Say I rent a DVD from Blockbuster. Ok, I did that last night. I've read the receipt and don't see any license or restrictions on what I may do with the DVD itself. Can't I pass it on to a friend to watch it if I want to? So, if I do that and 20 people see it in the week for which it was rented, isn't that fine? What if I rent the DVD and exhibit it at a party in my home? That's the whole point of renting DVDs, right? Blockbuster doesn't ask how many people are going to be watching the movie and charge more for more viewers. (Not that they probably haven't thought about it).
Now, most people would probably agree that the above uses of a DVD that I've rented would be considered acceptable. What about letting all 20 people (who were going to see it anyway) watch the DVD outside where I project it on a large building across the street? Is that any different? Keep in mind, I'm not charging money for my friends to see this movie. I'm making no profit. I paid $4 for 2 days of enjoyment of this DVD.
Now, I know there's a disclaimer that says I can't use it for public performances, but why? These uses aren't insidious in any way. I'm not cheating the studios or the theaters or Blockbuster out of any money. I'm using the disc the way most people use a DVD when they rent it.
I swear, if the MPAA makes movies only viewable through DRM, trusted computing, and a freakin' DNA scan, I'm ripping out my eyes and not watching another movie for the rest of my life (well, you know what I mean).
Oh, by the way, what if the disclaimer doesn't show up when I use dvdsimple://F:@1:1 in VLC to play the movie on a laptop and project it? I haven't seen a rental ad or trailer or damn into on a DVD in a year since I've started using VLC.
I suppose there could be a sharp edge on the lead of the scew... there could also be problems with clotting at center of the screw or at the edges of the tube containing the screw.
A helical pump might also work if the problems I wondered about for an Archimedes' screw were not problems.
Exactly. The thing that worries me about the trend is that it might become impossible to buy a device that is ONLY that specific device. I mean, technically you're committing a crime if you bring your cellular phone with a camera built-in to a movie theater in certain jurisdictions.
I want to be able to get my cheaper, smaller, thinner, better call phone without crap in it.
I welcome the trend, too, but there's always a "primary" device. In this case, it's a phone with a camera built in. The main functionality of the device is to work as a phone. It doesn't matter if the camera sucks, that's not the primary use of the device is.
I don't want to hold a really really heavy device to my ear to hear the phone because it has a gigantic hard drive built into it. And there's no way that a phone-integrated digital camera is ever going to really replace the high-end markets for other devices (think digital SLR, powerful computer, etc).
There's some integration of devices going on now, but it's always a crippled integration. The trend is encouraging, but I'm not sure it's ever really going to lead to anything.
It's so small, direct download is much faster than bittorrent. Besides, who's going to keep the seed going? It's an itty-bitty file. I leave mandrake-iso's going (or even re-start them sometimes), but why bother for such a small file?
If you're going to watch it anyway, why not just "wget http://images2.shockwave.com/afassets/flash/this_l and.swf" (removing the spaces) and actually save it to your HD so you have it later and don't have to download it every time you watch it or show it to people? It's just the same amount of load on the server in the beginning, but it's more convenient later.
Again, he's not internally consistant with his own story. You can quote and I can quote and we'll end up with two different values for the class of the laser because he lists two different values himself. I posted on the topic because there was no way a class I laser could cause ANY harm and I knew it. I still think they're being dumb for not publishing because the interlock was circumvented and a class II laser is now potentially exposed. It's visible light and your blink reflex will prevent vision damage.
he's not internally consistant with his page. The quote in the original post is a direct copy and paste. Also, yes, we've determined it's class II, but you've really got nothing to worry about since, as another poster pointed out, it's a red laser of less that 1mW. It's Nintendo covering their ass and a lot of/.'ers not seeing the point of my original post. It's nintendo covering their ass, but there's very little to worry about and it was just some lame-ass excuse to not publish the project.
Isn't this kind of the "old paradigm" for portals? I'd be far more interested if Google managed to come up with a new paradigm for data and information delivery much like their threaded concept for Gmail. If I want a page with email, stock quotes, tv listings, news, etc I can go over and use my.yahoo.com. That's been around for years, and I hope that Google doesn't tailor a unified portal just to compete with that. Google as a company is a great innovator and a new concept would keep them ahead of the game and make other people catch up instead of Google catching up with what Yahoo already offers.
