Shut off the new satellite image overlay. The two sets of data don't line up perfectly, but that appears to be a feature that was there before the new data.
This is a very good use of the technology. I hope this works if for no other reason than to bring closure to his family if he hasn't survived.
My problem is the way they've got the web page set up. Every time I submit a new "HIT", I have to scroll all the way down the page again to see the next image. It's great that they have a "primer" a the top, but I've done a couple hundred now... I don't need to keep seeing that over and over again. Just cut to the chase and show me the next picture to examine.
Also, looking at the Google Earth swath that this is covering, I can't help but think that he might be outside of that. Can anyone comment? Or do they know "if he's anywhere, he's in that area."?
Once again, I'm sure this will be doomed to failure. It will be riddled with DRM and have all sorts of technological (if not outright legal) hurdles to get the movies I buy to play when and where I want them.
The first company that manages to convince studios to release simple file downloads in common formats that are either/both a) ready to burn to DVD or b) ready to play on an ipod or appleTV and completely unencumbered by any manner of DRM will clean up.
But for now, the only way for me to get DRM-free movies is to buy the DVD and rip the content using quasi legal (or illegal depending on your perspective) methods. How else am I to get them loaded on my media server or transcoded for viewing on my ipod?
It's the same for music. Right now, I either get them at emusic.com where I have a subscription, or the itunes plus store, or I rip CDs. It's silly and wasteful to buy a physical CD, rip it once, and put it on the shelf. As storage capacity increases, this too will happen for movies/DVDs as it has for music/CDs.
I'm on the lookout for a system that will make new recordings audible again.
Virtually every new recording is compressed to the Nth degree with no sense of dynamics and utterly bereft of feeling and life. MP3 compression only makes bad recordings worse.
Egads people. The shuttle is scheduled to launch today. Could you please not post a front page story with words "Shuttle", "Space", and "Fiery End" all together? A quick glance at the sentence made me gasp and ask "WHAT HAPPENED?!?!?"
A half second later, I understood the context, but it took a few moments for my heart to slow back down...
There is exactly one option that will, at this point, make me say "justice served." That is complete and immediate dismissal of all charges and disbarment of the prosecutor who pursued this in the first place.
If this does go to trial, my defense strategy would be this: Bring one expert witness after another to the stand to testify that this could happen on a poorly patched and insecure system regardless of what this woman may have done. Eventually the prosecution will have to stipulate that fact to which one must then say "So, why are we here?"
This just makes me amazingly angry.
One more note... don't try to wiggle out of jury duty, folks. That may be your chance to be the voice or reason and to see justice done. It may also be an opportunity to exercise your right of Jury Nullification.
I've been so looking forward to being able to buy a wider variety of high-quality non-DRM music, but this info has really dampened my enthusiasm. Once again, I'm trying to be a law-abiding citizen for the most part, but here again they're treating me like a thief right from the start.
Am I going to put the files up on bittorent? No. But do I email a couple of my friends some songs or burn them onto a CD and say "Here, check out this great band I just discovered." Yes. That's what people who love music do. Is that technically illegal? Yea, it is. But God forbid that we actually show some enthusiasm for the bands we like and discover. And I can't even fathom how many music sales that's lead to. It's a HUGE number.
But now, I have to be careful with these. If I give one to a friend as a "check out this song" thing, I have to worry what he'll do with it. It's got MY info in it. And what if he's equally enthused by the song and tries to introduce someone else to it and THEY go and do the wrong thing and spread it wide and far?
Damn it! I just knew the record companies would find some way to screw this up. And I'm sure stripping the personal info will be utterly trivial, but that's not the point, is it? I just thought for once they'd do the right thing. I was wrong.
It wasn't that I wanted something for nothing. It's that they weren't forthright with what the deal was. They deliberately tried to pull a fast one on me. They should have said "You can have three months for free and at the end of the three months you will need to call otherwise your will be charged and the subscription will start." Would that have been so hard? Instead they tried to hide the fact that I would be charged if I didn't specifically call to cancel.
Their programming is excellent and I love the content and I'm happy to pay for it.
But their customer service has turned from helpful (when I signed up two years ago) to downright scummy now. I recently bought a new XM radio for my car, so I called to replace the one that I already had. It was very easy to do.
When the conversation was almost over, the woman on the other end said "If you'd like, we can give you three months of free service on the radio you took out of service in case you'd like to give it to a friend or family member to see if they like XM."
