Scherf nor his company did not "release" the database, it was already in the public domain because of Ti Kan
Again, what would you have them do? If it was already released to the public, should they just release it again for fun and larfs? In any case, why does it matter WHO released it, if it has been released?
It was not until Musicmatch defeated the Gracenote patent infringement lawsuit in August 2004
Hmm, that's funny. I just read the court documents at the Gracenote legal page, and they indicate (1) that Gracenote won the trial where Musicmatch was suing them (and that was the only trial there ever was), and (2) that the court's earlier pretrial rulings against Gracenote were overturned by the very judge that issued them in the first place. OVERTURNED. So can you please point to the document that shows where musicmatch defeated gracenote?
Apply a GPL to the database, or some subset of it, and the technique now
Didn't he say in the wired text that all of the data collected before CDDB went commercial has already been released, and the lookup code is GPLed too? So what else are you asking them to do?
This just appeared after the comment that notes the date disparity:
You're right, my memory is not perfect. This is the edit I made after the Seigenthaler incident [1]. I didn't know much about how Wikipedia works, or I would have requested deletion instead of editing the article at that time. I wanted to set the tone of the article, but leave it short. I had forgotten that I created the article, but a few months after Seigenthaler I realized there was something out there, and it was pretty empty and needed attention to set the tone. But your implication that I am lying about this is silly, because, as you have done, anyone can come and look at the page history. An honest mistake, and one that's pretty irrelevant anyway.
When CDDB closed up shop and was seized by gracenote for corrupt 16 million dollar grab
Where do you get this from? I don't think anyone's ever mentioned any aspects the deal anywhere on the net that I can see, so you're just pulling numbers out of your ass.
Gracenote is trying to buy patents to try and force Neilson and force MusicBrainz (libmusicbrainz ) off the net soon via onerous litigation
Again, WTF? Care to explain how you have insider knowledge that Gracenote is preparing to sue anyone? Oh, you don't actually know, you say? You're just guessing, you say?
Standard slashbot FUD. And rated at +5 to prove it!
This patent was first submitted in 2002, which probably means it was turned down and appealed at least twice. As anyone who has gone through the patent process knows, if you appeal enough times eventually you might find an examiner who is clueless enough to grant the patent.
While I agree that this patent is BS (I can probably find many examples of this in my own code since the 70's), your understanding of the patent process is flawed. Unless an examiner leaves, you're likely to have the same one throughout the many year process a patent normally takes. It is not un usual for patents to take this long; in fact, faster issuance is the rarity. On appeal you must not resubmit the same claims, so even if you could keep appealing until you find a favorable examiner, you still have to refine your language.
If a patent I filed was granted immediately, I would be worried about the strength of that patent. It is a good thing when examiners reject claims, because it requires you to think about how your patent differs from prior art. When you respond to the examiner's action after examining the rejection, your are then more certain of the validity of your patent. If an examiner just rubber stamped your patent, you wouldn't have as much certainty that the patent would hold if contested.
Also note that patent examiners are graded based on how many patents they reject, now how many they accept. They have little incentive to grant patents outright, so it is a rarity when it happens. The patent here, though invalid IMHO, did issue in an average amount of time.
This is pretty typical/. FUD. Show me a link to anything that indicates they ever sued freedb or anyone associated with the development of freedb. And why not RTFA and the link he gave to the full interview too before you spew uninformed garbage like this?
He also says that freedb stagnated because they didn't develop the technology further, not because they were sued or nobody would use freedb. Those are both bullshit. How would that have stopped freedb from developing the technology? Like fixing the f(*#$ing protocol so that different discs don't collide in the database any more. They had 7 years to fix the protocol and database format and they haven't done squat. That's why gracenote and musicbrainz are superior. For the life of me, I don't know why anyone still uses freedb.
Anyway, how about getting some facts before embarking on a clueless slashdot rampage?
MySpace wants to be in control. They want to own the music-delivery experience and have the leverage when it comes to dealing with bands who want to have a MySpace presence. And kicking all the non-MySpace music off of the site is the first step.
Umm, and why do you think this? Their strategy has worked very well for them up to now, so why would they change it in such an obviously detrimental way? The most obvious (and, frankly, correct) reason is that they are now filtering out copyrighted content to avoid lawsuits from record labels. Just like YouTube was forced to do. Where does all of this paranoia on slashdot come from anyway? Remember Occam's Razor whenever the conspiracy theories kick in...
