Okay, "Nearly all the power _which isn't re-reflected back into space_ is used to keep the earth at its current temperature, else it would drift towards zero."
I suppose if we actually captured all of the energy - or a significant portion - we'd see global warming on a scale the oil companies could never dream of. This is, I suppose somewhat relevant given that current solar collection is only 10-20% efficient, but the panels tend to absorb more energy than the earth. Which is, of course, a bad thing (TM), though I suppose that could be pretty well fixed using selective reflective surfaces which reject non-power-critical wavelegths.
It'd be a bitch to try and install two or three PCI tuner cards in one for a mythtv setup, and pretty few laptops come with digital audio out, much less HDMI ports.
You mean 1/10000 is used for human power, right? Nearly all the power is used to keep the earth at its current temperature, else it would drift towards zero (okay, 2.7, but who's counting). Also, much of the useful energy is used to convert CO2 to O2, and in the process store C in H in various forms for powering the metabolisms of the earth's inhabitants. Luckily, those are overlapping purposes, as is solar collection for discretionary energy use by humans.
We already subsist off of solar energy, for the most part - it's just our source happens to be stored a long time ago. Nuclear is about the only source (okay, geothermal, too) that isn't a form of solar energy. It's not so much the energy, it's the ability to store it in usable forms.
it won't be long until someone sues because they can't exercise their rights under the law
Yeah, because it as really pushed all those lawsuits concerning DVD backup and format shifting. Oh, right...it hasn't. Thing is, not enough people know enough to care, and so few streaming media outlets provide enough quallity to matter. The general population doesn't care, and the audio geeks don't want it (96kb streams, that is). Not that it would matter, they would just buy a patch to the law for audio. They've already done so for rentals.
No, the cable companies have been tasked with complying with a law which they don't want implemented. It's like asking the Enron accounting staff to come up with the implementation manual for SOX that the auditors will use.
They have purposefully confounded the process, and have further fucked the system by requiring compliant boxes to submit the software for testing approval _for every version_. It will hamstring the indutry for another decade. And the FCC will stand by with a towel for you to clean youself up when the cable cos get done with you.
You buy the S3, you can run your current setup with a 160hr S3L box. If you're getting unencrypted HD, you could even watch HD on your SD set through the composite output.
Or, you could decide that you _wanted_ stuff in the digital realm, then you could "step up" to paying for digital cable rates, and the cablecard(s) and the cc rental (which is supposed to be nominal).
You still wouldn't need an HD set, unless you wanted to step up to HD. OF course - again - if you get an HDTV and your cable provider is sending unencrypted OTA hd channels, you can watch them just fine without upgrading to digital.
By the way - based on what DirecTV did to the TiVo software, you can forget about doing anything useful with a Comcast version of TiVo. I'm not certain, but I think "Comcastic" is the Swahili word for "you're fucked".
If I had to go into modern times, NT3.5(1) would get my vote. NT was built for business, and then the marketing types got a hold of it and complained that the games weren't fast enough. Everything went to hell from there. Otherwise there were several iteration of MS-DOS which were solid.
As many other posters have jumped on you for the carbon from soil thing, the point remains:
If you let a plant die, much of the carbon remains in the soil. If you burn a plant you release the carbon. So by using the plant as fuel, more carbon enters the atmosphere than would have done so in a non-fuel-burning ecosystem.
I have the same issue with using waste oil for biodeisel - it's not carbon neutral because the carbon locked in the hydrocarbon molecules would have been plcae in a landfill insteaed of liberated intot he atmosphere in a very short time period.
Not that this is bad - I think its great that alternatives to fossile fuels are getting traction; but this is no magical cure for global warming, it just gives us more fuel options.
That lets you offer amendments to the proposed agreement. I presume it must be there, or it isn't really a contract, right?
Unless you happen to be dealing with someone who's large enough to have a legal department which reviews such things regularly, or you're doing so much business (or have a susbtantially large transaction) that they really are negotiating one on one, there is essentially no reason for them to accept anything other than the boilerplate version. Having a junior staff lawyer at $125/hr review your markups to their contract (probably twice, at least, in any negotiation process), as well as the postage/admin time just isn't worth it for a contract worth $1000 in gross revenue over two years, or that can be cancelled for $175 and you keep a handset they've subsidized by $50-$250.
