After what he did, and we all know what he did, damn straight I'm going to treat him like a pariah! If I see him walking on the street, I'm damn well going to cross to the other side to get away from him. If I'm eating in a restaurant and the owner let him come in and sit at a table, I'd damn well going to leave without paying the check... the owners can sue me for it.
I have this funny feeling that all you people who like to sit on your intellectual high horses and pontificate as to the literal meanings of this or that might feel a little differently if you found out your babysitter was taking pictures of her boyfriend molesting your 3 year old.
Why would we feel any different? You put the boyfriend in prison for molesting the three year old, and you put the babysitter in prison for a contributory charge of molesting the three year old.
Exactly the same thing the police do if she wasn't holding a camera.
If it were any other crime you would consider this situation insane. Lets say arson, or even the murder of nearly three thousand people on 9/11. If an arsonist takes photos of the fire he set, and a news crew comes along and takes more photos, you don't put the news crew in prison. You don't charge the arsonists with photography. If someone downloads those photos from the internet you would consider it insane to imprison that person on a possession-of-images crime. Maybe the person even has a fetish for fire, maybe they even get off looking at the arson images. However I believe you would have no trouble noticing the fact we are talking about an innocent person who hasn't committed arson.
For some reason a lot of people seem to have trouble applying the standard principals of law. Standard principals of law that that apply in every other case. The logic is dead-simple and obvious. Harmful acts are criminal. It is a gross perversion of law and a gross perversion of logic that we have invented possession-of-offensive-information crime. No criminal act, it's just that the information itself is so offensive that we tossed law and logic right out the window.
Anyone who says "arsonists should go to prison" gets burned as a witch when they point out that the-guy-with-the-photo-collection didn't commit arson, that he didn't commit any criminal act at all.
How about a true personal story. I'm a bit of a fan of redheads. Unfortunately redheads are rather rare. Several years ago I found this neat software called Imagewolf. You point it at a website downloading all the images, and then it follows all the links on that site to find more sites to search. It jumps from site to site to site across the internet blindly following links and downloading all the images it finds. I left it running for an entire weekend, saturating the download pipe on broadband. When I came back to my computer there were several gigs of images. Probably in the ballpark of a hundred thousand pics. I skimmed though deleting them thousands at a time, to find the redheads. The images collected were semi-random, an automated harvesting from a semi-random walk across the internet which began at a redhead website. And now here the thing... I came to the very strange realization that if I deleted one set of 99.9% of the pictures then I was a perfectly safe law abiding citizen with a redhead collection, however if I had deleted a different 99.9% of the pictures then somehow it would make me a criminal facing a bazillion years in prison.
That makes no sense! Everything up to that point was perfectly legitimate and lawful, but somehow the act of deleting pictures could somehow have magically made me a criminal? WTF?! The law is FUBARed. Arson is a criminal act, child molestation is a criminal act, people get put in prison for criminal acts. There is a distinct lack of any rational notion of "criminal act" here.
Russia collapsed in bankruptcy, but it seems almost certain that cultural influences and "24 hour propaganda radio" were contributing factors in that financial over-extension. It contributed to the paranoia and ego spending to keep up militarily, as well as stressing them to support a domestic economic image. The people wanted western goods and envied images of western lifestyles. The population was always told they were the greatest most powerful nation on earth with the best government and best economic system, and so they wanted more than they had, they felt entitled to more than they were getting. A population will be relatively content at almost any standard of living so long as they have nothing to compare it to, or if they don't feel entitled to equality. On the other hand when there is economic discontent that energy generally flows into ideology and ideals. Since they envied western goods and western lifestyles that energy would naturally get funneled into western ideology and ideals. To the extent the Soviets failed to keep up the domestic image it fueled problematical political pressures, and to the extent they did sustain the domestic image it overstretched their economy.
I don't mean to oversimplify the causes of the Soviet economic implosion, but I don't think it is correct to completely discount "24 hour propaganda radio" and surrounding media and cultural influences. I believe they increased, and focused, the pressures that ultimately drove them off the financial cliff.
"-1, Disagree" option in the drop-down box that takes a mod point but has no effect.
Instead on no effect it should be "-0, Disagree". Then the post would show up as "Score:X, Disagree" if there are equal or more disagree moderations than any other category. People could also set a personal positive or negative modifier for "disagree" posts in their preferences, just like they can for funny or troll posts.
China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, and the United States have veto power. The UN would be the least of our problems if such a resolution managed to pass.
You and I are focused more on the technology, and that it is wrong to criminalize legitimate uses and innocent people just to make it easier to go after infringement. Unfortunately legislators and the courts take a more jaundiced view. The clause defining what is targeted is phrased as a catch-all "or". Piratebay by virtue of the name itself immediately runs afoul of "marketed by its operator, or by a person acting in concert with the operator, to offer [infringing goods]". And as established by the Grokster ruling an absurd level of care is necessary to avoid tripping over this. The operator must be careful not to acknowledge the existence of the infringing material, and gets burned if even the lowest level individuals posting in a forum acknowledge infringing materials or in any way assist someone who may appears to be infringing. They are are toast if anyone "working in concert" with them trips up with careless statements. "Primarily designed" is wildly open to argument in a courtroom, and can go very badly if a majority of links are to infringing material.
