Ever considered streaming from high-quality
stations then?
Feel free to name a few - Either >256k/s,
or >160k/s VBR (I don't know of any
VBR streams, since streaming inherently tends
to require CBR content)...
Although, I've asked before, and I'll probably
ask again - Why not just rip from CDs borrowed
from friends (or the library)? Equally
untraceable (if not more so, since although
they can't tell what you do with the stream,
I'd imagine it must look exceedingly strange
to see someone listening to half-a-dozen
stations at a time, 24/7), and you get to
have 100% control over the resulting rip.
Best of all possible worlds - You get the
songs, you get as high of a quality as you
want, you get whatever format you prefer,
and not even the person you borrow the CD
from needs to know what you've done (although
at least for friends, most really don't care,
beyond asking for some reciprocation).
Like many/.'ers, I enjoy the use of the
internet for almost all my informational
needs; but sometimes, SneakerNet still
offers advantages you just can't get
anywhere online.
Better question - What do they plan to charge
people with, since they conveniently destroy
all the available evidence?
Sure, they may occasionally save people from
a bomb. But 99% of the time when you hear
about a "suspicious package", it turns out
as something like lunchmeat or talcum powder
for a baby.
Call me paranoid, but I consider this pretty
damned scary...
"We found your fingerprints on an unmarked
package at a bus station. We have decided
to charge you as a terrorist"
"But that just had my dirty clothes in it"
"Oh yeah? Prove it!"
"Umm... You blew it into a million bits"
"Gotcha - The bits tested positive for explosives"
"I repeat, you blew it up. Of course
it tested positive for explosives, the same ones
you used on it!"
"Oh, convenient story, you goddamned terrorist!
Say 'hi' to Bubba for me, scum."
"???"
Of course, any such case should get
thrown out of court (under the once-upon-a-time
idea of "innocent until proven guilty"). I,
however, wouldn't want to bet my anal virginity
on that.
Unfortunately, you probably won't find
a link - I've never seen more than passing
references to catalytic photolysis outside
research journals.
So where can I get a water photolysis system
that yields more energy out than a $15-20k
photovoltaic system? Does this exist outside
of research labs and plant leaves?
Again, you can't. Despite readily-reproduceable
results, I know of no commercial systems that
work by this method. I agree, holy grail
indeed! Sure, the catalysts don't come cheap,
but compared to $20k+ for PV?
I apologize for the scarcity of info on this
topic... Believe me, I wish I could
tell you more, but I have only recently come
across this concept myself, and it looks
truly staggering in the implications.
It also looks like one of those areas of
research that people keep very quiet
about, either in the hopes of someday marketing
it, or for fear of incurring the wrath of our
oil-baron leaders.
Isn't it fairly ineffecient to use the
electricity to make hydrogen? It seems to
me you would get more usable energy by just
useing the power the solar cells create
directly.
Think "batteries".
Storing enough electricity for a whole house
for a few days (might have rain for a week,
thus very little electricity produced) takes
a bank of batteries, and charging control
equipment, that cost as much as the PV array
itself, and worse, they tend to only have a
useful life of 5-10 years (20 for some of the
really high-end ones).
Storing hydrogen takes a tank, a low-volume
compressor, and a network of cheap copper
or cast iron pipe (not sure which you'd
use for hydrogen - Bottled LPG uses 3/8ths
copper, while "on-grid" NG uses 1/2" cast
iron). Only part that can wear out, the seals
on the compressor - A sub-$20 replacement
part every couple of years.
I do have a question about why they
chose to use PV to electrolytically produce
hydrogen, though - Consumer-grade PV only
gets an operating yield of around 20% and
drops over time, and electrolysis of water
gets 80% efficiency. Right off the bat,
you've wasted 85-90% of the energy from the
sun. Catalytic Photolysis, however, can
get 40-60% efficiency, and directly produces
hydrogen from water + sun (and better, as
research into the catalysts involved advances,
they will go up in efficiency and down in
price).
So, why PV rather than photolysis? Not only
could he get a higher yield, but the up-front
cost drops substantially (in US dollars,
I'd estimate well under $5k, vs $15-20k for
a large enough PV array).
for
Other than the few people who are signed
but still have files available (Armchair
Martian) who is worth listening to?
Red Delicious (a sort of college-rock/acoustic
Garbage group), Bitsream Dream (electronic
with a formerly large list on MP3.com, but
check out "Velvet Black" and the "Anger
Management" remix, and "Buddha's Patio" doesn't
suck, either), and Ghost in the Machine
(not-quite-ambient, sort of an electronic
Robert Miles), to name three that I discovered
through MP3.com and at least a handful of their
work made it to my personal playlist.
Or, how about Jonne Valtonen, better known
(one upon a time) as Purple Motion of Future
Crew?
Add to that a few dozen one-offs that made
it to my playlist (mostly by artists I lack
the name of), and although it makes a low
overall S:N, MP3.com did indeed have some
great music available there.
If a language feature makes code hard for
others to understand, then it is not a good
feature of the language.
My grandmother has trouble understanding
functions, variables, and flow-control.
Should I not use them?
Arguments like this absolutely infuriate
me. I code to the best of my ability.
I may have little loyalty to an employer
who might up and outsource my job to India
next week, but damn me if I don't produce
good code.
If someone that replaces me can't read
my code due to making full use of the
language, then the company has failed to
replace me. Nothing more, nothing
less.
Windown 95 did not support sound "out of the box"
on my ancient (as in, P90-era) laptop.
Not to say that I couldn't get it to work under
Win95, but it required a driver from the
manufacturer. Piece of cake - Go to the website,
grab the driver, and poof, all set.
Now, why can't I do the same under Linux?
Because the manufacturers don't provide
drivers for Linux (Actually, in my case, it
used some ESS variant, and I managed to get a
hacked-up workaround, but nothing as simple
as "Stick this on your system and do an insmod").
So, should we blame Linux for this?
IMO, Linux has just as good sound "support",
at the OS-level, as Windows. It just lacks
3rd-party support, with most of what it
does have coming from people who
took the time to track down specs (from
hardware vendors who balk at even giving out
the most basic info even though your work
will potentially increase their customer
base) and wrote a driver themselves.
In my opinion as an author, that solution
is morally untenable, since it amounts to
self-labeling and self-censoring.
Your readers wouldn't see such obfuscation,
they'd only see the words as you intended
them. How does that amount to self-censorship?
You haven't actually changed your message,
only completely hidden aspects of the medium.
Compare that to simply not having anyone
able to read your work. Does that seem
preferable?
