Funny. I seem to recall seeing that exact phrase daily on/.
Guess there's a lot of PHB's hanging out here then.
Re:It's a gamer's review, not an audiophile one
on
The State of PC Audio
·
· Score: 2
Are you talking about the M-Audio Delta 66 for Home Theater?
Actually, the M-Audio Audiophile 2496 or Delta 410 -- 24-bit, 96 KHz DACs with true, properly shielded and de-jittered S/PDIF outputs (both coax and TOSlink). The 410 has 8 outputs, which should handle nearly any standard thrown at it.
It's a gamer's review, not an audiophile one
on
The State of PC Audio
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I'll repost (most of) the comment I put on TR this morning. TR's comments don't get much feedback usually, and I'd like to get responses/pointers on the points I bring up.
The review is completely oriented toward gaming though, with only a slight nod toward music listening or DVDs (and the cards reviewed aren't particularly good toward those). With that in mind, the review isn't all that bad. And it brings up several nasty issues with Creative Labs - their drivers continue to suck, they seriously overdo reverb in EAX (uh, guys... you wrote the standard... why can't you do it right?), bloatware on a massive scale, and some of the comments indicate possible spyware.
Anyway, my original comment is now below, sans a few bits that pertained only to over there.
Sigh... well, not what I was hoping for, but still a decent review (as soundcard comparisons go at least). Should've marked this as a review for gamers though - for those looking to build a Home Theater PC it's reviewing the wrong cards (the M-Audio 6-channel is pretty much the standard nowadays, but there are competitors).
It would've been nice to get a few motherboard chipset reviews in with the cards. I know, you were already in review hell. But to whomever is going to try this next, do include a review of the cheapo AC97 codecs, the upgraded ones (such as CT5880), nForce, and such.
There are also sampling/playback issues - CL has long had an issue with automagically resampling from 44.1 KHz to 48 KHz. This introduces errors during playback. Testing to see which cards do this (on either record or playback) would've been nice.
Testing to see if the connectors provided are actually standard conforming would've been nice too. The digital output jack on the SB Live series, for instance, conforms to no standard known to man. It will work with most Dolby Digital decoders, but not all of them - it runs the voltage far, far, FAR too high, has absolutely no noise protection, and a few other issues. CL deciding to label their IEEE1394 connector as a "SB1394" makes me suspicious of it as well.
FAA regulations prohibit the use of electronic devices only during takeoff and landing. The captain may require additional restrictions if he thinks it's warranted.
During flight you can use just about anything except a cell phone or walkie talkie.
I wonder if the people mentioned in the article who don't like this new trend wish we could go back to dodge ball
Dodge ball was pretty much the only seriously physical sport I cared for in grade school. I always hoped it would rain just because then we might end up playing dodge ball.
I sucked at football, baseball, basketball, etc. But I owned at dodgeball. And since most of the jock-types disliked me, I was a pretty primary target.
Depends on the county. Where I went to HS it was against county rules to have a publicly accessible cola machine (ok, it's Atlanta - Coke machine. Anything else would've been heresy). There was one in the teacher's lounge, but that's it. Rules may've changed in the past decade or so, but that's how it was at my school. Several neighboring counties didn't have the prohibitions though - I recall going to some school competition at another school and envying their availability of Cokes.
Frankly, however, "flavoured sugar water" or no there's a serious issue with phys ed in schools today. I'll admit I never really enjoyed it in grade school or high school, but I still understood the need for it then, and I see it even more so now. Many schools have dropped the daily physical education class for a regular classroom course, some have eliminated PE entirely. This is not only sending the wrong message to kids (ok, I question how many "messages" we should expect schools to send as opposed to parents, but still), but it also eliminates one of the few outlets for kids to cut out stress from the school day.
I've never seen, much less played, DDR, but if it gets kids to want to excercise and is effective, more power to the teachers innovative enough to make use of it.
Did you just utterly miss the cross-platform Windows/Linux virus thread that was on here last week?
Here, go read this series of comments from that thread. The original post linked to was made by Alan Soloman, of Dr. Soloman Anti-Virus fame. If you continue to read the +4 posts you'll see how Linux or any other Unix is not invulnerable to viruses.
