If the DMCA clauses pass, I'll still have a right to make backups. It'll be harder to get the software for ripping, but it won't slow me down in the least, or worry me at all.
What it will do is encourage me to torrent download like a fiend to save the hassle of ripping and encoding my own DVDs for access via media server.
From what I see of friends and relatives, the people buying smart phones and tablets already have a PC at home, or in one case, a Mac. The new devices are used as supplementary on-the-go devices, but at home, the primary device is still the PC.
Which makes sense -- any serious work or data entry requires a keyboard, not a virtual keyboard with no tactile feedback. Where smart phones, tablets, and gaming consoles are primarily data consumer devices that can be used for data input in a pinch, the PC is focused on taking data input, and does media consumption as a side-line.
But that should be no surprise to anyone.
Windows 8 needs a way to choose between the Metro and traditional desktop, not just a way to launch the traditional desktop. Different devices are going to want different defaults, and making regular PC users go through an extra step to launch their "comfort zone" environment is going to piss them off to no end.
What an intriguing idea. A light that actually consumes heat and emits it as light. One energy source is as good as another -- I have to wonder if there are many other areas of research where we've focused on electricity as the power for a device when there might be alternative transforms from other sources available.
In short, no, it doesn't sound like they're breaking any laws of thermodynamics or energy balance equations. Instead, they're just using an unusual source to boost the inputs: heat.
I think it's pretty clear they had their exploits worked out and ready to go for some time, and were just waiting for the contest to start to unleash them.
Still, kudos on what has to be almost world-record-time penetration of a "secure" system.
I agree completely. I built an LFS system many years ago just to better understand the process a distribution goes through and to get a better grasp of the overall software components and build approaches used by Linux systems overall.
It was a highly educational experience, but I'll stick with Debian-based systems that use APT updates, thank you very much. While educational to roll your own installation, rolling your own updates is incredibly time consuming.
Don't forget the ability of someone with a million followers to draw attention to a problem and ensure everyone knows about it, not just the dev team, such that it becomes an embarrassment to the company that they have to fix to save face.
Think of accounts like George's as being those of the president and board of the user's union...
Another (almost racist) example is the infamous inability of the Chinese to pronounce "L" and "R" properly.
You may have noticed that recent immigrants from China don't have this problem with their English. That's because modern Chinese students are exposed to and practice speaking English, so they've learned to recognize the sounds and pronounce the difference.
But 20-30 years ago, immigrants saying things like "Flied Lice" instead of "Fried Rice" was quite common, because they were literally unable to hear the difference.
Sigh. Why is it that if people haven't heard something before, they immediately jump to the conclusion that the speaker is a lying bullshit artist?
Here's a Wikipedia article that discusses just one of the sound differences between English and other languages, a difference of inflection which English and Chinese speakers literally cannot hear when the other speaks.
This difference was explained in my sociology classes in first year university as an example of how learned behaviours can prevent the ability to even perceive alternatives later in life, much less learn them.
As a personal example, I had a friend named Xu. He kept complaining that I mispronounced his name. But it wasn't intentional -- I literally could not hear the difference when he tried to compare his pronunciation with mine. It sound like he was saying the same thing twice. To this day, I've never been able to hear the difference between the "correct" pronunciation and what I used to say.
The subject performing double blind tests has a huge affect on the results.
There are now almost two entire generations who have spent their entire lives listening the compressed digital artifacts and noise of CD and MP3 media. Much of the music they've listened to is synthesized, processed, and vocoded.
They've never heard a delicate triangle ringing out over a live orchestra.
They've never heard the brassy rattle of a live saxophone.
They've never heard the sharp ringing tones of a live trumpet.
In fact, they've spent their entire life training their ears NOT to hear those sounds.
And now we've got a population that has been so deafened to the sounds of real instruments that they deny people like me can hear the difference. I've literally got some bozo on slashdot screaming away that I'm a "troll" because he can't hear the difference, so he insists I'm delusional and crazy for claiming I can.
How I pity those generations. Even given the opportunity, they'll never be able to appreciate the glory of live music.
Because they can't hear it.
Literally.
It's like trying to convince someone with red-green colour blindness that there's a number hidden in the pattern of the dots in a colour blindness test. They're completely unable to perceive it.
So of course when such people do a double-blind test, they think the 44.1/16 sounds as good as the 192/24.