However, on a purely ideal level, I agree with
you. Censorship should simply not exist,
whether at work, by/in an organization, or
by a government. No one should need
to hide their message from anyone, ever. But,
censorship does exist, at so many levels it
makes me seriously wonder why we (in the
US) even have the first amendment. You can
deal with the realities of that, or go
completely unnoticed... Your choice.
And even so (I'm ashamed to admit) there's a bit
of spyware that I can't seem to track down.
Do a Google search for "sted380.zip" (you don't want
the ones after that, they disable themselves after a
while). It lets you see exactly what programs your
computer loads via the numerous startup methods, and
delete them. Short of your particular problem somehow
running as an actual device-driver, this would let you
kill it.
Also, you might want to make sure you don't have
any strange-looking services running - I've seen
a number of difficult-to-remove programs that work
by letting you kill them easily, but they don't
remove an associated service that just reinstalls
them at the next reboot.
That's not "slightly" misleading, that is
*extremely* misleading.
I disagree - Not all cookies do the same harmless
things - A tracking cookie (the sort AdAware usually
catches) can cause almost as much privacy-leakage as
a full-fledged running spyware program such as Gator.
No, they can't log your every keystroke, but for the
purpose of most spyware (namely, building a very
detailed demographic profile on the user), they
do just fine.
Just because it uses your browser to do its damage,
don't assume them as harmless - A biological virus
can't "do" anything by itself, either, until it
find a host cell willing to "run" it's "code".
Do you have that comic book cover (and associated
book) with Binky fighting the other rabbit, which
Groening extorted out of existence?
Nah... I've seen a handful of scans from it, but
never the whole thing. If I saw it dumped in full
to a newsgroup, I'd grab it, but I won't bother
trying to track it down one page at a time from
the net.
Now, if you have a link to it in full... By all
means, respond with a URL and I'd grab it. But
the collector-with-an-OCD-streak in me really
can't stand partial sets of anything.:-)
that one user will end up sending email to the
other via an AOL server in Chicago, when they could
have easily used "net send..." ?
Since "net send" doesn't understand the idea of
a truly multiheaded system, the desktop it
shows up on would occur pretty much by chance (or,
more likely, always on the primary head).
Irrelevant, though, since the two users would need
to occupy nearby physical locations - At best, you
could probably put this in one room and run the
second head through the wall into an adjacent room
(in which case, I suspect you have it right, they'd
probably try to chat via Chicago or some other equally
remote place (where do AIM's servers live?) rather than
just talking directly).
Overall, not worth the trouble. For the extra money
(and you still need two monitors/keyboards/mice, plus
the thing doesn't even come with a dual-headed video
card!), you could make a far more stable second system.
Re:Wondering about licensing and grammar
on
Dual User Windows PC
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I wonder how licensing will work for
software installed on such a computer.
For a better question, I wonder if anyone
(other than Microsoft) will care.
Not a troll or flamebait - Really, how many
home users actually went out and bought
Windows or Office? For a business, a few
hundred bucks might not mean much (particularly
in comparison with getting caught running an
unlicensed app). For a home user, many people
balk at even paying $50 for their tax
software, nevermind something as mundane as
a word processor and spreadsheet (and the
rest, that I have yet to see anyone use
outside a work environment).
People get Windows with their machines. They
get Office from a friend or borrow the install
CD from work. Legality simply doesn't matter,
end of story.
Or, for an already-common analogy, how many
people paid extra fees to use on a dual-CPU
box (most commercial software includes provisions
limiting its use to on a per-CPU basis as well)?
Answer? No one. Even businesses usually
overlook that one, for "mere" duals.
I don't currently have access to my archive of them
(I could post it next week, but Slashdot discussions
rarely last beyond the day they hit FP) so can't just
give you a full list, but as the other one I recently
added to my collection, DVD X Copy. Oh, and Kazaa
Lite - Not quite the same status as something like
DeCSS, but still technically banned.
I have somewhere around two dozen programs, total.
And as I mentioned, most of them I have no use at
all for (thus don't really remember much about
them - Hell, until this new PadLockSL issue, I
had even forgotten about Nullsoft's Waste).
But I also include other sorts of banned media
as well - DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album, for
example (available via Illegal Art), or just
about anything by NegativLand. Or check out
Wally Wood's "Disneyland Memorial Orgy" or
Tim Maloney's (the actual "creator" of Disney's
version of The Little Mermaid) video (of a
NegativLand song, unsurprisingly) "Gimme the
Mermaid". Not software, but all fall into the
same category - Things that only our insane
laws have made taboo.
Note that I do not inlude blatantly
stolen things, such as the Windows source code.
I do not like Microsoft, and would like them to
open their code, but something like that leaves
no moral ambiguity at all as to who owns it.
(Now, if someone used it to make something
"really" artistic (rather than "first amendment
proof of concept artistic" such as occurred with
DeCSS), I would consider adding that to
my collection.
Okay, just remembered one more - StreamBox VCR,
which RealNetworks managed to get an injunction
against. Actually, that counts as one of the
few that I do use at least occasionally.
A song, like a book (or book series), is
a discrete unit of art.
I think I would take that a step further...
You have hit the nail square on, but not noticed
that the nail holds two boards together. Most
music currently occurs as one-off compositions,
with little to no unity between songs on an album.
Thus, for most music, I prefer a semi-random
shuffle. But for works that do have a
sense of unity, I rarely play them in isolation.
In reasonably-modern music, I can only think
of a handful of albums that "should" stay as
a whole. I think would consider Pink Floyd
the best known (I can't stand hearing
"Another Brick in the Wall" or "Comfortably
Numb" in isolation from the rest of "The Wall").
Quite a bit of classical music (by which I mean
the genre, not the specific time period) also
falls into that category as well - Although I
enjoy Mussorgsky (just as an example) while
driving, I tend to find classical radio
stations extremely frustrating in that they'll
play just "Bydio" from "Pictures at an
Exhibition" in isolation from the rest. Or
just the third movement from Beethoven's
ninth. That drives me totally batty.
On the other hand, what little pop music I
do enjoy, I have no interest at all in hearing
the full album, because the songs have no
relation between each other, and for that
matter, usually literally 90% of the songs
on even a "hit" album quite simply suck.
Now, if you want to consider where the line
blurs, the FP may have some ground to
make an argument. Blue Man Group's "The Complex",
for example - Each track fits thematically with
one another, but beyond the tempo progression,
I wouldn't say you lose anything by shuffling
the order. But the linked article does not
make that distinction, so I do not think I
cheat them in my take on the meaninglessness
of their findings.
So, does a preference for a playlist reflect
my attention span, or the artist's? I'd
tend to say the latter. But then, perhaps I just
have too much brain damage to know the difference,
and lack the saavy to appreciate why I shouldn't
listen to "Oops I Did it Again" without also
following through to "Dear Diary" (despite them
not even having the same author, just the same
singer).;-)
Not that it stopped me from downloading it.
