A big point many people miss -- trackers are what keep the torrents together. Indexers like SuprNova, although highly popular, do nothing but point people where to go.
It's like asking a bartender about the street corners where the girls hang out late at night. If he responsible for how you use the information; ie, if you engage in prostition?
The big point that you are missing (and most people running torrent trackers) is that if you have a reasonable suspicion that the information you are providing to someone is going to be used for criminal purposes then you are treading dangerously close to the definition of "conspiracy".
Let's take your example of the helpful bartender a bit further. You wander into a bar and over several drinks proceed to tell the bartender about your sleazy business partner and how he is cheating you. The bartender tells you that "he knows a guy" who can take care of your problem for a bundle of cash. You take the number he gives you, meet with a contract hit man, and pay him a wad on money so that your business partner meets a rather violent demise.
Is the bartender a participant in your conspiracy to commit murder? According to the law he is. A reasonalbe person would have no problem conecting the dots here and information that was provided had a purpose...
To drag this back in to the real world, you might want to take a look at how the law deals with flea markets and swap meets where counterfeit goods are being sold. The person organizing the swap meet can post as many signs as they want saying that they have no idea what you are selling and are only providing a place for people to put their goods on display, but the law treats that claim like the BS it truly is. The people running the torrent trackers know what is being provided and what their role in the game is, and if they try to claim that they are shocked that people are trading pirated music, software, and videos on these services they will be bitch-slapped by the law.
There was a big fire that torched most of the city, and some of it was intentionally set, but most of it was caused by the quake itself (wooden buildings, fire/candles/oil-lamps as primary heat and light source, etc.) There was no conspiracy to bilk those big eastern banking interests, and since this was 1906 I would point out that _all_ current architecture was Victorian. In fact, because of the fact that the entire city was basically re-built in 1907 it probably has the largest collection of Victorian buildings left in the US.
The efforts made to stop the fire, using fire fighting technology that was "primitive" at best, were truly herculean. The cause was not helped by the fact that the earthquake had also destroyed most of the water mains and distribution infrastructure. [A couple of blocks from where I used to live there was a fireplug with a big brass plaque next to it that declared that particular plug to be the only one in the city that did not lose pressure during the firefighting effort after the quake (20th & Church next to Delores Park for locals)]
What eventually stopped the fire was a decision by the authorities to create a major firebreak by essentially blowing up a 1 block wide path down Van Ness Ave.
France and Japan are both largely nuclear. When's the last time you heard about an accident in those countries. Oh, right, never.
Well, I hate to intrude on a good rant, particularly one that I am in general agreement with, but you are way off base when it comes to Japan. In the past five years they have had at least two nuclear power accidents that killed people. The first was in September 1999 when some guys at a fuel processing plant decided to start mixing things in a goddamn BUCKET and managed to kill themselves and the second was a steam leak in August 2004 that killed four. (no radiation leak, but the problem would have been found if they ever did ultrasound checks of the pipes...and in 28 years of operation at this plant they had done 0 checks...makes me feel real good about the primary loop on this particular PWR plant...)
The first accident was due to people obviously too stupid to be allowed to continue living getting access to enriched isotopes and the second was due to poor maintenance practices, but let's not go around claiming that countries with a lot of experience in this area are doiing everything right...
Re:Not My Usual "Freedom of the Press"
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The study seems to completely ignore non-official members of the press. [...] That's the press.
How exactly are bloggers "members of the press"? They do not create news, they talk about it. Bloggers are pundits, not reporters. There is a difference. A very big difference.
Pundits are not reporters...
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While I am sure you think that you provide some useful interpretation of the news and events happening in the world outside your living room, have you actually ever provided news?
Didn't think so.
Until you do, please do not pretend you are a journalist. You have the same place in the news food chainas the people who write letters to the editor do... You may think you have an interesting perspective or point of view perhaps, but do not imagine yourself to ever be in the same class as the people who put thier lives on the line to actually tell the rest of the world what is happening.
Freedom of the press always belonged to publishers
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So you're saying the freedom of the press is limited those who own one . . . interesting.
And this has always been the case.
Honestly though, that is rapidly changing with the advent of the Internet.
This is the new factor, and one that will be "interesting" to watch in the near future. The problem with using the internet as your news source is that you are reduced to making uninformed decisions about which particular internet pundit to listen to. There are few, if any, "internet" news sources which actually are a source of news, but a lot of monkeys banging on keyboard who are ready to interpret the news for you. [e.g. Just because a news report comes from the CBC, BBC, El Pais, or Al-Jazerra does not make it any more credible, it is just another data point that someone will use to spin an event...]