This sounded good to me. "Sure," I said, "sounds good." Then I thought for a moment. "Wait, will I be charged at the end of three months." To which she responded, "You'll be able to cancel at any time." So I tried a different way of asking. And I got the same response. To which I finally said. "If I don't call to cancel, will I or won't I be automatically be charged for that new radio at the end of the three months." I didn't get a straight answer, so I asked again... slowly and loudly. To which she finally acquiesced and said "Yes, you will need to call and cancel the service before the three months is up." "Or what?" "Or that radio will be added to your service." "And I will be charged automatically?" "Yes."
At which point I said to forget it and make it perfectly clear in no uncertain terms that I wasn't happy with them trying to dupe me.
And you know what, if they'd given me the three months free and DID NOT auto-add the subscription at the end of the term, I'm nearly certain I would have given the radio to someone who would have become as addicted to satellite radio as I am and they probably would have gotten a new subscriber.
What they did, or at least tried to do, is to me, the antithesis of good customer service. They got nothing and ticked off one of their loyal customers all in one swoop.
Anything I BUY should be MINE to do with what I please within the privacy of my own home or in/on my own property (with obvious exceptions such as causing physical harm to others, etc.). And I should NOT be illegal in any way to provide the tools to allow me to exercise that right.
I'm thrilled that the courts are slowly, every so slowly, starting to realize this. They need to look past the fact that it's a DVD and realize that its a collection of bits on a piece of plastic. I understand copyright and why it's not legal for me to distribute it to millions or to re-sell copies of it, but copyright is limited not absolute. Having a copyright on something does not mean that you get to dictate how and where it is used in perpetuity.
If I buy a piece of furniture and I want another one like it for another room, should it be illegal for me to pull out my tape measure, buy some wood, and build myself another one just like it?
If I buy a small print from a local artist to hang in my bedroom, should it be illegal for me to scan it, manipulate the colors, and print another copy that matches the decor in the guest room?
If I have a VHS tape that I'd like to preserve, should it be illegal for me to capture it, do a little noise reduction and clean-up on the video, and burn it to DVD?
And if I have a shelf of DVDs, should it be illegal to rip them and stick them on a server in my own home. Should it be illegal to provide the tools that allow me to do that? Of course not. It's no more illegal than to make the hammer I use to put together the copy of the chair.
...and they formally copyrighted their papers prior to their submission to Turnitin. What exactly does that mean? I was under the impression that the mere act of creating the work rendered it "copyrighted".
The DMCA was written to attack the issues that lobbyist were paid to attack. I'm sure their handlers conceived of the ways it would be abused. That's WHY it was written the way it was. But the onus should have been on the lawmakers to ALSO perceive the ways it could have been abused and to make sure that couldn't happen. Of course, all to many of them (most?) are in the same pockets as the lobbyists are.
Fair use is (was) already well established doctrine. Any new law regarding any perceivable restrictions to fair use should be framed from the perspective of the end user (of the people, by the people, for the people) rather than from the perspective of the copyright holder. I BUY a DVD and it's ILLEGAL for me to rip it and put it on a server in my own home or to compress it and put it on a laptop. That's completely absurd. It's what happens when lobbyists write laws and lawmakers pass them without reading them and understanding the consequences.
We've heard what Senator Stevens has said about technology. Can you just imagine the things that get said in those committees discussing laws like the DMCA? I can't even fathom the level of stupidity that goes on when they're discussing complex technological issues.
You do realize that the 360 can act as a Media Center Extender for Windows XP Media Center 2005 and Vista, right? Yes, I'm aware of that. But I'm not interested in buying a pre-built PC in order to get Media Center and I'm certainly not interested in Vista (the whole HD DRM thing bugs me). I'd prefer to be able to stream from my Linux based NAS since it's on all the time anyway.
I've been looking to upgrade my media streamer capabilities and the original XBOX can run Xbox Media Center (http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/). I wonder if this means that a 360 version with HD streaming might be forthcoming? I hope so. I've been avoiding getting one because how locked down it is.
>I just burn a CD-RW as an audio CD of purchased music and re-import as MP3.
So you take a lousy quality 128 kbps file, convert it to.wav (which is what burning it), then re-encode it again in.mp3 (probably with the lousy encoder built into itunes). I take it sound quality is pretty low on your priority list, huh?