I don't like being told by whatever power that
I can't read forbidden text.
I think that counts as the best possible outcome
we can achieve in the current legal climate - That
we can download it regardless of legality. Apple
wants to squash it, and in trying to do so, have
guaranteed it immortality (almost a software
equivalent of martyrdom).
Personally, I downloaded it because of
the legality, as I have done with several similar
programs (DeCSS, Waste, PadLock, etc) in the past.
I don't even have an iPod, nor an iTMS
account, nor will I ever (I would rather pay a
few bucks more for a physical CD of the music,
and keep all my own ripped music as OGGs, not
AACs). But because Apple decided to go after
them, I grabbed a copy.
You could call this "petulant" if you wanted,
but really, what more can we do? "Civic Duty"
advocates might say "vote". Market-focused
individuals would say "vote with your dollar".
But put simply, neither of those matters, nor
does any other action I could take. "The
little guy", ie, almost all of us, has
absolutely no say in what the government
or corporate America does, we can at best try
to poke sticks into the chinks in their legal
armor.
I do have to wonder, though - Why has Apple gone
after PlayFair, but not VideoLan (which can also
remove FairPlay, though taking just a bit more
effort)? I do have a theory on that - VideoLan's
ability comes directly from "DVD Jon", who already
won (in his own country) a very similar
precedent-setting case - Namely, over DeCSS. If
Apple went after him, his lawyer would just point
to his earlier victory and call it a day.
While he makes a good point he does
it in a childish immature troll-like
fashion.
He does not make a good point. The
GPL doesn't say "if you give a link to the
binary, you must give a link to the source".
It says that you need to comply with at
least one of the options under
section three - Which simply by including
the GPL (in the form of the "COPYING"
file), Wang33 has done.
Unless AirLace contacted Wang33 to request
the source and either waited a reasonable
amount of time or received an outright
rejection, then Wang33 did NOT
violate the GPL. Additionally, since
he downloaded it from a site that originally
offered the source code, and he did not
modify that code, you could probably argue
that he also complied with 3.c, even though
VIA pulled original site (an event over
which Wang33 had no control).
Going even further, in complying with the
spirit of the GPL, if not the letter,
I'd have to say that pulling their own code
implies that VIA (and NullSoft before them)
would prefer it not receive wide
distribution. Since only the actual copyright
holder can go after violations, I highly doubt
VIA (or NullSoft) would, in this situation,
choose to complain that someone didn't
distribute the source code.
Thus, we can safely say that AirLace did
not make a good point, he just wanted to
act like a complete asshole. We don't need
people like him to "help" enforce the GPL.
Particularly in this sort of situation, where
Slashdot, as a community, has worked
to prevent some useful but suddenly unkosher
software from slipping into the void... Real
situations trump idealistic legalities - If
you save someone from drowning, no court will
care that you ignored a "no trespassing" sign
to do so. Similarly, A GPL violation (in
letter but not spirit) for the sake of
preventing this software from ceasing to
exist does not strike me as a reason to go
on a rampage over the perceived violation.
Do the GPL a favor and mod parent TROLL.
"Troll" does not suffice for this. If he had
just whined about it, I might call him "only"
a troll. Releasing personal info on a mere
accusation, and not even a true one at that?
We don't have a "should fuck off and die" mod.
It would be nice if they just sandwiched the
media between two.6mm pieces of plastic,
wouldn't change the thickness of the disc,
but at least there would be a bit more
protection for the media.
I think we call those "DVDs".
Seriously. It astounds me that we'd take a
step back with the next generation...
Scratch the top of a CD, and you have a coaster
(most people don't realize this, but your CDs
will live longer if you store them such
that any damage will occur to the bottom
rather than the top. Scratch the top of a DVD,
and you have a DVD with a scratch on top, but
otherwise just fine.
or leases for his or her own use to provide
himself or herself with services used as a
substitute for any switched service or dedicated
facility by which a dealer of communications
services provides a communication path
If you have the right statute (I can't tell
myself, even RTFA'ing didn't help much), then I
see two reasons why this wouldn't apply to a
LAN, only to a WAN...
First, no "dealer of communications services
provides a communication path" between my
upstairs and downstrairs computers. So, no
problem here.
Second, even if some company did decide
to fill that niche, I could also consider
myself a "dealer", selling bandwidth
to myself for no cost. Thus, their 9.x
percent tax amounts to zero. I don't mean
this as a stupid semantic argument, either...
If the law considers such a "service" as
something that someone needs to provide,
then it clearly can't exist without someone
providing it (pretty much a reflexive
statement). Thus, that "provider" would in
effect act as a dealer of networking services.
Since I did not charge myself to install my
LAN, I clearly would owe nothing (if I lived
in Florida, which thankfully I do not - That
place has far more problems than just
a LAN tax).
Interestingly, on the second point - Since I
work as an IT consultant, if I donate my
services in administering a LAN to myself,
does that mean I could write off the equvalent
of one network admin's salary on my taxes
as a business loss? Obviously I can't claim
it as a charitable donation, but if they can
try to tax it, why can't I call it a business
loss? It has value. No one paid me. Loss.
So.. why not make standard hard drive
controlers and buy new enclosed hard disks
with heads.
Because you could get 100GB per $60 if you
just go with EIDE drives.
Oh, wait, which stance did you want
defended?
Seriously, this strikes me as a joke. You
can get an external USB enclosure for less
than $100, and 3x the media size for the
same price as the Rev cartridges. Why the
hell would any sane person go with Iomega
on this one? Certainly not <click>
their legendary <click> reputation
for producing reliable<click>,
long-term backup <click>
solutions... The other respondant to you
mentioned the idea of a safe full of HDDs...
Now, I'll admit that HDDs tend to die more
often than actual DLTs, but compared to
Iomega's reputation with Zip and Jaz
drives? I'd trust my critical data to
an ancient RLL HDD before I'd rely on a
Jaz cartridge...
There's this thing called SMP, which lets
you have multiple CPU's in one machine.
One could simply run the program twice... That
style of use (two CPUs so two threads) illustrates
what I mean - Many people would think nothing of
tossing off a new thread, despite the need for
absolutely no communication between the
two threads/processes. Why?
Tuned for what processor?
P4, then Athlon, then P-III, then a tight
generic C version as a fallback. Although
P4 actually includes three (four, now?)
significantly differernt chips, the Athlon
includes four, and the P-III includes two
, we can safely ignore those differences
since this task could probably fit its
entire core routine's data in L1 cache.