And in particular note that you incorrectly quoted "significant other uses". This law does everything it can dragging the line away from that pesky Betamax ruling. If they can't nail you for an ambiguous "primarily designed", and if they can't nail you for careless public statements admitting encouraging or assisting infringement, then they water down "significant other purposes" into demonstrable and commercially significant purpose. A legitimate purpose isn't good enough, it must be commercially significant purpose. And you can't simply rely on the fact that there are a multitude of legitimate and valuable uses, you need to actually demonstrate the legitimate uses are actually being made by your userbase, and demonstrate how commercially significant they are.
The Betamax standard crucially relies upon a strong and sympathetic focus on legitimate uses. Even under that standard it is all too easy for legitimate uses to be disregarded as insignificant if the focus is placed on objectionable activities. Trying to re-write the standard as "demonstrable commercially significant" badly undermines the presumption that legitimate activities are (and remain) lawful.
It's basically a conflict between two approaches. On one hand there is the presumption that legitimate activity inherently legitimate and legal, that you specifically target people and activities that are criminal. On the other hand there's the approach that you put the innocent and the guilty on an equal scale, where you say it's ok if it's more convenient to knowingly harm and criminalize innocent people, that it's ok so long as the law enforcement benefits 51% outweigh the harm to the innocent. And of course "demonstrable, commercially significant purpose" carries the insane presumption that criminalizing innocent people doesn't count as harm, that criminalizing technology itself doesn't count as harm. It makes explicitly-commercial-harm the ruling standard for criminalizing activities and technologies.
If VCRs and photocopiers were invented today they would have a very precarious time getting established under this law. Their "primary design" would be attacked. Marketing materials and other statements would be run through a fine tooth comb for anything that could be interpreted as encouraging or advertising the ability to make infringing copies. And it would be far from trivial to demonstrate how much of your userbase's actual activities were non-infringing and commercially significant. In fact that would have a deadly chilling effect against introducing VCRs or photocopiers or any other new technology in the first place, because it is impossible to to know for certain what will happen until after you spend all of the money to develop and market the product. A company can do nothing wrong, it doesn't matter that a product has a million legitimate uses, a company can lose all of the money spend developing, marketing, and producing a product and furthermo
according to everything TFA said, this is aimed at sites that "traffic in" pirated goods. "Trafficking" = selling
TFA addresses the law in a uselessly the vague manner. According to the actual text of the draft bill:
(a) DEFINITION.--For purposes of this section, an Internet site is 'dedicated to infringing activities' if such a site -
(1) is otherwise subject to civil forfeiture to the United States Government under section 2323; or
(2) is - (A) primarily designed, has no demonstrable, commercially significant purpose or use other than, or is marketed by its operator, or by a person acting in concert with the operator, to offer -
(i) goods or services in violation of title 17, United States Code, or enable or facilitate a violation of title 17, United States Code, including by offering or providing access to, without the authorization of the copyright owner or otherwise by operation of law, copies of, or public performance or display of, works protected by title 17, in complete or substantially complete form, by any means, including by means of download, transmission, or otherwise, including the provision of a link or aggregated links to other sites or Internet resources for obtaining such copies for accessing such performance or displays
The bill applies to any infringement, including noncommercial infringement. The bill applies to a site that "enables or facilitates" infringement, which includes for example completely lawful sites with one-or-more links to other sites that have infringing materials. And of course this applies to any sort of torrent indexer like Piratebay. The bill applies to sites outside the United States, including sites and content which are completely lawful in the countries where they reside... the bill directs that foreign websites mush comply with US copyright law and that foreign websites shall be shut down if they fail to comply with US copyright law.
Those provisions of the law are unable to shutdown foreign websites hosted under foreign top level domains, so the bill so far as to say US ISPs must institute a mandatory filtering system to block people in the US from viewing any foreign website that the US government objects to.
"The trafficking of pirated American movies and music from rogue websites outside our borders is a big business," Bainwol said. "This bill is a welcome first step toward cutting off the financial lifeline that sustains these illegal operations and threatens the livelihoods of countless members of the American music community."
Of course the "illegal operations" of foreign sites completely disregards the actual jurisdiction of other nation's laws and imposes US law on a guilty-until-you-submit-to-US-law-and-prove-yourself-innocent basis.
Lawmakers introduced legislation Monday that would let the Justice Department seek U.S. court orders against piracy websites anywhere in the world, and shut them down through the sites' domain registration...
If passed, the Justice Department could ask a federal court for an injunction that would order a U.S. domain registrar or registry to stop resolving an infringing site's domain name, so that visitors to PirateBay.org, for example, would get an error message...
The bill would direct injunctions at a piracy site's domain registrar, if the registration was through a U.S. company. If not, the Justice Department could serve the court order at the registry for the site's top-level domain. Registry's for the dot-com, dot-net and dot-org domains are all U.S.-based, and thus within the courts' jurisdiction.
Dot-com, dot-org, dot-net, and any other top level domain hosted in the US would be exploted to impose this US law globally.