Presumably it'd be trivial for Myspace to run this in the background
I think you presume too much. Myspace would have to have the millions of banned fingerprints for the songs the record labels put in the blacklist. And they would have to have a process for acquiring new stuff added to the blacklist by the labels in reasonable time. Who's going to do that for them? What if there are bugs in the system? Who is going to fix that for them with any guarantee of correctness or promptness? Who is going to run the servers? Does MySpace have to do that themselves, or are they going to rely on some public servers somewhere with no guarantee of availability or throughput?
What I presume is that they discarded your entire notion as unworkable for a real company with record company lawyers breathing down their backs. More likely they examined all of the available commercial solutions and settled on the one that seemed to fit their needs. (I also presume they examined Shazam as part of their process, not in musicbrainz incarnation, whatever that really is.)
You make a good point. Freedb genres are messed up, partially because the genre is actually part of the unique identifier. But that's not a good reason to omit genres from a new system such as musicbrainz that's supposed to "fix" problems with previous solutions. Genre systems do work if well maintained. And it is possible to map between different genre systems to make everyone happy, as there are many genre systems in existence. But to toss the baby out with the bathwater and not support genres at all is a pretty major punt.
You may scoff at the seeming unimportance of genres in a media recognition system and its metadata, but you do so at the peril of musicbrainz remaining irrelevant to the majority of users. Like it or not, users want genres assigned to the thousands of files they create, and any system that ignores it won't be taken seriously by either users or application developers that want to be successful.
CDDB and FreeDB are old news. MusicBrainz is by far superior
While I agree that freedb is lagging behind CDDB (Gracenote) in most if not all ways in technology and data format, it's absurd to say that musicbrainz is ahead of them both. Musicbrainz doesn't even support the concept of music genre, for crying out loud. The page you link to says that's because they can't figure out how to support genres correctly?! So does that mean if you use musicbrainz (man that name is weak) to rip your music, you have to manually go and assign genres to your songs or what? (I've never tried so I really don't know, but I assume so considering they said it themselves.) If so, what's the point of using it in the first place? I don't want to manually enter any data whatsoever - who does?
Last I checked, Gracenote supports everything musicbrainz does and more. Freedb has its dupe problems and somewhat stagnant technology, but it has genres, users who submit to it/edit the data (which mb hardly has), and a concept of what users actually need/want. So what gives with the musicbrainz propaganda?
I read the article... did you? Each of the "discs" are to be kept separate and distinct. They may pack layers of them into a container, but they will be pulled out separately and loaded onto a spindle that uses suction to keep the flimsy thing in place. My thought was that they should layer multiple of them into a single piece of CD-like media to
avoid this rather sketchy-sounding approach. Perhaps you should RTFC (Read The F***ing Comment), and maybe keep the vitriol to yourself to avoid appearing like you are the moron.
Somehow this technology seems academically interesting, but practically kind of lame. Who cares how thin
the media is? It's so thin that it must be carried inside something else that's obviously got to be much larger than the media. This could be cool if they could layer numerous levels of these inside a standard thickness disc, but aside from that it seems fragile and dubious.
You've just got all the answers, don't you? I'm sorry, but I just don't have a lot of control over other people when they watch my kid for me. You NEVER know when they'll fail, despite all the easy answers you seem to have. And you never know when a lost kid will forget what he's supposed to do when he gets lost.
Oh, and by the way, when my family members were held captive at gunpoint, the captors did not relieve them of any personal items. The captors figured that tying them up was good enough. A cell phone in a kid's backpack is as likely to go unnoticed as not in such a situation as that, or a kidnapping. It's worth having one just in case.
You bizarrely imply that there's something inherently wrong with giving a kid a safety device like this, and that doing so should be avoided for some reason. I can't fathom why you seem to think that one shouldn't give one's kid something that might save them some day, out of some weird matter of principle. All I can guess is that I have been feeding the trolls. My bad.
None of the phone/service combos I have seen, including the ones listed in response to my posting, include all of the features I have noted:
Limited call list (with one button access)
Limited incoming call list
Password access when calling the phone from an unknown number
GPS tracking via web
I think the missing piece from most of the ones I've seen are password access to call the phone. That is crucial, in case you are not at a preordained phone number.
I guess you've never had a kid. They are not in your control 100% of the day. What if your kid goes to a school that is not fenced in? Snatchings are not unheard of, and it may be possible for them to wander off despite all best intentions of school staff. What if the kid is on a field trip, and manages to get separated from the group? What if they are at a friend's house and... on and on. Even when they are under your supervision, you can't watch them literally 100% of the time. The worst can happen in the blink of an eye despite eternal vigilance, regardless of what childless anonymous cowards may think.
