TiVo and SONICBlue both holding patents on parts of PVR technology... reading the synopsis, I immediately thought of this post from a story on Macromedia and Adobe getting involved in a patent fight:
"I gained a friend in a the large company that I worked for legal dept... Basically the story went like this, when we are sued we look at their portfolio of patents, then look at our portfolio of patents that we have that might cause their products to infringe... Which ever pile is taller gets paid royalties by the other company. That is a defensive patent."
At the time, I called it one of the "stupidest things I've ever read." Now we get something even stupider; patent fights over parts of the same aggregation of technology that is a PVR.
There are two ways for this to end; either both sides kiss, make up, and milk future PVR manufacturers for massive licensing fees, or the resulting patent apocalypse wipes out at least one combatant, severely harms another, and helps to stall future innovation in home video storage technology.
Apparently, Rogers' DNS is supposed to magically resolve "pop" properly. Didn't work here... fortunately, I was able to pull the relevant info from a dslreports.com thread.
The proper names for the POP and SMTP servers are:
pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com
ssmtp.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com (note: that's not a typo. Seriously.)
To make things a bit less obfuscated, aliases exist:
Those should work beautifully. I kind of wish Rogers had just listed those in the first place, instead of relying on m4d DNS m4gik. It screws up in certain cases, as you and I both discovered.
I have to wonder, with all the bizarre bugs that have been creeping into "stable" kernels... are they even being tested before release, or is Linus just slapping on some patches and putting out a new kernel as 2.4. instead of 2.4.-prewhatever?
The latter would seem to indicate frustration and burnout on his part.
My mother can't install Linux, so maybe we should dump that as well?
Sure. If it's too difficult, she should either find someone who knows how to set it up, or just find something simpler.
Mozilla is available for Windows; I hope you remembered that. And, my parents have actually successfully installed NS 6.1.
Point being, software writers, when trying to make a dumbed-down, easy-to-use product (such as IE), shouldn't leave those same users hanging when it comes to concepts they may not even be aware of, such as security and privacy. The business about cookies and images is excusable, simply bebause so many sites throw cookies at the user these days, although quietly routing a user through your own servers for tracking purposes is a bit squirrelly. But allowing non-users to install software, invisibly, without the user's knowledge? That's downright negligent.
Zealots aside, why is this better? Have you modified any of the source code? Have you contributed? Have you searched through it to make sure there are no back doors that mail out your keystrokes? Or are you karma whoring?
Does IE even give you that option at all? Can you directly e-mail any of the IE developers? Were the IE developers a diverse team from multiple companies and institutions?
Which limit's its use on heavily scripted, harmless, usefull sites. True, it saves you from mailicious porn webmasters who want to install their dialer programs, but that's not a problem if you know how to set up your internet security zones on IE.
Can your mother do that? Should your mother have to do that, just to be able to surf the web without having crap installed without her even being aware? This is assuming your mother looks at porn sites; substitute dad/brother/yourself as necessary...
A nice feature, true, but what happens when you go to click on a "help" icon and it can't open a new window?
The UI for turning the feature on and off at will hasn't been implemented in Mozilla that I know of, but Galeon currently allows for this. I think it's also possible to selectively allow and disallow popups from certain sites.
Which slows down the quick alt+tab everyone uses to switch between browser windows...
'Course, there are those who find it more convenient to have one window with multiple tabs, than several windows to flip between. Ever since Galeon picked up tabbed browsing, I haven't gone back; just saves desktop space, looks cleaner, and doesn't give that much of a performance hit. At least with Mozilla, the option exists, and works rather well.
Which is again nice, but means nothing if developers dont make their sites for standards, which they dont....
Nice to see you speak for all web developers.
Nor does IE, if you configure it correctly.
Again, can your mother do that, and should she have to just to be able to safely surf the web? Keep in mind, I'm not talking about the inevitable process of upgrading and patching bugs here; I'm talking about closing potential privacy and security holes deliberately set as defaults by the browser manufacturer.
More ramblings from a zealot. I'm sure the IE programmers care about IE. They just dont feel the need to sit around and pat each other on the back in public message boards.
