So 100,000 x (4 minutes avg song) x (1MB/min at 128kps mp3) = 400GB. That's just to store the songs.
50 feet away from me (30 ft down, 20 over) is a multi-terabyte fully redundant fibre controlled storage system and the set of database servers and web servers it feeds. The entire system takes up one rack. And web hits come back in under a tenth of a second, and we've never been able to get enough clients together to give it a full-to-the-breaking-point stress test.
And the equipment that I saw, just that which was photographed, easily takes up 10 times the space.
Ahh to live in the days when the easiest solution was just to order another server...
What you had were lots of dumb folks out there that jacked up the prices so that nothing was really all that good of a deal or anything to be surprised about
I've noticed a similar problem with eBay lately. Too many people with just barely too much money. They end up bidding OVER RETAIL in some cases!!!
So they have enough money that they don't care enough about how much they pay to do some research, but not enough that they don't just go pay "full price" for the items...
All those songs, lost.. there should be a law or something.
As a contributor to MP3.com allow me to assure you that the actual situation is far worse.
The new owner of their assets owns the same rights to their songs as I chose to grant MP3.com. However, they have removed my ability to manage those rights. If I don't want them to have the ability to broadcast my music as part of muzak (the business opportunity that makes this catalog profitable to them), I can submit my name and password to mp3.com to them. If I happen to guess my username and password right; yes that's right, they don't check when you type it in; then they say they'll remove my music from their list.
But I will never get a confirmation either way.
So I went through and entered every email address I've ever used and the 8-10 best guess passwords. Took me 3 hours. Hopefully this sleezeball company won't sell my music now.
Now perhaps if you believe Utilitarianism is the only ethical system, your distinction would make sense.
I've never heard of Utilitarianism, but the word itself evokes images very close to my belief. It seems to me that the only possible universal definition of immoral is those actions that decrease the personal survivability of an individual. I believe that ethical behaviour is behaviour which treats a larger unit than an individual in a moral fashion; the family, the nation, the species are all units to which this applies. If that's Utilitarianism, then that is indeed my ethical system, and I do believe it is the only ethical system that could possibly be proven logically, which is very important to me.
I borrowed my definitions of moral and ethical from Heinlein (Starship Troopers), and refined it a bit myself since then.
Basically, I define moral behaviour to be behaviour which increases the personal survivability of an individual. It is therefore always moral to break a law which you feel is immoral.
I define ethical behaviour to be the extension of moral behaviour to a group larger than yourself; your family, your town, your state, your nation, your species. An ethical sentient has a hierarchy like that that helps this sentient to resolve conflicts. A hyper-ethical sentient is one where the hierarchy is reversed; the good of the species comes before the good of the nation, etc. By this definition, breaking a law which is unethical is only in itself ethical in extreme circumstances, where it is obvious and unequivocal that the law is detrimental to the nation or the species as a whole.
Well I do create the melody, basslines, and percussion myself sometimes. The vocal arrangements are usually provided through partnerships with local artists. The melody may also be provided through partnerships with local artists.
I do admit that I use other people's work in my music. But I license it from them and obtain their permission to create derivative works for profit before I do it. That's the difference.
I believe you have misinterpreted me and perhaps the story itself sir.
When I said I sided with EMI, it was in the case of Grey Tuesday, which involves neither Apple, Eminem, nor Eight Mile Records.
The story is not about Apple selling a song, mp3 player, or music distribution service. The story is about Apple using (acapella) the lyrics of a song written by Eminem in one of their commercials. Eight Mile Studios, which is the organization that currently owns the copyright to that song, is suing Apple over such use. Note that Eminem may not have even known about this before it was publicly announced today, as that is (sadly) the situation with many artists and labels today.
As you say, Copyright was meant to forbid people from making copies of something for profit... in this case, Eight Mile Studios believe that Apple made a derivative work (also covered under copyright) of a song they owned, for profit, which was the goal of the advertisement in question.
