1. It is illegal to download from there in the US and probably most contries other than Russia.
Is this true? Import CDs are legal. If buying and downloading from allofmp3.com is, in fact, illegal, then would it be okay for them to mail me a CD with my purchased songs instead of downloading them?
I spent some time googling and found an answer to my own question, though hardly a definitive one.
Is downloading from allofmp3.com legal? Well...um...er...probably. Even if it is illegal, you're probably safe.
...at least that's what I gathered. I doubt this question can truly be answered without going to court.
Yeah, allofmp3.com got it right. Two "minor" complaints:
1. It is illegal to download from there in the US and probably most contries other than Russia.
Is this true? Import CDs are legal. If buying and downloading from allofmp3.com is, in fact, illegal, then would it be okay for them to mail me a CD with my purchased songs instead of downloading them?
If so, the only difference is how I my music is transferred. This doesn't seem logical...of course very little modern copyright law makes sense.
Perhaps you could point me to some legislation that says buying music from Russia over the internet is illegal.
we'll see the first quantum walkie-talkies within 10-15 years.
Quantum walkie talkies are highly unlikely. Quantum cryptography depends on the ability of a single quantum particle (a photon in this case) to retain it's state as it travels from sender to receiver. That means it can't be colliding with any other particles on the way, for any collisions would alter the photon's state. Likewise, a 3rd party can't listen-in on the conversation because the very act of measuring the photon changes its state. Due to the quirkiness of quantum mechanics, once that photon's state has changed, it's impossible for the eavesdropper to re-transmit a photon with a state identical to the one that was intercepted.
The very nature of quantum cryptography prevents it from working without a wire, or fiber, as the case may be. It is doubtful that wireless quantum cryptography will ever exist.
On the great scale, Phillip Morris's sins are so few and minimal compared to Gator. I mean, they only sell lung cancer to 13 yr olds that want to be cool...
I had a knee-jerk reaction to browsing this database filled with no less than a dozen of my friends', families', and aquaintances' political affiliations with corresponding addresses. My inner-self cried "INVASION OF PRIVACY! ABORT! ABORT!"
I then took a mental step back, collected my wits, and clicked the "Privacy" link. lo and behold:
All the information presented on Fundrace.org is part of the public record and provided by the Federal Election Commission of the United States.
Anyone who contributes "hard money" to political campaigns must provide personal information. This requirement limits the political influence of wealthy, anonymous individuals and allows the public to track financial contributions that may influence the political process.
Upon further investigation it becomes apparent that this site is a Very Good Thing(tm). It is a bastion of democracy.
They can throw you out for no good reason at all...it's their property, after all.
Yeah, property "rights", the last refuge of criminals.
Kicking someone out of my house or off my property hardly makes me, or the casino, a criminal. Property "rights" (as you call them) are very real and a necesary part of civil society.
I'll bet you understand the "logic" of your "rights" over the property you own... or perhaps you wouldn't mind if i walked into your house and helped myself.
wait a minute...cynical, illogical, vitriolic post...damn! i've been trolled!
So systems like the weather are unpredictable mainly because we can't measure the conditions perfectly, regardless of whether the universe is predictable or not.
Some would say the same of quantum particles...we can't predict their behavior because our measurements are far too clumsy. Perhaps a "perfect" measurement of anything is impossible...which could also be why the both fundamental nature of the universe, and the weather, seem inherently random.
also, did you realize that it is illegal to count cards in blackjack? even in your brain? if they have reason to believe that you are counting cards, even in your head, they will kick you to the curb.
afaik, counting cards is perfectly legal. It is also perfectly legal for any given casino to throw you off their property if they suspect you of counting cards. They can throw you out for no good reason at all...it's their property, after all.
Ain't poker a great game? Poker is the exception to the casino rule that says you lose money over time. After all, you're not playing against the house, but rather against other players. (The house takes a ~2-5% of everything in the pot, called the "rake")
Winning poker players have a strong grasp on the economic concepts you mention. They think about things like pot-odds and betting position. If you are a quality player there are plenty of suckers out there from whom you can consistently win money.
