Yes, you know a guy has really made it in the world when he has a blonde girlfriend. (Not a cheap knockoff, or just a very light brunette, but a genuine, certified blonde.)
Why waste CPU cycles on parsing a human-readable text file format such as XML?
There should be a standard byte-compiled representation of XML (CXML), which has been flattened into an easily readable data structure. It would be portable, with byte orders indicated in flags (or would just use network byte order, i.e., big-endian), and with fixed-length element start/end headers, and could be used in lieu of XML for machine-machine communications. If a human wants to inspect the data, XCML could be trivially converted to and from XML.
Why go to the trouble of running a parser for files that 99% of the time no human will ever look at?
If you look at the inside rim of a CD or DVD, you will find codes that look like "IFPI xxxx", where 'xxxx' is four digits or letters. I was under the impression that this is an IFPI licence code for the pressing plant where the CD and/or the glass master were made, for auditing purposes.
Or do they want SIDs embedded as watermarks in audio or something (undoubtedly for their legally-mandated A-D converters to detect)?
All colour photocopiers and laser printers on the US market encode the unit's serial number in a watermark in the colour dithering pattern. This is by agreement with the US Secret Service, to allow counterfeit currency to be traced.
This would give a lot of ammunition to those who want CD/DVD burners to embed their serial numbers on discs. In fact, with technology having advanced further since the colour photocopier agreement, the RIAA/IFPI's standards for DVD burner watermarks could contain other information (such as GPS coordinates, for example).
There's Universal Music (i.e., Bronfman's mafia, with their hard line on banning anonymity and stamping out MP3s, and their copy-restricted pseudo-CDs), and then there's their new media division, which includes mp3.com and emusic.com.
This could be part of a power struggle between the two poles, the hardliners and the moderates. If enough people buy the MP3, the moderates will get more power in Vivendi, and the hardliners will be discredited. If this fails, the hardliners will just say "I told you so".
If you want the whole album, you'll buy the CD with the packaging. This service, I'd guess, is intended for those who just want one or two tracks.
And given how many albums are mostly bland yet technically polished filler (particularly major-label commercial albums, where artists' creative control is usurped by marketing considerations), a service that lets you (legally) download an unencumbered copy of the one or two tracks you want and ditch the rest of the album can fill a niche.
Celine Dion fans would most probably be people who don't care (or know) what their computer runs; which means mostly Windows users.
Since Windows is the default OS, Windows users' tastes would be (on average) more mainstream than fringe users. Mac users would probably have more piercings/tattoos than the average person and would be likely to listen to eclectic bands most people have never heard of.
Darwin was a scientist. He observed phonomonea and came to a conclusion. His findings do not disprove creationism or God. All he has done has provided us with, based on observable phonomonea, the best possible understanding about the development of life on this planet.
Actually, by definition, that disproves creationism (being the doctrine that the world, life and humans were created as described in the Bible). There is no way of reconciling this doctrine with contemporary scientific evidence of how life originated.
Whether one believes in God (or Allah or Vishnu or the Great Pumpkin or whatever) is one's own choice; though with physics and biology describing the physical world as well as they do, the spiritual realm has been more or less exiled to philosophy and poetic metaphor. Thunderstorms are not Thor's anger, the Earth wasn't created in 6 days, and chances are the Virgin Mary wasn't a virgin either. If there is a God, he's staying well out of the way.
The DMCA is merely an implementation of the last WIPO treaty. Europe has its own DMCA-like law (the European Directive on Copyright), which member nations are obliged to implement in laws. Australia has a similar law. Only "rogue nations" (i.e., the ones that Mozilla tells you it's illegal to export it to) are likely to not have WIPO-based laws.
Eventually blocking ads will be illegal; either under copyright laws (as a circumvention technique to get around paying attention), or under "attention rights" legislation enshrining the practice of content providers' rights to consumers' attention in law.
Wasn't someone working on embedding a Perl interpreter in the Linux kernel a while ago? And/or rewriting all of/bin as Perl scripts using the kernel-based interpreter? Did anything ever come of this , umm, cunning plan?
A lot of spam these days is run by the Russian Mafia (in particular much of the porn is). You probably wouldn't want to mess with them unless you had very good protection.