In this case, I believe that Eight Mile Studios is in their legal right.
Let's get back to the original meaning of copyright.
Good luck with that. When you've talked to all the state senators and representatives and convinced them that this is the correct course of action and made it into law, then I will play by your game. Until then, fair or not, I will continue to obey the law of the land and expect you to do the same.
If you don't like it you can violate the law of the land. If you're doing so and I have the ability to stop you, you should not be surprised when I do so.
If you don't like that; well, there are always other countries...
No I do not feel that the current laws are a great balance. I feel, in fact, that the laws unjustly favor the copyright holder. Which, IMO, makes the laws moral but unethical. See my response to another poster below for my argument on why that is, and what I believe it is right to do about it...
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=98070& ci d=8378604
I'm not arguing for an unlimited monopoly to corporations here.
I'm arguing that if I create music, I have a right that others not profit off that right. I believe this right is transferable, and in this case, The Beatles chose to transfer this right to EMI.
Now our current legal system is setup such that copyrights are currently being extended in what is, IMO, unfairly. Our economic environment is such that, previously, one had to assign one's own rights to large record labels in order to get one's music distributed.
Neither of these is any reason to steal my work or the work of anyone else, however. Regardless of what anyone, Thomas Jefferson included, might say.
I define a democratic legal system as a set of laws setup by the public (or, in this case, their representatives) in order to enforce the public's best interests, to maintain order in society, and to provide a common ethical and moral framework for a nation. You may believe (as I do not) that current copyright law is immoral, that is, it is not geared towards the greater survivability of the copyright holders. If you do, then violating the law is certainly a correct action for you. However, I hardly think anyone would argue that current copyright law is unfavorable to the copyright holders.
You may believe (as I do) that current copyright law is unethical, that is that it harms society as a whole. The correct way to fix immoral legal situations IS civil disobedience. However, the correct way to fix unethical legal situations is to change the law. One cannot enact sweeping ethical legal changes without changing the law. Therefore I believe that the correct action here is not to violate the law, but to ask the lawmakers to change it. FWIW, I have corresponded with all of my state senators and representatives on this matter and made my opinion known. Most of them were in agreement to some degree or another.
My point being, if I believe that pickpocketing should not be a crime, that doesn't give me the right to pick your pocket.
As far as the economic situation; notice I spoke in past tense? There is a large underground music movement these days. One no longer has to give up rights to one's music in order to be distributed. Besides purely digital distribution methods (which are admittedly flawed), one can sign distribution deals with major labels, or join one of the many excellent independent labels out there.
For anyone doubting that one can make a profit with an independent label, I point out the case of the Insane Clown Posse*. They own and operate their own label, yet have 2 platinum records and 4 gold records. They are an extreme case, granted, but still they show that it is possible in the current economic market to be succesful without giving away your right to profit off your own music.
Therefore, I believe it is immoral, unethical, and illegal to profit off someone else's hardwork, regardless of who the current owner of that work may be.
*yes I'm a juggalo. Fuck you if you don't like it...
Since the site is slashdotted, I thought I'd share what info I can...
It's basically a freedom of speech civil disobedience thing based on posting DJ Danger Mouse's Grey album for 24 hours on your website (on Feb 24, "Fat Tuesday"), because EMI is (supposedly) wrongly trying to censor this work, as it is a remix of Jay-Z's Black Album and the Beatles' White Album. They claim rights to the White Album. The organizers claim that it is a respectful and positive derivative work and should not be stifled.
Hardly readable google cache here: http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:OqlsV9RPt3YJ: www.greytuesday.org/+grey+tuesday&hl=en&ie=UTF -8
As a digital DJ myself, I'm siding with EMI. I don't care if your work is respectful or not. I don't care if its positive or not. If I put hard work into making music, you have no right to profit off that work by remixing that music without seeking permission first.
Does anyone out there think that Intel has been planning this for a long time? Or at least this sort of thing? Why else would Intel try to secure IP rights to AMD patents royalty free, years ago?
