Hydrogen bombs have industrial strength output from fusion reactions. Oh yeah, but the reactions last a few microseconds at most, not exactly very useful.
) you will reach 100:1, at very little quality loss. Of course this is only possible because movies are *very* non-random both in each frame, and in one frame to the next.
Very little quality loss? Do you actually even watch DVDs? Is your TV or monitor a 9" screen? Come on, who are you kidding!?!? Watch a DVD on a 21" monitor or a 35" or bigger TV, and the compression quality, or shall I say the lack thereof, stands out like an eyesore. I mean, yeah, you get the gist of the seen. But the details are gone. More to the point, the objects move, but the textures typically don't move in sync with the objects. Even with motion encoding in the fancier algorithms, you can still see the gimicks and tricks used to squeeze out those higher compression ratios!
Well, they didn't say truly random, they just said random. Perhaps the algorithm takes bitstreams with lots of entropy (i.e. it looks "random"), and encodes them with fewer bits. The flip side would be that bitstreams with low entropy (e.g. text, graphics, sound) would not be compressed very well.
Typical compressors take bit strings with low entropy (the minority of possible strings, but the ones we care about) and make them a lot shorter, with the flip side that the majority of possible bit strings, which have high entropy, take up more space comrpessed. But who cares, right?
Perhaps this new compression algorithm takes bit strings which to us appear to have very high entropy, and it makes them a lot shorter, with the flip side that strings with low entropy (e.g. text, video, etc.) compress for crap! Woohoo! What a breakthrough!
That would require that a significant portion of Slashdot users use IE. Otherwise, only the article about the patch would get/.ed.
Re:This is a weapon of massless destruction
on
Lunar Lasers
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· Score: 1
3nd, I have to believe that the fact that there are hundreds of communications sattelites in geosynchronous orbits that don't collide, it wouldn't be excessivly difficult to add one more to the list. Admittedly it would be inconvenient due to the fact that nothing could fly underneath it, but again inconvenient does not mean impossible.
Two points:
First, I don't think he was talking just about geosynchronous orbits. I think he meant the thousands of low orbit (few hundred to thousand kilometers above earth) satellites that orbit a dozen times a day or more. That's a dozen times a day that the satellite has to be sure it doesn't get fried. And if the microwave transmitter is on the moon, its beam will also cross near the orbits of geosynchronous satellites about once a day.
As I understand it, the passage of time as we humans would care to measure it, or as our clocks would measure it, is based upon chemical and physical laws of nature, which depend on, among other things, the speed of light. The speed of light affects such mundane things as the strength of electromagnetic forces and the ratio of the the electric and magnetic constants to one another. Change the speed of light, and you change the rate at which all physical processes occur which we would use to measure time. If light moves slower, these processes move slower, and our sense of time has hence slowed, and light still travels at roughly the same speed.
But as the previous comment pointed out, the unitless constant alpha is not renormalized by the slowing of physical processes, so this can be measured, and may have possibly changed over time.
Also worth pointing out, is that phyiscal processes that happened billions of years ago with a "slower" or "faster" speed of light, could have happened at different rates because of altered electromagnetic strength and electric/mangnetic constant ratio, etc. This has been suggested as one explanation of redshifted light from distant objects. However, measurements of the constant alpha show only a very small change over time (if any), so the speed of light doesn't appear to have changed much at all over the last few billion years.
Also, what's up with the Klingon world being only 4 days away? So for years after this humans have edgy and sometimes warlike relations with a violent race that lives only 4 days away at Warp 4.5? Kirk would have had nothing to do but fly Earth patrols, it seems.
I agree. The show put the speed of warp 4.3-4.5 at about 100 times the speed of light (confirmed when someone said they were travelling about 30 million kilometers per second). Now, at 100c, if it took 4 days to get to Kronos (sp?), that's about 400 light-days, or about 1.1 light-years. Now timeline discontinuities aside (this could be the alternate timeline split off from the Borg-Enterprise influence), and "sci-fi physics" aside, I think we can safely assume that the Klingon homeworld is a lot further away than 1.1 light-years... Unless the whole star system is cloaked... Nahh...
So all other issues aside--physics, timeline, soft porn--I think my only gripe with the story was that it took a whole whopping four days to get to the Klongon Homeworld, as if that makes it sound so far away. I mean, they go through all the work to make the ship slow ("only" warp 4.5), why make the trip so short. It's not like the show would lose its romantic appeal if it took a more realistic 1-2 months! Columbus's voyage across the Atlantic took what, 2-3 months? (the number 71 days pops in my head, but I'm a little rusty on my history.)
I thinks there's something quite romantic about the long voyages. It gives a better impression, a better feeling for how long the trips between the stars would actually take, and a better impression of how much of an improvement warp 8 or 9 would be. Plus, if the show could place the 1-2 month trip in its proper perspective, as opposed to the 1-2 decade time of sublight travel, then the fantastic speeds acheived wouldn't seem so slow (spin it as amazing that the stars can be reached in just 1-2 months, as opposed to the attitude of "all this technology and it still takes 1-2 months. Damn that ship is slow!" that the producers probably had in mind when arbitrarily deciding that four days would make the plot work better.