Are viruses most prevalent on Windows? Sure. Does Windows have a crappy security design? Yup. Is Windows the most prevalent platform, making it the biggest target? Three for three. Is Linux/Unix magically immune to viruses, or is it just that nobody has really taken the time to bother?
Appreciate the reference... I have a new copy of McAfee AV 6.0 at home, but, well, it sucks. It locked up both my computer and my wife's computer repeatedly. She finally removed it. I finally blew away Windows and installed Linux.
What's particularly interesting, however, is for anyone who remembers the origin of McAfee -- they started out as a shareware/freeware shop. Corporations "had" to pay, individuals were "encouraged" to pay, and educational (and possibly non-profit) were totally free to use it at no cost.
They've long since abandoned that license and even abandoned free updates. You have to pay for support every 12 months, which I dislike. Particularly since at irregular intervals they change their core engine and render all older versions of the software incompatible with new updates.
Patents are not like any other intellectual property. If you do not protect your trademark or copyright, you can lose it simply through a demonstrated lack of due dillegence.
If you find out someone is infringing on your patent, however, you can ignore them until you decide that you don't want them doing that anymore. And then sue them for patent violation regardless of how long you knew about the issue, whether or not you warned them, etc. It may be different if you told them outright "it's ok", and certainly knowing about it and not acting on it may result in a reduced penalty to the infringing party, but it's still an infringement. And at the very least you could deny them the right to continue infringing.
IANAL, but I took an intellectual property law in college (and the patent/trademark bits are still relevant at least).
Your points are, in general, correct. However if you buy a decent TV then the chroma crawl, flickering, etc. are total non-issues. If you're talking big screen here (and you probably are) then you'll need a good deinterlacer... which your computer can do roughly the same job at as a $30k Farajouda or Snell and Wilcox.
When I want to see a movie, I want to see the whole effect: the sound, the quality, everything
Agreed... and I've started finding watching movies off cable to be abysmal... the sound sucks, the video quality is iffy at best, and it's pan and scan. Having watched widescreen DVDs a great deal now, I can often tell when a shot has been ruined by pan and scan... and without having ever seen the movie before. For movies I'm familiar with it's even worse.
And no, I don't have a big screen TV. My biggest TV is 32", and I've watched widescreen DVDs on a 20" TV before. Yes - you need a small room for the latter.
however, then you must watch them on you computer system
No you don't. Go look into HTPC's. Frankly, an HTPC will easily outdo the quality of anything short of a $30k system. The usability isn't there yet, but that's (very) slowly improving.
, I think the majority of people (ie computer-illterate) would much rather prefer to shell out a few bucks for the actual DVD than watch some ripped version
Agree again. Is there going to be pirating? Sure. And, frankly, most of it is going to be done by teenagers and college kids who don't have the money (or don't want to spend it that way) anyway. And if they didn't pirate it they probably wouldn't buy it. God knows I downloaded loads of games that I would never have looked at twice in the computer store when I was in that scene many years ago. And most didn't last on my HD for more than a few days. Those that did wound up getting bought by me sooner or later.
The flip side is that the CD didn't get played in an ampitheater first and garner millions to hundreds of millions of dollars before being released.
Of course, anyone will tell you that the CD makes jack for most artists. They make their money off concerts (which is about the best analogy to a movie theater release possible here), while buying the CD just lets you listen to the music when you want and pays (mostly) the record label. I don't support piracy, but I've also pretty much stopped buying music too (I listen to it much less as well - changing lifestyle).
The previous responder made some very good comments on DVD too.
Ok, ignoring the "our theories say" bit on finding life, let's look at it from another (perhaps even more improbable) angle.
If we want to terraform other worlds, our best bets are to find similar worlds to do that with. When you're building a house which do you look at first - the flat land that's already cleared or the swamp?
Even if we were to determine, definitively, that we are the only sapient species within 1000 light years, finding Earth-like planets means we have someplace to go that won't require too much work. Frankly, if we're stuck terraforming gas giants, then screw going elsewhere - let's build a Dyson sphere (or Ringworld, or what have you) here first. It's just about as feasible.