And what if your kid is somehow snatched from school? You seem to suggest that school officials having some way of calling you would help in that situation. Are they going to be able to tell me where the snatcher went? No, but the GPS on the cell phone just might.
No decent parent would ever let their kid do anything without ensuring that there will be adult supervision, and I am not saying that a phone should ever be treated as a substitute for an adult being present. I am saying that a phone would be good additional reassurance. Family members of mine have been kidnapped, held at gunpoint, gotten lost at very young ages, and I have personally gotten lost on field trips when I was very young. If you've never had even one of these things happen to you or people you know, then you are either very lucky or ignorant.
My kid is 5, and I have been mulling the idea of getting her a cell phone. I have a problem with the thought of kids at any age yapping into a cell phone at school (or just about anywhere/anytime), but safety and security may well have to override this. If there was a good cell phone that was only capable of calling preassigned numbers and which can only receive calls from
specific numbers or from callers who know the password, I would probably go buy it now. As far as I can tell, this combination of phone and service does not yet exist in Silicon Valley/Bay Area. Also, a phone with live GPS tracking would be truly awesome. But I don't think we're there yet.
This is the real failure of our educational system. People fail to see how science and religion can coexist, that they are not mutually exclusive. There are a bunch of uneducated morons in this country who have little or no grasp of science. To them it's all gobbledygook, and their understanding of their own religions is, ironically, flawed as a result.
To think that some of the greatest scientific minds of the human race were also highly religious seems truly ironic, until you look more closely at how understanding the universe actually brought them closer to their religion. Look at Georges Lemaitre, the physicist who proposed the Big Bang theory - he was a Catholic priest. So long as you treat religious writings such as the bible as allegorical rather than literal messages, science can actually serve as an illustration of how the hand of god works.
The literalism practiced by fundamentalists is the root of the problem here. Perhaps these people don't need more science education so much as they need a history lesson. The history of the bible, that is. When one understands the origin of the bible as a select collection of works written by various authors, edited by committee, and translated numerous times, one quickly sees the fallacy of literal interpretation.
Though it may seem counterintuitive, I think actually teaching some religion in schools might help alleviate a lot of the ignorance in this country. If students were actually taught the history of the bible, perhaps fear of science as contradictory to the message of the bible would fade away. As a rabid anti-religion activist, I never thought I'd hear myself say that any aspect of religion should be taught in schools, but I think this makes some sense. Maybe it would remove the roadblocks to learning science.
To call something an object, doesn't it have to consist of contiguously connected/adjacent atoms? Last I checked, galaxies, even "tightly packed" ones have immense space between the actual objects inside, aka stars and other celestial bodies. To call this thing the largest known object is simply sensationalism. It may be a novel thing, however, whatever it is, and shouldn't that be interesting enough in itself?
Lyrics sites won't be going away any time soon. They've been trying to crack down on lyrics sites for years, and there are more of them than ever. Why does anyone think this will change, just because they saw a press release saying the record companies will be going after pirates? With so many sites, it will be impractical to try and shut them all down.
I agree with what someone here said about lyrics and cover art being integral to the music, which is why you get them when you buy an album. You should get them when you buy digital music too, and I think that's just what's going to happen. I don't think music retailers are going to raise the price of music for this. I think they're going to use it to make online music more attractive. You can't charge a significant amount more for lyrics, especially when they are so easy to find. Legal sales of lyrics mean consumer software and electronics can now carry lyrics. Everyone should be jumping for joy, not bitching. I for one am looking forward to having lyrics displayed on my iPod some day (soon?). Until now, no company making a legitimate consumer product would/could include lyrics; now they can.
The thing that makes lyrics and art so complicated is that there is no central place to license the rights. The music, art and lyrics are all potentially owned by different parties, and often are. Obtaining the rights to them can be near impossible, which is why you don't really see covers being sold with digital music. And when you do see covers, they are generally low-res. You can't have a low-res lyric, so it's a different problem that is difficult to solve. It will be interesting to see how they are packaged.
Regardless, I don't think this signals the death of lyrics search. The articles I've ready say that search is part of what's been licensed. So you'll still be able to search for lyrics, and presumably view them (else what good is
search capability?).