Not that I really feel bad for AMD; lets not forget people, AMD started business doing exactly this sort of thing to Intel. Personally, I can't wait for nanotech to take off to the point where at least home fab facilities are affordable. Then we can design our own cores and forget this whole debate altogether. For those curious, there are already people doing that in FPGAs; its too bad that affordable FPGAs are an order of magnitude or two slower than best-of-breed processors these days.
On the flip side if you find that you suddenly need a 256-bit bus or 8 pixel pipelines, an FPGA can reconfigure itself on the fly for that. It'd be great if every program carried with it a set of core designs for the various subsystems, and could reconfigure them on the fly.
I would love to have a computer with 4-8 FPGAs on a PCIX card, a GPU consisting of 2-4 high speed FPGAs, and a nice big high speed FPGA for the main processor. Need hardware SSL? No problem. Hardware MPEG2 to DivX transcoding? No problem. Highly optimized pixel pipelines? Just send me the bits baby...
Its a nice dream anyways...
For those interested in trying something like that out on their own, I highly recommend http://www.opencores.org/
Sir I have never trolled before in my life, and this most emphatically is not a troll.
The posted article had a factual error in it.
A slashdot reader questioned this factual error.
I took the time to respond to this question to the best of my ability, explaining why the original must be in error, and even pointed out two possible interpretations of the original that might make a bit more sense.
Did you consider for a moment that this isn't "patently obvious [a troll]" because ITS NOT A TROLL???
The ignition's tumblers are higher precision and, in some cars, have sensors that read a code embedded in the chip to verify the key.
The number of cars that use actual active electronics at this stage are vanishingly few; basically only the extremely expensive limited runs require this level of paranoia.
Most of the cars that have a "chip", don't actually have any electronics to output some sort of code; the chip is merely a precision resistor. If the resistance level doesn't match to some insanely intolerant level, it is rejected. The tolerance level is somewhat more digits than common electronic multimeters will read, but still good enough to accomodate slightly dirty or damp contacts, physicial stress (which causes a slight piezoelectric effect), or other inaccuracies...
I am not an astrophysist, but does the phrase, "will be first used to study black holes in distant quasars" have any meaning at all?
I was just about to post the same thing.
AFAIK, a quasar is a far-universe object with a particular radio signature which indicates that it is highly energetic. The best theories state that this is a result of a large graviational mass (which probably previously went through a fusing-of-hydrogen-into-helium star stage) collapsing to the point that the gravitational gradient causes the nuclei in the atoms to seperate from their electron orbitals, all the protons and electrons neutralizing, and thus is a large ball of very hot very energetic neutrons.
A black hole is what happens when not even the energy involved at that stage is enough to prevent the matter from collapsing further, to the point where light itself cannot enter, and the mathematical equations governing the workings of the universe completely break down.
It is possible for a black hole to be small enough to fit inside a quasar. The usual result is that all matter touching the black hole is sucked inside, quickly, and you eventually have a bigger black hole.
A black hole can exist on a quantum level; that is, on a scale such that it could only have been formed by quantum forces in the early universe, and that it has a very small event horizon. However, the neutron-star-gobbling behaviour detailed above is asymptotic. There is a point where such a black hole would not eat its parent star immediately; that is where the black hole is so small and its gravitational gradient so steep that it gains practically no mass, gobbling up mere atoms on each orbit (black holes this small can orbit inside of solid matter)... however if its just a little bit larger than that, there's an exponential growth factor of the rate of consumption, governed by orbital mechanics, size of the black hole, and structural integrity of the matter matrix in which it is embedded.
To put it another way, the black hole eating matter slows its orbit, which causes more matter infall as it passes through, because a neutron star (and every other substance we know of) is incredibly fluid under the gravitational forces at work. This causes the black hole to increase in size quickly, causing still more matter to infall.