No, they just have MS Marketing to whip up press releases and hype it as the Next Big Thing. Seriously, do you think the developers spend their time in the netscape.mozilla.* and Bugzilla boards holding public circle jerks?
Internet privacy zones. From your top menu in IE6: tools -> internet options -> privacy -> click the edit button. Yep, it works in IE on a site by site basis.
In short, they're about equal, and the Mozilla team doesn't have the need to give it the wankeriffic term of "privacy zones" or whatnot. Just cookie management and image management. Works damn well, too.
How many straws will it take before the people of the United States, the people who take pride in living in the "best nation on Earth", the "land of the free," stand up and say ENOUGH?
Is a sense of security worth allowing Stalinist Russia to be reborn in America?
For any Slashdotter who thinks the proposed limitations to the attorney-client privilege revocation will be respected by the U.S. government when those limitations prove inconvenient, I have five words for you:
SOHO's main page is a blast in general, pardon the pun. The up-to-date images of the Sun just look cool, and it has a pretty comprehensive set of links to information about that big thermonuclear furnace about 93 million miles thataway *points at big glowing thing in sky*.
It's also rather good for reminding oneself that there are things far greater than ourselves, and our own self-made problems and petty arguments. Insert quote from Babylon 5: "And All My Dreams, Torn Asunder" here.
But they are actually helping people in those areas to obtain steady jobs which allow them to live more comfortable lives which allows for invention and advancement.
Actually, several reports on Nike contractor factories throughout Asia have shown that workers often have extremely little leisure time outside of work, and the wages paid barely cover food, never mind creating a "comfortable" life. Improvements in working conditions and wages are not coming out of some magical improvement drive by the company, but from pressure by civil society groups making conditions in these factories known to the very people who might purchase Nike shoes.
As some reports like to point out, many companies also contract work to Asian factories that pay their workers a living wage, don't abuse them, provide decent working conditions, and don't force things like 29-day work months and unpaid overtime. The atrocious working conditions in garment-industry factories, around the world, including within the U.S., is not a lie; it is well-known and shameful. Ask Kathie Lee Gifford, or Nike CEO Phil Knight.
Some people here like to point out that early factories in the U.S. and Britain also had atrocious working conditions, but improved over time. And who pushed for those improvements - the businesses themselves, or labour unions and individuals organizing, protesting and demanding changes for the better?
And the solution these protestors see is to make governments MORE powerful.
Certainly, the authoritarian socialists in the movement think this way, although I always personally wonder whether those same people would prefer to be the proletariat or the decision-makers in the system they envision. Something I'll have to discuss with one sometime...
Anarchists make up a sizable segment of the anti-corporatist movement, people who don't see government as a viable choice either. Instead, they wish to continue the decentralization of authority and power started long ago, and remove hierarchical decision-making systems entirely - take all the dictators off the throne, melt down the throne, and get back to the business of living for each other, not for the king or the president or the flag or whatnot...
I hope its homogeny, cause I'd really like to try "combined dishes" like a chinese-italian dish:-)
Watch your definitions - is that "homogeny" you're promoting there, or diversity? Homogeny is the food of a single culture becoming the most popular food in every nation. Diversity is being able to choose between Thai, American, and Mexican food, or any combination thereof.
I like differences in culture, because those differences make our species a bit richer as a whole - different ways of looking at art, societyy, what tastes good. We just need to quit sniping at each other for those differences. Easier said than done, but much progress to this end has been made, driven by civil rights and social activists over the past couple hundred years.
Klein's NoLogo theories... are nice, but forget the fact that Globalisation works on all levels: education included.
Which is why the term "anti-corporate globalization" is being adopted by certain segments. Katz brings up "corporatism" as a better word for what is taking place than "globalization," which shouldn't refer only to economic globalization.
Whether that understanding is developed in the first instance as a tool to exploit is somewhat irrelevent, because the same globalisation process is used by those who want to help.
