Not only is AVI a container (actually, it's not, really, just a bastardized file extension that's been reused for a dozen or more different formats, the actual AVI file format is rarely used any more), but so is the QT.mov format, and DivX, and MPEG-4 (especially since QT6 is based on MPEG-4, which is based in part on earlier versions of QT, and DivX is based on MPEG-4). MPEG-4 audio, which you mentioned at the beginning of your post, can be anything, including MP3 audio, just as MPEG-4 video can be Sorenson-encoded video that can't be viewed without a Sorenson codec.
You were right up until you started talking about MPEG-4. DivX is *not* a container format, it is solely a video codec. MPEG-4 does have a container specification, but it also has a video and audio specification. When someone talks about "MPEG-4 video" they mean the video codec specified in the MPEG-4 standards document, not whatever video stream happens to be in an.mp4 file. So, no, it can't be Sorenson video. Same thing goes for audio. When someone talks about MPEG-4 audio, they mean AAC.
Not only is AVI a container (actually, it's not, really, just a bastardized file extension that's been reused for a dozen or more different formats, the actual AVI file format is rarely used any more), but so is the QT.mov format, and DivX, and MPEG-4 (especially since QT6 is based on MPEG-4, which is based in part on earlier versions of QT, and DivX is based on MPEG-4). MPEG-4 audio, which you mentioned at the beginning of your post, can be anything, including MP3 audio, just as MPEG-4 video can be Sorenson-encoded video that can't be viewed without a Sorenson codec.
You were right up until you started talking about MPEG-4. DivX is *not* a container format, it is solely a video codec. MPEG-4 does have a container specification, but it also has a video and audio specification. When someone talks about "MPEG-4 video" they mean the video codec specified in the MPEG-4 standards document, not whatever video stream happens to be in an.mp4 file. So, no, it can't be Sorenson video. Same thing goes for audio. When someone talks about MPEG-4 audio, they mean AAC.
Forget paint, imagine your car's paint job as one giant, instantly changable bumper sticker. Now you can finally tell the guy who just cut you off, or the jackass who is sitting on your bumper just where he can stick his tailpipe in large-type plain english!
What is the point with this argument? It has nothing to do with either the lottery or insurance. The lottery you can do indefinitely for all intents and purposes, as you can buy more than one ticket with different combinations on them. Besides, this doesn't invalidate my expected return argument, it just adds another factor to the expected return in very limited cases.
If I was allowed to do it an indefinite number of times, then yes. If you are trying to make the argument that the expected return is affected by your lifetime, try again. The odds for the lottery are not nearly that astronomical.
So why is it that people who bet on horse races don't always bet on the underdog?
In horse racing, the payoff has nothing to do with the probability of winning, only with the amount of money other people bet on the same horse. The reason people don't bet on the underdog is because they think the payoff is less than the likelihood of him winning warrants, or in other words, the expected return is less than 1. Its not simply because he's not likely to win.
The protocol used by MSN Messenger is clearly covered by this definition - it does not need to be patented. This is why, for instance, you cannot bottle some tap water and sell it as "Dasani". Dasani is not a "work", but it is IP, and it is copyrighted.
Uhh... no. Straight from the Copyright Act: "In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work."
Protocols *cannot* be copyrighted, they must be patented. If this protocol is not patented, then bollocks to MS and their licensing.
BTW, the Dasani thing has nothing to do with IP at all. Dasani is a trademark, and is protected under a completely different set of laws.
Ah, so the orders of magnitude that separate the probability of needing insurance and winning the lottery don't count as a "difference"? This is getting very good.
No, it doesn't. The only thing that matters statistically is the ratio between the payoff and the probability of getting that payoff, or in other words, the expected return. I believe that the expected return for the lottery is close to the ratio for insurance. A bet with a 1% chance of winning and a 1:200 payoff is just as good as a bet with a 10% chance of winning and a 1:20 payoff. The expected return is the same.
Please explain how playing the lottery and buying insurance are both equally wise decisions given the vast gulf between the probability of needing insurance and winning the lottery.
Simple, they both have similar expected returns. Since the expected returns are under 1, they are both equally unwise, if you only consider statistics.
