Does Vorbis still have a place in the world, or would I be better off re-ripping my music to MP3 - even if I still think Vorbis is technically superior?
I am with you. I too drank that Kool Aid. Get an iRiver player or something similar that plays the format. It's not dead, but it's not catching on as fast as I'd have hoped.
I think part of it is that lossy encoding is dead, to an extent. I mean, drive space is cheap as dirt now. I have no reason not to encode everything in Ogg Flac (which I do) that is lossless and can be migrated to other format as needed.
In fact, I just wrote a couple of scripts to encode a folder of Ogg Flac to Ogg Vorbis en masse so that I can load my iRiver player when I want to without trouble. Just copy the files I want to a folder, run the script and it reencodes on the fly to a very small lossy Vorbis file. The iRiver can play Ogg Flac also, but I can fit a TON of low res Vorbis files on the player at once, and on a small portable player like that, the lossy encoding is unnoticable.
Most people in your country accept that humans were created in their current form.
Um, no, they don't. Quite few actually believe that. In a discussion about the scientific method, one would hope that we wouldn't spread unsubstantiated claims. Where is your data? What studies can you cite that show this as fact? Are you going based on the word of the New orgs that want to sell papers. A headline that reads "America says Man didn't come from Monkey!" sells more papers than "Though most in America agree in principle with the theories of evolution, a vocal minority doesn't".
The majority of Americans don't have a problem with evolution, don't attend church regularly, aren't fundamentalist or evangelical, and value education (though they tend to value productivity more). A small, loud segment of Ameicans are speaking out in a way that is incongrous with mainstream beliefs. I guess that never happens in your country. Must be nice.:-\
Most of the heavily religious people in the US are Christians with fairly fundamentalist, or at least evangelical, views.
Do you have any data that back that claim up? I have a degree in Religious Studies and I work with religious groups regularly. I live in the same city as Pat Robertson and his CBN organization. Even here, in the so-called buckle of the bible belt, it would be a stretch, if not blatantly false, to say that/most/ heavily religious poeple are evangelical or fundementalist, unless your definition of those two terms is "someone who is heavily religious".
I'm not trying to start a debate, but really just curious as to whether or not you have evidence to back that claim (being a thread on science and all, we should be making fact-based claims.;-)
Where was the religious right during the cold war? Or the Iraq war? Or capital punishment?
Many stood firmly against all that as well. I am against abortion rights, against the death penalty, and against any war that doesn't have at it's core a STRONGLY morally-justifiable end (as it did in the classic example of WWII and the more recent Rawandan Genocide affair).
Don't assume that just becuase someone disagrees with you that they are somehow inconsistent.
Heck even the Chinese have adopted the Greek ways(architecture, calendar, Greek loan words from West European languages).
I just left China 2 weeks ago. No they are not. Hong Kong is, buit Hong Kong was a British Colony for a century. They are quite westernized. The rest? It's a COMPLETELY different world, dude. The architecture is utterly foreign to the West. The Calendar referenced by the people of China is the Chinese one (which, in fact, caused me a funny bit of confusion while I was there). The western "loan words" are limited to "Bye Bye" and "OK", neither of which have a Greek root.
Which brings me to the next point:
Here are some of the Greek prefixes used in English: acanth(o), achromat(o), acr(o), actin(i/o), aden(o), aer(o), alg(o)... I could go on.
No, you couldn't. You could continue to copy and paste for the Greek online dictionary, maybe, but that's about it. I, however, can speak Koine Greek, the Greek used in the New Testement.
Which brings me to the NEXT point:
Or from the religion with the New Testament as its basis which of course was written in Greek.
I have a degree in religious studies. The religion of the New Testement was distinctly Hebrew with some nod toward Hellenized Rome (ie, the Greek-speaking Roman Empire). With the exception of the Gospel of Luke, the hellenization of the New Testemant is pretty much limited to the written language and a few parables that reference Greek mythemes for purposes of reaching a different audience. The Theology and the ideas underlying it DO NOT have origins in Greco-Roman philosophy or religion. Even Luke's hellenized influence is not so great, just greater than the other writers of the NT.
Is our architecture based on the Chinese or the Greek?
OURS is based on the English and French, primarily, neither of which owe much in that specific regard to the Greeks. Your house has marble columns? Mine doesn't. I think one house in my whole neighborhood does. It's pretty ugly. Either way, you should actually READ what I said before replying with your dick-voice. I said the East was as influenced by the Chinese as the West was by the Greeks. We are the West, meanign that I already said we were influenced by the Greeks. But places like Japan, Korea, India, etc., are equally influenced by the Chinese, not the Greeks.