I agree that this wasn't as sophisticated as the press makes it out to be. That only three or four organizations in the world have the level of sophistication necessary is ludicrous.
Structural engineers? Let's see, they didn't hit it at the foundation, probably because flying a plane that is 156+ feet wide is a little hard to do at several hundred miles an hour on streets that aren't even that wide. Hmm, maybe they hit it at the 80th floor because that was the easiest place to hit it, to make sure they didn't go too high, or too low and hit the surrounding biuldings. And it doesn't take a structural engineer to know that the corners of a building are it's structural weak points (look at the middle ages, that's why they stopped using square guard towers).
As for organizing 15-20 people, having two to four "cells" of five to ten people gives you a two-tiered structure that gives you better organization, and terrorists have had years to practice this system.
As for the sophistication of their "synchronization", why didn't they run a simlutaneous op on the west coast? Now that would have been much more difficult, because that would have meant more electronic communication, which would have risked detection by intelligence agencies. Also, a strike on the west coast could have used "red-eye" trans-Pacific flights out of SF to cause similar or greater destruction to west Bay Area targets, including landmarks like the Golden Gate or Trans-America building, or high tech targets that could cripple our local economy. But alas, that would have required sophistication.
Well, as long as we're all getting technical, it's not exactly zero. From what I remember from experimental analyses of copper wires, as the temperature was lowered in.01 C increments, the conductance drops linearly (as expected) down to the critical temperature, then it drops by over a dozen orders of magnitude over a very small range (a few hundredths of a degree). The resistance doesn't drop to zero, it just drops to a very very very very small amount, which is "essentially" zero, but technically not "exactly" zero.
No. It is my understanding the purpose of copyrights is to promote works by allowing the producers to gain a livelihood from it.
So giving an artist <1% of the revenues, and undoubtedly <5% of the profits, while hording the other 95%, consitutes providing a "livelihood" to the artists? Admittedly, the <0.1% of artists who actually manage to make enough money to buy a house, (let alone a mansion and a fancy car that you probably envision all artists having) are provided a "livelihood", as you call it. The rest live in squalor compared to the vanities of the record labels. You are sadly mistaken if you think that $18 CDs provide a "livelihood" to the artists whose music is being pimped by the record labels.
Hey, I was there from about 10:45 AM to noon. Where would I send pictures I took with my digital camera? I don't have any place to host the pictures from.
Why don't you wake up? Did it ever occur to you that they compared it to 4.78 instead of 6.0 to make a point?!? They were comparing stability, not features. And 6.0 is about as stable as ununoctium! Except that we have proof that Netscape 6.0 was successfully created.
"Fair use" for you should indeed take a back seat to promoting arts, science, etc. by securing for the authors exclusive rights blah blah blah.
Hmm... Fair use should take a back seat to promoting arts... Let's see, an artist's CD, marketed by a record label, costs about $18-$20 these days at a typical store (ignoring the argument of online retailers that can save you a whopping $2-$4, woohoo!). Now the average listener would like to listen to/own several new albums a month, perhaps dozens. Let's see, the average listener does not have $200 month/$2400 a year to spend on new CDs, roughly %10-%20 of income after taxes (for some of us, 40%-50%). Result? That music is not purchased legally, because it CANNOT be purchased legally. Therefore, in your perfect world where copies cannot be made, those artists' work was NOT promoted... Hmm, great argument. I hope you didn't spend all day coming up with that one.
The record labels have done a great job of promoting artists, for the intent of maximizing profits, while disregarding the necessity to maximise the number of people who can legally acquire the artists' work. Thus your argument falls through completely. Halve the price of CDs, and you'll sell 50%-120% more CDs, reducing music-whore profits (boo-hoo), while increasing the artists' promotion. And isn't that the point of copyrights in the first place?
Two problems with your statement. First of all, destroying the equipment of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people, who are making LEGAL backup copies of their music, is not worth the "revenge" that would occur when a significantly smaller number of pirates have their equipment destroyed. By people that are "pirating the shit" out of the record companies, I assume you mean people who illegally copy substantially more CDs per year than they legally purchase, as opposed to people who pirate a tiny percentage of the CDs they actually own. And people who "pirate the shit" out of the record companies probably pay attention to stunts like this, and they will simply fall back on analog copies or wait for a hacker to break the scheme. In which case, your sweet revenge hurt probably ten to a hundred times as many people making legal copies as illegal copies!!! So sure, this is "a nice feature instantly hitting all little evil pirates out there". In other words, honest hard-working people purchasing CDs legally and making copies, legally, and getting screwed, with potentially several hundred to thousnds of dollars worth of equipment damaged. Great protection scheme. I think we should give them an award.