What both sides in this discussion have missed is the real key difference between the lottery and insurance. With the lottery, you have the choice between making a bet and not making a bet (or making a bet that has a 100% probability and a 1:1 payoff). Since the bet has an expected return of less than 1, not making the bet is the better choice. With insurance, you have the choice between two bets. You either bet that you will have an accident (i.e. getting insurance), or you bet that you won't (i.e. not getting insurance). Getting insurance is a bet that has an expected return of less than 1, and not getting insurance has an expected return of greater than 1, so on the surface it would seem that not getting the insurance is the better choice. But what that reasoning misses is that not getting insurance is betting with money you don't have and that can be very dangerous. Unless you have a disposable $20,000 lying around, not getting insurance is not a good choice.
Unfortunately the house wasn't wired with RJ-45 jacks, which was an entirely other issue.
Most houses weren't, considering that neither Ethernet nor Token Ring used them yet.. Most houses still aren't wired that way.
P.S. The connector you are thinking of is RJ-11.
Copyright law is very simple, and very specific. You don't have the right to make a copy of copyrighted material unless the owner explicitly grants you that right. All rights reserved? That means the right to copy is not granted.
Same for the right to rent.
The right to modify.
Etc.
Both the right to rent and the right to modify are rights reserved to the consumer. The right to rent is protected under the first sale doctrine. As for modifying, copyright law does give the copyrights for any derivative work back to the original copyright holder, but that doesn't prevent you from creating the derivative work, only copying it. The classic example is that it is perfectly legal to buy a book, rip out every third page, and sell it again. However, it is not legal for you to make copies of that derivative work and distribute them. You have to buy a new legal copy of the original book and modify it if you want another copy of your derivative work.
These things that you are talking about are small pieces of printed cardboard. Their 'approx total value' does not exceed ten cents. If you paid more for them, that's entirely your problem.
That stack of $100 bills is just a bunch of cloth paper. The 'approx total value' does not exceed $5. If you paid more for it, thats your problem.
No, it would be akin to paying someone $50 for a stack of Magic cards. If you had 10 mint Beta Black Lotuses (approx total value: $7000) and someone stole them, would you say "Oh well, it was just a game."? I sure hope not.
Now say you have 20 foil Birds of Paradise in Magic:Online (total approx value: $1000) and someone hacks WotC's server and steals them all. Would you say it was just a game then? The line gets blurry, especially when you consider that you have to pay for packs of online cards just like you pay for packs for real cardboard.
No, they didn't have to exploit anything. IBM published full documentation on the BIOS. All they had to do was "clean-room" engineer it. In other words, they had some guys paraphrase the documentation, and then had some other guys who had never seen the documentation implement a BIOS that did all the same things.
The entire point of putting it in the book was to prove to the unbelieving Jews that Jesus fulfilled the prophesies about the Christ, the major one was that he was born of the line of David.
Again, this is a ridiculous attempt to try to worm around a contradiction. Exactly how does this geneaology show he is of the line of David? I could have sworn Jesus was supposed to be the son of God, not of Joseph, or was I mistaken on that point?
I've never read any of the Harry Potter series. I think I'd probably enjoy them, though. But I'm _very_ aware of them. The Harry Potter phenom is well covered in the media, and I doubt they would be so popular without the involment of the media.
The media coverage of Harry Potter started *because* of its popularity, it didn't cause it. I will grant that the popularity of the fifth book has probably been helped along by the media coverage, but remember, the popularity of the series was already quite entrenched when the fourth book was being anticipated. The fact that little kids were lining up to be the first to read a 700 plus page book on their own was what made the story newsworthy.
Thats not entirely true. I had an ADC student membership all through 2000, and I got OS X DP4. I didn't get DP1, DP2, or DP3 though. The student members get some of the seedings, just not most of them.
For an easy example, try the two completely different genealogies of Jesus. The one in Matthew 1 completely contradicts the one in Luke 3. The only three names that are the same in both lists are Jesus, Joseph, and David. The standard answer to this problem is that one genealogy is of Joseph's ancestry and the other is of Mary's, but a quick count of the number of generations between Jesus and David in either list shows that this attempt is pretty ridiculous.
Aquinas? You've got to be kidding me. Aquinas had the logic completely backwards. The idea of every effect having a cause doesn't require a first cause, it expressly denies one.
Yeah, but that only works in a homogenous environment. If you start letting people optimize the math and stuff like the parent thread was suggesting, you can no longer tell which result is the correct one just by comparing the results from a bunch of different computers working on the same data.