Slots, roulette, even blackjack for the most part are no better than the scratch tickets I see bums lining up for over at the local convenience store. Play those games long enough and you _will_ lose (well...blackjack can be beaten, but not without effort).
Perhaps not, but there _is_ a Micro Center. (with directions from La Guardia)
I frequent the Micro Center in Boston, and while it's not quite Frye's, it's head & shoulders above BestBuy or CompUSA. They have very competitive prices and an excellent selection of high-end parts for computer enthusiants. There's a wide range of brand name PC laptops available, as well as an entire Apple store if you would rather have a PowerBook (who wouldn't?).
You can even shop online and then schedule an in-store pickup during your trip to the states.
It seems to me that by having a namespace in the DNS registry devoted to certificate "status" would effectively solve this problem.
After reading this, my initial thought was "AHA! Excellent idea." Upon reflection, though, one reason the DNS system works so well is because the task of maintaining records falls on the owner of the domain. i.e. Yahoo is responsible to make sure yahoo.com maps to the correct IP.
Would you trust the spammers to set their own "status" to "revoked"? Kinda reminds me of the evil bit.
I like the rest of your post and would love to see signed email become mainstream. I'm just not sure how to build infrastructure for a reliable, trustworthy, scalable, world-wide certificate authority.
--
this post will not be moderated. it missed the 5-minute window after fp
3. THIS IS NOT WHAT A FIREWALL DOES. If you think a firewall blocks spyware, then you are flat out wrong, and misinformed on the concept of a firewall.
My firewall blocks spyware and trojans. Traditional (think corporate) firewalls may not block spyware and trojans, but recent years have seen the development of the "personal" firewall. Every time any executable tries to access the network or the internet, my personal firewall pops-up a box telling me the details of the connection, and asking if I want to allow it. The same is true of incoming connections...and listening sockets, for that matter. A hash check upon execution of an allowed executable prevents a trojan or virus from altering a file unnoticed. No network traffic on my pc goes unmonitored.
The relatively recent windows worm that exploited RPC was blocked by my personal firewall because it needed me to explicitly allow the connection to occur. Even if I had become infected, I would have then needed to allow the worm to connect to other computers if I was to be contagious.
18 year olds can't buy alcohol yet pay taxes, work, and can get drafted to die in a war.
Because the vast majority of alcohol related driving injuries and fatalities involve "teens". Many can't handle the responsibility.
Perhaps teen drivers would be more responsible behind the wheel if they developed a proper respect for alcohol BEFORE getting a license to drive. I propose changing the drinking age to 16 and the driving age to 18. Maybe once the kids have had a couple years to figure out how to drink responsibly, they won't drink & drive. Besides, if I'm a parent, I'd much rather have my child's first drinking experience be at home, perhaps a family gathering or some low-key "adult" party.
Under 21s can't even enter a bar, thus banning them from their own local music scene until they turn 21.
Any you have no idea how grateful those over 21 are for that.
Frankly, I resent that remark. I'm 23 and I have friends ranging from 16 to 30. It sucks when you're a mature, young adult, age 18-20, and you can't follow your friends into the club where your favorite band is playing.
Please don't get me wrong...your post is well written and insightful; I just felt the need to address those points.
It also appears over North Pole I think, it's just much smaller (lucky for Nordic countries, Russia, Canada and Alaska).
Come to think of it, why is the hole in the ozone over the South pole SO much bigger than the one over the north pole? I would think most of the CFCs and other ozone-destroyers would be released by cities in the northern hemisphere. North America and Eurasia hold the great majority of the world's population, after all... (right?)
I'm genuinely curious about this; so despite being so far OT, please enlighten me if you know the answer.
So they obviously meant "nutritional." I looked up the word in the dictionary and found that it simply means "edible."
