If an LED can pulse at 10MHz, would a cheap diode laser be able to do the same? I realize that its not a very tight beam, but you get a nice dot at a few hundred meters, certainly enough for a photodetector to work with. That said, it would be an interesting hack to send 10Mbit ethernet a short distance in this manner.
Someone did this with LEDs, there was a slashdot story (or perhaps just a comment, I can't quite recall) linking to a page that details his efforts. The page was quite old; it predated the availability of cheap diode lasers. It also used an older style of ethernet with different signalling and connector/cable requirements.
So would this be workable with a cheap diode laser of the kind found in $20 pointers?
Annoying? That flicker is sexy. Why do you think they put LED status indicators? They're not terribly useful, especially not on rackmounted equipment that no one ever sees. They're there for the pure sex appeal of the light emitting diode; the feeling that that sleek black box is doing something, and boy is it ever doing it fast. Take away the flicker and you lose that wonderful feeling!
I too have trouble believing that I actually have something to add to a conversation about the feasability of klingons, but here goes...
There was a particular episode of DS9 where Worf was on trial for the destruction of a civilian transport, and his prosecutor was a klingon, and yes, a male.
Basically, he made the prosecution his battle. Anything can be approached with that mentality: a desire to overcome an enemy, even the limitations of one's own mind, can be a strong driving force for development.
Even for us, engineering started out as the development of machines of war... there would certainly be honor in that... so long as something can be construed as advancing the dominance of the empire, it could be honored and respected.
Of course, this is me being a pathetic apologist fanboy... your points are perfectly valid: trek is downright sloppy in some areas.
The ISP doesn't want the type of user who downloads 1GB per day from alt.binaries: in fact, they would be more than happy to lose them as customers.
They want to provide a "surfing service." (quote from @home tech support drone). Basically, sell broadband to the people that don't need it: the ones who check their yahoo mail accounts and chat on AIM... the ones who couldn't even saturate a modem connection... The ideal business plan consists of a mass of ignorant users all checking their email, stocks, sports, weather.
We see this with upload/download restrictions and transfer rate caps as well as the blocking of binaries groups.
Besides, in most places you don't exactly have a lot of freedom in choosing your broadband provider: they can do anything to you and you'll keep them because they're still better than a modem.
The real solution will come when an efficient, non impacting form of electrical generation is perfected.
It's been around for decades: nuclear power.
Irrational fears about radiation output, and a bad reputation given to it by incompotent soviets, are preventing us from using the cleanest and least disruptive form of power generation we have.
Instead, we prefer to suck down the countless tons of toxic fumes produced every day by the operation of coal and gas power plants.
Basic common sense indicates that the ISP has no control over their users' actions. They provide a network over which people can communicate, and nothing more.
The court saying that an ISP *is* actually liable for the actions of their users can hardly be justifiable...
Perhaps this is an important trend... First, lawsuits against ISPs for facilitating copyright infringement will be won in several major countries worldwide. Once a precedent is set, ISPs will realize that the only way in which they can continue to operate is by implementing technical restrictions into their services that attempt to stop the transfer of media files.
Media companies know that they can't go after every individual trading copyrighted content; it's not practical, and there is no money in it. Thus, they will put great amounts of effort into suing ISPs...
Given that AOL is owned by a media company, I wouldn't be surprised if AOL wasn't too eager to defend itself. It's probably looking for an excuse to begin restricting what people can and cannot do with their internet connections. Every ISP will follow in the next few years, and it will not end until the internet is just a point and click version of TV...
DVD took quite a while to reach mass acceptance, but it's finally at the point where it has a large enough installed base that it isn't going away. I don't think it's the best technology, but it's clearly superior to VHS in every way.
DVD is simply too limited in the amount of data it can store. When CDs were first released, 650MB was many times larger than the average hard disk. DVD, with its 4.5GB per layer, already looks small compared to newer hard drives.
The physical media might have a future in the HDTV era though. Video compression has become considerably more effecient since MPEG2 was created. MPEG4 at a tenth of the bitrate of MPEG2 has the same quality. So, DVD media, with MPEG4 video stored on it, would be large enough to accomodate HDTV resolution.