No, if he wanted to he could RIGHT NOW introduce a bill in the Senate to do it.
He has not. What does that tell you?
It tells me that the Senate is not in session right now dipshit. Even leaving aside the realipolitik of sponsoring a bill that has so little upside for a presidential candidate, the simple fact remains that it is not possible for him to do so.
What does that tell the rest of us about your ignorance of the political process?
Well, if it is property then you can expect your file to be taxed for the value that file has at each transaction, and you can expect your ability to share your property to be regulated by the government via the powers invested in it by the commerce clause. Oh yeah, did your file include sufficient access for disabled users, and was it produced according to OSHA safety regulations? You do have the paperwork, right?
not everything in life that requires my attention needs escalating to 999
And not everything that you think needs you attention actually requires it. It is hard to accept, but sometimes your kids will benefit from you not being there more than if you are always there to "solve" their problem.
If you're raging at the misuse of mobiles in cinemas and theatres then please understand I'm on your side.
No, you are not.
You are among the large group of people who say that they agree with limiting cell phone interruptions in principle but think that for some reason or another these principles do not apply in their specific case. What everyone else is pointing out to you is that your preceived need to be in constant contact is not a valid reason. The social pressure that might otherwise seem a good solution to this problem has been proven not to work, particularly in public situations where the offender can feel protected in the anonymity of the crowd...
The GUI -- windows, mouse for control, pop-ups, etc. -- was invented by Dr. Douglas Engelbart at SRI in the 60s. It was Xerox who applied the metaphor to the PC, added overlapping windows and the LAN, and then coupled it with a development environment that was more that one-off coding hacks (important to be sure, but not close to "inventing" the GUI.)
And when the two parties have practically the same opinion?!
I guess that means that an overwhelming majority of the population shares these same opinions and values, with the remaining points of disagreement occurring at the edges of the two groups.
When I last checked this was actually pretty close to the definition of democracy... You know, will of the majority and all that good stuff.
[This is your cue to launch into your "sheeple" rant about how if only the people knew what was happening and was not being fed their opinions by their corporate masters they would agree with you, because you are so much smarter than they are and you see things "the way they really are" yada yada yada... btw, this is also a signal that it is time for you to take your meds again or take another hit off the bong...]
They were on enough ballots to theoretically win. What other criteria do you need?
How about the ability to poll above the margin of error? Even if polling results are not completely accurate, they are good enough to tell everyone that having these two additional candidates on stage would be a waste of time.
When the stakes in an election are as high as they are now, do you really think that having viewers subjected to the rhetoric of two no-chance candidates with extremist agendas to push would benefit the end-result of the process? A simple opening shot of a screen that said "the following parties are qualified on enough ballots to have a theoretical chance of winning, check out the following web sites for information on their positions" would have been more than any of these third-party candidates deserved.
You guys have a political system that makes it essential impossible for anyone without multi-millions in backing to get anything like enough coverage to let voters know that they have choices outside the dualistic monopoly of the Democrats and Republicans, and you still think it's a bad idea for him to bring some attention to that fact?
Probably because in our system the president is only one facet of a system that divides power among multiple groups. How far would a libertarian president get when he is unable to get any of his proposals or ideas introduced into congress (you do know that the president does not make laws, or even propose them, right?) when all of the legislators are of other parties and even if there was a single LP legislator this person would not be able to get a single bill out of committee. So now we have a president who enters office as a lame-duck! Yeah, we all want that.
These idiots are not credible candidates for the same reason Ralph Nader isn't, they will end up getting fewer votes in a state than the losing major party candidate will receive in any particular congressional district.
We have a political system that demands that candidates have some credibiliity in terms of their ability to govern. Good ideas are not good enough. You need to prove that you can actually govern. You prove this by starting off by running in a local or state-wide political race, winning, and then showing the voters that you are not a complete idiot while in office.
The third-parties that actually have a shot at legitimacy (which includes the LP and Green party, but not these particular two bozos that everyone is discussing) have started to work on the state and local level, building the sort of political organization that is required to actually participate in the process in this country.
3) Is the two-party system really the best system? Wouldn't more competition improve the political system?