I don't mean to nitpick, but here's the definiton of "nutritional":
Nu*tri"tion*al\, a. Of or pertaining to nutrition; as, nutritional changes.
Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, (C) 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc
Don't get me wrong, I hate misleading advertising too. There's one Energizer commercial (or is it Duracel?) with the annoying driver yammering away. The passenger with the gameboy's batteries die first, then the cd player guy, while the dude with the mp3 player lasts forever...the implication was he was using the new Energizer batteries, but each of those devices would die in the same order if you used the same betteries in each...
[t]he feats of athleticism and dedication required to play at the level of NFL players is just amazing.
You'd get more enjoyment out of going outside and doing it yourself, trust me on this one.
Personally, I don't enjoy getting tackled by a 6'5", 310lb. gorilla with a neck the size of my chest. I'd much rather watch others play football and stick to Disc Golf:-P
Now...all kidding aside:
So, who should get all that money?
This is a truely fucked up country... Try: Homeless. Education. Security....
Are you suggesting the government step in and forcibly redistribute the profits from professional sports? I mean, they already tax it at a high percentage as income (athletes are in a high-tier tax bracket, no doubt), then they tax it again when it is spent.
If an individual wishes to be charitable, he is free to be generous; but it is certainly not your place, nor mine, nor the government's to step in and forcibly redistribute what's left after taxes. Perhaps the government itself should be more charitable with the money it collects, but that is _not_ the fault of the world of professional sports.
...paided enough to live on and have BITCHING medical. That's fair I think, for playing A CHILDS GAME FOR A LIVING. And they should consider themselves lucky they get that much.
Whoa! I sense some issues with the high school football team. Let it go, man.
I, for one, would MUCH rather have it go to the players
My Nvidia Ti 4600 finally was crashing my computer too much
Pardon my curiosity, but did your computer stop crashing when you switched cards? Is it a documented bug that you've tracked down? In my experience, nvidia's windows drivers are rock solid (and i hear the linux drivers are quality, too).
Without knowing anything about the situation whatsoever, I suspect you may have other problems with your system...overheating comes to mind. A new, quality fan and a good air-dusting may do wonders for the stability of your system.
Also, (and this goes for everyone) if you haven't upgraded to the new Detonator 52.16 drivers, do so. After spending an hour testing em out last night, all I can say is "wow".
--
never underestimate the power of a good disk defragmenter (i.e. window's defrag blows)
Slashdot Mirror
I spent some time googling and found an answer to my own question, though hardly a definitive one.
Is downloading from allofmp3.com legal? Well...um...er...probably. Even if it is illegal, you're probably safe....at least that's what I gathered. I doubt this question can truly be answered without going to court.
Is this true? Import CDs are legal. If buying and downloading from allofmp3.com is, in fact, illegal, then would it be okay for them to mail me a CD with my purchased songs instead of downloading them?
If so, the only difference is how I my music is transferred. This doesn't seem logical...of course very little modern copyright law makes sense.
Perhaps you could point me to some legislation that says buying music from Russia over the internet is illegal.
>> "Star Wars: The Super-Extra-Special-Parody Edition"
> Isnt that the edition which we must buy in order to get a ticket for Episode 3?
No, that _is_ Episode III.Props to Walt Mossberg, regardless.
Quantum walkie talkies are highly unlikely. Quantum cryptography depends on the ability of a single quantum particle (a photon in this case) to retain it's state as it travels from sender to receiver. That means it can't be colliding with any other particles on the way, for any collisions would alter the photon's state. Likewise, a 3rd party can't listen-in on the conversation because the very act of measuring the photon changes its state. Due to the quirkiness of quantum mechanics, once that photon's state has changed, it's impossible for the eavesdropper to re-transmit a photon with a state identical to the one that was intercepted.
The very nature of quantum cryptography prevents it from working without a wire, or fiber, as the case may be. It is doubtful that wireless quantum cryptography will ever exist.
Damn straight! That's why I only buy from RJR.