You're assuming the laser emits radiation in a visible wavelength. Some CD player lasers user IR laser diodes which could POTENTIALLY damage your vision without any perception that the laser was on. But yeah, you'd probably be fine.
Some extra checking shows that they might not be totally full of shit. Wikipedia discusses Laser safety and mentions that a laser may be defined as a class I laser system if there is an interlock preventing exposure with the laser. It's not obvious that's what Nintendo meant to say, but it's possible the laser is actually class II but the interlock makes it class I. Or it's still possible the laser itself is class I and there's nothing to worry about. Either way, I think they should have published the photos.
the Nintendo GameCube has a Class I laser housed inside a Class I case and if the mechanism is bypassed that prevents operation of the laser while the lid is open, then potential eye damage is probable. They didn't want to give anyone the idea to take apart a GameCube and damage their vision.
Well, drawing upon the definition of class 1 lasers, we can see that:
No individual, regardless of exposure conditions to the eyes or skin, would be expected to be injured by a Class I laser. No safety requirements are needed to use Class I laser devices.
It is neat that they replied with a non-canned response, but it was total BS. You don't have anything to worry about with this laser, and they just don't want to encourage people to modify their products like this for some reason.
But the Vulcans are supposedly from our own galaxy, not a galaxy far, far away. Oh, and vulcan space travel would be occurring now or in the future vs. a long time ago as Star Wars supposedly took place.
Sandia National Labs, unlike Los Alamos, is not run by the University of California system. Rather, Lockheed-Martin (and before that AT&T) ran the Labs after they were split from Los Alamos as a separate division.
What is the main advantage to having a bluetooth enaabled phone? I guess when I shop I look for reasonable price, tri-band (Not a lot of digital coverage in the rural West of USA), and maybe a good selection of features from the service provider such as internet.
As I understand it, Bluetooth allows two different electronic devices to interact, but what would a bluetooth cell phone do? Interact with a PDA/Laptop? I've searched around on Google, and mainly it's the typical sales sites without any real information on the benefits.
Basically, it comes down to a question from me: Should I look for a bluetooth enabled phone for my next cell phone?
220 is large enough for statistical sampling in some cases, but when you just say "only 30 people" should have gotten cancer, I wonder what statistic you're using. Perhaps you're simply comparing the incidence of cancer in local/national populations with that of the crew/cast? A small sample group of 220 may be large enough to do such a comparison, but any social scientist or epidemiologist will tell you about the problems you get when you compare two different sized groups on one single statistic. It's more complicated than most people realize.
I don't know about software, but I was dabbling in learning the Arabic alphabet and language this Summer. In the course of my searching, I found one site called Fun With Arabic that does a pretty good job teaching some things. You can learn the alphabet, some common words, and eventually learn to write Arabic script. A second site which I haven't even checked out yet is Babel Arabic.
I hope these prove useful. I learned a bit just playing around with the sites last week. Good luck - Arabic is a step harder to learn than German or French because you have to learn the alphabet first.
If you're just looking for conversational Arabic, I don't think the sites address that as much. I found a few that do, but if you're planning on being in the Middle East for any period of time, I'd assume you'd like to learn to read and write, as well.
I know it's not non-profit, but Thawte does provide personal certificates for free. You can use them for email encryption and signing without any difficulty. As for server certificates (https, etc), I think you'd have to pay for, but for personal email usage, Thawte is a pretty good option.
I completely agree. Why not just use tabbed interfaces for individual programs? The taskbar was designed to allow easy access to each running application. When all it says is "Mozilla Firefox 9", that's not useful to me. Also, any ordering of programs in the taskbar that I may have DELIBERATELY set up disappears. Does anyone know if it can be turned off? I know it's more an annoyance than a feature.
Tabs inside programs allow me to bring the program I want to the front and then to find the right tab inside it. If MS can't get it right and allow lots of user customization, at least Mozilla has it right.