Too bad the moderators marked you "informative". Unfortunately now people will take your "information" as fact. Par for the course on slashdot, I suppose.
I can say with absolute, total authority that CDDB data was never GPLed. Aside from the multiple legal analyses of the GPL that I have received over the years that state the GPL does not apply to data, it's very straightforward: use google to locate an old CDDB data package from before 1998 and download it. Unpack it and read the included GPL notice. What? You can't find it? Hmm, that's funny, I wonder why that is? Because it was NEVER THERE. Now look at the copyright notice in each entry. What, no GPL there either? Oh, what's that, a copyright notice that says "Copyright Ti Kan"? Hmm, that doesn't look like the GPL either... Maybe that's because it's not!
You were saying?
Oh yeah, you were saying, "what's he's already put out there as GPL is, and shall always remain, free software". Who's talking about software? Of course the software was GPLed, but it wasn't copyrighted by Ti Kan. It was copyrighted by Steve Scherf. And of course it's free software, it was GPLed and nobody is disputing that. But we were talking about the data, not the software, weren't we?
What freedb has done is taken data that was never released under the GPL and tried to put it under the GPL. It's legally sketchy, and may well be illegal in some places. However, though the issue is very gray and not clearly illegal, it's of questionable ethical standing to take something you don't own the copyright to and try to change the copyright notice, wouldn't you say?
Even if you don't say, it doesn't matter. You clearly don't understand the issue and haven't done your homework. You are just spouting the standard party line of the freedb "activist".
And CDDB ripped off the users how? Last I checked, both the data and source code they released to the public are what freedb was started with. When CDDB and freedb branched, they started with largely the same thing each other had. And who's got the better service? All of this really sounds like sour grapes by people who threw in their lot with the side who could only copy and not actually innovate;they're angry because freedb never went anywhere.
Nobody here seems to have a clue about copyright law, or about the actual state of freedb data. First, the original CDDB data was never released under the GPL. Why not? Perhaps because you can't GPL data, only source code. But nobody here is actually a lawyer, so that little fact never seems to see the light of day here. Second, read those little CDDB data files, the ones that first came from CDDB itself. They all say "Copyright Ti Kan". That's right, a legal copyright notice that the data is owned by an actual individual. By law, that simple statement is enough for Ti Kan himself to claim ownership of the data. But copyright law does not protect collections of data (like the phone book), so it's questionable if the data is really protected or not.
By releasing the data under a different copyright (as they have already done, frankly), freedb would essentially be saying, "We're going to steal this data from Ti Kan. But we think we're justified because we're free and open and FU to anyone who wants to keep data from being free. Even if we don't own it. Besides, copyright law is in our favor, so never mind if it's hippocritical or unjustified for us to make this data our own. We don't care, and nobody can stop us." But because the law is somewhat murky, and because the provenance of the current dataset is unclear, the data is essentially public domain already. But those who are pushing to make it officially public domain are just as "greedy" as those thieves they accuse of taking the data from the users. If you stole it from others, I can steal it from you! Then I'd be stealing from you, not them.
You took the words right out of my mouth. That's the first thing I thought when I read the article excerpt. Wimpy home bus? What they hell are they talking about?
My workstation at home is a Shuttle with a standard P4 3Ghz. My workstation at the office is an Asus tower with a P4 2.8 Ghz. Both have a gig of RAM. I do my real work on a set of Sun v40z servers, which I have all to myself for research and development. They are quad AMD Optereons, each with 32GB RAM and 6 uber-fast drives in a RAID 10 setup. I am crunching through lots of data on those servers, and clearly the workstations would not be up to the task because they only have 1gig of RAM. But when I have a task to do that fits into 1 gig, I use one of my workstations. Why? Because they're faster. Memory speeds are close, but the Opteron wins only slightly,and then not even all of the time. But for actual calculation, the P4 kills it. The Opterons are designed to move data and scale while doing it, but my "cheap" "home bus" workstation can kick its but in many ways.
Whoever wrote this crap article is either an idiot or a shill.
They already do auctions for the best seats. Where has the author been? I just bought some tickets this way a few weeks ago, and it's a total scam. They also end the auction one day *after* general ticket sales, so if you don't win that auction, you get nothing. Totally evil, and designed to make you bid to the max so you don't get left in the cold. I really wanted to see that concert, though (I rarely find one I want to see), so I bid high just like they wanted.
