You build a big infrastructure around some frequencies and use it for some years, then when renewal time comes around, your infrastructure is obsolete enough that you can't make a competitive bid against someone using newer technology. Why the hell should you be allowed to keep consuming a public resource (spectrum) when there are more efficient uses that can be made for it?
Obviously the renewal terms should be long enough to make the rentals able to generate a reasonable return on investment even if that infrastructure has to be dismantled at the end of the term. I don't think that's so terrible. And the prospect of having to take down the infrastructure simply would get built into the bid amounts.
What I see instead is an agenda on the govt's part to turn public spectrum into the private fiefdom of some lobbying corporations. That must not be allowed.
1. Yes, I know Albuquerque is in NM. I simply had a brainfart when I saw "abqjournal" and read it as "azjournal" or something like that.
2. The article I submitted was edited for length before posting, so some stuff I'd asked was chopped out, like whether there were errors in Kerry's favor similar to the ones for Bush. The abqjournal article itself was not clear about that at all. While it says there were some errors in each direction, we don't know at all whether 90% of the errors favored Bush, 90% favored Kerry, or what.
3. ABQ Journal is apparently a Republican paper and it has endorsed Bush, so anything it prints is certainly not Democratic propoganda.
The perfect online music store is already up and running. It has mp3 downloads and streams of entire albums under Creative Commons licenses. If you want WAV, Ogg, FLAC, or other formats, you can pay for those. They are still under the CC license permitting non-commercial redistribution so you don't have to click on agreements allowing RIAA thugs to inspect your underwear drawer. If you want to use the music commercially (say as a movie score), the licenses for that are right there on the site: select the one you want, print it, sign it, and send it in with a check for the specified amount.
Admittedly, there's nowhere near as wide a choice of CC-licensed music right now as there is of RIAA-style proprietary music, but that doesn't bother me. There's been so much music recorded through history that there's no way to ever listen to it all, and everything I've downloaded from Magnatune has been excellent. There's enough selection there to keep me happy for quite a while. I've completely lost interest in RIAA music and haven't bought a CD from a record store in years. (I've bought a few directly from performers at live shows, but that's about it).
The Constitution authorizes Congress to enact IP legislation, but it does not mandate it. The same part of the Constitution gives Congress the power to levy taxes. But, the Constitution laying out the framework for taxation does not all by itself mean anyone in particular needs to support the existence of taxes, and I think libtertarians are generally opposed to taxes. It can be the same way with IP laws. Whether that's a good idea or not is of course a totally separate question.
The book is also online in html form.
It sounds like you weren't used to the Lagrangian formulation of mechanics, which has been around for a long time but is usuually not taught in lower level undergrad physics courses (i.e. normal engineering physics). If you take an upper level class in classical mechanics, you'd cover it thoroughly. Sussman and Wisdom's book presents it in an interesting computer-inspired way. Note though that this is a textbook (with problem sets and all that), not a popularization.
That 5 GB drive is equivalent to a DVD. So you could have a camcorder that stores a full hour of high quality MPEG-2 video, or a half an hour of DV-25 (i.e. MiniDV compression) video.
And forgot to mention: the server could also send the audio (and maybe even video) stream back to the Zaurus through the wifi, so if I wanted, I could listen through headphones or watch video on the little PDA screen, turning the Zaurus into a wireless portable music/video player with essentially unlimited capacity for use around the house (i.e. within range of the wifi base).
to use my Sharp Zaurus PDA as a remote control for my music/video library. The Zaurus would just run a web browser over a WiFi card in the CF slot. The server with my Vorbis and video files would run a straightforward web application that I'd browse with the Zaurus. I could search for titles, look at artwork and lyrics, and whatever; and there would be an XMMS-like control panel that would let me play stuff through the speakers and on the monitor. No need for a CD player or DVD's or anything; it would all come straight off the hard disc and out the audio and VGA ports.
are probably about your speed. The PD150 is the pro DVCAM version (about $3.5K) and the VX2000 is the prosumer mini-DV version (maybe $2.5K). These are the standard cameras for most film-school and semi-pro and in-house projects. Lots of low-budget indie feature films are shot with these cameras. They are 3CCD cameras with tons of accessories available. Their main competition is the clunkier Canon XL1/XL2 series. Serious professional cameras are $5K and up which is probably steep for you.
Note that the resolution of all standard TV cameras is the same, 720x480 or something like that. There is just one consumer HDTV camera (made by JVC) which costs about $3K and is 800x600, but it's a 1-CCD camera. Professional HDTV cameras start a lot higher, like, $50K or who knows, more than you want to think about.