As for other architectures - First of all,
I can absolutely guarantee that you'll get a
far higher total volume of work done just
by specifically optimizing for 80% (RNPOOMA)
of desktops running one of those, than by
dragging the whole thing to a crawl just to
allow the other 20% of desktops to also run
this program.
Now, if he knows he'll have a very large number
of Sun IVs or G5s or the like running this, it
would make sense to support that. But barring
that, from the stated purpose of this run,
he'd do better to completely ignore them (or
at most provide a vanilla C version) and
focus on what most of his target userbase
actually has.
Apart from compiler writers, who needs
hand-tuned assembler?
People interested in "recreational mathematics"
programming, exactly like this particular
project. People who fully expect to take a
few centuries of CPU time spread across
hundreds of machines.
To give me some credibility here, I
recently finished just such a run myself,
searching for Lychrel seeds. Racked up
30+ years of CPU time, and just the
postprocessing to get the results in a
meaningful form will take four months (can't
distribute that, unfortunately, so four
"real" months).
It's impossible to port without a complete
rewrite, difficult to upkeep, and you'd need
to retune your programs every time a new
processor comes out.
I specifically mentioned my recent project
(above) for one reason - I did port
it mid-project. We started off targetting
only Windows machines, but suddenly needed
to support Linux. Total time for the port?
Three days. If I hadn't stupidly used
GetFileAttributes() rather than the
tried-and-true (and portable) stat() call,
the port would have taken under an hour.
Once it ran on Linux, we could have run
on any machine that supports Linux.
Now, you may say, Linux on a P4 has the
same CPU tuning as Windows on a P4. True.
However, "supporting" a platform doesn't
mean you need to waste hundreds of hours
optimizing for that platfom. You
might only have a single client program
on obscure-platform-X, why waste time?
Developer time is better spent optimizing
algorithms than performing mechanical tasks
that the computer can do for you.
You go right ahead and figure out a better
way to track particle trajectories. Perhaps
I'll read about you making a fortune by
writing the next big 3d game engine. In
the mean time, in terms of accomplishing a
specific goal, taking the current best and
making an optimized implementation will get
the job done. And while, in another decade
you may still not have built a better
mousetrap, this project will have finished,
published, and perhaps started gearing up
for a "Mega-zillion" iteration run.
He needs networking connection, a decent
threading model and doesn't want to crash
your box.
False, on all of the above.
For "networking", users will manually send him
their cache directory (as the FP explicitly
stated). As for threading... To do what? He
wants to run a completely straightforward
trajectory simulation, iterated a few
"zillion" times. I'll admit that I have a bias
against most uses of multithreading and consider
them inappropriate 99.9% of the time, but if
you can even force them onto this project,
you need to go back to the drawing board.
So while he could spend a huge amount of time doing
all these basic things in C and still have major
risks for the people running it, he has chosen to
use the right tool for the job.
Umm... Yeah, whatever. He wants to run a CPU-intensive
background process, performing a totally straightforward
set of calculations, and nothing else. No GUI (beyond a
few simple controls to make it play nice), and nothing
server-side - sounds like a perfect candidate for anything
but Java.
Personally, I'd say this even sounds like a good
candidate for hand-tuned assembly. But then, at
least from my alma-mater, they don't even
require that to graduate in CS anymore. Sad... And
people actually wonder why tech jobs keep heading
for India. Well, the FP and you just provided a
nice answer - Using Java for a tightly CPU-bound
problem? Using threads for the same (Ever heard of
"cache consistancy"? Yet another reason to avoid
multithreading in a program of this nature)? Why
not just downgrade to a 486? Same effect, less
complex.
do they sell at the same rate they buy from?
depends on the state..
I'd worry about that, too...
Looking at my own electric bill, it divides
almost perfectly in half, with 50% going
to electric "supply", and 50% going to
"distribution". So, even if they paid me
the same rate they charge me, it would seem
that, no matter how much I produce, I could
at best break even (since presumeably I
would make the money on supply, but still
have to pay almost the same rate for
distribution).
I dunno. But personally, I'd stay on the
grid (unless something major happened, in
which case, I'd make damn sure I had an
overly-dramatic Very Big Switch I could
throw to disconnect me) just for the
convenience factor in case something
goes wrong with my own production system
(generator breaks, stream dries up,
whatever).
As an aside, though, I still consider wind
the way to go (though would certainly not
suggest we completely skip solar, but I would
consider solar more of a backup system than
a primary one). With hydroelectric, you need
year-round running water with a decent head.
With solar, you need a fairly high-capacity
storage system for the 60-80% of the day when
you can't generate enough to match usage.
With any sort of combustion, you need fuel.
But with wind? It doesn't even really matter
where you live - an 80' tower will produce
a few kW just about anywhere. Aside from
the "ugly" factor, including a wind turbine
into the cost of every new house would
reduce our current electric grid from a critical
utility, to little more than a backup system.
When I finally "settle down", I consider that
a major point in my decision of where to
buy property - If I can't have a wind turbine
due to local BS laws and zoning regs, I won't
live there.
PlayFair actually checks that you have
a valid key to use the downloaded music. It
won't work on music that you haven't paid for.
Thus, it doesn't "circumvent" the DRM, it fully
enforces it. It does, however, change
what happens to the music for those with legal
access to it. Rather than play it, it writes
the perfectly-legitimately-accessed music
stream to a non-DRM'd AAC file.
Call such a distinction nit-picking, but that
very fact means the difference between a DMCA
violation and a legal use of one's purchased
music.
Now, an end-user actually doing this
process may violate their contract with
Apple, but that differs drastically from
the authors of PlayFair violating the DMCA.
you just gotta get your DMCA violating source
code from an off-shore ISP or get sourceforge to
relocate.
Exactly what happened - The project relocated to
Sarovar, an Indian equivalent to SourceForge.
Since India lacks an equivalent to the DMCA, the
project should count as legal now.
Interestingly, I'd like any readers of this to
really stop and think about what that means - A
project designed to protect our fair use (a concept
itself (theoretically) recognized in the US but not
in all countries) may have broken US law (unless
this goes to trial, we can't say they did
break the law), simply by moving to another country,
magically becomes legal.
So, the DMCA has so much validity that one can
circumvent it (how apropos <G>) merely
by changing where the "illegal" codebase resides?
Definite problem there... Which of course, rather
than address in any meaningful way, US lawmakers
will try to "fix" by imposing the DMCA on the entire
world via treaties (such as those currently under
debate in the UN).
then you just push the mess back one
level - what counts as "income"?
Income - anything that comes into my posession
that I do not need to eventually return (with
the sole exception, for the purpose of avoiding
recursion, that you do not need to consider
tax refunds as income). So a loan wouldn't
count, but my salary would.
e.g. $1,000 student loan. is the tax -200,
0 or 200?