Second problem. Your argument about avoiding the real problem is only a distraction to allow yourself to avoid the REAL real problem. That record companies hold a cartel-like monopoly that allows them to overcharge the public, screwing us and the artists whose music they are marketing. Granted, there are plenty of record labels out there, but as a whole they've set the standard of outrageously high prices, with a tacit understanding that their competitors will not undercut them severely, and that new labels have to overcome huge barriers to enter the market, forcing them to charge the same insane prices.
In bulk, CDs cost pennies to manufacture, pennies to print, and including packaging and shipping, still only a few measly dollars, if that. Pay the artist a quarter (not a quarter of the price, a quarter of a dollar), and pocket the remaining $15 (well, I guess the reseller gets his markup/cut too, only fair), and voila, another innocent civilian successfully raped. Not to mention their refusal (or at least dragging their feet) to make music, either by song or by album, available for purchase online, which would further reduce the costs of manufacturing, stamping, packaging, and shipping. In other words, the costs would be the the cost of running a file server, the royalties to the artists, and the amortized costs of sound recording/mixing/production, and the software to make the music difficult to make illegal copies (but not legal copies) of.
The record companies have the right strategy to fight piracy, but the wrong tactic. What is the strategy? Make it more difficult/annoying to copy, or in other words, simpler and more convenient to legally purchase CDs. However, rather than make defective products of reduced quality when listened to legally, which are destructive when listened to copied (probably legally as well), why not just make CDs AFFORDABLE?!?!?!?!? Or better yet, available online, which would make music more affordable and bring in higher percentage profits to the record companies (I say percentage, because overall revenues would decline somewhat, but far fewer people/equipment/materials would be needed. Also, CDs that cost $5 an album would sell in much greater volume than CDs at $20 an album, so revenues wouldn't decline 75%, probably only about 25%-50%. That, with a 80%-90% decline in production/shipping costs, means BETTER profits AND better customer satisfaction. Yeah, I completely understand why the music companies don't want that one. Probably because it would reduce the barrier costs for competition to enter the market. And we all know competition is bad for the economy, so let's lobby for legislation to prevent it from happening. There, society's safe once again.) That's the "real problem", which you so deftly missed!
Putting aside the truth or falsity of the claim, WTF does business have to do with our philosophical ideas?
MS just can't comprehend anyone having a philosophy that does not maximize profit.
Well, you have to give Microsoft some credit. After all, that's like the first thing you learn in micro-economics classes, is the whole supply and demand, with basically one goal in sight: maximizing profit. It's a business model that works great for Mom-and-pop busniesses up to medium size corporations. Even a little child can understand the concept. When your small busniess is not trying to maximize profit, it's probably because you're trying to change your business model, combat competition, and/or research new products/services, all in the hopes of.... maximizing profit.
Unfortunately, with the economics of scale and their self-inflicted monopoly, Microsoft is no longer in a position where they can ethically justify maximizing profit. To do so would greatly benefit Microsoft at the extreme harm of the public. Corporations of the size of Microsoft and AOL/Time Warner have such a stifling effect on competition, and provide such important services, that they must be considered as public services, and not mere businesses.
They can no longer justify their corporate existence as merely a means to maximize profits. They must take responsibility for the public they are raping in the name of capitalism.
Unfortunately, Microsoft is run and maintained by people benefitting from Microsoft's greed. They, inspired by visions of Porsches, Lexi, big houses and even bigger TVs, are not in a position to dictate how their company can best serve the public. This means that we the people (well, we the nerds, because the people are not well enough informed, nor do they care unless we take away their Napster) must fight this tooth and nail.
Well, I'd say more, but I think this comment's indented far enough in the thread to be ignored.
Yep, getting rid of all those 1-5 character passwords really saved you some time. And getting rid of anything in the dictionary I bet saved you a bunch too.
Let's see, 62 letters and numbers (case sensitive), let's call it 2**6. Assuming 8 or 9 digits, that's 2**54 + 2**48. 2**44 more than covers the 2**42 7-character passwords, 2**36 6-char passwords, etc., and all the "word-like" passwords. So congratulations, you've eliminated about 0.1% of your searchspace by using the hints that were given. Yep, "that information was very helpful". Have fun going through a 2**54 keyspace.
I agree whole-heartedly. Java is a cute language, and in the (rather small (no offense to web gurus)) web industry, Java and JavaScript are good languages to know. The company I work for recently released a web-based server running nothing but good ol' Java, so the thing runs on NT, Linux, Solaris, you name it. It creates dynamic web pages and links into XML. In my opinion, the product kicks ass. Oh yeah, I think we sold about five copies of the product before we realized that there's almost no demand for it in today's tight market. Well, I guess there would be a demand if we didn't charge $150k per copy.