I regularly negotiate my contracts, but I'm the chief, cook, and bottle washer. If there is a serious legal issue I have to get formally reviewed by my council, it would have to be on a contract worth at least $10-15k, otherwise, I'm just go to say "no, thanks." It's just not worth it.
...then I'm glad to see others having problems. It tried to install twice, but kept coming up as a pending patch. On the third try, I figured it must be fucked on MS end, and disabled the install and told update to ignore it from now on. *shrug*
I know, $69 for some dead simple programs. Trust me - they're updated regularly, and they just plain work. When a problem disc comes out, they rev the software.
You'll make back the money in lack of frustration in no time. I've gone through most of the free utilities, and regularly play with win and linux doing video extraction from my HD TiVo. I've got 300 DVDs (many Disney, and a 4 yo to watch them ad infinitum). Save your time, drop the cash on AnyDVD and CloneDVD. If you're lucky, they'll have a promo code for $5 off each (they run them from time to time).
You can strip out everything but the movie. For DVDs you don't need to transcode (many of the Disney ones will fit in 4.7GB without the fluff without transcoding), its a simple copy process that takes just a few minutes per disc. I've transferred about 50-60 (half with AnyDVD) and the process was very simple. A warning: this does not offer advanced control of the copy (new menuing and such), but it is dead simple. Really.
I think you've missed part of the point. The point is not that it's okay to "steal" a product, but that there is a feeling of being cheated on the part of the consumer which drives people to make copies of a work they should pay for. They feel justified because - unlike just about every other industry they come in contact with - the primary reason for the price is the monopoly the content holders have. They can make the discs $1000, without retribution or fear of competition - there is no alternative vendor for Dido.
In a civilized society, we (the general populace) expect that the price of the goods has a relationship to the cost of production. That means the cost of all of the production - including reasonable overhead, product development, and recurring costs. CDs don't appear to be priced that way, and the consumers resent it. Since there is no legitimate competition, an illigtimate market has emerged.
There will always be those who are in it just to get around the system, but the vast majority of those who copy music do it because the cost of the product has been set artificially high. Based on what we (think we) know about the industry, we're the ones getting robbed every time we go to a music store.
For what it's worth I happen to work in an IP field, and my works are protected by copyright.
No,no, my favorite is the "regulatory recovery fee". Just another way to make us pay extra (since they can't raise the rate on a contract) for government requirements that they have to comply with - some of which they were always required to comply with, but never did until they lost an appeal in court.
You're just jealous. Her link is so fast, she just pipes the downloads to/dev/null, just to piss everybody else off. Old ladies can be like that, you know.
(Damn...she's not using linux. So much for that...ahh but what a bitch slap it would have been!)
And why - pray tell - would you change a default if you didn't know what you were doing? Windows will let you hose your computer, too - in fact, it's most happy to do that in some machines by default. (ex: I have a 400SC with an SATA drive for storage and an PATA drive for the system. It installs the bootloader on the SATA drive and won't let you change it. Caused quite a stir when I moved the storage to an external box!)
The point is that Ubuntu, in its default install without any knowledge of operating systems, will work on a large majority of machines. Sure, we can all find exceptions, or do something stupid in installation to screw it up, but the probability is heavily in your favor that it will work "out of the box". And although I'm not sure the laptop my 4 year old plays with makes much difference in the grand scheme of market share, it is one less windows installation out there.
You are allowed to break encryption to make a backup. You can even get help from somebody else. Of course, that somebody else will ahve to go to jail, because helping someone else break the encryption is illegal - but being helped is not. Think of it as making abortion legal, but wording the law so that anybody who performs them for someone else, or sells the supplies and instruments necessary to do so, or provides instruction in such a procedure goes to jail. You can always use a coathanger, a flashlight, and guess - so that preserves your rights, doesn't it?
It's regulation, but it's fixing an ill that is essentially forced on users. At this level - with the barriers to entry in the market (i.e. spectrum costs, to start with) - the consumer has essentially zero leverage in contract negotiations. This simply prevents consumer lock in - generally considered a bad thing. Whine and complain all you want to about the USPTO, but this is neither an attemp to correct their ills, nor some attempt to fix congressional errors.
If you want to provide fewer features, put fewer of them in the device to begin with. If you want to prevent your customers from taking your subsidized handset to another carrier, don's subsidize them.
