The city of Tacoma, WA has done it. A few years ago they demonstrated that municipalities can enter into the media market by laying the fiber for their own Cable/Internet service, Click! Network, and go head to head with TCI/AT&T/Comcast. Click! was spawned after Tacoma citizens were so fed up with the lack of customer support by the private cable company and the city council got the approval to roll their own. And from what I understand, it has been quite successful. They did not even need to beg for customers to sign up.
It may seem that city governments are the only ones with deep enough pocketbooks (read, taxation) to do this. How many other cities have followed suit? Surely not the smaller ones.
On the other hand, in more remote places like Eastern Idaho from what I understand, CableONE is piping their cable service wirelessly to some customers who don't live in populated areas where the RG-6 is cheaper to lay. This may cost more of a premium for the equipment but I doubt the customers are unhappy.
I am soooo gonna kick your ass at the next con I see you at, trekkie-boy!
And steal your lunch money too! </offtopic>
<ontopic> Correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn't feeding a black hole be inversely exponential it increasing the size? or would it be exponential? </ontopic>
The RIAA and MPAA are hoping to hell that it is only the geeks who are ripping these movies and CD's to a non-protected format. They do NOT want the general consumer to find out how to do it.
And all it would take is for someone major like FOX News to do a story about how this "brand new technology" has been cracked 5 seconds out of the jewel case due to existing technology like DeCSS. That would blow the whole thing wide open and raise awareness on how to be able to keep what you pay for.
Face the facts. The vast majority of the population does NOT read Ars, Slashdot, etc. Computer manufacturers, who want to save some money picking Transmeta over Intel or AMD are the primary consumers of these chips. They then pass their new line of cheaper computers to the 90% of the unwashed masses who don't know the difference between the CPU and the Monitor. Potential market my ass. Only the geeks who read this site and others like it are the ones booing DRM, but the rest of the public could care less.
Personally, I think DRM has a valid place in society and is inevitable, however the current iteration is quite flawed. Information is no longer free...those who won't accept that will be the ones banging their heads against the wall in the end wishing for the good `ole days of Napster.
I was born in Alaska, and moved to Washington when I was 2.5 years of age. A couple of things that I can specifically remember about Alaska was the Townhouse we lived in:
-The window in the living room overlooking the Gastenau Channel. -The bookshelf next to that brown recliner that had all the Time-Life World War II books with black and white photographic colors. -My brother and I zipping down the stairs, riding in cardboard boxes. -My favorite toy, a green 'jack-in-the-box' style toaster with the plastic bread that popped out that I used to play with when my mom was doing laundry.
Now, I know I have heard more stories about stuff like the rides in boxes, but I specifically remember the toy, and the window. All at the tender age of two. Digging up much more than this has seemed quite impossible.
So who is to say that some one or group won't take on the in-game occupation of Bounty Hunter? If you could enter into some binding agreement, perhaps with an in-game escrow, It could be a fruitful business.
1. Hunt a perpetrator of a crime down 2. Kill repeatedly 3. Loot their bodies 4. Give desired item to employer 5. Collect fee from escrow 6. Profit!
Something just occured to me during all this arguing censorship. How different is what Clean-Flicks doing, by snipping out the "bad" parts and marking the tape as edited, versus Wal-Mart selling CD's censored by a third party, often not even marking them at all?
Ever since I have read that article on/. (I cannot seem to locate the article, if anyone knows where it is at, please reply) about that, I have specifically avoided the CD section at Wal-Mart. I let my money speak for me. In the past month, they opened a Sam Goody in town(more expensive, but less hassle, and they have a decent anime section:)
I live in Rexburg, ID, where there is a Clean-Flicks a couple of blocks away from me. Since the populus is a vast majority of Mormons, they should have a customer base who is interested in the service. Every time I have walked by or driven by the place since I used to work at the pizza place next door, I have not seen a SINGLE person enter or exit that store. Across the street there is a Hollywood Video which gets a LOT of traffic.
I think my point speaks for itself. I think most college kids around here do the same with their money, even though it seems to fly in the face of their moral education.