And as if that wasn't bad enough, the law goes on to pull an arguably stupider stunt:
For domains not under U.S. control, the bill would demand that internet service providers in the United States block resolution of the address upon a court order, but overseas users would not be impacted.
Moron legislators want to start sending out mandatory filter lists to all US ISPs.
when I hear bluray has been cracked is that I can pull a bit-for-bit identical stream of the bluray disk that is in the drive, not just being able to record a copy
There can be some nitpicking back and forth on precise definitions, but with the HDCP crack software can be written to pretty much do that. The movie goes through a lossy compression, which is then recorded on the disk. That data gets decompressed and can be captured via the now broken HDCP. I don't know if anyone has bothered, but I am certain it is possible to losslessly recompress the expanded data back down to the format that was stored on the disk. This will produce either a bit-for-bit identical copy of what was on the disk, or a precise data synonym of the bits on the disk. I have not looked closely at video formats and how I'd write this sort of lossless recompression software, but to be fair I'll admit I can see reasons why it may (or may not?) run significantly slower than the usual step of running a new lossy compression.
What you have just described means that the SoL (Speed of Light) changes when the ring laser rotates.
You misunderstood. I was saying that the laser locks on a frequency that produces constructive interference - reinforcement.
Since the lasing frequency is fixed a wavelength change means a SoL change.
The lasing frequency is not a fixed wavelength. The laser produces many photons, and those multiple photons have a range of frequencies. If a frequency goes around the ring and produces destructive interference when it returns to the laser that frequency THEN production of photons at that frequency is suppressed. There is no change in SoL, no change in frequency, for any given photon. If a ring is not rotating then the distance traveled in both directions will be equal and the frequency lock will be identical in both directions.
Rotation is absolute, there is a unique non-rotating reference. The distance traveled around the ring can be measured in that non-rotating reference. In that non-rotating reference the laser has moved, and the photons in opposite directions travel different distances. The fixed SoL means that difference in distance in the two directions shows up and measurably changes things when the light returns to the laser. The frequencies that produce constructive or destructive interference will be different in the two directions. The laser will select... amplify... lock onto... photons of different frequencies in the two directions.
don't mention that it is the lab or ECEF frame that is the absolute system for measuring rotation
Absolutely not! (Pardon the pun:)
The laser ring in the lab will show a non-zero value because the lab is NOT an absolute frame for measuring rotation. The lab is (presumably) on the rotating earth, which itself is in rotation around the sun, which is in rotation around the center of the Milky Way, which itself almost certainly has a non-zero velocity around the center of gravity of the local cluster of galaxies. Rotation is detectable. There is an absolute meaning for "non-rotating". An asbolute meaning independent of the lab, independent of earth, independent of anything and everything else in the universe.
Yeah, I've never hear any native born Americans ever refer to Italy Germany Ireland Mexico or anywhere else as any sort of home country because they have ancestry there and the majority of their relatives still live there.
Oh wait, yes I have.
But heay, don't worry. Another six years and he'll be gone.....although the Republicans have been looking at Jindal as a potential candidate, and god-knows who the Democrats will nominate after Obama. You could potentially get stuck with a brown president for ten or fourteen more years years. Unless the Death Panels get ya first.
the dinosaurs are fine, and not extinct; they now inhabit the shell of the topmost Turtle.
Don't be ridiculous. Dinosaurs aren't exactly known for their climbing abilities. The dinosaurs are one turtle down. We're on the topmost turtle. Because we're special. God loves us the most bestest.
Try looking at General Relativity a bit more closely. Results are the same either way.
You are mistaken. Translation is relative, but rotation is not. Rotation us absolute and measurable.
There is for example the Sagnac effect used in some inertial navigation systems. A laser is placed in a ring with light circling in both directions. The laser will lock on a reinforcing frequency where the light takes an integer number of wavelengths around the ring. After making a loop around the ring there is constructive interference as the standing wave overlaps itself. The light going around in both directions will have the same frequency and wavelength. Now lets give the ring some rotation. The light going around in opposite directions need to cover different distances around the ring to return to the laser which that has advanced during the that time. The wavelength of the light in one direction must increase and the wavelength of the light in the other direction must decrease in order to maintain the integer-number-of-wavelengths constructive interference.
If the ring is not rotating then the light going in the two directions locks at the identical frequency. If the ring is rotating then there will be a difference between the two frequencies, and that difference is exactly proportional to the rate of rotation.
This is not merely theoretical, it is the actual foundation of existing navigation systems.
IMHO geometrically speaking you probably can take the earth as fixed and the universe revolving around it, and all the phenomenons like wind, coriolis acceleration and stuff should hold anyway.
Under standard physics constant speed reference frames are undetectable, but rotation is easily detectable. Coriolis is zero when rotation is zero.
What you can do is build a sort of complicated joke version of physics that lies to you. The physics would state that you feel certain forces in certain directions when you're not moving, and that you feel those forces for no particular reason, that the universe simply always pushes on things with those forces when they aren't moving, and that those forces just coincidentally happen to match the forces you would feel if you were rotating at a certain speed. The physics would also say that if you rotate to the left at speed X, you'll feel X+1 forces. If you rotate to the left at speed X+1 then you'll feel X+2 forces. It also says that if you rotate to the right at a certain speed then all of the forces drop to zero.