Yes, it would require a new player, but that player could be backwards compatible with MPEG2 DVDs.
Not that this will happen, but it should. I have a feeling we will be watching NTSC resolution DVDs on HDTV sets for a long time to come.
Using AMD's 3DNOW instructions in a compressor would probably be a win. Those allow you to split the FPU in half and do two 32-bit operations simultaneously. But the codec doesn't support this, which adds a a pro-Intel bias.
3dnow has been present in AMD chips for ages now, in fact, it came out long before SSE. I recall that 3dnow optimizations for Quake2 made the K6-2 a respectable competitor to the P2, which had a much better FPU.
Yet 3dnow is basically unused today. It's a sad situation, because 3dnow can do for the Athlon what SSE2 will do for the P4.
I suppose the reason it was never widely accepted was because AMD did not have sufficient influence in the industry to push it. That's why SSE won, despite being introduced much later. Yes, SSE adds a "pro-Intel bais," but an SSE optimized benchmark would still be valid, as it would reflect the conditions AMD must compete under.
Re:Golden Age of Music Sharing is over
on
Scour is Dead
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· Score: 1
It's not that it's difficult to prosecute someone with the user information IRC can give you, but that it simply can't be done on a large scale.
The case you point out seems like an attempt by the BSA to make examples of a few people. Needless to say, it hasn't been a very effective deterrent; mp3 trading is alive and well on IRC. No organization has pockets deep enough to go after thousands of people trading or serving mp3's, all they can do is make pathetic attempts to scare them.
I doubt any company can sneak a distributed computing client onto a PC; it takes one person to notice and publish their findings. The backlash against the company would be huge.
I occasionally run a load monitor, and I suspect many others do.
On a device like a WebTV client, there is no way to run a load monitor. The software is completely controlled by the manufacturer, and probably embedded into the device.
In addition, most of the people accessing the internet through such a device are unlikely to have the computer literacy to notice, or even care. So it makes sense to exploit the idle time of a device like that.
And I don't think that blowing up a helpless island would be good for the image of any country.
On the other hand, look at the Kosovo mess. Interfering in internal affairs, and blowing up large parts of a near-helpless country seems to be perfectly justifiable. The media circus surrounding it was almost exclusively positive.
"...it is flat-out the absolute best, highest quality-high-compression video format available."
The image quality is very nice... the one frame per second that I can see from it. The codec seems to require at least a P2 to view the movie at an acceptable frame rate. To make matters worse, Quicktime4 is an ineffecient piece of garbage. Even qt3 movies don't play at an acceptable speed on a low-end machine, while they play fine if I use any other program.
MPEG1 is supported by virtually every operating system on every hardware platform, can be decoded on even low-end hardware, and has decent quality. By using qt4, they are only limiting their audience.
Sorenson is nice quality: if you have win32, Apple's quicktime garbage, and a p2-500.
The only reason sony hasn't forced multiple closed technologies on their customers is because they are not powerful enough to do so yet. They have a good position in console sales, but nowhere near a monopoly. They don't have a very large presence in the PC market, and so far they haven't captured a large part of the market for handheld devices.
The only area that they have a very strong presence in is home electronics, and there isn't much room there to introduce their own standards. They try with things like the minidisc, but end up licensing it to other companies because there is too much competition in that market for a completely closed system to succeed; they need the support of other major electronics companies.
If they acquire a significant market share in any area, they will abuse it like any other large company. The idea that companies will regulate themselves has been proven false more times than I care to note.
For now, all you get with a Sony PC is a Sony PC, but how long until their PCs begin to feature customized connectors to their other products, such as video cameras?
Sony does innovate a fair bit, I think they can be credited with the first portable cd players. If they could, Sony would much rather "innovate" the MS way: develop their own bastardized version of a standard and force it down the public's throat until they have control. This is exactly the situation with Memory Sticks. CompactFlash is a well-established standard created long before Memory Sticks and used by many devices, but Sony feels the need to do things their own way. Both are flash memory: I don't see any technical advantages to Sony's version. They just want to be the only supplier of it so they can keep their nice fat profit margins, and send the lawyers after anyone who tries to make a compatible product.