Warner has switched from backing HD-DVD to Blu-Ray
Though I understand why the submitter said this---because the article is unclear on this point---but Warner has only agreed to "nonexclusive" support for Blu-ray, meaning it could theoretically produce films in both formats, though it will initially produce movies for Blue-Ray. Not as ringing an endorsement as Walt Disney and Fox, both of whom have exclusive support agreements with the Blue-Ray tech consortium.
I know it's splitting hairs, but in this case, those are important hairs to split.
had many things the US and other Western countries claim to have invented
Not to be mean or anything, but what world do you live in? Every American Schoolkid knows what the Greeks gave us. It's common knowledge that our government was based in part on Greek ideas, like those that came from Plato's Republic. In Virginia, this is an SOL for the 3rd grade, meaning that the average 8 yr old has passed a test on the topic and is aware of the value that ancient Greece has to us now.
I appreciate you wanted to make all this clear, but your post makes it sound like it wasn't already well known. The Greeks and the Hebrews gave more to the Western World than any other two peoples without question.
Ancient Chinese and Egyptians had bits and pieces of mathematical knowledge but they failed to grasp the big picture
Here you are going a bit too far, I think. Perhaps your comment is true about the Egyptians, but the Chinese were every bit as innovative and amazing as the Greeks, and every bit as influential to the Eastern worls as the Greeks were to the West.
I feel sad when Modern Greeks are made fun of by other peoples
You shouldn't. We all make fun of each other. It's OK. It's just friendly kidding. I've never heard anyone joke the modern Greeks that wasn't really just playing around. Really though, I almost never hear anyone joking about the modern Greeks. Frankly, they are pretty quiet on the international front, so they aren't mentioned that often in America, in my experience...maybe you live somewhere where nationalism runs higher than the norm and or peoples are regularly insulted. That would make me pretty sad too. Here in Virginia, however, it don't see any of that.
If it weren't for Quicken, Mom and Dad would be using SuSE by now.
I and two others I know (the other two are not IT people) run Quicken in Linux under Crossover Office. Works beautifully in my experience. A couple very minor visual glitches on some dialog boxes, but that's basically it. If they really wanna move the Linux (in other words "not just becuase you or I may want them using linux") then I'd say they could do it today with Crossover Office.
I suppose I should add that your mileage may vary.
how come in this day and age the default format for text isn't html?
It could easily replace rtf, but a full featured word processor, like Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.Org Writer, demands more. There are formatting features, revsion controls, and all manner of underlying tech that html simply doesn't suport.
That said, I totally agree that html should be the default for text documents that are more complex than raw ascii and less complex than a 500 page technical manual with macros and embedded revison history. That's the spot rtf current tries to take, but html is a better choice there.
That means 6 million people need to purchase each episode in order to match what ABC currently gets from advertisers.
And Desperate Housewives averages 21.3 million viewers per episode. If a market can be created where even 1 out of 3 viewers downloads the episode instead of watching the advertising-laden version, they've made their money. If half the viewers downloaded instead of watching over the air, the business model is changed forever. Better than that. Offer a discount to people willing to commit to a whole season preemptively and you've got a clear budget going into the shooting season. No more begging for more money from execs. No more guesswork about return on investment. Just "we have brought in 4 million per episode this season so we are keeping shooting costs under 3.5 million per episode". Nice and straightforward.
I've been saying this for a very long time. All it will take it to build this purchase/download capability into the next gen tuners (Tivo is already moving in this direction) and even the next gen AV receivers.
Do that. Make it easy for people to find and get what they want. Make a mint.
Somehow I think the people talking about the death of broadcast TV are a bit pre-mature.
The prediction of the death of broadcast TV is both premature and possible erroneous. It neededn't die out. They may still be a market in perpetuity for people willing to watch it over the air with commercials for free, but that is most definately not the way of the future. It'll be about as common as rotary phone service is now. I know some people still have it, but not too many.
IPTV is about delivering an A/V signal using IP, not about delivering an A/V signal over the Internet. There's a world of difference. Major companies are already experimenting with it in selected markets now, and NOT over the Internet. IPTV is deleivered over existing cable lines.