You just add a rotation to everything, do all of the normal real physics equations, and then you subtract out the rotation at the end. It turns all of the physics equations into a silly mess of spaghetti, but that silly mess of spaghetti allows you to feel and measure the forces of a certain rotation but call it "motionless".
Maybe a better way to explain it is if you drive over a bumpy road with potholes. You could make up a silly model of physics that says that when driving over a flat road you will feel jarring forces up and down in a certain pattern... the physics has no particular reason that you'd feel those forces bumping you around when driving flat... we just write those up and forces in and say a zero flat road has them. Now when you drive on that pothole road and feel those forces, well now our physics says that's a flat road. The fun part is now you drive on an actual flat road and feel a smooth ride.... our physics says you now feel a FLAT ride because you're on a bumpy road and those bumps are exactly canceling the up and down forces that our physics says a flat road hits you with.
That's what a "The-Earth-isn't-rotating" physics is like... taking the forces of a specific rotation or a specific bumpy road and arbitrarily stating that is what zero and flat feel like.
if you try to prove them wrong whilst in an atmosphere, you are going to look like a crank. (believe me I have tried to prove this to my kids, and only managed to reinforce there belief in there personal experience.)
You may be able to rescue the situation. If you hold a flat sheet of paper by the top edge of so it hangs vertically, the air resistance will be negligible for the first few feet... until it picks up significant speed and swerves randomly. With a little luck you can do this from shoulder height and get a sheet of paper and heavy object to strike the ground at (visually) the same instant. If you want to drop it a greater distance or preform it more reliably you can start with the sheet of paper with a bit of tape along the edge, ask them weather the paper or a brick will fall faster, then roll up the paper into a very tight tube (taped shut) and again let it hang vertically for release. The paper tube can fall from from a decent height before the speed gets fast enough to destabilize it and wind drag to become important. If you hold another sheet of paper horizontally and drop that for comparison it should make it obvious that it's only the wind drag on the horizontal surface size which is causing "light" things fall slowly.
Sadly the more realistic truth is that it's 36% who have no clue that the Earth goes around the sun. Blind guessing on the question results in a 50-50 shot at the right answer. The poll obviously missed the half of them who accidentally gave the right answer.
We seem to be having communication difficulties. I meant the hundreds of exiting off-the-shelf games for any system that it can emulate. The system effectively has multiple full library of games, a full library of games for each system that it can emulate. Any Pandora-specific games are just icing above and beyond those multiple full catalogs of games.
>what sorts of media the Pandora natively reads. SD cards containing Debian ARM packages.
Anything on SD cards then. The appropriate emulator mode would then be able to read whatever is on the SD card.
But I can't think of a lot of other consoles for which an easy-to-use cart copier exists.
I don't know. Anything that comes on SD cards, anything we can read into a PC can then be written out on an SD card... and Pandora only started shipping a few hundreds of units just a few months ago. I'm sure that accessibility for each emulated system will be worked out as a user base gets established.
one device exclusively for major-label games and a second device exclusively for indie games?
Do you expect original games with production values comparable to those of well-known PSP games to be produced for the Pandora?
You seem to be missing that there is no need to buy a second device for major label games, just one device to run them all. There is no need for special "licensed ROMs" when you can just buy off-the-shelf games. You already have all of the commercial "production value" of off-the-shelf games. (And even cheaper if it's bought off the used-shelf, chuckle.)
I don't know what sorts of media the Pandora natively reads. For some emulated platforms you might need to copy the game to a format that it can read, but that is specifically legal and you don't even need to rely on the doctrine of Fair Use for it to be legal. US copyright law title 17 section 117 explicitly makes it legal. I believe EU copyright, and probably most other countries, is equivalent in that regard.
I'd say it's quite a striking transition from dry barren red rock to that wet greenery. I'd say it pretty well qualifies as "Terraformed! Like Jurassic Park style." It's all the more striking when you realize that you can walk from the barren desert on one side in to that third photo, and walk back out to barren desert on the other side, in probably less than two hours. I expect boundary is advancing at a decent rate each year, and the area of the biome increasing by the square of the radius.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe if we got everyone to pirate every child porn video on the internet at once, we could put these people out of business!
Congress would step in to stop the violation of all those poor defenseless copyrights.
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rather than treat him like a pariah
After what he did, and we all know what he did, damn straight I'm going to treat him like a pariah!
If I see him walking on the street, I'm damn well going to cross to the other side to get away from him. If I'm eating in a restaurant and the owner let him come in and sit at a table, I'd damn well going to leave without paying the check... the owners can sue me for it.
Michael Jackson is dead to me.
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I have this funny feeling that all you people who like to sit on your intellectual high horses and pontificate as to the literal meanings of this or that might feel a little differently if you found out your babysitter was taking pictures of her boyfriend molesting your 3 year old.
Why would we feel any different? You put the boyfriend in prison for molesting the three year old, and you put the babysitter in prison for a contributory charge of molesting the three year old.
Exactly the same thing the police do if she wasn't holding a camera.
