First, when I think about what I was doing in 1993 and you point out it was 16 years ago, you just make me feel old.
Thanks a lot.
Second, I wouldn't project the pace things changed in the last 16 years to the pace they're going to change in the next 16. Half of that time was still before the massive explosion in computer usage. 16 years ago computers were a "nerd" interest. Some of us had Internet, and some colleges had it available to students, but most people were using BBS's or other dial-up destination services. Computers were uncommon.
Today, new technologies come and go in the matter of years. Technology uptake is multiples faster than it was 16 years ago. Even basic things like interface types are starting to vanish. Firewire? SCSI? Parallel ports? Floppy drives? CDs are starting to fade, less than ten years after the use of them for recordable storage became practical. Even DVD recording is starting to fade because media has gotten too big for DVDs.
I wouldn't assume for a moment that any hardware or media today will work on a computer 16 years from now. USB 3/4/5 may have some backwards compatibility, but wireless connectivity and higher bandwidth standards will show up, and there will be a point that going 3-4 revisions back on a standard just won't happen. Your USB flash drive won't work anymore. Bandwidth into homes and dropping flash prices will almost certainly eliminate optical storage by that time. They're already too small for backups, and useless for most people for music playback. My video camera *today* can shoot video big enough to fill a dual layer DVD in 15 minutes.
IMO, putting digital content in a time capsule is a waste of time. The odds are SO low that it'll be readable in 16 years without someone tracking down very old hardware to use, I think they're better off putting physical things that mean something in there.
No, its not free legally online in the US, and the Kindle is US only.
As others have said a hundred times in this thread, Amazon took back something they could not legally sell. The way people can self-publish on the Kindle store, and the VAST number of books that people have ripped off from Project Gutenberg and are trying to sell on there, its just a matter of time until a book that is legal in places other than the US gets on there. That's what happened. It'll probably happen again.
I don't actually know anyone with a Kindle who is particularly upset about it beyond the initial knee-jerk reaction.
If you buy stolen property, you don't get to keep it.
Those were about playing back DVDs on unlicensed software or format shifting, not making a copy of a DVD.
Put a DVD in your computer. Rip an ISO. Burn the ISO to a new blank DVD. Works fine on any DVD, you can do it with command line tools if you'd like.
Now, if you want to take a 8GB DVD and get it onto a single layer disk (which is what that software was doing) by re-encoding the video or stripping stuff out, you are no longer backing up the disk and yes, you have to decrypt it, and yes that is illegal.
You don't have to violate the DMCA to copy a DVD. Just copy the files to a blank disk.
CSS is about player licensing, not copy protection. (Which there are a lot of people that *still* don't get...)
You can't play a DVD back on a player that isn't licensed by the DVD consortium. Thats what CSS prevents. (And thus, you can't format shift.)
Making a backup works just fine, and is perfectly legal. In fact, you can make a backup to a harddrive and it'll work just fine as long as the program playing it on your computer is a licensed DVD player. No decryption needed, no DCMA violation, no breaking of copyright.
US law is actually the same thing. The photograph is still copyrighted, even if the thing it is of isn't.
Example: Say there is a text from a book written in the 1800's that is out of copyright in the US. I want to publish a copy of it, say, for a Kindle or even a discount-book print copy.
I have to find a printing of the source material that is out of copyright already. I need to have a physical book to get the text from that is over 75 years old (or whatever the appropriate copyright term is for that physical book).
I *can't* take a reprinting from 20 years ago and base it on that because *that* book IS copyrighted, even if the source material isn't.
Its the same with photos, even in the US. A photo has its own copyright. I can copy a *photo* that is out of copyright freely, but can't copy a photo that is under copyright of something that isn't.
NPG is in the right, here... in the US and the UK. (And rightfully so, IMO -- there's a lot of work that goes into making those digital images... if you want one out of copyright, do it youself and release your copy into the public domain.)
Designing, building the Hubble was about $1.5billion, although there's some funny math there because in reality a lot of the hardware was shared with CIA Keyhole satellites.
Launch cost was nearly a billion because it was done in a Shuttle rather than on a rocket.
Hubble weights about 11000kg.
A Saturn V, for example, could launch TEN of them in a single shot, based on weight at almost an identical cost to a single shuttle launch.
An Ariene 5 is $120m and can carry the Hubble up to the appropriate orbit.
For the price of the repair mission, with all the delays and the costs NASA tends to hide in their normal operating budget, they could've build and launched two brand new HSTs.