If one wants portability, one could always code in Python and use PyGame. Python does everything Java does, other than having management-friendly buzzwords, and has a more civilised syntax too.
Maybe look around for one of those underemployed Russian geniuses who'd be willing to take it over? Last time I checked, copyright laws in that part of the world didn't involve anything quite so draconian.
Some have claimed that the NSA is 200 years ahead of the rest of the world in mathematics. Even if this is an exaggeration, it's something to think about.
A friend of mine (from Australia) went to the US a year or two ago, and found himself needing to call a service which used such a system. When he did, he found that it could not understand his accent; after three unsuccessful attempts at doing an "American" accent, he gave up.
The moral of this story: make sure that there's a touch-tone menu to fall back on.
Has anybody tried replacing the kernel on a commercial MacOS X system with a user-compiled Darwin kernel? Did it work? Were there any issues?
Also, I recall that the delay in adding DVD support to 10.1 was partly due to the problem of satisfying the DVDCCA that the system was "secure", and that no rogue hacker could intercept their precious video frames; this would most likely have involved modifications to the kernel (and/or the Mach microkernel), and a fork from the open-source Darwin kernel (otherwise the "security" features could be bypassed by using a modified kernel). Has anybody tried playing DVDs over a home-made Darwin kernel?
Perhaps making it viewable in non-domestic regions could be construed as making it available to non-domestic markets, making the BBC liable for additional licensing fees, royalties to actors, or what have you. Or perhaps locking out other regions gives the BBC the option of licensing it through another distributor for overseas markets.
Yes, well, it's one thing hearing a penguinhead saying that copy protection doesn't work, the DMCA is futile or that Bill Gates is a Sith Lord; you'd sort of expect that. However, hearing it from a multinational consumer electronics giant is another matter altogether.
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Yes, you know a guy has really made it in the world when he has a blonde girlfriend. (Not a cheap knockoff, or just a very light brunette, but a genuine, certified blonde.)
Wonder if they'll start lopping people's hands off for copying MS Office or the latest Britney Spears album.
Today's heavy-handed patriotism is tomorrow's post-ironic kitsch.
Some day, your kids or grandkids will look back on 2002 in the same way you looked at those old Norman Rockwell prints.
Why waste CPU cycles on parsing a human-readable text file format such as XML?
There should be a standard byte-compiled representation of XML (CXML), which has been flattened into an easily readable data structure. It would be portable, with byte orders indicated in flags (or would just use network byte order, i.e., big-endian), and with fixed-length element start/end headers, and could be used in lieu of XML for machine-machine communications. If a human wants to inspect the data, XCML could be trivially converted to and from XML.
Why go to the trouble of running a parser for files that 99% of the time no human will ever look at?
If you look at the inside rim of a CD or DVD, you will find codes that look like "IFPI xxxx", where 'xxxx' is four digits or letters. I was under the impression that this is an IFPI licence code for the pressing plant where the CD and/or the glass master were made, for auditing purposes.
Or do they want SIDs embedded as watermarks in audio or something (undoubtedly for their legally-mandated A-D converters to detect)?
All colour photocopiers and laser printers on the US market encode the unit's serial number in a watermark in the colour dithering pattern. This is by agreement with the US Secret Service, to allow counterfeit currency to be traced.
This would give a lot of ammunition to those who want CD/DVD burners to embed their serial numbers on discs. In fact, with technology having advanced further since the colour photocopier agreement, the RIAA/IFPI's standards for DVD burner watermarks could contain other information (such as GPS coordinates, for example).
There's Universal Music (i.e., Bronfman's mafia, with their hard line on banning anonymity and stamping out MP3s, and their copy-restricted pseudo-CDs), and then there's their new media division, which includes mp3.com and emusic.com.
This could be part of a power struggle between the two poles, the hardliners and the moderates. If enough people buy the MP3, the moderates will get more power in Vivendi, and the hardliners will be discredited. If this fails, the hardliners will just say "I told you so".
If you want the whole album, you'll buy the CD with the packaging. This service, I'd guess, is intended for those who just want one or two tracks.