If it were any other crime you would consider this situation insane. Lets say arson, or even the murder of nearly three thousand people on 9/11. If an arsonist takes photos of the fire he set, and a news crew comes along and takes more photos, you don't put the news crew in prison. You don't charge the arsonists with photography. If someone downloads those photos from the internet you would consider it insane to imprison that person on a possession-of-images crime. Maybe the person even has a fetish for fire, maybe they even get off looking at the arson images. However I believe you would have no trouble noticing the fact we are talking about an innocent person who hasn't committed arson.
For some reason a lot of people seem to have trouble applying the standard principals of law. Standard principals of law that that apply in every other case. The logic is dead-simple and obvious. Harmful acts are criminal. It is a gross perversion of law and a gross perversion of logic that we have invented possession-of-offensive-information crime. No criminal act, it's just that the information itself is so offensive that we tossed law and logic right out the window.
Anyone who says "arsonists should go to prison" gets burned as a witch when they point out that the-guy-with-the-photo-collection didn't commit arson, that he didn't commit any criminal act at all.
How about a true personal story. I'm a bit of a fan of redheads. Unfortunately redheads are rather rare. Several years ago I found this neat software called Imagewolf. You point it at a website downloading all the images, and then it follows all the links on that site to find more sites to search. It jumps from site to site to site across the internet blindly following links and downloading all the images it finds. I left it running for an entire weekend, saturating the download pipe on broadband. When I came back to my computer there were several gigs of images. Probably in the ballpark of a hundred thousand pics. I skimmed though deleting them thousands at a time, to find the redheads. The images collected were semi-random, an automated harvesting from a semi-random walk across the internet which began at a redhead website. And now here the thing... I came to the very strange realization that if I deleted one set of 99.9% of the pictures then I was a perfectly safe law abiding citizen with a redhead collection, however if I had deleted a different 99.9% of the pictures then somehow it would make me a criminal facing a bazillion years in prison.
That makes no sense! Everything up to that point was perfectly legitimate and lawful, but somehow the act of deleting pictures could somehow have magically made me a criminal? WTF?! The law is FUBARed. Arson is a criminal act, child molestation is a criminal act, people get put in prison for criminal acts. There is a distinct lack of any rational notion of "criminal act" here.
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Russia collapsed in bankruptcy, but it seems almost certain that cultural influences and "24 hour propaganda radio" were contributing factors in that financial over-extension. It contributed to the paranoia and ego spending to keep up militarily, as well as stressing them to support a domestic economic image. The people wanted western goods and envied images of western lifestyles. The population was always told they were the greatest most powerful nation on earth with the best government and best economic system, and so they wanted more than they had, they felt entitled to more than they were getting. A population will be relatively content at almost any standard of living so long as they have nothing to compare it to, or if they don't feel entitled to equality. On the other hand when there is economic discontent that energy generally flows into ideology and ideals. Since they envied western goods and western lifestyles that energy would naturally get funneled into western ideology and ideals. To the extent the Soviets failed to keep up the domestic image it fueled problematical political pressures, and to the extent they did sustain the domestic image it overstretched their economy.
I don't mean to oversimplify the causes of the Soviet economic implosion, but I don't think it is correct to completely discount "24 hour propaganda radio" and surrounding media and cultural influences. I believe they increased, and focused, the pressures that ultimately drove them off the financial cliff.
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"-1, Disagree" option in the drop-down box that takes a mod point but has no effect.
Instead on no effect it should be "-0, Disagree". Then the post would show up as "Score:X, Disagree" if there are equal or more disagree moderations than any other category. People could also set a personal positive or negative modifier for "disagree" posts in their preferences, just like they can for funny or troll posts.
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China, France, Russia, United Kingdom, and the United States have veto power.
The UN would be the least of our problems if such a resolution managed to pass.
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You and I are focused more on the technology, and that it is wrong to criminalize legitimate uses and innocent people just to make it easier to go after infringement. Unfortunately legislators and the courts take a more jaundiced view. The clause defining what is targeted is phrased as a catch-all "or". Piratebay by virtue of the name itself immediately runs afoul of "marketed by its operator, or by a person acting in concert with the operator, to offer [infringing goods]". And as established by the Grokster ruling an absurd level of care is necessary to avoid tripping over this. The operator must be careful not to acknowledge the existence of the infringing material, and gets burned if even the lowest level individuals posting in a forum acknowledge infringing materials or in any way assist someone who may appears to be infringing. They are are toast if anyone "working in concert" with them trips up with careless statements. "Primarily designed" is wildly open to argument in a courtroom, and can go very badly if a majority of links are to infringing material.
And in particular note that you incorrectly quoted "significant other uses". This law does everything it can dragging the line away from that pesky Betamax ruling. If they can't nail you for an ambiguous "primarily designed", and if they can't nail you for careless public statements admitting encouraging or assisting infringement, then they water down "significant other purposes" into demonstrable and commercially significant purpose. A legitimate purpose isn't good enough, it must be commercially significant purpose. And you can't simply rely on the fact that there are a multitude of legitimate and valuable uses, you need to actually demonstrate the legitimate uses are actually being made by your userbase, and demonstrate how commercially significant they are.