If nothing else, it will stop the rest of the world from laughing at (this new part) of our Byzantine mobile communication system.
Yeah, but the distances are short. I can get a $145 round trip ticket from NY to Ft. Lauderdale, FL, which is nearly 200km further. I don't know how much that fare is to Rome, but $77 each way for 1700km is cheaper than the price of gas here in the US for an efficient sedan.
Wow, you use it for the easy stuff. I use MediaMonkey for tagging my FLACs/APEs and syncing to my devices with conversion on the fly to a compressed format, though the latter is a gold function. I'm currently wating for 4.0 so that I can sync/autocompress to my iPod in AAC format.
I have issues with most software players because they take Artist as some God-given way to sort, but between compilations, soundtracks/cast recordings, and one-off downloads, my artist list is so long it's practically unusable. MediaMonkey is at least customizable enough to let me add things while being useful out of the box (which is not true of foobar) though the tagging isn't the easiest to use. For lots of tagging, I like Tag&Rename.
Whoa, there. There are lots of ways to violate FCC regulations with off the shelf hardware. Whether it happens in hardware or software, it's still illegal. There's no reason that OSS can't comply, they're simply arguing that somebody could re-code it to be non-compliant. Hardly a valid reason for disallowing it.
Wait a minute. It isn't surface mount, and it's saving space? You've got to have space for the wires and a secondary capture mechanism - why not just replace the wirespace with end contacts? It sounds more like there was no space for a battery door, so it was decided that since there is no easy way for endusers to change the battery, it would be best if there was no practical way for endusers to chagne the battery. That would result in fewer opened cases and fewer angry customers accidentally screwing up the phone. Even many tech-aware people are iffy about soldering.
It's easy for a professional to replace, but it also adds significant expense and inconvenience to the process. That doesn't mean they're stupid, it just means they intend to enforce their "full service"-like policies. Not bad if you don't care about the pocket money and have sufficient patience. Not so hot otherwise.
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Okay, "Nearly all the power _which isn't re-reflected back into space_ is used to keep the earth at its current temperature, else it would drift towards zero."
I suppose if we actually captured all of the energy - or a significant portion - we'd see global warming on a scale the oil companies could never dream of. This is, I suppose somewhat relevant given that current solar collection is only 10-20% efficient, but the panels tend to absorb more energy than the earth. Which is, of course, a bad thing (TM), though I suppose that could be pretty well fixed using selective reflective surfaces which reject non-power-critical wavelegths.
Walmart is the least classy place on earth.
You've clearly never been in a Big Lots.
It'd be a bitch to try and install two or three PCI tuner cards in one for a mythtv setup, and pretty few laptops come with digital audio out, much less HDMI ports.
You mean 1/10000 is used for human power, right? Nearly all the power is used to keep the earth at its current temperature, else it would drift towards zero (okay, 2.7, but who's counting). Also, much of the useful energy is used to convert CO2 to O2, and in the process store C in H in various forms for powering the metabolisms of the earth's inhabitants. Luckily, those are overlapping purposes, as is solar collection for discretionary energy use by humans.
We already subsist off of solar energy, for the most part - it's just our source happens to be stored a long time ago. Nuclear is about the only source (okay, geothermal, too) that isn't a form of solar energy. It's not so much the energy, it's the ability to store it in usable forms.
it won't be long until someone sues because they can't exercise their rights under the law
Yeah, because it as really pushed all those lawsuits concerning DVD backup and format shifting. Oh, right...it hasn't. Thing is, not enough people know enough to care, and so few streaming media outlets provide enough quallity to matter. The general population doesn't care, and the audio geeks don't want it (96kb streams, that is). Not that it would matter, they would just buy a patch to the law for audio. They've already done so for rentals.
100 posts and nobody has bothered to point out that you need two to play? ;-)
No, the cable companies have been tasked with complying with a law which they don't want implemented. It's like asking the Enron accounting staff to come up with the implementation manual for SOX that the auditors will use.
They have purposefully confounded the process, and have further fucked the system by requiring compliant boxes to submit the software for testing approval _for every version_. It will hamstring the indutry for another decade. And the FCC will stand by with a towel for you to clean youself up when the cable cos get done with you.
You buy the S3, you can run your current setup with a 160hr S3L box. If you're getting unencrypted HD, you could even watch HD on your SD set through the composite output.