Because it has a modicum of protection as compared to MP3.
Get over it. This is a pretty damn reasonable plan from the record studios, assuming the quality of the audio is good.
I suspect there isn't any LA support for a number of (essentially) dead systems. Too bad. This is the way the world works. If you want it that badly, write it yourself or run something that can handle it. Kvetching about it not supporting your dead-as-a-doornail OS is about as good as horse buggy makers complaining about the Model T.
It would be a mistake if I had either thought or said that. I'm not sure where you got that from my post
Based off your arguments that public domain doesn't need to exist. PD is, indeed, an artifact of the copyright/patent/etc. system - but it's only an artifact because it would be undefinable without such protections and would be, more or less, the natural state otherwise.
And what should the Supreme Court do?
Declaring it illegal to extend a copyright from the past would be a start. In some ways that could be viewed as an ex post facto law - the work was created with the assumption that the copyright would last a specific amount of time. By extending that time period, after the point of creation, you have harmed the public domain and osteniably the rights of all the people therein. And have done in in a manner that can continue to affect them for perpetuity.
Is it shaky legal reasoning? Sure. But, again, so is the extention in the first place. I tend toward a strict constitutional reading myself, and in this case I feel that the extentions are an unlawful abrogation of the "limited term" clause. Want longer copyrights for new works? Fine. Go for it. But retroactively changing the copyright on prior art removes the limitation that was placed in the Constitution itself.
That said, on a personal basis, I'd like to see shorter copyrights... and possibly dependant on the domain of the work (ala patents, although that's a poor system to base work off of too). A lot of holes on "work for hire" need to be ironed out too - what's occurred in the music business is a travesty.
That is unethical. I am surpised nobody has pointed that out yet. For one thing, it is dishonest.
Why? I'm really trying to figure out why people keep whinging about this.
The data was backed up. There is no data loss. The only thing lost is time, and frankly, you'll wind up way the hell ahead on that when it fails for real and it's just a matter of restoring data instead of trying to figure out just what the user had stored on their local drive instead of the network drive.
Equally important, it'll let you actually test your restore capabilities and make sure that everyone involved knows what to do.
Unethical? No. The guy said to get permission and agreement from the upper level managers to do exactly this. Ethics are covered. As for honesty - sorry, but it is at times necessary to lie in order to prevent greater harm.
Users don't listen - they're bombarded with too many policies that seem random from their POV. Unless you make it clear what the consequences are a good number of random policies will be ignored because of it.
I do not trust you or anyone else here who condones that behavior to manage my network in a responsible manner
It's sad to see that you'd rather blindly trust an untested plan than to trust someone who not only implements a plan, but ensures that it actually works. And does so properly - by getting management approval instead of just letting something happen.
And if you don't think something will happen, well, I guess you don't need data backup then.
Even in a world with no governments and no copyright law it would still be charity. You are working to create something that you give away to everyone. That is charity. Many books from the time period before copyright are charity. The authors made no profit, and we have benefitted immensely from their charity.
Ignore that bit. I'm wrong. It is indeed described in the consitution, I just didn't find the right bit at the time.
The argument currently being made that the laws are not specifying a limited time because Congress will just extend it in the future is very shaky legally
The extentions themselves are shaky, legally. A limited time means just that. It does not mean that you get to keep adding time repeatedly just before the clock expires. Doing so prevents the passage of IP into the public domain and circumvents the express purpose of the laws in the first place.
Your mistake is in thinking that public domain is not the natural order of IP. It is. Without a law, there is nothing to stop me from copying a book, music, video, or software. Or from copying how a complex (or simple) piece of machinery is built and selling it myself (or giving it away). Or duplicating the chemicals that make up Claratin or other drugs. There may be technological barriers, but we've seen those steadily fall away over the past few thousand years, and that pace continues to accelerate.
The purpose of IP laws is to give inventors, artists, writers, and so forth an incentive to publish their findings, discoveries, works, and such. It is intended to give them a limited time period in which to recoup their expenses - after which those protections no longer apply and they can no longer prosecute someone who uses that information without their consent.