Slashdot Mirror
Scherf nor his company did not "release" the database, it was already in the public domain because of Ti Kan
Again, what would you have them do? If it was already released to the public, should they just release it again for fun and larfs? In any case, why does it matter WHO released it, if it has been released?
It was not until Musicmatch defeated the Gracenote patent infringement lawsuit in August 2004
Hmm, that's funny. I just read the court documents at the Gracenote legal page, and they indicate (1) that Gracenote won the trial where Musicmatch was suing them (and that was the only trial there ever was), and (2) that the court's earlier pretrial rulings against Gracenote were overturned by the very judge that issued them in the first place. OVERTURNED. So can you please point to the document that shows where musicmatch defeated gracenote?
Apply a GPL to the database, or some subset of it, and the technique now
Didn't he say in the wired text that all of the data collected before CDDB went commercial has already been released, and the lookup code is GPLed too? So what else are you asking them to do?
This just appeared after the comment that notes the date disparity:
You're right, my memory is not perfect. This is the edit I made after the Seigenthaler incident [1]. I didn't know much about how Wikipedia works, or I would have requested deletion instead of editing the article at that time. I wanted to set the tone of the article, but leave it short. I had forgotten that I created the article, but a few months after Seigenthaler I realized there was something out there, and it was pretty empty and needed attention to set the tone. But your implication that I am lying about this is silly, because, as you have done, anyone can come and look at the page history. An honest mistake, and one that's pretty irrelevant anyway.
When CDDB closed up shop and was seized by gracenote for corrupt 16 million dollar grab
Where do you get this from? I don't think anyone's ever mentioned any aspects the deal anywhere on the net that I can see, so you're just pulling numbers out of your ass.
Gracenote is trying to buy patents to try and force Neilson and force MusicBrainz (libmusicbrainz ) off the net soon via onerous litigation
Again, WTF? Care to explain how you have insider knowledge that Gracenote is preparing to sue anyone? Oh, you don't actually know, you say? You're just guessing, you say? Standard slashbot FUD. And rated at +5 to prove it!
This patent was first submitted in 2002, which probably means it was turned down and appealed at least twice. As anyone who has gone through the patent process knows, if you appeal enough times eventually you might find an examiner who is clueless enough to grant the patent.
While I agree that this patent is BS (I can probably find many examples of this in my own code since the 70's), your understanding of the patent process is flawed. Unless an examiner leaves, you're likely to have the same one throughout the many year process a patent normally takes. It is not un usual for patents to take this long; in fact, faster issuance is the rarity. On appeal you must not resubmit the same claims, so even if you could keep appealing until you find a favorable examiner, you still have to refine your language.
If a patent I filed was granted immediately, I would be worried about the strength of that patent. It is a good thing when examiners reject claims, because it requires you to think about how your patent differs from prior art. When you respond to the examiner's action after examining the rejection, your are then more certain of the validity of your patent. If an examiner just rubber stamped your patent, you wouldn't have as much certainty that the patent would hold if contested.
Also note that patent examiners are graded based on how many patents they reject, now how many they accept. They have little incentive to grant patents outright, so it is a rarity when it happens. The patent here, though invalid IMHO, did issue in an average amount of time.
This is pretty typical /. FUD. Show me a link to anything that indicates they ever sued freedb or anyone associated with the development of freedb. And why not RTFA and the link he gave to the full interview too before you spew uninformed garbage like this?
He also says that freedb stagnated because they didn't develop the technology further, not because they were sued or nobody would use freedb. Those are both bullshit. How would that have stopped freedb from developing the technology? Like fixing the f(*#$ing protocol so that different discs don't collide in the database any more. They had 7 years to fix the protocol and database format and they haven't done squat. That's why gracenote and musicbrainz are superior. For the life of me, I don't know why anyone still uses freedb.
Anyway, how about getting some facts before embarking on a clueless slashdot rampage?
MySpace wants to be in control. They want to own the music-delivery experience and have the leverage when it comes to dealing with bands who want to have a MySpace presence. And kicking all the non-MySpace music off of the site is the first step.
Umm, and why do you think this? Their strategy has worked very well for them up to now, so why would they change it in such an obviously detrimental way? The most obvious (and, frankly, correct) reason is that they are now filtering out copyrighted content to avoid lawsuits from record labels. Just like YouTube was forced to do. Where does all of this paranoia on slashdot come from anyway? Remember Occam's Razor whenever the conspiracy theories kick in...
