And take advertising from companies offering browser
plugins that automatically turn URLs back to links.
Not the one I used to use (which also "cleaned" links that included
redirects), the name of which I've forgotten, but the
Linkification Firefox extension does exactly what you want.
URL-like text on a page automagically turns into a link.
Which only leaves one question - Will "they" try to ban Firefox,
or just anything containing the magic word "http"?
If your intent is to take the server down, that's illegal.
IANAL, obviously.
But in all the DDOSing cases I've heard about so far, the actual
charges had nothing to do with "taking down the server". Instead,
the charges involve interfering with interstate commerce.
Since this doesn't involve commerce, has no monetary value (though
I suppose you could argue that hosting the site in-house saved the
school $15 per month), and didn't cross state lines (until it made
Slashdot), I fail to see how any of the normal "crimes" involved in
a DDOS apply.
Then again, since when do the tech-incomepetent legal systems of
the world deal with spooooooky "compluter" crime analogously to
"real" crimes? Lend a CD to a friend or tape a song off the radio,
it would get laughed out of court if not for the 0% chance of
getting caught in the first place; give a friend the password to
your home audio server FTP site, and you can expect the RIAA to
show up at your door with their illegal warrantless extralegal
powers to violate the bill of rights in the name of profit.
I'll wait until they release the model with the entire
body made of something transparent.
And if you mod this "funny", you've missed my intent. Quite
serious, why go for a window rather than at least the
non-board-half fully transparent? Not like these things have
a lot of stress on the shell itself, that they need to use
metals to protect them...
Are there really that many people, even on Slashdot, that
think stealing intellectual property is not wrong?
I'd say quite the opposite of your point - It takes a
herculean effort to convince people that "stealing"
intangibles counts as a crime in any way at all. We learn
from a young age that society considers "sharing" a good
trait; The entirety of IP law goes against that, and with
the best possible sharing-"goods", ones that we can share yet
still use ourselves.
In my personal experience, most people understand IP crimes
only by analogy to plaguerism - Stealing another person's
ideas for personal (possibly financial) gain. But on pushing
that analogy, it fails miserably... in private; for no gain
beyond the enjoyment of the work itself; for "librarians"
(the people who collect all 27,342 known NES roms including all
variants, hacks, and PD games, when they couldn't possibly
play all of them if they did nothing else for an entire lifetime);
for "small" numbers off offenses; etc.
So I'd have to say that if you take away the assorted
laws against IP-related crime, it wouldn't take anything
at all to convince most people that they can and should
"share" intangibles once again. For that matter, I'd say
you can just look at how seriously most people take
IP law - namely, not at all. People might think
twice about piracy on-line just because they've heard about
getting caught. But ask a friend for a copy of a CD, and
see if they even pause before agreeing.
They want you to trust that the unofficial patch for the Windows
Metafile Volunerability that is currently being exploited by an IM worm.
The problem there (aside from the FP's atrocious grammar) comes from
how the "unofficial" patch will interact with MS's eventual real
fix.
I certainly don't consider myself a Microsoft apologist, but I
KNOW that anyone who installs this patch, then discovers
some bizarre (potentially very serious) problem from Microsoft's
solution, will bitch loudly that Microsoft should have taken the
interim fix into consideration. These same people currently
bitch that Microsoft should throw caution to the wind and issue a
fix ASAP, out of their normal patch cycle and without adequate
testing.
Personally, I don't see the problem with temporarily unregistering the
affected DLL... I NEVER view thumbnails through explorer (slows it down
beyond belief), and MS's built-in image viewing/printing software
lacks even the basic editing capabilities necessary to print "grandma"
rather than "a grandma-like dark smear, 27 unknown people, and 90% sky".
Guess the TSA regs just means the Space Industry
will have non-US based locations
Let's see...
Dennis Tito: Soyuz capsule launched from Khazakstan.
Mark Shuttleworth: Soyuz capsule launched from Khazakstan.
Gregory Olsen: Soyuz capsule launched from Khazakstan.
Notice a pattern there?
The US may have "won" the race to the moon, but we've
already lost the commercialization of space to the
Russians (although Richard Branson - A Brit - may beat
them to making such travel commonplace via Virgin
Galactic).
The TSA can make whatever rules it wants to. As can
I... In fact, I hereby decree that all space tourists
must pass a rigorous 57 point inspection at the nearest
Jiffy-Lube. Of course, I expect my rules to have as
much relevance as the TSA's on this matter.
DC offset, actually. Silent, yes, but still a valid
waveform (and it even occurs naturally, if both rare
and for short periods of time).
Ironically enough, to come as close as possible to a
DC offset on SACD, it would use its highest
possibly frequency - Get to the desired level, then
with every pair of bits, exceed it and drop back.
Science is always fun. I always keep a few bits of my
scientific past around the house. Beakers for drinking
tea out of, gram scales for whatever may arise. Micrometer.
Although I agree fully, I'd suggest EXTREME caution there...