Beale Corner's video pages are a good place to surf around from about this stuff.
In Nomine is a D&D-style roleplaying game rather than a computer game, but it's religiously based in amazing detail. From the site blurb:
In Nomine is a modern roleplaying game in which the players take the part of celestial beings -- angels and demons -- as they struggle for control of humanity and themselves. The celestials, powerful though they may be, are merely pawns in a much larger game being played by their Superiors, the Archangels and Demon Princes.
Based on the best-selling French RPG by the wonderfully diabolical Croc!
I haven't played it but have looked at some of the webpages. It seems really cool.
are more commonly called intercontinental ballistic missiles and interest in them is generally not "commercial". Launching one takes almost as much velocity as getting all the way to orbit. But SS1 was a long way from either. It just went up and came down in basically the same spot.
There is already orbital flight available from private launch services (for satellites), just not manned orbital flight. SC built a suborbital vehicle that carried a very brave human test pilot who at age 61 may have decided that even if the spaceship crashed, he'd already had a pretty good life. Launching satellites is of big practical consequence, putting a person into a suborbital launch is a publicity stunt. Also, when your launch package is 99% fuel, re-usability of the vehicle is overrated. A Space Shuttle launch is a heck of a lot more expensive per pound of payload to orbit than a 1970's Saturn V launch used to be, despite the re-usable vehicle.
Bonanza was on for a lot longer than any of the ST shows, and managed to stay watchable. The problem with the current incarnations of ST is their constant theme of teenage angst stops being interesting for teens and non-teens alike. Yes, JMS could breathe some life back into that old series, but I'd rather that they just laid it to rest.
I mean, the guy flew a plane real real high. It went up, it came back down almost immediately. Others have done that too, maybe not quite as high. Yeah, it's a milestone in the sense of a box on a list that one can check off. But what's the immediate practical consequence? Not much.
Spaceflight gets interesting when you can actually put stuff into orbit. So that once it goes up, it stays up without using more fuel. That means you have to get the rocket flying at close to Mach 25. Then once you've gotten up to Mach 25, if you want to land again, you've got to slow back down to zero, which means getting rid of a heck of a lot of kinetic energy. That's why the Space Shuttle needs those notorious problematic thermal tiles, to dissipate the ferocious amount of heat created by that slowdown. Think your car's brakes get hot driving down a mountain? Try it from orbit.
SpaceShip One's propaganda made it sound like they'd beaten NASA by developing better reentry technology that didn't need thermal tiles. In reality, they didn't need thermal tiles because they never reached anywhere near orbital speed, so they didn't have all that heat to dissipate. If they ever build an orbital craft, they'll have to deal with reentry heat just like everyone else has.
SpaceShip One is about as close to that as the Wright Brothers flyer is to a jet airliner. The amount of technical development (and expenditure) needed to get a reusable vehicle in orbit makes what's been done so far look pretty trivial. Space Ship One got about as far into space as the Redstone rockets of the 1950's.
I don't mean to belittle the accomplishment but it shouldn't be overestimated either. It's a step, an important step, but a baby step, there are a lot more to go.
Not one that needs special motherboard support, but one that physically and logically looks exactly like a normal 3.5" drive. Inside it would have two 2.5" laptop drives but you wouldn't even have to know that. You'd just plug it in and use it like a 3.5" drive and all data would automatically be replicated across both internal drives. If one of the drives crashed, the RAID (in some mode) would simply shut itself down (if it kept going like nothing had happened, you might never notice til the other drive crashed). You could then investigate what happened and change a jumper to put the RAID back in service on just one drive, until you had a chance to replace the failed internal drive.
I'm not sure if the form factors allow for it, but it would be even better if you could do this for laptop drives, since most laptops have space for just one drive. You'd put two 1.8" iPod-type drives (available up to 40 GB) into a single 2.5" drive slot. I guess you could certainly fit 1.3" microdrives, but those are way expensive and max out at 4 GB each.
Just dump the old email to DVD-R and archive it somewhere. If someone wants to subpoena it, burn off copies and wish 'em luck. Even if the city is getting a million pieces of spam a day, at 5kb each after data compression, that's just one DVD-R per day at a buck or so each, peanuts compared to what the city already must spend xeroxing memos for records retention purposes.
Remember the scammer gave a fake phone number to Fedex and when it couldn't be used to contact him, he went and paid the customs duties to Fedex in cash. There are no credit cards involved.