It's biggest benefit---and I cannot BELEIVE the summary doesn't make mention of it---is the bandwidth savings. Right now, cable providers are hitting a brickwall with respect to bandwidth. They simply cannot deliever much more HDTV becuase they haven't got a big enough pipe. Remember that with exosting cable systems, the pipe is streaming every channel all the time, whether or not you are watching it. It's your tuner that selects the signal that you request from that mess...it's like trying to drink from a firehose.
The promise of IPTV, and like it or not, Microsoft did a good thing here, is that you only receive the signal you request. If you are watching channel 10, then the only channel on the pipe to your home is channel 10.
With that innovation in deleivery, cable companies can start offering a full line up of HDTV (much more than the paltry few channels they offer currently) without feart that they will run out of bandwidth.
And yes, you can also watch multiple channels and change channels instantly and all that other stuff that isn't nearly as important as the bandwidth savings.
All you guys who slept through Physics and ended up with a Liberal Arts degree instead contributed to this situation.
A person with a Liberal Arts degree can major in Physics, work in a lab, and contribute quite successfully to the West's scientific cache of ideas and inventions. It's a person with a Liberal Arts major who wouldn't as easily have been able to do that. Don't insult things you don't understand. It makes you look stupid.
FYI, I'm normally not nearly this pointed or harsh, but if you are gonna come out of the gate throwing insults at my choice of education (a Liberal Arts degree) then I'm not inclined to be terribly polite in return.
Neither the Russian organization nor Russian courts have standing to take them to court over their activities in the US.
Actually, in this case, they do. They have legal right to fight infringing sales and uses of US music. That's why they looked into it.
Hey, don't believe me. Don't buy anything from them if you want. Heck, doubt it til you're blue in the face. I had my doubts too. But in the end, if they were doing something illegal or even on the border of illegal, they'd have been shut down when the RIAA and it's Russian counterpart looked into it initially.
I said it before and I'll say it again: It's screamingly telling that instead of going to court, whcih they had the option of doing, they went to the Russian law makers and are now trying to/change the law/ so that it will not be allowed in the future. If it weren't allowed now, they wouldn't need to do that.
But, so many poepl are so busy convincing themselves that they must be doing something wrong that they are depriving themselves of a perfectly legal opportunity. It's sad to me that the RIAA has managed to scare people so much that they won't even buy music from a legally licensed reseller.
They are licensed to sell that music in Russia./em?
Not according to their contract with the music labels under Russian law. There exosts no such stipulation. That is something people say becuase they/assume/ no givernment would enforce something so obviously beneficial to consumers...but interestingly to me, Russia has. Specifically:
"All the materials in the MediaServices projects are available for distribution through Internet according to license # LS-3-05-03 of the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society. Under the license terms, MediaServices pays license fees for all the materials subject to the Law of the Russian Federation "On Copyright and Related Rights". All the materials are available solely for personal use and must not be used for further distribution, resale or broadcasting."
Their contract never stipulates this Russia-only clause that so many people assume must be there. You say it's untested law, whereas I say clearly written and willfully entered into contracts are not untested law. Just the opposite, I doubt there is a more tested and safe section of law than those laws surrounding the enforcement of two-party contracts. Putting the Internet in the middle means nothing if that is an understood and spelled out part of the contract in question.
Like I said, though, no one/has/ to buy from them. They already have a solid clientele and I'm already reaping to benefits of using them. If others don't, it's no skin off my back. It's like Linux. If ya don't like it, you don't have to use it, but if you ever change your mind, there are plenty of people willing to help you change course.:)
There's all kinds of examples of governments treating internet transactions as if they were taking place at the client rather than at the server.
True, but even if it were treated that way, it's still a legal sale of a song/album from one validly licensed reseller to a customer. There is never a drop is licensure, which is key here, I think. AllOfMP3 is allowed, by law and by explicit agreement with the record labels, to sell that merchandise, and the agreement is cler that they may sell it at whatever price in whatever manner they please, so long as they continue to honor Russian law.
The RIAA (well, the Russian equivalent organization) has looked into AllOfMP3 and did not take them to court. They recognize the legality. In fact, they implicitly acknowledged it when instead of attacking AllOfMP3 for their practices, they went to Russian lawmakers to have the laws re-written. That's the current state of things. They can't stop them, becuase it isn't illegal, but they make it made illegal so they can plug what they see as a loophole. Sounds familiar.:-\
I'n never heard of a challenge to the idea that I can buy something that is legal to own here and elsewhere over the internet. Specifically, U.S. copyright law seems clear that:
"In a case where the copies or phonorecords were lawfully made, the United States Customs Service has no authority to prevent their importation unless the provisions of section 601 are applicable."