When the RIAA gets the police to bust down your door,
all that innocuous chemistry equimpent magically turns
you into a "meth lab", or at the very least,
transmutes into "paraphernalia" if they fail to find
anything more incriminating in your home.
You have the right to pursuit of happiness, so long as
you don't enjoy anything more "suspicious" than football
and beer. And don't go making too much beer, either!
I disagree. SACD nicely commented on the audio industry's
real delusion... Namely, they seem to seriously
believe that most of us sit at home in our sound-booth/home-theatre
ne living-room, and play our music and movies on a dedicated
player in a dedicated environment.
I seriously believe they attribute the success of iTunes
to people sticking a computer in that same "home sound
booth" model, rather than accepting the cold hard reality
that 99.9% of us listen to music:
A) in the car
B) at work (mostly through our computers), and
C) while jogging/waiting to see a doctor/waiting for a train/etc.
That has held true for decades, and the industry still
doesn't "get" it. The rise of modern portable large-capacity
MP3/AAC/whatever players hasn't changed anything but the need
to change discs/tapes/stations.
As for SACD... First of all, following the above mini-rant,
nothing supports it except for what amount to standalone
home-media-center modular units. Yeah, someone will probably
point out a Sony/Philips portable player or even a CD-ROM
drive that supports it. I've never seen one. I've never
even seen it mentioned as a selling point while shopping
for either of those two products specifically. Second,
although it has theoretically better (high-end) frequency response
(1hz-100khz) than a standard CD (0-22khz... interestingly, SACD
cannot reproduce 0hz due to the encoding used, not that it really
matters), neither my speakers nor any human ears can physically
suffer the limitation of a standard CD. Third, although SACD has
a slightly better dynamic range than normal CDs, when the
idiots mastering them clip even on CDs (Hello? Didn't you guys
learn the word "headroom" in Audio Engineering school???), giving
anything short of infinite dynamic range won't matter, and
even if we gave them that, they'd just use it to blow our
speakers on the first note in the name of "volume". And fourth
no matter how many channels you can encode, I still only
have two ears (plus, arguably, a tactile "bass" channel).
Names do matter when you insist on stuffing 14,000 poorly documented
apps into your favorite Linux distro, half beginning with "G" and the
other with "K."
I know you meant that number facetiously, but a quick search of my
main XP box at work shows 1472 ".exe" files and another roughly 2000
somewhat-executable files (assorted scripts, dlls, and other
extensions generally considered unsafe to allow your email
program to open). Of those, oddly enough, over half begin
with "w" or "m"
Now, I consider myself fairly knowledgeable when it comes to
the actual files on a Windows system, but I could only tell you
what perhaps a tenth of those do (without some research,
of course). And even looking them up online, past experience
doing exactly that has shown that for probably a third of
those, no one outside Microsoft has the faintest idea what they
do or how to use them.
Like it or not, computers take a bit of education to use.
A good GUI can make that far, far easier (and a bad GUI can
make it considerably harder), but at some point, you need
to accept that users just need to "suck it up" and crack a
book (or load a webpage).
They only made one major screwup sufficient to warrant a
comment from them on it.
That seems like the basic pattern to those "awards"... Company
makes an error or needs to explain poor performance; CEO or
chairman or other higher-up (who most likely lacks any clue
about either the plebes or the detailed goings-on of
their company) speaks basically off-the-record; words end up
looking rather silly or offensive.
Now, following that pattern, if you want to question the
number of entries by anyone, I'd have to wonder how
Bush didn't sweep the list. Clueless baboon, out of touch
with everything, and says things which (if not for
the fact that people keep dying as a result of them)
sound absolutely hilarious.
I call bullshit! ... The industry average is 26.4 hours per car!!
And I call "Common sense".
The US alone buys 17 million new cars per year,
or an average of 51,000 per 26.4 hours. Those
cars, by necessity, come from somewhere.
Do you seriously suggest that the entire
planet has 51 thousand automobile
assembly lines operational?
And for another bit of reality, the UAW has 620,000
members. That would come out to only 12 people per
line... I know the automobile industry has gone
mostly to robots, but 12 people? Sounds a bit
low even to just keep the robots fed and
in working condition, doesn't it?
So where does that figure of 26.4 hours come from?
Offhand, I would say it includes all the time
that goes into making each and every sub-assembly.
For a fair comparison, if you build your own PCs,
would you include the actual manufacturing of a
modern CPU in your time estimate?
Only 6 minutes? Is that long enough to really see how
this stuff is made? I suppose it is just supposed to be a
snapshot so...
I've seen a few different numbers (probably for different
models, I expect), but modern auto assembly lines spit out
entire cars in less than one minute each.
Or to look at it another way - You have 525,600 minutes
per year (assuming 24/7). If you hope to manufacture
one million of something per year (like, say, a modern
video game console), you better have a way to make two
per minute. The flip side of that, at six minutes per
unit, you can't even push out 100k units per year.
So yes, virtually all mass-produced products take well
under six minutes to put together.
Did you try to put it into a little box to get it to the vet?
