when you buy music, movies in any format, it says you are not allowed to distribute it without consent from whoever produced it.
So what? Did you sign something saying that you agree with and accept those after-sale terms? If not, then you're bound by regular copyright law and not whatever convenient fiction that the entertainment industry is pushing this week.
If copyright law does not prohibit me from allowing you to make a tape of my CD to play in your car, but the fine print on the CD says I'm not allowed to do so, then would you care to guess which is legally enforceable? Hint: it's not the one that tells how the record companies wish you would behave.
I've seen the movie dozens of times, and I'd always been hesitant about approaching the book. Thanks for the recommendation - we might have to add that to our "to be read" pile.
So far, "The Mouse and the Motorcycle" and everything by Roald Dahl have been hits. We just finished "The Little Prince", and the kids also liked that (although not as much as we did). They liked "The Black Stallion", so we thought maybe they'd also enjoy "Black Beauty". We were wrong. That book is so beyond awful that I considered throwing it away when we were finished.
I want to get my hands on the "Danny Dunn" and "Encyclopedia Brown" series some time. I loved those as a kid, and hope my kids will like them too.
We read a few chapters from a book to our four year old son and five year old daughter each night. There've been some terrific successes (the kids loved "James And The Giant Peach"), but the occasional dud. The last time we were at a bookstore, we let our girl pick "The Little Princess" and started to read it a week or so ago. We hit chapters 1, 2, 3, and 35. The kids were content - they had no idea that we skipped the entire middle - and we were happy to move on to something a little less hideous.
As a side note, reading to your kids can be a blast. The trick is not to slog through the same "little golden books" every night. Kids are pretty smart little critters, and can cope with rather sophisticated story lines if you can make the reading lively enough.
Up next - "Through The Looking Glass".
You give them the originals?!?
on
The VHS is Dead
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The fast rule in our house is that kids get to play with the backups, and the adults keep the originals stored away safely. This applies to video games, CDs, and DVDs. It's annoying when my kid scratches a Veggie Tales copy, but I'd be pretty peaved if he destroyed a Disney ("We're So Special We Only Release Every Seven Years!") movie.
Seriously, make backups of everything. Blank media is dirt cheap these days, and in our household at least $cost_of_movie * %likelihood_of_destruction is far greater than $cost_of_dvd-r.
I don't really need a tuner since my only input will be a satellite dish (composite)
Current models have a firmware problem that causes occasional skipping with composite input (although tech support claims to have a fix in the works). If your tuner has s-video out, though, you shouldn't have any problems.
so how is this Pyro A/V link for watching TV?
I've only used it with iMovie, and I've never bothered to look for other programs to access it. In iMovie, you can "Preview" the video source to watch it in realtime in a window, and this works perfectly well. The Pyro appears as a DVHS deck (I think), so any program that can control a DVHS player should be able to display the Pyro's output. Again, though, I haven't personally tested this.
Re:Still for sale though
on
The VHS is Dead
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· Score: 2, Informative
HAHAHA YEAH THAT'S A KNEESLAPPER. Yeesh, mods on crack again.
Anyway, we recently bought a Pyro A/V Link analog-to-digital converter. It plugs into the Firewire port on my wife's iMac and appears as a video camera to iMovie. Converting our VHS movies to DVD consists of:
Open iMovie.
Click "Import" and hit "play" on the VCR.
Wait until the import is finished.
Export the project to iDVD.
Click "Burn".
Profit. In this case, that means don't spend more money on the DVD version of a movie we already own than the cost of the blank DVD-R.
The killer app for us is being able to move our kids' movies to a more future-compatible format. As a bonus, we can use the same device to burn content from our DVR without having to mess with its broken Firewire port.
My wife mumbled something about "wedding video", so I guess everybody has their own pet use.
Why do Debian, Gentoo, and the BSDs not have dependency hell? Because the repositories are controlled!
Umm, no. Debian controls their main repository, as does Red Hat. Debian has no control over the many alternative repositories listed at http://www.apt-get.org/, and Red Hat has no say about the contents of http://rpmfind.net/.
Any system that lets users can add unofficial package sources to their management system is subject to dependency hell. RPM-based systems happen to get the lion's share of bad publicity in this department, but any Debian user who experimented with the alternative KDE packages people were sending out before the official packages were available knows that it is every bit as susceptible as Red Hat.