And that the section on infringing importation does not apply to cases of:
"importation, for the private use of the importer and not for distribution, by any person with respect to no more than one copy or phonorecord of any one work at any one time"
In short, I can buy music online from anywhere I want, so long as the seller has a legitimate license to sell the work being sold. In the case of ALLOfMP3, they do. This is the side of globalization that big business DOESN'T want us to see.
For a longer treatment of this debate you can read this earlier thread, of which I offer more a more nuanced version of my opinion on the topic.
That thread is kinda huge, so if you just wanna read the parts I wrote:
Mostly that's just to give you an idea of the point I'm driving at. I hope that helps. (well, really I hope it convinces you I'm right, but I'm an optimist that way);-)
It would be a great deal if it was legal for them to do business in most countries outise the former Soviet Union.
Luckily for us, it is. It's been debated ad nauseum on/. before, so I won't waste your time repeating details, but the short version is that the contracts are valid Russian contracts and Russia is a valid member in good standing of WIPO and several other pertinent international trade orgs. Said contracts are enforceable througout the world, but only as long as the business itself remains a Russian business. A loophole? Yes, but a legal one.:)
If I buy a legitimate CD in Russia, it's not illegal to bring the CD home...even though the CD will cost a lot less there than it would in the US.
I'm surprised the article doesn't explore Religion and it's affect on people's happiness.
Most religions do not consider happiness a goal. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, for instance, make no promises for personal happiness. Moses, Christ, and Mohammad didn't promise their followers that they'd have a great time. Regarding the eastern religions, Nirvana and Moksha are hardly "happy" end goals. Remember that the Buddha said that life == suffering.
It's also worth noting that, all too often, people fail to distinguish between Joy and Happiness. I can be happy alone in my room with no help from others. Question for the class: Can I be joyous alone? Don't answer, just spend a few years thinking about it.
My disclaimers: My degree is in religious studies. I'm a Christian, though I see great value in studying the teachings of other faiths. Also, I'm both happy and joyous more often than not, but happiness isn't really much of a goal of mine. I've just been fortunate enough to get it anyway.
Unless that laptop is running a 64 bit OS, like Linux. In that case, you, the user, must go fsck yourself because Macromedia thinks 64 bit computing is a fad.
All I did was write a simple script that cleans out my cookies and cache. I've set it to run daily on logout. Change $user to your username and $profile with your profile string and use it:
echo "drop firefox cache and history" shred -u/home/$user/.mozilla/firefox/$profile/Cache/* shred -u/home/$user/.mozilla/firefox/$profile/history.*
echo "get rid of all cookies not explicitly kept above" shred -u/home/$user/.mozilla/firefox/$profile/cookies.txt mv/home/$user/.mozilla/firefox/$profile/cookiesnew.t xt/home/$user/.mozilla/firefox/$profile/cookies.txt
echo "done"
Just add a new line for each cookie that you want kept in the "grab all valid firefox cookies" section just as I did (noting the > vs >> piping).
I mean, it works for me, at least. Why do I shred instead of rm? Because I'm one of the lunatic fringe that likes the idea of actually deleting files that I tell to be deleted.
Coupled with Firefox's AdBlock add-on, I'm pretty comfortable with my browsing experience.
Slashdot Mirror
Does Vorbis still have a place in the world, or would I be better off re-ripping my music to MP3 - even if I still think Vorbis is technically superior?
I am with you. I too drank that Kool Aid. Get an iRiver player or something similar that plays the format. It's not dead, but it's not catching on as fast as I'd have hoped.
I think part of it is that lossy encoding is dead, to an extent. I mean, drive space is cheap as dirt now. I have no reason not to encode everything in Ogg Flac (which I do) that is lossless and can be migrated to other format as needed.
In fact, I just wrote a couple of scripts to encode a folder of Ogg Flac to Ogg Vorbis en masse so that I can load my iRiver player when I want to without trouble. Just copy the files I want to a folder, run the script and it reencodes on the fly to a very small lossy Vorbis file. The iRiver can play Ogg Flac also, but I can fit a TON of low res Vorbis files on the player at once, and on a small portable player like that, the lossy encoding is unnoticable.