And given how many albums are mostly bland yet technically polished filler (particularly major-label commercial albums, where artists' creative control is usurped by marketing considerations), a service that lets you (legally) download an unencumbered copy of the one or two tracks you want and ditch the rest of the album can fill a niche.
Celine Dion fans would most probably be people who don't care (or know) what their computer runs; which means mostly Windows users.
Since Windows is the default OS, Windows users' tastes would be (on average) more mainstream than fringe users. Mac users would probably have more piercings/tattoos than the average person and would be likely to listen to eclectic bands most people have never heard of.
Darwin was a scientist. He observed phonomonea and came to a conclusion. His findings do not disprove creationism or God. All he has done has provided us with, based on observable phonomonea, the best possible understanding about the development of life on this planet.
Actually, by definition, that disproves creationism (being the doctrine that the world, life and humans were created as described in the Bible). There is no way of reconciling this doctrine with contemporary scientific evidence of how life originated.
Whether one believes in God (or Allah or Vishnu or the Great Pumpkin or whatever) is one's own choice; though with physics and biology describing the physical world as well as they do, the spiritual realm has been more or less exiled to philosophy and poetic metaphor. Thunderstorms are not Thor's anger, the Earth wasn't created in 6 days, and chances are the Virgin Mary wasn't a virgin either. If there is a God, he's staying well out of the way.
The DMCA is merely an implementation of the last WIPO treaty. Europe has its own DMCA-like law (the European Directive on Copyright), which member nations are obliged to implement in laws. Australia has a similar law. Only "rogue nations" (i.e., the ones that Mozilla tells you it's illegal to export it to) are likely to not have WIPO-based laws.
Eventually blocking ads will be illegal; either under copyright laws (as a circumvention technique to get around paying attention), or under "attention rights" legislation enshrining the practice of content providers' rights to consumers' attention in law.
Wasn't someone working on embedding a Perl interpreter in the Linux kernel a while ago? And/or rewriting all of /bin as Perl scripts using the kernel-based interpreter? Did anything ever come of this , umm, cunning plan?
A lot of spam these days is run by the Russian Mafia (in particular much of the porn is). You probably wouldn't want to mess with them unless you had very good protection.
If one wants portability, one could always code in Python and use PyGame. Python does everything Java does, other than having management-friendly buzzwords, and has a more civilised syntax too.
Maybe look around for one of those underemployed Russian geniuses who'd be willing to take it over? Last time I checked, copyright laws in that part of the world didn't involve anything quite so draconian.
You're not one of those Objectivist nutters by any chance, are you?
Some have claimed that the NSA is 200 years ahead of the rest of the world in mathematics. Even if this is an exaggeration, it's something to think about.
After 9-11, that's what the public wants; it's hardly surprising that the Patriotic Thriller has become the top genre.
A friend of mine (from Australia) went to the US a year or two ago, and found himself needing to call a service which used such a system. When he did, he found that it could not understand his accent; after three unsuccessful attempts at doing an "American" accent, he gave up.
The moral of this story: make sure that there's a touch-tone menu to fall back on.
Has anybody tried replacing the kernel on a commercial MacOS X system with a user-compiled Darwin kernel? Did it work? Were there any issues?
Also, I recall that the delay in adding DVD support to 10.1 was partly due to the problem of satisfying the DVDCCA that the system was "secure", and that no rogue hacker could intercept their precious video frames; this would most likely have involved modifications to the kernel (and/or the Mach microkernel), and a fork from the open-source Darwin kernel (otherwise the "security" features could be bypassed by using a modified kernel). Has anybody tried playing DVDs over a home-made Darwin kernel?
Perhaps making it viewable in non-domestic regions could be construed as making it available to non-domestic markets, making the BBC liable for additional licensing fees, royalties to actors, or what have you. Or perhaps locking out other regions gives the BBC the option of licensing it through another distributor for overseas markets.
Yes, well, it's one thing hearing a penguinhead saying that copy protection doesn't work, the DMCA is futile or that Bill Gates is a Sith Lord; you'd sort of expect that. However, hearing it from a multinational consumer electronics giant is another matter altogether.
Which was the largest recording company; then, in 1998 or so, PolyGram was bought out and swallowed up by our old friends Universal.
Which goes to the point and doesn't mess around with euphemisms.