The point? The only black holes inside quasars are smaller than nuclei. And if we can only see a sugar cube on the moon, there's no way we're seeing nuclei 10 billion light years away, so there's no fucking way this can be used to look at black holes inside quasars.
The story may have been referring to a search for quasars that are infalling to black holes near them (a distance of 0.5 light year or less would cause something like this to happen), or perhaps to two seperate categories of objects that this new effect could be used to investigate...
More than anything, I just am stunned that they haven't been yanked short by an order to stop making accusations and laying charges until they prove at least one point!!!
IANAL but I beleive the main reason this may not have been done is a little constitutional guarantee called due process; its a standard tactic for delaying trials and trying to get off on technicalities; you simply hide behind due process, saying you must be given a chance to prove blah blah blah, and no judge can touch you until you stop.
does it only open the port for that one IP somehow, using also advanced IP filtering, cause otherwise this is dumb, it would be like unlocking your door for the first customer to knock right, but having to leave it open the whole time the customer is shopping.
Actually there is something you can do that combined with the way TCP/IP is built that makes this very secure.
Only allow that IP to login. After one connection attempt, close the port. A listen port doesn't need to be open for communciation to occur; remember that when you connect to my computer on port 80, what you're really doing is going to port 80 to be assigned ANOTHER port to communicate on, and that other port is what is actually used for the TCP/IP message traffic.
not being backwards compatible will just push everyone to playstation. [...] being able to play them is the point in having a game system.
Ummm how do you figure?
The modern console gaming industry has been around for 15 years (dating from NES). Console gaming as a whole has been around for much longer than that.
In all that time, the only game console that was backwards compatible before the release of the PS2 was the Atari 2600/5200/7800, and AFAIK the 5200 and 7800 did pretty poorly. I'm not counting the Sega Master System here because both versions were a simultaneous release; it wasn't backwards compatibility so much as it was a pricing point.
Yet you speak like backwards compatibility is a staple of the console gaming industry?
Could I put my NES games into my SNES? Nope. SNES games into N64? Nope. Genesis Carts into my Dreamcast? Nope.
Did that deter me from buying any of the above systems?
Nope.
Why would I buy them? Because they offered a compelling gaming experience that I couldn't get elsewhere. Just because XBOX2 won't support the previous gen's games doesn't mean that it won't be able to offer an equally compelling and unique experience...
Esentially the 802.11b receiver part was simple PCMCIA card with external antennas soldered to the card. So much for fancy technology... I can understand it makes sense from the producers point of view but it still is a bit surprising when you see it.
Actually, we have several high-end WAPs that do the same thing. Except the PCMCIA card is external. The WAP itself serves as router, firewall, authenticator, and all around network appliance (where applicable)... and due to the PCMCIA cards, it is upgradeable. When its time to go to 802.11g, just buy the cards and pop them in... other networking technologies should be similarily supported...
Perhaps you could explain how the French Resistance, the Founding Fathers, etc. directed violence against civilian populations, as the parent poster noted.
Perhaps you could define, in provable legal terms, the meaning of the word directed?
I tried taking a couple stabs at it, and I couldn't come up with an objective, provable definition of the word directed.
Every one of the groups listed above certainly harmed civilian populations at some point or another.
For that matter, so did our shock and awe campaign. Which started by launching cruise missles against a convention center (underneath which happened to be Saddam's hardened bunker) without a prior formal declaration of hostilities.
The problem is proving whether or not that violence was directed.
I would say that in our case at the beginning of Desert Storm II, it certainly was.
Slashdot Mirror
So 100,000 x (4 minutes avg song) x (1MB/min at 128kps mp3) = 400GB. That's just to store the songs.
50 feet away from me (30 ft down, 20 over) is a multi-terabyte fully redundant fibre controlled storage system and the set of database servers and web servers it feeds. The entire system takes up one rack. And web hits come back in under a tenth of a second, and we've never been able to get enough clients together to give it a full-to-the-breaking-point stress test.
And the equipment that I saw, just that which was photographed, easily takes up 10 times the space.