Maybe the main difference is that darn near every program you've ever heard of is available from the official Debian sources, so there's almost never any need to use third-party sources. If Red Hat packaged everything under the sun, then their users would probably use those packages and there would be many fewer problems. I'm not suggesting that Red Hat do this, but I do believe that's the reason for their reputation.
It only takes one time of forgetting to log out of KDE while a Konqueror file browser window is open to undo years' worth of work. This is where offsite backups ("Hey, Kevin, could you hang on to this DVD-R for me?") really pay off.
Where's "-1: Psychotic"? Do you really visit everything interesting in ~ at least once a month? I haven't touched my resume in over a year, but I'd hate to lose it. Also, at least one of the following is true:
/home is mounted with noatime, or you use tar with the --atime-preserve flag or dump for backups.
You don't do backups, or do them less often than every 30 days.
You're not actually deleting any files because atime gets touched every time you run a backup.
If you're relying on atime to play nicely with your backups, then your system is a bit fragile; change one parameter and things no longer work as expected. If you don't do backups but you clean house with a blind find | rm, then you're freakin' nuts and probably don't care about the finer points anyway.:)
Nope, MySQL libraries are GPL. Unless I'm missing something critical, that would seem to mean that you can only develop GPLed web applications with MySQL (or commercial software with a paid license from MySQL AB, or using PHP due to the special exemption).
Now, if the GPL were altered so that you have to provide source to people who access a GPLed web application, then it would seem to me that LAMP is dead.
Of course, it's might not be a bad idea to migrate the app from MySQL to PostgreSQL anyway:-)
No argument there.:) Still, this would seem to be hugely disruptive.
I don't see anyone moving away from Windows while using Firefox.
I do. I just convinced some friends to buy a Mac. Because their bank's website was defective, they had to use recent versions of IE [0]. Now that it fixed and working in Firefox, their single last reason for sticking with Windows is gone. That's clearly not the case for everyone, but for someone who just wants to browse the web and read email, IE-only websites may be the only thing keeping them on Windows.
[0] There is no version of IE for Mac. There used to be one, but it's old, nasty, and no longer supported by MS.
IANAL and I haven't really followed the "server hole" debates, so I'm really ignorant of this subject. That said, it sounds like the gist of the discussion is that people are trying to find a way to require that web applications built on GPL components must itself be GPLed. If that's correct, how would this affect LAMP applications that are built with MySQL? Would switching to PostgreSQL be the only legitimate way to keep such applications "closed"?
By the way, to my untrained eye the Affero GPL (an alternative license suggested by GNU themselves) sucks. Section 2a reads:
If the Program as you received it is intended to interact with users through a computer network and if, in the version you received, any user interacting with the Program was given the opportunity to request transmission to that user of the Program's complete source code, you must not remove that facility from your modified version of the Program or work based on the Program, and must offer an equivalent opportunity for all users interacting with your Program through a computer network to request immediate transmission by HTTP of the complete source code of your modified version or other derivative work.
Gigantic loopholes include:
The use of the phrase "any user" at the beginning of this run-on sentence is ambiguous. Does that mean "at least one user" ("Did you see any deer?") or "each and every user" ("Any programmer could read this")? I assume they meant the former, but if I wanted to rip off code under this license, I'd ask my lawyer to argue the latter.
Q: "[M]ust offer an equivalent opportunity for all users interacting with your Program through a computer network to request immediate transmission by HTTP of the complete source code"? A: 403 - request denied. It doesn't say you actually have to honor the request; you just have to allow them to make the request.
I think I understand what they're trying to do, but again, is it a good idea? Does anyone have a good idea about how to really accomplish it? Are there any licenses right now that don't have the glaring holes of the Affero GPL?
If I'm proposing to my school to provide a piece of software on all campus computers it has to have a name that isn't this offensive.
It's Free Software. "sed -ri 's/GIMP/michaelnz Happy Editor/'; make; make install" to build your own package locally and there you have it.
Actually, I'm not being facetious. If this is an important issue to you, then fork your own version and distribute it. If enough people switch to your version, then you've accomplished your mission. If they don't, then you've overestimated the need for that change.
Re:Does this work for Rubbing Alcohol?
on
Hacking Vodka
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· Score: 2, Informative
About as many times as it takes to split all of the methanol parts into H-OH + HCH and for them to magically and completely recombine into ethanol and some excess water. Up until that point, it will kill you. Good luck!