Take the hint. If your precious secret hidey-holes and pillow-forts
have such glaring vulnerabilities that a picture of them from above
would help terrorists, you have MUCH bigger problems than keeping
your cat from clawing the hell out of you in the car.
But aren't most of these recorded radio shows still copyrighted
(until 2067 under State of New York copyright) and all rights reserved?
Yes under US (or various state) laws; but "no", by virtue of the
2nd law of thermodynamics, which trumps US law every time.
The VAST MAJORITY of OTR shows have irretrievably vanished due
to exactly those laws designed to "protect" the interests of the
copyright holder. A part of our (well, on Slashdot, our grandparents')
culture gone forever.
Some of them never existed as recordings, just live shows. Many
did get recorded, but either those recordings have decayed beyond
useability over time, or simply got thrown out as trash (such as
almost all of the pre-1960s Dr Who radio episodes).
Copyright and patents exist for the SOLE purpose of encouraging
people to create intangible "property". Although we can debate the
ethics of downloading the newest BoyBand(tm)'s MP3s off the net, the
entire idea of copyright presumes that eventually their music
will enter the public domain, thereby enriching us all.
When copyright becomes a tool that permits (even encourages)
eradicating all traces of that content, the copyright
holder has very blatantly broken their side of the social
(and arguably legal) contract that allows them to make money
from their ideas in the first place.
Looking at google analytics for vadiumgroup.com
I can see the following
Except, those assume everyone browses in kiosk mode (fullscreen,
with no toolbars or menus or sidebars or the like).
Very, very few people browse like that.
Personally, I use FF with the status bar, the menu, the URL bar, the
Bookmarks Toolbar, and the tab bar alwasy visible, with no sidebars.
But I don't let the browser take up my entire screen horizontally,
either (I end up with something like a square 900x900 area for the
content itself).
In general, designing a site for a particular resolution WILL
eventually make your site look silly, will certainly piss off some of
your audience immediately, will make the presentation of your site more
browser-dependent, and requires MORE work up front in the first place.
Just make sure your site doesn't look outright broken at 640x480 (or
even 320x200 if you buy into the BS that all web pages should look
good even on a handheld device - though in that case, I'd say that you
should only tailor your site's layout for handhelds, by making
a stripped-down version of the page with nothing but unformatted plain
text), and that it doesn't look too silly at something like 1920x1200.
If you satisfy those, any of your audience that complain will do so
about content, not aspects of their experience you can't directly
control.
No matter how great a movie is I just am not going to
pay $25 or $30 and in some cases $40 for a DVD!
Name one major-release single-DVD movie (as opposed to
the "super ultra limited edition 20-discs-of-commentary
re-re-re-re-release in the gold-foil box with a hologram
and beta-test sample animal cracker of the most annoying
but cute character in the movie" versions) that retails
for over $25.
Many full season boxed sets go for around $40,
but a single movie? I have yet to see it.
Put that price down to $5 and I won't download another
movie. Even $10 works.
So go to WallyWorld and root around in their "2 for $11"
bin with the rest of the livestock/consumers. Buy used,
where you usually see big-name movies for $8 or $9, and
"B" movies (which sometimes include the Best
movies, oddly enough) for under $5.
Not even the most naive Slashdotter would mistake setting up
a fake mailing addy in a tax-free state as "legal". We just
don't care that it breaks the law.
When my tax return starts letting me designate exactly which
BS programs my tax dollars go to, INCLUDING those stolen from
me (without representation) via state and local sales taxes,
I (and others) will care more about "doing it right, for its
own sake". Until then, ONLY the fact that my employer reports
my income to the IRS keeps me filing every year.
I hoped this would seem obvious, but so far, no one has
mentioned it yet: Regulating "service" does not
mean the same thing as regulating "content".
The FCC currently regulates phone SERVICE in the US. You
can call up almost anyone, with only the most abusive of
calls restricted (go ahead, just try to report someone
for harassment... It takes nothing short of a knowingly-taped
confession of intent to harass to get anything done). As
a result, we have reasonably cheap universal phone access,
which without the FCC would cost more, and only even exist for
those lucky enough to live in a dense population center.
The FCC also regulates allocation of RF spectrum. This not
only allows things like radio and television to exist (imagine
trying to watch your favorite show with 100 competing stations
all very near the same frequency in the same geographic area),
but makes even the somewhat-unregulated uses such as WiFi
possible (imagine trying to transmit data with some moron
using a sparkgap transmitter next door).
The FCC also regulates broadcast television CONTENT.
This, as we all know, counts as a giant crock of constitution-violating
BS and should cease immediately. The US government does NOT exist
to force wholesome Christian values on us via the whims of the PTC.
But don't make the mistake of assuming "regulation" equals
"censorship". Some regulation does indeed contribute
to the greater good. We just need to vigilantly watch for and
prevent/stop abuses of regulatory powers when they start
taking away rights we otherwise have.
The only public and fairly safe way to swap copyrighted
material without permission from the copyright holde
You forgot trading "used" CDs, the single safest way to
pirate music known to man (and even some females).