Considering the numer of students who itemize
deductions, does it really matter? But assuming
you want to consider such things, "0". You pay
it back, so not really income. As for getting
a tax break on the interest - Screw that. I
spend what I have. If I take out a loan, the
interest on it serves as a direct disincentive,
so what point exists in reducing that disincentive?
Actually, speaking of recursion, I did encounter
a curious problem while doing my taxes this
year... To calculate the "Alternative Minimum
Tax", you need to know your state taxes. But
most states (mine included) base your taxes
on your federal return. Anyone else get a tad
confused by this? I suppose one could, in
theory, iteratively recalculate both until the
difference settles below half of a cent, but
that doesn't really seem to make much sense
for the majority of non-computer-geek taxpayers
out there...
Slashdot Mirror
Ever considered streaming from high-quality stations then?
/.'ers, I enjoy the use of the
internet for almost all my informational
needs; but sometimes, SneakerNet still
offers advantages you just can't get
anywhere online.
Feel free to name a few - Either >256k/s, or >160k/s VBR (I don't know of any VBR streams, since streaming inherently tends to require CBR content)...
Although, I've asked before, and I'll probably ask again - Why not just rip from CDs borrowed from friends (or the library)? Equally untraceable (if not more so, since although they can't tell what you do with the stream, I'd imagine it must look exceedingly strange to see someone listening to half-a-dozen stations at a time, 24/7), and you get to have 100% control over the resulting rip. Best of all possible worlds - You get the songs, you get as high of a quality as you want, you get whatever format you prefer, and not even the person you borrow the CD from needs to know what you've done (although at least for friends, most really don't care, beyond asking for some reciprocation).
Like many
I wonder how this is going to hold up in court?
Better question - What do they plan to charge people with, since they conveniently destroy all the available evidence?
Sure, they may occasionally save people from a bomb. But 99% of the time when you hear about a "suspicious package", it turns out as something like lunchmeat or talcum powder for a baby.
Call me paranoid, but I consider this pretty damned scary...
"We found your fingerprints on an unmarked package at a bus station. We have decided to charge you as a terrorist"
"But that just had my dirty clothes in it"
"Oh yeah? Prove it!"
"Umm... You blew it into a million bits"
"Gotcha - The bits tested positive for explosives"
"I repeat, you blew it up. Of course it tested positive for explosives, the same ones you used on it!"
"Oh, convenient story, you goddamned terrorist! Say 'hi' to Bubba for me, scum."
"???"
Of course, any such case should get thrown out of court (under the once-upon-a-time idea of "innocent until proven guilty"). I, however, wouldn't want to bet my anal virginity on that.
This is why I asked for someone to dig up a link.
Unfortunately, you probably won't find a link - I've never seen more than passing references to catalytic photolysis outside research journals.
So where can I get a water photolysis system that yields more energy out than a $15-20k photovoltaic system? Does this exist outside of research labs and plant leaves?
Again, you can't. Despite readily-reproduceable results, I know of no commercial systems that work by this method. I agree, holy grail indeed! Sure, the catalysts don't come cheap, but compared to $20k+ for PV?
I apologize for the scarcity of info on this topic... Believe me, I wish I could tell you more, but I have only recently come across this concept myself, and it looks truly staggering in the implications. It also looks like one of those areas of research that people keep very quiet about, either in the hopes of someday marketing it, or for fear of incurring the wrath of our oil-baron leaders.
Isn't it fairly ineffecient to use the electricity to make hydrogen? It seems to me you would get more usable energy by just useing the power the solar cells create directly.
Think "batteries".
Storing enough electricity for a whole house for a few days (might have rain for a week, thus very little electricity produced) takes a bank of batteries, and charging control equipment, that cost as much as the PV array itself, and worse, they tend to only have a useful life of 5-10 years (20 for some of the really high-end ones).
Storing hydrogen takes a tank, a low-volume compressor, and a network of cheap copper or cast iron pipe (not sure which you'd use for hydrogen - Bottled LPG uses 3/8ths copper, while "on-grid" NG uses 1/2" cast iron). Only part that can wear out, the seals on the compressor - A sub-$20 replacement part every couple of years.
I do have a question about why they chose to use PV to electrolytically produce hydrogen, though - Consumer-grade PV only gets an operating yield of around 20% and drops over time, and electrolysis of water gets 80% efficiency. Right off the bat, you've wasted 85-90% of the energy from the sun. Catalytic Photolysis, however, can get 40-60% efficiency, and directly produces hydrogen from water + sun (and better, as research into the catalysts involved advances, they will go up in efficiency and down in price).
So, why PV rather than photolysis? Not only could he get a higher yield, but the up-front cost drops substantially (in US dollars, I'd estimate well under $5k, vs $15-20k for a large enough PV array).
for
Other than the few people who are signed but still have files available (Armchair Martian) who is worth listening to?
Red Delicious (a sort of college-rock/acoustic Garbage group), Bitsream Dream (electronic with a formerly large list on MP3.com, but check out "Velvet Black" and the "Anger Management" remix, and "Buddha's Patio" doesn't suck, either), and Ghost in the Machine (not-quite-ambient, sort of an electronic Robert Miles), to name three that I discovered through MP3.com and at least a handful of their work made it to my personal playlist.
Or, how about Jonne Valtonen, better known (one upon a time) as Purple Motion of Future Crew?
Add to that a few dozen one-offs that made it to my playlist (mostly by artists I lack the name of), and although it makes a low overall S:N, MP3.com did indeed have some great music available there.
If a language feature makes code hard for others to understand, then it is not a good feature of the language.
My grandmother has trouble understanding functions, variables, and flow-control. Should I not use them?
Arguments like this absolutely infuriate me. I code to the best of my ability. I may have little loyalty to an employer who might up and outsource my job to India next week, but damn me if I don't produce good code.
If someone that replaces me can't read my code due to making full use of the language, then the company has failed to replace me. Nothing more, nothing less.
Windown 95 did not support sound "out of the box" on my ancient (as in, P90-era) laptop.
Not to say that I couldn't get it to work under Win95, but it required a driver from the manufacturer. Piece of cake - Go to the website, grab the driver, and poof, all set.
Now, why can't I do the same under Linux?
Because the manufacturers don't provide drivers for Linux (Actually, in my case, it used some ESS variant, and I managed to get a hacked-up workaround, but nothing as simple as "Stick this on your system and do an insmod").
So, should we blame Linux for this? IMO, Linux has just as good sound "support", at the OS-level, as Windows. It just lacks 3rd-party support, with most of what it does have coming from people who took the time to track down specs (from hardware vendors who balk at even giving out the most basic info even though your work will potentially increase their customer base) and wrote a driver themselves.