It would be hypocritical, but they will probably try it anyway. "Trust the butterfly!" Seriously, though, as long as we are willing to allow "free" portals to have access to all of our personal information, how can we get upset when they have access to our personal information? MS can hold on to your CC# and passwords and automatically fill them in on sites that require it, if you use hotmail they have your email, and they're trying to improve their crappy search engine that few people use. Oh, and if you use MSN, they've got you that way too. Yahoo has shops and stores that I find somehow already know my credit card number (past purchase, no doubt), they have my email (one of my account anyway), and they offer searching, tv-listings, a calendar, etc. That's just a few examples of what MS and Yahoo! aleady have from millions of customers. The fact that Google (which has proven itself less scuzzy than its competition) is trying to expand is welcomed by myself and nearly all my friends. If you give all your info to a site, don't be surprised if they have all your info at a later date. Convenience and privacy are hard to simultaneously maintain with current services.
I know I would love to see the prices on movie tickets go down, too. The problem I see with this is that the way Hollywood seems to track movie attendance is by DOLLAR AMOUNT of tickets sold, not TOTAL NUMBER of tickets sold. That's just something to take into consideration for distribution companies to begin charging less. I'm not even positive the number of tickets sold is tracked any longer. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I know the news media certainly doesn't report it.
Another thing - we seem to think theaters rip us off for a 64-oz soda (or whatever a LARGE is today). Maybe that's a good thing considering the sheer amount of calories a non-diet soda that size contains.
We all know the syrup and carbonated water doesn't cost anywhere near what we even pay at McDonald's, but we pay it anyway. Until there's a complete price restructuring for all soft drinks (fountain drinks cost less for Schwepps vs. Coca Cola brands for example), I think we don't have much cause to go after the concessions prices that keep the theaters open. If you don't like their price, don't buy their sugar. Movie prices are another matter, of course.
I saw a program for just this purpose posted on slashdot a while back. It was called Dead Man's Switch if I recall. If you use it or some similar piece of software you'd be pretty protected. Basically, it will encrypt (and I think delete if you want) any files on your computer that you don't want to exist after your death. It's a timer you re-set every week or so. Seems like a good idea - not just for people who don't want porn to stay on their computer, but also if you had anything sensitive on your computer. I've tried it and it seems to work pretty well.
Are you under the impression this works for DRM'd files? I'm pretty sure I have the latest version of VLC and when I play songs I've purchased from itms, all I hear is silence. VLC is great, works great for DVDs without windows, but not a substitute for iTunes in this case.
Slashdot Mirror
Say I rent a DVD from Blockbuster. Ok, I did that last night. I've read the receipt and don't see any license or restrictions on what I may do with the DVD itself. Can't I pass it on to a friend to watch it if I want to? So, if I do that and 20 people see it in the week for which it was rented, isn't that fine? What if I rent the DVD and exhibit it at a party in my home? That's the whole point of renting DVDs, right? Blockbuster doesn't ask how many people are going to be watching the movie and charge more for more viewers. (Not that they probably haven't thought about it).
Now, most people would probably agree that the above uses of a DVD that I've rented would be considered acceptable. What about letting all 20 people (who were going to see it anyway) watch the DVD outside where I project it on a large building across the street? Is that any different? Keep in mind, I'm not charging money for my friends to see this movie. I'm making no profit. I paid $4 for 2 days of enjoyment of this DVD.
Now, I know there's a disclaimer that says I can't use it for public performances, but why? These uses aren't insidious in any way. I'm not cheating the studios or the theaters or Blockbuster out of any money. I'm using the disc the way most people use a DVD when they rent it.
I swear, if the MPAA makes movies only viewable through DRM, trusted computing, and a freakin' DNA scan, I'm ripping out my eyes and not watching another movie for the rest of my life (well, you know what I mean).
Oh, by the way, what if the disclaimer doesn't show up when I use dvdsimple://F:@1:1 in VLC to play the movie on a laptop and project it? I haven't seen a rental ad or trailer or damn into on a DVD in a year since I've started using VLC.
I suppose there could be a sharp edge on the lead of the scew... there could also be problems with clotting at center of the screw or at the edges of the tube containing the screw.
A helical pump might also work if the problems I wondered about for an Archimedes' screw were not problems.
Exactly. The thing that worries me about the trend is that it might become impossible to buy a device that is ONLY that specific device. I mean, technically you're committing a crime if you bring your cellular phone with a camera built-in to a movie theater in certain jurisdictions.