Presumably it'd be trivial for Myspace to run this in the background
I think you presume too much. Myspace would have to have the millions of banned fingerprints for the songs the record labels put in the blacklist. And they would have to have a process for acquiring new stuff added to the blacklist by the labels in reasonable time. Who's going to do that for them? What if there are bugs in the system? Who is going to fix that for them with any guarantee of correctness or promptness? Who is going to run the servers? Does MySpace have to do that themselves, or are they going to rely on some public servers somewhere with no guarantee of availability or throughput?
What I presume is that they discarded your entire notion as unworkable for a real company with record company lawyers breathing down their backs. More likely they examined all of the available commercial solutions and settled on the one that seemed to fit their needs. (I also presume they examined Shazam as part of their process, not in musicbrainz incarnation, whatever that really is.)
You make a good point. Freedb genres are messed up, partially because the genre is actually part of the unique identifier. But that's not a good reason to omit genres from a new system such as musicbrainz that's supposed to "fix" problems with previous solutions. Genre systems do work if well maintained. And it is possible to map between different genre systems to make everyone happy, as there are many genre systems in existence. But to toss the baby out with the bathwater and not support genres at all is a pretty major punt.
You may scoff at the seeming unimportance of genres in a media recognition system and its metadata, but you do so at the peril of musicbrainz remaining irrelevant to the majority of users. Like it or not, users want genres assigned to the thousands of files they create, and any system that ignores it won't be taken seriously by either users or application developers that want to be successful.
CDDB and FreeDB are old news. MusicBrainz is by far superior
While I agree that freedb is lagging behind CDDB (Gracenote) in most if not all ways in technology and data format, it's absurd to say that musicbrainz is ahead of them both. Musicbrainz doesn't even support the concept of music genre, for crying out loud. The page you link to says that's because they can't figure out how to support genres correctly?! So does that mean if you use musicbrainz (man that name is weak) to rip your music, you have to manually go and assign genres to your songs or what? (I've never tried so I really don't know, but I assume so considering they said it themselves.) If so, what's the point of using it in the first place? I don't want to manually enter any data whatsoever - who does?
Last I checked, Gracenote supports everything musicbrainz does and more. Freedb has its dupe problems and somewhat stagnant technology, but it has genres, users who submit to it/edit the data (which mb hardly has), and a concept of what users actually need/want. So what gives with the musicbrainz propaganda?
I read the article... did you? Each of the "discs" are to be kept separate and distinct. They may pack layers of them into a container, but they will be pulled out separately and loaded onto a spindle that uses suction to keep the flimsy thing in place. My thought was that they should layer multiple of them into a single piece of CD-like media to avoid this rather sketchy-sounding approach. Perhaps you should RTFC (Read The F***ing Comment), and maybe keep the vitriol to yourself to avoid appearing like you are the moron.
Somehow this technology seems academically interesting, but practically kind of lame. Who cares how thin the media is? It's so thin that it must be carried inside something else that's obviously got to be much larger than the media. This could be cool if they could layer numerous levels of these inside a standard thickness disc, but aside from that it seems fragile and dubious.
You've just got all the answers, don't you? I'm sorry, but I just don't have a lot of control over other people when they watch my kid for me. You NEVER know when they'll fail, despite all the easy answers you seem to have. And you never know when a lost kid will forget what he's supposed to do when he gets lost.
Oh, and by the way, when my family members were held captive at gunpoint, the captors did not relieve them of any personal items. The captors figured that tying them up was good enough. A cell phone in a kid's backpack is as likely to go unnoticed as not in such a situation as that, or a kidnapping. It's worth having one just in case.
You bizarrely imply that there's something inherently wrong with giving a kid a safety device like this, and that doing so should be avoided for some reason. I can't fathom why you seem to think that one shouldn't give one's kid something that might save them some day, out of some weird matter of principle. All I can guess is that I have been feeding the trolls. My bad.
None of the phone/service combos I have seen, including the ones listed in response to my posting, include all of the features I have noted:
Limited call list (with one button access)
Limited incoming call list
Password access when calling the phone from an unknown number
GPS tracking via web
I think the missing piece from most of the ones I've seen are password access to call the phone. That is crucial, in case you are not at a preordained phone number.
I guess you've never had a kid. They are not in your control 100% of the day. What if your kid goes to a school that is not fenced in? Snatchings are not unheard of, and it may be possible for them to wander off despite all best intentions of school staff. What if the kid is on a field trip, and manages to get separated from the group? What if they are at a friend's house and... on and on. Even when they are under your supervision, you can't watch them literally 100% of the time. The worst can happen in the blink of an eye despite eternal vigilance, regardless of what childless anonymous cowards may think.