Of course, you could always just buy said used CDs,
thereby getting a more-or-less permanent copy and arguably
the legal right to rip it for personal use - And most importantly,
still not supporting the RIAA (though also not supporting the
artist, which really seems like the sticking point to any
attempt to "punish" the RIAA by way of "voting with your
wallet").
But if you really want to safely trade copyrighted music,
save your bandwidth for porn and just trade CDs (one-for-one,
no money necessary) with friends, neighbors, hell, you don't
even need to do it subtly since it doesn't break the law
(until the "rip and retrade" part)... Post your offer on a
public BB at your local supermarket or quad, for all anyone
can do about it!
With talent like that I can't understand why the
music industry is in a slump.
Oops... yeah, "cheap", not "free". My bad.
But I woulnd't suggest you take that as at all representative
of her normal style, any more than my other example of Nine
Inch Nails covering the LoZ theme music (which also really
exists). Just sort of a joke to toss out to the hardcore
fans at a concert, something so entirely unexpected as to
make it a sort of cult classic.
The decision is the latest sign of a looming 'format war'
between the competing standards for a new generation
First of all, only those of us who actually want to use this
stuff will "lose" this war. As with the DVD +/- "war", we'll
just end up seeing every device need to license both formats,
boosting prices and causing massive incompatibilities where people
argue about which brand of media works best in which brand of
drive. And Grandma still won't understand why she
can't burn her now-in-HD soaps to a plain ordinary CD ("But it
fits in the drive!").
These industry groups REALLY needs to suck up their
pride, and just play a hand of poker to decide which format
wins. The winner will agree to buy out the loser's R&D costs
(perhaps with a bit extra as a deal-sweetener), and the loser
will in turn refrain from unnecessarily fragmenting the market.
Then we all win. Even the industry groups.
But more importantly, I see the whole Blu-Ray vs HD-HVD issue
as all but moot. Regardless of who wins, we'll only see
at best a roughly 10x increase in optical storage capacity per
disc, and even that only at the tail end of the effective lifetime
of the media (ie, look at writeable dual-layer DVDs - Oh wait,
I can't, I've never even seen one in person, and they cost a few
bucks each).
The "home theater" market does not have the same requirements as
the data storage market. For home theater, just switching the
existing DVD standard to allow MPEG-4 would allow for HD movies.
But for data storage, particularly backups, we now have desktop
PCs with 500GB drives - Which will still take 20 first-gen
Blu-Ray discs, or 34 HD-DVDs, to completely back up. And many of
us who appreciate the need for good backups have home file servers
in excess of a terabyte.
What we really need, we won't get out of simple industry
greed in pushing incremental upgrades on us - We need everyone to
say "screw the sub-100GB optical formats, let's finally get one
of these multi-TB holographic techs we keep hearing about, to market".
The air wave is dead and Adam Curry has crawled
from the belly of the beast
Except that "video" didn't kill the radio star - Evolution did.
Before radio, people went to concerts, both the "normal" sort, and
the free sort (like concerts in the park, except they happened
every weekend and in every park). Quite a lot more people could
actually sing or play an instrument, to some degree of competency,
and any social gathering often involved some form of self-provided
musical entertainment.
Then we could just flip on the radio. No need for concerts in the
park, no need to provide one's own music at parties.
Then video... Video killed itself. The best musicians don't
quite seem right in the head, and while we might "oooh" and "aaah"
over cryptic lyrics, actually seeing Axyl Rose in a kilt
pretty much cinches the diagnosis. Not to mention, when you can
actually see the singer, suddenly the main focus goes from "music"
to "eye candy", so you get annoying doe-eyed bimbos who can't really
sing all that well with megahits. But that undercuts the pretense of
the medium (a way to present music with visual accompaniment).
And now, we have "the internets". Almost overnight, getting music
changed from going to a store and hoping that they either still had
a copy of that hot new pop album, or (depending on your tastes)
that they had even heard of that obscure import you want... To
simply picking the songs you want from a list and clicking (again,
depending on your preference) "download" or "buy now". The online
stores always have a full stock of anything even remotely
popular, and the "underground" sites always have just about the most
obscure thing you could imagine to search for (NIN covering the Legend
of Zelda theme song? Check. Tori Amos singing "Assholes are free
today?" Check. You name it, you can find it).
As an aside more relevant to the FP than the parent, and at the risk
of sounding redundant - The record companies just don't get it.
They complain about declining revenue while individual track sales
online have increased... It doesn't take a genius to put two and two
together to figure out that, if you support full albums by basically
bad artists with one or two decent songs per CD, that if people can
buy just those two songs, they will. And at a buck per
track, that results in listeners paying $1-$3 instead of $15-$20,
no piracy necessary as an excuse.
Unfortunately, once they do "get it", I fear the obvious solution
will involve simply killing the idea of the album. For 99% of pop
music, that won't much matter, nothing but a rag-tag colleciton of
singles mixed with dross anyway. But will that prevent the next
Pink Floyd from ever getting started? I would consider that
a very sad loss indeed.