I want to be able to get my cheaper, smaller, thinner, better call phone without crap in it.
I welcome the trend, too, but there's always a "primary" device. In this case, it's a phone with a camera built in. The main functionality of the device is to work as a phone. It doesn't matter if the camera sucks, that's not the primary use of the device is.
I don't want to hold a really really heavy device to my ear to hear the phone because it has a gigantic hard drive built into it. And there's no way that a phone-integrated digital camera is ever going to really replace the high-end markets for other devices (think digital SLR, powerful computer, etc).
There's some integration of devices going on now, but it's always a crippled integration. The trend is encouraging, but I'm not sure it's ever really going to lead to anything.
It's so small, direct download is much faster than bittorrent. Besides, who's going to keep the seed going? It's an itty-bitty file. I leave mandrake-iso's going (or even re-start them sometimes), but why bother for such a small file?
If you're going to watch it anyway, why not just "wget http://images2.shockwave.com/afassets/flash/this_l and.swf" (removing the spaces) and actually save it to your HD so you have it later and don't have to download it every time you watch it or show it to people? It's just the same amount of load on the server in the beginning, but it's more convenient later.
Again, he's not internally consistant with his own story. You can quote and I can quote and we'll end up with two different values for the class of the laser because he lists two different values himself. I posted on the topic because there was no way a class I laser could cause ANY harm and I knew it. I still think they're being dumb for not publishing because the interlock was circumvented and a class II laser is now potentially exposed. It's visible light and your blink reflex will prevent vision damage.
clarification != correction
he's not internally consistant with his page. The quote in the original post is a direct copy and paste. Also, yes, we've determined it's class II, but you've really got nothing to worry about since, as another poster pointed out, it's a red laser of less that 1mW. It's Nintendo covering their ass and a lot of /.'ers not seeing the point of my original post. It's nintendo covering their ass, but there's very little to worry about and it was just some lame-ass excuse to not publish the project.
Isn't this kind of the "old paradigm" for portals? I'd be far more interested if Google managed to come up with a new paradigm for data and information delivery much like their threaded concept for Gmail. If I want a page with email, stock quotes, tv listings, news, etc I can go over and use my.yahoo.com. That's been around for years, and I hope that Google doesn't tailor a unified portal just to compete with that. Google as a company is a great innovator and a new concept would keep them ahead of the game and make other people catch up instead of Google catching up with what Yahoo already offers.
You're assuming the laser emits radiation in a visible wavelength. Some CD player lasers user IR laser diodes which could POTENTIALLY damage your vision without any perception that the laser was on. But yeah, you'd probably be fine.
Some extra checking shows that they might not be totally full of shit. Wikipedia discusses Laser safety and mentions that a laser may be defined as a class I laser system if there is an interlock preventing exposure with the laser. It's not obvious that's what Nintendo meant to say, but it's possible the laser is actually class II but the interlock makes it class I. Or it's still possible the laser itself is class I and there's nothing to worry about. Either way, I think they should have published the photos.
Well, drawing upon the definition of class 1 lasers, we can see that:
It is neat that they replied with a non-canned response, but it was total BS. You don't have anything to worry about with this laser, and they just don't want to encourage people to modify their products like this for some reason.
But the Vulcans are supposedly from our own galaxy, not a galaxy far, far away. Oh, and vulcan space travel would be occurring now or in the future vs. a long time ago as Star Wars supposedly took place.
Sandia National Labs, unlike Los Alamos, is not run by the University of California system. Rather, Lockheed-Martin (and before that AT&T) ran the Labs after they were split from Los Alamos as a separate division.
What is the main advantage to having a bluetooth enaabled phone? I guess when I shop I look for reasonable price, tri-band (Not a lot of digital coverage in the rural West of USA), and maybe a good selection of features from the service provider such as internet.
As I understand it, Bluetooth allows two different electronic devices to interact, but what would a bluetooth cell phone do? Interact with a PDA/Laptop? I've searched around on Google, and mainly it's the typical sales sites without any real information on the benefits.
Basically, it comes down to a question from me: Should I look for a bluetooth enabled phone for my next cell phone?