I wonder what Sony is going to try to force down our throats with the PSX2.
I agree that what Unisys proposed to do with LZW licensing is ridiculous, but to date I have not heard of a single website that has been forced to cough up the money. I don't think we have to worry about Unisys lawyers knocking on our doors anytime soon. While the elimination of GIFs might be the right thing to do, it just isn't feasable for most sites. It requires quite a bit of effort to convert a large site.
In most browsers, PNG support is incomplete at best, buggy at worst. The rendering time for PNGs is also far greater, especially if you have a slow machine.
GIFs are also far more compact than PNGs; you can have GIFs with two or three colors. I don't believe PNGs have this ability.
JPEG is obviously not practical to replace GIF, the images are larger and lack the indexed color of GIFs as well.
The intentions might be honorable, but most sites can't afford the additional time it takes to convert and the increased bandwith usage.
This idea is a little bit ahead of its time. Maybe if software support gets better and we can all afford the increased bandwidth, then it will time to dump GIF.
All the advertising for computers that I've seen focuses on the idea of getting more information faster, learning more, etc.
Ads for any other kind of product all appeal to masculinity by featuring seductive females, fast cars, and loud music.
Intel ads have a little people in neon suits dancing around like idiots with a little jingle at the end. I don't know how the hell this has been one of the most successful ad campaigns in recent history.
Intel claims the P3 makes "the internet go faster," which is nothing short of a blatant lie. AMD needs to flaunt the one/real/ thing they have: SPEED. Show the Bunny People (tm) getting run over by a scantily clad female in a fast car or something.
While Intel advertises the speed of the internet (which looks more like CAD in their commercials), AMD should be advertising the amazing performance with shots of violent Q3 timedemo's and gorgeous women.
The problem with the "terminator" seeds is that many farmers may feel compelled to use them because they will be engineered to have superior insect and pesticide resistant properties. If the farmer wants the better crop, he may have no choice but to accept the terminator gene with it.
In the worst case, terminator seeds could become so common that regular "free" seeds would be difficult if not impossible to acquire.
There may also be the risk that the genes that make the plant terminate will be spread to other plant species, with obviously catastrophic effects.
People have a skepticism for manufactured culture," he added.
I beg to differ: people seem all too willing to embrace "manufactured" culture these days. Culture is becoming what corporate media wants it to become.
In 1984, Orwell writes that stories and songs were generated by massive machines (the novel was written before he could have imagined doing it electronically).
Brutus.1 is not real AI, it simply constructs stories based on mathematical rules for putting together words. This is exactly what we should fear: stories and media without even artificial intelligence behind them. Stories can become completely meaningless, but they will still be amusing to the general public (note the large number of books that have absolutlely nothing but entertainment value).
This is a first step to "manufactured" media devoid of any real content.
Hacking or disabling the vchip itself would be quite pointless. Anyone who has the knowledge to implement such a hack would probably not have mommy and daddy censoring them based on the ratings.
As far as i can see, the only way to get around this would be to sabotage it at the network's systems, making all shows have the lowest rating, and I can't imagine that happening.
Addiction is when you feel an uncontrollable urge to do something, a bit like a compulsion. Or it is a dependancy on something. Either way, it is uncontrollable.
What you describe sounds more like a way of killing time to get away from a boring job than an addiction.
I for one have no problems if I have my net access cut off, so long as I have somehing else to do. I don't have any cravings, I don't become irratable: none of the signs of an addiction.
I find myself doing almost exactly what you describe. I don't go to chat rooms, I don't frequent porn sites, and I don't gamble.
I just enjoy aquiring information, for no particular reason other than to alleviate boredom.
From what I understand, they are selling it in a propreitary, encrypted format.
Palm pilots become obsolete almost as fast as computers. In a decade, those books that were paid for and stored on the pilot will most likely be useless without the pilot itself; they will be stuck on the pc.
Printed books, on the other hand, have been known to last hundreds of years. It would be a shame to see information made inacessible because the equipment became obsolete.
Have you ever contributed an educated, informed, or insightful opinion to a discussion?
The large majority of your posts are "top x" posts. Those in doubt hit the User Info link and see for yourselves.
