative prank, either. An earlier poster made a reference to "MAN SEX" as a pranked plate on his tow truck. I wouldn't have done that myself, but I think it's pretty funny that he and his friends liked it. To go from that to harassing someone is actually a pretty important step, but not one that should land them in jail. Would it be fair to put someone in jail if they called the IRS and anonymously informed them you were cheating on your taxes? Fines, community service, and a restraining order would be the correct reaction, not putting them in jail.
I'll reiterate my original point. We need to stop being an 0wnership culture. Diplomatic victories are the best kind, as everyone progresses. Punishment should be about prevention not revenge.
But, speeding is a crime in that by speeding you are needlessly endangering other people's lives. Laws are not necessarily what is moral and in some cases for need of practicality, laws must be preventative instead of reactionary. Not that I'm advocating the extent to which they go, but by your logic we should remove ALL airport security.
Driving needlessly endangers other people's lives. Heck, so does existence. There's a certain amount of gray area in this. And while laws are not necessarily moral, the people who apply them are by definition.
In any case, not to get distracted from the subject at hand, I refute that speeding, as defined by going faster than a posted limit, is needlessly endangering lives. Those limits are decided by engineers who have NOT decided on the best speed. They've applied some rules of thumb, some rules of law, and some rules of common sense to arrive at a nice round number that is more correct than not. However, with cameras you're no longer talking more or less. You're talking exactly, atomically, right or wrong.
P.S. I'm missing the link between airport security and machines making legal choices.
P.S.S. And being a pilot, I can assure you that most of airport security is a farce. But I think just about everybody already knows that.
Never. It's always a prank. If you want to argue that after getting caught ten times and clearly refusing to mend your ways that you should face some stiffer penalties, I couldn't agree more. That doesn't change that putting someone in jail for an administrative prank is wrong. And the knee jerk reaction to *want* that is perverted.
Here's a solution: why not take away their driver's license? That would have the same effect on stopping the abuse, while ratcheting up the pressure (getting caught driving with a suspended license is far more serious) all without the slightest risk of permanently scars.
Well, the accuracy of the cameras is now no longer in question...
Of course it still is. The accuracy of machines will always be in question. I'm a controls engineer and I can tell you all day long about how machines screw up doing simple tasks they've done 100 times before, or simply get things wrong all the time but no one notices because according to those in control, the machine functions "well enough".
As long as there's no way for citizens' groups to validate these cameras without fear of getting stiff fines or thrown in jail, their accuracy will always be suspect. There are simply too many advantages to getting it wrong, and too few to getting it right.
A photo does nothing more than prove you were there at a certain time. Now, if there were some video, and you could demonstrate an average, that would be at least not be legally bankrupt and founded on solid principles that jury of peers can judge on. But of course, before issuing a ticket said video would have to be reviewed by a person, who would have to be paid, and moreover would then be responsible for the judgement. So obviously this model is not economically viable for those giving the tickets, so we're using a system that is very much in doubt, all because people bend over and accept it.