I know! I know! You know how in some major cities they use cell phone towers that are disguised as (yuk yuk) evergreen trees? why not do the same technique with bricks!
Go get the local high school drama club to make up some mock bricks out of styrofoam that carrier waves can easily pass through. All they really require is a weekly paint job to keep them looking authentic since they would need to stand up to the elements...
The second graphic on one of the pages compares the estimated exposure time from the different telescopes and compares the pixel arc secs as well.
The VLT clocked in at pixel.20 arc secs for a ~16x16 pixel image that took just over 10 minutes to recieve (for a bluish blob).
The OWL is estimated to recieve the same image except at a ~1.6 Megapixel size at pixel.0005 arc secs for the same area, but at crystal clear resolution (by comparison) in about 1 seconds time.
Forget turkeys...this would be a perfect way to char-broil steaks, and it would only take a quick pass underneath it to be cooked to perfection (yum yum). Also, I would highly recommend wearing asbestos gloves while doing this.
Wait a minute, asbestos, charbroil, asbestos, charbroil...Well, then again you are prolly going to get cancer from either the charred steak, the asbestos, or the insane amounts of UV radiation... Looks like cancer is the big winner.
The concept of P2P radio was just begging to be released by the likes of CARP and the RIAA. Well, Hillary Rosen, what have you to say for yourself now that you have uncorked the genie THIS time?
...
And now for something completely different:
If you have a website, I'll trade you the full version of Spheres of Chaos for a link here. As long as it's not a completely rubbish site that is. I need more traffic. it's a backwater in here... (emphasis added)
How long after this drive becomes available in the United States will someone be on the streets of New York selling their artwork burned onto dirt cheap CD-Rs for $5.00 a pop? How long will it take for every pr0n retailer to start including pr0n piccie CD's with every sale.
Yikes, and I only thought AOL was bad about innundating the market with their wares.
If this argument apples for the XBOX then you must apply the same argument for all the other potential on-line gmaes that have come out for all the platforms. For an example, the Playstation 2 is coming out with Final Fantasy XI, which is an on-line RPG, like Everquest. If XBOX's on-line network is doomed due to the reasons stated above, then the PS2's on-line network must fail for the same reasons.
Updateability? As it stands right now, the PS2 or the Dreamcast (humor me) do not have internal hard drives and have no way to be able to keep any updates that would be "offered" to fix any problems that may occur. You are correct on this in that a console game is release software. The game must be rock solid otherwise the only choice is to recall it from the open market if it has any serious bugs. You seem to imply, on the other hand, that since the game media carries the name "Micro$oft" on the label, that they cannot release a piece of software that will not ever need to be patched. What about a 3rd party company who is actually producing the game, like Sierra, Infogrames or Interplay? Be careful, your bias is showing.
Now, take another look at zone.msn.com and how many players are on it at any given time. If MS is going to be running the XBOX on the same network, how exactly will it fail?
You seem to have the First Amendment confused with something else. The First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States is:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
The First Amendment only applies when the GOVERNMENT is attempting to prevent you from doing what you stated above. Microsoft, on the other hand, is a private company who does not fall under the jurisdiction of the First Amendment. Now if you were to indirectly copy material (running it through your own words and interpretations), you could be accused of plagiarism.
please Please PLEASE!! let these singing cows be better than these ones. IMHO Gateway is furthering a is a more worthy cause for all us geeks.
And now for some music:
Eat steak, eat steak, eat a big ol' steer
Eat steak, eat steak, do we have one here? Eat beef, eat beef, it's a mighty good food It's a grade 'A' meal when I'm in the mood.
-The Reverend Horton Heat
Food for thought
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Time travel is not a new concept, obviously. Time machines have been invented and successfully used for some time now. However, the reason we haven't seen any successful results of them, is that time protects itself from tampering.
If Professor A creates a time machine, and uses it to travel back to the past to alter a certain event, say preventing JFK from getting shot. He may effect the timeline, but he will create a branch at the same time. He will continue along that branch and reality forever.
The rest of us on the main trunk will never see that effect that professor A had on the past, since history has already been written for us. Professor A has been lost forever since he will be living in the history he has created.