You are like someone who has red-green colour blindness presented with a full-colour picture, completely unable to perceive the difference. I could take you to a live concert, and you would not be able to hear the difference between a ringing cymbal and the compressed paper-like noise that comes out of a CD because you spent a lifetime training your ears and your neurons not to hear the difference.
What good is a double-blind test by someone who is half deaf?
After a lifetime of training your ears to listen to 44.1/16 and MP3s as music, you've trained yourself not to hear anything more.
There's a tale of an island tribe trying to make sense of a tallship on the horizon. They'd never seen anything on the horizon of the ocean before. Some tribal members even said they couldn't see anything.
I pity you. I really do. You can't even know the joy of hearing real music after all the years of listening to compression and noise artifacts, so you deny that others can tell the difference.
The average music listener in the modern age has never heard music that wasn't from a CD or an MP3 player. They've trained their ears for a lifetime to interpret that noise as real music. They CAN'T hear the difference.
Have you ever heard live, unamplified acoustic instruments?
Have you ever listened to music that wasn't from a CD or an MP3 player, such as a truly high-end, properly tuned analogue playback system?
Well, I have. I played in orchestral, jazz, and blues bands in my primary school years. I still hear the ring of real cymbals when I see live bands playing locally. There are buskers downtown playing real instruments.
The difference between 44/16 and 192/24 is immediately and blatantly obvious to anyone who grew up or still listens to real, honest to God instruments and voices instead of synth drums and vocoders.
Unfortunately, it has been proven time and again for decades that if you're not exposed to sounds early in your life, you may never be able to hear them because your neurons never develop the pathways to recognize those sounds. It's why English speakers have such a hell of a time learning Chinese -- there are sounds in Chinese that don't exist at all in English, so we literally can't hear the difference in what they're saying.
I pity those of you who've spent a lifetime training your ears with compressed digital media. You'll never hear the delicate ring of a triangle floating over an orchestra. You'll never hear the raspy metal on metal rustling of a snare brush. You can't. You trained the ability out of yourself.
A snare brush rustles at 192/24 instead of sounding like rustling paper.
Go listen to some LIVE music to hear what REAL instruments sound like instead of judging based on your years of bias listening to compressed and crappy CDs.
Of course if your music consists of synth beats, vocoder samplings, and other such drek, you've never HEARD a real instrument before in your life to know what one SHOULD sound like.
If you can't hear the difference between cymbals, bells, brass, and other "edgy" instruments at 44KHz/16bit "lossless" and 192KHz/24-bit, you're either deaf or using earbuds.
I have to agree. I think Rob will bring some amazing insight to just about anything he cares to do after spending so many years reading the opinions of intelligent people (and their detractors) for so many years. One thing that Slashdot has done over the years is collected opinions and dialogue from an entire planet full of frustrated and highly educated "nerds." Rob's job was to read all that crap for a couple of decades -- I've no doubt he just might have picked up a few relevant and useful bits of "trivia" along the way.:D
Apparently the Canadian music industry has never bother reading Canadian law, our Charter of Rights, or paid attention to the past 40+ years of rulings in the courts against their abusive and egregious demands.
Even the POLICE in this country don't have access to subscriber information without a warrant, and a bunch of media moguls with a track record of not doing a proper investigation before pulling out the sue-bat think the Canadian people are going to give it to THEM?
Weren't they paying attention to what happened to Toews when he tried to grant the POLICE similar powers?
But you gotta give the ankle-biters credit: they're as persistent as a chihuahua barking at the feet of the Canadian people and the Charter of Rights, and about as likely to intimidate us into submission.
Here's a few key points for you morons:
1. We have the right to listen to media before we buy it. Stores are required to have headphone kiosks for us to do so. That doesn't mean they like us browsing around the store and then going online to buy. So cut the crap and accept that downloading torrents and streaming media are how we preview nowadays. If we like it, we'll buy it; if we don't, we won't. And your sales numbers show we're still buying a LOT despite the difficulty of finding GOOD music amongst the thousands of CDs that come out every year.
2. When you signed up for the levies on blank CDs, you effectively gave your approval to people making backups of their media. We'd been granted that permission time and again over the years, but you sealed your own fate when you signed off on that one.
3. A media player is not a copy of anything. It's a player. You know, like those things you used to shove disks into? You do NOT get to charge me time and again for the media for each and every single device I choose to play my media on. Fuck off.
Hippos have been clocked at 30 km/h (19 mph) over short distances.