Be careful; this treads close to an "ends justify the means" argument. Good actions do not necessarily cancel out bad ones automatically; hence, even if activists and reporters swoop in to expose shoe production sweatshops in Indonesia, and possibly lead to greater awareness of the problem in the U.S., possibly leading to pressure on Indonesia's government to force changes... it still doesn't change the fact that shoe companies, among others, are performing exploitation that wouldn't be accepted here. "Do unto others..." covers almost all aspects of life rather well.
Taco's hobby is obscure Japanese animation, my wife loves African guitar music. THAT is just as much globalisation as the spectre of nasty corporations.
In fact, this kind of cultural exchange is a large part of what anti-corporatist activists would like to see. I think what a lot of anti-corporatists, myself included, are afraid of is replacing one dictator - government, even that which is supposedly "of the people, by the people, for the people" - and replacing it with another - large corporations that take advantage of weak environmental and labour laws.
It probably sounds a bit hypocritical to refer to government as a dictator, and then complain about corporations gravitating, when possible, toward places with lax protection laws, but this leads into another point brought up by certain segments of the anti-corporatist movement - that changes in the way we perceive the world around us will have to accompany any kind of economic changes, possibly to the point of eliminating large, monolithic government structures that try to boil down complicated social interactions into even less comprehensible limits, and decentralizing power even more than ever before. This would hinge upon more people figuring out how to properly treat other humans (ie; "Do unto others..."), and becoming aware of how we fit in with the larger world around us (ie; we are a part of it, not above it, still subject to the basic laws that govern life and survival).
In short, concepts of being nice to our fellow humans, here and abroad, and seeing this planet as more than a resource to be exploited for man's benefit, but a home and a system we rely on to exist, shouldn't need to be regulated - they should be common survival sense.
Re:Globalisation for Greed
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 1
Last I checked we weren't the ones flying Afgani airliners into downtown Kabul to get this thing started. If I recall correctly they're the one's who started things up.
Be very careful who you define "they" as.
Virtually none of the people believed to have been involved in the planning of the WTC/Pentagon attack were Afghans, but Saudis, Egyptians, and people from other regions of the Middle East. But no Afghans. Many came from countries the U.S. counts as allies right now.
So... why is the U.S. bombing Afghanistan again? It won't wipe out al Qaeda; indeed, it appears to be strengthening support for Usama bin Ladin as a fighter against what is perceived, rightly or wrongly, as an imperial West.
So why'd the dog turn on you in the first place?
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 1
There is no difference.
If you treat other countries as your inferiors, they will treaet you as oppressors. We're not dealing with dogs here - we're dealing with humans, as vicious and angry as they may be (in the case of the Taliban and al Qaeda).
Minidiscs are the defacto standard medium for amateur bootleggers (for concerts, etc), since they're cheap, small, and have good quality.
I've done some work with a small, university-based radio station that uses minidiscs for their field recording. They're relatively cheap, and the quality is OK for FM radio broadcasting. However, the overall quality's not spectacular; as others have said, the compression used is lossy.
The best are DAT recorders, but they're expensive and big.
Not entirely true. I rented a handheld DAT recorder three years ago from a local musicians' store. It was a Sony device, and worked quite well. It was a bit heavier than a minidisc recorder, but about the size of a small Walkman. Quality was excellent. Of course, there's the eternal issue with DAT; it may be digital, but it's still tape, and we all know what can happen to tape:)
Basically the story went like this, when we are sued we look at their portfolio of patents, then look at our portfolio of patents that we have that might cause their products to infringe... Which ever pile is taller gets paid royalties by the other company. That is a defensive patent.
That is one of the stupidest things I've ever read, and makes me all the more happy I purchased the Alan Cox software patents shirt. When a measure meant to protect inventors becomes a way for two companies to hold silly legal dicksize contests, it's a sign the system is broken and needs fixing, or scrapping, or something. Anything to halt the flood of crap that flows through the USPTO... and the Slashdot front page.
Let me get this straight. It's basically not possible any more to purchase a new PC without a copy of Windows bundled in (and included in the price), and you're not legally allowed to sell or even give this copy of Windows to anyone else?
Hence the term "Microsoft tax." Even if you don't like it, you still have to pay it - just like your income and sales taxes!
You could get a custom-built box from a local dealer, but I understand MS has been leaning on such places to cut down on "naked PCs." There was a/. article about this a while back.