You could go back in time, but you will never be able to return to THIS reality. That would be the paradox.
No but they might offer you discounted E-meter auditing sessions so you can get rid of those nasty thetans that would have you do evil and attract the government's attention.
Dammit! They should do something better! What exactly, I dunno. But they gotta do something.
This is what I interpreted from the article, A rant about the use of a new type of encoding because it is a new take on the old. So what if it is kludgy. It seems to be working. I don't see any new type of encoding coming down the pipe that would be considered a next-generation-USENET-type-of-thingy.
Hell, maybe USENET has lived beyond it's usefulness and does need an overhaul, but I seem to remember a time when people were bitching "Stop posting in base64! The rest of us can't read these files!" or even "Stop posting in JPG format! It takes too long for my poor 286 to decode JPGs instead of GIFs"
All this appears to be is more of the same. The haves versus the have-nots.
Just by analyzing what makes meat taste good (as you point out in your post), we could make _even_ better tasting meats. It seems reasonable to me that in the future, meat the highest quality meats would be lab-grown.
Going slightly OT here, but isn't this what the majority of the agriculture industry doing this to some degree already? Talking to my roommate who is an agri major at our school, I found out the most common fruits and vegitables we find in the supermarket are direct clones of each other. The same corn plant that produces one stalk will be the exact same strain that another grower uses in the next state over.
Now if they start using the same type of technique for producing meats, wouldn't it get rather bland after a long time? One of the best things is the slight differences in taste from one plate to the next, to compare one meal to the previous one. If everything tastes the same after awhile, it no longer becomes a treat to have a nice medium-rare filet mignon.
So in this case, let's take Microsoft out of the picture for a moment. If the German equivalent of...lets say, a fire marshall or other government safety official makes the same complaint to the shows organizers, then everything is fine, BAD SONY!!
But in this case since it is big bad Microsoft making the complaint, then it's earth shattering news?
Slashdot Mirror
Not true.
The city of Tacoma, WA has done it. A few years ago they demonstrated that municipalities can enter into the media market by laying the fiber for their own Cable/Internet service, Click! Network, and go head to head with TCI/AT&T/Comcast. Click! was spawned after Tacoma citizens were so fed up with the lack of customer support by the private cable company and the city council got the approval to roll their own. And from what I understand, it has been quite successful. They did not even need to beg for customers to sign up.
It may seem that city governments are the only ones with deep enough pocketbooks (read, taxation) to do this. How many other cities have followed suit? Surely not the smaller ones.
On the other hand, in more remote places like Eastern Idaho from what I understand, CableONE is piping their cable service wirelessly to some customers who don't live in populated areas where the RG-6 is cheaper to lay. This may cost more of a premium for the equipment but I doubt the customers are unhappy.
I am soooo gonna kick your ass at the next con I see you at, trekkie-boy!
And steal your lunch money too!
</offtopic>
<ontopic>
Correct me if I am wrong, but wouldn't feeding a black hole be inversely exponential it increasing the size? or would it be exponential?
</ontopic>
The RIAA and MPAA are hoping to hell that it is only the geeks who are ripping these movies and CD's to a non-protected format. They do NOT want the general consumer to find out how to do it.
And all it would take is for someone major like FOX News to do a story about how this "brand new technology" has been cracked 5 seconds out of the jewel case due to existing technology like DeCSS. That would blow the whole thing wide open and raise awareness on how to be able to keep what you pay for.
Poor xxAA, I weep for thee!
The Canadians are going to help America with the war on terrorism.
They have pledged 2 of their biggest battle ships, 6000 ground troops and 6 fighter jets.
Unfortunately, after the exchange rate conversion, we ended up with 2 canoes, 1 Mountie, and some flying squirrels.
Face the facts. The vast majority of the population does NOT read Ars, Slashdot, etc. Computer manufacturers, who want to save some money picking Transmeta over Intel or AMD are the primary consumers of these chips. They then pass their new line of cheaper computers to the 90% of the unwashed masses who don't know the difference between the CPU and the Monitor. Potential market my ass. Only the geeks who read this site and others like it are the ones booing DRM, but the rest of the public could care less.