It seems that the only types of posts you are capable of producing are rather sad attempts at being humorous.
This may have been funny the fist few times, but it really is getting tiresome.
This problem is made worse by those moderators who consistently increase the score of such comments. Those with moderator access should have better ways to spend their scarce points; these type of posts are simply not worth it.
The fact that a post of this quality is moderated to such a high score shows that the moderation system still needs to be adjusted a bit. I suggest making comments rated as "funny" have a maximum score of 2.
14A means adult accompaniment required if under 14, 18A means adult accompaniment required if under 18. This is a far more sensible rating system, although I still don't approve of it.
Looking at the movie listings, South Park and American Pie are both rated 18A here.
While we do have the 14A rating, which should be used for movies targeted at a younger audience but featuring violence/swearing/etc, it is often replaced by the 18A rating by the movie theaters.
I think that it is up to each individual theater chain (all two of them if you don't count the independant ones) to decide what rating the movie gets, based on the american rating (G, PG, PG13, R).
I know that Cineplex is far worse with their policy, they always give people trouble. I try to stay away from them as much as possible.
I mean, what would be the point? There are only 3 reasons to hack/crack/h4x0r antention, money, or beacuse you belive your target is moraly wrong.
There is one additional motivation that some people have that you overlooked: the desire to cause damage for absolutely no reason. Some people simply take pleasure in destroying a legitamite project.
While any attempt to restrict making digital copies of audio will be cracked eventually, there is always the possibility of using analog recording. If it's done with a decent soundcard, the recording will be almost perfect. While some people will notice a difference, the average music pirate won't. AFAIK there is no technology that can prevent users from making an analog copy.
All these useless "security" features are probably going to increase the cost of a unit quite a bit. If diamond doesn't realize that their potential customers don't want this, then it will only open up the market for competition. If diamond fails to deliver what the people want, then the people will go elsewhere.
I think SGS/Thompson makes an MP3 decoder IC. While it isn't easy for the average hobbyist to put together an MP3 player, a company willing to throw some money at it could develop a player with a little bit of effort.
There is already competition in the MP3 player market. There is the RIO, the Yepp, the Nomad, and the MPMan (the first portable MP3 player. is that still out there?).
Slashdot Mirror
If an LED can pulse at 10MHz, would a cheap diode laser be able to do the same? I realize that its not a very tight beam, but you get a nice dot at a few hundred meters, certainly enough for a photodetector to work with. That said, it would be an interesting hack to send 10Mbit ethernet a short distance in this manner.
Someone did this with LEDs, there was a slashdot story (or perhaps just a comment, I can't quite recall) linking to a page that details his efforts. The page was quite old; it predated the availability of cheap diode lasers. It also used an older style of ethernet with different signalling and connector/cable requirements.
So would this be workable with a cheap diode laser of the kind found in $20 pointers?
Annoying? That flicker is sexy. Why do you think they put LED status indicators? They're not terribly useful, especially not on rackmounted equipment that no one ever sees. They're there for the pure sex appeal of the light emitting diode; the feeling that that sleek black box is doing something, and boy is it ever doing it fast. Take away the flicker and you lose that wonderful feeling!
I too have trouble believing that I actually have something to add to a conversation about the feasability of klingons, but here goes...
There was a particular episode of DS9 where Worf was on trial for the destruction of a civilian transport, and his prosecutor was a klingon, and yes, a male.
Basically, he made the prosecution his battle. Anything can be approached with that mentality: a desire to overcome an enemy, even the limitations of one's own mind, can be a strong driving force for development.
Even for us, engineering started out as the development of machines of war... there would certainly be honor in that... so long as something can be construed as advancing the dominance of the empire, it could be honored and respected.
Of course, this is me being a pathetic apologist fanboy... your points are perfectly valid: trek is downright sloppy in some areas.
Opera handles that rather well... gestures aren't interpreted unless the right mouse button is being held down.
The ISP doesn't want the type of user who downloads 1GB per day from alt.binaries: in fact, they would be more than happy to lose them as customers.