Ahh to live in the days when the easiest solution was just to order another server...
What you had were lots of dumb folks out there that jacked up the prices so that nothing was really all that good of a deal or anything to be surprised about
I've noticed a similar problem with eBay lately. Too many people with just barely too much money. They end up bidding OVER RETAIL in some cases!!!
So they have enough money that they don't care enough about how much they pay to do some research, but not enough that they don't just go pay "full price" for the items...
All those songs, lost.. there should be a law or something.
As a contributor to MP3.com allow me to assure you that the actual situation is far worse.
The new owner of their assets owns the same rights to their songs as I chose to grant MP3.com. However, they have removed my ability to manage those rights. If I don't want them to have the ability to broadcast my music as part of muzak (the business opportunity that makes this catalog profitable to them), I can submit my name and password to mp3.com to them. If I happen to guess my username and password right; yes that's right, they don't check when you type it in; then they say they'll remove my music from their list.
But I will never get a confirmation either way.
So I went through and entered every email address I've ever used and the 8-10 best guess passwords. Took me 3 hours. Hopefully this sleezeball company won't sell my music now.
And I really wish there was a law or something.
Just, dear god, don't let the trolls see this. They're annoying enough without it...
please tell me you have a script to do that; the joke wasn't good enough to justify actually typing in all that code
:)
On the other hand, if you do have a script to do it for you... mind sharing? I promise I won't give it to the trolls
Now perhaps if you believe Utilitarianism is the only ethical system, your distinction would make sense.
I've never heard of Utilitarianism, but the word itself evokes images very close to my belief. It seems to me that the only possible universal definition of immoral is those actions that decrease the personal survivability of an individual. I believe that ethical behaviour is behaviour which treats a larger unit than an individual in a moral fashion; the family, the nation, the species are all units to which this applies. If that's Utilitarianism, then that is indeed my ethical system, and I do believe it is the only ethical system that could possibly be proven logically, which is very important to me.
I borrowed my definitions of moral and ethical from Heinlein (Starship Troopers), and refined it a bit myself since then.
Basically, I define moral behaviour to be behaviour which increases the personal survivability of an individual. It is therefore always moral to break a law which you feel is immoral.
I define ethical behaviour to be the extension of moral behaviour to a group larger than yourself; your family, your town, your state, your nation, your species. An ethical sentient has a hierarchy like that that helps this sentient to resolve conflicts. A hyper-ethical sentient is one where the hierarchy is reversed; the good of the species comes before the good of the nation, etc. By this definition, breaking a law which is unethical is only in itself ethical in extreme circumstances, where it is obvious and unequivocal that the law is detrimental to the nation or the species as a whole.
Well I do create the melody, basslines, and percussion myself sometimes. The vocal arrangements are usually provided through partnerships with local artists. The melody may also be provided through partnerships with local artists.
I do admit that I use other people's work in my music. But I license it from them and obtain their permission to create derivative works for profit before I do it. That's the difference.
I believe you have misinterpreted me and perhaps the story itself sir.
When I said I sided with EMI, it was in the case of Grey Tuesday, which involves neither Apple, Eminem, nor Eight Mile Records.
The story is not about Apple selling a song, mp3 player, or music distribution service. The story is about Apple using (acapella) the lyrics of a song written by Eminem in one of their commercials. Eight Mile Studios, which is the organization that currently owns the copyright to that song, is suing Apple over such use. Note that Eminem may not have even known about this before it was publicly announced today, as that is (sadly) the situation with many artists and labels today.
As you say, Copyright was meant to forbid people from making copies of something for profit... in this case, Eight Mile Studios believe that Apple made a derivative work (also covered under copyright) of a song they owned, for profit, which was the goal of the advertisement in question.
In this case, I believe that Eight Mile Studios is in their legal right.
Let's get back to the original meaning of copyright.
