The MP3 stereo I got was $150 from Wal-Mart last year; you can get this for ninety bucks now. I'll just be getting the old one installed in my car instead of the current stock tape deck, but it'd still be cheaper to get a new one than to use a laptop. Plus, the stereo's more space-efficient.
Good for you! Just starting to move out into the larger world of paying for my own food, transportation, etc. at this point in my life, I'm noticing that if you don't have some sort of insane compulsion to get a new, shiny, expensive x (like my girlfriend does), you can actually live kind of cheaply.
I got a decade-old station wagon (Chevy Cavalier) for twelve hundred bucks. It gets twenty-three miles to the gallon and gets me where I'm going reasonably comfortably. (Though I'd like to put an MP3-capable stereo in there, for those long trips.) My girlfriend keeps poking at me to get a newer car, the instant I can 'afford' it. She's several thousand bucks in credit card debt. I have student loans in the low four digits, and that's all. Why? I don't buy shit I don't need.
Other example: my father had a 1990 (or so) BMW 320i. He got it with about two hundred thousand miles on it, and it finally croaked at 320k. (It needed a new radiator at some point in there, though.)
If I can afford to, someday, get a new computer, I hope I'm levelheaded enough not to.
Errm. Electrolysis of salt water, I'm pretty sure, won't produce sulfur. The most prevalent ions (more than three-fourths) in seawater, are Cl- and Na+. Let's review: hydrogen gas gets bottled and sent off to run cars, etc. Oxygen flies off into the atmosphere, where there's already plenty of it, which doesn't suddenly turn into SO2 for no apparent reason. (Source.)
Now, there's sulfate dissolved in seawater, true. Why that couldn't just be either (a) mined for industrial purposes or (b) tossed back into the ocean) is beyond me.
The Economist is some sort of high-and-mighty, very-smart-people magazine, right? So you'd expect their tech summaries to be clear, concise and accurate, right?
Fuel cells are a method for storing energy. Storing. Like a battery. Saying "we'll all run on fuel cells" is like saying "we'll all run on capacitors" or "we'll all run on car batteries". The energy to charge those fuel cells has to come from somewhere. Why is an energy transport technology being touted as the solution to power generation problems?
Furthermore, don't modern crops require petroleum-based fertilizers to maintain their high yields? As in, it takes several liters of petroleum to make one liter of ethanol from corn. Ergo, corn-a-hol is a good idea if we have too much fucking corn---which we do; subsidies make it that way---but have nothing to do with growing cheap energy.
Both of these methods---touted as the end of the oil age---are just ways of putting oil behind the scenes. Whether fossil fuels power the electrical plant that supplies the energy for your fuel cell charging station, or are poured into the ground to make that oh-so-clean ethanol. (Hmm. I wonder if 'cornahol' could catch on.)
So, then, what are the classification levels within DOD? Are there other levels for, say, the CIA or the FBI or the NSA? Is there actually and for real something called 'Majestic'?
Did you notice the part where he says, "My first step was to use a common compiler"? Looks to me like he used the 2.95 to compile the 3.3.1 so that the same compiler would be running on both operating systems.
What are you talking about? Both benchmarks used gcc 3.3.1. Notice where it says "Compilation Time (GCC 3.3.1)" above the compile-time graph? Yes, he had to compile the same version of gcc on both machines, but he specifically doesn't include that task in the benchmarks.
How can it be twenty-two minutes? Must be for things like sports, which (at least it seems) are interrupted more frequently. Prime-time hour-long dramas (don't know about reality shows, news, anything else) seem to have stabilized at around forty-two to forty-four minutes long with the commercials removed. Maybe early-morning infomercials are being counted.
Still, having an actual study would be better than pulling out my own back-of-the-envelope figures. Do you remember the name of the textbook from that class.
What exactly do you mean by record once? Sounds like a dumb question, but since the program is only broadcast once (for purposes of argument), shouldn't the options only be 'don't record', 'record at shitty quality' and 'record freely'? Do you mean having playback limited?
Having ad-stripped versions of certain series, I can make an observation.
The Outer Limits (early sixties). Fifty-three to fifty-five minute runtime. 5--7 minutes of ads per hour.
X-Files (or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or any new Trek series, etc.) Forty-two to forty-four minutes. 16--18 minutes of ads per hour.
Plus, look at the season lengths. First season of The Outer Limits had 32 eps. 32*54 = 1728 mins/season. Average season of X-Files or Buffy has around 22 episodes. 22*43 = 946 mins/season.
Ergo, a season of television consisted of nearly twice as much (eighty-three percent more) back in the day, than it does now. I can't believe they still have filler episodes in the shortened seasons. Bleah.