Most people in your country accept that humans were created in their current form.
:-\
Um, no, they don't. Quite few actually believe that. In a discussion about the scientific method, one would hope that we wouldn't spread unsubstantiated claims. Where is your data? What studies can you cite that show this as fact? Are you going based on the word of the New orgs that want to sell papers. A headline that reads "America says Man didn't come from Monkey!" sells more papers than "Though most in America agree in principle with the theories of evolution, a vocal minority doesn't".
The majority of Americans don't have a problem with evolution, don't attend church regularly, aren't fundamentalist or evangelical, and value education (though they tend to value productivity more). A small, loud segment of Ameicans are speaking out in a way that is incongrous with mainstream beliefs. I guess that never happens in your country. Must be nice.
Most of the heavily religious people in the US are Christians with fairly fundamentalist, or at least evangelical, views.
/most/ heavily religious poeple are evangelical or fundementalist, unless your definition of those two terms is "someone who is heavily religious".
;-)
Do you have any data that back that claim up? I have a degree in Religious Studies and I work with religious groups regularly. I live in the same city as Pat Robertson and his CBN organization. Even here, in the so-called buckle of the bible belt, it would be a stretch, if not blatantly false, to say that
I'm not trying to start a debate, but really just curious as to whether or not you have evidence to back that claim (being a thread on science and all, we should be making fact-based claims.
For the chicks.
I switched because of all the 'tang I knew I'd score being a Linux stud. Is there another reason?
Where was the religious right during the cold war? Or the Iraq war? Or capital punishment?
Many stood firmly against all that as well. I am against abortion rights, against the death penalty, and against any war that doesn't have at it's core a STRONGLY morally-justifiable end (as it did in the classic example of WWII and the more recent Rawandan Genocide affair).
Don't assume that just becuase someone disagrees with you that they are somehow inconsistent.
Heck even the Chinese have adopted the Greek ways(architecture, calendar, Greek loan words from West European languages).
... I could go on.
I just left China 2 weeks ago. No they are not. Hong Kong is, buit Hong Kong was a British Colony for a century. They are quite westernized. The rest? It's a COMPLETELY different world, dude. The architecture is utterly foreign to the West. The Calendar referenced by the people of China is the Chinese one (which, in fact, caused me a funny bit of confusion while I was there). The western "loan words" are limited to "Bye Bye" and "OK", neither of which have a Greek root.
Which brings me to the next point:
Here are some of the Greek prefixes used in English: acanth(o), achromat(o), acr(o), actin(i/o), aden(o), aer(o), alg(o)
No, you couldn't. You could continue to copy and paste for the Greek online dictionary, maybe, but that's about it. I, however, can speak Koine Greek, the Greek used in the New Testement.
Which brings me to the NEXT point:
Or from the religion with the New Testament as its basis which of course was written in Greek.
I have a degree in religious studies. The religion of the New Testement was distinctly Hebrew with some nod toward Hellenized Rome (ie, the Greek-speaking Roman Empire). With the exception of the Gospel of Luke, the hellenization of the New Testemant is pretty much limited to the written language and a few parables that reference Greek mythemes for purposes of reaching a different audience. The Theology and the ideas underlying it DO NOT have origins in Greco-Roman philosophy or religion. Even Luke's hellenized influence is not so great, just greater than the other writers of the NT.
Is our architecture based on the Chinese or the Greek?
OURS is based on the English and French, primarily, neither of which owe much in that specific regard to the Greeks. Your house has marble columns? Mine doesn't. I think one house in my whole neighborhood does. It's pretty ugly. Either way, you should actually READ what I said before replying with your dick-voice. I said the East was as influenced by the Chinese as the West was by the Greeks. We are the West, meanign that I already said we were influenced by the Greeks. But places like Japan, Korea, India, etc., are equally influenced by the Chinese, not the Greeks.
Warner has switched from backing HD-DVD to Blu-Ray
Though I understand why the submitter said this---because the article is unclear on this point---but Warner has only agreed to "nonexclusive" support for Blu-ray, meaning it could theoretically produce films in both formats, though it will initially produce movies for Blue-Ray. Not as ringing an endorsement as Walt Disney and Fox, both of whom have exclusive support agreements with the Blue-Ray tech consortium.