I think there is a concept that underlies all the concerns of privacy advocates, cypherpunks, civil rights advocates, and consumer protection advocates when presented with the concept of some kind of "national identification."
Trust.
Trust that your ID won't be used to track your purchases in order to determine your buying habits, so that info can be sold to someone else, to sell to someone else, to build a huge database about the buying habits of millions including yourself, to sell to the highest bidder.
Trust that you won't have every movement scrutinized by authorities and put in a file, tagged to your ID card, because you think the death penalty is moronic, or marijuana should be legalized, or that animals have similar rights as the animal species homo sapiens, so that law enforcement can threaten you into submission by showing how closely they can watch you, or take any innocuous action and turn it into reason for denial of bail - or even a conviction - by painting a "picture" of someone "suspicious".
Trust that the people involved in administering the system won't abuse the authority given to them.
Trust that the people who provide the resources won't try to exploit that avenue of control to gain some kind of political or economic advantage.
Trust that this system is being set up for the benefit of all, instead of the benefit of a few.
Trust that the system will be transparent and fair.
Trust in something is a powerful emotion, one that can drive a person to give another some kind of power over them, in the hope that power won't be abused. Trust in government, in business, in law enforcement, in the very people handed power and authority, has been spectacularly eroded over the past century, thanks to uncountable incidents of abuse of power and control.
Trust will have to be rebuilt in a lot of people before a national ID system can be effectively put into place.
Slashdot Mirror
So what the survey really tries to say is...
...Linux is dying?
TiVo and SONICBlue both holding patents on parts of PVR technology... reading the synopsis, I immediately thought of this post from a story on Macromedia and Adobe getting involved in a patent fight:
"I gained a friend in a the large company that I worked for legal dept... Basically the story went like this, when we are sued we look at their portfolio of patents, then look at our portfolio of patents that we have that might cause their products to infringe... Which ever pile is taller gets paid royalties by the other company. That is a defensive patent."
At the time, I called it one of the "stupidest things I've ever read." Now we get something even stupider; patent fights over parts of the same aggregation of technology that is a PVR.
There are two ways for this to end; either both sides kiss, make up, and milk future PVR manufacturers for massive licensing fees, or the resulting patent apocalypse wipes out at least one combatant, severely harms another, and helps to stall future innovation in home video storage technology.
Apparently, Rogers' DNS is supposed to magically resolve "pop" properly. Didn't work here... fortunately, I was able to pull the relevant info from a dslreports.com thread.
The proper names for the POP and SMTP servers are:
pop.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com
ssmtp.bloor.is.net.cable.rogers.com (note: that's not a typo. Seriously.)
To make things a bit less obfuscated, aliases exist:
pop.broadband.rogers.com
smtp.broadband.rogers.com
Those should work beautifully. I kind of wish Rogers had just listed those in the first place, instead of relying on m4d DNS m4gik. It screws up in certain cases, as you and I both discovered.
I have to wonder, with all the bizarre bugs that have been creeping into "stable" kernels... are they even being tested before release, or is Linus just slapping on some patches and putting out a new kernel as 2.4. instead of 2.4.-prewhatever?
The latter would seem to indicate frustration and burnout on his part.
My mother can't install Linux, so maybe we should dump that as well?
Sure. If it's too difficult, she should either find someone who knows how to set it up, or just find something simpler.
Mozilla is available for Windows; I hope you remembered that. And, my parents have actually successfully installed NS 6.1.
Point being, software writers, when trying to make a dumbed-down, easy-to-use product (such as IE), shouldn't leave those same users hanging when it comes to concepts they may not even be aware of, such as security and privacy. The business about cookies and images is excusable, simply bebause so many sites throw cookies at the user these days, although quietly routing a user through your own servers for tracking purposes is a bit squirrelly. But allowing non-users to install software, invisibly, without the user's knowledge? That's downright negligent.
Zealots aside, why is this better? Have you modified any of the source code? Have you contributed? Have you searched through it to make sure there are no back doors that mail out your keystrokes? Or are you karma whoring?
....