The point I'm trying to make is that without IP laws we don't fall into a situation where I can't copy a book - we fall into a situation where I can do whatever the hell I want to with that book, and you have no say about it.
The original video, audio, and other data you place on that DVD is, indeed, yours to do with as you like.
However the encrypted data has blended the copyrights of your original data and that of the DVDCCA (or whoever the hell has the copyright on the CSS code). So while you may relenquish your rights, it doesn't mean that you can relenquish theirs - yes, the protected DVD is a derivative work. But it's a derivative work of multiple copyrights, not all of which you control.
As another poster pointed out, you can release your own IP in any manner you choose - even on DVD. As long as you don't encrypt it or impinge on anyone else's copyright in the process.
Fun, isn't it?
Some of the more recent IP laws are certainly bogus, as they violate the spirit of the original IP laws. I don't know that they could be ruled unconstitutional though, as intellectual property was never mentioned in the constitution - it's purely a legislative and judicial process.
AIX 4.2 has ksh as/bin/sh, so you can get bit that way too.
Smart developers know what's a sh feature, what's a ksh feature, and what's a bash feature and code appropriately, but there are far too few smart developers. And even the smart ones can get lazy and include a feature just to make life easier or because they forget that "export VAR=value" is just fine in ksh/bash, but not sh.
The story is similar for just about any standard you care to name.
And, the fact of the matter is, standards are determined not by a committee, but by the real world. If 90% of the web pages use IE "features" that aren't "standards" compliant, then what's the real standard out there? The user doesn't care what's written on some piece of paper, they care about what they see in their browser.
Yes, watch what you buy. And don't buy a car that has a seriously screwed up radio deck if you're planning to replace it.
Duh.
When I was shopping for my first (new) car being able to replace the piece-of-shit radio with an aftermarket unit was a requirement to me. And so some cars got axed because of that. And when I had it down to two models it weighed heavily on the final decision.
It's not one for me now (I no longer drive as much nor do I listen to music loudly as much), so it wasn't an issue with my current vehicle. Nor was it one with my previous car (which had some integration, but nothing that made me want to keep the crappy-and-broken stereo).
Frankly, your apparant happiness with the level of integration is rather interesting. I have to admit, it sounds pretty slick, but I also know that electrical systems are one of the most common points of failures in cars (particularly GM vehicles), and that radios in particular have a tendancy to fail rapidly.
Gonna be a pretty penny when you have to replace that highly integrated stereo.
Probably not. They're geosynch and designed to cover the East and West coasts. So if you lose one, you'll lose everyone on the extremity, and you'll have a bit of signal path issues in some areas where the signal quality was marginal.
With elliptical orbits, you lose one of the three and you'll have rolling blackouts. And they'll be essentially random from the user's point of view since they'll always occur at different times of the day.
With XM losing one bird you can pretty much predict a set percentage of people will lose service, and handle that appropriately. With Sirius losing one bird you can also predict what percentage of people will lose service, but the number is considerably higher - as in 100%. And it's harder to guess how many of them will be due refunds or will cancel.
What it boils down to is that losing a satellite would be disasterous for either, and you can't say that Sirius having 3 vs XM's 2 is an advantage or a disadvantage.
The general use of lasers for interstellar flight is nothing even vaguely close to this... most proposals for a large space based laser platform powering a spaceship involve the use of light sails - superlight materials spanning a thousand kilometers or so to capture light and use the photon impulse to gain momentum.
Go read some of Robert Forward's books (Indistinguishable from Magic is more science than SF; Dragonfly is more SF than science) for some examples of solar/light sails and possible usage. A terawatt microwave laser could push a 16 gram lightsail craft up to ~0.3C in about a month, and using tacking you could even have it come back home instead of just having it transmit data.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny. I seem to recall seeing that exact phrase daily on /.
Guess there's a lot of PHB's hanging out here then.
Are you talking about the M-Audio Delta 66 for Home Theater?