Slashdot Mirror
And take advertising from companies offering browser plugins that automatically turn URLs back to links.
Not the one I used to use (which also "cleaned" links that included redirects), the name of which I've forgotten, but the Linkification Firefox extension does exactly what you want. URL-like text on a page automagically turns into a link.
Which only leaves one question - Will "they" try to ban Firefox, or just anything containing the magic word "http"?
If your intent is to take the server down, that's illegal.
IANAL, obviously.
But in all the DDOSing cases I've heard about so far, the actual charges had nothing to do with "taking down the server". Instead, the charges involve interfering with interstate commerce.
Since this doesn't involve commerce, has no monetary value (though I suppose you could argue that hosting the site in-house saved the school $15 per month), and didn't cross state lines (until it made Slashdot), I fail to see how any of the normal "crimes" involved in a DDOS apply.
Then again, since when do the tech-incomepetent legal systems of the world deal with spooooooky "compluter" crime analogously to "real" crimes? Lend a CD to a friend or tape a song off the radio, it would get laughed out of court if not for the 0% chance of getting caught in the first place; give a friend the password to your home audio server FTP site, and you can expect the RIAA to show up at your door with their illegal warrantless extralegal powers to violate the bill of rights in the name of profit.
I'll wait until they release the model with the entire body made of something transparent.
And if you mod this "funny", you've missed my intent. Quite serious, why go for a window rather than at least the non-board-half fully transparent? Not like these things have a lot of stress on the shell itself, that they need to use metals to protect them...
Are there really that many people, even on Slashdot, that think stealing intellectual property is not wrong?
I'd say quite the opposite of your point - It takes a herculean effort to convince people that "stealing" intangibles counts as a crime in any way at all. We learn from a young age that society considers "sharing" a good trait; The entirety of IP law goes against that, and with the best possible sharing-"goods", ones that we can share yet still use ourselves.
In my personal experience, most people understand IP crimes only by analogy to plaguerism - Stealing another person's ideas for personal (possibly financial) gain. But on pushing that analogy, it fails miserably... in private; for no gain beyond the enjoyment of the work itself; for "librarians" (the people who collect all 27,342 known NES roms including all variants, hacks, and PD games, when they couldn't possibly play all of them if they did nothing else for an entire lifetime); for "small" numbers off offenses; etc.
So I'd have to say that if you take away the assorted laws against IP-related crime, it wouldn't take anything at all to convince most people that they can and should "share" intangibles once again. For that matter, I'd say you can just look at how seriously most people take IP law - namely, not at all. People might think twice about piracy on-line just because they've heard about getting caught. But ask a friend for a copy of a CD, and see if they even pause before agreeing.
This is nothing more than the same cheesball .js
that every forums troll uses in their sig to brag
about how leet they are.
True or not, that doesn't mean they haven't logged your IP address.
For both Apache and IIS, they would have needed to deliberately disable logging your IP from the default.
They want you to trust that the unofficial patch for the Windows Metafile Volunerability that is currently being exploited by an IM worm.
The problem there (aside from the FP's atrocious grammar) comes from how the "unofficial" patch will interact with MS's eventual real fix.
I certainly don't consider myself a Microsoft apologist, but I KNOW that anyone who installs this patch, then discovers some bizarre (potentially very serious) problem from Microsoft's solution, will bitch loudly that Microsoft should have taken the interim fix into consideration. These same people currently bitch that Microsoft should throw caution to the wind and issue a fix ASAP, out of their normal patch cycle and without adequate testing.
Personally, I don't see the problem with temporarily unregistering the affected DLL... I NEVER view thumbnails through explorer (slows it down beyond belief), and MS's built-in image viewing/printing software lacks even the basic editing capabilities necessary to print "grandma" rather than "a grandma-like dark smear, 27 unknown people, and 90% sky".
Guess the TSA regs just means the Space Industry will have non-US based locations
Let's see...
Dennis Tito: Soyuz capsule launched from Khazakstan.
Mark Shuttleworth: Soyuz capsule launched from Khazakstan.
Gregory Olsen: Soyuz capsule launched from Khazakstan.
Notice a pattern there?
The US may have "won" the race to the moon, but we've already lost the commercialization of space to the Russians (although Richard Branson - A Brit - may beat them to making such travel commonplace via Virgin Galactic).
The TSA can make whatever rules it wants to. As can I... In fact, I hereby decree that all space tourists must pass a rigorous 57 point inspection at the nearest Jiffy-Lube. Of course, I expect my rules to have as much relevance as the TSA's on this matter.
0 Hz? Isn't that silence?
DC offset, actually. Silent, yes, but still a valid waveform (and it even occurs naturally, if both rare and for short periods of time).
Ironically enough, to come as close as possible to a DC offset on SACD, it would use its highest possibly frequency - Get to the desired level, then with every pair of bits, exceed it and drop back.
Creepy dynamics, IMO.