NASA has existed since the late 70's largely as a corporate welfare program for defense contractors -- the companies needed a way to keep their skilled employees employed between contracts as the requirements of the cold war was shifting.
The shuttle was originally conceived as a cheap way to get to orbit, but even by the time it was first launched, the management knew that it was NEVER going to fly at the costs the public and some of congress were told to get it funded. For 30 years now the Shuttle and ISS have been used as excuses to fund each other precisely for those reasons.
Because doing things that make sense has never been a requirement of the manned space program, they continue to make ridiculous decisions for poor reasons. Fixing the Hubble, as you mentioned, is a perfect example -- they could've built and launched a new one for less than this last repair mission cost, but it got a week solid of national TV coverage to have astronauts doing it.
Shuttle missions, in general, are ridiculous -- it costs nearly as much to recertify the spacecraft between flights as it would to make a new one from scratch.
Things will start to take off when companies start doing this. There are fantastic things that NASA does with its science-focused arm, but the manned space program is one of the worst examples of government waste.
A lawyer saying "I'm right, because I'm a lawyer" would be like a programmer saying "this program is bug free, because I'm a programmer." It just doesn't (or at least shouldn't) happen that often.
What? I've used that line twice already today... (and ironically, just as I was about to hit send I got a build break alert pop up... nevermind!)
Your research wasn't very good if you didn't turn up the hundred companies building car computers that do precisely that or the tens of thousands or more people who use them.
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First, when I think about what I was doing in 1993 and you point out it was 16 years ago, you just make me feel old.
Thanks a lot.
Second, I wouldn't project the pace things changed in the last 16 years to the pace they're going to change in the next 16. Half of that time was still before the massive explosion in computer usage. 16 years ago computers were a "nerd" interest. Some of us had Internet, and some colleges had it available to students, but most people were using BBS's or other dial-up destination services. Computers were uncommon.
Today, new technologies come and go in the matter of years. Technology uptake is multiples faster than it was 16 years ago. Even basic things like interface types are starting to vanish. Firewire? SCSI? Parallel ports? Floppy drives? CDs are starting to fade, less than ten years after the use of them for recordable storage became practical. Even DVD recording is starting to fade because media has gotten too big for DVDs.
I wouldn't assume for a moment that any hardware or media today will work on a computer 16 years from now. USB 3/4/5 may have some backwards compatibility, but wireless connectivity and higher bandwidth standards will show up, and there will be a point that going 3-4 revisions back on a standard just won't happen. Your USB flash drive won't work anymore. Bandwidth into homes and dropping flash prices will almost certainly eliminate optical storage by that time. They're already too small for backups, and useless for most people for music playback. My video camera *today* can shoot video big enough to fill a dual layer DVD in 15 minutes.
IMO, putting digital content in a time capsule is a waste of time. The odds are SO low that it'll be readable in 16 years without someone tracking down very old hardware to use, I think they're better off putting physical things that mean something in there.
Reading comprehension is complex, I know, but if you persevere you can do it!
Or were you just trying to make some snarky anti-environment statement?
Educated minds already know.
Maybe the feds put it there to monitor all the hax0rs!!!
They took it to hide the evidence!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I haven't seen Moon, but I thought Sunshine falls into that category of unusually hard Sci-Fi that got wide attention.
If you've followed the company the last six or seven years, your joke has a certain bite of truth to it ...
No, its not free legally online in the US, and the Kindle is US only.
As others have said a hundred times in this thread, Amazon took back something they could not legally sell. The way people can self-publish on the Kindle store, and the VAST number of books that people have ripped off from Project Gutenberg and are trying to sell on there, its just a matter of time until a book that is legal in places other than the US gets on there. That's what happened. It'll probably happen again.
I don't actually know anyone with a Kindle who is particularly upset about it beyond the initial knee-jerk reaction.
If you buy stolen property, you don't get to keep it.
Can I get it in a spray mister so I can just spray it into my basement and not worry about all that pesky radon?
Those were about playing back DVDs on unlicensed software or format shifting, not making a copy of a DVD.
Put a DVD in your computer. Rip an ISO. Burn the ISO to a new blank DVD. Works fine on any DVD, you can do it with command line tools if you'd like.
Now, if you want to take a 8GB DVD and get it onto a single layer disk (which is what that software was doing) by re-encoding the video or stripping stuff out, you are no longer backing up the disk and yes, you have to decrypt it, and yes that is illegal.
But backups are not.
You don't have to violate the DMCA to copy a DVD. Just copy the files to a blank disk.