What's on that's good? Every series I'm watching at the moment (I watch 'em all at once, without the commercials) has ended by this point: X-Files, Babylon 5, The Outer Limits (the original 1959-or-so one)... is there anything really decent on now that Firefly's been cancelled?
Actually, it is, in large enough quantities, which aren't that large. A thousand bucks of retail-value infringement in a six-month period, and you're up shit creek.
Absolutely right. It has the little flange on it so it lies flush with the case, but it's the standard connector. Don't know why I thought otherwise; must've had a brainfart.
The iMac cables, however, are most definitely evil.
"Ten years later, this country---the original advoceas of the peaceful colonisation of space---decide to build giant space weapons. Strictly for defense, of course. One of their space flights blows up, killing---among others---a female teacher.
Their space weapon shield proves to be impractical, and so they change the focus of their research... developing a weapon capable of causing large disturbances in the heart of the sun... disturbances large enough to wipe out the planets closest to her.
They hold the world hostage to their threat to reduce Earth to a cinder. A conflict isn't settled to their satisfaction. Many buttons are pushed.
A hundred million years afterward, a blue-green fungus appears spontaneously on one of Jupiter's moons. It dies out within a week.
And that's it for life in this solar system."
--The Judge, Cerebus: Church and State pp. 1207--8, by Dave Sim
My boss (system manager for the UConn math department) has (by my rough estimate) about ten cubic feet of well-packed power cables, Y-adapters, gender changers and sundry accessories.
So yeah, other people feel a need to hoard those things.
"Vintage"? Next thing you know, we're going to go to keyboard-testing events, wash our hands in salt water and blow-dry them between testings, and start using weird adjectives.
"Ah, yes. This eMachines knockoff displays a firmer character, with elements of plozz and fwimple, leading to an oaky finish."
Long ago, in a distant land, I, Aku, the shapeshifting---
Wait, no.
Long ago, some folks who may or may not have pre-dated the original IBM PC came up with the standard power cable. That power cable works with any new AT or ATX motherboard, any laser printer I've seen, or any CRT I've seen. (Most flat-panels use a DC adapter which takes---you got it---the standard power cable.) Apples take the standard power cable, even.
Or, at least, they did.
Recently, Apple, in what can only be described as an effort to reduce their karma dramatically, have introduced a new, nonstandard power cable. It does exactly the same thing, but the iMac (or the G5, for that matter) cannot use the standard power cable which has been a standard for, oh, at least twenty-some odd years.
Do I seem bitter? Must be the big box of standard power cables in my basement which are soon to become obsolete.
*ahem* So, the answer is: they were all the same until Apple fucked it up.
[USC 17 506]: (a) Criminal Infringement. - Any person who infringes a copyright willfully either -
(1) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, or
(2) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000,
shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, United States Code. For purposes of this subsection, evidence of reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement.
But I'm still confused about one thing. Why are all the RIAA/MPAA cases civil, and not criminal, if there's criminal law out there which applies? It can't be under section (a)(1), which requires that a profit be made...... but then again, (a)(2) would require that the retail value of a single work was greater than a thousand bucks. Which, without RIAA math (you shared a thousand songs, multiply by eighteen bucks a song, damages are eighteen grand), doesn't really cover much of anyone.
So.
Unless we're talking about WareZ K1dz tossing around the latest Maya or 3DSMax (that's still under copyright infringement, right?), it ain't a crime.
So.
I appear to still be right. Copyright violation, in terms of movies and songs, is not a criminal act, since no single movie or song has a retail value of over a thousand dollars.
You're not listening to what I'm saying. I'm arguing that because copyright infringement does not violate criminal law, it's not a crime. I don't care what you can garnish theft (which is a totally different legal idea) with.
One more time: neither federal nor state law defines copyright violation as a crime. It's a tort. Which is why people are being sued for violating it, not arrested and put on criminal trial.
Maybe You're New Here, or you weren't paying attention the numerous times this has been gone over, or you've just read too much mainstream news.
Copyright Infringement != Theft.
Say it again, and pay attention this time.
Copyright Infringement != Theft.
Copyright infringement is a civil tort. Theft is a criminal offense. They're very, very different. No matter what some asshat from the RIAA or MPAA says.
Slashdot Mirror
The MP3 stereo I got was $150 from Wal-Mart last year; you can get this for ninety bucks now. I'll just be getting the old one installed in my car instead of the current stock tape deck, but it'd still be cheaper to get a new one than to use a laptop. Plus, the stereo's more space-efficient.
--grendel drago
Good for you! Just starting to move out into the larger world of paying for my own food, transportation, etc. at this point in my life, I'm noticing that if you don't have some sort of insane compulsion to get a new, shiny, expensive x (like my girlfriend does), you can actually live kind of cheaply.