Actually, the M-Audio Audiophile 2496 or Delta 410 -- 24-bit, 96 KHz DACs with true, properly shielded and de-jittered S/PDIF outputs (both coax and TOSlink). The 410 has 8 outputs, which should handle nearly any standard thrown at it.
I'll repost (most of) the comment I put on TR this morning. TR's comments don't get much feedback usually, and I'd like to get responses/pointers on the points I bring up.
The review is completely oriented toward gaming though, with only a slight nod toward music listening or DVDs (and the cards reviewed aren't particularly good toward those). With that in mind, the review isn't all that bad. And it brings up several nasty issues with Creative Labs - their drivers continue to suck, they seriously overdo reverb in EAX (uh, guys... you wrote the standard... why can't you do it right?), bloatware on a massive scale, and some of the comments indicate possible spyware.
Anyway, my original comment is now below, sans a few bits that pertained only to over there.
Sigh... well, not what I was hoping for, but still a decent review (as soundcard comparisons go at least). Should've marked this as a review for gamers though - for those looking to build a Home Theater PC it's reviewing the wrong cards (the M-Audio 6-channel is pretty much the standard nowadays, but there are competitors).
It would've been nice to get a few motherboard chipset reviews in with the cards. I know, you were already in review hell. But to whomever is going to try this next, do include a review of the cheapo AC97 codecs, the upgraded ones (such as CT5880), nForce, and such.
There are also sampling/playback issues - CL has long had an issue with automagically resampling from 44.1 KHz to 48 KHz. This introduces errors during playback. Testing to see which cards do this (on either record or playback) would've been nice.
Testing to see if the connectors provided are actually standard conforming would've been nice too. The digital output jack on the SB Live series, for instance, conforms to no standard known to man. It will work with most Dolby Digital decoders, but not all of them - it runs the voltage far, far, FAR too high, has absolutely no noise protection, and a few other issues. CL deciding to label their IEEE1394 connector as a "SB1394" makes me suspicious of it as well.
Imagining it.
FAA regulations prohibit the use of electronic devices only during takeoff and landing. The captain may require additional restrictions if he thinks it's warranted.
During flight you can use just about anything except a cell phone or walkie talkie.
You're not supposed to moderate based on whether you agree with the post! You're supposed to moderate based on whether it's interesting or not
/. and it makes it easier to ignore the uninformed
Your post wasn't interesting. Several of the replies were. Deal with it.
No one reads anonymous coward posts
Speak for yourself, thank you.
your user number typically indicates if you're a newcomer to
So newcomers are inherently uninformed? What was your babbling about an underclass about again?
What a small, small world you live in.
I wonder if the people mentioned in the article who don't like this new trend wish we could go back to dodge ball
Dodge ball was pretty much the only seriously physical sport I cared for in grade school. I always hoped it would rain just because then we might end up playing dodge ball.
I sucked at football, baseball, basketball, etc. But I owned at dodgeball. And since most of the jock-types disliked me, I was a pretty primary target.
Depends on the county. Where I went to HS it was against county rules to have a publicly accessible cola machine (ok, it's Atlanta - Coke machine. Anything else would've been heresy). There was one in the teacher's lounge, but that's it. Rules may've changed in the past decade or so, but that's how it was at my school. Several neighboring counties didn't have the prohibitions though - I recall going to some school competition at another school and envying their availability of Cokes.
Frankly, however, "flavoured sugar water" or no there's a serious issue with phys ed in schools today. I'll admit I never really enjoyed it in grade school or high school, but I still understood the need for it then, and I see it even more so now. Many schools have dropped the daily physical education class for a regular classroom course, some have eliminated PE entirely. This is not only sending the wrong message to kids (ok, I question how many "messages" we should expect schools to send as opposed to parents, but still), but it also eliminates one of the few outlets for kids to cut out stress from the school day.
I've never seen, much less played, DDR, but if it gets kids to want to excercise and is effective, more power to the teachers innovative enough to make use of it.
Did you just utterly miss the cross-platform Windows/Linux virus thread that was on here last week?