In my opinion as an author, that solution is morally untenable, since it amounts to self-labeling and self-censoring.
Your readers wouldn't see such obfuscation, they'd only see the words as you intended them. How does that amount to self-censorship? You haven't actually changed your message, only completely hidden aspects of the medium.
Compare that to simply not having anyone able to read your work. Does that seem preferable?
However, on a purely ideal level, I agree with you. Censorship should simply not exist, whether at work, by/in an organization, or by a government. No one should need to hide their message from anyone, ever. But, censorship does exist, at so many levels it makes me seriously wonder why we (in the US) even have the first amendment. You can deal with the realities of that, or go completely unnoticed... Your choice.
And even so (I'm ashamed to admit) there's a bit of spyware that I can't seem to track down.
Do a Google search for "sted380.zip" (you don't want the ones after that, they disable themselves after a while). It lets you see exactly what programs your computer loads via the numerous startup methods, and delete them. Short of your particular problem somehow running as an actual device-driver, this would let you kill it.
Also, you might want to make sure you don't have any strange-looking services running - I've seen a number of difficult-to-remove programs that work by letting you kill them easily, but they don't remove an associated service that just reinstalls them at the next reboot.
That's not "slightly" misleading, that is *extremely* misleading.
I disagree - Not all cookies do the same harmless things - A tracking cookie (the sort AdAware usually catches) can cause almost as much privacy-leakage as a full-fledged running spyware program such as Gator. No, they can't log your every keystroke, but for the purpose of most spyware (namely, building a very detailed demographic profile on the user), they do just fine.
Just because it uses your browser to do its damage, don't assume them as harmless - A biological virus can't "do" anything by itself, either, until it find a host cell willing to "run" it's "code".
Do you have that comic book cover (and associated book) with Binky fighting the other rabbit, which Groening extorted out of existence?
:-)
Nah... I've seen a handful of scans from it, but never the whole thing. If I saw it dumped in full to a newsgroup, I'd grab it, but I won't bother trying to track it down one page at a time from the net.
Now, if you have a link to it in full... By all means, respond with a URL and I'd grab it. But the collector-with-an-OCD-streak in me really can't stand partial sets of anything.
that one user will end up sending email to the other via an AOL server in Chicago, when they could have easily used "net send ..." ?
Since "net send" doesn't understand the idea of a truly multiheaded system, the desktop it shows up on would occur pretty much by chance (or, more likely, always on the primary head).
Irrelevant, though, since the two users would need to occupy nearby physical locations - At best, you could probably put this in one room and run the second head through the wall into an adjacent room (in which case, I suspect you have it right, they'd probably try to chat via Chicago or some other equally remote place (where do AIM's servers live?) rather than just talking directly).
Overall, not worth the trouble. For the extra money (and you still need two monitors/keyboards/mice, plus the thing doesn't even come with a dual-headed video card!), you could make a far more stable second system.
I wonder how licensing will work for software installed on such a computer.
For a better question, I wonder if anyone (other than Microsoft) will care.
Not a troll or flamebait - Really, how many home users actually went out and bought Windows or Office? For a business, a few hundred bucks might not mean much (particularly in comparison with getting caught running an unlicensed app). For a home user, many people balk at even paying $50 for their tax software, nevermind something as mundane as a word processor and spreadsheet (and the rest, that I have yet to see anyone use outside a work environment).
People get Windows with their machines. They get Office from a friend or borrow the install CD from work. Legality simply doesn't matter, end of story.
Or, for an already-common analogy, how many people paid extra fees to use on a dual-CPU box (most commercial software includes provisions limiting its use to on a per-CPU basis as well)? Answer? No one. Even businesses usually overlook that one, for "mere" duals.
what other 'controversial' apps are there?
I don't currently have access to my archive of them (I could post it next week, but Slashdot discussions rarely last beyond the day they hit FP) so can't just give you a full list, but as the other one I recently added to my collection, DVD X Copy. Oh, and Kazaa Lite - Not quite the same status as something like DeCSS, but still technically banned.
I have somewhere around two dozen programs, total. And as I mentioned, most of them I have no use at all for (thus don't really remember much about them - Hell, until this new PadLockSL issue, I had even forgotten about Nullsoft's Waste).
But I also include other sorts of banned media as well - DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album, for example (available via Illegal Art), or just about anything by NegativLand. Or check out Wally Wood's "Disneyland Memorial Orgy" or Tim Maloney's (the actual "creator" of Disney's version of The Little Mermaid) video (of a NegativLand song, unsurprisingly) "Gimme the Mermaid". Not software, but all fall into the same category - Things that only our insane laws have made taboo.
Note that I do not inlude blatantly stolen things, such as the Windows source code. I do not like Microsoft, and would like them to open their code, but something like that leaves no moral ambiguity at all as to who owns it. (Now, if someone used it to make something "really" artistic (rather than "first amendment proof of concept artistic" such as occurred with DeCSS), I would consider adding that to my collection.
Okay, just remembered one more - StreamBox VCR, which RealNetworks managed to get an injunction against. Actually, that counts as one of the few that I do use at least occasionally.
A song, like a book (or book series), is a discrete unit of art.
;-)
I think I would take that a step further...
You have hit the nail square on, but not noticed that the nail holds two boards together. Most music currently occurs as one-off compositions, with little to no unity between songs on an album. Thus, for most music, I prefer a semi-random shuffle. But for works that do have a sense of unity, I rarely play them in isolation.
In reasonably-modern music, I can only think of a handful of albums that "should" stay as a whole. I think would consider Pink Floyd the best known (I can't stand hearing "Another Brick in the Wall" or "Comfortably Numb" in isolation from the rest of "The Wall"). Quite a bit of classical music (by which I mean the genre, not the specific time period) also falls into that category as well - Although I enjoy Mussorgsky (just as an example) while driving, I tend to find classical radio stations extremely frustrating in that they'll play just "Bydio" from "Pictures at an Exhibition" in isolation from the rest. Or just the third movement from Beethoven's ninth. That drives me totally batty.
On the other hand, what little pop music I do enjoy, I have no interest at all in hearing the full album, because the songs have no relation between each other, and for that matter, usually literally 90% of the songs on even a "hit" album quite simply suck.
Now, if you want to consider where the line blurs, the FP may have some ground to make an argument. Blue Man Group's "The Complex", for example - Each track fits thematically with one another, but beyond the tempo progression, I wouldn't say you lose anything by shuffling the order. But the linked article does not make that distinction, so I do not think I cheat them in my take on the meaninglessness of their findings.
So, does a preference for a playlist reflect my attention span, or the artist's? I'd tend to say the latter. But then, perhaps I just have too much brain damage to know the difference, and lack the saavy to appreciate why I shouldn't listen to "Oops I Did it Again" without also following through to "Dear Diary" (despite them not even having the same author, just the same singer).