Science is always fun. I always keep a few bits of my scientific past around the house. Beakers for drinking tea out of, gram scales for whatever may arise. Micrometer.
Although I agree fully, I'd suggest EXTREME caution there...
When the RIAA gets the police to bust down your door, all that innocuous chemistry equimpent magically turns you into a "meth lab", or at the very least, transmutes into "paraphernalia" if they fail to find anything more incriminating in your home.
You have the right to pursuit of happiness, so long as you don't enjoy anything more "suspicious" than football and beer. And don't go making too much beer, either!
as in SACD replacing Audio CD
I disagree. SACD nicely commented on the audio industry's real delusion... Namely, they seem to seriously believe that most of us sit at home in our sound-booth/home-theatre ne living-room, and play our music and movies on a dedicated player in a dedicated environment.
I seriously believe they attribute the success of iTunes to people sticking a computer in that same "home sound booth" model, rather than accepting the cold hard reality that 99.9% of us listen to music:
A) in the car
B) at work (mostly through our computers), and
C) while jogging/waiting to see a doctor/waiting for a train/etc.
That has held true for decades, and the industry still doesn't "get" it. The rise of modern portable large-capacity MP3/AAC/whatever players hasn't changed anything but the need to change discs/tapes/stations.
As for SACD... First of all, following the above mini-rant, nothing supports it except for what amount to standalone home-media-center modular units. Yeah, someone will probably point out a Sony/Philips portable player or even a CD-ROM drive that supports it. I've never seen one. I've never even seen it mentioned as a selling point while shopping for either of those two products specifically. Second, although it has theoretically better (high-end) frequency response (1hz-100khz) than a standard CD (0-22khz... interestingly, SACD cannot reproduce 0hz due to the encoding used, not that it really matters), neither my speakers nor any human ears can physically suffer the limitation of a standard CD. Third, although SACD has a slightly better dynamic range than normal CDs, when the idiots mastering them clip even on CDs (Hello? Didn't you guys learn the word "headroom" in Audio Engineering school???), giving anything short of infinite dynamic range won't matter, and even if we gave them that, they'd just use it to blow our speakers on the first note in the name of "volume". And fourth no matter how many channels you can encode, I still only have two ears (plus, arguably, a tactile "bass" channel).
So... Um... The actual topic. DRM sucks. Yeah.
Names do matter when you insist on stuffing 14,000 poorly documented apps into your favorite Linux distro, half beginning with "G" and the other with "K."
I know you meant that number facetiously, but a quick search of my main XP box at work shows 1472 ".exe" files and another roughly 2000 somewhat-executable files (assorted scripts, dlls, and other extensions generally considered unsafe to allow your email program to open). Of those, oddly enough, over half begin with "w" or "m"
Now, I consider myself fairly knowledgeable when it comes to the actual files on a Windows system, but I could only tell you what perhaps a tenth of those do (without some research, of course). And even looking them up online, past experience doing exactly that has shown that for probably a third of those, no one outside Microsoft has the faintest idea what they do or how to use them.
Like it or not, computers take a bit of education to use. A good GUI can make that far, far easier (and a bad GUI can make it considerably harder), but at some point, you need to accept that users just need to "suck it up" and crack a book (or load a webpage).
Sony's only on there once.
They only made one major screwup sufficient to warrant a comment from them on it.
That seems like the basic pattern to those "awards"... Company makes an error or needs to explain poor performance; CEO or chairman or other higher-up (who most likely lacks any clue about either the plebes or the detailed goings-on of their company) speaks basically off-the-record; words end up looking rather silly or offensive.
Now, following that pattern, if you want to question the number of entries by anyone, I'd have to wonder how Bush didn't sweep the list. Clueless baboon, out of touch with everything, and says things which (if not for the fact that people keep dying as a result of them) sound absolutely hilarious.
But so it goes.
I call bullshit!
...
The industry average is 26.4 hours per car!!
And I call "Common sense".
The US alone buys 17 million new cars per year, or an average of 51,000 per 26.4 hours. Those cars, by necessity, come from somewhere.
Do you seriously suggest that the entire planet has 51 thousand automobile assembly lines operational?
And for another bit of reality, the UAW has 620,000 members. That would come out to only 12 people per line... I know the automobile industry has gone mostly to robots, but 12 people? Sounds a bit low even to just keep the robots fed and in working condition, doesn't it?
So where does that figure of 26.4 hours come from? Offhand, I would say it includes all the time that goes into making each and every sub-assembly. For a fair comparison, if you build your own PCs, would you include the actual manufacturing of a modern CPU in your time estimate?
Only 6 minutes? Is that long enough to really see how this stuff is made? I suppose it is just supposed to be a snapshot so...
I've seen a few different numbers (probably for different models, I expect), but modern auto assembly lines spit out entire cars in less than one minute each.
Or to look at it another way - You have 525,600 minutes per year (assuming 24/7). If you hope to manufacture one million of something per year (like, say, a modern video game console), you better have a way to make two per minute. The flip side of that, at six minutes per unit, you can't even push out 100k units per year.
