Hmmmm. In the prairies, there's a town of 1000 people every 20 km. So that means we could have each person do 20 meters (60 feet). Seems reasonable.
Of course the impossible part is doing all the paperwork and getting all the permits and especially organizing all the people and getting them willing to do something. Too bad they're mostly morons and dopes.
DivX does seem to be really bad at doing cartoons. It must be something about the format/algorithm. Perhaps they need a "cartoon optimization" feature.
Personally I think someone needs to create a codec/algorithm specifically designed from the get go for cartoons, then we'll see some spectacular quality with really low bandwidth.
No. That's why we have anti-monopoly laws and the like. When one company controls so much, they begin to have more power over what you are free to do, because your choice is restricted. The entry barrier to the market that clear-channel has a near lock on is so high that your options are limited. Your only option is to give up listening to rock on the radio. That's like giving up playing video games because your only option is (or was) Microsoft.
Of course, the internet and mass colaboration may shift things slightly, but not if our personal distribution mechanisms keep getting suppressed.
(Monty Python sound-bite runs through my mind - "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!!".)
Secondly, anyone who says that redundancy is somehow bad because there is more equipment to fail, and then blames the added cost of the equipment failure on the operating system, is just nuts.
Ahem. They're saying that NT is so unstable and unscalable that instead of running all 3 major systems on one box with great reliability, they're being forced to run them on 3 different boxes with 3 more backups, which multiplies their software costs by 6. That's directly due to the failings of NT and Microsoft!
Next, the author states that "The next couple of years saw a dramatic increase in data storage requirements and internet use", and then goes on to insinuate that the OS was somehow to blame for uptime / reliability of the hardware used.
Hardware scales. NT doesn't, not without increased software and maintenance costs. Also note the term "and internet use". Are you fully aware of the extra burdensome licensing terms AND EXTRA COSTS Microsoft imposes on-top of everything else, should your services be accessed by users over a VPN or internet? (If they're the same people who access it from work? If they're completely different outside/external customers?)
First of all, the assertion that the company would HAVE to move to per-seat licensing when they moved to separate file, print and mail servers is just wrong. 2000 concurrent users are still 2000 concurrent users, whether they are connected to one server or three.
Now I want to see and hear YOUR qualifications to give an authoritative statement on the most appropriate Microsoft licensing scheme given their circumstances. If their story is true, then their licensing wasn't chosen by some shmuck, but was decided/recommended by Microsoft itself.
What you or I think is fair doesn't matter a whiff to Microsoft given their monopoly position and the fact that most corporations are already in up to their armpits.
I saw a ray of hope last night on network TV, an ad from Earthlink:
A woman is at a bar and a guy is chatting her up. Eventually he asks her for her number, and she obliges. Suddenly the bartender and then the guy sitting next to him ask the guy for the woman's number. He thinks for a few seconds, then says, "$5 each?". The woman sits there dumbfounded as this guy auctions off her home phone number. Then we see the Earthlink pitch, about "privacy and not selling your personal information".
I thought it was kind of kool. Makes up for a lot of the past things I've heard about Earthlink.
You can dynamically change the color of a SlashDot page by using the ?colorblock= setting. Ages ago many of us went through hoops to figure out which indexed field matched which "things" on slashdot, and so we came up with our own colorblock settings.
For example, mine was like this (http://slashdot.org/index.pl?colorblock=white,med iumblue,black,white,darkblue,lightsteelblue,E0E8FF,darkblue).
Unfortunately Slashdot 2.2 breaks the indexing, and now we have to totally re-discover which old index matches which new index!!!
Arrghhhhh! How hard would it have been to maintain backwards compatibility?
(Heyyyy, cool. I no longer have to manually put in the paragraph tags! Now that's progress!)