They want to provide a "surfing service." (quote from @home tech support drone). Basically, sell broadband to the people that don't need it: the ones who check their yahoo mail accounts and chat on AIM... the ones who couldn't even saturate a modem connection... The ideal business plan consists of a mass of ignorant users all checking their email, stocks, sports, weather.
We see this with upload/download restrictions and transfer rate caps as well as the blocking of binaries groups.
Besides, in most places you don't exactly have a lot of freedom in choosing your broadband provider: they can do anything to you and you'll keep them because they're still better than a modem.
It's been around for decades: nuclear power.
Irrational fears about radiation output, and a bad reputation given to it by incompotent soviets, are preventing us from using the cleanest and least disruptive form of power generation we have.
Instead, we prefer to suck down the countless tons of toxic fumes produced every day by the operation of coal and gas power plants.
Basic common sense indicates that the ISP has no control over their users' actions. They provide a network over which people can communicate, and nothing more.
The court saying that an ISP *is* actually liable for the actions of their users can hardly be justifiable...
Perhaps this is an important trend... First, lawsuits against ISPs for facilitating copyright infringement will be won in several major countries worldwide. Once a precedent is set, ISPs will realize that the only way in which they can continue to operate is by implementing technical restrictions into their services that attempt to stop the transfer of media files.
Media companies know that they can't go after every individual trading copyrighted content; it's not practical, and there is no money in it. Thus, they will put great amounts of effort into suing ISPs...
Given that AOL is owned by a media company, I wouldn't be surprised if AOL wasn't too eager to defend itself. It's probably looking for an excuse to begin restricting what people can and cannot do with their internet connections. Every ISP will follow in the next few years, and it will not end until the internet is just a point and click version of TV...
DVD took quite a while to reach mass acceptance, but it's finally at the point where it has a large enough installed base that it isn't going away. I don't think it's the best technology, but it's clearly superior to VHS in every way.
DVD is simply too limited in the amount of data it can store. When CDs were first released, 650MB was many times larger than the average hard disk. DVD, with its 4.5GB per layer, already looks small compared to newer hard drives.
The physical media might have a future in the HDTV era though. Video compression has become considerably more effecient since MPEG2 was created. MPEG4 at a tenth of the bitrate of MPEG2 has the same quality. So, DVD media, with MPEG4 video stored on it, would be large enough to accomodate HDTV resolution.
Yes, it would require a new player, but that player could be backwards compatible with MPEG2 DVDs.
Not that this will happen, but it should. I have a feeling we will be watching NTSC resolution DVDs on HDTV sets for a long time to come.
3dnow has been present in AMD chips for ages now, in fact, it came out long before SSE. I recall that 3dnow optimizations for Quake2 made the K6-2 a respectable competitor to the P2, which had a much better FPU.
Yet 3dnow is basically unused today. It's a sad situation, because 3dnow can do for the Athlon what SSE2 will do for the P4.
I suppose the reason it was never widely accepted was because AMD did not have sufficient influence in the industry to push it. That's why SSE won, despite being introduced much later. Yes, SSE adds a "pro-Intel bais," but an SSE optimized benchmark would still be valid, as it would reflect the conditions AMD must compete under.
It's not that it's difficult to prosecute someone with the user information IRC can give you, but that it simply can't be done on a large scale.
The case you point out seems like an attempt by the BSA to make examples of a few people. Needless to say, it hasn't been a very effective deterrent; mp3 trading is alive and well on IRC. No organization has pockets deep enough to go after thousands of people trading or serving mp3's, all they can do is make pathetic attempts to scare them.
I doubt any company can sneak a distributed computing client onto a PC; it takes one person to notice and publish their findings. The backlash against the company would be huge.
I occasionally run a load monitor, and I suspect many others do.
On a device like a WebTV client, there is no way to run a load monitor. The software is completely controlled by the manufacturer, and probably embedded into the device.
In addition, most of the people accessing the internet through such a device are unlikely to have the computer literacy to notice, or even care. So it makes sense to exploit the idle time of a device like that.
And I don't think that blowing up a helpless island would be good for the image of any country.
On the other hand, look at the Kosovo mess. Interfering in internal affairs, and blowing up large parts of a near-helpless country seems to be perfectly justifiable. The media circus surrounding it was almost exclusively positive.