If the SETI project as a whole was going to succeed, it should have succeeded in the first 10-15 years or so. It didn't. The only two likely possibilities for alien life is that it is either everywhere or nowhere. Anything else would mean that the alien life happened to develop at just about the same time that we did, which is exceedingly unlikely. Since we have scanned a statistically significant portion of the sky for signals and found nothing, either the techniques we are trying to use for detection won't work (i.e. the aliens use some form of communication other than RF), or the aliens simply aren't out there. Either way, SETI is pretty much useless, and should at the very least take a backseat to other more important scientific projects.
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Not only is AVI a container (actually, it's not, really, just a bastardized file extension that's been reused for a dozen or more different formats, the actual AVI file format is rarely used any more), but so is the QT .mov format, and DivX, and MPEG-4 (especially since QT6 is based on MPEG-4, which is based in part on earlier versions of QT, and DivX is based on MPEG-4). MPEG-4 audio, which you mentioned at the beginning of your post, can be anything, including MP3 audio, just as MPEG-4 video can be Sorenson-encoded video that can't be viewed without a Sorenson codec.
You were right up until you started talking about MPEG-4. DivX is *not* a container format, it is solely a video codec. MPEG-4 does have a container specification, but it also has a video and audio specification. When someone talks about "MPEG-4 video" they mean the video codec specified in the MPEG-4 standards document, not whatever video stream happens to be in an .mp4 file. So, no, it can't be Sorenson video. Same thing goes for audio. When someone talks about MPEG-4 audio, they mean AAC.
Not only is AVI a container (actually, it's not, really, just a bastardized file extension that's been reused for a dozen or more different formats, the actual AVI file format is rarely used any more), but so is the QT .mov format, and DivX, and MPEG-4 (especially since QT6 is based on MPEG-4, which is based in part on earlier versions of QT, and DivX is based on MPEG-4). MPEG-4 audio, which you mentioned at the beginning of your post, can be anything, including MP3 audio, just as MPEG-4 video can be Sorenson-encoded video that can't be viewed without a Sorenson codec.
You were right up until you started talking about MPEG-4. DivX is *not* a container format, it is solely a video codec. MPEG-4 does have a container specification, but it also has a video and audio specification. When someone talks about "MPEG-4 video" they mean the video codec specified in the MPEG-4 standards document, not whatever video stream happens to be in an .mp4 file. So, no, it can't be Sorenson video. Same thing goes for audio. When someone talks about MPEG-4 audio, they mean AAC.
Forget paint, imagine your car's paint job as one giant, instantly changable bumper sticker. Now you can finally tell the guy who just cut you off, or the jackass who is sitting on your bumper just where he can stick his tailpipe in large-type plain english!
What is the point with this argument? It has nothing to do with either the lottery or insurance. The lottery you can do indefinitely for all intents and purposes, as you can buy more than one ticket with different combinations on them. Besides, this doesn't invalidate my expected return argument, it just adds another factor to the expected return in very limited cases.
If I was allowed to do it an indefinite number of times, then yes. If you are trying to make the argument that the expected return is affected by your lifetime, try again. The odds for the lottery are not nearly that astronomical.
In horse racing, the payoff has nothing to do with the probability of winning, only with the amount of money other people bet on the same horse. The reason people don't bet on the underdog is because they think the payoff is less than the likelihood of him winning warrants, or in other words, the expected return is less than 1. Its not simply because he's not likely to win.
Uhh... no. Straight from the Copyright Act: "In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work."
Protocols *cannot* be copyrighted, they must be patented. If this protocol is not patented, then bollocks to MS and their licensing.
BTW, the Dasani thing has nothing to do with IP at all. Dasani is a trademark, and is protected under a completely different set of laws.
No, it doesn't. The only thing that matters statistically is the ratio between the payoff and the probability of getting that payoff, or in other words, the expected return. I believe that the expected return for the lottery is close to the ratio for insurance. A bet with a 1% chance of winning and a 1:200 payoff is just as good as a bet with a 10% chance of winning and a 1:20 payoff. The expected return is the same.
Please explain how playing the lottery and buying insurance are both equally wise decisions given the vast gulf between the probability of needing insurance and winning the lottery.
Simple, they both have similar expected returns. Since the expected returns are under 1, they are both equally unwise, if you only consider statistics.