Good luck with that. When you've talked to all the state senators and representatives and convinced them that this is the correct course of action and made it into law, then I will play by your game. Until then, fair or not, I will continue to obey the law of the land and expect you to do the same.
If you don't like it you can violate the law of the land. If you're doing so and I have the ability to stop you, you should not be surprised when I do so.
If you don't like that; well, there are always other countries...
No I do not feel that the current laws are a great balance. I feel, in fact, that the laws unjustly favor the copyright holder. Which, IMO, makes the laws moral but unethical. See my response to another poster below for my argument on why that is, and what I believe it is right to do about it...
& ci d=8378604
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=98070
I'm not arguing for an unlimited monopoly to corporations here.
I'm arguing that if I create music, I have a right that others not profit off that right. I believe this right is transferable, and in this case, The Beatles chose to transfer this right to EMI.
Now our current legal system is setup such that copyrights are currently being extended in what is, IMO, unfairly. Our economic environment is such that, previously, one had to assign one's own rights to large record labels in order to get one's music distributed.
Neither of these is any reason to steal my work or the work of anyone else, however. Regardless of what anyone, Thomas Jefferson included, might say.
I define a democratic legal system as a set of laws setup by the public (or, in this case, their representatives) in order to enforce the public's best interests, to maintain order in society, and to provide a common ethical and moral framework for a nation. You may believe (as I do not) that current copyright law is immoral, that is, it is not geared towards the greater survivability of the copyright holders. If you do, then violating the law is certainly a correct action for you. However, I hardly think anyone would argue that current copyright law is unfavorable to the copyright holders.
You may believe (as I do) that current copyright law is unethical, that is that it harms society as a whole. The correct way to fix immoral legal situations IS civil disobedience. However, the correct way to fix unethical legal situations is to change the law. One cannot enact sweeping ethical legal changes without changing the law. Therefore I believe that the correct action here is not to violate the law, but to ask the lawmakers to change it. FWIW, I have corresponded with all of my state senators and representatives on this matter and made my opinion known. Most of them were in agreement to some degree or another.
My point being, if I believe that pickpocketing should not be a crime, that doesn't give me the right to pick your pocket.
As far as the economic situation; notice I spoke in past tense? There is a large underground music movement these days. One no longer has to give up rights to one's music in order to be distributed. Besides purely digital distribution methods (which are admittedly flawed), one can sign distribution deals with major labels, or join one of the many excellent independent labels out there.
For anyone doubting that one can make a profit with an independent label, I point out the case of the Insane Clown Posse*. They own and operate their own label, yet have 2 platinum records and 4 gold records. They are an extreme case, granted, but still they show that it is possible in the current economic market to be succesful without giving away your right to profit off your own music.
Therefore, I believe it is immoral, unethical, and illegal to profit off someone else's hardwork, regardless of who the current owner of that work may be.
*yes I'm a juggalo. Fuck you if you don't like it...
Since the site is slashdotted, I thought I'd share what info I can...
: www.greytuesday.org/+grey+tuesday&hl=en&ie=UTF -8
It's basically a freedom of speech civil disobedience thing based on posting DJ Danger Mouse's Grey album for 24 hours on your website (on Feb 24, "Fat Tuesday"), because EMI is (supposedly) wrongly trying to censor this work, as it is a remix of Jay-Z's Black Album and the Beatles' White Album. They claim rights to the White Album. The organizers claim that it is a respectful and positive derivative work and should not be stifled.
Hardly readable google cache here: http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:OqlsV9RPt3YJ
As a digital DJ myself, I'm siding with EMI. I don't care if your work is respectful or not. I don't care if its positive or not. If I put hard work into making music, you have no right to profit off that work by remixing that music without seeking permission first.
Does anyone out there think that Intel has been planning this for a long time? Or at least this sort of thing? Why else would Intel try to secure IP rights to AMD patents royalty free, years ago?