Here, go read this series of comments from that thread. The original post linked to was made by Alan Soloman, of Dr. Soloman Anti-Virus fame. If you continue to read the +4 posts you'll see how Linux or any other Unix is not invulnerable to viruses.
Are viruses most prevalent on Windows? Sure. Does Windows have a crappy security design? Yup. Is Windows the most prevalent platform, making it the biggest target? Three for three. Is Linux/Unix magically immune to viruses, or is it just that nobody has really taken the time to bother?
Appreciate the reference... I have a new copy of McAfee AV 6.0 at home, but, well, it sucks. It locked up both my computer and my wife's computer repeatedly. She finally removed it. I finally blew away Windows and installed Linux.
What's particularly interesting, however, is for anyone who remembers the origin of McAfee -- they started out as a shareware/freeware shop. Corporations "had" to pay, individuals were "encouraged" to pay, and educational (and possibly non-profit) were totally free to use it at no cost.
They've long since abandoned that license and even abandoned free updates. You have to pay for support every 12 months, which I dislike. Particularly since at irregular intervals they change their core engine and render all older versions of the software incompatible with new updates.
Patents are not like any other intellectual property. If you do not protect your trademark or copyright, you can lose it simply through a demonstrated lack of due dillegence.
If you find out someone is infringing on your patent, however, you can ignore them until you decide that you don't want them doing that anymore. And then sue them for patent violation regardless of how long you knew about the issue, whether or not you warned them, etc. It may be different if you told them outright "it's ok", and certainly knowing about it and not acting on it may result in a reduced penalty to the infringing party, but it's still an infringement. And at the very least you could deny them the right to continue infringing.
IANAL, but I took an intellectual property law in college (and the patent/trademark bits are still relevant at least).
Your points are, in general, correct. However if you buy a decent TV then the chroma crawl, flickering, etc. are total non-issues. If you're talking big screen here (and you probably are) then you'll need a good deinterlacer... which your computer can do roughly the same job at as a $30k Farajouda or Snell and Wilcox.
When I want to see a movie, I want to see the whole effect: the sound, the quality, everything
Agreed... and I've started finding watching movies off cable to be abysmal... the sound sucks, the video quality is iffy at best, and it's pan and scan. Having watched widescreen DVDs a great deal now, I can often tell when a shot has been ruined by pan and scan... and without having ever seen the movie before. For movies I'm familiar with it's even worse.
And no, I don't have a big screen TV. My biggest TV is 32", and I've watched widescreen DVDs on a 20" TV before. Yes - you need a small room for the latter.
however, then you must watch them on you computer system
No you don't. Go look into HTPC's. Frankly, an HTPC will easily outdo the quality of anything short of a $30k system. The usability isn't there yet, but that's (very) slowly improving.
, I think the majority of people (ie computer-illterate) would much rather prefer to shell out a few bucks for the actual DVD than watch some ripped version
Agree again. Is there going to be pirating? Sure. And, frankly, most of it is going to be done by teenagers and college kids who don't have the money (or don't want to spend it that way) anyway. And if they didn't pirate it they probably wouldn't buy it. God knows I downloaded loads of games that I would never have looked at twice in the computer store when I was in that scene many years ago. And most didn't last on my HD for more than a few days. Those that did wound up getting bought by me sooner or later.
The flip side is that the CD didn't get played in an ampitheater first and garner millions to hundreds of millions of dollars before being released.
Of course, anyone will tell you that the CD makes jack for most artists. They make their money off concerts (which is about the best analogy to a movie theater release possible here), while buying the CD just lets you listen to the music when you want and pays (mostly) the record label. I don't support piracy, but I've also pretty much stopped buying music too (I listen to it much less as well - changing lifestyle).
The previous responder made some very good comments on DVD too.
Ok, ignoring the "our theories say" bit on finding life, let's look at it from another (perhaps even more improbable) angle.
If we want to terraform other worlds, our best bets are to find similar worlds to do that with. When you're building a house which do you look at first - the flat land that's already cleared or the swamp?
Even if we were to determine, definitively, that we are the only sapient species within 1000 light years, finding Earth-like planets means we have someplace to go that won't require too much work. Frankly, if we're stuck terraforming gas giants, then screw going elsewhere - let's build a Dyson sphere (or Ringworld, or what have you) here first. It's just about as feasible.