Please don't give them any ideas...
I had a knee-jerk reaction to browsing this database filled with no less than a dozen of my friends', families', and aquaintances' political affiliations with corresponding addresses. My inner-self cried "INVASION OF PRIVACY! ABORT! ABORT!"
I then took a mental step back, collected my wits, and clicked the "Privacy" link. lo and behold:
Upon further investigation it becomes apparent that this site is a Very Good Thing(tm). It is a bastion of democracy.
Fundrace, I salute you.
Kicking someone out of my house or off my property hardly makes me, or the casino, a criminal. Property "rights" (as you call them) are very real and a necesary part of civil society.
I'll bet you understand the "logic" of your "rights" over the property you own... or perhaps you wouldn't mind if i walked into your house and helped myself.
wait a minute...cynical, illogical, vitriolic post...damn! i've been trolled!
Some would say the same of quantum particles...we can't predict their behavior because our measurements are far too clumsy. Perhaps a "perfect" measurement of anything is impossible...which could also be why the both fundamental nature of the universe, and the weather, seem inherently random.
afaik, counting cards is perfectly legal. It is also perfectly legal for any given casino to throw you off their property if they suspect you of counting cards. They can throw you out for no good reason at all...it's their property, after all.
Ain't poker a great game? Poker is the exception to the casino rule that says you lose money over time. After all, you're not playing against the house, but rather against other players. (The house takes a ~2-5% of everything in the pot, called the "rake")
Winning poker players have a strong grasp on the economic concepts you mention. They think about things like pot-odds and betting position. If you are a quality player there are plenty of suckers out there from whom you can consistently win money.
Slots, roulette, even blackjack for the most part are no better than the scratch tickets I see bums lining up for over at the local convenience store. Play those games long enough and you _will_ lose (well...blackjack can be beaten, but not without effort).
hehe...I appreciate the subtle irony.
The article:f t.html?ex=1080709200&en=81be83eda9c09dad&ei=5062&p artner=GOOGLE
f t.html?ei=5062&en=81be83eda9c09dad&ex=1080709200&p artner=GOOGLE&pagewanted=print&position=&g t;
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/24/technology/24so
and again without ads...
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/24/technology/24so
Perhaps not, but there _is_ a Micro Center. (with directions from La Guardia)
I frequent the Micro Center in Boston, and while it's not quite Frye's, it's head & shoulders above BestBuy or CompUSA. They have very competitive prices and an excellent selection of high-end parts for computer enthusiants. There's a wide range of brand name PC laptops available, as well as an entire Apple store if you would rather have a PowerBook (who wouldn't?).
You can even shop online and then schedule an in-store pickup during your trip to the states.
gl with customs ;-)
01001001 01100110 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 01110010 00100000 00100111 00110000 00100111 00100000 00100110 00100000 00100111 00110001 00100111 00100000 01101011 01100101 01111001 01110011 00100000 01100010 01110010 01100101 01100001 01101011 00101110 00101110 00101110 01001110 01100101 01110110 01100101 01110010 00100000 01100110 01100101 01100001 01110010 00101100 00100000 01110100 01110010 01111001 00100000 01101000 01100101 01110010 01100101 00111010 00100000 01101000 01110100 01110100 01110000 00111010 00101111 00101111 01110111 01110111 01110111 00101110 01110011 01101001 01110100 01101001 01101110 01110100 01101000 01100101 01100011 01101111 01110010 01101110 01100101 01110010 00101110 01100011 01101111 01101101 00101111 01100010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001 00101111 01100010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001 00101110 01110000 01101000 01110000
After reading this, my initial thought was "AHA! Excellent idea." Upon reflection, though, one reason the DNS system works so well is because the task of maintaining records falls on the owner of the domain. i.e. Yahoo is responsible to make sure yahoo.com maps to the correct IP.
Would you trust the spammers to set their own "status" to "revoked"? Kinda reminds me of the evil bit.