Not that I really feel bad for AMD; lets not forget people, AMD started business doing exactly this sort of thing to Intel. Personally, I can't wait for nanotech to take off to the point where at least home fab facilities are affordable. Then we can design our own cores and forget this whole debate altogether. For those curious, there are already people doing that in FPGAs; its too bad that affordable FPGAs are an order of magnitude or two slower than best-of-breed processors these days.
On the flip side if you find that you suddenly need a 256-bit bus or 8 pixel pipelines, an FPGA can reconfigure itself on the fly for that. It'd be great if every program carried with it a set of core designs for the various subsystems, and could reconfigure them on the fly.
I would love to have a computer with 4-8 FPGAs on a PCIX card, a GPU consisting of 2-4 high speed FPGAs, and a nice big high speed FPGA for the main processor. Need hardware SSL? No problem. Hardware MPEG2 to DivX transcoding? No problem. Highly optimized pixel pipelines? Just send me the bits baby...
Its a nice dream anyways...
For those interested in trying something like that out on their own, I highly recommend http://www.opencores.org/
Sir I have never trolled before in my life, and this most emphatically is not a troll.
The posted article had a factual error in it.
A slashdot reader questioned this factual error.
I took the time to respond to this question to the best of my ability, explaining why the original must be in error, and even pointed out two possible interpretations of the original that might make a bit more sense.
Did you consider for a moment that this isn't "patently obvious [a troll]" because ITS NOT A TROLL???
The ignition's tumblers are higher precision and, in some cars, have sensors that read a code embedded in the chip to verify the key.
The number of cars that use actual active electronics at this stage are vanishingly few; basically only the extremely expensive limited runs require this level of paranoia.
Most of the cars that have a "chip", don't actually have any electronics to output some sort of code; the chip is merely a precision resistor. If the resistance level doesn't match to some insanely intolerant level, it is rejected. The tolerance level is somewhat more digits than common electronic multimeters will read, but still good enough to accomodate slightly dirty or damp contacts, physicial stress (which causes a slight piezoelectric effect), or other inaccuracies...
I am not an astrophysist, but does the phrase, "will be first used to study black holes in distant quasars" have any meaning at all?
I was just about to post the same thing.
AFAIK, a quasar is a far-universe object with a particular radio signature which indicates that it is highly energetic. The best theories state that this is a result of a large graviational mass (which probably previously went through a fusing-of-hydrogen-into-helium star stage) collapsing to the point that the gravitational gradient causes the nuclei in the atoms to seperate from their electron orbitals, all the protons and electrons neutralizing, and thus is a large ball of very hot very energetic neutrons.
A black hole is what happens when not even the energy involved at that stage is enough to prevent the matter from collapsing further, to the point where light itself cannot enter, and the mathematical equations governing the workings of the universe completely break down.
It is possible for a black hole to be small enough to fit inside a quasar. The usual result is that all matter touching the black hole is sucked inside, quickly, and you eventually have a bigger black hole.
A black hole can exist on a quantum level; that is, on a scale such that it could only have been formed by quantum forces in the early universe, and that it has a very small event horizon. However, the neutron-star-gobbling behaviour detailed above is asymptotic. There is a point where such a black hole would not eat its parent star immediately; that is where the black hole is so small and its gravitational gradient so steep that it gains practically no mass, gobbling up mere atoms on each orbit (black holes this small can orbit inside of solid matter)... however if its just a little bit larger than that, there's an exponential growth factor of the rate of consumption, governed by orbital mechanics, size of the black hole, and structural integrity of the matter matrix in which it is embedded.
To put it another way, the black hole eating matter slows its orbit, which causes more matter infall as it passes through, because a neutron star (and every other substance we know of) is incredibly fluid under the gravitational forces at work. This causes the black hole to increase in size quickly, causing still more matter to infall.
The point? The only black holes inside quasars are smaller than nuclei. And if we can only see a sugar cube on the moon, there's no way we're seeing nuclei 10 billion light years away, so there's no fucking way this can be used to look at black holes inside quasars.