So yes, virtually all mass-produced products take well under six minutes to put together.
Have you ever belonged to a pet cat?
Did you ever take it to the vet?
Did you try to put it into a little box to get it to the vet?
Take the hint. If your precious secret hidey-holes and pillow-forts have such glaring vulnerabilities that a picture of them from above would help terrorists, you have MUCH bigger problems than keeping your cat from clawing the hell out of you in the car.
But aren't most of these recorded radio shows still copyrighted (until 2067 under State of New York copyright) and all rights reserved?
Yes under US (or various state) laws; but "no", by virtue of the 2nd law of thermodynamics, which trumps US law every time.
The VAST MAJORITY of OTR shows have irretrievably vanished due to exactly those laws designed to "protect" the interests of the copyright holder. A part of our (well, on Slashdot, our grandparents') culture gone forever.
Some of them never existed as recordings, just live shows. Many did get recorded, but either those recordings have decayed beyond useability over time, or simply got thrown out as trash (such as almost all of the pre-1960s Dr Who radio episodes).
Copyright and patents exist for the SOLE purpose of encouraging people to create intangible "property". Although we can debate the ethics of downloading the newest BoyBand(tm)'s MP3s off the net, the entire idea of copyright presumes that eventually their music will enter the public domain, thereby enriching us all.
When copyright becomes a tool that permits (even encourages) eradicating all traces of that content, the copyright holder has very blatantly broken their side of the social (and arguably legal) contract that allows them to make money from their ideas in the first place.
Looking at google analytics for vadiumgroup.com I can see the following
Except, those assume everyone browses in kiosk mode (fullscreen, with no toolbars or menus or sidebars or the like).
Very, very few people browse like that.
Personally, I use FF with the status bar, the menu, the URL bar, the Bookmarks Toolbar, and the tab bar alwasy visible, with no sidebars. But I don't let the browser take up my entire screen horizontally, either (I end up with something like a square 900x900 area for the content itself).
In general, designing a site for a particular resolution WILL eventually make your site look silly, will certainly piss off some of your audience immediately, will make the presentation of your site more browser-dependent, and requires MORE work up front in the first place. Just make sure your site doesn't look outright broken at 640x480 (or even 320x200 if you buy into the BS that all web pages should look good even on a handheld device - though in that case, I'd say that you should only tailor your site's layout for handhelds, by making a stripped-down version of the page with nothing but unformatted plain text), and that it doesn't look too silly at something like 1920x1200. If you satisfy those, any of your audience that complain will do so about content, not aspects of their experience you can't directly control.
No matter how great a movie is I just am not going to pay $25 or $30 and in some cases $40 for a DVD!
Name one major-release single-DVD movie (as opposed to the "super ultra limited edition 20-discs-of-commentary re-re-re-re-release in the gold-foil box with a hologram and beta-test sample animal cracker of the most annoying but cute character in the movie" versions) that retails for over $25.
Many full season boxed sets go for around $40, but a single movie? I have yet to see it.
Put that price down to $5 and I won't download another movie. Even $10 works.
So go to WallyWorld and root around in their "2 for $11" bin with the rest of the livestock/consumers. Buy used, where you usually see big-name movies for $8 or $9, and "B" movies (which sometimes include the Best movies, oddly enough) for under $5.
You are missing a point...
No, YOU have missed the point.
Not even the most naive Slashdotter would mistake setting up a fake mailing addy in a tax-free state as "legal". We just don't care that it breaks the law.
When my tax return starts letting me designate exactly which BS programs my tax dollars go to, INCLUDING those stolen from me (without representation) via state and local sales taxes, I (and others) will care more about "doing it right, for its own sake". Until then, ONLY the fact that my employer reports my income to the IRS keeps me filing every year.
I hoped this would seem obvious, but so far, no one has mentioned it yet: Regulating "service" does not mean the same thing as regulating "content".
The FCC currently regulates phone SERVICE in the US. You can call up almost anyone, with only the most abusive of calls restricted (go ahead, just try to report someone for harassment... It takes nothing short of a knowingly-taped confession of intent to harass to get anything done). As a result, we have reasonably cheap universal phone access, which without the FCC would cost more, and only even exist for those lucky enough to live in a dense population center.
The FCC also regulates allocation of RF spectrum. This not only allows things like radio and television to exist (imagine trying to watch your favorite show with 100 competing stations all very near the same frequency in the same geographic area), but makes even the somewhat-unregulated uses such as WiFi possible (imagine trying to transmit data with some moron using a sparkgap transmitter next door).
The FCC also regulates broadcast television CONTENT. This, as we all know, counts as a giant crock of constitution-violating BS and should cease immediately. The US government does NOT exist to force wholesome Christian values on us via the whims of the PTC.
But don't make the mistake of assuming "regulation" equals "censorship". Some regulation does indeed contribute to the greater good. We just need to vigilantly watch for and prevent/stop abuses of regulatory powers when they start taking away rights we otherwise have.