And what if your kid is somehow snatched from school? You seem to suggest that school officials having some way of calling you would help in that situation. Are they going to be able to tell me where the snatcher went? No, but the GPS on the cell phone just might.
No decent parent would ever let their kid do anything without ensuring that there will be adult supervision, and I am not saying that a phone should ever be treated as a substitute for an adult being present. I am saying that a phone would be good additional reassurance. Family members of mine have been kidnapped, held at gunpoint, gotten lost at very young ages, and I have personally gotten lost on field trips when I was very young. If you've never had even one of these things happen to you or people you know, then you are either very lucky or ignorant.
My kid is 5, and I have been mulling the idea of getting her a cell phone. I have a problem with the thought of kids at any age yapping into a cell phone at school (or just about anywhere/anytime), but safety and security may well have to override this. If there was a good cell phone that was only capable of calling preassigned numbers and which can only receive calls from specific numbers or from callers who know the password, I would probably go buy it now. As far as I can tell, this combination of phone and service does not yet exist in Silicon Valley/Bay Area. Also, a phone with live GPS tracking would be truly awesome. But I don't think we're there yet.
Science threatens their faith.
This is the real failure of our educational system. People fail to see how science and religion can coexist, that they are not mutually exclusive. There are a bunch of uneducated morons in this country who have little or no grasp of science. To them it's all gobbledygook, and their understanding of their own religions is, ironically, flawed as a result.
To think that some of the greatest scientific minds of the human race were also highly religious seems truly ironic, until you look more closely at how understanding the universe actually brought them closer to their religion. Look at Georges Lemaitre, the physicist who proposed the Big Bang theory - he was a Catholic priest. So long as you treat religious writings such as the bible as allegorical rather than literal messages, science can actually serve as an illustration of how the hand of god works.
The literalism practiced by fundamentalists is the root of the problem here. Perhaps these people don't need more science education so much as they need a history lesson. The history of the bible, that is. When one understands the origin of the bible as a select collection of works written by various authors, edited by committee, and translated numerous times, one quickly sees the fallacy of literal interpretation.
Though it may seem counterintuitive, I think actually teaching some religion in schools might help alleviate a lot of the ignorance in this country. If students were actually taught the history of the bible, perhaps fear of science as contradictory to the message of the bible would fade away. As a rabid anti-religion activist, I never thought I'd hear myself say that any aspect of religion should be taught in schools, but I think this makes some sense. Maybe it would remove the roadblocks to learning science.
To call something an object, doesn't it have to consist of contiguously connected/adjacent atoms? Last I checked, galaxies, even "tightly packed" ones have immense space between the actual objects inside, aka stars and other celestial bodies. To call this thing the largest known object is simply sensationalism. It may be a novel thing, however, whatever it is, and shouldn't that be interesting enough in itself?
Lyrics sites won't be going away any time soon. They've been trying to crack down on lyrics sites for years, and there are more of them than ever. Why does anyone think this will change, just because they saw a press release saying the record companies will be going after pirates? With so many sites, it will be impractical to try and shut them all down.
I agree with what someone here said about lyrics and cover art being integral to the music, which is why you get them when you buy an album. You should get them when you buy digital music too, and I think that's just what's going to happen. I don't think music retailers are going to raise the price of music for this. I think they're going to use it to make online music more attractive. You can't charge a significant amount more for lyrics, especially when they are so easy to find. Legal sales of lyrics mean consumer software and electronics can now carry lyrics. Everyone should be jumping for joy, not bitching. I for one am looking forward to having lyrics displayed on my iPod some day (soon?). Until now, no company making a legitimate consumer product would/could include lyrics; now they can.
The thing that makes lyrics and art so complicated is that there is no central place to license the rights. The music, art and lyrics are all potentially owned by different parties, and often are. Obtaining the rights to them can be near impossible, which is why you don't really see covers being sold with digital music. And when you do see covers, they are generally low-res. You can't have a low-res lyric, so it's a different problem that is difficult to solve. It will be interesting to see how they are packaged.
Regardless, I don't think this signals the death of lyrics search. The articles I've ready say that search is part of what's been licensed. So you'll still be able to search for lyrics, and presumably view them (else what good is search capability?).
Too bad the moderators marked you "informative". Unfortunately now people will take your "information" as fact. Par for the course on slashdot, I suppose.