Personally, I think DRM has a valid place in society and is inevitable, however the current iteration is quite flawed. Information is no longer free...those who won't accept that will be the ones banging their heads against the wall in the end wishing for the good `ole days of Napster.
I was born in Alaska, and moved to Washington when I was 2.5 years of age. A couple of things that I can specifically remember about Alaska was the Townhouse we lived in:
-The window in the living room overlooking the Gastenau Channel.
-The bookshelf next to that brown recliner that had all the Time-Life World War II books with black and white photographic colors.
-My brother and I zipping down the stairs, riding in cardboard boxes.
-My favorite toy, a green 'jack-in-the-box' style toaster with the plastic bread that popped out that I used to play with when my mom was doing laundry.
Now, I know I have heard more stories about stuff like the rides in boxes, but I specifically remember the toy, and the window. All at the tender age of two. Digging up much more than this has seemed quite impossible.
So who is to say that some one or group won't take on the in-game occupation of Bounty Hunter? If you could enter into some binding agreement, perhaps with an in-game escrow, It could be a fruitful business.
1. Hunt a perpetrator of a crime down
2. Kill repeatedly
3. Loot their bodies
4. Give desired item to employer
5. Collect fee from escrow
6. Profit!
It was a rhetorical question.
Something just occured to me during all this arguing censorship. How different is what Clean-Flicks doing, by snipping out the "bad" parts and marking the tape as edited, versus Wal-Mart selling CD's censored by a third party, often not even marking them at all?
/. (I cannot seem to locate the article, if anyone knows where it is at, please reply) about that, I have specifically avoided the CD section at Wal-Mart. I let my money speak for me. In the past month, they opened a Sam Goody in town(more expensive, but less hassle, and they have a decent anime section :)
Ever since I have read that article on
I live in Rexburg, ID, where there is a Clean-Flicks a couple of blocks away from me. Since the populus is a vast majority of Mormons, they should have a customer base who is interested in the service. Every time I have walked by or driven by the place since I used to work at the pizza place next door, I have not seen a SINGLE person enter or exit that store. Across the street there is a Hollywood Video which gets a LOT of traffic.
I think my point speaks for itself. I think most college kids around here do the same with their money, even though it seems to fly in the face of their moral education.
Go get the local high school drama club to make up some mock bricks out of styrofoam that carrier waves can easily pass through. All they really require is a weekly paint job to keep them looking authentic since they would need to stand up to the elements...
...ok, ok I give up! stop hitting me!...
The second graphic on one of the pages compares the estimated exposure time from the different telescopes and compares the pixel arc secs as well.
.20 arc secs for a ~16x16 pixel image that took just over 10 minutes to recieve (for a bluish blob).
.0005 arc secs for the same area, but at crystal clear resolution (by comparison) in about 1 seconds time.
The VLT clocked in at pixel
The OWL is estimated to recieve the same image except at a ~1.6 Megapixel size at pixel
Forget turkeys...this would be a perfect way to char-broil steaks, and it would only take a quick pass underneath it to be cooked to perfection (yum yum). Also, I would highly recommend wearing asbestos gloves while doing this.
Wait a minute, asbestos, charbroil, asbestos, charbroil...Well, then again you are prolly going to get cancer from either the charred steak, the asbestos, or the insane amounts of UV radiation... Looks like cancer is the big winner.
...
And now for something completely different:
need I say more
How long after this drive becomes available in the United States will someone be on the streets of New York selling their artwork burned onto dirt cheap CD-Rs for $5.00 a pop? How long will it take for every pr0n retailer to start including pr0n piccie CD's with every sale.
Yikes, and I only thought AOL was bad about innundating the market with their wares.
Pardon my ignorance, but is there a quick and dirty MD5 checksum viewer for a win32 platform available? and if so, where would I find one.
I would just like to find out what all the hype behind Mozilla is...