There are plenty of other examples of multi-party democracies out there and they don't seem to work any better than the (primarily) two-party system in the US. Actual results of these systems seem to vary quite a bit.
At one end you have the consensus-oriented Dutch system, where a curtural bias towards compormise tends to create stable governments but where this consensus can prevent the government from enforcing unpalatable reforms on the population (see the current protests over cutting public benefits necessary to deal with the fact that Europe's population is aging too fast to sustain the current welface state.)
At the other end you get the unstable Israeli parliment, where small extremist parties at the polar ends of the social/political spectrum are able to exert an unforgivable amount of influence by tipping the balance of power in the Knesset to one or the other of the major parties. These parties are basically blackmailed into giving this minor party some powerful cabinet post that allows the party to promote its particular agenda, even if most of the supporters of the major party do not agree with this agenda.
The American system values stability and tends to let the popular will drive the parties rather than the other way around. Take a look at the history of american political parties, they have actually splintered, reformed, and changed direction as the popular will changed. This shifting tended to slow down quite a bit during the cold war (the efforts that used to go into changing "the party" instead went into PACs and other efforts to exert direct influence on "the system"), but the ability of the internet to change how people organize and communicate and the narrowing of the opinions of the electorate is starting to change things again.
Personally, I'm dissappointed that the idea of using genetic programming (or related technology) to develop or improve CODECs has not, at least to my knowlege, taken off.
The problem is that the evaluation loop is too expensive. It is _trivial_ to develop a system that attempts to eveolve various mechanisms to encode data, but to iterate each generation you need some sort of way to determine the winners and the losers. If you could figure out a way to use a program to determine which was the better of two video encoding mechanisms it would be worthy of a PhD or two. The simple way to think about this is that if you could perform this evaluation with a computer you would have figured out a practical mechanism for general-application computer vision.
One possibility is to corral ten thousand or so friends and get them to view three encoded clips (the original source and the versions produced by the two population members you are testing) but keeping this up long enough to end up with a decent encoder is an unlikely proposition. Making this harder is that once your population of encoding algorithms weeds out the obviously broken solutions you need evaluators who can determine things like which codec produced the fewest artifacts and other details that would shrink your potential pool of human evaluators.
The hard part about using evolutionary computing techniques is not the evolution engine, it is all about figuring out how to test the population members your engine generates. If you do not already have a well-defined target that is easy to describe mathematically (or a test environment in which you can pit two population members against each other) you are basically screwed.
It should be, but just because you have a recording in format A does not mean you have a legal right to bypass the distributors (aka RIAA) to get a copy in format B. To do it legally you would have to do your own {analog | digital} -> analog -> digital (mp3) conversion yourself.
According to the law you are one of the thieves of whom Ballmer speaks...
Does Californica not realize that the Internet will treat this as damage, and route around it?
Considering the fact that until recently the majority of packets on the internet either originated or terminated in California, I sincerly invite you to try routing around CA.
The benefit of running the state that contains Silicon Valley (and the tech centers in LA and San Diego) is that you get to exert a significant impact on the internet, whether the rest of the internet likes it or not.
As for the network efficiency argument, stick the freaking towers in the middle of New York and LA. Theres 30 million users. 1/10th of the US market in 2 cities. Sure it doesn't solve the problem of "why can't I get 3G in the middle of the Arizona desert!" but theres no excuse for major cities not to be eqipped with the latest in cell phone technology.
And guess what? In some major cities in the US you can get EV-DO wireless broadband that kicks the shit out of your WCMDA and in most cities you can get 1xRTT that is not great but still better than dialup.
Getting this service everywhere in the US is the hard part..
The Merlin card for Sprint works just fine on my Powerbook. You need to activate it on a PC, but once you jump through this hoop it works fine on the Mac.
To flash out the "real soon now", the first public betas of the consumer version of the HiveCache backup system will be available for windows at the end of October, Linux and OS X clients will probably be ready for beta testing before the end of the year.
Consider of course, the Fermi paradox. If there are/were ETs, then where are they? Why can't we detect even the faintest echo of their long-dead civilization when we can measure the spin of stars at the edge of the universe? Occam's razor leads us to assume that it is because Drake is wrong, or at least the numbers most people plug in to the equation are wrong.
Additional problems with the Drake Equation is that one thing the original research that kicked off this story suggest quite strongly is that the f{p} (fraction of stars with planets) and n{e} (percentage of planets that are inhabitable) numbers are much lower than people think.