CSS is about player licensing, not copy protection. (Which there are a lot of people that *still* don't get...)
You can't play a DVD back on a player that isn't licensed by the DVD consortium. Thats what CSS prevents. (And thus, you can't format shift.)
Making a backup works just fine, and is perfectly legal. In fact, you can make a backup to a harddrive and it'll work just fine as long as the program playing it on your computer is a licensed DVD player. No decryption needed, no DCMA violation, no breaking of copyright.
Correct, which violates both US, UK and international copyright law.
US law is actually the same thing. The photograph is still copyrighted, even if the thing it is of isn't.
Example: Say there is a text from a book written in the 1800's that is out of copyright in the US. I want to publish a copy of it, say, for a Kindle or even a discount-book print copy.
I have to find a printing of the source material that is out of copyright already. I need to have a physical book to get the text from that is over 75 years old (or whatever the appropriate copyright term is for that physical book).
I *can't* take a reprinting from 20 years ago and base it on that because *that* book IS copyrighted, even if the source material isn't.
Its the same with photos, even in the US. A photo has its own copyright. I can copy a *photo* that is out of copyright freely, but can't copy a photo that is under copyright of something that isn't.
NPG is in the right, here... in the US and the UK. (And rightfully so, IMO -- there's a lot of work that goes into making those digital images... if you want one out of copyright, do it youself and release your copy into the public domain.)
Backups of DVDs and CDs are not illegal, what gave you that idea?
My parents complain to this day how I never did anything they wanted when I was even that young.
Designing, building the Hubble was about $1.5billion, although there's some funny math there because in reality a lot of the hardware was shared with CIA Keyhole satellites.
Launch cost was nearly a billion because it was done in a Shuttle rather than on a rocket.
Hubble weights about 11000kg.
A Saturn V, for example, could launch TEN of them in a single shot, based on weight at almost an identical cost to a single shuttle launch.
An Ariene 5 is $120m and can carry the Hubble up to the appropriate orbit.
For the price of the repair mission, with all the delays and the costs NASA tends to hide in their normal operating budget, they could've build and launched two brand new HSTs.
NASA has existed since the late 70's largely as a corporate welfare program for defense contractors -- the companies needed a way to keep their skilled employees employed between contracts as the requirements of the cold war was shifting.
The shuttle was originally conceived as a cheap way to get to orbit, but even by the time it was first launched, the management knew that it was NEVER going to fly at the costs the public and some of congress were told to get it funded. For 30 years now the Shuttle and ISS have been used as excuses to fund each other precisely for those reasons.
Because doing things that make sense has never been a requirement of the manned space program, they continue to make ridiculous decisions for poor reasons. Fixing the Hubble, as you mentioned, is a perfect example -- they could've built and launched a new one for less than this last repair mission cost, but it got a week solid of national TV coverage to have astronauts doing it.
Shuttle missions, in general, are ridiculous -- it costs nearly as much to recertify the spacecraft between flights as it would to make a new one from scratch.
Things will start to take off when companies start doing this. There are fantastic things that NASA does with its science-focused arm, but the manned space program is one of the worst examples of government waste.
And those people probably live closer to them then they think.
The number of reactors out there is vastly higher than the number generating electricity. A good number of universities have them, for example...
MIT's is in the middle of a residential area of Cambridge, MA and has been for decades.
Two kinds of people are scared of them -- morons, and the uneducated.
Cosmos was *bar none* my favorite show to watch on TV when I was 5.
Sorry you were so simple when you were a child. Don't assume all children are.
There are a lot of people who watch Jerry Springer, too.
I have the same problem with both groups.
Sign your soul away?
Its $60 a month.
Personally, if such a thing as a soul existed, mine would be worth vastly more than $60 a month.
But it did sound dramatic, I suppose.
You know, there was a time that any software you were using at home was on a cassette device.
A lawyer saying "I'm right, because I'm a lawyer" would be like a programmer saying "this program is bug free, because I'm a programmer." It just doesn't (or at least shouldn't) happen that often.
What? I've used that line twice already today... (and ironically, just as I was about to hit send I got a build break alert pop up... nevermind!)
Why not also your dishwasher? or the whole fucking car for that matter?
That's why I built my own car, from scratch.
And you should see my dishwasher. That wasn't from scratch, but boy it'll clean dishes.
Your research wasn't very good if you didn't turn up the hundred companies building car computers that do precisely that or the tens of thousands or more people who use them.
Breeding is not a requirement. If people can't afford to, then they shouldn't do it.