The 'exploding water' thing predates the e-mail by a few years. When we got our first microwave (a Toshiba, IIRC) the manual contained a warning
Same here. I don't know where I learned it, perhaps from the manual of my parents old huge massive microwave from the 80's. But I've always known that when you microwave water you need some sort of particulate matter in the water to provide nucleation centers for bubbles and steam, otherwise what you describe could happen.
Here is a great reference. Someone who got 1st and 2nd degree burns from this effect.
To those websites who self rightously call this a hoax or an un-necessary warning, no-one (except us Physicists or Engineers) would expect anything like this, this superheated nucleation water explosion effect. It's not a predictable thing given the average person's experiences. Thus finding some way of warning everyone in the world (ala Microwave instructions) is actually justified.
The same goes for filtration and vacuum drains at swimming pools. A half dozen young people have been killed in Ontario Canada alone in the past decade. Broken or missing grates in pools mean it's very easy for a small child to get wedged into one of the pool filter vacuum spouts, and a grown adult can not dislodge them. If a young girl with long hair gets it entangled in a sub-surface moving part, she's a goner. It's actually quite pathetic, but even after a half dozen "coroner's inquests" (which merely deliver "recommendations", and have no legal force), it still happens.
It's not just the airline industry, everything we do is "Tombstone Technology".
In that report he claims that mp3.com is "low spam", since they have an opt out system.
HOWEVER, if you do ANYTHING FURTHER at mp3.com, they force you to re-confirm your registered information, which again signs you up for more spam (it's right there, in the fine print).
So in effect, it is impossible to use mp3.com over the long haul without putting up with their spam, without using a fake e-mail address. So if you want to do something that requires a valid e-mail address, like maintain a "station" (list of favorite songs for others to browse, highly useful, one the best way of finding good music on mp3.com these days), or send feedback/e-mail to an artist using the mp3.com feedback box (the only way for some artists, who don't want to publicly announce their e-mail addresses), you're screwed.
This has been one of the main things keeping me from wanting to buy artist's discs and giving artists money on mp3.com, because I know that every time I do I'll be forced to take more mp3.com spam and "unsubscribe" all over again.
> The problem is, what can anyone do about it? Nothing is offlimits from the grasp of greedy business men.
Tell you what. If worst comes to worse, we build our own damn internet. I see all these apartment buildings with cable-tv wires draped all over the outsides and I figure, "why can't we do that to create a LAN in my building?".
What's the difference between that game, another game, and the objects/people in your real life 'game'?
What's the internal/mental difference between the experiences and interactions you had with your house/car/girlfriend (not including those in the bedroom) in the 'real' world, and any other experience and interaction in the world with other objects/people, including those in any 'fake' world?
What causes you to place value A on one and value B on another? Fundamentally.
Actually, maybe they should have first asked Dimitri if he'd be willing to volunteer his freedom in order to turn this into a DMCA-killer case. IE: No negotiations, run them all the way to the supreme court and get it the entire thing declared unconstitutional.
Of course the down side would be if they screwed up the case and lost... so I guess I wouldn't blame anyone for not wanting to try this.
You've made so many factual mistakes it's astounding. I'll just counter the few that were obvious to me:
Second, you have to get it in to Canada. While we do have huge unguarded borders up north, you're going to have a hell of a time getting it from the Yukon or wherever to the 49th parallel.
Ahem, we have a VERY nice big road from the Yukon all the way down to the US border. It would be SIMPLE, you'd never get stopped. AFAIK you'd be an idiot to start at the Yukon.
Also, the US is pushing for increased Canadian border security and unified policies on security and entry into North America.
What I heard was that we might actually get our act together and do the same as European countries have, eliminate ALL the US/Canadian border crossings. Sure we might beef up our 'external' borders, but they're too big and lightly populated.