I know it's splitting hairs, but in this case, those are important hairs to split.
had many things the US and other Western countries claim to have invented
Not to be mean or anything, but what world do you live in? Every American Schoolkid knows what the Greeks gave us. It's common knowledge that our government was based in part on Greek ideas, like those that came from Plato's Republic. In Virginia, this is an SOL for the 3rd grade, meaning that the average 8 yr old has passed a test on the topic and is aware of the value that ancient Greece has to us now.
I appreciate you wanted to make all this clear, but your post makes it sound like it wasn't already well known. The Greeks and the Hebrews gave more to the Western World than any other two peoples without question.
Ancient Chinese and Egyptians had bits and pieces of mathematical knowledge but they failed to grasp the big picture
Here you are going a bit too far, I think. Perhaps your comment is true about the Egyptians, but the Chinese were every bit as innovative and amazing as the Greeks, and every bit as influential to the Eastern worls as the Greeks were to the West.
I feel sad when Modern Greeks are made fun of by other peoples
You shouldn't. We all make fun of each other. It's OK. It's just friendly kidding. I've never heard anyone joke the modern Greeks that wasn't really just playing around. Really though, I almost never hear anyone joking about the modern Greeks. Frankly, they are pretty quiet on the international front, so they aren't mentioned that often in America, in my experience...maybe you live somewhere where nationalism runs higher than the norm and or peoples are regularly insulted. That would make me pretty sad too. Here in Virginia, however, it don't see any of that.
That's GNU/Antikythera if you please.
If it weren't for Quicken, Mom and Dad would be using SuSE by now.
I and two others I know (the other two are not IT people) run Quicken in Linux under Crossover Office. Works beautifully in my experience. A couple very minor visual glitches on some dialog boxes, but that's basically it. If they really wanna move the Linux (in other words "not just becuase you or I may want them using linux") then I'd say they could do it today with Crossover Office.
I suppose I should add that your mileage may vary.
how come in this day and age the default format for text isn't html?
It could easily replace rtf, but a full featured word processor, like Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.Org Writer, demands more. There are formatting features, revsion controls, and all manner of underlying tech that html simply doesn't suport.
That said, I totally agree that html should be the default for text documents that are more complex than raw ascii and less complex than a 500 page technical manual with macros and embedded revison history. That's the spot rtf current tries to take, but html is a better choice there.
That means 6 million people need to purchase each episode in order to match what ABC currently gets from advertisers.
And Desperate Housewives averages 21.3 million viewers per episode. If a market can be created where even 1 out of 3 viewers downloads the episode instead of watching the advertising-laden version, they've made their money. If half the viewers downloaded instead of watching over the air, the business model is changed forever. Better than that. Offer a discount to people willing to commit to a whole season preemptively and you've got a clear budget going into the shooting season. No more begging for more money from execs. No more guesswork about return on investment. Just "we have brought in 4 million per episode this season so we are keeping shooting costs under 3.5 million per episode". Nice and straightforward.
I've been saying this for a very long time. All it will take it to build this purchase/download capability into the next gen tuners (Tivo is already moving in this direction) and even the next gen AV receivers.
Do that. Make it easy for people to find and get what they want. Make a mint.
Somehow I think the people talking about the death of broadcast TV are a bit pre-mature.
The prediction of the death of broadcast TV is both premature and possible erroneous. It neededn't die out. They may still be a market in perpetuity for people willing to watch it over the air with commercials for free, but that is most definately not the way of the future. It'll be about as common as rotary phone service is now. I know some people still have it, but not too many.
IPTV is about delivering an A/V signal using IP, not about delivering an A/V signal over the Internet. There's a world of difference. Major companies are already experimenting with it in selected markets now, and NOT over the Internet. IPTV is deleivered over existing cable lines.
It's biggest benefit---and I cannot BELEIVE the summary doesn't make mention of it---is the bandwidth savings. Right now, cable providers are hitting a brickwall with respect to bandwidth. They simply cannot deliever much more HDTV becuase they haven't got a big enough pipe. Remember that with exosting cable systems, the pipe is streaming every channel all the time, whether or not you are watching it. It's your tuner that selects the signal that you request from that mess...it's like trying to drink from a firehose.
The promise of IPTV, and like it or not, Microsoft did a good thing here, is that you only receive the signal you request. If you are watching channel 10, then the only channel on the pipe to your home is channel 10.
With that innovation in deleivery, cable companies can start offering a full line up of HDTV (much more than the paltry few channels they offer currently) without feart that they will run out of bandwidth.