I hope Munich carefully audits all of Microsoft's source code before deploying it as well.
You have reached the heart of the problem, but have it backwards because you don't understand how the law works. If Microsoft infringes upon someone else's patent then _Microsoft_ is responsible for satisfying the patent holder and for providing the same or equivalent product to the customer. If some bozo check in some Linux code that is later found to violate a patent then the city of Munich is responsible (because they have no indemnification from the software provider.) Notice the difference?
As much as it may suck, this is one of the things which you get when you actually pay for your software. Perhaps it is the only thing of value, but in the biz world it is important to have these uncertainties taken care of (especially when you are a deep-pocket target for various bottom-feeders...er, make that fine, upstanding members of the legal professsion...)
One of the claims that can be made regarding a parody or satire is that it is for non-commercial purposes. Having these two guys shilling their site on Leno and talking about how this animation has increased their commercial prospects is not really the sort of statements that a lawyer would advise them to make...
A parody mocks the artist or composer. A satire mocks someone else using the work created by the artist or composer. Parody is protected by fair use (since it is a sort of review or statement about the work in question) while satire is not.
JibJab is probably going to be ruled satire since it does not comment directly on Woody Guthrie or his works, but rather uses his works to make a statement about Kerry and Bush.
The relevant case law here is Dr. Seuss Enterprises vs. Penguin Books (9th circuit)
I think he bought a processor for over $1000, and gets the grease for free.
Well, if I could get raw crude oil for free I would be happy to sell you gasoline at $1 a gallon...
The input is free in this example only because biodiesel is in its infancy, so the community refiner you reference has no competition for the used grease. Within five years you can expect that the restaurants that pay this person to take the grease away or give it to him for free will have several competing offers to pay the restaurant for the priviledge of hauling away the grease for later refining.
This McNuggest Nation may use a lot of vegetable oil every day, but it is not even a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of diesel fuel that is used daily (which is only a small fraction of the amount of gasoline used) so there is no way this scales up beyond proof-of-concept stages.
Of course, this sort of leads one to wonder why the companies which are actually in the business of hauling away and disposing of the contents of the grease traps in american restaurants are not starting to produce biodiesel to increase their profit margins. I am sure it will be fairly common soon, but does anyone know of anyone doing this already?
Slashdot Mirror
A big point many people miss -- trackers are what keep the torrents together. Indexers like SuprNova, although highly popular, do nothing but point people where to go.
It's like asking a bartender about the street corners where the girls hang out late at night. If he responsible for how you use the information; ie, if you engage in prostition?
The big point that you are missing (and most people running torrent trackers) is that if you have a reasonable suspicion that the information you are providing to someone is going to be used for criminal purposes then you are treading dangerously close to the definition of "conspiracy".
Let's take your example of the helpful bartender a bit further. You wander into a bar and over several drinks proceed to tell the bartender about your sleazy business partner and how he is cheating you. The bartender tells you that "he knows a guy" who can take care of your problem for a bundle of cash. You take the number he gives you, meet with a contract hit man, and pay him a wad on money so that your business partner meets a rather violent demise.
Is the bartender a participant in your conspiracy to commit murder? According to the law he is. A reasonalbe person would have no problem conecting the dots here and information that was provided had a purpose...
To drag this back in to the real world, you might want to take a look at how the law deals with flea markets and swap meets where counterfeit goods are being sold. The person organizing the swap meet can post as many signs as they want saying that they have no idea what you are selling and are only providing a place for people to put their goods on display, but the law treats that claim like the BS it truly is. The people running the torrent trackers know what is being provided and what their role in the game is, and if they try to claim that they are shocked that people are trading pirated music, software, and videos on these services they will be bitch-slapped by the law.
There was a big fire that torched most of the city, and some of it was intentionally set, but most of it was caused by the quake itself (wooden buildings, fire/candles/oil-lamps as primary heat and light source, etc.) There was no conspiracy to bilk those big eastern banking interests, and since this was 1906 I would point out that _all_ current architecture was Victorian. In fact, because of the fact that the entire city was basically re-built in 1907 it probably has the largest collection of Victorian buildings left in the US.
The efforts made to stop the fire, using fire fighting technology that was "primitive" at best, were truly herculean. The cause was not helped by the fact that the earthquake had also destroyed most of the water mains and distribution infrastructure. [A couple of blocks from where I used to live there was a fireplug with a big brass plaque next to it that declared that particular plug to be the only one in the city that did not lose pressure during the firefighting effort after the quake (20th & Church next to Delores Park for locals)]
What eventually stopped the fire was a decision by the authorities to create a major firebreak by essentially blowing up a 1 block wide path down Van Ness Ave.