Slashdot mentioned a few days ago that mp3.com held 1.7 million songs at the time Vivendi took it down.
I also read recently elsewhere that there are around 30,000 CD's released in the US every year. At ten songs (average) per CD, that's 300,000 songs/year released on CD.
I don't know how long the original mp3.com was around, but it was probably less than 5 years, and it probably put up mp3's at a faster rate near the end than near the beginning. But even at a uniform rate over the whole 5 years, it sounds like one web site was distributing more songs per year all by itself, than the entire CD industry released put together (1.7 million songs / 5 years = 340,000 songs/year). Add to that the number of musicians who distribute their stuff through their own sites, and it's clear there's a heck of a lot more music being released as gratis downloads than as proprietary CD's.
Some people blame diminishing CD sales on unauthorized CD copying; others blame it on technological obsolescence (people buy DVD's instead of CD's now); still others say it's because poor artistic decisions by record labels result in releasing uninteresting music that people don't want to buy. I haven't yet seen a connection made with authorized, freely downloadable music, that people can listen to instead of buying proprietary CD's, just like they can run GNU/Linux instead of buying Windows, Apache instead of IIS, etc. Sure, a lot of mp3.com downloads are crap, but lots of commercial CD's are crap too.
Anyway, it seems to me that most of the music even on these "secret" all-music p2p networks is likely to be freely downloadable.
(Note: this post mostly rehashes an earlier comment of mine from that other thread, but the statistic is interesting enough that I felt it was worth posting again).
The way I read that second press release, the court first ordered TWO paragraphs deleted from the web site. The later reversal restored ONE of the two paragraphs. I'm not sure about this. I will examine it further when I get a chance, or (easier for me, at least) maybe someone else here could look into it.
I read recently that there are around 30,000 CD's released in the US every year. At ten songs (average) per CD, that's 300,000 songs/year released on CD. I don't know how long the original mp3.com was around but it was probably less than 5 years, and it probably put up mp3's at a faster rate near the end than near the beginning. But even at a uniform rate over the whole 5 years, it sounds like one web site was distributing more songs per year all by itself, than the entire CD industry released put together. Add to that the number of musicians who distribute their stuff through their own sites, and it's clear there's a heck of a lot more music being released as gratis downloads than as proprietary CD's.
Some people blame diminishing CD sales on unauthorized CD copying; others blame it on technological obsolescence (people buy DVD's instead of CD's now); still others say it's because poor artistic decisions by record labels result in releasing uninteresting music that people don't want to buy. I haven't yet seen a connection made with authorized, freely downloadable music, that people can listen to instead of buying proprietary CD's, just like they can run GNU/Linux instead of buying Windows, Apache instead of IIS, etc. Sure, a lot of mp3.com downloads are crap, but lots of commercial CD's are crap too.
Another really good site, by the way, is Magnatunes. They publish entire CD's under a Creative Commons license and you can download the complete CD's in mp3 format and pass around copies noncommercially. You can also pay to download in FLAC or Ogg Vorbis format, or buy commercial licenses (e.g. if you want to use one of the CD's as a movie soundtrack) through a simple web interface. There is some really excellent music there too.
No I'm not going to link it; you can paste it yourself. WARNING, it goes to a browser hijacker that puts up a cascade of goatse.cx variety shock pictures. Not work safe. It completely wedged Mozilla 1.6 when I clicked on it. I didn't try in 1.7. Blecccch. If you look at it, don't say I didn't warn you. Note that if you turn off Javascript, you just see a blank page.
The JS in it also tries to capture the text from your clipboard and send it to the remote server, though I hope Mozilla isn't stupid enough to let THAT operation work.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously the renewal terms should be long enough to make the rentals able to generate a reasonable return on investment even if that infrastructure has to be dismantled at the end of the term. I don't think that's so terrible. And the prospect of having to take down the infrastructure simply would get built into the bid amounts.
What I see instead is an agenda on the govt's part to turn public spectrum into the private fiefdom of some lobbying corporations. That must not be allowed.
1. Yes, I know Albuquerque is in NM. I simply had a brainfart when I saw "abqjournal" and read it as "azjournal" or something like that. 2. The article I submitted was edited for length before posting, so some stuff I'd asked was chopped out, like whether there were errors in Kerry's favor similar to the ones for Bush. The abqjournal article itself was not clear about that at all. While it says there were some errors in each direction, we don't know at all whether 90% of the errors favored Bush, 90% favored Kerry, or what. 3. ABQ Journal is apparently a Republican paper and it has endorsed Bush, so anything it prints is certainly not Democratic propoganda.