And yes, you can also watch multiple channels and change channels instantly and all that other stuff that isn't nearly as important as the bandwidth savings.
All you guys who slept through Physics and ended up with a Liberal Arts degree instead contributed to this situation.
A person with a Liberal Arts degree can major in Physics, work in a lab, and contribute quite successfully to the West's scientific cache of ideas and inventions. It's a person with a Liberal Arts major who wouldn't as easily have been able to do that. Don't insult things you don't understand. It makes you look stupid.
FYI, I'm normally not nearly this pointed or harsh, but if you are gonna come out of the gate throwing insults at my choice of education (a Liberal Arts degree) then I'm not inclined to be terribly polite in return.
Neither the Russian organization nor Russian courts have standing to take them to court over their activities in the US.
/change the law/ so that it will not be allowed in the future. If it weren't allowed now, they wouldn't need to do that.
/assume/ no givernment would enforce something so obviously beneficial to consumers...but interestingly to me, Russia has. Specifically:
/has/ to buy from them. They already have a solid clientele and I'm already reaping to benefits of using them. If others don't, it's no skin off my back. It's like Linux. If ya don't like it, you don't have to use it, but if you ever change your mind, there are plenty of people willing to help you change course. :)
Actually, in this case, they do. They have legal right to fight infringing sales and uses of US music. That's why they looked into it.
Hey, don't believe me. Don't buy anything from them if you want. Heck, doubt it til you're blue in the face. I had my doubts too. But in the end, if they were doing something illegal or even on the border of illegal, they'd have been shut down when the RIAA and it's Russian counterpart looked into it initially.
I said it before and I'll say it again: It's screamingly telling that instead of going to court, whcih they had the option of doing, they went to the Russian law makers and are now trying to
But, so many poepl are so busy convincing themselves that they must be doing something wrong that they are depriving themselves of a perfectly legal opportunity. It's sad to me that the RIAA has managed to scare people so much that they won't even buy music from a legally licensed reseller.
They are licensed to sell that music in Russia./em?
Not according to their contract with the music labels under Russian law. There exosts no such stipulation. That is something people say becuase they
"All the materials in the MediaServices projects are available for distribution through Internet according to license # LS-3-05-03 of the Russian Multimedia and Internet Society. Under the license terms, MediaServices pays license fees for all the materials subject to the Law of the Russian Federation "On Copyright and Related Rights". All the materials are available solely for personal use and must not be used for further distribution, resale or broadcasting."
Their contract never stipulates this Russia-only clause that so many people assume must be there. You say it's untested law, whereas I say clearly written and willfully entered into contracts are not untested law. Just the opposite, I doubt there is a more tested and safe section of law than those laws surrounding the enforcement of two-party contracts. Putting the Internet in the middle means nothing if that is an understood and spelled out part of the contract in question.
Like I said, though, no one
There's all kinds of examples of governments treating internet transactions as if they were taking place at the client rather than at the server.
:-\
True, but even if it were treated that way, it's still a legal sale of a song/album from one validly licensed reseller to a customer. There is never a drop is licensure, which is key here, I think. AllOfMP3 is allowed, by law and by explicit agreement with the record labels, to sell that merchandise, and the agreement is cler that they may sell it at whatever price in whatever manner they please, so long as they continue to honor Russian law.
The RIAA (well, the Russian equivalent organization) has looked into AllOfMP3 and did not take them to court. They recognize the legality. In fact, they implicitly acknowledged it when instead of attacking AllOfMP3 for their practices, they went to Russian lawmakers to have the laws re-written. That's the current state of things. They can't stop them, becuase it isn't illegal, but they make it made illegal so they can plug what they see as a loophole. Sounds familiar.
that's DEFINITELY not settled law.
d =10372214r eshold=-1&commentsort=3&tid=141&mode=thread&pid=10 373598#10374094r eshold=-1&commentsort=3&tid=141&mode=thread&pid=10 374584#10376270
;-)
I'n never heard of a challenge to the idea that I can buy something that is legal to own here and elsewhere over the internet. Specifically, U.S. copyright law seems clear that:
"In a case where the copies or phonorecords were lawfully made, the United States Customs Service has no authority to prevent their importation unless the provisions of section 601 are applicable."