What both sides in this discussion have missed is the real key difference between the lottery and insurance. With the lottery, you have the choice between making a bet and not making a bet (or making a bet that has a 100% probability and a 1:1 payoff). Since the bet has an expected return of less than 1, not making the bet is the better choice. With insurance, you have the choice between two bets. You either bet that you will have an accident (i.e. getting insurance), or you bet that you won't (i.e. not getting insurance). Getting insurance is a bet that has an expected return of less than 1, and not getting insurance has an expected return of greater than 1, so on the surface it would seem that not getting the insurance is the better choice. But what that reasoning misses is that not getting insurance is betting with money you don't have and that can be very dangerous. Unless you have a disposable $20,000 lying around, not getting insurance is not a good choice.
Most houses weren't, considering that neither Ethernet nor Token Ring used them yet.. Most houses still aren't wired that way. P.S. The connector you are thinking of is RJ-11.
ProE is rumoured to be out for the Mac by the end of the year.
Try logging in as ">console".
Both the right to rent and the right to modify are rights reserved to the consumer. The right to rent is protected under the first sale doctrine. As for modifying, copyright law does give the copyrights for any derivative work back to the original copyright holder, but that doesn't prevent you from creating the derivative work, only copying it. The classic example is that it is perfectly legal to buy a book, rip out every third page, and sell it again. However, it is not legal for you to make copies of that derivative work and distribute them. You have to buy a new legal copy of the original book and modify it if you want another copy of your derivative work.
That stack of $100 bills is just a bunch of cloth paper. The 'approx total value' does not exceed $5. If you paid more for it, thats your problem.
No, it would be akin to paying someone $50 for a stack of Magic cards. If you had 10 mint Beta Black Lotuses (approx total value: $7000) and someone stole them, would you say "Oh well, it was just a game."? I sure hope not. Now say you have 20 foil Birds of Paradise in Magic:Online (total approx value: $1000) and someone hacks WotC's server and steals them all. Would you say it was just a game then? The line gets blurry, especially when you consider that you have to pay for packs of online cards just like you pay for packs for real cardboard.
No, they didn't have to exploit anything. IBM published full documentation on the BIOS. All they had to do was "clean-room" engineer it. In other words, they had some guys paraphrase the documentation, and then had some other guys who had never seen the documentation implement a BIOS that did all the same things.
Umm... what? I've never had a journal. I'm too lazy to post on it. Perhaps you are thinking of the other GMontag?
Again, this is a ridiculous attempt to try to worm around a contradiction. Exactly how does this geneaology show he is of the line of David? I could have sworn Jesus was supposed to be the son of God, not of Joseph, or was I mistaken on that point?
The media coverage of Harry Potter started *because* of its popularity, it didn't cause it. I will grant that the popularity of the fifth book has probably been helped along by the media coverage, but remember, the popularity of the series was already quite entrenched when the fourth book was being anticipated. The fact that little kids were lining up to be the first to read a 700 plus page book on their own was what made the story newsworthy.
Thats not entirely true. I had an ADC student membership all through 2000, and I got OS X DP4. I didn't get DP1, DP2, or DP3 though. The student members get some of the seedings, just not most of them.
For an easy example, try the two completely different genealogies of Jesus. The one in Matthew 1 completely contradicts the one in Luke 3. The only three names that are the same in both lists are Jesus, Joseph, and David. The standard answer to this problem is that one genealogy is of Joseph's ancestry and the other is of Mary's, but a quick count of the number of generations between Jesus and David in either list shows that this attempt is pretty ridiculous.
I'd say it goes to the combination hardware/software hack that let you burn paper with your PowerBook's infrared port.
Aquinas? You've got to be kidding me. Aquinas had the logic completely backwards. The idea of every effect having a cause doesn't require a first cause, it expressly denies one.
I don't run *any* scientific projects, as I am not a scientist. I was talking about SETI, not S@H. They are two different things, you know.
Yeah, but that only works in a homogenous environment. If you start letting people optimize the math and stuff like the parent thread was suggesting, you can no longer tell which result is the correct one just by comparing the results from a bunch of different computers working on the same data.
If the SETI project as a whole was going to succeed, it should have succeeded in the first 10-15 years or so. It didn't. The only two likely possibilities for alien life is that it is either everywhere or nowhere. Anything else would mean that the alien life happened to develop at just about the same time that we did, which is exceedingly unlikely. Since we have scanned a statistically significant portion of the sky for signals and found nothing, either the techniques we are trying to use for detection won't work (i.e. the aliens use some form of communication other than RF), or the aliens simply aren't out there. Either way, SETI is pretty much useless, and should at the very least take a backseat to other more important scientific projects.