"...it is flat-out the absolute best, highest quality-high-compression video format available."
The image quality is very nice... the one frame per second that I can see from it. The codec seems to require at least a P2 to view the movie at an acceptable frame rate. To make matters worse, Quicktime4 is an ineffecient piece of garbage. Even qt3 movies don't play at an acceptable speed on a low-end machine, while they play fine if I use any other program.
MPEG1 is supported by virtually every operating system on every hardware platform, can be decoded on even low-end hardware, and has decent quality. By using qt4, they are only limiting their audience.
Sorenson is nice quality: if you have win32, Apple's quicktime garbage, and a p2-500.
The only reason sony hasn't forced multiple closed technologies on their customers is because they are not powerful enough to do so yet. They have a good position in console sales, but nowhere near a monopoly. They don't have a very large presence in the PC market, and so far they haven't captured a large part of the market for handheld devices.
The only area that they have a very strong presence in is home electronics, and there isn't much room there to introduce their own standards. They try with things like the minidisc, but end up licensing it to other companies because there is too much competition in that market for a completely closed system to succeed; they need the support of other major electronics companies.
If they acquire a significant market share in any area, they will abuse it like any other large company. The idea that companies will regulate themselves has been proven false more times than I care to note.
For now, all you get with a Sony PC is a Sony PC, but how long until their PCs begin to feature customized connectors to their other products, such as video cameras?
Sony does innovate a fair bit, I think they can be credited with the first portable cd players. If they could, Sony would much rather "innovate" the MS way: develop their own bastardized version of a standard and force it down the public's throat until they have control. This is exactly the situation with Memory Sticks. CompactFlash is a well-established standard created long before Memory Sticks and used by many devices, but Sony feels the need to do things their own way. Both are flash memory: I don't see any technical advantages to Sony's version. They just want to be the only supplier of it so they can keep their nice fat profit margins, and send the lawyers after anyone who tries to make a compatible product.
I wonder what Sony is going to try to force down our throats with the PSX2.
I agree that what Unisys proposed to do with LZW licensing is ridiculous, but to date I have not heard of a single website that has been forced to cough up the money. I don't think we have to worry about Unisys lawyers knocking on our doors anytime soon. While the elimination of GIFs might be the right thing to do, it just isn't feasable for most sites. It requires quite a bit of effort to convert a large site.
In most browsers, PNG support is incomplete at best, buggy at worst. The rendering time for PNGs is also far greater, especially if you have a slow machine.
GIFs are also far more compact than PNGs; you can have GIFs with two or three colors. I don't believe PNGs have this ability.
JPEG is obviously not practical to replace GIF, the images are larger and lack the indexed color of GIFs as well.
The intentions might be honorable, but most sites can't afford the additional time it takes to convert and the increased bandwith usage.
This idea is a little bit ahead of its time. Maybe if software support gets better and we can all afford the increased bandwidth, then it will time to dump GIF.
All the advertising for computers that I've seen focuses on the idea of getting more information faster, learning more, etc.
/real/ thing they have: SPEED. Show the Bunny People (tm) getting run over by a scantily clad female in a fast car or something.
Ads for any other kind of product all appeal to masculinity by featuring seductive females, fast cars, and loud music.
Intel ads have a little people in neon suits dancing around like idiots with a little jingle at the end. I don't know how the hell this has been one of the most successful ad campaigns in recent history.
Intel claims the P3 makes "the internet go faster," which is nothing short of a blatant lie. AMD needs to flaunt the one
While Intel advertises the speed of the internet (which looks more like CAD in their commercials), AMD should be advertising the amazing performance with shots of violent Q3 timedemo's and gorgeous women.
The problem with the "terminator" seeds is that many farmers may feel compelled to use them because they will be engineered to have superior insect and pesticide resistant properties. If the farmer wants the better crop, he may have no choice but to accept the terminator gene with it.
In the worst case, terminator seeds could become so common that regular "free" seeds would be difficult if not impossible to acquire.
There may also be the risk that the genes that make the plant terminate will be spread to other plant species, with obviously catastrophic effects.