And that the section on infringing importation does not apply to cases of:
"importation, for the private use of the importer and not for distribution, by any person with respect to no more than one copy or phonorecord of any one work at any one time"
In short, I can buy music online from anywhere I want, so long as the seller has a legitimate license to sell the work being sold. In the case of ALLOfMP3, they do. This is the side of globalization that big business DOESN'T want us to see.
For a longer treatment of this debate you can read this earlier thread, of which I offer more a more nuanced version of my opinion on the topic.
That thread is kinda huge, so if you just wanna read the parts I wrote:
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=123447&ci
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=123447&th
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=123447&th
Mostly that's just to give you an idea of the point I'm driving at. I hope that helps. (well, really I hope it convinces you I'm right, but I'm an optimist that way)
It would be a great deal if it was legal for them to do business in most countries outise the former Soviet Union.
/. before, so I won't waste your time repeating details, but the short version is that the contracts are valid Russian contracts and Russia is a valid member in good standing of WIPO and several other pertinent international trade orgs. Said contracts are enforceable througout the world, but only as long as the business itself remains a Russian business. A loophole? Yes, but a legal one. :)
Luckily for us, it is. It's been debated ad nauseum on
If I buy a legitimate CD in Russia, it's not illegal to bring the CD home...even though the CD will cost a lot less there than it would in the US.
I guess All Of MP3 is below their radar, but US$1.50 for an entire album is pretty damn cheap, even compared to Walmart.
I'm surprised the article doesn't explore Religion and it's affect on people's happiness.
Most religions do not consider happiness a goal. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, for instance, make no promises for personal happiness. Moses, Christ, and Mohammad didn't promise their followers that they'd have a great time. Regarding the eastern religions, Nirvana and Moksha are hardly "happy" end goals. Remember that the Buddha said that life == suffering.
It's also worth noting that, all too often, people fail to distinguish between Joy and Happiness. I can be happy alone in my room with no help from others. Question for the class: Can I be joyous alone? Don't answer, just spend a few years thinking about it.
My disclaimers: My degree is in religious studies. I'm a Christian, though I see great value in studying the teachings of other faiths. Also, I'm both happy and joyous more often than not, but happiness isn't really much of a goal of mine. I've just been fortunate enough to get it anyway.
You can install the player on laptops.
;-)
Unless that laptop is running a 64 bit OS, like Linux. In that case, you, the user, must go fsck yourself because Macromedia thinks 64 bit computing is a fad.
But I'm not bitter.
You interviewer doesn't care whether you respect it or not. He only cares that you have it.
Thanks for the feedback. I'll make the changes. It's much cleaner using egrep!
All I did was write a simple script that cleans out my cookies and cache. I've set it to run daily on logout. Change $user to your username and $profile with your profile string and use it:
/home/$user/.mozilla/firefox/$profile/Cache/* /home/$user/.mozilla/firefox/$profile/history.*
/home/$user/.mozilla/firefox/$profile/cookies.txt |grep slashdot >/home/$user/.mozilla/firefox/$profile/cookiesnew. txt /home/$user/.mozilla/firefox/$profile/cookies.txt |grep mapquest >>/home/$user/.mozilla/firefox/$profile/cookiesnew .txt /home/$user/.mozilla/firefox/$profile/cookies.txt |grep mywebgrocer >>/home/$user/.mozilla/firefox/$profile/cookiesnew .txt /home/$user/.mozilla/firefox/$profile/cookies.txt |grep news.google >>/home/$user/.mozilla/firefox/$profile/cookiesnew .txt /home/$user/.mozilla/firefox/$profile/cookies.txt |grep netflix >>/home/$user/.mozilla/firefox/$profile/cookiesnew .txt
/home/$user/.mozilla/firefox/$profile/cookies.txt /home/$user/.mozilla/firefox/$profile/cookiesnew.t xt /home/$user/.mozilla/firefox/$profile/cookies.txt
echo "drop firefox cache and history"
shred -u
shred -u
echo "grab all valid firefox cookies"
cat
cat
cat
cat
cat
echo "get rid of all cookies not explicitly kept above"
shred -u
mv
echo "done"
Just add a new line for each cookie that you want kept in the "grab all valid firefox cookies" section just as I did (noting the > vs >> piping).
I mean, it works for me, at least. Why do I shred instead of rm? Because I'm one of the lunatic fringe that likes the idea of actually deleting files that I tell to be deleted.
Coupled with Firefox's AdBlock add-on, I'm pretty comfortable with my browsing experience.
ROT13 is the answer! That'll ensure privacy and anonymity for certain!