Not that it stopped me from downloading it. I don't like being told by whatever power that I can't read forbidden text.
I think that counts as the best possible outcome we can achieve in the current legal climate - That we can download it regardless of legality. Apple wants to squash it, and in trying to do so, have guaranteed it immortality (almost a software equivalent of martyrdom).
Personally, I downloaded it because of the legality, as I have done with several similar programs (DeCSS, Waste, PadLock, etc) in the past. I don't even have an iPod, nor an iTMS account, nor will I ever (I would rather pay a few bucks more for a physical CD of the music, and keep all my own ripped music as OGGs, not AACs). But because Apple decided to go after them, I grabbed a copy.
You could call this "petulant" if you wanted, but really, what more can we do? "Civic Duty" advocates might say "vote". Market-focused individuals would say "vote with your dollar". But put simply, neither of those matters, nor does any other action I could take. "The little guy", ie, almost all of us, has absolutely no say in what the government or corporate America does, we can at best try to poke sticks into the chinks in their legal armor.
I do have to wonder, though - Why has Apple gone after PlayFair, but not VideoLan (which can also remove FairPlay, though taking just a bit more effort)? I do have a theory on that - VideoLan's ability comes directly from "DVD Jon", who already won (in his own country) a very similar precedent-setting case - Namely, over DeCSS. If Apple went after him, his lawyer would just point to his earlier victory and call it a day.
While he makes a good point he does it in a childish immature troll-like fashion.
He does not make a good point. The GPL doesn't say "if you give a link to the binary, you must give a link to the source". It says that you need to comply with at least one of the options under section three - Which simply by including the GPL (in the form of the "COPYING" file), Wang33 has done.
Unless AirLace contacted Wang33 to request the source and either waited a reasonable amount of time or received an outright rejection, then Wang33 did NOT violate the GPL. Additionally, since he downloaded it from a site that originally offered the source code, and he did not modify that code, you could probably argue that he also complied with 3.c, even though VIA pulled original site (an event over which Wang33 had no control).
Going even further, in complying with the spirit of the GPL, if not the letter, I'd have to say that pulling their own code implies that VIA (and NullSoft before them) would prefer it not receive wide distribution. Since only the actual copyright holder can go after violations, I highly doubt VIA (or NullSoft) would, in this situation, choose to complain that someone didn't distribute the source code.
Thus, we can safely say that AirLace did not make a good point, he just wanted to act like a complete asshole. We don't need people like him to "help" enforce the GPL. Particularly in this sort of situation, where Slashdot, as a community, has worked to prevent some useful but suddenly unkosher software from slipping into the void... Real situations trump idealistic legalities - If you save someone from drowning, no court will care that you ignored a "no trespassing" sign to do so. Similarly, A GPL violation (in letter but not spirit) for the sake of preventing this software from ceasing to exist does not strike me as a reason to go on a rampage over the perceived violation.
Do the GPL a favor and mod parent TROLL.
"Troll" does not suffice for this. If he had just whined about it, I might call him "only" a troll. Releasing personal info on a mere accusation, and not even a true one at that? We don't have a "should fuck off and die" mod.
It would be nice if they just sandwiched the media between two .6mm pieces of plastic,
wouldn't change the thickness of the disc,
but at least there would be a bit more
protection for the media.
I think we call those "DVDs".
Seriously. It astounds me that we'd take a step back with the next generation...
Scratch the top of a CD, and you have a coaster (most people don't realize this, but your CDs will live longer if you store them such that any damage will occur to the bottom rather than the top. Scratch the top of a DVD, and you have a DVD with a scratch on top, but otherwise just fine.
or leases for his or her own use to provide himself or herself with services used as a substitute for any switched service or dedicated facility by which a dealer of communications services provides a communication path
If you have the right statute (I can't tell myself, even RTFA'ing didn't help much), then I see two reasons why this wouldn't apply to a LAN, only to a WAN...
First, no "dealer of communications services provides a communication path" between my upstairs and downstrairs computers. So, no problem here.
Second, even if some company did decide to fill that niche, I could also consider myself a "dealer", selling bandwidth to myself for no cost. Thus, their 9.x percent tax amounts to zero. I don't mean this as a stupid semantic argument, either... If the law considers such a "service" as something that someone needs to provide, then it clearly can't exist without someone providing it (pretty much a reflexive statement). Thus, that "provider" would in effect act as a dealer of networking services. Since I did not charge myself to install my LAN, I clearly would owe nothing (if I lived in Florida, which thankfully I do not - That place has far more problems than just a LAN tax).
Interestingly, on the second point - Since I work as an IT consultant, if I donate my services in administering a LAN to myself, does that mean I could write off the equvalent of one network admin's salary on my taxes as a business loss? Obviously I can't claim it as a charitable donation, but if they can try to tax it, why can't I call it a business loss? It has value. No one paid me. Loss.
So.. why not make standard hard drive controlers and buy new enclosed hard disks with heads.
Because you could get 100GB per $60 if you just go with EIDE drives.
Oh, wait, which stance did you want defended?
Seriously, this strikes me as a joke. You can get an external USB enclosure for less than $100, and 3x the media size for the same price as the Rev cartridges. Why the hell would any sane person go with Iomega on this one? Certainly not <click> their legendary <click> reputation for producing reliable<click>, long-term backup <click> solutions... The other respondant to you mentioned the idea of a safe full of HDDs... Now, I'll admit that HDDs tend to die more often than actual DLTs, but compared to Iomega's reputation with Zip and Jaz drives? I'd trust my critical data to an ancient RLL HDD before I'd rely on a Jaz cartridge...
There's this thing called SMP, which lets you have multiple CPU's in one machine.
One could simply run the program twice... That style of use (two CPUs so two threads) illustrates what I mean - Many people would think nothing of tossing off a new thread, despite the need for absolutely no communication between the two threads/processes. Why?
Tuned for what processor?
P4, then Athlon, then P-III, then a tight generic C version as a fallback. Although P4 actually includes three (four, now?) significantly differernt chips, the Athlon includes four, and the P-III includes two , we can safely ignore those differences since this task could probably fit its entire core routine's data in L1 cache. As for other architectures - First of all, I can absolutely guarantee that you'll get a far higher total volume of work done just by specifically optimizing for 80% (RNPOOMA) of desktops running one of those, than by dragging the whole thing to a crawl just to allow the other 20% of desktops to also run this program.
Now, if he knows he'll have a very large number of Sun IVs or G5s or the like running this, it would make sense to support that. But barring that, from the stated purpose of this run, he'd do better to completely ignore them (or at most provide a vanilla C version) and focus on what most of his target userbase actually has.