In 1984, Orwell writes that stories and songs were generated by massive machines (the novel was written before he could have imagined doing it electronically).
Brutus.1 is not real AI, it simply constructs stories based on mathematical rules for putting together words. This is exactly what we should fear: stories and media without even artificial intelligence behind them. Stories can become completely meaningless, but they will still be amusing to the general public (note the large number of books that have absolutlely nothing but entertainment value).
This is a first step to "manufactured" media devoid of any real content.
Hacking or disabling the vchip itself would be quite pointless. Anyone who has the knowledge to implement such a hack would probably not have mommy and daddy censoring them based on the ratings.
As far as i can see, the only way to get around this would be to sabotage it at the network's systems, making all shows have the lowest rating, and I can't imagine that happening.
Addiction is when you feel an uncontrollable urge to do something, a bit like a compulsion. Or it is a dependancy on something. Either way, it is uncontrollable.
What you describe sounds more like a way of killing time to get away from a boring job than an addiction.
I for one have no problems if I have my net access cut off, so long as I have somehing else to do. I don't have any cravings, I don't become irratable: none of the signs of an addiction.
I find myself doing almost exactly what you describe. I don't go to chat rooms, I don't frequent porn sites, and I don't gamble.
I just enjoy aquiring information, for no particular reason other than to alleviate boredom.
From what I understand, they are selling it in a propreitary, encrypted format.
Palm pilots become obsolete almost as fast as computers. In a decade, those books that were paid for and stored on the pilot will most likely be useless without the pilot itself; they will be stuck on the pc.
Printed books, on the other hand, have been known to last hundreds of years. It would be a shame to see information made inacessible because the equipment became obsolete.
Have you ever contributed an educated, informed, or insightful opinion to a discussion?
The large majority of your posts are "top x" posts. Those in doubt hit the User Info link and see for yourselves.
It seems that the only types of posts you are capable of producing are rather sad attempts at being humorous.
This may have been funny the fist few times, but it really is getting tiresome.
This problem is made worse by those moderators who consistently increase the score of such comments. Those with moderator access should have better ways to spend their scarce points; these type of posts are simply not worth it.
The fact that a post of this quality is moderated to such a high score shows that the moderation system still needs to be adjusted a bit. I suggest making comments rated as "funny" have a maximum score of 2.
In BC, we have G, PG, 14A, 18A, and R.
14A means adult accompaniment required if under 14, 18A means adult accompaniment required if under 18. This is a far more sensible rating system, although I still don't approve of it.
Looking at the movie listings, South Park and American Pie are both rated 18A here.
While we do have the 14A rating, which should be used for movies targeted at a younger audience but featuring violence/swearing/etc, it is often replaced by the 18A rating by the movie theaters.
I think that it is up to each individual theater chain (all two of them if you don't count the independant ones) to decide what rating the movie gets, based on the american rating (G, PG, PG13, R).
I know that Cineplex is far worse with their policy, they always give people trouble. I try to stay away from them as much as possible.
I mean, what would be the point? There are only 3 reasons to hack/crack/h4x0r antention, money, or beacuse you belive your target is moraly wrong.
There is one additional motivation that some people have that you overlooked: the desire to cause damage for absolutely no reason. Some people simply take pleasure in destroying a legitamite project.
While any attempt to restrict making digital copies of audio will be cracked eventually, there is always the possibility of using analog recording. If it's done with a decent soundcard, the recording will be almost perfect. While some people will notice a difference, the average music pirate won't. AFAIK there is no technology that can prevent users from making an analog copy.
All these useless "security" features are probably going to increase the cost of a unit quite a bit. If diamond doesn't realize that their potential customers don't want this, then it will only open up the market for competition. If diamond fails to deliver what the people want, then the people will go elsewhere.
I think SGS/Thompson makes an MP3 decoder IC. While it isn't easy for the average hobbyist to put together an MP3 player, a company willing to throw some money at it could develop a player with a little bit of effort.
There is already competition in the MP3 player market. There is the RIO, the Yepp, the Nomad, and the MPMan (the first portable MP3 player. is that still out there?).
The RIO is not the only choice.