I can say with absolute, total authority that CDDB data was never GPLed. Aside from the multiple legal analyses of the GPL that I have received over the years that state the GPL does not apply to data, it's very straightforward: use google to locate an old CDDB data package from before 1998 and download it. Unpack it and read the included GPL notice. What? You can't find it? Hmm, that's funny, I wonder why that is? Because it was NEVER THERE. Now look at the copyright notice in each entry. What, no GPL there either? Oh, what's that, a copyright notice that says "Copyright Ti Kan"? Hmm, that doesn't look like the GPL either... Maybe that's because it's not!
You were saying?
Oh yeah, you were saying, "what's he's already put out there as GPL is, and shall always remain, free software". Who's talking about software? Of course the software was GPLed, but it wasn't copyrighted by Ti Kan. It was copyrighted by Steve Scherf. And of course it's free software, it was GPLed and nobody is disputing that. But we were talking about the data, not the software, weren't we?
What freedb has done is taken data that was never released under the GPL and tried to put it under the GPL. It's legally sketchy, and may well be illegal in some places. However, though the issue is very gray and not clearly illegal, it's of questionable ethical standing to take something you don't own the copyright to and try to change the copyright notice, wouldn't you say?
Even if you don't say, it doesn't matter. You clearly don't understand the issue and haven't done your homework. You are just spouting the standard party line of the freedb "activist".
And CDDB ripped off the users how? Last I checked, both the data and source code they released to the public are what freedb was started with. When CDDB and freedb branched, they started with largely the same thing each other had. And who's got the better service? All of this really sounds like sour grapes by people who threw in their lot with the side who could only copy and not actually innovate;they're angry because freedb never went anywhere.
Nobody here seems to have a clue about copyright law, or about the actual state of freedb data. First, the original CDDB data was never released under the GPL. Why not? Perhaps because you can't GPL data, only source code. But nobody here is actually a lawyer, so that little fact never seems to see the light of day here. Second, read those little CDDB data files, the ones that first came from CDDB itself. They all say "Copyright Ti Kan". That's right, a legal copyright notice that the data is owned by an actual individual. By law, that simple statement is enough for Ti Kan himself to claim ownership of the data. But copyright law does not protect collections of data (like the phone book), so it's questionable if the data is really protected or not.
By releasing the data under a different copyright (as they have already done, frankly), freedb would essentially be saying, "We're going to steal this data from Ti Kan. But we think we're justified because we're free and open and FU to anyone who wants to keep data from being free. Even if we don't own it. Besides, copyright law is in our favor, so never mind if it's hippocritical or unjustified for us to make this data our own. We don't care, and nobody can stop us." But because the law is somewhat murky, and because the provenance of the current dataset is unclear, the data is essentially public domain already. But those who are pushing to make it officially public domain are just as "greedy" as those thieves they accuse of taking the data from the users. If you stole it from others, I can steal it from you! Then I'd be stealing from you, not them.
This is utter crap.
You took the words right out of my mouth. That's the first thing I thought when I read the article excerpt. Wimpy home bus? What they hell are they talking about?
My workstation at home is a Shuttle with a standard P4 3Ghz. My workstation at the office is an Asus tower with a P4 2.8 Ghz. Both have a gig of RAM. I do my real work on a set of Sun v40z servers, which I have all to myself for research and development. They are quad AMD Optereons, each with 32GB RAM and 6 uber-fast drives in a RAID 10 setup. I am crunching through lots of data on those servers, and clearly the workstations would not be up to the task because they only have 1gig of RAM. But when I have a task to do that fits into 1 gig, I use one of my workstations. Why? Because they're faster. Memory speeds are close, but the Opteron wins only slightly,and then not even all of the time. But for actual calculation, the P4 kills it. The Opterons are designed to move data and scale while doing it, but my "cheap" "home bus" workstation can kick its but in many ways.
Whoever wrote this crap article is either an idiot or a shill.
They already do auctions for the best seats. Where has the author been? I just bought some tickets this way a few weeks ago, and it's a total scam. They also end the auction one day *after* general ticket sales, so if you don't win that auction, you get nothing. Totally evil, and designed to make you bid to the max so you don't get left in the cold. I really wanted to see that concert, though (I rarely find one I want to see), so I bid high just like they wanted.
Last time I checked they don't have to jam a needle into your arm to take your fingerprints.
The first one doesn't work in Firefox. The second one is too tight. Third one seems reasonable.