France and Japan are both largely nuclear. When's the last time you heard about an accident in those countries. Oh, right, never.
Well, I hate to intrude on a good rant, particularly one that I am in general agreement with, but you are way off base when it comes to Japan. In the past five years they have had at least two nuclear power accidents that killed people. The first was in September 1999 when some guys at a fuel processing plant decided to start mixing things in a goddamn BUCKET and managed to kill themselves and the second was a steam leak in August 2004 that killed four. (no radiation leak, but the problem would have been found if they ever did ultrasound checks of the pipes...and in 28 years of operation at this plant they had done 0 checks...makes me feel real good about the primary loop on this particular PWR plant...)
The first accident was due to people obviously too stupid to be allowed to continue living getting access to enriched isotopes and the second was due to poor maintenance practices, but let's not go around claiming that countries with a lot of experience in this area are doiing everything right...
The study seems to completely ignore non-official members of the press. [...] That's the press.
How exactly are bloggers "members of the press"? They do not create news, they talk about it. Bloggers are pundits, not reporters. There is a difference. A very big difference.
While I am sure you think that you provide some useful interpretation of the news and events happening in the world outside your living room, have you actually ever provided news?
Didn't think so.
Until you do, please do not pretend you are a journalist. You have the same place in the news food chainas the people who write letters to the editor do... You may think you have an interesting perspective or point of view perhaps, but do not imagine yourself to ever be in the same class as the people who put thier lives on the line to actually tell the rest of the world what is happening.
So you're saying the freedom of the press is limited those who own one . . . interesting.
And this has always been the case.
Honestly though, that is rapidly changing with the advent of the Internet.
This is the new factor, and one that will be "interesting" to watch in the near future. The problem with using the internet as your news source is that you are reduced to making uninformed decisions about which particular internet pundit to listen to. There are few, if any, "internet" news sources which actually are a source of news, but a lot of monkeys banging on keyboard who are ready to interpret the news for you. [e.g. Just because a news report comes from the CBC, BBC, El Pais, or Al-Jazerra does not make it any more credible, it is just another data point that someone will use to spin an event...]
Is this any better? I really don't know.
No, if he wanted to he could RIGHT NOW introduce a bill in the Senate to do it.
He has not. What does that tell you?
It tells me that the Senate is not in session right now dipshit. Even leaving aside the realipolitik of sponsoring a bill that has so little upside for a presidential candidate, the simple fact remains that it is not possible for him to do so.
What does that tell the rest of us about your ignorance of the political process?
Well, if it is property then you can expect your file to be taxed for the value that file has at each transaction, and you can expect your ability to share your property to be regulated by the government via the powers invested in it by the commerce clause. Oh yeah, did your file include sufficient access for disabled users, and was it produced according to OSHA safety regulations? You do have the paperwork, right?
not everything in life that requires my attention needs escalating to 999
And not everything that you think needs you attention actually requires it. It is hard to accept, but sometimes your kids will benefit from you not being there more than if you are always there to "solve" their problem.
If you're raging at the misuse of mobiles in cinemas and theatres then please understand I'm on your side.
No, you are not.
You are among the large group of people who say that they agree with limiting cell phone interruptions in principle but think that for some reason or another these principles do not apply in their specific case. What everyone else is pointing out to you is that your preceived need to be in constant contact is not a valid reason. The social pressure that might otherwise seem a good solution to this problem has been proven not to work, particularly in public situations where the offender can feel protected in the anonymity of the crowd...
The GUI -- windows, mouse for control, pop-ups, etc. -- was invented by Dr. Douglas Engelbart at SRI in the 60s. It was Xerox who applied the metaphor to the PC, added overlapping windows and the LAN, and then coupled it with a development environment that was more that one-off coding hacks (important to be sure, but not close to "inventing" the GUI.)
And when the two parties have practically the same opinion?!
I guess that means that an overwhelming majority of the population shares these same opinions and values, with the remaining points of disagreement occurring at the edges of the two groups.
When I last checked this was actually pretty close to the definition of democracy... You know, will of the majority and all that good stuff.
