You can reduce a piece of music to a generic set of characteristics by writing it out in SHEET MUSIC. It isn't that hard.
You've never listened closely to Bill Evans, then. He played (jazz piano) in a manner that would be nearly impossible even to get on sheet music, let alone reproduce from the sheet music.
Transcribe a solo by one of the great jazz masters. Doesn't matter who. Bill Evans, Monk, Oscar Peterson, Dizzy Gillespie, Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, Sonny Stitt. Doesn't matter. Now feed it into your nearest MIDI program. Play it alongside the original. Gee, doesn't sound so good now, does it? And that's not just because it's not on a real instrument. It's because it's not played by a real musician.
For any further dissenters: the "humans are intrinsically superior because we are human" crowd said the same thing about chess. Where are they now? Oh, they just jumped to a new topic.
Chess is, by its nature, not a creative act. It's a logic game with a well-defined objective. What's the objective of music? What are the rules?
Now, are you telling me you can't think of any applications where pen or voice control would be appropriate? A lot of people thought the Newton was pretty cool, and I know some people who use Dragon's speech recognition software for transcription. Um, maybe, just maybe Steve Jobs wants a piece of their wallets? I hardly find that to be in FUCKING MORON territory.
No, I'm telling you I don't think the technologies are developed well enough that Apple feels that everyday people can use them reliably and have them Just Work, reliably, 100% of the time (or near enough that it doesn't matter). Maybe Apple R&D has been putting in the hours necessary for this to happen. If they have, and Steve is able to pull this out of his ass at a MacWorld keynote before everybody else is doing it, it'll be yet another home run for Apple.
Perhaps this is yet another one of Apple's (in)famous mole hunts designed to plug up leaks. I mean, Apple's done some pretty stupid things in its time (Performa, anybody?), but Steve would have to be a FUCKING MORON to completely remove a keyboard from a computer while pen-based input and (especially) voice input are still less useful than keyboard input.
Ah, but you're forgetting one minor detail. We're talking about Steven King here. He's a Big Name compared to most fiction authors out there.
Additionally, let's not forget how he got where he is now. Without major publisher support in the first place, he'd still be writing short stories appearing in girlie mags (not flamebait--he actually did this while attending the University of Maine) or would have found something else to do that resulted in him getting paid.
I really like what he said about the Internet spawning a generation of people who thought that you shouldn't have to pay for the fruits of others' creativity. It's true. And it's pretty sad.
Nope. Mac OS Rumors is now based in New Hampshire. See, after Ryan started pissing people off by doing such things as not paying them (Why Jon Thompson, Karthik Arumugham, Slashdot, Evan Desjardins, John Stiteler, NiftyWerks, and myself are no longer associated with him), his "media empire" started bleeding red ink like a son of a bitch. He was getting behind on his colo fees. He couldn't afford the rent on his apartment anymore, so he moved to his family's second home in New Hampshire, which he inhabits rent-free with the rump that he calls his girlfriend.
<ONTOPIC>But yeah, US-centrism is justified here.</ONTOPIC>
If i remember from my economics class correctly, being able to divide and name a price for a given market based on how much they are able to pay is textbook monopolistic behavior.
Not quite. Being able to divide and name a price for a given market based on how much they are able to pay is just a sign that you can provide multiple prices for different types of users (Regular vs. Academic, for example), and shouldn't be (and isn't) illegal for just that reason, as it's good for the consumers as well. Academic pricng and volume discounts are quite good for consumers.
Microsoft, however, charged OEMs a different price based not on ability to pay, but one based on how much the other company pissed them off.
These bullet points from the third page of the PDF(marked as page 2) basically sum the case up:
Under the Diamond decision and the AHRA, consumers have an absolute right to create and transfer digital music for noncommercial purposes; since its users are not directly infringing, Napster cannot be held liable for contributory infringement.
Napster's directory service is capable of numerous and substantial non-infringing uses and thus under the Supreme Court's decision in Sony, Napster has no liability.