The Betamax standard crucially relies upon a strong and sympathetic focus on legitimate uses. Even under that standard it is all too easy for legitimate uses to be disregarded as insignificant if the focus is placed on objectionable activities. Trying to re-write the standard as "demonstrable commercially significant" badly undermines the presumption that legitimate activities are (and remain) lawful.
It's basically a conflict between two approaches. On one hand there is the presumption that legitimate activity inherently legitimate and legal, that you specifically target people and activities that are criminal. On the other hand there's the approach that you put the innocent and the guilty on an equal scale, where you say it's ok if it's more convenient to knowingly harm and criminalize innocent people, that it's ok so long as the law enforcement benefits 51% outweigh the harm to the innocent. And of course "demonstrable, commercially significant purpose" carries the insane presumption that criminalizing innocent people doesn't count as harm, that criminalizing technology itself doesn't count as harm. It makes explicitly-commercial-harm the ruling standard for criminalizing activities and technologies.
If VCRs and photocopiers were invented today they would have a very precarious time getting established under this law. Their "primary design" would be attacked. Marketing materials and other statements would be run through a fine tooth comb for anything that could be interpreted as encouraging or advertising the ability to make infringing copies. And it would be far from trivial to demonstrate how much of your userbase's actual activities were non-infringing and commercially significant. In fact that would have a deadly chilling effect against introducing VCRs or photocopiers or any other new technology in the first place, because it is impossible to to know for certain what will happen until after you spend all of the money to develop and market the product. A company can do nothing wrong, it doesn't matter that a product has a million legitimate uses, a company can lose all of the money spend developing, marketing, and producing a product and furthermo
according to everything TFA said, this is aimed at sites that "traffic in" pirated goods. "Trafficking" = selling
TFA addresses the law in a uselessly the vague manner. According to the actual text of the draft bill:
(a) DEFINITION.--For purposes of this section, an Internet site is 'dedicated to infringing activities' if such a site -
(1) is otherwise subject to civil forfeiture to the United States Government under section 2323; or
(2) is - (A) primarily designed, has no demonstrable, commercially significant purpose or use other than, or is marketed by its operator, or by a person acting in concert with the operator, to offer -
(i) goods or services in violation of title 17, United States Code, or enable or facilitate a violation of title 17, United States Code, including by offering or providing access to, without the authorization of the copyright owner or otherwise by operation of law, copies of, or public performance or display of, works protected by title 17, in complete or substantially complete form, by any means, including by means of download, transmission, or otherwise, including the provision of a link or aggregated links to other sites or Internet resources for obtaining such copies for accessing such performance or displays
The bill applies to any infringement, including noncommercial infringement.
The bill applies to a site that "enables or facilitates" infringement, which includes for example completely lawful sites with one-or-more links to other sites that have infringing materials. And of course this applies to any sort of torrent indexer like Piratebay.
The bill applies to sites outside the United States, including sites and content which are completely lawful in the countries where they reside... the bill directs that foreign websites mush comply with US copyright law and that foreign websites shall be shut down if they fail to comply with US copyright law.
Those provisions of the law are unable to shutdown foreign websites hosted under foreign top level domains, so the bill so far as to say US ISPs must institute a mandatory filtering system to block people in the US from viewing any foreign website that the US government objects to.
The Great Firewall of America. Oh joy.
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.com isn't specifically american
From this Wired article:
"The trafficking of pirated American movies and music from rogue websites outside our borders is a big business," Bainwol said. "This bill is a welcome first step toward cutting off the financial lifeline that sustains these illegal operations and threatens the livelihoods of countless members of the American music community."
Of course the "illegal operations" of foreign sites completely disregards the actual jurisdiction of other nation's laws and imposes US law on a guilty-until-you-submit-to-US-law-and-prove-yourself-innocent basis.
Lawmakers introduced legislation Monday that would let the Justice Department seek U.S. court orders against piracy websites anywhere in the world, and shut them down through the sites' domain registration...
If passed, the Justice Department could ask a federal court for an injunction that would order a U.S. domain registrar or registry to stop resolving an infringing site's domain name, so that visitors to PirateBay.org, for example, would get an error message...
The bill would direct injunctions at a piracy site's domain registrar, if the registration was through a U.S. company. If not, the Justice Department could serve the court order at the registry for the site's top-level domain. Registry's for the dot-com, dot-net and dot-org domains are all U.S.-based, and thus within the courts' jurisdiction.
Dot-com, dot-org, dot-net, and any other top level domain hosted in the US would be exploted to impose this US law globally.
And as if that wasn't bad enough, the law goes on to pull an arguably stupider stunt:
For domains not under U.S. control, the bill would demand that internet service providers in the United States block resolution of the address upon a court order, but overseas users would not be impacted.
Moron legislators want to start sending out mandatory filter lists to all US ISPs.
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That won't work unless you rotate the bit harmonics first.