It's the bane of anyone who has to present technical information. It forces complex information to be dumbed down into bite sized morsels for those with exceptionally limited grasp of the technical concepts and those with short attention spans.
This isn't a judgement... more of a curiosity. I don't understand why "conservative Republicans" are so determined to deny that global warming is happening. It's fairly pervasive, or at least seems to to me. I can't tell if it's just people towing the party line and that line comes from the top, or if there's some aspect of religious doctrination that forces this attitude, or something else.
Case in point, I have relatives who are conservatives. I can't say all of them say this, but I'm surprised at the numbers who believe that global warming is a bunch of bull. I was listening to an NPR Technology podcast about this and a guy called in, identified himself as a conservative Republican, and proceded to state that he didn't believe global warming was happening.
I don't get why the skeptisism is drawn by party lines. What am I missing? Is it as simple as the top Republican leadership protecting oil interests and everyone else just follows along, or is there a deeper, more historical context that I'm unaware of?
>Why don't you try actually sending them your thoughts DIRECTLY, as I have done in the past.
As have I... regularly. I've even sent them pictures of my media collection just to prove I'm not BS'ing them on the amount of media I buy. But I'm pretty much fed up with them (the **AA's. I buy almost 100% independent artists now. I subscribe to eMusic. I shop at Newbury Comics (a local music chain that specializes in independent music, though they do carry all of the other stuff too).
Everything the **AA's are doing now are the death throws of a wounded animal. They're becoming increasingly irrelevant and probably will be a footnote in history 25 years from now.
Agreed. If one of my friends asks me about these formats (and they do, knowing what a home theater and media junkie I am), I roll through all of the DRM hoops that they'll have to jump through in order to play the things the way they want it.
The industry NEEDS the word-of-mouth. And as it stands, that word-of-mouth is negative. It's "yea, the picture is great, but then there's all this other stuff you'll have to deal with." That's not going to fly.
Slashdot Mirror
Shut off the new satellite image overlay. The two sets of data don't line up perfectly, but that appears to be a feature that was there before the new data.
-S
This is a very good use of the technology. I hope this works if for no other reason than to bring closure to his family if he hasn't survived.
My problem is the way they've got the web page set up. Every time I submit a new "HIT", I have to scroll all the way down the page again to see the next image. It's great that they have a "primer" a the top, but I've done a couple hundred now... I don't need to keep seeing that over and over again. Just cut to the chase and show me the next picture to examine.
Also, looking at the Google Earth swath that this is covering, I can't help but think that he might be outside of that. Can anyone comment? Or do they know "if he's anywhere, he's in that area."?
-S
Once again, I'm sure this will be doomed to failure. It will be riddled with DRM and have all sorts of technological (if not outright legal) hurdles to get the movies I buy to play when and where I want them.
The first company that manages to convince studios to release simple file downloads in common formats that are either/both a) ready to burn to DVD or b) ready to play on an ipod or appleTV and completely unencumbered by any manner of DRM will clean up.
But for now, the only way for me to get DRM-free movies is to buy the DVD and rip the content using quasi legal (or illegal depending on your perspective) methods. How else am I to get them loaded on my media server or transcoded for viewing on my ipod?
It's the same for music. Right now, I either get them at emusic.com where I have a subscription, or the itunes plus store, or I rip CDs. It's silly and wasteful to buy a physical CD, rip it once, and put it on the shelf. As storage capacity increases, this too will happen for movies/DVDs as it has for music/CDs.
-S
"The new authority will only be used to go after terrorists..."
Uh-huh. And the FBI isn't going to spy on ordinary Americans.
Where's the outrage?
I'm on the lookout for a system that will make new recordings audible again.
Virtually every new recording is compressed to the Nth degree with no sense of dynamics and utterly bereft of feeling and life. MP3 compression only makes bad recordings worse.
-S
If I make one from a 3-d printer or SLA, then what? That's a Mobius strip with no stresses and equal energy density throughout.
Does throw out their math?
-S
I've read a few things this morning... I rather liked Lisa Schwarzbaum's writeup in Entertainment Weekly.
My wife was horribly dissapointed but I'm glad we get to wonder what they might be doing now, albeit without us watching...
-S
Egads people. The shuttle is scheduled to launch today. Could you please not post a front page story with words "Shuttle", "Space", and "Fiery End" all together? A quick glance at the sentence made me gasp and ask "WHAT HAPPENED?!?!?"