Because Napster users use Napster in a variety of ways that constitute "fair use," such as space shifting and sampling, no injunction can issue.
Plaintiffs have engaged in copyright misuse, which precludes enforcement of their copyrights against Napster.
No injunction can issue because it would violate the First Amendment rights to free speech of Napster and its user.
Finally, no injunction can issue because to do so would irrevocably alter the status quo, result in permanent injury to Napster, and ultimately not benefit Plaintiffs.
It seems that while the third, fifth, and sixth points are pretty weak (the fifth and sixth ones especially), the first, second, and fourth (two of which mention legal precedents) are especially damning.
This is one of the few legal briefs that I have read that have actually made me smile and chuckle with delight. Nice work, Boies.:)
I do not believe the average American is an idiot.
Perhaps not an idiot. Lazy would be a better adjective, as would apathetic and umotivated. Definitely not brilliant.
I believe people should be free. With that freedom, comes responsibility. A society that protects its citizens from responsibility is not a free society.
Exactly. Most people don't want absolute responsibility. I know that I sure as hell don't want to have to spend all of my time sorting through a fuckload of advertisements and glossy product literature just to buy a tube of toothpaste that's not going to end up killing me. I'd much rather have the FDA bar unsafe goods from entering the market or at least mandate a warning label (a la cigarettes).
Are you willing to give up your rights as an adult in order to have the government raise you children for you?
No, I'll raise my children myself. They're not, however, born knowing the ins and outs of everything--especially products which may do them harm. Between the Government regulating potentially unsafe and outright unsafe products and my advice to this end, I'm pretty sure they'll turn out all right, regardless of their intellectual capacities.
Are you willing to give up a free market in order to avoid having to read the fine print?
If it prevents people whose sole motivation in doing business is to screw stupid people out of their money from conducting business, yes.
You see, libertarianism, much like its almost direct opposite philosophy, communism, is basically just political masturbation. It looks really good in theory, and both of them promise to make things great for people--the difference being that libertarianism makes things great for the really smart and communism makes things great for the really dumb--but the results aren't quite what you expect, and it ends up being virtually impracticable.
Look at Soviet communism. Didn't work so well. Everybody ended up getting screwed except for the Party insiders.
Look at the more-libertarian-than-now industrial American economy of the mid-to-late 1800s and early 1900s. Free market as far as the eye can see. But everybody ended up getting screwed except for either the really smart, clever, ruthless people, the really rich people, or the really rich, smart, clever, and ruthless people.
Eventually people (i.e., the non-plutocrats) got fed up with it and formed labor unions to prevent just these types of abuses. Congress, after a fashion, finally woke up and started passing laws to enable this to a certain extent.
The Articles of the Confederation was a very libertarian document. The federal government was severely restricted in its powers. And we lived with it for a while. Then it started out turning into an incredibly huge mess, causing the founding fathers to say, "Hey, wait a minute. This isn't exactly what we wanted." So they scrapped it like the pile of junk it was and started over, this time yielding the Constitution, which firmed up the government's powers. Not counting the Civil War (which we, incidentally, won) we've had over 200 years of stability since then.
So you see, we had our experiments with libertarianism. We ended up not liking it. We told the Government to get involved. And you're a fool if you think that the government's going to cease its involvement based on the nagging of what (societally) amounts to a political splinter group that most people don't even know exists.
Well, the C|Net article said something like 3 months to simulate the first.01sec. Now, I'm going to make the almost obviously false assumption that an equal amount of computing power is required to simulate all parts of the explosion. I know this is false, but I don't know the physics involved, so I'll just talk about simulating the first.01sec in.01 sec.
So, simple math being your friend, let's assume that we're talking June, July, and August. That's 92 days. Each day has 86,400 seconds. So that gives a total of 7,948,800 seconds in June, July, and August. Now, this amount of time only simulates the first.01 second. So we need to multiply by 100, yielding 794,880,000. This means that the computer needs to be 794,880,000 times more powerful to simulate the first.01 second of a nuclear explosion in.01 second.