I got a decade-old station wagon (Chevy Cavalier) for twelve hundred bucks. It gets twenty-three miles to the gallon and gets me where I'm going reasonably comfortably. (Though I'd like to put an MP3-capable stereo in there, for those long trips.) My girlfriend keeps poking at me to get a newer car, the instant I can 'afford' it. She's several thousand bucks in credit card debt. I have student loans in the low four digits, and that's all. Why? I don't buy shit I don't need.
Other example: my father had a 1990 (or so) BMW 320i. He got it with about two hundred thousand miles on it, and it finally croaked at 320k. (It needed a new radiator at some point in there, though.)
If I can afford to, someday, get a new computer, I hope I'm levelheaded enough not to.
--grendel drago
Errm. Electrolysis of salt water, I'm pretty sure, won't produce sulfur. The most prevalent ions (more than three-fourths) in seawater, are Cl- and Na+. Let's review: hydrogen gas gets bottled and sent off to run cars, etc. Oxygen flies off into the atmosphere, where there's already plenty of it, which doesn't suddenly turn into SO2 for no apparent reason. (Source.)
Now, there's sulfate dissolved in seawater, true. Why that couldn't just be either (a) mined for industrial purposes or (b) tossed back into the ocean) is beyond me.
--grendel drago
This is ridiculous.
The Economist is some sort of high-and-mighty, very-smart-people magazine, right? So you'd expect their tech summaries to be clear, concise and accurate, right?
Fuel cells are a method for storing energy. Storing. Like a battery. Saying "we'll all run on fuel cells" is like saying "we'll all run on capacitors" or "we'll all run on car batteries". The energy to charge those fuel cells has to come from somewhere. Why is an energy transport technology being touted as the solution to power generation problems?
Furthermore, don't modern crops require petroleum-based fertilizers to maintain their high yields? As in, it takes several liters of petroleum to make one liter of ethanol from corn. Ergo, corn-a-hol is a good idea if we have too much fucking corn---which we do; subsidies make it that way---but have nothing to do with growing cheap energy.
Both of these methods---touted as the end of the oil age---are just ways of putting oil behind the scenes. Whether fossil fuels power the electrical plant that supplies the energy for your fuel cell charging station, or are poured into the ground to make that oh-so-clean ethanol. (Hmm. I wonder if 'cornahol' could catch on.)
--grendel drago
So, then, what are the classification levels within DOD? Are there other levels for, say, the CIA or the FBI or the NSA? Is there actually and for real something called 'Majestic'?
--grendel drago
Did you notice the part where he says, "My first step was to use a common compiler"? Looks to me like he used the 2.95 to compile the 3.3.1 so that the same compiler would be running on both operating systems.
--grendel drago
What are you talking about? Both benchmarks used gcc 3.3.1. Notice where it says "Compilation Time (GCC 3.3.1)" above the compile-time graph? Yes, he had to compile the same version of gcc on both machines, but he specifically doesn't include that task in the benchmarks.
--grendel drago
Which series? TOS (sixties), TNG (late-eighties/early-nineties), DS9/Voyager (mid-nineties) or Enterprise (current)?
--grendel drago
How can it be twenty-two minutes? Must be for things like sports, which (at least it seems) are interrupted more frequently. Prime-time hour-long dramas (don't know about reality shows, news, anything else) seem to have stabilized at around forty-two to forty-four minutes long with the commercials removed. Maybe early-morning infomercials are being counted.
Still, having an actual study would be better than pulling out my own back-of-the-envelope figures. Do you remember the name of the textbook from that class.
--grendel drago
What exactly do you mean by record once? Sounds like a dumb question, but since the program is only broadcast once (for purposes of argument), shouldn't the options only be 'don't record', 'record at shitty quality' and 'record freely'? Do you mean having playback limited?
--grendel drago
10--13 minutes per hour?!
Having ad-stripped versions of certain series, I can make an observation.
The Outer Limits (early sixties). Fifty-three to fifty-five minute runtime. 5--7 minutes of ads per hour.
X-Files (or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or any new Trek series, etc.) Forty-two to forty-four minutes. 16--18 minutes of ads per hour.
Plus, look at the season lengths. First season of The Outer Limits had 32 eps. 32*54 = 1728 mins/season. Average season of X-Files or Buffy has around 22 episodes. 22*43 = 946 mins/season.
Ergo, a season of television consisted of nearly twice as much (eighty-three percent more) back in the day, than it does now. I can't believe they still have filler episodes in the shortened seasons. Bleah.
--grendel drago
What's on that's good? Every series I'm watching at the moment (I watch 'em all at once, without the commercials) has ended by this point: X-Files, Babylon 5, The Outer Limits (the original 1959-or-so one)... is there anything really decent on now that Firefly's been cancelled?
--grendel drago
COPYRIGHT infringment! (Which is a civil, not criminal matter.)