Third, you have to cross the US border. While I don't know for sure, I would bet there are hidden radiation detectors at all the border crossings. Liquid scintillator column-style detectors are incredibly sensitive, and it would be nearly impossible to shield the near-critical fissionable material in a bomb from the detectors (the gamma rays produced have too much penetrating power)
You do know that when encased in a thin stainless steel casing (and I mean THIN, 1/8th or 1/16th an inch), plutonium cores can be safely handled by hand. Didn't you see Joan Lunden handling that one on her new show that went behind the scenes at one of the US Military plutonium handling facilities? That was cool. You may still have a point about the scintillation detectors. Mrs. Lunded also did a show (or was it the same one) that looked at the US's military response team responsible for finding and defusing a radioactive/nuclear "suitcase" threat in a major US city.
However you'd be an idiot to go across at a formal crossing without the suitcase surrounded by some lead. Not every vehicle is Xrayed. Better yet dont' use a formal crossing, not when there are 3000 other undefended miles. They do have ground motion sensors and the like, but if you know what you're doing they'll be easy to avoid. Better yet to go over in an ultralight at 30 feet off the ground.
Re:Preview of what's to come...
on
Internet2 Update
·
· Score: 1
Anyone remember the Intellivision game "Microsurgeon"?
(Darn it, now I'm going to have to blow an evening finding and setting up a good emulator! Wonder how that all-java Intellivision emulator is going...)
I'm sorry, have they shut LAME down yet? No? Why not?
I was under the impression that they only have the rights to one set of the algorithms used to encode/decode the mp3 file, not the raw mp3 format itself. Thus LAME was able to code a free implementation of the encryption algorithm.
> The big robot arm that doesn't work right is from Canada.
It does work right. Mostly. It's just that once they saw something strange, but it's been working perfectly fine ever since and they haven't been able to figure out what caused the strange event.
Of course, knowing that you have some hidden software or system bug but not knowing what causes it or when or where it will creep up again always leaves a taste in your mouth.
Slashdot Mirror
That's bloodly un-intuitive. Can't google set things up so that it automatically does that when someone uses quotes?
Hmmmm. In the prairies, there's a town of 1000 people every 20 km. So that means we could have each person do 20 meters (60 feet). Seems reasonable.
Of course the impossible part is doing all the paperwork and getting all the permits and especially organizing all the people and getting them willing to do something. Too bad they're mostly morons and dopes.
You know it's going to be a serious Special Forces war when the US requests and gets both Canadian and Austrailian Special Forces units.
(This isn't a joke, both are on the way).
DivX does seem to be really bad at doing cartoons. It must be something about the format/algorithm. Perhaps they need a "cartoon optimization" feature.
Personally I think someone needs to create a codec/algorithm specifically designed from the get go for cartoons, then we'll see some spectacular quality with really low bandwidth.
No. That's why we have anti-monopoly laws and the like. When one company controls so much, they begin to have more power over what you are free to do, because your choice is restricted. The entry barrier to the market that clear-channel has a near lock on is so high that your options are limited. Your only option is to give up listening to rock on the radio. That's like giving up playing video games because your only option is (or was) Microsoft.
Of course, the internet and mass colaboration may shift things slightly, but not if our personal distribution mechanisms keep getting suppressed.
(Monty Python sound-bite runs through my mind - "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!!".)
Secondly, anyone who says that redundancy is somehow bad because there is more equipment to fail, and then blames the added cost of the equipment failure on the operating system, is just nuts.
Ahem. They're saying that NT is so unstable and unscalable that instead of running all 3 major systems on one box with great reliability, they're being forced to run them on 3 different boxes with 3 more backups, which multiplies their software costs by 6. That's directly due to the failings of NT and Microsoft!
Next, the author states that "The next couple of years saw a dramatic increase in data storage requirements and internet use", and then goes on to insinuate that the OS was somehow to blame for uptime / reliability of the hardware used.
Hardware scales. NT doesn't, not without increased software and maintenance costs. Also note the term "and internet use". Are you fully aware of the extra burdensome licensing terms AND EXTRA COSTS Microsoft imposes on-top of everything else, should your services be accessed by users over a VPN or internet? (If they're the same people who access it from work? If they're completely different outside/external customers?)