220 is large enough for statistical sampling in some cases, but when you just say "only 30 people" should have gotten cancer, I wonder what statistic you're using. Perhaps you're simply comparing the incidence of cancer in local/national populations with that of the crew/cast? A small sample group of 220 may be large enough to do such a comparison, but any social scientist or epidemiologist will tell you about the problems you get when you compare two different sized groups on one single statistic. It's more complicated than most people realize.
I don't know about software, but I was dabbling in learning the Arabic alphabet and language this Summer. In the course of my searching, I found one site called Fun With Arabic that does a pretty good job teaching some things. You can learn the alphabet, some common words, and eventually learn to write Arabic script. A second site which I haven't even checked out yet is Babel Arabic.
I hope these prove useful. I learned a bit just playing around with the sites last week. Good luck - Arabic is a step harder to learn than German or French because you have to learn the alphabet first.
If you're just looking for conversational Arabic, I don't think the sites address that as much. I found a few that do, but if you're planning on being in the Middle East for any period of time, I'd assume you'd like to learn to read and write, as well.
I know it's not non-profit, but Thawte does provide personal certificates for free. You can use them for email encryption and signing without any difficulty. As for server certificates (https, etc), I think you'd have to pay for, but for personal email usage, Thawte is a pretty good option.
I completely agree. Why not just use tabbed interfaces for individual programs? The taskbar was designed to allow easy access to each running application. When all it says is "Mozilla Firefox 9", that's not useful to me. Also, any ordering of programs in the taskbar that I may have DELIBERATELY set up disappears. Does anyone know if it can be turned off? I know it's more an annoyance than a feature.
Tabs inside programs allow me to bring the program I want to the front and then to find the right tab inside it. If MS can't get it right and allow lots of user customization, at least Mozilla has it right.
It would be hypocritical, but they will probably try it anyway. "Trust the butterfly!"
Seriously, though, as long as we are willing to allow "free" portals to have access to all of our personal information, how can we get upset when they have access to our personal information?
MS can hold on to your CC# and passwords and automatically fill them in on sites that require it, if you use hotmail they have your email, and they're trying to improve their crappy search engine that few people use. Oh, and if you use MSN, they've got you that way too.
Yahoo has shops and stores that I find somehow already know my credit card number (past purchase, no doubt), they have my email (one of my account anyway), and they offer searching, tv-listings, a calendar, etc.
That's just a few examples of what MS and Yahoo! aleady have from millions of customers. The fact that Google (which has proven itself less scuzzy than its competition) is trying to expand is welcomed by myself and nearly all my friends.
If you give all your info to a site, don't be surprised if they have all your info at a later date. Convenience and privacy are hard to simultaneously maintain with current services.
I know I would love to see the prices on movie tickets go down, too. The problem I see with this is that the way Hollywood seems to track movie attendance is by DOLLAR AMOUNT of tickets sold, not TOTAL NUMBER of tickets sold.
That's just something to take into consideration for distribution companies to begin charging less. I'm not even positive the number of tickets sold is tracked any longer. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I know the news media certainly doesn't report it.
Another thing - we seem to think theaters rip us off for a 64-oz soda (or whatever a LARGE is today). Maybe that's a good thing considering the sheer amount of calories a non-diet soda that size contains.
We all know the syrup and carbonated water doesn't cost anywhere near what we even pay at McDonald's, but we pay it anyway. Until there's a complete price restructuring for all soft drinks (fountain drinks cost less for Schwepps vs. Coca Cola brands for example), I think we don't have much cause to go after the concessions prices that keep the theaters open. If you don't like their price, don't buy their sugar. Movie prices are another matter, of course.
I saw a program for just this purpose posted on slashdot a while back. It was called Dead Man's Switch if I recall. If you use it or some similar piece of software you'd be pretty protected.
Basically, it will encrypt (and I think delete if you want) any files on your computer that you don't want to exist after your death. It's a timer you re-set every week or so. Seems like a good idea - not just for people who don't want porn to stay on their computer, but also if you had anything sensitive on your computer. I've tried it and it seems to work pretty well.
To add to the sibling post, here is a link to the snopes article which shows the quote to be falsified.
Are you under the impression this works for DRM'd files? I'm pretty sure I have the latest version of VLC and when I play songs I've purchased from itms, all I hear is silence.
VLC is great, works great for DVDs without windows, but not a substitute for iTunes in this case.