Admittedly, there's nowhere near as wide a choice of CC-licensed music right now as there is of RIAA-style proprietary music, but that doesn't bother me. There's been so much music recorded through history that there's no way to ever listen to it all, and everything I've downloaded from Magnatune has been excellent. There's enough selection there to keep me happy for quite a while. I've completely lost interest in RIAA music and haven't bought a CD from a record store in years. (I've bought a few directly from performers at live shows, but that's about it).
The Constitution authorizes Congress to enact IP legislation, but it does not mandate it. The same part of the Constitution gives Congress the power to levy taxes. But, the Constitution laying out the framework for taxation does not all by itself mean anyone in particular needs to support the existence of taxes, and I think libtertarians are generally opposed to taxes. It can be the same way with IP laws. Whether that's a good idea or not is of course a totally separate question.
MIT Press blurb
The book is also online in html form. It sounds like you weren't used to the Lagrangian formulation of mechanics, which has been around for a long time but is usuually not taught in lower level undergrad physics courses (i.e. normal engineering physics). If you take an upper level class in classical mechanics, you'd cover it thoroughly. Sussman and Wisdom's book presents it in an interesting computer-inspired way. Note though that this is a textbook (with problem sets and all that), not a popularization.
That 5 GB drive is equivalent to a DVD. So you could have a camcorder that stores a full hour of high quality MPEG-2 video, or a half an hour of DV-25 (i.e. MiniDV compression) video.
It's being worked on. And yeah, Halliburton is getting the juice from it.
And forgot to mention: the server could also send the audio (and maybe even video) stream back to the Zaurus through the wifi, so if I wanted, I could listen through headphones or watch video on the little PDA screen, turning the Zaurus into a wireless portable music/video player with essentially unlimited capacity for use around the house (i.e. within range of the wifi base).
to use my Sharp Zaurus PDA as a remote control for my music/video library. The Zaurus would just run a web browser over a WiFi card in the CF slot. The server with my Vorbis and video files would run a straightforward web application that I'd browse with the Zaurus. I could search for titles, look at artwork and lyrics, and whatever; and there would be an XMMS-like control panel that would let me play stuff through the speakers and on the monitor. No need for a CD player or DVD's or anything; it would all come straight off the hard disc and out the audio and VGA ports.
Note that the resolution of all standard TV cameras is the same, 720x480 or something like that. There is just one consumer HDTV camera (made by JVC) which costs about $3K and is 800x600, but it's a 1-CCD camera. Professional HDTV cameras start a lot higher, like, $50K or who knows, more than you want to think about.
Beale Corner's video pages are a good place to surf around from about this stuff.
are more commonly called intercontinental ballistic missiles and interest in them is generally not "commercial". Launching one takes almost as much velocity as getting all the way to orbit. But SS1 was a long way from either. It just went up and came down in basically the same spot.
There is already orbital flight available from private launch services (for satellites), just not manned orbital flight. SC built a suborbital vehicle that carried a very brave human test pilot who at age 61 may have decided that even if the spaceship crashed, he'd already had a pretty good life. Launching satellites is of big practical consequence, putting a person into a suborbital launch is a publicity stunt. Also, when your launch package is 99% fuel, re-usability of the vehicle is overrated. A Space Shuttle launch is a heck of a lot more expensive per pound of payload to orbit than a 1970's Saturn V launch used to be, despite the re-usable vehicle.
Bonanza was on for a lot longer than any of the ST shows, and managed to stay watchable. The problem with the current incarnations of ST is their constant theme of teenage angst stops being interesting for teens and non-teens alike. Yes, JMS could breathe some life back into that old series, but I'd rather that they just laid it to rest.
Spaceflight gets interesting when you can actually put stuff into orbit. So that once it goes up, it stays up without using more fuel. That means you have to get the rocket flying at close to Mach 25. Then once you've gotten up to Mach 25, if you want to land again, you've got to slow back down to zero, which means getting rid of a heck of a lot of kinetic energy. That's why the Space Shuttle needs those notorious problematic thermal tiles, to dissipate the ferocious amount of heat created by that slowdown. Think your car's brakes get hot driving down a mountain? Try it from orbit.
SpaceShip One's propaganda made it sound like they'd beaten NASA by developing better reentry technology that didn't need thermal tiles. In reality, they didn't need thermal tiles because they never reached anywhere near orbital speed, so they didn't have all that heat to dissipate. If they ever build an orbital craft, they'll have to deal with reentry heat just like everyone else has.