The point is, Java does have real world value, even sellable value. But in a very limited scope. Not enough to require that all students learn it as their first language. Most programming jobs out there are C/C++, or Fortran, or COBOL (if you're working for a bank or the government). I'm willing to bet there's more demand for VB "programmers" these days than Java, at least in the applications market. Not to mention that Java doesn't teach you enough to be able to jump from Java to C++ or to VB or other high demand languages.
Going from C++ to Java was a breeze. The only problem I had was all the extra typing (You mean I have to make four class jumps to go from a file, through the input stream classes, to the actual file buffer that I care about? And then I have to go through one or two classes to convert that data to a useable format?).
Anyway, as far as C++ goes, we do need manufacturers to implement the standards a little better. Microsoft VC++ 6.0 (please don't flame me, I got it for free) won't even compile C++ files with ANSI C++ turned on and the "windows.h" header included. I'm sorry, but it doesn't get more pathetic than that.
Well, I don't know about LCD's, because I assume they don't flicker on and off like CRT's do. Or if they do, they're on for a greater percentage of the time than CRT's. Technically, CRT's are only "on" for like 0.001% of the time, then they start discharging, a nice approx. exponential decay in light intensity.
This rate of discharge can have an effect on the perceived refresh rate. The article you referenced does have some interesting points about visible refresh rates. However, their argument about the flickering of a monitor being visible up to 72 Hz doesn't prove that 72 Hz is the solid limit. The quality of the CRT could affect this test.
It really depends on how long the monitor's phosphors stay lit up. On really crappy monitors, the phosphors stay lit longer to compensate for the monitor's low refresh rate. That way the monitor's light doesn't strobe. But more expensive monitors designed with 150 Hz refreshes in mind have much more quickly discharging phosphors. Otherwise, they would blur at the higher rates. Because the phosphors discharge more quickly, at lower rates than 150 Hz (say, 60-85 Hz), there's s substantially greater flicker than on a crappy monitor. I have a crappy monitor at home, on which 60 Hz is a little annoying (but do-able), but 70 is pretty good, and I can't see the flicker at 75 Hz. But on my friend's $1000 21 incher, 60 Hz can practically cause seizures it's so painful, 75 Hz still hurts, and even at 85 Hz you can kinda tell that there's a flicker (though it's not annoying, you have to be looking for it).
So in theory, a 60 Hz CRT wouldn't actually bother you if the phosphors didn't decay for the first 16.7 millseconds or so. And if I can still tell there's a slight flicker at 80-85 Hz (on a higher quality CRT), then I think there's something to be said for running a FPS at 90 Hz.
Anyway, for monitors (CRT or LCD), continuous light is they key. As long as you have continuous light, your eyes won't be strained to the point of insanity. I guess that's one potential advantage of LCD screens. I'm not sure how they work in regards to flickering, but I assume they're not as bad as CRTs.
I agree that the argument for the most part doesn't say it's a ban on spam (though functionally it could be).
However, it's not like the judges ignored that aspect of the law.
>Because we conclude that the Act's local benefits surpass any alleged
>burden on interstate commerce, the statute likewise survives the Pike
>balancing test. The Act protects the interests of three groups--ISPs,
>actual owners of forged domain names, and e-mail users. The problems
>that spam causes have been discussed in prior cases and legislative
>hearings. A federal district court described the harms a mass e-mailer
>caused ISP CompuServe:
>. . . . {H}andling the enormous volume of mass mailings that CompuServe
>receives places a tremendous burden on its equipment. Defendants' more
>recent practice of evading CompuServe's filters by disguising the origin
>of their messages commandeers even more computer resources because
>CompuServe's computers are forced to store undeliverable e-mail messages
>and labor in vain to return the messages to an address that does not
>exist.
Clearly, the court took into consideration that ISP's face high costs because of these emails. Obviously, if someone is to be such a burden on a system without paying for it (as people must with snailmail), they will lose their privileges.
Furthermore, the court realized and argued that even if the spammer's email accounts were canceled, this cancellation only affected email accounts used to send the UCE. The spammer could and should provide a means to receive replies. It would be no harder to setup such a "receive" account as to setup the dozens of "send" accounts spammers need to do business, so this is hardly an undue burden.
To Quote:
>Heckel's practice of cycling through e-mail addresses ensured that
>those addresses were useless to the recipients of his UCE messages.7
>During the months that Heckel was sending out bulk e-mail solicitations
>on the Juno accounts, he maintained a personal e-mail account from
>which he sent no spam, but that e-mail address was not included in any
>of his spam messages.
I think that makes it pretty clear that the court WAS considering "both sides of the fence" in a fair and equitable way. They acknowledge that the email addresses used to send the mail could be canceled, but also acknowledged that that doesn't mean the sender of the spam can use that as an excuse to be unreachable. Of course, if the spammer gave out his "personal e-mail account", he would most likely be the recipient of thouasands of replies, mostly hate mail and more spam. But wouldn't that be poetic justice?