Because it has a modicum of protection as compared to MP3.
Get over it. This is a pretty damn reasonable plan from the record studios, assuming the quality of the audio is good.
I suspect there isn't any LA support for a number of (essentially) dead systems. Too bad. This is the way the world works. If you want it that badly, write it yourself or run something that can handle it. Kvetching about it not supporting your dead-as-a-doornail OS is about as good as horse buggy makers complaining about the Model T.
It would be a mistake if I had either thought or said that. I'm not sure where you got that from my post
Based off your arguments that public domain doesn't need to exist. PD is, indeed, an artifact of the copyright/patent/etc. system - but it's only an artifact because it would be undefinable without such protections and would be, more or less, the natural state otherwise.
And what should the Supreme Court do?
Declaring it illegal to extend a copyright from the past would be a start. In some ways that could be viewed as an ex post facto law - the work was created with the assumption that the copyright would last a specific amount of time. By extending that time period, after the point of creation, you have harmed the public domain and osteniably the rights of all the people therein. And have done in in a manner that can continue to affect them for perpetuity.
Is it shaky legal reasoning? Sure. But, again, so is the extention in the first place. I tend toward a strict constitutional reading myself, and in this case I feel that the extentions are an unlawful abrogation of the "limited term" clause. Want longer copyrights for new works? Fine. Go for it. But retroactively changing the copyright on prior art removes the limitation that was placed in the Constitution itself.
That said, on a personal basis, I'd like to see shorter copyrights... and possibly dependant on the domain of the work (ala patents, although that's a poor system to base work off of too). A lot of holes on "work for hire" need to be ironed out too - what's occurred in the music business is a travesty.
That is unethical. I am surpised nobody has pointed that out yet. For one thing, it is dishonest.
Why? I'm really trying to figure out why people keep whinging about this.
The data was backed up. There is no data loss. The only thing lost is time, and frankly, you'll wind up way the hell ahead on that when it fails for real and it's just a matter of restoring data instead of trying to figure out just what the user had stored on their local drive instead of the network drive.
Equally important, it'll let you actually test your restore capabilities and make sure that everyone involved knows what to do.
Unethical? No. The guy said to get permission and agreement from the upper level managers to do exactly this. Ethics are covered. As for honesty - sorry, but it is at times necessary to lie in order to prevent greater harm.
Users don't listen - they're bombarded with too many policies that seem random from their POV. Unless you make it clear what the consequences are a good number of random policies will be ignored because of it.
I do not trust you or anyone else here who condones that behavior to manage my network in a responsible manner
It's sad to see that you'd rather blindly trust an untested plan than to trust someone who not only implements a plan, but ensures that it actually works. And does so properly - by getting management approval instead of just letting something happen.
And if you don't think something will happen, well, I guess you don't need data backup then.
Even in a world with no governments and no copyright law it would still be charity. You are working to create something that you give away to everyone. That is charity. Many books from the time period before copyright are charity. The authors made no profit, and we have benefitted immensely from their charity.
Ignore that bit. I'm wrong. It is indeed described in the consitution, I just didn't find the right bit at the time.
The argument currently being made that the laws are not specifying a limited time because Congress will just extend it in the future is very shaky legally
The extentions themselves are shaky, legally. A limited time means just that. It does not mean that you get to keep adding time repeatedly just before the clock expires. Doing so prevents the passage of IP into the public domain and circumvents the express purpose of the laws in the first place.
Your mistake is in thinking that public domain is not the natural order of IP. It is. Without a law, there is nothing to stop me from copying a book, music, video, or software. Or from copying how a complex (or simple) piece of machinery is built and selling it myself (or giving it away). Or duplicating the chemicals that make up Claratin or other drugs. There may be technological barriers, but we've seen those steadily fall away over the past few thousand years, and that pace continues to accelerate.