The story may have been referring to a search for quasars that are infalling to black holes near them (a distance of 0.5 light year or less would cause something like this to happen), or perhaps to two seperate categories of objects that this new effect could be used to investigate...
err...this is a project to show system load, not temperature.
Ahh, but one is dependant (and caused by) the other; so wouldn't this be both?
I could imagine some company deciding to put these gauges on their heatsinks... that would be cool...
More than anything, I just am stunned that they haven't been yanked short by an order to stop making accusations and laying charges until they prove at least one point!!!
IANAL but I beleive the main reason this may not have been done is a little constitutional guarantee called due process; its a standard tactic for delaying trials and trying to get off on technicalities; you simply hide behind due process, saying you must be given a chance to prove blah blah blah, and no judge can touch you until you stop.
This appears to be largely of that order...
does it only open the port for that one IP somehow, using also advanced IP filtering, cause otherwise this is dumb, it would be like unlocking your door for the first customer to knock right, but having to leave it open the whole time the customer is shopping.
Actually there is something you can do that combined with the way TCP/IP is built that makes this very secure.
Only allow that IP to login. After one connection attempt, close the port. A listen port doesn't need to be open for communciation to occur; remember that when you connect to my computer on port 80, what you're really doing is going to port 80 to be assigned ANOTHER port to communicate on, and that other port is what is actually used for the TCP/IP message traffic.
not being backwards compatible will just push everyone to playstation. [...] being able to play them is the point in having a game system.
Ummm how do you figure?
The modern console gaming industry has been around for 15 years (dating from NES). Console gaming as a whole has been around for much longer than that.
In all that time, the only game console that was backwards compatible before the release of the PS2 was the Atari 2600/5200/7800, and AFAIK the 5200 and 7800 did pretty poorly. I'm not counting the Sega Master System here because both versions were a simultaneous release; it wasn't backwards compatibility so much as it was a pricing point.
Yet you speak like backwards compatibility is a staple of the console gaming industry?
Could I put my NES games into my SNES? Nope. SNES games into N64? Nope. Genesis Carts into my Dreamcast? Nope.
Did that deter me from buying any of the above systems?
Nope.
Why would I buy them? Because they offered a compelling gaming experience that I couldn't get elsewhere. Just because XBOX2 won't support the previous gen's games doesn't mean that it won't be able to offer an equally compelling and unique experience...
You wouldn't happen to be Mike Shephard would you?
Esentially the 802.11b receiver part was simple PCMCIA card with external antennas soldered to the card.
So much for fancy technology... I can understand it makes sense from the producers point of view but it still is a bit surprising when you see it.
Actually, we have several high-end WAPs that do the same thing. Except the PCMCIA card is external. The WAP itself serves as router, firewall, authenticator, and all around network appliance (where applicable)... and due to the PCMCIA cards, it is upgradeable. When its time to go to 802.11g, just buy the cards and pop them in... other networking technologies should be similarily supported...
The only thing that girl's bandagewear could have possibly protected against was an NC-17 rating.
And let me say that that was a dangerous rating that I, for one, would have been willing to brave.
Oh yes I am a bastion of courage.
Perhaps you could explain how the French Resistance, the Founding Fathers, etc. directed violence against civilian populations, as the parent poster noted.
Perhaps you could define, in provable legal terms, the meaning of the word directed?
I tried taking a couple stabs at it, and I couldn't come up with an objective, provable definition of the word directed.
Every one of the groups listed above certainly harmed civilian populations at some point or another.
For that matter, so did our shock and awe campaign. Which started by launching cruise missles against a convention center (underneath which happened to be Saddam's hardened bunker) without a prior formal declaration of hostilities.
The problem is proving whether or not that violence was directed.
I would say that in our case at the beginning of Desert Storm II, it certainly was.
I think that on the third hand, there's enough legal education and know-how ...
...
I would like to apologize to my fellow slashdotters. What my fellow nerd meant to say was of course:
On the gripping hand, there's enough legal education and know-how