Does IE even give you that option at all? Can you directly e-mail any of the IE developers? Were the IE developers a diverse team from multiple companies and institutions?
Which limit's its use on heavily scripted, harmless, usefull sites. True, it saves you from mailicious porn webmasters who want to install their dialer programs, but that's not a problem if you know how to set up your internet security zones on IE.
Can your mother do that? Should your mother have to do that, just to be able to surf the web without having crap installed without her even being aware? This is assuming your mother looks at porn sites; substitute dad/brother/yourself as necessary...
A nice feature, true, but what happens when you go to click on a "help" icon and it can't open a new window?
The UI for turning the feature on and off at will hasn't been implemented in Mozilla that I know of, but Galeon currently allows for this. I think it's also possible to selectively allow and disallow popups from certain sites.
Which slows down the quick alt+tab everyone uses to switch between browser windows...
'Course, there are those who find it more convenient to have one window with multiple tabs, than several windows to flip between. Ever since Galeon picked up tabbed browsing, I haven't gone back; just saves desktop space, looks cleaner, and doesn't give that much of a performance hit. At least with Mozilla, the option exists, and works rather well.
Which is again nice, but means nothing if developers dont make their sites for standards, which they dont
Nice to see you speak for all web developers.
Nor does IE, if you configure it correctly.
Again, can your mother do that, and should she have to just to be able to safely surf the web? Keep in mind, I'm not talking about the inevitable process of upgrading and patching bugs here; I'm talking about closing potential privacy and security holes deliberately set as defaults by the browser manufacturer.
More ramblings from a zealot. I'm sure the IE programmers care about IE. They just dont feel the need to sit around and pat each other on the back in public message boards.
No, they just have MS Marketing to whip up press releases and hype it as the Next Big Thing. Seriously, do you think the developers spend their time in the netscape.mozilla.* and Bugzilla boards holding public circle jerks?
Internet privacy zones. From your top menu in IE6: tools -> internet options -> privacy -> click the edit button. Yep, it works in IE on a site by site basis.
In short, they're about equal, and the Mozilla team doesn't have the need to give it the wankeriffic term of "privacy zones" or whatnot. Just cookie management and image management. Works damn well, too.
How many straws will it take before the people of the United States, the people who take pride in living in the "best nation on Earth", the "land of the free," stand up and say ENOUGH?
Is a sense of security worth allowing Stalinist Russia to be reborn in America?
How many straws, America? How many?
Oh, so you did get it in first! I thought it was just another case of Slashdot Editor Stupidity.
silly me:)
bahamat wrote yesterday...
So did someone else - scroll down...
*sniff*
2001-11-14 04:03:53 Wil Wheaton will be in Star Trek X (articles,movies) (rejected)
Dang. It was worth a shot.
Posted by wil @ 11/13/2001 08:17 PM PST
So, who's the editor that saw a submission from CleverNickName in the queue regarding his cameo in STX and rejected it?
Be sure to read the item linked above; LeVar Burton went to bat for Wil, and came through. Now, that's a friend.
For any Slashdotter who thinks the proposed limitations to the attorney-client privilege revocation will be respected by the U.S. government when those limitations prove inconvenient, I have five words for you:
"Iran-Contra"
"War on Drugs"
SOHO's main page is a blast in general, pardon the pun. The up-to-date images of the Sun just look cool, and it has a pretty comprehensive set of links to information about that big thermonuclear furnace about 93 million miles thataway *points at big glowing thing in sky*.
It's also rather good for reminding oneself that there are things far greater than ourselves, and our own self-made problems and petty arguments. Insert quote from Babylon 5: "And All My Dreams, Torn Asunder" here.
Timmy... you, uhhh, seem to know your porn distributors rather well.
But they are actually helping people in those areas to obtain steady jobs which allow them to live more comfortable lives which allows for invention and advancement.
Actually, several reports on Nike contractor factories throughout Asia have shown that workers often have extremely little leisure time outside of work, and the wages paid barely cover food, never mind creating a "comfortable" life. Improvements in working conditions and wages are not coming out of some magical improvement drive by the company, but from pressure by civil society groups making conditions in these factories known to the very people who might purchase Nike shoes.