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when I hear bluray has been cracked is that I can pull a bit-for-bit identical stream of the bluray disk that is in the drive, not just being able to record a copy
There can be some nitpicking back and forth on precise definitions, but with the HDCP crack software can be written to pretty much do that. The movie goes through a lossy compression, which is then recorded on the disk. That data gets decompressed and can be captured via the now broken HDCP. I don't know if anyone has bothered, but I am certain it is possible to losslessly recompress the expanded data back down to the format that was stored on the disk. This will produce either a bit-for-bit identical copy of what was on the disk, or a precise data synonym of the bits on the disk. I have not looked closely at video formats and how I'd write this sort of lossless recompression software, but to be fair I'll admit I can see reasons why it may (or may not?) run significantly slower than the usual step of running a new lossy compression.
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I have two eyes but I can't tell the difference between the distance to the moon and the distance to the sun and that's quite some difference.
You mean you used to have two eyes before you tried that.
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What you have just described means that the SoL (Speed of Light) changes when the ring laser rotates.
You misunderstood. I was saying that the laser locks on a frequency that produces constructive interference - reinforcement.
Since the lasing frequency is fixed a wavelength change means a SoL change.
The lasing frequency is not a fixed wavelength. The laser produces many photons, and those multiple photons have a range of frequencies. If a frequency goes around the ring and produces destructive interference when it returns to the laser that frequency THEN production of photons at that frequency is suppressed. There is no change in SoL, no change in frequency, for any given photon. If a ring is not rotating then the distance traveled in both directions will be equal and the frequency lock will be identical in both directions.
Rotation is absolute, there is a unique non-rotating reference. The distance traveled around the ring can be measured in that non-rotating reference. In that non-rotating reference the laser has moved, and the photons in opposite directions travel different distances. The fixed SoL means that difference in distance in the two directions shows up and measurably changes things when the light returns to the laser. The frequencies that produce constructive or destructive interference will be different in the two directions. The laser will select... amplify... lock onto... photons of different frequencies in the two directions.
don't mention that it is the lab or ECEF frame that is the absolute system for measuring rotation
Absolutely not! (Pardon the pun :)
The laser ring in the lab will show a non-zero value because the lab is NOT an absolute frame for measuring rotation. The lab is (presumably) on the rotating earth, which itself is in rotation around the sun, which is in rotation around the center of the Milky Way, which itself almost certainly has a non-zero velocity around the center of gravity of the local cluster of galaxies. Rotation is detectable. There is an absolute meaning for "non-rotating". An asbolute meaning independent of the lab, independent of earth, independent of anything and everything else in the universe.
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Yeah, I've never hear any native born Americans ever refer to Italy Germany Ireland Mexico or anywhere else as any sort of home country because they have ancestry there and the majority of their relatives still live there.
Oh wait, yes I have.
But heay, don't worry. Another six years and he'll be gone. ....although the Republicans have been looking at Jindal as a potential candidate, and god-knows who the Democrats will nominate after Obama. You could potentially get stuck with a brown president for ten or fourteen more years years. Unless the Death Panels get ya first.
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the dinosaurs are fine, and not extinct; they now inhabit the shell of the topmost Turtle.
Don't be ridiculous. Dinosaurs aren't exactly known for their climbing abilities. The dinosaurs are one turtle down. We're on the topmost turtle. Because we're special. God loves us the most bestest.
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Try looking at General Relativity a bit more closely. Results are the same either way.
You are mistaken. Translation is relative, but rotation is not. Rotation us absolute and measurable.
There is for example the Sagnac effect used in some inertial navigation systems. A laser is placed in a ring with light circling in both directions. The laser will lock on a reinforcing frequency where the light takes an integer number of wavelengths around the ring. After making a loop around the ring there is constructive interference as the standing wave overlaps itself. The light going around in both directions will have the same frequency and wavelength. Now lets give the ring some rotation. The light going around in opposite directions need to cover different distances around the ring to return to the laser which that has advanced during the that time. The wavelength of the light in one direction must increase and the wavelength of the light in the other direction must decrease in order to maintain the integer-number-of-wavelengths constructive interference.
If the ring is not rotating then the light going in the two directions locks at the identical frequency. If the ring is rotating then there will be a difference between the two frequencies, and that difference is exactly proportional to the rate of rotation.
This is not merely theoretical, it is the actual foundation of existing navigation systems.
Rotating reference frames are currently a bit of a mess in General Relativity. There isn't a single well defined way to define simultaneous time across a rotating disk, leaving no single well defined measure of length either. If you Google relativity rotating frames the top result is a $360 book on the multitude of often contradictory models attempting to define rotating reference frames in General Relativity.
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IMHO geometrically speaking you probably can take the earth as fixed and the universe revolving around it, and all the phenomenons like wind, coriolis acceleration and stuff should hold anyway.
Under standard physics constant speed reference frames are undetectable, but rotation is easily detectable. Coriolis is zero when rotation is zero.
What you can do is build a sort of complicated joke version of physics that lies to you. The physics would state that you feel certain forces in certain directions when you're not moving, and that you feel those forces for no particular reason, that the universe simply always pushes on things with those forces when they aren't moving, and that those forces just coincidentally happen to match the forces you would feel if you were rotating at a certain speed. The physics would also say that if you rotate to the left at speed X, you'll feel X+1 forces. If you rotate to the left at speed X+1 then you'll feel X+2 forces. It also says that if you rotate to the right at a certain speed then all of the forces drop to zero.