As impressive as it is for a walking robot to achieve this kind of speed, I'd be a lot more impressed if it were demonstrating the ability to adapt to real terrain while doing so. Running on a treadmill is a disgustingly controlled environment compared to the real worlds, and what I've always found fascinating about robotics is the ideas people have for algorithms that can adapt to an unpredictable and far-from-level world.
I'm not so sure about that at all. In order for there to be a grown neural interface, there has to be a component that merges with the flesh, what you refer to as a connector (and which I think of as a mount point, like a gun turret.)
My concern is not just the failure of the attached prosthetic, which could be detached and repaired as you suggest, but the components of the neural interface itself. I think it's far more likely that as time progresses, such devices would be designed and built with the idea of being a permanent and unremovable replacement limb, eye, or ear, which brings me back to the question on how to repair such devices.
It's too early to worry about such issues, but it's not too early to start talking about them.
Both the Israelis and the Iranians are led by dogmatic, war-mongering, belligerent psychopaths. It's like two schoolyard bullies yelling threats at each other for decades on end, and pointing to the threats as "proof" that they're "just defending themselves", while neither actually has received so much as a bloody nose.
But when one of those bullies has a few hundred nukes on hand and they're screaming that the world is going to end if the other bully gets a nuke...
When one of those bullies surrounds and detains the population of an entire nation while decrying the "human rights abuses" of their neighbours...
When one of those bullies keeps building on the land they claim to be negotiating over...
When one of those bullies keeps claiming to be an "independant nation" while taking hundreds of millions if not billions per year in foreign aid...
Well, think about it, and come to your own conclusions.
And remember this key point: the PEOPLE of neither Iran nor Israel WANT war. It's the blowhards and the bigots who "speak for the nation" that keep ragging on and blustering about invading and destroying each other.
Slashdot Mirror
It's also interesting that California, cancer-paranoid as they are, still approved medical cannabis legislation, and famously so.
If the DMCA clauses pass, I'll still have a right to make backups. It'll be harder to get the software for ripping, but it won't slow me down in the least, or worry me at all.
What it will do is encourage me to torrent download like a fiend to save the hassle of ripping and encoding my own DVDs for access via media server.
Now a "news" article essentially amounts to "someone posted a message about someone telling them that someone else said they'd..."
Are you serious? That chain of "evidence" is worse than most small town gossip!
And even if it's true -- so what? As convenient as it is, TPB is hardly the only torrent site in the world...
This is Microsoft we're talking about.
Of course it's going to cost 'em!
From what I see of friends and relatives, the people buying smart phones and tablets already have a PC at home, or in one case, a Mac. The new devices are used as supplementary on-the-go devices, but at home, the primary device is still the PC.
Which makes sense -- any serious work or data entry requires a keyboard, not a virtual keyboard with no tactile feedback. Where smart phones, tablets, and gaming consoles are primarily data consumer devices that can be used for data input in a pinch, the PC is focused on taking data input, and does media consumption as a side-line.
But that should be no surprise to anyone.
Windows 8 needs a way to choose between the Metro and traditional desktop, not just a way to launch the traditional desktop. Different devices are going to want different defaults, and making regular PC users go through an extra step to launch their "comfort zone" environment is going to piss them off to no end.
What an intriguing idea. A light that actually consumes heat and emits it as light. One energy source is as good as another -- I have to wonder if there are many other areas of research where we've focused on electricity as the power for a device when there might be alternative transforms from other sources available.
In short, no, it doesn't sound like they're breaking any laws of thermodynamics or energy balance equations. Instead, they're just using an unusual source to boost the inputs: heat.
I think it's pretty clear they had their exploits worked out and ready to go for some time, and were just waiting for the contest to start to unleash them.
Still, kudos on what has to be almost world-record-time penetration of a "secure" system.
I agree completely. I built an LFS system many years ago just to better understand the process a distribution goes through and to get a better grasp of the overall software components and build approaches used by Linux systems overall.
It was a highly educational experience, but I'll stick with Debian-based systems that use APT updates, thank you very much. While educational to roll your own installation, rolling your own updates is incredibly time consuming.
Don't forget the ability of someone with a million followers to draw attention to a problem and ensure everyone knows about it, not just the dev team, such that it becomes an embarrassment to the company that they have to fix to save face.
Think of accounts like George's as being those of the president and board of the user's union...