As some reports like to point out, many companies also contract work to Asian factories that pay their workers a living wage, don't abuse them, provide decent working conditions, and don't force things like 29-day work months and unpaid overtime. The atrocious working conditions in garment-industry factories, around the world, including within the U.S., is not a lie; it is well-known and shameful. Ask Kathie Lee Gifford, or Nike CEO Phil Knight.
Some people here like to point out that early factories in the U.S. and Britain also had atrocious working conditions, but improved over time. And who pushed for those improvements - the businesses themselves, or labour unions and individuals organizing, protesting and demanding changes for the better?
While the greatest transgression that Nike has allegedly committed is not giving bathroom breaks,
If you think that's the "worst transgression" Nike's been accused of, you have another thing coming.
And the solution these protestors see is to make governments MORE powerful.
Certainly, the authoritarian socialists in the movement think this way, although I always personally wonder whether those same people would prefer to be the proletariat or the decision-makers in the system they envision. Something I'll have to discuss with one sometime...
Anarchists make up a sizable segment of the anti-corporatist movement, people who don't see government as a viable choice either. Instead, they wish to continue the decentralization of authority and power started long ago, and remove hierarchical decision-making systems entirely - take all the dictators off the throne, melt down the throne, and get back to the business of living for each other, not for the king or the president or the flag or whatnot...
I hope its homogeny, cause I'd really like to try "combined dishes" like a chinese-italian dish :-)
Watch your definitions - is that "homogeny" you're promoting there, or diversity? Homogeny is the food of a single culture becoming the most popular food in every nation. Diversity is being able to choose between Thai, American, and Mexican food, or any combination thereof.
I like differences in culture, because those differences make our species a bit richer as a whole - different ways of looking at art, societyy, what tastes good. We just need to quit sniping at each other for those differences. Easier said than done, but much progress to this end has been made, driven by civil rights and social activists over the past couple hundred years.
Klein's NoLogo theories ... are nice, but forget the fact that Globalisation works on all levels: education included.
Which is why the term "anti-corporate globalization" is being adopted by certain segments. Katz brings up "corporatism" as a better word for what is taking place than "globalization," which shouldn't refer only to economic globalization.
Whether that understanding is developed in the first instance as a tool to exploit is somewhat irrelevent, because the same globalisation process is used by those who want to help.
Be careful; this treads close to an "ends justify the means" argument. Good actions do not necessarily cancel out bad ones automatically; hence, even if activists and reporters swoop in to expose shoe production sweatshops in Indonesia, and possibly lead to greater awareness of the problem in the U.S., possibly leading to pressure on Indonesia's government to force changes... it still doesn't change the fact that shoe companies, among others, are performing exploitation that wouldn't be accepted here. "Do unto others..." covers almost all aspects of life rather well.
Taco's hobby is obscure Japanese animation, my wife loves African guitar music. THAT is just as much globalisation as the spectre of nasty corporations.
In fact, this kind of cultural exchange is a large part of what anti-corporatist activists would like to see. I think what a lot of anti-corporatists, myself included, are afraid of is replacing one dictator - government, even that which is supposedly "of the people, by the people, for the people" - and replacing it with another - large corporations that take advantage of weak environmental and labour laws.
It probably sounds a bit hypocritical to refer to government as a dictator, and then complain about corporations gravitating, when possible, toward places with lax protection laws, but this leads into another point brought up by certain segments of the anti-corporatist movement - that changes in the way we perceive the world around us will have to accompany any kind of economic changes, possibly to the point of eliminating large, monolithic government structures that try to boil down complicated social interactions into even less comprehensible limits, and decentralizing power even more than ever before. This would hinge upon more people figuring out how to properly treat other humans (ie; "Do unto others..."), and becoming aware of how we fit in with the larger world around us (ie; we are a part of it, not above it, still subject to the basic laws that govern life and survival).
In short, concepts of being nice to our fellow humans, here and abroad, and seeing this planet as more than a resource to be exploited for man's benefit, but a home and a system we rely on to exist, shouldn't need to be regulated - they should be common survival sense.