If it didn't kill him outright, then it probably wouldn't have any ill effect at all. Considering that HCL is the primary content of your stomach, I'd say that the odds of a small amount of it diluted past the point that it would burn your esophagus should be completely harmless. Note that IANA gastroenterologist, so if you try it and die painfully I assume no blame.:)
When I withdrawn a large sum of money from the bank
That sounds like an excellent bank. Say, purely out of curiosity, how large of a withdrawal are we talking about? What branch do you usually visit? You seem like a nice guy - do you have a picture of yourself? What time do you usually do your banking? Are you a member of the NRA?
Modified idea: it's accessible only in a particularly well-controlled venue, such as at an official polling place that's being staffed by neutral observers (or even better, multiple opposed strongly partisan observers) to ensure that only the voter can physically see the display. In other words, make the audit process analogous to the way that the elections themselves are held.
Maybe you could have an official "Audit Day" on the day following an election, so voters could visit the same location staffed by the same people and check their results on the same equipment they originally voted on.
According to one source, the US spends roughly four times per person what Canada does for national defense. They can do this mainly because of your observation: there is no way on earth that the US would allow anyone to attack Canada unopposed. First, it would be strategically disastrous to have enemy troops so near our own country. Second, and most importantly, we like Canada.
To any Canadians reading this: we know that you don't approve of our lifestyles or our choices, but you're still one of our best friends. Noone gets to you without fighting us first. Remember, though, that we're spending over $700 per person per year more than you to defend our two countries. Yes, you guys have managed to do some pretty neat things with your tax revenue, but we could probably use that money for some nifty projects of our own if we weren't using it for mutual defense.
Did they take into account the fact that Pat Buchanan (popular among very right-wing Republicans) didn't run this year, and the fact that the heavily-populated counties where he campaigned hard in 2000 are the same heavily-populated counties that adopted electronic voting machines this time?
Slashdot Mirror
So what? Did you sign something saying that you agree with and accept those after-sale terms? If not, then you're bound by regular copyright law and not whatever convenient fiction that the entertainment industry is pushing this week.
If copyright law does not prohibit me from allowing you to make a tape of my CD to play in your car, but the fine print on the CD says I'm not allowed to do so, then would you care to guess which is legally enforceable? Hint: it's not the one that tells how the record companies wish you would behave.
But the janitors don't get to put "Taught college courses on the following subject areas:" on their resumes. That's not something to be sneezed at.
Would you really trust a company called "PayPal" to safe-guard your money? OK, you might not, but I think a lot of the general public would.
"Ping" is no better or worse than the myriad of other contrived names for Internet services.
I've seen the movie dozens of times, and I'd always been hesitant about approaching the book. Thanks for the recommendation - we might have to add that to our "to be read" pile.
So far, "The Mouse and the Motorcycle" and everything by Roald Dahl have been hits. We just finished "The Little Prince", and the kids also liked that (although not as much as we did). They liked "The Black Stallion", so we thought maybe they'd also enjoy "Black Beauty". We were wrong. That book is so beyond awful that I considered throwing it away when we were finished.
I want to get my hands on the "Danny Dunn" and "Encyclopedia Brown" series some time. I loved those as a kid, and hope my kids will like them too.
As a side note, reading to your kids can be a blast. The trick is not to slog through the same "little golden books" every night. Kids are pretty smart little critters, and can cope with rather sophisticated story lines if you can make the reading lively enough.
Up next - "Through The Looking Glass".
Seriously, make backups of everything. Blank media is dirt cheap these days, and in our household at least $cost_of_movie * %likelihood_of_destruction is far greater than $cost_of_dvd-r.
Current models have a firmware problem that causes occasional skipping with composite input (although tech support claims to have a fix in the works). If your tuner has s-video out, though, you shouldn't have any problems.
so how is this Pyro A/V link for watching TV?
I've only used it with iMovie, and I've never bothered to look for other programs to access it. In iMovie, you can "Preview" the video source to watch it in realtime in a window, and this works perfectly well. The Pyro appears as a DVHS deck (I think), so any program that can control a DVHS player should be able to display the Pyro's output. Again, though, I haven't personally tested this.
Anyway, we recently bought a Pyro A/V Link analog-to-digital converter. It plugs into the Firewire port on my wife's iMac and appears as a video camera to iMovie. Converting our VHS movies to DVD consists of:
The killer app for us is being able to move our kids' movies to a more future-compatible format. As a bonus, we can use the same device to burn content from our DVR without having to mess with its broken Firewire port.
My wife mumbled something about "wedding video", so I guess everybody has their own pet use.