You just add a rotation to everything, do all of the normal real physics equations, and then you subtract out the rotation at the end. It turns all of the physics equations into a silly mess of spaghetti, but that silly mess of spaghetti allows you to feel and measure the forces of a certain rotation but call it "motionless".
Maybe a better way to explain it is if you drive over a bumpy road with potholes. You could make up a silly model of physics that says that when driving over a flat road you will feel jarring forces up and down in a certain pattern... the physics has no particular reason that you'd feel those forces bumping you around when driving flat... we just write those up and forces in and say a zero flat road has them. Now when you drive on that pothole road and feel those forces, well now our physics says that's a flat road. The fun part is now you drive on an actual flat road and feel a smooth ride.... our physics says you now feel a FLAT ride because you're on a bumpy road and those bumps are exactly canceling the up and down forces that our physics says a flat road hits you with.
That's what a "The-Earth-isn't-rotating" physics is like... taking the forces of a specific rotation or a specific bumpy road and arbitrarily stating that is what zero and flat feel like.
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Sig: There aint no pancake so thin it doesn't have two sides.
Of course there are.
I make my pancakes in Mobius Strips.
You know, that would be a pretty awesome stunt to pull when serving breakfast at some sort of math conference or other sufficiently geeky event :)
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if you try to prove them wrong whilst in an atmosphere, you are going to look like a crank. (believe me I have tried to prove this to my kids, and only managed to reinforce there belief in there personal experience.)
You may be able to rescue the situation. If you hold a flat sheet of paper by the top edge of so it hangs vertically, the air resistance will be negligible for the first few feet... until it picks up significant speed and swerves randomly. With a little luck you can do this from shoulder height and get a sheet of paper and heavy object to strike the ground at (visually) the same instant. If you want to drop it a greater distance or preform it more reliably you can start with the sheet of paper with a bit of tape along the edge, ask them weather the paper or a brick will fall faster, then roll up the paper into a very tight tube (taped shut) and again let it hang vertically for release. The paper tube can fall from from a decent height before the speed gets fast enough to destabilize it and wind drag to become important. If you hold another sheet of paper horizontally and drop that for comparison it should make it obvious that it's only the wind drag on the horizontal surface size which is causing "light" things fall slowly.
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Sadly the more realistic truth is that it's 36% who have no clue that the Earth goes around the sun. Blind guessing on the question results in a 50-50 shot at the right answer. The poll obviously missed the half of them who accidentally gave the right answer.
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What off-the-shelf games are made for Pandora?
We seem to be having communication difficulties. I meant the hundreds of exiting off-the-shelf games for any system that it can emulate. The system effectively has multiple full library of games, a full library of games for each system that it can emulate. Any Pandora-specific games are just icing above and beyond those multiple full catalogs of games.
>what sorts of media the Pandora natively reads.
SD cards containing Debian ARM packages.
Anything on SD cards then. The appropriate emulator mode would then be able to read whatever is on the SD card.
But I can't think of a lot of other consoles for which an easy-to-use cart copier exists.
I don't know. Anything that comes on SD cards, anything we can read into a PC can then be written out on an SD card... and Pandora only started shipping a few hundreds of units just a few months ago. I'm sure that accessibility for each emulated system will be worked out as a user base gets established.
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a bunch of emulators (without any licensed ROMs)
one device exclusively for major-label games and a second device exclusively for indie games?
Do you expect original games with production values comparable to those of well-known PSP games to be produced for the Pandora?
You seem to be missing that there is no need to buy a second device for major label games, just one device to run them all. There is no need for special "licensed ROMs" when you can just buy off-the-shelf games. You already have all of the commercial "production value" of off-the-shelf games. (And even cheaper if it's bought off the used-shelf, chuckle.)
I don't know what sorts of media the Pandora natively reads. For some emulated platforms you might need to copy the game to a format that it can read, but that is specifically legal and you don't even need to rely on the doctrine of Fair Use for it to be legal. US copyright law title 17 section 117 explicitly makes it legal. I believe EU copyright, and probably most other countries, is equivalent in that regard.
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Cool overhead shot. It lead me to some even more illuminating ground photos.
This barren photo appears to represent the natural state of the island. If you go about one mile there's this photo from the edge of the green zone looking out over the barren island. A mere quarter mile further we find this photo at the heart of the green zone.
I'd say it's quite a striking transition from dry barren red rock to that wet greenery. I'd say it pretty well qualifies as "Terraformed! Like Jurassic Park style." It's all the more striking when you realize that you can walk from the barren desert on one side in to that third photo, and walk back out to barren desert on the other side, in probably less than two hours. I expect boundary is advancing at a decent rate each year, and the area of the biome increasing by the square of the radius.
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I am so superior that I use omnipotent beings as servants, and I condescendingly use their names as verbs.
I Q my torrents.
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Sheph stakes his eternal future on the presumption that Zeus does not exist. If he is wrong, he will spend eternity burning in Hades.
That takes a great deal of faith (or ignorance take your pick).
On second thought it's just plain ignorance. Calling it faith is just a euphemism.
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