Multiplying this figure by 12 (They said it had a peak of 12.3, but it probably can't do 12.3 all the time), a computer would need to be capable of 9,538,560,000 teraflops to model the first.01 second of a nuclear explosion in.01 second. And the complexity increases from there.
If portability is the only real issue for finding a solution to get us out of this mess, then how about two IP's a static and virtual one. The virtual one is portable.
Good job; you just described what DNS is--except your idea uses numbers, which are harder to remember than names are. You deserve a medal.
Perhaps you can provide some more background on the nature of the case--or even a case number--that's common practice when citing Supreme court opinions.
Anyway, there are two reasons why that opinion isn't valid here:
Unlike a railroad, which is built up of rail belonging to multiple companies and has managed junction points, when a.COM/.NET/.ORG domain name registrar screws its customers over, its customers can always change to a different registrar without harming the customer and other registrars.
The domain registrars aren't in bed with each other like the railroad companies were, so this portion:
[...]
roads owned by those companies were operated in connection with each other on joint account, or that there was such community of interests among them as would make all of them liable for the acts of agents or employees of one.
just doesn't apply here. Domain registrars directly compete with each other in the same market, so they aren't likely to manage each other in a manner consistent with a "community of interests among them as would make all of them liable or the acts of agents or employees of one."
Any court case about this using that opinion as a precedent would get thrown out by a level-headed judge.
Absolutely correct. If I own a domain, it's like my own little plot in cyberspace. It's my virtual home.
No. Absolutely incorrect. You don't "own" a domain in the same sense that you "own" a house. You lease it from any of a number of properly-licensed registrars. It's your virtual apartment.
Now some corporate entity is going to take that away, put someone else up on that domain? There is no justification for this. The Third Amendment states:
No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
Now I know Netsol is not the U.S. government.
Seeing as you realize that Network Solutions isn't the US Government, you also realize that the Third Amendment doesn't apply to them; it is therefore irrelevant in this context.
I do not consent to have my domains compromised by two-bit enterprises.
Really? Is that so? Please answer the following questions truthfully:
1) Did you register a domain name with Network Solutions? 2) If so, did you agree to their terms and conditions?
If your answer to Question #1 is "No," then this is none of your business. You're not involved. These aren't the old days when NSI having the monopoly on.COM/.NET/.ORG. You can choose your own registrar now. Allow NSI to alienate its customer base by screwing it over. If they end up pissing enough people off, they will die.
If your answer to Question #1 is "Yes," then your answer to Question #2 also has to be "Yes." You have to agree to their terms and conditions to do business with them. You may not like it, but you agreed that they could change the agreement upon notifying you, which is what they just did.
Perhaps the problem is that you didn't read what you were agreeing to. If that is indeed the case, you have nobody to blame but yourself. Grow up. Deal with it. Move on. Find a different registrar.
Heh. I'm a jazz pianist, so I have a definite bias towards Db as opposed to C#. See, pianists (and most horn players) like flats. Flats are nice. We enjoy them.
Keys like F, Bb, Eb, Ab, and, to a limited extent, C make us happy. Keys like G, D, A, E, and B give guitarists orgasms but really piss us--or at least me--off.
It's mostly a mental thing. I have to play this piece in E for a friend's wedding, and it took me a while to get used to hearing things in that key, because most jazz charts are in flat-friendly keys. Yes, friends, a LARGE part of playing music is hearing what you're playing inside your head.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.kgreen.org/images/cnnmath.gif
Looks like some more of that "fuzzy math."
Slashdot -- News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.
I don't see the word "advocacy" in there anywhere. Do you?
You've never listened closely to Bill Evans, then. He played (jazz piano) in a manner that would be nearly impossible even to get on sheet music, let alone reproduce from the sheet music.