Umm, no. Debian controls their main repository, as does Red Hat. Debian has no control over the many alternative repositories listed at http://www.apt-get.org/, and Red Hat has no say about the contents of http://rpmfind.net/.
Any system that lets users can add unofficial package sources to their management system is subject to dependency hell. RPM-based systems happen to get the lion's share of bad publicity in this department, but any Debian user who experimented with the alternative KDE packages people were sending out before the official packages were available knows that it is every bit as susceptible as Red Hat.
Maybe the main difference is that darn near every program you've ever heard of is available from the official Debian sources, so there's almost never any need to use third-party sources. If Red Hat packaged everything under the sun, then their users would probably use those packages and there would be many fewer problems. I'm not suggesting that Red Hat do this, but I do believe that's the reason for their reputation.
It only takes one time of forgetting to log out of KDE while a Konqueror file browser window is open to undo years' worth of work. This is where offsite backups ("Hey, Kevin, could you hang on to this DVD-R for me?") really pay off.
Don't forget ~/sourcecode for pr0n - the wife will never think to look there.
If you're relying on atime to play nicely with your backups, then your system is a bit fragile; change one parameter and things no longer work as expected. If you don't do backups but you clean house with a blind find | rm, then you're freakin' nuts and probably don't care about the finer points anyway. :)
Now, if the GPL were altered so that you have to provide source to people who access a GPLed web application, then it would seem to me that LAMP is dead.
Of course, it's might not be a bad idea to migrate the app from MySQL to PostgreSQL anyway :-)
No argument there. :) Still, this would seem to be hugely disruptive.
I do. I just convinced some friends to buy a Mac. Because their bank's website was defective, they had to use recent versions of IE [0]. Now that it fixed and working in Firefox, their single last reason for sticking with Windows is gone. That's clearly not the case for everyone, but for someone who just wants to browse the web and read email, IE-only websites may be the only thing keeping them on Windows.
[0] There is no version of IE for Mac. There used to be one, but it's old, nasty, and no longer supported by MS.
By the way, to my untrained eye the Affero GPL (an alternative license suggested by GNU themselves) sucks. Section 2a reads:
Gigantic loopholes include:
I think I understand what they're trying to do, but again, is it a good idea? Does anyone have a good idea about how to really accomplish it? Are there any licenses right now that don't have the glaring holes of the Affero GPL?
I'm actually an RMS fanboy, but I've seen glaciers that move faster than some of the GNU projects.
It's Free Software. "sed -ri 's/GIMP/michaelnz Happy Editor/'; make; make install" to build your own package locally and there you have it.
Actually, I'm not being facetious. If this is an important issue to you, then fork your own version and distribute it. If enough people switch to your version, then you've accomplished your mission. If they don't, then you've overestimated the need for that change.
About as many times as it takes to split all of the methanol parts into H-OH + HCH and for them to magically and completely recombine into ethanol and some excess water. Up until that point, it will kill you. Good luck!
If it didn't kill him outright, then it probably wouldn't have any ill effect at all. Considering that HCL is the primary content of your stomach, I'd say that the odds of a small amount of it diluted past the point that it would burn your esophagus should be completely harmless. Note that IANA gastroenterologist, so if you try it and die painfully I assume no blame. :)
I poured in a Fat Tire and got a Bud Light. The second pass end up like a Corona, and I didn't have the heart to subject it to a third run.
That sounds like an excellent bank. Say, purely out of curiosity, how large of a withdrawal are we talking about? What branch do you usually visit? You seem like a nice guy - do you have a picture of yourself? What time do you usually do your banking? Are you a member of the NRA?
Maybe you could have an official "Audit Day" on the day following an election, so voters could visit the same location staffed by the same people and check their results on the same equipment they originally voted on.
Any thoughts?
To any Canadians reading this: we know that you don't approve of our lifestyles or our choices, but you're still one of our best friends. Noone gets to you without fighting us first. Remember, though, that we're spending over $700 per person per year more than you to defend our two countries. Yes, you guys have managed to do some pretty neat things with your tax revenue, but we could probably use that money for some nifty projects of our own if we weren't using it for mutual defense.
...or I'll say halt again, that's what!
Did they take into account the fact that Pat Buchanan (popular among very right-wing Republicans) didn't run this year, and the fact that the heavily-populated counties where he campaigned hard in 2000 are the same heavily-populated counties that adopted electronic voting machines this time?