[This is your cue to launch into your "sheeple" rant about how if only the people knew what was happening and was not being fed their opinions by their corporate masters they would agree with you, because you are so much smarter than they are and you see things "the way they really are" yada yada yada... btw, this is also a signal that it is time for you to take your meds again or take another hit off the bong...]
They were on enough ballots to theoretically win. What other criteria do you need?
How about the ability to poll above the margin of error? Even if polling results are not completely accurate, they are good enough to tell everyone that having these two additional candidates on stage would be a waste of time.
When the stakes in an election are as high as they are now, do you really think that having viewers subjected to the rhetoric of two no-chance candidates with extremist agendas to push would benefit the end-result of the process? A simple opening shot of a screen that said "the following parties are qualified on enough ballots to have a theoretical chance of winning, check out the following web sites for information on their positions" would have been more than any of these third-party candidates deserved.
You guys have a political system that makes it essential impossible for anyone without multi-millions in backing to get anything like enough coverage to let voters know that they have choices outside the dualistic monopoly of the Democrats and Republicans, and you still think it's a bad idea for him to bring some attention to that fact?
Probably because in our system the president is only one facet of a system that divides power among multiple groups. How far would a libertarian president get when he is unable to get any of his proposals or ideas introduced into congress (you do know that the president does not make laws, or even propose them, right?) when all of the legislators are of other parties and even if there was a single LP legislator this person would not be able to get a single bill out of committee. So now we have a president who enters office as a lame-duck! Yeah, we all want that.
These idiots are not credible candidates for the same reason Ralph Nader isn't, they will end up getting fewer votes in a state than the losing major party candidate will receive in any particular congressional district.
We have a political system that demands that candidates have some credibiliity in terms of their ability to govern. Good ideas are not good enough. You need to prove that you can actually govern. You prove this by starting off by running in a local or state-wide political race, winning, and then showing the voters that you are not a complete idiot while in office.
The third-parties that actually have a shot at legitimacy (which includes the LP and Green party, but not these particular two bozos that everyone is discussing) have started to work on the state and local level, building the sort of political organization that is required to actually participate in the process in this country.
3) Is the two-party system really the best system? Wouldn't more competition improve the political system?
There are plenty of other examples of multi-party democracies out there and they don't seem to work any better than the (primarily) two-party system in the US. Actual results of these systems seem to vary quite a bit.
At one end you have the consensus-oriented Dutch system, where a curtural bias towards compormise tends to create stable governments but where this consensus can prevent the government from enforcing unpalatable reforms on the population (see the current protests over cutting public benefits necessary to deal with the fact that Europe's population is aging too fast to sustain the current welface state.)
At the other end you get the unstable Israeli parliment, where small extremist parties at the polar ends of the social/political spectrum are able to exert an unforgivable amount of influence by tipping the balance of power in the Knesset to one or the other of the major parties. These parties are basically blackmailed into giving this minor party some powerful cabinet post that allows the party to promote its particular agenda, even if most of the supporters of the major party do not agree with this agenda.
The American system values stability and tends to let the popular will drive the parties rather than the other way around. Take a look at the history of american political parties, they have actually splintered, reformed, and changed direction as the popular will changed. This shifting tended to slow down quite a bit during the cold war (the efforts that used to go into changing "the party" instead went into PACs and other efforts to exert direct influence on "the system"), but the ability of the internet to change how people organize and communicate and the narrowing of the opinions of the electorate is starting to change things again.
Personally, I'm dissappointed that the idea of using genetic programming (or related technology) to develop or improve CODECs has not, at least to my knowlege, taken off.
The problem is that the evaluation loop is too expensive. It is _trivial_ to develop a system that attempts to eveolve various mechanisms to encode data, but to iterate each generation you need some sort of way to determine the winners and the losers. If you could figure out a way to use a program to determine which was the better of two video encoding mechanisms it would be worthy of a PhD or two. The simple way to think about this is that if you could perform this evaluation with a computer you would have figured out a practical mechanism for general-application computer vision.
One possibility is to corral ten thousand or so friends and get them to view three encoded clips (the original source and the versions produced by the two population members you are testing) but keeping this up long enough to end up with a decent encoder is an unlikely proposition. Making this harder is that once your population of encoding algorithms weeds out the obviously broken solutions you need evaluators who can determine things like which codec produced the fewest artifacts and other details that would shrink your potential pool of human evaluators.