Transcribe a solo by one of the great jazz masters. Doesn't matter who. Bill Evans, Monk, Oscar Peterson, Dizzy Gillespie, Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, Sonny Stitt. Doesn't matter. Now feed it into your nearest MIDI program. Play it alongside the original. Gee, doesn't sound so good now, does it? And that's not just because it's not on a real instrument. It's because it's not played by a real musician.
Chess is, by its nature, not a creative act. It's a logic game with a well-defined objective. What's the objective of music? What are the rules?
Happily reading Slashdot behind SurfWatch.
No, I'm telling you I don't think the technologies are developed well enough that Apple feels that everyday people can use them reliably and have them Just Work, reliably, 100% of the time (or near enough that it doesn't matter). Maybe Apple R&D has been putting in the hours necessary for this to happen. If they have, and Steve is able to pull this out of his ass at a MacWorld keynote before everybody else is doing it, it'll be yet another home run for Apple.
I'm just skeptical.
Perhaps this is yet another one of Apple's (in)famous mole hunts designed to plug up leaks. I mean, Apple's done some pretty stupid things in its time (Performa, anybody?), but Steve would have to be a FUCKING MORON to completely remove a keyboard from a computer while pen-based input and (especially) voice input are still less useful than keyboard input.
Additionally, let's not forget how he got where he is now. Without major publisher support in the first place, he'd still be writing short stories appearing in girlie mags (not flamebait--he actually did this while attending the University of Maine) or would have found something else to do that resulted in him getting paid.
I really like what he said about the Internet spawning a generation of people who thought that you shouldn't have to pay for the fruits of others' creativity. It's true. And it's pretty sad.
Because he just moved in the spring and BA publishes phonebooks in the fall.
<ONTOPIC>But yeah, US-centrism is justified here.</ONTOPIC>
Not quite. Being able to divide and name a price for a given market based on how much they are able to pay is just a sign that you can provide multiple prices for different types of users (Regular vs. Academic, for example), and shouldn't be (and isn't) illegal for just that reason, as it's good for the consumers as well. Academic pricng and volume discounts are quite good for consumers.
Microsoft, however, charged OEMs a different price based not on ability to pay, but one based on how much the other company pissed them off.
Whoah there, Cowboy! Not so fast! You'll have to explain that one further. How is DVD region encoding anti-competitive?
It seems that while the third, fifth, and sixth points are pretty weak (the fifth and sixth ones especially), the first, second, and fourth (two of which mention legal precedents) are especially damning.
This is one of the few legal briefs that I have read that have actually made me smile and chuckle with delight. Nice work, Boies. :)
Perhaps not an idiot. Lazy would be a better adjective, as would apathetic and umotivated. Definitely not brilliant.
Exactly. Most people don't want absolute responsibility. I know that I sure as hell don't want to have to spend all of my time sorting through a fuckload of advertisements and glossy product literature just to buy a tube of toothpaste that's not going to end up killing me. I'd much rather have the FDA bar unsafe goods from entering the market or at least mandate a warning label (a la cigarettes).
No, I'll raise my children myself. They're not, however, born knowing the ins and outs of everything--especially products which may do them harm. Between the Government regulating potentially unsafe and outright unsafe products and my advice to this end, I'm pretty sure they'll turn out all right, regardless of their intellectual capacities.
If it prevents people whose sole motivation in doing business is to screw stupid people out of their money from conducting business, yes.
You see, libertarianism, much like its almost direct opposite philosophy, communism, is basically just political masturbation. It looks really good in theory, and both of them promise to make things great for people--the difference being that libertarianism makes things great for the really smart and communism makes things great for the really dumb--but the results aren't quite what you expect, and it ends up being virtually impracticable.
Look at Soviet communism. Didn't work so well. Everybody ended up getting screwed except for the Party insiders.