I like the rest of your post and would love to see signed email become mainstream. I'm just not sure how to build infrastructure for a reliable, trustworthy, scalable, world-wide certificate authority.
--this post will not be moderated. it missed the 5-minute window after fp
Frankly, yes.
I can most certainly hear the difference between mp3s and non-lossy formats, but only on high-end speakers.
--this is my real sig.
My firewall blocks spyware and trojans. Traditional (think corporate) firewalls may not block spyware and trojans, but recent years have seen the development of the "personal" firewall. Every time any executable tries to access the network or the internet, my personal firewall pops-up a box telling me the details of the connection, and asking if I want to allow it. The same is true of incoming connections...and listening sockets, for that matter. A hash check upon execution of an allowed executable prevents a trojan or virus from altering a file unnoticed. No network traffic on my pc goes unmonitored.
The relatively recent windows worm that exploited RPC was blocked by my personal firewall because it needed me to explicitly allow the connection to occur. Even if I had become infected, I would have then needed to allow the worm to connect to other computers if I was to be contagious.
I use the free(!) Sygate Personal Firewall, and I highly reccomend it.
--this is my real sig.
Perhaps teen drivers would be more responsible behind the wheel if they developed a proper respect for alcohol BEFORE getting a license to drive. I propose changing the drinking age to 16 and the driving age to 18. Maybe once the kids have had a couple years to figure out how to drink responsibly, they won't drink & drive. Besides, if I'm a parent, I'd much rather have my child's first drinking experience be at home, perhaps a family gathering or some low-key "adult" party.
Frankly, I resent that remark. I'm 23 and I have friends ranging from 16 to 30. It sucks when you're a mature, young adult, age 18-20, and you can't follow your friends into the club where your favorite band is playing.
Please don't get me wrong...your post is well written and insightful; I just felt the need to address those points.
--this is my real sig.
Come to think of it, why is the hole in the ozone over the South pole SO much bigger than the one over the north pole? I would think most of the CFCs and other ozone-destroyers would be released by cities in the northern hemisphere. North America and Eurasia hold the great majority of the world's population, after all... (right?)
I'm genuinely curious about this; so despite being so far OT, please enlighten me if you know the answer.
--this is my real sig.
I don't mean to nitpick, but here's the definiton of "nutritional":
Nu*tri"tion*al\, a. Of or pertaining to nutrition; as, nutritional changes. Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, (C) 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc
Don't get me wrong, I hate misleading advertising too. There's one Energizer commercial (or is it Duracel?) with the annoying driver yammering away. The passenger with the gameboy's batteries die first, then the cd player guy, while the dude with the mp3 player lasts forever...the implication was he was using the new Energizer batteries, but each of those devices would die in the same order if you used the same betteries in each...
--this is my real sig.
Personally, I don't enjoy getting tackled by a 6'5", 310lb. gorilla with a neck the size of my chest. I'd much rather watch others play football and stick to Disc Golf :-P
Now...all kidding aside:
Are you suggesting the government step in and forcibly redistribute the profits from professional sports? I mean, they already tax it at a high percentage as income (athletes are in a high-tier tax bracket, no doubt), then they tax it again when it is spent.
If an individual wishes to be charitable, he is free to be generous; but it is certainly not your place, nor mine, nor the government's to step in and forcibly redistribute what's left after taxes. Perhaps the government itself should be more charitable with the money it collects, but that is _not_ the fault of the world of professional sports.
Whoa! I sense some issues with the high school football team. Let it go, man.damn straight.
--this is my real sig.
Without knowing anything about the situation whatsoever, I suspect you may have other problems with your system...overheating comes to mind. A new, quality fan and a good air-dusting may do wonders for the stability of your system.
Also, (and this goes for everyone) if you haven't upgraded to the new Detonator 52.16 drivers, do so. After spending an hour testing em out last night, all I can say is "wow".
--
never underestimate the power of a good disk defragmenter (i.e. window's defrag blows)