The purpose of IP laws is to give inventors, artists, writers, and so forth an incentive to publish their findings, discoveries, works, and such. It is intended to give them a limited time period in which to recoup their expenses - after which those protections no longer apply and they can no longer prosecute someone who uses that information without their consent.
The point I'm trying to make is that without IP laws we don't fall into a situation where I can't copy a book - we fall into a situation where I can do whatever the hell I want to with that book, and you have no say about it.
The original video, audio, and other data you place on that DVD is, indeed, yours to do with as you like.
However the encrypted data has blended the copyrights of your original data and that of the DVDCCA (or whoever the hell has the copyright on the CSS code). So while you may relenquish your rights, it doesn't mean that you can relenquish theirs - yes, the protected DVD is a derivative work. But it's a derivative work of multiple copyrights, not all of which you control.
As another poster pointed out, you can release your own IP in any manner you choose - even on DVD. As long as you don't encrypt it or impinge on anyone else's copyright in the process.
Fun, isn't it?
Some of the more recent IP laws are certainly bogus, as they violate the spirit of the original IP laws. I don't know that they could be ruled unconstitutional though, as intellectual property was never mentioned in the constitution - it's purely a legislative and judicial process.
It's not just Linux either.
/bin/sh, so you can get bit that way too.
AIX 4.2 has ksh as
Smart developers know what's a sh feature, what's a ksh feature, and what's a bash feature and code appropriately, but there are far too few smart developers. And even the smart ones can get lazy and include a feature just to make life easier or because they forget that "export VAR=value" is just fine in ksh/bash, but not sh.
The story is similar for just about any standard you care to name.
And, the fact of the matter is, standards are determined not by a committee, but by the real world. If 90% of the web pages use IE "features" that aren't "standards" compliant, then what's the real standard out there? The user doesn't care what's written on some piece of paper, they care about what they see in their browser.
Underrated/Overrated already do this - change the post's score without changing karma.
That said, if people would post reprints as AC's then people wouldn't whine about karma whoring (or, rather, they would still but they'd be morons).
Yes, watch what you buy. And don't buy a car that has a seriously screwed up radio deck if you're planning to replace it.
Duh.
When I was shopping for my first (new) car being able to replace the piece-of-shit radio with an aftermarket unit was a requirement to me. And so some cars got axed because of that. And when I had it down to two models it weighed heavily on the final decision.
It's not one for me now (I no longer drive as much nor do I listen to music loudly as much), so it wasn't an issue with my current vehicle. Nor was it one with my previous car (which had some integration, but nothing that made me want to keep the crappy-and-broken stereo).
Frankly, your apparant happiness with the level of integration is rather interesting. I have to admit, it sounds pretty slick, but I also know that electrical systems are one of the most common points of failures in cars (particularly GM vehicles), and that radios in particular have a tendancy to fail rapidly.
Gonna be a pretty penny when you have to replace that highly integrated stereo.
Probably not. They're geosynch and designed to cover the East and West coasts. So if you lose one, you'll lose everyone on the extremity, and you'll have a bit of signal path issues in some areas where the signal quality was marginal.
With elliptical orbits, you lose one of the three and you'll have rolling blackouts. And they'll be essentially random from the user's point of view since they'll always occur at different times of the day.
With XM losing one bird you can pretty much predict a set percentage of people will lose service, and handle that appropriately. With Sirius losing one bird you can also predict what percentage of people will lose service, but the number is considerably higher - as in 100%. And it's harder to guess how many of them will be due refunds or will cancel.
What it boils down to is that losing a satellite would be disasterous for either, and you can't say that Sirius having 3 vs XM's 2 is an advantage or a disadvantage.
The general use of lasers for interstellar flight is nothing even vaguely close to this... most proposals for a large space based laser platform powering a spaceship involve the use of light sails - superlight materials spanning a thousand kilometers or so to capture light and use the photon impulse to gain momentum.
Go read some of Robert Forward's books (Indistinguishable from Magic is more science than SF; Dragonfly is more SF than science) for some examples of solar/light sails and possible usage. A terawatt microwave laser could push a 16 gram lightsail craft up to ~0.3C in about a month, and using tacking you could even have it come back home instead of just having it transmit data.