Last I checked we weren't the ones flying Afgani airliners into downtown Kabul to get this thing started. If I recall correctly they're the one's who started things up.
Be very careful who you define "they" as.
Virtually none of the people believed to have been involved in the planning of the WTC/Pentagon attack were Afghans, but Saudis, Egyptians, and people from other regions of the Middle East. But no Afghans. Many came from countries the U.S. counts as allies right now.
So... why is the U.S. bombing Afghanistan again? It won't wipe out al Qaeda; indeed, it appears to be strengthening support for Usama bin Ladin as a fighter against what is perceived, rightly or wrongly, as an imperial West.
There is no difference.
If you treat other countries as your inferiors, they will treaet you as oppressors. We're not dealing with dogs here - we're dealing with humans, as vicious and angry as they may be (in the case of the Taliban and al Qaeda).
Minidiscs are the defacto standard medium for amateur bootleggers (for concerts, etc), since they're cheap, small, and have good quality.
I've done some work with a small, university-based radio station that uses minidiscs for their field recording. They're relatively cheap, and the quality is OK for FM radio broadcasting. However, the overall quality's not spectacular; as others have said, the compression used is lossy.
The best are DAT recorders, but they're expensive and big.
Not entirely true. I rented a handheld DAT recorder three years ago from a local musicians' store. It was a Sony device, and worked quite well. It was a bit heavier than a minidisc recorder, but about the size of a small Walkman. Quality was excellent. Of course, there's the eternal issue with DAT; it may be digital, but it's still tape, and we all know what can happen to tape:)
Basically the story went like this, when we are sued we look at their portfolio of patents, then look at our portfolio of patents that we have that might cause their products to infringe... Which ever pile is taller gets paid royalties by the other company. That is a defensive patent.
That is one of the stupidest things I've ever read, and makes me all the more happy I purchased the Alan Cox software patents shirt. When a measure meant to protect inventors becomes a way for two companies to hold silly legal dicksize contests, it's a sign the system is broken and needs fixing, or scrapping, or something. Anything to halt the flood of crap that flows through the USPTO... and the Slashdot front page.
I think what really needs to happen is we need to finish the IIS...
Man, that's one scary typo when you think about it:)
Let me get this straight. It's basically not possible any more to purchase a new PC without a copy of Windows bundled in (and included in the price), and you're not legally allowed to sell or even give this copy of Windows to anyone else?
/. article about this a while back.
Hence the term "Microsoft tax." Even if you don't like it, you still have to pay it - just like your income and sales taxes!
You could get a custom-built box from a local dealer, but I understand MS has been leaning on such places to cut down on "naked PCs." There was a
I think there is a concept that underlies all the concerns of privacy advocates, cypherpunks, civil rights advocates, and consumer protection advocates when presented with the concept of some kind of "national identification."
Trust.
Trust that your ID won't be used to track your purchases in order to determine your buying habits, so that info can be sold to someone else, to sell to someone else, to build a huge database about the buying habits of millions including yourself, to sell to the highest bidder.
Trust that you won't have every movement scrutinized by authorities and put in a file, tagged to your ID card, because you think the death penalty is moronic, or marijuana should be legalized, or that animals have similar rights as the animal species homo sapiens, so that law enforcement can threaten you into submission by showing how closely they can watch you, or take any innocuous action and turn it into reason for denial of bail - or even a conviction - by painting a "picture" of someone "suspicious".
Trust that the people involved in administering the system won't abuse the authority given to them.
Trust that the people who provide the resources won't try to exploit that avenue of control to gain some kind of political or economic advantage.
Trust that this system is being set up for the benefit of all, instead of the benefit of a few.
Trust that the system will be transparent and fair.
Trust in something is a powerful emotion, one that can drive a person to give another some kind of power over them, in the hope that power won't be abused. Trust in government, in business, in law enforcement, in the very people handed power and authority, has been spectacularly eroded over the past century, thanks to uncountable incidents of abuse of power and control.
Trust will have to be rebuilt in a lot of people before a national ID system can be effectively put into place.
All you have to say is hey, you have to drive a car to live in this country.
Well, that fucks over the blind.