Another (almost racist) example is the infamous inability of the Chinese to pronounce "L" and "R" properly.
You may have noticed that recent immigrants from China don't have this problem with their English. That's because modern Chinese students are exposed to and practice speaking English, so they've learned to recognize the sounds and pronounce the difference.
But 20-30 years ago, immigrants saying things like "Flied Lice" instead of "Fried Rice" was quite common, because they were literally unable to hear the difference.
There is nothing so idiotic as a deaf man telling me I'm delusional because he can't hear what I do.
You sir, are fucking MORON.
Sigh. Why is it that if people haven't heard something before, they immediately jump to the conclusion that the speaker is a lying bullshit artist?
Here's a Wikipedia article that discusses just one of the sound differences between English and other languages, a difference of inflection which English and Chinese speakers literally cannot hear when the other speaks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreleased_stop
This difference was explained in my sociology classes in first year university as an example of how learned behaviours can prevent the ability to even perceive alternatives later in life, much less learn them.
As a personal example, I had a friend named Xu. He kept complaining that I mispronounced his name. But it wasn't intentional -- I literally could not hear the difference when he tried to compare his pronunciation with mine. It sound like he was saying the same thing twice. To this day, I've never been able to hear the difference between the "correct" pronunciation and what I used to say.
The subject performing double blind tests has a huge affect on the results.
There are now almost two entire generations who have spent their entire lives listening the compressed digital artifacts and noise of CD and MP3 media. Much of the music they've listened to is synthesized, processed, and vocoded.
They've never heard a delicate triangle ringing out over a live orchestra.
They've never heard the brassy rattle of a live saxophone.
They've never heard the sharp ringing tones of a live trumpet.
In fact, they've spent their entire life training their ears NOT to hear those sounds.
And now we've got a population that has been so deafened to the sounds of real instruments that they deny people like me can hear the difference. I've literally got some bozo on slashdot screaming away that I'm a "troll" because he can't hear the difference, so he insists I'm delusional and crazy for claiming I can.
How I pity those generations. Even given the opportunity, they'll never be able to appreciate the glory of live music.
Because they can't hear it.
Literally.
It's like trying to convince someone with red-green colour blindness that there's a number hidden in the pattern of the dots in a colour blindness test. They're completely unable to perceive it.
So of course when such people do a double-blind test, they think the 44.1/16 sounds as good as the 192/24.
Your data is irrelevant.
You are like someone who has red-green colour blindness presented with a full-colour picture, completely unable to perceive the difference. I could take you to a live concert, and you would not be able to hear the difference between a ringing cymbal and the compressed paper-like noise that comes out of a CD because you spent a lifetime training your ears and your neurons not to hear the difference.
Call me whatever names you like.
You are the blind one. Or in this case, deaf.
What good is a double-blind test by someone who is half deaf?
After a lifetime of training your ears to listen to 44.1/16 and MP3s as music, you've trained yourself not to hear anything more.
There's a tale of an island tribe trying to make sense of a tallship on the horizon. They'd never seen anything on the horizon of the ocean before. Some tribal members even said they couldn't see anything.
I pity you. I really do. You can't even know the joy of hearing real music after all the years of listening to compression and noise artifacts, so you deny that others can tell the difference.
You're not getting it, are you?
The average music listener in the modern age has never heard music that wasn't from a CD or an MP3 player. They've trained their ears for a lifetime to interpret that noise as real music. They CAN'T hear the difference.
Have you ever heard live, unamplified acoustic instruments?
Have you ever listened to music that wasn't from a CD or an MP3 player, such as a truly high-end, properly tuned analogue playback system?
Well, I have. I played in orchestral, jazz, and blues bands in my primary school years. I still hear the ring of real cymbals when I see live bands playing locally. There are buskers downtown playing real instruments.
The difference between 44/16 and 192/24 is immediately and blatantly obvious to anyone who grew up or still listens to real, honest to God instruments and voices instead of synth drums and vocoders.
Unfortunately, it has been proven time and again for decades that if you're not exposed to sounds early in your life, you may never be able to hear them because your neurons never develop the pathways to recognize those sounds. It's why English speakers have such a hell of a time learning Chinese -- there are sounds in Chinese that don't exist at all in English, so we literally can't hear the difference in what they're saying.
I pity those of you who've spent a lifetime training your ears with compressed digital media. You'll never hear the delicate ring of a triangle floating over an orchestra. You'll never hear the raspy metal on metal rustling of a snare brush. You can't. You trained the ability out of yourself.