Slashdot Mirror
Hydrogen bombs have industrial strength output from fusion reactions. Oh yeah, but the reactions last a few microseconds at most, not exactly very useful.
) you will reach 100:1, at very little quality loss. Of course this is only possible because movies are *very* non-random both in each frame, and in one frame to the next.
Very little quality loss? Do you actually even watch DVDs? Is your TV or monitor a 9" screen? Come on, who are you kidding!?!? Watch a DVD on a 21" monitor or a 35" or bigger TV, and the compression quality, or shall I say the lack thereof, stands out like an eyesore. I mean, yeah, you get the gist of the seen. But the details are gone. More to the point, the objects move, but the textures typically don't move in sync with the objects. Even with motion encoding in the fancier algorithms, you can still see the gimicks and tricks used to squeeze out those higher compression ratios!
but whats the current ratio?
For truly random data? 1:1 at the absolute best.
Well, they didn't say truly random, they just said random. Perhaps the algorithm takes bitstreams with lots of entropy (i.e. it looks "random"), and encodes them with fewer bits. The flip side would be that bitstreams with low entropy (e.g. text, graphics, sound) would not be compressed very well.
Typical compressors take bit strings with low entropy (the minority of possible strings, but the ones we care about) and make them a lot shorter, with the flip side that the majority of possible bit strings, which have high entropy, take up more space comrpessed. But who cares, right?
Perhaps this new compression algorithm takes bit strings which to us appear to have very high entropy, and it makes them a lot shorter, with the flip side that strings with low entropy (e.g. text, video, etc.) compress for crap! Woohoo! What a breakthrough!
And will this cause the /. effect on Microsoft?
/.ed.
That would require that a significant portion of Slashdot users use IE. Otherwise, only the article about the patch would get
3nd, I have to believe that the fact that there are hundreds of communications sattelites in geosynchronous orbits that don't collide, it wouldn't be excessivly difficult to add one more to the list. Admittedly it would be inconvenient due to the fact that nothing could fly underneath it, but again inconvenient does not mean impossible.
Two points:
First, I don't think he was talking just about geosynchronous orbits. I think he meant the thousands of low orbit (few hundred to thousand kilometers above earth) satellites that orbit a dozen times a day or more. That's a dozen times a day that the satellite has to be sure it doesn't get fried. And if the microwave transmitter is on the moon, its beam will also cross near the orbits of geosynchronous satellites about once a day.
Second, it's 3rd, not 3nd.
As I understand it, the passage of time as we humans would care to measure it, or as our clocks would measure it, is based upon chemical and physical laws of nature, which depend on, among other things, the speed of light. The speed of light affects such mundane things as the strength of electromagnetic forces and the ratio of the the electric and magnetic constants to one another. Change the speed of light, and you change the rate at which all physical processes occur which we would use to measure time. If light moves slower, these processes move slower, and our sense of time has hence slowed, and light still travels at roughly the same speed.
But as the previous comment pointed out, the unitless constant alpha is not renormalized by the slowing of physical processes, so this can be measured, and may have possibly changed over time.
Also worth pointing out, is that phyiscal processes that happened billions of years ago with a "slower" or "faster" speed of light, could have happened at different rates because of altered electromagnetic strength and electric/mangnetic constant ratio, etc. This has been suggested as one explanation of redshifted light from distant objects. However, measurements of the constant alpha show only a very small change over time (if any), so the speed of light doesn't appear to have changed much at all over the last few billion years.
Also, what's up with the Klingon world being only 4 days away? So for years after this humans have edgy and sometimes warlike relations with a violent race that lives only 4 days away at Warp 4.5? Kirk would have had nothing to do but fly Earth patrols, it seems.
I agree. The show put the speed of warp 4.3-4.5 at about 100 times the speed of light (confirmed when someone said they were travelling about 30 million kilometers per second). Now, at 100c, if it took 4 days to get to Kronos (sp?), that's about 400 light-days, or about 1.1 light-years. Now timeline discontinuities aside (this could be the alternate timeline split off from the Borg-Enterprise influence), and "sci-fi physics" aside, I think we can safely assume that the Klingon homeworld is a lot further away than 1.1 light-years... Unless the whole star system is cloaked... Nahh...
So all other issues aside--physics, timeline, soft porn--I think my only gripe with the story was that it took a whole whopping four days to get to the Klongon Homeworld, as if that makes it sound so far away. I mean, they go through all the work to make the ship slow ("only" warp 4.5), why make the trip so short. It's not like the show would lose its romantic appeal if it took a more realistic 1-2 months! Columbus's voyage across the Atlantic took what, 2-3 months? (the number 71 days pops in my head, but I'm a little rusty on my history.)
I thinks there's something quite romantic about the long voyages. It gives a better impression, a better feeling for how long the trips between the stars would actually take, and a better impression of how much of an improvement warp 8 or 9 would be. Plus, if the show could place the 1-2 month trip in its proper perspective, as opposed to the 1-2 decade time of sublight travel, then the fantastic speeds acheived wouldn't seem so slow (spin it as amazing that the stars can be reached in just 1-2 months, as opposed to the attitude of "all this technology and it still takes 1-2 months. Damn that ship is slow!" that the producers probably had in mind when arbitrarily deciding that four days would make the plot work better.