Apart from compiler writers, who needs hand-tuned assembler?
People interested in "recreational mathematics" programming, exactly like this particular project. People who fully expect to take a few centuries of CPU time spread across hundreds of machines.
To give me some credibility here, I recently finished just such a run myself, searching for Lychrel seeds. Racked up 30+ years of CPU time, and just the postprocessing to get the results in a meaningful form will take four months (can't distribute that, unfortunately, so four "real" months).
It's impossible to port without a complete rewrite, difficult to upkeep, and you'd need to retune your programs every time a new processor comes out.
I specifically mentioned my recent project (above) for one reason - I did port it mid-project. We started off targetting only Windows machines, but suddenly needed to support Linux. Total time for the port? Three days. If I hadn't stupidly used GetFileAttributes() rather than the tried-and-true (and portable) stat() call, the port would have taken under an hour. Once it ran on Linux, we could have run on any machine that supports Linux.
Now, you may say, Linux on a P4 has the same CPU tuning as Windows on a P4. True. However, "supporting" a platform doesn't mean you need to waste hundreds of hours optimizing for that platfom. You might only have a single client program on obscure-platform-X, why waste time?
Developer time is better spent optimizing algorithms than performing mechanical tasks that the computer can do for you.
You go right ahead and figure out a better way to track particle trajectories. Perhaps I'll read about you making a fortune by writing the next big 3d game engine. In the mean time, in terms of accomplishing a specific goal, taking the current best and making an optimized implementation will get the job done. And while, in another decade you may still not have built a better mousetrap, this project will have finished, published, and perhaps started gearing up for a "Mega-zillion" iteration run.
He needs networking connection, a decent threading model and doesn't want to crash your box.
False, on all of the above.
For "networking", users will manually send him their cache directory (as the FP explicitly stated). As for threading... To do what? He wants to run a completely straightforward trajectory simulation, iterated a few "zillion" times. I'll admit that I have a bias against most uses of multithreading and consider them inappropriate 99.9% of the time, but if you can even force them onto this project, you need to go back to the drawing board.
So while he could spend a huge amount of time doing all these basic things in C and still have major risks for the people running it, he has chosen to use the right tool for the job.
Umm... Yeah, whatever. He wants to run a CPU-intensive background process, performing a totally straightforward set of calculations, and nothing else. No GUI (beyond a few simple controls to make it play nice), and nothing server-side - sounds like a perfect candidate for anything but Java.
Personally, I'd say this even sounds like a good candidate for hand-tuned assembly. But then, at least from my alma-mater, they don't even require that to graduate in CS anymore. Sad... And people actually wonder why tech jobs keep heading for India. Well, the FP and you just provided a nice answer - Using Java for a tightly CPU-bound problem? Using threads for the same (Ever heard of "cache consistancy"? Yet another reason to avoid multithreading in a program of this nature)? Why not just downgrade to a 486? Same effect, less complex.
do they sell at the same rate they buy from? depends on the state..
I'd worry about that, too...
Looking at my own electric bill, it divides almost perfectly in half, with 50% going to electric "supply", and 50% going to "distribution". So, even if they paid me the same rate they charge me, it would seem that, no matter how much I produce, I could at best break even (since presumeably I would make the money on supply, but still have to pay almost the same rate for distribution).
I dunno. But personally, I'd stay on the grid (unless something major happened, in which case, I'd make damn sure I had an overly-dramatic Very Big Switch I could throw to disconnect me) just for the convenience factor in case something goes wrong with my own production system (generator breaks, stream dries up, whatever).
As an aside, though, I still consider wind the way to go (though would certainly not suggest we completely skip solar, but I would consider solar more of a backup system than a primary one). With hydroelectric, you need year-round running water with a decent head. With solar, you need a fairly high-capacity storage system for the 60-80% of the day when you can't generate enough to match usage. With any sort of combustion, you need fuel. But with wind? It doesn't even really matter where you live - an 80' tower will produce a few kW just about anywhere. Aside from the "ugly" factor, including a wind turbine into the cost of every new house would reduce our current electric grid from a critical utility, to little more than a backup system. When I finally "settle down", I consider that a major point in my decision of where to buy property - If I can't have a wind turbine due to local BS laws and zoning regs, I won't live there.
They basically broke the law
No, they didn't.
PlayFair actually checks that you have a valid key to use the downloaded music. It won't work on music that you haven't paid for. Thus, it doesn't "circumvent" the DRM, it fully enforces it. It does, however, change what happens to the music for those with legal access to it. Rather than play it, it writes the perfectly-legitimately-accessed music stream to a non-DRM'd AAC file.
Call such a distinction nit-picking, but that very fact means the difference between a DMCA violation and a legal use of one's purchased music.
Now, an end-user actually doing this process may violate their contract with Apple, but that differs drastically from the authors of PlayFair violating the DMCA.
you just gotta get your DMCA violating source code from an off-shore ISP or get sourceforge to relocate.
Exactly what happened - The project relocated to Sarovar, an Indian equivalent to SourceForge. Since India lacks an equivalent to the DMCA, the project should count as legal now.
Interestingly, I'd like any readers of this to really stop and think about what that means - A project designed to protect our fair use (a concept itself (theoretically) recognized in the US but not in all countries) may have broken US law (unless this goes to trial, we can't say they did break the law), simply by moving to another country, magically becomes legal.
So, the DMCA has so much validity that one can circumvent it (how apropos <G>) merely by changing where the "illegal" codebase resides? Definite problem there... Which of course, rather than address in any meaningful way, US lawmakers will try to "fix" by imposing the DMCA on the entire world via treaties (such as those currently under debate in the UN).
Dike, meet fingers. Fingers, meet Dike.
then you just push the mess back one level - what counts as "income"?
Income - anything that comes into my posession that I do not need to eventually return (with the sole exception, for the purpose of avoiding recursion, that you do not need to consider tax refunds as income). So a loan wouldn't count, but my salary would.
e.g. $1,000 student loan. is the tax -200, 0 or 200?
Considering the numer of students who itemize deductions, does it really matter? But assuming you want to consider such things, "0". You pay it back, so not really income. As for getting a tax break on the interest - Screw that. I spend what I have. If I take out a loan, the interest on it serves as a direct disincentive, so what point exists in reducing that disincentive?
Actually, speaking of recursion, I did encounter a curious problem while doing my taxes this year... To calculate the "Alternative Minimum Tax", you need to know your state taxes. But most states (mine included) base your taxes on your federal return. Anyone else get a tad confused by this? I suppose one could, in theory, iteratively recalculate both until the difference settles below half of a cent, but that doesn't really seem to make much sense for the majority of non-computer-geek taxpayers out there...