Or, you could decide that you _wanted_ stuff in the digital realm, then you could "step up" to paying for digital cable rates, and the cablecard(s) and the cc rental (which is supposed to be nominal).
You still wouldn't need an HD set, unless you wanted to step up to HD. OF course - again - if you get an HDTV and your cable provider is sending unencrypted OTA hd channels, you can watch them just fine without upgrading to digital.
By the way - based on what DirecTV did to the TiVo software, you can forget about doing anything useful with a Comcast version of TiVo. I'm not certain, but I think "Comcastic" is the Swahili word for "you're fucked".
If I had to go into modern times, NT3.5(1) would get my vote. NT was built for business, and then the marketing types got a hold of it and complained that the games weren't fast enough. Everything went to hell from there. Otherwise there were several iteration of MS-DOS which were solid.
As many other posters have jumped on you for the carbon from soil thing, the point remains:
If you let a plant die, much of the carbon remains in the soil. If you burn a plant you release the carbon. So by using the plant as fuel, more carbon enters the atmosphere than would have done so in a non-fuel-burning ecosystem.
I have the same issue with using waste oil for biodeisel - it's not carbon neutral because the carbon locked in the hydrocarbon molecules would have been plcae in a landfill insteaed of liberated intot he atmosphere in a very short time period.
Not that this is bad - I think its great that alternatives to fossile fuels are getting traction; but this is no magical cure for global warming, it just gives us more fuel options.
That lets you offer amendments to the proposed agreement. I presume it must be there, or it isn't really a contract, right?
Unless you happen to be dealing with someone who's large enough to have a legal department which reviews such things regularly, or you're doing so much business (or have a susbtantially large transaction) that they really are negotiating one on one, there is essentially no reason for them to accept anything other than the boilerplate version. Having a junior staff lawyer at $125/hr review your markups to their contract (probably twice, at least, in any negotiation process), as well as the postage/admin time just isn't worth it for a contract worth $1000 in gross revenue over two years, or that can be cancelled for $175 and you keep a handset they've subsidized by $50-$250.
I regularly negotiate my contracts, but I'm the chief, cook, and bottle washer. If there is a serious legal issue I have to get formally reviewed by my council, it would have to be on a contract worth at least $10-15k, otherwise, I'm just go to say "no, thanks." It's just not worth it.
...then I'm glad to see others having problems. It tried to install twice, but kept coming up as a pending patch. On the third try, I figured it must be fucked on MS end, and disabled the install and told update to ignore it from now on. *shrug*
I know, $69 for some dead simple programs. Trust me - they're updated regularly, and they just plain work. When a problem disc comes out, they rev the software.
You'll make back the money in lack of frustration in no time. I've gone through most of the free utilities, and regularly play with win and linux doing video extraction from my HD TiVo. I've got 300 DVDs (many Disney, and a 4 yo to watch them ad infinitum). Save your time, drop the cash on AnyDVD and CloneDVD. If you're lucky, they'll have a promo code for $5 off each (they run them from time to time).
You can strip out everything but the movie. For DVDs you don't need to transcode (many of the Disney ones will fit in 4.7GB without the fluff without transcoding), its a simple copy process that takes just a few minutes per disc. I've transferred about 50-60 (half with AnyDVD) and the process was very simple. A warning: this does not offer advanced control of the copy (new menuing and such), but it is dead simple. Really.
I think you've missed part of the point. The point is not that it's okay to "steal" a product, but that there is a feeling of being cheated on the part of the consumer which drives people to make copies of a work they should pay for. They feel justified because - unlike just about every other industry they come in contact with - the primary reason for the price is the monopoly the content holders have. They can make the discs $1000, without retribution or fear of competition - there is no alternative vendor for Dido.
In a civilized society, we (the general populace) expect that the price of the goods has a relationship to the cost of production. That means the cost of all of the production - including reasonable overhead, product development, and recurring costs. CDs don't appear to be priced that way, and the consumers resent it. Since there is no legitimate competition, an illigtimate market has emerged.
There will always be those who are in it just to get around the system, but the vast majority of those who copy music do it because the cost of the product has been set artificially high. Based on what we (think we) know about the industry, we're the ones getting robbed every time we go to a music store.
For what it's worth I happen to work in an IP field, and my works are protected by copyright.