The hard part about using evolutionary computing techniques is not the evolution engine, it is all about figuring out how to test the population members your engine generates. If you do not already have a well-defined target that is easy to describe mathematically (or a test environment in which you can pit two population members against each other) you are basically screwed.
It should be, but just because you have a recording in format A does not mean you have a legal right to bypass the distributors (aka RIAA) to get a copy in format B. To do it legally you would have to do your own {analog | digital} -> analog -> digital (mp3) conversion yourself.
According to the law you are one of the thieves of whom Ballmer speaks...
Does Californica not realize that the Internet will treat this as damage, and route around it?
Considering the fact that until recently the majority of packets on the internet either originated or terminated in California, I sincerly invite you to try routing around CA.
The benefit of running the state that contains Silicon Valley (and the tech centers in LA and San Diego) is that you get to exert a significant impact on the internet, whether the rest of the internet likes it or not.
As for the network efficiency argument, stick the freaking towers in the middle of New York and LA. Theres 30 million users. 1/10th of the US market in 2 cities. Sure it doesn't solve the problem of "why can't I get 3G in the middle of the Arizona desert!" but theres no excuse for major cities not to be eqipped with the latest in cell phone technology.
And guess what? In some major cities in the US you can get EV-DO wireless broadband that kicks the shit out of your WCMDA and in most cities you can get 1xRTT that is not great but still better than dialup.
Getting this service everywhere in the US is the hard part..
The Merlin card for Sprint works just fine on my Powerbook. You need to activate it on a PC, but once you jump through this hoop it works fine on the Mac.
To flash out the "real soon now", the first public betas of the consumer version of the HiveCache backup system will be available for windows at the end of October, Linux and OS X clients will probably be ready for beta testing before the end of the year.
Consider of course, the Fermi paradox. If there are/were ETs, then where are they? Why can't we detect even the faintest echo of their long-dead civilization when we can measure the spin of stars at the edge of the universe? Occam's razor leads us to assume that it is because Drake is wrong, or at least the numbers most people plug in to the equation are wrong.
Additional problems with the Drake Equation is that one thing the original research that kicked off this story suggest quite strongly is that the f{p} (fraction of stars with planets) and n{e} (percentage of planets that are inhabitable) numbers are much lower than people think.
I hope Munich carefully audits all of Microsoft's source code before deploying it as well.
You have reached the heart of the problem, but have it backwards because you don't understand how the law works. If Microsoft infringes upon someone else's patent then _Microsoft_ is responsible for satisfying the patent holder and for providing the same or equivalent product to the customer. If some bozo check in some Linux code that is later found to violate a patent then the city of Munich is responsible (because they have no indemnification from the software provider.) Notice the difference?
As much as it may suck, this is one of the things which you get when you actually pay for your software. Perhaps it is the only thing of value, but in the biz world it is important to have these uncertainties taken care of (especially when you are a deep-pocket target for various bottom-feeders...er, make that fine, upstanding members of the legal professsion...)
One of the claims that can be made regarding a parody or satire is that it is for non-commercial purposes. Having these two guys shilling their site on Leno and talking about how this animation has increased their commercial prospects is not really the sort of statements that a lawyer would advise them to make...
A parody mocks the artist or composer. A satire mocks someone else using the work created by the artist or composer. Parody is protected by fair use (since it is a sort of review or statement about the work in question) while satire is not.
JibJab is probably going to be ruled satire since it does not comment directly on Woody Guthrie or his works, but rather uses his works to make a statement about Kerry and Bush.
The relevant case law here is Dr. Seuss Enterprises vs. Penguin Books (9th circuit)
I think he bought a processor for over $1000, and gets the grease for free.
Well, if I could get raw crude oil for free I would be happy to sell you gasoline at $1 a gallon...
The input is free in this example only because biodiesel is in its infancy, so the community refiner you reference has no competition for the used grease. Within five years you can expect that the restaurants that pay this person to take the grease away or give it to him for free will have several competing offers to pay the restaurant for the priviledge of hauling away the grease for later refining.
This McNuggest Nation may use a lot of vegetable oil every day, but it is not even a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of diesel fuel that is used daily (which is only a small fraction of the amount of gasoline used) so there is no way this scales up beyond proof-of-concept stages.
Of course, this sort of leads one to wonder why the companies which are actually in the business of hauling away and disposing of the contents of the grease traps in american restaurants are not starting to produce biodiesel to increase their profit margins. I am sure it will be fairly common soon, but does anyone know of anyone doing this already?