I agree that this wasn't as sophisticated as the press makes it out to be. That only three or four organizations in the world have the level of sophistication necessary is ludicrous.
Structural engineers? Let's see, they didn't hit it at the foundation, probably because flying a plane that is 156+ feet wide is a little hard to do at several hundred miles an hour on streets that aren't even that wide. Hmm, maybe they hit it at the 80th floor because that was the easiest place to hit it, to make sure they didn't go too high, or too low and hit the surrounding biuldings. And it doesn't take a structural engineer to know that the corners of a building are it's structural weak points (look at the middle ages, that's why they stopped using square guard towers).
As for organizing 15-20 people, having two to four "cells" of five to ten people gives you a two-tiered structure that gives you better organization, and terrorists have had years to practice this system.
As for the sophistication of their "synchronization", why didn't they run a simlutaneous op on the west coast? Now that would have been much more difficult, because that would have meant more electronic communication, which would have risked detection by intelligence agencies. Also, a strike on the west coast could have used "red-eye" trans-Pacific flights out of SF to cause similar or greater destruction to west Bay Area targets, including landmarks like the Golden Gate or Trans-America building, or high tech targets that could cripple our local economy. But alas, that would have required sophistication.
Uhh, that would be a triangle wave, wouldn't it?
Well, as long as we're all getting technical, it's not exactly zero. From what I remember from experimental analyses of copper wires, as the temperature was lowered in .01 C increments, the conductance drops linearly (as expected) down to the critical temperature, then it drops by over a dozen orders of magnitude over a very small range (a few hundredths of a degree). The resistance doesn't drop to zero, it just drops to a very very very very small amount, which is "essentially" zero, but technically not "exactly" zero.
No. It is my understanding the purpose of copyrights is to promote works by allowing the producers to gain a livelihood from it.
So giving an artist <1% of the revenues, and undoubtedly <5% of the profits, while hording the other 95%, consitutes providing a "livelihood" to the artists? Admittedly, the <0.1% of artists who actually manage to make enough money to buy a house, (let alone a mansion and a fancy car that you probably envision all artists having) are provided a "livelihood", as you call it. The rest live in squalor compared to the vanities of the record labels. You are sadly mistaken if you think that $18 CDs provide a "livelihood" to the artists whose music is being pimped by the record labels.
Hey, I was there from about 10:45 AM to noon. Where would I send pictures I took with my digital camera? I don't have any place to host the pictures from.
Why don't you wake up? Did it ever occur to you that they compared it to 4.78 instead of 6.0 to make a point?!? They were comparing stability, not features. And 6.0 is about as stable as ununoctium! Except that we have proof that Netscape 6.0 was successfully created.
"Fair use" for you should indeed take a back seat to promoting arts, science, etc. by securing for the authors exclusive rights blah blah blah.
Hmm... Fair use should take a back seat to promoting arts... Let's see, an artist's CD, marketed by a record label, costs about $18-$20 these days at a typical store (ignoring the argument of online retailers that can save you a whopping $2-$4, woohoo!). Now the average listener would like to listen to/own several new albums a month, perhaps dozens. Let's see, the average listener does not have $200 month/$2400 a year to spend on new CDs, roughly %10-%20 of income after taxes (for some of us, 40%-50%). Result? That music is not purchased legally, because it CANNOT be purchased legally. Therefore, in your perfect world where copies cannot be made, those artists' work was NOT promoted... Hmm, great argument. I hope you didn't spend all day coming up with that one.
The record labels have done a great job of promoting artists, for the intent of maximizing profits, while disregarding the necessity to maximise the number of people who can legally acquire the artists' work. Thus your argument falls through completely. Halve the price of CDs, and you'll sell 50%-120% more CDs, reducing music-whore profits (boo-hoo), while increasing the artists' promotion. And isn't that the point of copyrights in the first place?
Two problems with your statement. First of all, destroying the equipment of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people, who are making LEGAL backup copies of their music, is not worth the "revenge" that would occur when a significantly smaller number of pirates have their equipment destroyed. By people that are "pirating the shit" out of the record companies, I assume you mean people who illegally copy substantially more CDs per year than they legally purchase, as opposed to people who pirate a tiny percentage of the CDs they actually own. And people who "pirate the shit" out of the record companies probably pay attention to stunts like this, and they will simply fall back on analog copies or wait for a hacker to break the scheme. In which case, your sweet revenge hurt probably ten to a hundred times as many people making legal copies as illegal copies!!! So sure, this is "a nice feature instantly hitting all little evil pirates out there". In other words, honest hard-working people purchasing CDs legally and making copies, legally, and getting screwed, with potentially several hundred to thousnds of dollars worth of equipment damaged. Great protection scheme. I think we should give them an award.