SpaceShip One is about as close to that as the Wright Brothers flyer is to a jet airliner. The amount of technical development (and expenditure) needed to get a reusable vehicle in orbit makes what's been done so far look pretty trivial. Space Ship One got about as far into space as the Redstone rockets of the 1950's.
I don't mean to belittle the accomplishment but it shouldn't be overestimated either. It's a step, an important step, but a baby step, there are a lot more to go.
I'm not sure if the form factors allow for it, but it would be even better if you could do this for laptop drives, since most laptops have space for just one drive. You'd put two 1.8" iPod-type drives (available up to 40 GB) into a single 2.5" drive slot. I guess you could certainly fit 1.3" microdrives, but those are way expensive and max out at 4 GB each.
Just dump the old email to DVD-R and archive it somewhere. If someone wants to subpoena it, burn off copies and wish 'em luck. Even if the city is getting a million pieces of spam a day, at 5kb each after data compression, that's just one DVD-R per day at a buck or so each, peanuts compared to what the city already must spend xeroxing memos for records retention purposes.
carving their bones into flutes for Linus's children to play.
Remember the scammer gave a fake phone number to Fedex and when it couldn't be used to contact him, he went and paid the customs duties to Fedex in cash. There are no credit cards involved.
I don't know how long the original mp3.com was around, but it was probably less than 5 years, and it probably put up mp3's at a faster rate near the end than near the beginning. But even at a uniform rate over the whole 5 years, it sounds like one web site was distributing more songs per year all by itself, than the entire CD industry released put together (1.7 million songs / 5 years = 340,000 songs/year). Add to that the number of musicians who distribute their stuff through their own sites, and it's clear there's a heck of a lot more music being released as gratis downloads than as proprietary CD's.
Some people blame diminishing CD sales on unauthorized CD copying; others blame it on technological obsolescence (people buy DVD's instead of CD's now); still others say it's because poor artistic decisions by record labels result in releasing uninteresting music that people don't want to buy. I haven't yet seen a connection made with authorized, freely downloadable music, that people can listen to instead of buying proprietary CD's, just like they can run GNU/Linux instead of buying Windows, Apache instead of IIS, etc. Sure, a lot of mp3.com downloads are crap, but lots of commercial CD's are crap too.
Anyway, it seems to me that most of the music even on these "secret" all-music p2p networks is likely to be freely downloadable.
(Note: this post mostly rehashes an earlier comment of mine from that other thread, but the statistic is interesting enough that I felt it was worth posting again).
The way I read that second press release, the court first ordered TWO paragraphs deleted from the web site. The later reversal restored ONE of the two paragraphs. I'm not sure about this. I will examine it further when I get a chance, or (easier for me, at least) maybe someone else here could look into it.
Some people blame diminishing CD sales on unauthorized CD copying; others blame it on technological obsolescence (people buy DVD's instead of CD's now); still others say it's because poor artistic decisions by record labels result in releasing uninteresting music that people don't want to buy. I haven't yet seen a connection made with authorized, freely downloadable music, that people can listen to instead of buying proprietary CD's, just like they can run GNU/Linux instead of buying Windows, Apache instead of IIS, etc. Sure, a lot of mp3.com downloads are crap, but lots of commercial CD's are crap too.
Another really good site, by the way, is Magnatunes. They publish entire CD's under a Creative Commons license and you can download the complete CD's in mp3 format and pass around copies noncommercially. You can also pay to download in FLAC or Ogg Vorbis format, or buy commercial licenses (e.g. if you want to use one of the CD's as a movie soundtrack) through a simple web interface. There is some really excellent music there too.
http://plextor.bounceme.net/
No I'm not going to link it; you can paste it yourself. WARNING, it goes to a browser hijacker that puts up a cascade of goatse.cx variety shock pictures. Not work safe. It completely wedged Mozilla 1.6 when I clicked on it. I didn't try in 1.7. Blecccch. If you look at it, don't say I didn't warn you. Note that if you turn off Javascript, you just see a blank page.
The JS in it also tries to capture the text from your clipboard and send it to the remote server, though I hope Mozilla isn't stupid enough to let THAT operation work.
http://shopper-zdnet.com.com/Toshiba_MK4004GAH___h ard_drive___40_GB___ATA_100/4014-3186_15-30680986. html?tag=pl&q=Toshiba
Try this link.