A half second later, I understood the context, but it took a few moments for my heart to slow back down...
-S
There is exactly one option that will, at this point, make me say "justice served." That is complete and immediate dismissal of all charges and disbarment of the prosecutor who pursued this in the first place.
If this does go to trial, my defense strategy would be this: Bring one expert witness after another to the stand to testify that this could happen on a poorly patched and insecure system regardless of what this woman may have done. Eventually the prosecution will have to stipulate that fact to which one must then say "So, why are we here?"
This just makes me amazingly angry.
One more note... don't try to wiggle out of jury duty, folks. That may be your chance to be the voice or reason and to see justice done. It may also be an opportunity to exercise your right of Jury Nullification.
-S
I've been so looking forward to being able to buy a wider variety of high-quality non-DRM music, but this info has really dampened my enthusiasm. Once again, I'm trying to be a law-abiding citizen for the most part, but here again they're treating me like a thief right from the start.
Am I going to put the files up on bittorent? No. But do I email a couple of my friends some songs or burn them onto a CD and say "Here, check out this great band I just discovered." Yes. That's what people who love music do. Is that technically illegal? Yea, it is. But God forbid that we actually show some enthusiasm for the bands we like and discover. And I can't even fathom how many music sales that's lead to. It's a HUGE number.
But now, I have to be careful with these. If I give one to a friend as a "check out this song" thing, I have to worry what he'll do with it. It's got MY info in it. And what if he's equally enthused by the song and tries to introduce someone else to it and THEY go and do the wrong thing and spread it wide and far?
Damn it! I just knew the record companies would find some way to screw this up. And I'm sure stripping the personal info will be utterly trivial, but that's not the point, is it? I just thought for once they'd do the right thing. I was wrong.
-S
Apparently the dude lives on an abandoned sea fort off the cost of England.
-S
It wasn't that I wanted something for nothing. It's that they weren't forthright with what the deal was. They deliberately tried to pull a fast one on me. They should have said "You can have three months for free and at the end of the three months you will need to call otherwise your will be charged and the subscription will start." Would that have been so hard? Instead they tried to hide the fact that I would be charged if I didn't specifically call to cancel.
-S
Their programming is excellent and I love the content and I'm happy to pay for it.
But their customer service has turned from helpful (when I signed up two years ago) to downright scummy now. I recently bought a new XM radio for my car, so I called to replace the one that I already had. It was very easy to do.
When the conversation was almost over, the woman on the other end said "If you'd like, we can give you three months of free service on the radio you took out of service in case you'd like to give it to a friend or family member to see if they like XM."
This sounded good to me. "Sure," I said, "sounds good." Then I thought for a moment. "Wait, will I be charged at the end of three months." To which she responded, "You'll be able to cancel at any time." So I tried a different way of asking. And I got the same response. To which I finally said. "If I don't call to cancel, will I or won't I be automatically be charged for that new radio at the end of the three months." I didn't get a straight answer, so I asked again... slowly and loudly. To which she finally acquiesced and said "Yes, you will need to call and cancel the service before the three months is up." "Or what?" "Or that radio will be added to your service." "And I will be charged automatically?" "Yes."
At which point I said to forget it and make it perfectly clear in no uncertain terms that I wasn't happy with them trying to dupe me.
And you know what, if they'd given me the three months free and DID NOT auto-add the subscription at the end of the term, I'm nearly certain I would have given the radio to someone who would have become as addicted to satellite radio as I am and they probably would have gotten a new subscriber.
What they did, or at least tried to do, is to me, the antithesis of good customer service. They got nothing and ticked off one of their loyal customers all in one swoop.
-S
DRM = Digitally Restricted Media
DCE = Digitally Constrained Entertainment
A turd by any other name would still smell as foul... er, or something like that.
-S
Anything I BUY should be MINE to do with what I please within the privacy of my own home or in/on my own property (with obvious exceptions such as causing physical harm to others, etc.). And I should NOT be illegal in any way to provide the tools to allow me to exercise that right.
I'm thrilled that the courts are slowly, every so slowly, starting to realize this. They need to look past the fact that it's a DVD and realize that its a collection of bits on a piece of plastic. I understand copyright and why it's not legal for me to distribute it to millions or to re-sell copies of it, but copyright is limited not absolute. Having a copyright on something does not mean that you get to dictate how and where it is used in perpetuity.