Second problem. Your argument about avoiding the real problem is only a distraction to allow yourself to avoid the REAL real problem. That record companies hold a cartel-like monopoly that allows them to overcharge the public, screwing us and the artists whose music they are marketing. Granted, there are plenty of record labels out there, but as a whole they've set the standard of outrageously high prices, with a tacit understanding that their competitors will not undercut them severely, and that new labels have to overcome huge barriers to enter the market, forcing them to charge the same insane prices.
In bulk, CDs cost pennies to manufacture, pennies to print, and including packaging and shipping, still only a few measly dollars, if that. Pay the artist a quarter (not a quarter of the price, a quarter of a dollar), and pocket the remaining $15 (well, I guess the reseller gets his markup/cut too, only fair), and voila, another innocent civilian successfully raped. Not to mention their refusal (or at least dragging their feet) to make music, either by song or by album, available for purchase online, which would further reduce the costs of manufacturing, stamping, packaging, and shipping. In other words, the costs would be the the cost of running a file server, the royalties to the artists, and the amortized costs of sound recording/mixing/production, and the software to make the music difficult to make illegal copies (but not legal copies) of.
The record companies have the right strategy to fight piracy, but the wrong tactic. What is the strategy? Make it more difficult/annoying to copy, or in other words, simpler and more convenient to legally purchase CDs. However, rather than make defective products of reduced quality when listened to legally, which are destructive when listened to copied (probably legally as well), why not just make CDs AFFORDABLE?!?!?!?!? Or better yet, available online, which would make music more affordable and bring in higher percentage profits to the record companies (I say percentage, because overall revenues would decline somewhat, but far fewer people/equipment/materials would be needed. Also, CDs that cost $5 an album would sell in much greater volume than CDs at $20 an album, so revenues wouldn't decline 75%, probably only about 25%-50%. That, with a 80%-90% decline in production/shipping costs, means BETTER profits AND better customer satisfaction. Yeah, I completely understand why the music companies don't want that one. Probably because it would reduce the barrier costs for competition to enter the market. And we all know competition is bad for the economy, so let's lobby for legislation to prevent it from happening. There, society's safe once again.) That's the "real problem", which you so deftly missed!
Putting aside the truth or falsity of the claim, WTF does business have to do with our philosophical ideas?
MS just can't comprehend anyone having a philosophy that does not maximize profit.
Well, you have to give Microsoft some credit. After all, that's like the first thing you learn in micro-economics classes, is the whole supply and demand, with basically one goal in sight: maximizing profit. It's a business model that works great for Mom-and-pop busniesses up to medium size corporations. Even a little child can understand the concept. When your small busniess is not trying to maximize profit, it's probably because you're trying to change your business model, combat competition, and/or research new products/services, all in the hopes of.... maximizing profit.
Unfortunately, with the economics of scale and their self-inflicted monopoly, Microsoft is no longer in a position where they can ethically justify maximizing profit. To do so would greatly benefit Microsoft at the extreme harm of the public. Corporations of the size of Microsoft and AOL/Time Warner have such a stifling effect on competition, and provide such important services, that they must be considered as public services, and not mere businesses.
They can no longer justify their corporate existence as merely a means to maximize profits. They must take responsibility for the public they are raping in the name of capitalism.
Unfortunately, Microsoft is run and maintained by people benefitting from Microsoft's greed. They, inspired by visions of Porsches, Lexi, big houses and even bigger TVs, are not in a position to dictate how their company can best serve the public. This means that we the people (well, we the nerds, because the people are not well enough informed, nor do they care unless we take away their Napster) must fight this tooth and nail.
Well, I'd say more, but I think this comment's indented far enough in the thread to be ignored.
Yep, getting rid of all those 1-5 character passwords really saved you some time. And getting rid of anything in the dictionary I bet saved you a bunch too.
Let's see, 62 letters and numbers (case sensitive), let's call it 2**6. Assuming 8 or 9 digits, that's 2**54 + 2**48. 2**44 more than covers the 2**42 7-character passwords, 2**36 6-char passwords, etc., and all the "word-like" passwords. So congratulations, you've eliminated about 0.1% of your searchspace by using the hints that were given. Yep, "that information was very helpful". Have fun going through a 2**54 keyspace.
I agree whole-heartedly. Java is a cute language, and in the (rather small (no offense to web gurus)) web industry, Java and JavaScript are good languages to know. The company I work for recently released a web-based server running nothing but good ol' Java, so the thing runs on NT, Linux, Solaris, you name it. It creates dynamic web pages and links into XML. In my opinion, the product kicks ass. Oh yeah, I think we sold about five copies of the product before we realized that there's almost no demand for it in today's tight market. Well, I guess there would be a demand if we didn't charge $150k per copy.