Look at the more-libertarian-than-now industrial American economy of the mid-to-late 1800s and early 1900s. Free market as far as the eye can see. But everybody ended up getting screwed except for either the really smart, clever, ruthless people, the really rich people, or the really rich, smart, clever, and ruthless people.
Eventually people (i.e., the non-plutocrats) got fed up with it and formed labor unions to prevent just these types of abuses. Congress, after a fashion, finally woke up and started passing laws to enable this to a certain extent.
The Articles of the Confederation was a very libertarian document. The federal government was severely restricted in its powers. And we lived with it for a while. Then it started out turning into an incredibly huge mess, causing the founding fathers to say, "Hey, wait a minute. This isn't exactly what we wanted." So they scrapped it like the pile of junk it was and started over, this time yielding the Constitution, which firmed up the government's powers. Not counting the Civil War (which we, incidentally, won) we've had over 200 years of stability since then.
So you see, we had our experiments with libertarianism. We ended up not liking it. We told the Government to get involved. And you're a fool if you think that the government's going to cease its involvement based on the nagging of what (societally) amounts to a political splinter group that most people don't even know exists.
So, simple math being your friend, let's assume that we're talking June, July, and August. That's 92 days. Each day has 86,400 seconds. So that gives a total of 7,948,800 seconds in June, July, and August. Now, this amount of time only simulates the first .01 second. So we need to multiply by 100, yielding 794,880,000. This means that the computer needs to be 794,880,000 times more powerful to simulate the first .01 second of a nuclear explosion in .01 second.
Multiplying this figure by 12 (They said it had a peak of 12.3, but it probably can't do 12.3 all the time), a computer would need to be capable of 9,538,560,000 teraflops to model the first .01 second of a nuclear explosion in .01 second. And the complexity increases from there.
Damn.
Or so that weird melty guy that I was talking to while I was doubled over after having too many curries said.
Have you tried putting in some flaky hardware? A great way to get NT/Win2k to break would be to put some bad memory in the box.
Good job; you just described what DNS is--except your idea uses numbers, which are harder to remember than names are. You deserve a medal.
Yes, but in the course of playing music a different thought process is involved with C# than is with Db. It's really subjective and really weird.
Anyway, there are two reasons why that opinion isn't valid here:
Any court case about this using that opinion as a precedent would get thrown out by a level-headed judge.
No. Absolutely incorrect. You don't "own" a domain in the same sense that you "own" a house. You lease it from any of a number of properly-licensed registrars. It's your virtual apartment.
Seeing as you realize that Network Solutions isn't the US Government, you also realize that the Third Amendment doesn't apply to them; it is therefore irrelevant in this context.
Really? Is that so? Please answer the following questions truthfully:
1) Did you register a domain name with Network Solutions?
2) If so, did you agree to their terms and conditions?
If your answer to Question #1 is "No," then this is none of your business. You're not involved. These aren't the old days when NSI having the monopoly on .COM/.NET/.ORG. You can choose your own registrar now. Allow NSI to alienate its customer base by screwing it over. If they end up pissing enough people off, they will die.
If your answer to Question #1 is "Yes," then your answer to Question #2 also has to be "Yes." You have to agree to their terms and conditions to do business with them. You may not like it, but you agreed that they could change the agreement upon notifying you, which is what they just did.
Perhaps the problem is that you didn't read what you were agreeing to. If that is indeed the case, you have nobody to blame but yourself. Grow up. Deal with it. Move on. Find a different registrar.
Keys like F, Bb, Eb, Ab, and, to a limited extent, C make us happy. Keys like G, D, A, E, and B give guitarists orgasms but really piss us--or at least me--off.
It's mostly a mental thing. I have to play this piece in E for a friend's wedding, and it took me a while to get used to hearing things in that key, because most jazz charts are in flat-friendly keys. Yes, friends, a LARGE part of playing music is hearing what you're playing inside your head.
Dammit. That looked *FINE* in preview. It's .
Freshmeat.
It's not a tag. It's an entity reference. And it's , not nbsp&.