First of all, the assertion that the company would HAVE to move to per-seat licensing when they moved to separate file, print and mail servers is just wrong. 2000 concurrent users are still 2000 concurrent users, whether they are connected to one server or three.
Now I want to see and hear YOUR qualifications to give an authoritative statement on the most appropriate Microsoft licensing scheme given their circumstances. If their story is true, then their licensing wasn't chosen by some shmuck, but was decided/recommended by Microsoft itself.
What you or I think is fair doesn't matter a whiff to Microsoft given their monopoly position and the fact that most corporations are already in up to their armpits.
I saw a ray of hope last night on network TV, an ad from Earthlink:
A woman is at a bar and a guy is chatting her up. Eventually he asks her for her number, and she obliges. Suddenly the bartender and then the guy sitting next to him ask the guy for the woman's number. He thinks for a few seconds, then says, "$5 each?". The woman sits there dumbfounded as this guy auctions off her home phone number. Then we see the Earthlink pitch, about "privacy and not selling your personal information".
I thought it was kind of kool. Makes up for a lot of the past things I've heard about Earthlink.
You can dynamically change the color of a SlashDot page by using the ?colorblock= setting. Ages ago many of us went through hoops to figure out which indexed field matched which "things" on slashdot, and so we came up with our own colorblock settings.
d iumblue,black,white,darkblue,lightsteelblue,E0E8FF ,darkblue).
For example, mine was like this (http://slashdot.org/index.pl?colorblock=white,me
Unfortunately Slashdot 2.2 breaks the indexing, and now we have to totally re-discover which old index matches which new index!!!
Arrghhhhh! How hard would it have been to maintain backwards compatibility?
(Heyyyy, cool. I no longer have to manually put in the paragraph tags! Now that's progress!)
Same here. I don't know where I learned it, perhaps from the manual of my parents old huge massive microwave from the 80's. But I've always known that when you microwave water you need some sort of particulate matter in the water to provide nucleation centers for bubbles and steam, otherwise what you describe could happen.
Here is a great reference. Someone who got 1st and 2nd degree burns from this effect.
To those websites who self rightously call this a hoax or an un-necessary warning, no-one (except us Physicists or Engineers) would expect anything like this, this superheated nucleation water explosion effect. It's not a predictable thing given the average person's experiences. Thus finding some way of warning everyone in the world (ala Microwave instructions) is actually justified.
The same goes for filtration and vacuum drains at swimming pools. A half dozen young people have been killed in Ontario Canada alone in the past decade. Broken or missing grates in pools mean it's very easy for a small child to get wedged into one of the pool filter vacuum spouts, and a grown adult can not dislodge them. If a young girl with long hair gets it entangled in a sub-surface moving part, she's a goner. It's actually quite pathetic, but even after a half dozen "coroner's inquests" (which merely deliver "recommendations", and have no legal force), it still happens.
It's not just the airline industry, everything we do is "Tombstone Technology".
In that report he claims that mp3.com is "low spam", since they have an opt out system.
HOWEVER, if you do ANYTHING FURTHER at mp3.com, they force you to re-confirm your registered information, which again signs you up for more spam (it's right there, in the fine print).
So in effect, it is impossible to use mp3.com over the long haul without putting up with their spam, without using a fake e-mail address. So if you want to do something that requires a valid e-mail address, like maintain a "station" (list of favorite songs for others to browse, highly useful, one the best way of finding good music on mp3.com these days), or send feedback/e-mail to an artist using the mp3.com feedback box (the only way for some artists, who don't want to publicly announce their e-mail addresses), you're screwed.
This has been one of the main things keeping me from wanting to buy artist's discs and giving artists money on mp3.com, because I know that every time I do I'll be forced to take more mp3.com spam and "unsubscribe" all over again.
> The problem is, what can anyone do about it? Nothing is offlimits from the grasp of greedy business men.