The point is, Java does have real world value, even sellable value. But in a very limited scope. Not enough to require that all students learn it as their first language. Most programming jobs out there are C/C++, or Fortran, or COBOL (if you're working for a bank or the government). I'm willing to bet there's more demand for VB "programmers" these days than Java, at least in the applications market. Not to mention that Java doesn't teach you enough to be able to jump from Java to C++ or to VB or other high demand languages.
Going from C++ to Java was a breeze. The only problem I had was all the extra typing (You mean I have to make four class jumps to go from a file, through the input stream classes, to the actual file buffer that I care about? And then I have to go through one or two classes to convert that data to a useable format?).
Anyway, as far as C++ goes, we do need manufacturers to implement the standards a little better. Microsoft VC++ 6.0 (please don't flame me, I got it for free) won't even compile C++ files with ANSI C++ turned on and the "windows.h" header included. I'm sorry, but it doesn't get more pathetic than that.
Well, I don't know about LCD's, because I assume they don't flicker on and off like CRT's do. Or if they do, they're on for a greater percentage of the time than CRT's. Technically, CRT's are only "on" for like 0.001% of the time, then they start discharging, a nice approx. exponential decay in light intensity.
This rate of discharge can have an effect on the perceived refresh rate. The article you referenced does have some interesting points about visible refresh rates. However, their argument about the flickering of a monitor being visible up to 72 Hz doesn't prove that 72 Hz is the solid limit. The quality of the CRT could affect this test.
It really depends on how long the monitor's phosphors stay lit up. On really crappy monitors, the phosphors stay lit longer to compensate for the monitor's low refresh rate. That way the monitor's light doesn't strobe. But more expensive monitors designed with 150 Hz refreshes in mind have much more quickly discharging phosphors. Otherwise, they would blur at the higher rates. Because the phosphors discharge more quickly, at lower rates than 150 Hz (say, 60-85 Hz), there's s substantially greater flicker than on a crappy monitor. I have a crappy monitor at home, on which 60 Hz is a little annoying (but do-able), but 70 is pretty good, and I can't see the flicker at 75 Hz. But on my friend's $1000 21 incher, 60 Hz can practically cause seizures it's so painful, 75 Hz still hurts, and even at 85 Hz you can kinda tell that there's a flicker (though it's not annoying, you have to be looking for it).
So in theory, a 60 Hz CRT wouldn't actually bother you if the phosphors didn't decay for the first 16.7 millseconds or so. And if I can still tell there's a slight flicker at 80-85 Hz (on a higher quality CRT), then I think there's something to be said for running a FPS at 90 Hz.
Anyway, for monitors (CRT or LCD), continuous light is they key. As long as you have continuous light, your eyes won't be strained to the point of insanity. I guess that's one potential advantage of LCD screens. I'm not sure how they work in regards to flickering, but I assume they're not as bad as CRTs.
I agree that the argument for the most part doesn't say it's a ban on spam (though functionally it could be).
However, it's not like the judges ignored that aspect of the law.
>Because we conclude that the Act's local benefits surpass any alleged
>burden on interstate commerce, the statute likewise survives the Pike
>balancing test. The Act protects the interests of three groups--ISPs,
>actual owners of forged domain names, and e-mail users. The problems
>that spam causes have been discussed in prior cases and legislative
>hearings. A federal district court described the harms a mass e-mailer
>caused ISP CompuServe:
>. . . . {H}andling the enormous volume of mass mailings that CompuServe
>receives places a tremendous burden on its equipment. Defendants' more
>recent practice of evading CompuServe's filters by disguising the origin
>of their messages commandeers even more computer resources because
>CompuServe's computers are forced to store undeliverable e-mail messages
>and labor in vain to return the messages to an address that does not
>exist.
Clearly, the court took into consideration that ISP's face high costs because of these emails. Obviously, if someone is to be such a burden on a system without paying for it (as people must with snailmail), they will lose their privileges.
Furthermore, the court realized and argued that even if the spammer's email accounts were canceled, this cancellation only affected email accounts used to send the UCE. The spammer could and should provide a means to receive replies. It would be no harder to setup such a "receive" account as to setup the dozens of "send" accounts spammers need to do business, so this is hardly an undue burden.
To Quote:
>Heckel's practice of cycling through e-mail addresses ensured that
>those addresses were useless to the recipients of his UCE messages.7
>During the months that Heckel was sending out bulk e-mail solicitations
>on the Juno accounts, he maintained a personal e-mail account from
>which he sent no spam, but that e-mail address was not included in any
>of his spam messages.
I think that makes it pretty clear that the court WAS considering "both sides of the fence" in a fair and equitable way. They acknowledge that the email addresses used to send the mail could be canceled, but also acknowledged that that doesn't mean the sender of the spam can use that as an excuse to be unreachable. Of course, if the spammer gave out his "personal e-mail account", he would most likely be the recipient of thouasands of replies, mostly hate mail and more spam. But wouldn't that be poetic justice?