The only public and fairly safe way to swap copyrighted material without permission from the copyright holde
You forgot trading "used" CDs, the single safest way to pirate music known to man (and even some females).
Of course, you could always just buy said used CDs, thereby getting a more-or-less permanent copy and arguably the legal right to rip it for personal use - And most importantly, still not supporting the RIAA (though also not supporting the artist, which really seems like the sticking point to any attempt to "punish" the RIAA by way of "voting with your wallet").
But if you really want to safely trade copyrighted music, save your bandwidth for porn and just trade CDs (one-for-one, no money necessary) with friends, neighbors, hell, you don't even need to do it subtly since it doesn't break the law (until the "rip and retrade" part)... Post your offer on a public BB at your local supermarket or quad, for all anyone can do about it!
With talent like that I can't understand why the music industry is in a slump.
Oops... yeah, "cheap", not "free". My bad.
But I woulnd't suggest you take that as at all representative of her normal style, any more than my other example of Nine Inch Nails covering the LoZ theme music (which also really exists). Just sort of a joke to toss out to the hardcore fans at a concert, something so entirely unexpected as to make it a sort of cult classic.
The decision is the latest sign of a looming 'format war' between the competing standards for a new generation
First of all, only those of us who actually want to use this stuff will "lose" this war. As with the DVD +/- "war", we'll just end up seeing every device need to license both formats, boosting prices and causing massive incompatibilities where people argue about which brand of media works best in which brand of drive. And Grandma still won't understand why she can't burn her now-in-HD soaps to a plain ordinary CD ("But it fits in the drive!").
These industry groups REALLY needs to suck up their pride, and just play a hand of poker to decide which format wins. The winner will agree to buy out the loser's R&D costs (perhaps with a bit extra as a deal-sweetener), and the loser will in turn refrain from unnecessarily fragmenting the market. Then we all win. Even the industry groups.
But more importantly, I see the whole Blu-Ray vs HD-HVD issue as all but moot. Regardless of who wins, we'll only see at best a roughly 10x increase in optical storage capacity per disc, and even that only at the tail end of the effective lifetime of the media (ie, look at writeable dual-layer DVDs - Oh wait, I can't, I've never even seen one in person, and they cost a few bucks each).
The "home theater" market does not have the same requirements as the data storage market. For home theater, just switching the existing DVD standard to allow MPEG-4 would allow for HD movies. But for data storage, particularly backups, we now have desktop PCs with 500GB drives - Which will still take 20 first-gen Blu-Ray discs, or 34 HD-DVDs, to completely back up. And many of us who appreciate the need for good backups have home file servers in excess of a terabyte.
What we really need, we won't get out of simple industry greed in pushing incremental upgrades on us - We need everyone to say "screw the sub-100GB optical formats, let's finally get one of these multi-TB holographic techs we keep hearing about, to market".
The air wave is dead and Adam Curry has crawled from the belly of the beast
Except that "video" didn't kill the radio star - Evolution did.
Before radio, people went to concerts, both the "normal" sort, and the free sort (like concerts in the park, except they happened every weekend and in every park). Quite a lot more people could actually sing or play an instrument, to some degree of competency, and any social gathering often involved some form of self-provided musical entertainment.
Then we could just flip on the radio. No need for concerts in the park, no need to provide one's own music at parties.
Then video... Video killed itself. The best musicians don't quite seem right in the head, and while we might "oooh" and "aaah" over cryptic lyrics, actually seeing Axyl Rose in a kilt pretty much cinches the diagnosis. Not to mention, when you can actually see the singer, suddenly the main focus goes from "music" to "eye candy", so you get annoying doe-eyed bimbos who can't really sing all that well with megahits. But that undercuts the pretense of the medium (a way to present music with visual accompaniment).
And now, we have "the internets". Almost overnight, getting music changed from going to a store and hoping that they either still had a copy of that hot new pop album, or (depending on your tastes) that they had even heard of that obscure import you want... To simply picking the songs you want from a list and clicking (again, depending on your preference) "download" or "buy now". The online stores always have a full stock of anything even remotely popular, and the "underground" sites always have just about the most obscure thing you could imagine to search for (NIN covering the Legend of Zelda theme song? Check. Tori Amos singing "Assholes are free today?" Check. You name it, you can find it).
As an aside more relevant to the FP than the parent, and at the risk of sounding redundant - The record companies just don't get it. They complain about declining revenue while individual track sales online have increased... It doesn't take a genius to put two and two together to figure out that, if you support full albums by basically bad artists with one or two decent songs per CD, that if people can buy just those two songs, they will. And at a buck per track, that results in listeners paying $1-$3 instead of $15-$20, no piracy necessary as an excuse.
Unfortunately, once they do "get it", I fear the obvious solution will involve simply killing the idea of the album. For 99% of pop music, that won't much matter, nothing but a rag-tag colleciton of singles mixed with dross anyway. But will that prevent the next Pink Floyd from ever getting started? I would consider that a very sad loss indeed.