If I buy a piece of furniture and I want another one like it for another room, should it be illegal for me to pull out my tape measure, buy some wood, and build myself another one just like it?
If I buy a small print from a local artist to hang in my bedroom, should it be illegal for me to scan it, manipulate the colors, and print another copy that matches the decor in the guest room?
If I have a VHS tape that I'd like to preserve, should it be illegal for me to capture it, do a little noise reduction and clean-up on the video, and burn it to DVD?
And if I have a shelf of DVDs, should it be illegal to rip them and stick them on a server in my own home. Should it be illegal to provide the tools that allow me to do that? Of course not. It's no more illegal than to make the hammer I use to put together the copy of the chair.
-S
...and they formally copyrighted their papers prior to their submission to Turnitin. What exactly does that mean? I was under the impression that the mere act of creating the work rendered it "copyrighted".-S
If they can't force their product into polling places, how on earth do you expect them to be able to manipulate the election results?
The DMCA was written to attack the issues that lobbyist were paid to attack. I'm sure their handlers conceived of the ways it would be abused. That's WHY it was written the way it was. But the onus should have been on the lawmakers to ALSO perceive the ways it could have been abused and to make sure that couldn't happen. Of course, all to many of them (most?) are in the same pockets as the lobbyists are.
Fair use is (was) already well established doctrine. Any new law regarding any perceivable restrictions to fair use should be framed from the perspective of the end user (of the people, by the people, for the people) rather than from the perspective of the copyright holder. I BUY a DVD and it's ILLEGAL for me to rip it and put it on a server in my own home or to compress it and put it on a laptop. That's completely absurd. It's what happens when lobbyists write laws and lawmakers pass them without reading them and understanding the consequences.
We've heard what Senator Stevens has said about technology. Can you just imagine the things that get said in those committees discussing laws like the DMCA? I can't even fathom the level of stupidity that goes on when they're discussing complex technological issues.
-S
-S
I've been looking to upgrade my media streamer capabilities and the original XBOX can run Xbox Media Center (http://www.xboxmediacenter.com/). I wonder if this means that a 360 version with HD streaming might be forthcoming? I hope so. I've been avoiding getting one because how locked down it is.
-S
>I just burn a CD-RW as an audio CD of purchased music and re-import as MP3.
.wav (which is what burning it), then re-encode it again in .mp3 (probably with the lousy encoder built into itunes). I take it sound quality is pretty low on your priority list, huh?
So you take a lousy quality 128 kbps file, convert it to
-S
It's the bane of anyone who has to present technical information. It forces complex information to be dumbed down into bite sized morsels for those with exceptionally limited grasp of the technical concepts and those with short attention spans.
-S
This isn't a judgement... more of a curiosity. I don't understand why "conservative Republicans" are so determined to deny that global warming is happening. It's fairly pervasive, or at least seems to to me. I can't tell if it's just people towing the party line and that line comes from the top, or if there's some aspect of religious doctrination that forces this attitude, or something else.
Case in point, I have relatives who are conservatives. I can't say all of them say this, but I'm surprised at the numbers who believe that global warming is a bunch of bull. I was listening to an NPR Technology podcast about this and a guy called in, identified himself as a conservative Republican, and proceded to state that he didn't believe global warming was happening.
I don't get why the skeptisism is drawn by party lines. What am I missing? Is it as simple as the top Republican leadership protecting oil interests and everyone else just follows along, or is there a deeper, more historical context that I'm unaware of?
-S
>Why don't you try actually sending them your thoughts DIRECTLY, as I have done in the past.
As have I... regularly. I've even sent them pictures of my media collection just to prove I'm not BS'ing them on the amount of media I buy. But I'm pretty much fed up with them (the **AA's. I buy almost 100% independent artists now. I subscribe to eMusic. I shop at Newbury Comics (a local music chain that specializes in independent music, though they do carry all of the other stuff too).
Everything the **AA's are doing now are the death throws of a wounded animal. They're becoming increasingly irrelevant and probably will be a footnote in history 25 years from now.
-S
Agreed. If one of my friends asks me about these formats (and they do, knowing what a home theater and media junkie I am), I roll through all of the DRM hoops that they'll have to jump through in order to play the things the way they want it.
The industry NEEDS the word-of-mouth. And as it stands, that word-of-mouth is negative. It's "yea, the picture is great, but then there's all this other stuff you'll have to deal with." That's not going to fly.
-S