I have tried several times going to the posted URL at the top of the article, but all I get are 404 errors.
d ex.html
Here is a better link that will bring up the article directly:
http://www6.tomshardware.com/howto/02q2/020521/in
If this argument apples for the XBOX then you must apply the same argument for all the other potential on-line gmaes that have come out for all the platforms. For an example, the Playstation 2 is coming out with Final Fantasy XI, which is an on-line RPG, like Everquest. If XBOX's on-line network is doomed due to the reasons stated above, then the PS2's on-line network must fail for the same reasons.
Updateability? As it stands right now, the PS2 or the Dreamcast (humor me) do not have internal hard drives and have no way to be able to keep any updates that would be "offered" to fix any problems that may occur. You are correct on this in that a console game is release software. The game must be rock solid otherwise the only choice is to recall it from the open market if it has any serious bugs. You seem to imply, on the other hand, that since the game media carries the name "Micro$oft" on the label, that they cannot release a piece of software that will not ever need to be patched. What about a 3rd party company who is actually producing the game, like Sierra, Infogrames or Interplay? Be careful, your bias is showing.
Now, take another look at zone.msn.com and how many players are on it at any given time. If MS is going to be running the XBOX on the same network, how exactly will it fail?
The First Amendment only applies when the GOVERNMENT is attempting to prevent you from doing what you stated above. Microsoft, on the other hand, is a private company who does not fall under the jurisdiction of the First Amendment. Now if you were to indirectly copy material (running it through your own words and interpretations), you could be accused of plagiarism.
And now for some music:
Eat steak, eat steak, eat a big ol' steer
Eat steak, eat steak, do we have one here?
Eat beef, eat beef, it's a mighty good food
It's a grade 'A' meal when I'm in the mood.
-The Reverend Horton Heat
Time travel is not a new concept, obviously. Time machines have been invented and successfully used for some time now. However, the reason we haven't seen any successful results of them, is that time protects itself from tampering.
If Professor A creates a time machine, and uses it to travel back to the past to alter a certain event, say preventing JFK from getting shot. He may effect the timeline, but he will create a branch at the same time. He will continue along that branch and reality forever.
The rest of us on the main trunk will never see that effect that professor A had on the past, since history has already been written for us. Professor A has been lost forever since he will be living in the history he has created.
You could go back in time, but you will never be able to return to THIS reality. That would be the paradox.
No but they might offer you discounted E-meter auditing sessions so you can get rid of those nasty thetans that would have you do evil and attract the government's attention.
My computer really is a piece of shit!
--
Text added to bypass the lameness filter
Dammit! They should do something better! What exactly, I dunno. But they gotta do something.
This is what I interpreted from the article, A rant about the use of a new type of encoding because it is a new take on the old. So what if it is kludgy. It seems to be working. I don't see any new type of encoding coming down the pipe that would be considered a next-generation-USENET-type-of-thingy.
Hell, maybe USENET has lived beyond it's usefulness and does need an overhaul, but I seem to remember a time when people were bitching "Stop posting in base64! The rest of us can't read these files!" or even "Stop posting in JPG format! It takes too long for my poor 286 to decode JPGs instead of GIFs"
All this appears to be is more of the same. The haves versus the have-nots.
Just by analyzing what makes meat taste good (as you point out in your post), we could make _even_ better tasting meats. It seems reasonable to me that in the future, meat the highest quality meats would be lab-grown.
Going slightly OT here, but isn't this what the majority of the agriculture industry doing this to some degree already? Talking to my roommate who is an agri major at our school, I found out the most common fruits and vegitables we find in the supermarket are direct clones of each other. The same corn plant that produces one stalk will be the exact same strain that another grower uses in the next state over.
Now if they start using the same type of technique for producing meats, wouldn't it get rather bland after a long time? One of the best things is the slight differences in taste from one plate to the next, to compare one meal to the previous one. If everything tastes the same after awhile, it no longer becomes a treat to have a nice medium-rare filet mignon.
So in this case, let's take Microsoft out of the picture for a moment. If the German equivalent of...lets say, a fire marshall or other government safety official makes the same complaint to the shows organizers, then everything is fine, BAD SONY!!
But in this case since it is big bad Microsoft making the complaint, then it's earth shattering news?
Hypocrates...