A triangle or bell should ring, not crackle.
A snare brush rustles at 192/24 instead of sounding like rustling paper.
Go listen to some LIVE music to hear what REAL instruments sound like instead of judging based on your years of bias listening to compressed and crappy CDs.
Of course if your music consists of synth beats, vocoder samplings, and other such drek, you've never HEARD a real instrument before in your life to know what one SHOULD sound like.
If you can't hear the difference between cymbals, bells, brass, and other "edgy" instruments at 44KHz/16bit "lossless" and 192KHz/24-bit, you're either deaf or using earbuds.
Idiot.
I have to agree. I think Rob will bring some amazing insight to just about anything he cares to do after spending so many years reading the opinions of intelligent people (and their detractors) for so many years. One thing that Slashdot has done over the years is collected opinions and dialogue from an entire planet full of frustrated and highly educated "nerds." Rob's job was to read all that crap for a couple of decades -- I've no doubt he just might have picked up a few relevant and useful bits of "trivia" along the way. :D
Good luck, Rob.
Apparently the Canadian music industry has never bother reading Canadian law, our Charter of Rights, or paid attention to the past 40+ years of rulings in the courts against their abusive and egregious demands.
Even the POLICE in this country don't have access to subscriber information without a warrant, and a bunch of media moguls with a track record of not doing a proper investigation before pulling out the sue-bat think the Canadian people are going to give it to THEM?
Weren't they paying attention to what happened to Toews when he tried to grant the POLICE similar powers?
But you gotta give the ankle-biters credit: they're as persistent as a chihuahua barking at the feet of the Canadian people and the Charter of Rights, and about as likely to intimidate us into submission.
Here's a few key points for you morons:
1. We have the right to listen to media before we buy it. Stores are required to have headphone kiosks for us to do so. That doesn't mean they like us browsing around the store and then going online to buy. So cut the crap and accept that downloading torrents and streaming media are how we preview nowadays. If we like it, we'll buy it; if we don't, we won't. And your sales numbers show we're still buying a LOT despite the difficulty of finding GOOD music amongst the thousands of CDs that come out every year.
2. When you signed up for the levies on blank CDs, you effectively gave your approval to people making backups of their media. We'd been granted that permission time and again over the years, but you sealed your own fate when you signed off on that one.
3. A media player is not a copy of anything. It's a player. You know, like those things you used to shove disks into? You do NOT get to charge me time and again for the media for each and every single device I choose to play my media on. Fuck off.
The robocall scandal happened.
As impressive as it is for a walking robot to achieve this kind of speed, I'd be a lot more impressed if it were demonstrating the ability to adapt to real terrain while doing so. Running on a treadmill is a disgustingly controlled environment compared to the real worlds, and what I've always found fascinating about robotics is the ideas people have for algorithms that can adapt to an unpredictable and far-from-level world.
I'm not so sure about that at all. In order for there to be a grown neural interface, there has to be a component that merges with the flesh, what you refer to as a connector (and which I think of as a mount point, like a gun turret.)
My concern is not just the failure of the attached prosthetic, which could be detached and repaired as you suggest, but the components of the neural interface itself. I think it's far more likely that as time progresses, such devices would be designed and built with the idea of being a permanent and unremovable replacement limb, eye, or ear, which brings me back to the question on how to repair such devices.
It's too early to worry about such issues, but it's not too early to start talking about them.
Both the Israelis and the Iranians are led by dogmatic, war-mongering, belligerent psychopaths. It's like two schoolyard bullies yelling threats at each other for decades on end, and pointing to the threats as "proof" that they're "just defending themselves", while neither actually has received so much as a bloody nose.
But when one of those bullies has a few hundred nukes on hand and they're screaming that the world is going to end if the other bully gets a nuke...
When one of those bullies surrounds and detains the population of an entire nation while decrying the "human rights abuses" of their neighbours...
When one of those bullies keeps building on the land they claim to be negotiating over...
When one of those bullies keeps claiming to be an "independant nation" while taking hundreds of millions if not billions per year in foreign aid...
Well, think about it, and come to your own conclusions.
And remember this key point: the PEOPLE of neither Iran nor Israel WANT war. It's the blowhards and the bigots who "speak for the nation" that keep ragging on and blustering about invading and destroying each other.