Tell you what. If worst comes to worse, we build our own damn internet. I see all these apartment buildings with cable-tv wires draped all over the outsides and I figure, "why can't we do that to create a LAN in my building?".
That's was *so* eloquent.
Seriously!
Thankyou.
> it's only a game, folks.
What's the difference between that game, another game, and the objects/people in your real life 'game'?
What's the internal/mental difference between the experiences and interactions you had with your house/car/girlfriend (not including those in the bedroom) in the 'real' world, and any other experience and interaction in the world with other objects/people, including those in any 'fake' world?
What causes you to place value A on one and value B on another? Fundamentally.
Don't make me get philisophical on your ass.
Actually, maybe they should have first asked Dimitri if he'd be willing to volunteer his freedom in order to turn this into a DMCA-killer case. IE: No negotiations, run them all the way to the supreme court and get it the entire thing declared unconstitutional.
Of course the down side would be if they screwed up the case and lost... so I guess I wouldn't blame anyone for not wanting to try this.
Ackk... I meant "Search and Replace".
Sure you can search, but you can't replace. It's in the WinNT notepad, and I swear it was in the Win95/3.1 notepad. But not Win98.
Is the EFF going to defend him?
I think this is *another* great opportunity to have the DMCA overturned as unconstitutional.
Don't forget that in the Win98 version of Notepad you can't search for text.
What idiocy.
Ummm, no.
There are only a few grams of plasma in the entire thing. You could build the secondary containment structure out of plywood and heavy aluminum foil.
You've made so many factual mistakes it's astounding. I'll just counter the few that were obvious to me: Ahem, we have a VERY nice big road from the Yukon all the way down to the US border. It would be SIMPLE, you'd never get stopped. AFAIK you'd be an idiot to start at the Yukon. What I heard was that we might actually get our act together and do the same as European countries have, eliminate ALL the US/Canadian border crossings. Sure we might beef up our 'external' borders, but they're too big and lightly populated. You do know that when encased in a thin stainless steel casing (and I mean THIN, 1/8th or 1/16th an inch), plutonium cores can be safely handled by hand. Didn't you see Joan Lunden handling that one on her new show that went behind the scenes at one of the US Military plutonium handling facilities? That was cool. You may still have a point about the scintillation detectors. Mrs. Lunded also did a show (or was it the same one) that looked at the US's military response team responsible for finding and defusing a radioactive/nuclear "suitcase" threat in a major US city.
However you'd be an idiot to go across at a formal crossing without the suitcase surrounded by some lead. Not every vehicle is Xrayed. Better yet dont' use a formal crossing, not when there are 3000 other undefended miles. They do have ground motion sensors and the like, but if you know what you're doing they'll be easy to avoid. Better yet to go over in an ultralight at 30 feet off the ground.
Anyone remember the Intellivision game "Microsurgeon"?
(Darn it, now I'm going to have to blow an evening finding and setting up a good emulator! Wonder how that all-java Intellivision emulator is going...)
bleah. Brain fart. I mean encoding algorithm, not encryption algorithm.
(oooh, /. has increased the posting-interval rate from once per minute to once per 2 minutes...)
I'm sorry, have they shut LAME down yet? No? Why not?
I was under the impression that they only have the rights to one set of the algorithms used to encode/decode the mp3 file, not the raw mp3 format itself. Thus LAME was able to code a free implementation of the encryption algorithm.
> The big robot arm that doesn't work right is from Canada.
It does work right. Mostly. It's just that once they saw something strange, but it's been working perfectly fine ever since and they haven't been able to figure out what caused the strange event.
Of course, knowing that you have some hidden software or system bug but not knowing what causes it or when or where it will creep up again always leaves a taste in your mouth.
Just like Microsoft.
Are you inferring that batteries no longer do that?
Cool, when did that happen? How come I didn't hear about it?
am I the only one that gets irritated by the McDonald's commercial? "I speak Atlantian".. Not after I hit her in the face with a brick.
I second that!!! I can't stand that commercial.