No,no, my favorite is the "regulatory recovery fee". Just another way to make us pay extra (since they can't raise the rate on a contract) for government requirements that they have to comply with - some of which they were always required to comply with, but never did until they lost an appeal in court.
You're just jealous. Her link is so fast, she just pipes the downloads to /dev/null, just to piss everybody else off. Old ladies can be like that, you know.
(Damn...she's not using linux. So much for that...ahh but what a bitch slap it would have been!)
Pedantic, yes, but a perfectly accpetable peev for those of us who are not sheep.
because the head(s) of NASA...that should be talking about it won't
Actually, Mike Griffen (NASA Administrator) took a stab at it on NPR; I'm not sure he's the spokesman you're looking for.
And why - pray tell - would you change a default if you didn't know what you were doing? Windows will let you hose your computer, too - in fact, it's most happy to do that in some machines by default. (ex: I have a 400SC with an SATA drive for storage and an PATA drive for the system. It installs the bootloader on the SATA drive and won't let you change it. Caused quite a stir when I moved the storage to an external box!)
The point is that Ubuntu, in its default install without any knowledge of operating systems, will work on a large majority of machines. Sure, we can all find exceptions, or do something stupid in installation to screw it up, but the probability is heavily in your favor that it will work "out of the box". And although I'm not sure the laptop my 4 year old plays with makes much difference in the grand scheme of market share, it is one less windows installation out there.
When can we get this through to people?
You are allowed to break encryption to make a backup. You can even get help from somebody else. Of course, that somebody else will ahve to go to jail, because helping someone else break the encryption is illegal - but being helped is not. Think of it as making abortion legal, but wording the law so that anybody who performs them for someone else, or sells the supplies and instruments necessary to do so, or provides instruction in such a procedure goes to jail. You can always use a coathanger, a flashlight, and guess - so that preserves your rights, doesn't it?
It's regulation, but it's fixing an ill that is essentially forced on users. At this level - with the barriers to entry in the market (i.e. spectrum costs, to start with) - the consumer has essentially zero leverage in contract negotiations. This simply prevents consumer lock in - generally considered a bad thing. Whine and complain all you want to about the USPTO, but this is neither an attemp to correct their ills, nor some attempt to fix congressional errors.
If you want to provide fewer features, put fewer of them in the device to begin with. If you want to prevent your customers from taking your subsidized handset to another carrier, don's subsidize them.
If nothing else, it will stop the rest of the world from laughing at (this new part) of our Byzantine mobile communication system.
Yeah, but the distances are short. I can get a $145 round trip ticket from NY to Ft. Lauderdale, FL, which is nearly 200km further. I don't know how much that fare is to Rome, but $77 each way for 1700km is cheaper than the price of gas here in the US for an efficient sedan.
Wow, you use it for the easy stuff. I use MediaMonkey for tagging my FLACs/APEs and syncing to my devices with conversion on the fly to a compressed format, though the latter is a gold function. I'm currently wating for 4.0 so that I can sync/autocompress to my iPod in AAC format.
I have issues with most software players because they take Artist as some God-given way to sort, but between compilations, soundtracks/cast recordings, and one-off downloads, my artist list is so long it's practically unusable. MediaMonkey is at least customizable enough to let me add things while being useful out of the box (which is not true of foobar) though the tagging isn't the easiest to use. For lots of tagging, I like Tag&Rename.
Whoa, there. There are lots of ways to violate FCC regulations with off the shelf hardware. Whether it happens in hardware or software, it's still illegal. There's no reason that OSS can't comply, they're simply arguing that somebody could re-code it to be non-compliant. Hardly a valid reason for disallowing it.
Wait a minute. It isn't surface mount, and it's saving space? You've got to have space for the wires and a secondary capture mechanism - why not just replace the wirespace with end contacts? It sounds more like there was no space for a battery door, so it was decided that since there is no easy way for endusers to change the battery, it would be best if there was no practical way for endusers to chagne the battery. That would result in fewer opened cases and fewer angry customers accidentally screwing up the phone. Even many tech-aware people are iffy about soldering.
It's easy for a professional to replace, but it also adds significant expense and inconvenience to the process. That doesn't mean they're stupid, it just means they intend to enforce their "full service"-like policies. Not bad if you don't care about the pocket money and have sufficient patience. Not so hot otherwise.