How come I'm the only one who gets picked on for this shit?
--grendel drago
Actually, it is, in large enough quantities, which aren't that large. A thousand bucks of retail-value infringement in a six-month period, and you're up shit creek.
Careful, or you too might go from 'gullible loser' to 'elitist idiot'.
(Is downloading legally 'reproduction'? Or is uploading the only way for it to count as a crime?)
--grendel drago
Absolutely right. It has the little flange on it so it lies flush with the case, but it's the standard connector. Don't know why I thought otherwise; must've had a brainfart.
The iMac cables, however, are most definitely evil.
--grendel drago
"Ten years later, this country---the original advoceas of the peaceful colonisation of space---decide to build giant space weapons. Strictly for defense, of course. One of their space flights blows up, killing---among others---a female teacher.
Their space weapon shield proves to be impractical, and so they change the focus of their research... developing a weapon capable of causing large disturbances in the heart of the sun... disturbances large enough to wipe out the planets closest to her.
They hold the world hostage to their threat to reduce Earth to a cinder. A conflict isn't settled to their satisfaction. Many buttons are pushed.
A hundred million years afterward, a blue-green fungus appears spontaneously on one of Jupiter's moons. It dies out within a week.
And that's it for life in this solar system."
--The Judge, Cerebus: Church and State pp. 1207--8, by Dave Sim
My boss (system manager for the UConn math department) has (by my rough estimate) about ten cubic feet of well-packed power cables, Y-adapters, gender changers and sundry accessories.
So yeah, other people feel a need to hoard those things.
--grendel drago
"Vintage"? Next thing you know, we're going to go to keyboard-testing events, wash our hands in salt water and blow-dry them between testings, and start using weird adjectives.
"Ah, yes. This eMachines knockoff displays a firmer character, with elements of plozz and fwimple, leading to an oaky finish."
Eep.
--grendel drago
Long ago, in a distant land, I, Aku, the shapeshifting---
Wait, no.
Long ago, some folks who may or may not have pre-dated the original IBM PC came up with the standard power cable. That power cable works with any new AT or ATX motherboard, any laser printer I've seen, or any CRT I've seen. (Most flat-panels use a DC adapter which takes---you got it---the standard power cable.) Apples take the standard power cable, even.
Or, at least, they did.
Recently, Apple, in what can only be described as an effort to reduce their karma dramatically, have introduced a new, nonstandard power cable. It does exactly the same thing, but the iMac (or the G5, for that matter) cannot use the standard power cable which has been a standard for, oh, at least twenty-some odd years.
Do I seem bitter? Must be the big box of standard power cables in my basement which are soon to become obsolete.
*ahem* So, the answer is: they were all the same until Apple fucked it up.
--grendel drago
Well, look at that. Egg on me.
... but then again, (a)(2) would require that the retail value of a single work was greater than a thousand bucks. Which, without RIAA math (you shared a thousand songs, multiply by eighteen bucks a song, damages are eighteen grand), doesn't really cover much of anyone.
[USC 17 506]:
(a) Criminal Infringement. - Any person who infringes a copyright willfully either -
(1) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, or
(2) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000,
shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, United States Code. For purposes of this subsection, evidence of reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work, by itself, shall not be sufficient to establish willful infringement.
But I'm still confused about one thing. Why are all the RIAA/MPAA cases civil, and not criminal, if there's criminal law out there which applies? It can't be under section (a)(1), which requires that a profit be made...
So.
Unless we're talking about WareZ K1dz tossing around the latest Maya or 3DSMax (that's still under copyright infringement, right?), it ain't a crime.
So.
I appear to still be right. Copyright violation, in terms of movies and songs, is not a criminal act, since no single movie or song has a retail value of over a thousand dollars.
Nyah.
--grendel drago
Get the facts, dittohead.
--grendelkhan
You're not listening to what I'm saying. I'm arguing that because copyright infringement does not violate criminal law, it's not a crime. I don't care what you can garnish theft (which is a totally different legal idea) with.
One more time: neither federal nor state law defines copyright violation as a crime. It's a tort. Which is why people are being sued for violating it, not arrested and put on criminal trial.
--grendel drago
Really? OpenBSD is insecure by design? Remind me the last time they had a remote root exploit in their default install?
--grendel drago
Technically, it's 'fraud'. Not 'stealing'. Close, though.
--grendel drago
Maybe You're New Here, or you weren't paying attention the numerous times this has been gone over, or you've just read too much mainstream news.
Copyright Infringement != Theft.
Say it again, and pay attention this time.
Copyright Infringement != Theft.
Copyright infringement is a civil tort. Theft is a criminal offense. They're very, very different. No matter what some asshat from the RIAA or MPAA says.
--grendel drago